One of my recurring themes is the suicidal nature of Rousseau-ist cults. The double helix of the fanatic is composed of a desire to obliterate their self by swapping their identity with that of the group. The other side is the desire to get to the promised land by destroying the present, which is seen as the cage that holds the followers from reaching their goal. The nucleotides are the various fads that we see bubbling up from time time like racism, minoritism, various economic lunacies and so forth. The result is a movement that seeks to pull the roof down on human civilization.

That, paradoxically, makes it reactionary. The modern Progressive looks out at the world for that which is embraced by civilization and attacks it. They also embrace those who attack these things. Homosexuals, for example, are despised by Progressives, but they make a useful weapon against those pesky recalcitrant Christians in the hinterlands. Similarly, blacks have been a useful weapon in the assault on traditional Anglo-Saxon organizational traditions.

Islam, the mirror of Liberalism, is another useful lever to use on the foundation stones of civilization. Progressives have a tough time with it, because Muslims have a habit of beheading people and posting the videos on-line. So, the hunt for the moderate Muslim has been a recurring motif. This story is a good example of how the natural impulse of the Left is to embrace anything that is at war with Western Culture.

The U.S. State Department endorsed on Wednesday a controversial anti-terror handbook published by Canada’s Muslim community that refers to jihad as “noble” and urges law enforcement to avoid using terms such as “Islamic extremism.”

The handbook, published earlier this month by two Canadian Muslim community organizations, was so controversial that the Royal Canadian Mounted Police (RCMP) flatly rejected the manual and ordered its officers not to use it.

Yet the State Department’s official anti-terrorism Twitter feed, called Think Again Turn Away, appeared to endorse the controversial handbook on Twitter and linked to a positive article about it.

The handbook, titled United Against Terrorism, has become a contentious issue for the RCMP since its release. Several sections of the guide instruct Muslim community members not to cooperate with police while others claim jihad “is a noble concept.”

The RCMP ultimately decided to reject the book, citing its “adversarial tone.”

“After a final review of the handbook, the RCMP could not support the adversarial tone set by elements of the booklet and therefore directed RCMP Manitoba not to proceed with this initiative,” the police force said in a statement posted on its website.

The handbook itself recommends that “intelligence and law enforcement officials” should “avoid terms such as ‘Islamist terrorism’, ‘Islamicism’, and ‘Islamic extremism’ in favor of more accurate terms such as ‘al Qaeda inspired extremist,’” according to one section of the handbook, which still bears RCMP’s official logo.

Law enforcement officials also are told to “discontinue any inappropriate information gathering techniques including (but not limited to) showing up at workplaces, intimidating newcomers, questioning individuals religiosity, and discouraging legal representation,” according to the handbook.

The term “jihad” also is not appropriate to use, according to the handbook, a copy of which was first published by Canada’s CBC News.

“Do not refer to terrorists as ‘jihadis,’” the manual states. “This only emboldens them and gives them a legitimate status in the eyes of the vulnerable. Terrorism is not jihad. Jihad is a noble concept in Islam.”

Other sections tell the Muslim community that they are under no obligation to speak to the police about individuals who may be suspected of having extremist ties.

“The  tweet you are referring to features a repost of information from a Globe and Mail report on a new booklet produced by the RCMP and two Islamic groups,” said State Department spokeswoman Carolyn Glassman. “CSCC was simply sharing information about a new product related to counterterrorism. Our reposting does not connote an endorsement.”

The State Department’s endorsement of the guidebook struck some Twitter users as curious. This is not the first time that the State Department has run into trouble as a result of it tweets.

The department’s Counterterrorism Bureau (CT Bureau) was forced to issue multiple apologies earlier this year after it endorsed on Twitter a radical Muslim cleric who backed a fatwa calling for the murder of U.S. troops.

Terrorism analyst and reporter Patrick Poole said that the State Department’s tweet of the controversial handbook is a sign of what he called its disjointed policies.

“This is a testament to how absurd this administration’s counter-terrorism policies have become—promoting a publication the Canadian government has publicly rejected because they realized this booklet would do more to radicalize than to actually deradicalize,” he said.

“From letting members of designated terrorist groups into the White House, backing the Muslim Brotherhood in the so-called ‘Arab Spring’, responding to demands of Islamic groups to purge counter-terror training materials, to endorsing extremist Islamic clerics like Sheikh Bin Bayyah only then to have to apologize, and now this,” he said. “To describe it as a series of missteps is a gross understatement. This is a coordinated campaign of counter-terror catastrophe.”

This is going to become more common..

It had been a relatively quiet policy debate until the full-page ad appeared in the local newspaper. “A male wants to shower beside your 14-year-old daughter,” it said. “Are you OK with that?”

The ad, placed by a socially conservative group in Minnesota, was meant to snap attention to a proposal to allow transgender students to play on teams based on their preferred gender rather than the sex assigned to them at birth.

It appears to have worked. More than 100 community members flooded a meeting this week near Minneapolis, and thousands more sent e-mails. In response, the quasi-public body governing high school sports in Minnesota decided to delay a vote on a new policy covering sports participation by transgender students. Members of the board of directors said they needed more time to study the issue.

The policy, which they now plan to vote on in December, was an attempt to grapple with a question that has bedeviled many states: How do you deal with the growing number of children identifying as transgender who want to participate in the highly gender-specific worlds of high school sports and extracurricular activities?

When the Left stopped using the word sex to mean male and female and started using the word “gender”, you know we were headed for trouble. Back then, the madness was about denying the obvious differences between boys and girls. Hilariously, they claimed that sex was a social construct, not a biological one. In order to mask the madness, they changed the language. If you let the lunatics control the language, everyone eventually sounds like a lunatic.

The fact that “growing number of children identifying as transgender” does not set off any alarm bells speaks volumes. Science tells us that human beings evolved very slowly over thousands of generations of trial and error. It does not happen overnight. Therefore, “new” traits and new “trends” are never new. Either we just discovered a way to notice or we are kidding ourselves, pretending the old is new. In the case of children suffering from the mental disease of “transgenerism” the latter is the most likely answer. Turning a mental disorder into a fad is almost as crazy as thinking you are the off-spring of a human-alien coupling.

Those crazy people I references at the start have been handed control of society. Now it is the sane who are tormented, wondering if they are the ones losing their minds because they don’t think reality is infinity negotiable. If you don’t want a homosexual taking your son into the woods, you’re a child abusing nut. If you think your daughter should not be forced to shower with the boys, you”re a sexist. If you punch a woman in the face, you’re a misogynistic monster, but if you come to that woman’s aid, you’re also a misogynistic monster.

In the madhouse of modern America, this makes sense, What’s wrong with you?

The Bush years, I suspect, will be studied by historians for a long time. It’s not that Bush was all that interesting. It’s that he and his band of neoconservative fanatics sent so many people into a permanent state of insanity. Most of the old paleos went nuts over the war mongering. Many eventually embraced the weird anti-Israel paranoia that used to be the private domain of the Lyndon LaRouche followers. That’s not to say Israel is not trouble, it’s just that they are not the only trouble.

The Left, of course, was taken over by the crazies. The end of the Cold War probably was the main cause, but Bush hatred was one cause. Maybe Bush hatred was just a symptom of the craziness. it really does not matter. What the Bush years revealed is the ruling class has gone crazy. One side wants to make war on the world and the other side wants to make war on us. Lots of people have gone crazy trying to understand what in the world is happening to these people.

There were minor figures who also went bonkers. Rod Dreher was a conventional Catholic conservative in the Sam Francis vein. Then he started getting squirrelly, writing about “crunchy-cons” and then he wandered off to find himself. His work today has all the hallmarks of a man who was defined by his faith and then lost his faith. There’s a maudlin obsession with suffering. The source story is here. The bullshit meter is at eleven on this one. A little google work and I see it is a hoax.

The fact is we have four types of poor people in America. The first and most common is the dependency class. These are the folks you never see. They live in the bad areas or what you assume to be bad areas. In the ghetto, the women get on the dole and the men sell drugs, get high and get in trouble. There are some of the other type of ghetto dweller. This is the working poor. These people have jobs and try to live decent lives.

Then you have the temporary poor. These are young people starting out and divorced mothers trying to bounce back. The former often made some poor early choices and are struggling to recover. They do and it builds character. The latter are women who end up divorced with kids and living in an apartment. Again, it is temporary. Eventually their salary rises and the kids move on or they find a new man. The thing with this group is they just don’t have money. That’s different than poverty, which has a behavior component. Give these people more money and they put it away for a rainy day.

The final category of poor people are the imaginary ones. These are the poor the SWPL-types like Rod Dreher read about or see on TV. The imaginary poor are designed to elicit feelings of pity followed by an urge to “get involved.” The tale offered up by Linda Tirado, for example. hits all the current fads in SWPL-ville. She smokes and eats junk food. SWPL’s are big into self-denial. She prefers abortion to motherhood, but the closest abortion mill is too far away so she has kids she does not want.

This weird form of Mercerism would be harmless if not for the fact public policy is all geared toward helping the imaginary and temporary poor. Rod Dreher spends hours coming up with ideas to do something about the imaginary poor. Democrats in Washington are always championing polices to help the temporary poor, but end up writing laws for the imaginary poor, cause that’s where the emotion lies. It is why Mao packed off the intellectuals for the rice paddy.

Many of us out on the fringes have been pondering the series of weird moral panics and cultural shifts that have been coming at us for a long time now. The weird thing is the culture war seemed to be running out of steam in the Clinton years. He was a degenerate, but not much of a culture warrior. Polling showed the public had turned on the family issues like abortion and divorce. Even Bill Clinton was talking about abortion being “rare, legal and safe.”

Then things went bonkers again. Homosexual rights quickly sprung up with groups like Act Out and then, of course, homosexual marriage was on us. That was 15 years ago, maybe? That fight raged and then the ground shifted again. The trannies were suddenly in the street demanding I’m not sure what. Today brings news that the Feds are suing a company for discriminating against trannies. It won’t be long before they are forced to make cakes for them.

It’s easy to let the freakishness of it all distract from what’s really going on. Many on the right make that error, thinking the issue is the issue. They never stop and wonder why these issues. Steve Sailer has written about the bigger picture, but I suspect he just finds it all too amusing to waste much time on it. Frankly, I fall into this trap as well. The material is just too rich to leave untended. The jokes write themselves.

In my more lucid moments I used to think it was all part of the suicidal impulse of the Left. As I’ve written before, people join movements out of self-loathing. They seek to replace their identity with that of the group. It is a form of self-obliteration. Get enough of these people together heading in the wrong direction and they are soon shopping for alien abduction insurance and Phenobarbital. In a political cult like Liberalism, they try to tear down the structures of civil society. In other words, all of these causes are a means to an end and have little to do with helping the oppressed minorities, real or imagined.

Sitting atop a mountain, cross-legged in quiet contemplation, it occurred to me that the latest rounds of moral panics about the big bad NFL are a piece with the current war on normal. We have male players acting poorly towards women and children. Further, we have alpha male owners not disciplining those players to the satisfaction of the Cult. Worse yet, the big dog at the top of the NFL has not been groveling sufficiently. Compounding it is the fact the NFL is a tough guy, manly man league. It ain’t soccer.

Outside of football, the sporting press is forever ranting about fighting in hockey. They want the beaning of hitters in baseball eliminated. They hate the physical play in basketball, a sport no one would confuse with a tough guy sport. Boxing, of course, has been pushed to the fringes.of course, you have the berserk fanaticism on the Left for chav ball. It is the one sport that boys and girls can play together.

Outside of sports, you have the mania for doping up boys so they don’t act like boys in school. As soon as a boy shows some spunk a bureaucrat is racing to the scene with a handful of Ritalin to “fix” the boy and make sure he stops acting like a boy. This story the other day on NRO is emblematic of the war of males congregating without women. The insanity of forcing “fraternities” to admit women is no impediment to the war on men.

It is the one thread you see running through all of this. I’d include the war on women nonsense that was a part of the last campaign. All of these things are a reaction to and a rejection of what has been a part of western culture’s sense of masculinity. The new religion of America is going to be a feminine religion, one where women and the traits of women are dominant over men and the traits of men. That’s why the hysterical response to the NFL. It’s attempts to attract women and appeal beyond working class males is a threat to the new religion.

Interestingly, the other great religion of our day is Islam, an over the top masculine faith. From the start it has been about the dominant males dominating the other males. Women have no place in Islam. They have a minimal role in Islamic life. If you look at old photos from Muslim countries, you see women dressed like normal women of the day. That was a time when Islam was on the wane. Once Islam revived, the women were put  back in their bags and into the back rooms.

If you look at how Islam polices itself, it is hard not to see the parallels to what is going on in America. The two religions are mirrors of one another. In Islam, heretics and enemies are not just killed, they become trophies. Throughout history, the victor has held up the severed head of the vanquished. The loser has offered his neck to the winner. The last act of an honorable man, who has been defeated, is to offer up his neck to his better.

On the other side of the coin, we see heretics and enemies humiliated and forced to grovel. They are not confronted or physically harmed, they are shamed and forced to confront themselves through the public apology. Shame has always been the way women were punished in western societies. A man would get a beating, while a woman would be publicly humiliated with the scarlet letter or a turn in the dunking chair. That’s what we see with the Cult today. The accused is forced to recant in public and grovel for mercy.

We’ve had a glimpse of the end game for Islam. In Iran, where Islam is absolute, fertility rates have collapsed. David Goldman claims there are more prostitutes in Tehren than mothers. That may be an exaggeration, but the TFR is 1.8, well below replacement. When you net out the non-Persian in the hinterland with their high fertility, the numbers are worse. Across the Islamic world, the rise of Islam brings a fall in fertility. That can only go on for so long before it all falls apart.

Similarly, the West has seen fertility rates collapse. The argument from the Cult is rising education levels result in fewer children. That does not change the fact that fewer children means fewer people. The logical end is no people. I’ve written before that we are living in a different sort of Iran. Ours is a highly feminine version where women seek to dominate men. The results appear to be similar. The difference is the West has a store of value built up over 500 years of progress. Otherwise, our mullahs wear pants suits.

A good way to get yourself sent off to the reeducation camp is to point out the dysfunction in black America. The only acceptable opinion is that blacks are the victims of white racism. No matter the topic, if it includes black people the answer is racism, even for blacks talking about the topic. There’s some truth to it, but the reason for that is the insane rule itself. This story about the mayor of New York City is a good example.

A senior adviser to Mayor Bill de Blasio is in a serious relationship with a convicted killer and interstate drug trafficker whose most recent run-in with the law happened late last year — when he nearly ran over a New Jersey police officer while driving her car, records show.

Rachel Noerdlinger, the chief of staff to first lady Chirlane McCray who has attended top-level NYPD meetings, has been romantically linked to Hassaun McFarlan since 2010. Court and police records show that the two have lived together for nearly two years.

McFarlan, 36, has been arrested at least five times, including for the fatal shooting of a teenager over a down jacket, records show.

Two of the arrests occurred while he was dating Noerdlinger, a former aide to the Rev. Al Sharpton. While they’ve been an item, McFarlan has also trashed police officers on his Facebook account, referring to them as “pigs” in two posts.

In one online rant, McFarlan said, “I cant come outside without the pigs f—— with me in the hood.”

Most black people, especially black women, are law abiding, peaceable people who just want to live their lives. Rachel Noerdlinger is obviously a bright and hard working women. If she were your co-worker or neighbor, you would probably like her. The trouble comes when the violent, out of control boyfriend arrives. They almost always arrive. That’s the problem and it is a problem for the majority of black people. They are forever terrorized by this subset of the black community.

Whites are good at dealing with their trouble makers. Violent and lazy whites are shunned by respectable whites. Even in the lower classes, the criminal element is segregated from the rest. Blacks don’t do this and it harms all black people. Rachel Noerdlinger will most likely get fired. She will pay the price for her criminally violent boyfriend.

This is why segregation is still common. A black family moves in and the whites are thrilled to be diverse. Then the ghetto friends of the black family show up one night and party until four in the morning. The next week all of those white people with their “coexist” bumper stickers are calling the Realtor. The rush to get out is on and the original black family finds themselves living in the old neighborhood again, just in a different location.