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.