I’m weary of degenerate society where my values aren’t welcome

By David McElroy · June 19, 2021

Although I didn’t say anything, I felt disgusted. I listened carefully, like an anthropologist documenting life among a primitive tribe.

I was sitting next to four teens — all female, ages from 16 to 19 — on break at their restaurant jobs. They all know me casually, so they don’t filter what they have to say. I routinely hear their normal conversations.

I won’t quote their actual words, not because I wasn’t making notes — I was — but because I’m not willing to quote the sort of language they were using. They were talking about the porn they watch, sometimes with others and sometimes alone.

It was all about “tits” and “pussy” and “dicks.” These teens talked about these things as casually as people 30 years ago might have discussed their favorite television shows. From this porn they watch, they’ve learned their bodies are fat and ugly — although three of them are actually normal size — because they’re not the skinny women with silicone-enhanced breasts they see in porn.

They discuss what a big deal it is for a man to have a giant penis. (One of them said her fantasy was “12 inches.”) They all wanted breast enlargements. And one talked openly about surgery on her labia — because “everybody knows” that an “outie is ugly.”

I feel like an alien here. And I’m again reminded that my quaint values — the ones which most decent people held not so long ago — are no longer welcome in this degenerate society.

I don’t want to force anyone to hold my values. I don’t want to force anybody to be like me. But I miss living in a culture where sex was a good and pleasurable thing that was private between partners. I miss living among people who were bright and intellectually worldly, but who chose to live in conservative ways.

If you object to any of what’s going on today, people tell you that you’re a prude. They shake their heads at how out of step you are. And I don’t mind being out of step with this dysfunctional culture. I just miss the time when there were more people who made the same choices for their own lives — when there were more families teaching their children to hold more enlightened values.

This is not about conservative politics. Although some political conservatives do embrace conservative lifestyles, many of them are hedonistic and licentious when there are no cameras pointed at them. Very many of them are hypocrites. Some of the wildest behavior I’ve observed came among the upper-middle-class Republicans who I used to work with in politics.

Although I’m no longer a political conservative — even by the older definitions — I’m one of the most socially conservative people you’ve ever known. That’s the way I choose to live my life, and it’s what I want in those I hold closest to me. I don’t want to force my beliefs or my lifestyle on anybody else, but I long for a culture in which those who are like me are still considered normal and admirable people.

I miss a culture in which my conservative social values were admired and respected. And I miss living among people who share those values — without having to be part of a group which is trying to use the force of law to impose our social values on others.

The bounds of decency have been pushed over and over in music, in movies and on television. Things which might have been shocking even 20 or 30 years ago aren’t even notable today. Those who want to make money by selling products to young people have crossed the lines of degenerate behavior so often — and gone so far — that there’s almost nothing that can shock or outrage a postmodern society.

Well, there are things that outrage them, but they’re insane things.

If you mention that it’s a simple biological fact that a man can’t become a woman — and a woman can’t become a man — you will have people screaming at you about how hateful you are.

If you express the thought that it’s not a good idea for women to dress with very little left to the imagination — that it’s simply indecent — you’ll be accused of “slut-shaming.”

If you object to the way people routinely use loud profanity in public — not because they’re angry, but simply because it’s normal speech to them — you’ll be told to get over it, because “it’s just words.” (Of course, if you use words the postmodern crowd objects to, you will be screamed into silence.)

It goes on and on. We not only are expected to welcome their outrageous behavior, but we are mocked and viciously criticized for holding onto social values and norms which matter to us.

I don’t want to return to the past. The “good old days” weren’t really so good in most ways. But social values matter to the strength of families, to the strength of communities and to the strength of the entire society.

Right now, we live in a degenerate society which is falling apart — and few people are willing to accept that. I can’t force anybody to understand this and I don’t want to force anybody to live as I choose to live. But I desperately long for the company of good and influential people who still understand why I’ve made the choices which shape my life.

I long for communities like that. I long for a family of good people who share my values. And I long for a time when more people can understand why they might want to be like us.

Many historians believe that the decline of morals and values played a key role in the fall of Rome. Future historians will one day write the same things about the fall of America.

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If you have problems with high blood pressure, I’d like to encourage you to consider making serious changes to your diet. There might be some people who don’t have any choice but to start taking prescription medications for high blood pressure, but I’d like to tell you that I have completely eliminated my issue by eliminating all sugar and almost all carbohydrates. (A couple of months ago, my blood pressure hit 185/144, which was dangerously high — considered stage 3 hypertension.) By completely changing my eating habits, I’m down 22 pounds and my blood pressure is now in the “ideal” range — without taking any medication. In addition, I sleep better and I have more energy. Getting away from the sugar-laden mess that we generally refer to as “highly processed food” has been a life-changer for me. Now my challenge is to avoid slipping back into old habits — by eating in the dangerous ways that almost everyone in our society has come to see as normal.

When I first heard about this, I thought it must be satire. When I discovered it was real, I was appalled, but I still thought it must be a one-time thing from some nutty activist. But it turns out it’s the latest bit of pandering to a bunch of far-left activists who believe that a man can become a woman if he decides to claim he’s a woman. As everybody knows, men have prostate glands. Women do not. Period. End of story. Men can get prostate cancer. Women cannot. But political activists are so eager to pretend that a man claiming to be a “trans woman” is really a woman that they are insisting that “women” be included in public health messages about the issue. This is nothing but political virtue-signaling. If you’re a man, you know which parts you have. You know that you ought to be screened. Nobody is made any safer by dragging far-left gender ideology into simple medical reality.

Every time someone tries to tighten requirements around the use of absentee ballots, I hear screams from Democrats and others on the political left that such efforts are nothing but “suppression of black voters.” These protests have never made sense to me, especially because it’s never been a secret that absentee ballot fraud goes on all the time in certain areas. (Everybody knew it when I worked in politics.) The people who engage in such fraud are rarely caught — often because the local political establishment approves of the crime — but a Democrat who won a primary election in Clay County, Alabama, last year has pleaded guilty to this sort of cheating. Terry Andrew Heflin was running for a place on the Clay County Commission. He was caught ordering seven absentee ballots in the names of various voters and sending them to his post office box — after which he used the ballots to vote absentee for himself seven time. Did he have other people cast additional fraudulent ballots? We’ll never know. But in a primary in which he was able to win with only 141 votes, it wouldn’t take many fraudulent votes to change the election. The next time you hear “civil rights activists” claim that it’s just “voter suppression” to hurt blacks which is at the root of efforts to stop this fraud, remember Terry Heflin. If you care about fair and honest elections, ballot security and voter identity should matter to you.

A state legislator in Maine has been stripped of the ability to speak in the state Legislature — and her votes are not being counted on legislative issues — all because she made a truthful social media post. Rep. Laurel Libby (R-Auburn, Maine) opposes allowing boys to compete against girls’ teams in school athletics and she’s become known for making an issue of it. On Feb. 17, she posted on Facebook about a recent example that she found outrageous. She posted side-by-side photos of a boy named John who competed last year in a state track event and won fifth place against other boys two years ago — and a photo of the same boy (now called Katie) who won first place in the same event this year against girls. Whether you find this outrageous or not, Libby is clearly being honest and truthful about the objective facts of an issue of public importance. But the state Legislature censured her. Democrats decreed that she could not speak in the House and that her votes would not count on legislation — until she apologized for the outrage of telling the truth. She refused and her constituents have been unrepresented in the state House since then. The people who promote this ideology are out of touch with reality and won’t rest until they force the rest of us to join them in this delusion. But even if you agree with “trans” ideology, you should be appalled at this heavy-handed attack on political speech.

The late Steve Jobs was at the center of our culture’s transition from analog to digital. He co-founded Apple Computer. He led the team that revolutionized personal computing with the first Macintosh. As CEO of Apple, he led the development of the iPhone and later the iPad. You would think the children of such a man would be surrounded by technology. But Jobs and his wife Laureen didn’t let their children use iPads. Their home had few screens of any kind. Even though Jobs spent most of his time developing and selling Macs and iPhones and iPads, he was home with his wife and children for dinner when he was in town. The family ate together at a simple wooden table in their kitchen — and there were no digital devices or focus on popular culture. Instead, he’s said to have guided his family toward deep discussions of art, philosophy and education — with no iPads to be found. If the man who guided the development of such products chose a different path for his own children, does that suggest that his digital experience taught him that children need human connection, not screens? And does it suggest the possibility that we might be better off if we made the same choice for our families?

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