Objective reality has now become offensive in dysfunctional culture

By David McElroy · September 30, 2021

Evan Bialosuknia is a 17-year-old boy who’s a senior at Olympia High School in Orlando, Fla. Those are objective facts.

But Evan has decided he’s really a girl, so you’ll be called a bigot if you point out he’s a guy. This is the insanity of the philosophy behind the far left in this culture today. Objective truth has become offensive to the shrieking banshees who control what you’re allowed to say.

Evan has been elected homecoming queen for his high school. Who you read the flood of media accounts, this is being celebrated as a historic milestone for “transgender” students. All the stories even refer to Evan as “she” and “her.”

This isn’t because it represents reality. It’s because intellectual bullies have made up bizarre new rules for others to follow — and those who don’t agree are accused of hate and bigotry.

Our culture is so dysfunctional that simple objective facts are considered hate.

I don’t hate this boy, but I do know that he’s a boy, not a girl.

He has every right to pretend he’s a girl. He can dress like a typical girl. He can also act in ways that are more typical of a girl. He can take female hormones to cause himself to grow breasts if he wants. He can even have his penis cut off, which many doctors are eager to do for such children.

But he can’t make me pretend he’s a girl.

And the people who are so eager to pretend he’s a girl — and who are eager to force the rest of us to go along with this delusion — can’t make me responsible for the hate they are making up in their own minds.

It’s not just this one issue, of course. Across a wide range of subjects, elements of the far left are insisting that we deny objective reality and bow to their whims. New rules are invented on the fly all the time.

After an Oregon football player showboated during a game Saturday — and had his team penalized for unsportsmanlike conduct — Coach Mario Cristobal yelled at the player for his selfish actions hurting the team. We’ve seen this a million times and most of us understand a coach demanding a player put the team first.

But an ESPN commentator was offended. Why? Because the coach was yelling at a black player. The offended black commentator tweeted a complaint.

“…[T]he image of a 51 year old White man berating a young Black man so publicly rubs a lot of us the wrong way,” ESPN’s Rod Gilmore wrote. “Especially w/all the racial injustice. Bad optics. U can deliver the lesson w/o flexing your power & control. It did not make Black parents I know happy.”

So the new unwritten rule — according to this social justice warrior — is that a white coach isn’t allowed to treat a black player in the same way he would treat a white player.

And if anybody is keeping score, Cristobal is actually the Hispanic son of Cuban immigrants to this country. Does that give him extra “social justice points” that allow him to yell at anybody? I’m not sure what the rules are.

If you’re not afraid of falling afoul of this new leftist behavior code, you should be. Last year at UCLA, a professor had the nerve to insist that he was going to treat all of his students the same — so he was suspended.

In the wake of the Minneapolis riots after the death of George Floyd, a student emailed instructor Gordon Klein and suggested that black students should be given special consideration in their grades. The student suggested to Klein that black students had suffered from trauma as a result of the events related to King and the resulting protests, so they should be treated differently.

The student wanted black students to be given a “no-harm” final, meaning if they did well, it could raise their grades, but it wouldn’t count against them if they did poorly. He wanted black students graded on a curve and he wanted other special treatment for them.

In his emailed response, Klein rejected the idea and pointed out that he wouldn’t even know who’s black and who’s not, because it’s an online course and he’s not given racial information. He indignantly explained that he was going to treat all students the same way and explained why it should be that way.

UCLA suspended Klein — and it’s never been clear why. The school couldn’t fault him for anything he objectively did wrong, so he was accused of taking the wrong tone. Or something.

Klein is now suing UCLA for damaging his reputation.

We are in the middle of a dysfunctional culture falling apart. We’re being torn to bits by insane groups of people — some on the right and some on the left — who are full of hatred and who desperately want to control everybody else.

The political left is most dangerous right now, though, simply because they are the mob that has been slowing winning the battle to control academia and culture for decades. They are winning by controlling education.

They’re brainwashing each new generation with toxic ideas. I’m far more afraid of these people than I am of the pathetic clowns who attacked the U.S. Capitol in early January. What the Capitol attackers did was scary and stupid, but it doesn’t have the long-term impact that the far left has had for decades.

For years, the left claimed they stood for tolerance. The culture now tolerates pretty much anything that the left insists we tolerate. But that’s not what they really wanted.

They didn’t want tolerance. They wanted obedience — to whatever ideas, norms and beliefs they dictated. They wanted to control what people say and what they think. Now they even want to control the tone you use.

The social justice warriors of the left don’t want discussion. They don’t want dialogue. They just want compliance. The far left has become what they always accused the far right of wanting to become.

This sort of “thought control” is dangerous, no matter which group it comes from. I don’t hate anybody, but I refuse to obey people who demand that I deny objective reality.

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I’m seeing a lot of simplistic and dishonest explanations right now for the current rioting in France. Those on the populist far right claim it’s all about Muslim immigrants to France disrupting the culture. Their message is that this sort of thing is going to happen in the U.S. unless “we defend the border.” On the far left, socialists and their fellow travelers claim the riots are all about wealthy people in France not paying enough taxes, resulting in cuts to government services. The truth is far more complicated, but it’s rooted in the decline of population growth in Europe. There simply aren’t enough young workers paying into the tax system anymore, so cuts in social services were inevitable. There is genuine cultural tension as more and more people immigrate from other countries, but government cuts to education and other services are even more important to what’s happening. The situation is complicated, so don’t let dishonest people with U.S. political agendas tell you that it happens to support whatever they were already promoting for partisan reasons.

Here’s another reason to appreciate the cats in your life: New research involving 93 countries found that places with more cats per person also tended to have happier people. The researchers say the finding fits with previous evidence that living with pets can reduce loneliness and stress while providing companionship, emotional attachment and social support. The study doesn’t prove that cats cause greater happiness, but it certainly adds to the evidence that sharing your home — and your life — with a cat might be good for you.

The company that owns Facebook and Instagram is heavily promoting its new AI-based software assistant called Muse, but people who are using it as it was designed are incredibly foolish. An early adopter of the software discovered that a few days ago when he advertised an item for sale on Facebook Marketplace — and he inadvertently gave Muse full authority to act on his behalf. The software agreed to a lowball offer made by another Facebook user and then gave that man the home address of the man for whom he was an agent. The software told the buyer that the seller was home and waiting for him. When the buyer showed up and waited angrily, the would-be buyer left an angry review for the man. And this angry man had the seller’s home address. It was only well after that that the software reported what it had done and admitted it had made a mistake. I won’t be putting that much power into the hands of any software. I think anyone who agrees to such terms is a fool. And the software’s user agreement says you’re responsible for purchases the software makes in your name. Nope.

Meet my new girlfriend. Her name is Meg. And she’s my little sweetheart. A couple of months ago, a neighbor across the street told me about a new stray in the neighborhood that she and I were both soon feeding. The cat had been very skittish about contact and she had a lot of scabs and parasites in her fur, but a trip to the vet last week revealed that she was otherwise in good health. The vet estimates her to be 1 to 2 years old. I named her for Meg Murry, the 13-year-old protagonist of Madeleine L’Engle’s wonderful book, “A Wrinkle in Time.” (Please read the book. Don’t watch the horrible movie.) Since we lost Lucy almost a year ago, it seems appropriate that we finally have a new little girl to join the household. She’s already captured my heart, but Alex, Oliver and Sam aren’t there quite yet.

There’s nothing socially acceptable that’s as dangerous as drinking alcohol. Most people grow up being told to “drink responsibly” — and all of us see people abusing this drug in one way or another — but the truth is that drinking alcohol is always a terrible risk. The alcohol in these drinks is toxic and the human liver has to work hard to filter the toxins out. What most people don’t realize is that alcohol is classified as a known carcinogen by the World Health Organization — because of the well-established connection between imbibing and various cancers. Many people have taken refuge behind the idea that light or moderate drinking might be safe, but a new study shows that drinking even one drink a day increases the risks of 10 types of cancer. When I was a teen-ager, I looked around and saw the negative effects that this behavior had on a lot of people and decided not to start drinking, so I’ve never even tried this poison. The evidence keeps piling up that I was lucky to have come to that conclusion early.

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