Society

"In July, Britain’s National Health Service announced a major revamp of its gender identity services for young people. The famed Tavistock clinic — officially named the Gender Identity Development Service, operated by the Tavistock and Portman Trust and a flashpoint for the country’s debate about gender, trans issues and hormone treatments — would be shuttered. As the New York Times reported, it would be replaced by “a more distributed and comprehensive network of medical care for adolescents seeking hormones and other gender treatments.” This outcome was strongly hinted at in the interim report of the Cass Review, an ongoing investigation into gender identity services for children, headed by the accomplished pediatrics expert Hilary Cass.

Feminist author "Dr." Naomi Wolf is making the rounds with a bombastic new claim that nearly half of pregnant women in a Pfizer vaccine trial miscarried. It's not true. Several media outlets have touted Wolf and her analysis, with her blog being shared all over social media. The doctor (of English literature) claims she has 2,500 volunteers and hundreds of lawyers combing recently released Pfizer documents. This makes it even more astounding that they so wildly misinterpreted the data available to them. Wolf's egregious claims center on the document linked here — a report of adverse effects in subjects who took the Pfizer vaccines prior to March 2021.

Articles about the future and “progress” have been popping up a lot lately, with conversations revolving around the inevitable advancements in technology and automation. Where we should head next is the collective theme. To the metaverse? To outer space itself? But instead of setting our sights on colonizing Mars or creating a perfect alternate reality, we should slow our roll, focus on the here and now and consider whether the frenzied “progress” we’re in such a rush to make has demonstrated any benefit to real-life people. Manufacturing is a good place to start. Let this startling reality sink in, reported in 2017 by the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development: Between 2000 and 2010, US manufacturing experienced a nightmare.

The way I see it, there are two options for the future: a transplanetary society or a transhuman one. What got me thinking about this was right-wing billionaire Peter Thiel’s recent interview with Mary Harrington, which she wrote up in UnHerd. As Harrington puts it, Thiel’s diagnosis of modern social ills is not that “progress is inevitably self-destructive,” but that we’ve been making the wrong kind of progress. "We’ve had continued progress in the world of computers, bits, internet, mobile internet, but it’s a narrow zone of progress. And it’s been more interior, atomizing and inward-focused,” Thiel said. Meanwhile, “there’s been limited progress in the world of atoms.” So far, so good. But then the interview took a strange turn.

In 2016, the Obama-Biden administration concluded that “the quality and strength of evidence” for medicalized gender transition was “low” and insufficient “to determine whether gender reassignment surgery improves health outcomes for Medicare beneficiaries with gender dysphoria.” Six years on, such skepticism has evaporated. In June, the Biden-Harris administration issued an executive order directing the departments of health and education to “promote expanded access to gender-affirming care.” What changed? Not the evidence, only the politics. At a special Pride Month ceremony for LGBT activists at the White House, the president promised to use the “full force of the federal government” in implementing their policy agenda, from education to healthcare.

In 2020, then-president Donald Trump attempted to ban the wildly popular social media app TikTok. Its Gen Z influencers were horrified — how dare the bad orange man take away their right to vogue to teen beats in search of internet fame? Unfortunately, we would not be shielded from TikTok's insane viral trends (the latest involves users getting food poisoning after purchasing one creator's mysterious and apparently highly perishable "pink sauce"). Trump's order was stalled by legal proceedings and ultimately overturned by President Biden when he took office. Yet America still faces serious national security issues from TikTok due to its ownership by a Chinese company, ByteDance. ByteDance has long since scrapped any plans it had to sell TikTok to comply with Trump's order.

When monkeypox crept onto the scene last month, with a handful of confirmed cases in the US, it seemed too absurd to be taken seriously by anyone who’d been paying attention over the last two years. Americans wised up to media malfeasance and career scammers in our health bureaucracies, rolled their eyes and thought, here we go again. The name itself, monkeypox, couldn’t be scarier — like something from a doomsday novel, or cooked up in an editorial meeting to provoke maximum panic. White liberals — the inexhaustible, ever-dutiful and poised-for-action enforcers of tyranny — had a different issue: the name’s racist.

I was legitimately worried when I saw a friend post that her daughter may lose access to an important drug used to treat her autoimmune disease. In the aftermath of Roe v. Wade being overturned by the Supreme Court, my friend said drugs such as Methotrexate and Mifepristone were being banned in some states because of their dual purposes as medicative abortion drugs. As an ardent pro-lifer, I’ve been adamant to clarify how the overturning of Roe v. Wade affects women outside of the legality of abortion itself. When I first heard that ectopic pregnancy or miscarriage treatment could be criminalized in some way, I immediately consulted doctors and lawyers who could clarify the law’s intent.

The number of Americans who believe in God has reached an all-time low, according to a Gallup survey that’s been tracking our nation’s “values and beliefs” since 1944. For a God fearin’ woman such as myself, it’s a disheartening statistic. But we are told never to abandon hope, and recent events — the Supreme Court rulings against abortion and in favor of prayer, a million swing voters switching their registrations to Republican, Keeping Up with the Kardashians finally airing its last season — betoken a more God-centered future. Gallup reports: The vast majority of US adults believe in God, but the 81 percent who do so is down six percentage points from 2017 and is the lowest in Gallup’s trend.

Jordan Peterson went from being a psychologist advising troubled kids to an unlikely political figure as he fought against the Canadian government’s compelled speech law for pronouns. Cockburn watched with fascination as Peterson clashed repeatedly with the left-wing narrative, even going as far as to resign from his tenured position at the University of Toronto due to their rampant leftist ideology. On June 28, Twitter suspended him for this tweet (as recalled by his daughter): https://twitter.com/MikhailaFuller/status/1541946666567323649 Clearly referring to someone by their birth name is a sin for Twitter. Little did Cockburn know that Dave Rubin, the host of The Rubin Report, was to be next on the chopping block. Rubin sent this tweet before being suspended: https://twitter.

Just when I thought woke, mainline American Protestantism couldn’t descend any further into self-parody, the liberal Evangelical Lutheran Church in America went and surprised me. Here’s a summary, courtesy of Dr. Jordan B. Cooper, a pastor in one of the conservative rump denominations that didn’t join the ELCA: Neurodivergent nonbinary trans pastor is made bishop. This individual then disciplines abusive latinxpastor. But this is unknowingly done on a Hispanic holiday and is thus racist. Woman archbishop rebukes bishop but isn't harsh enough so is then also racist. Wait, what?

Cockburn started his Sunday by spitting Darjeeling all over the pages of the New York Times magazine. The cause of alarm? A lengthy, nuanced, meaty analysis of gender therapy had found its way into the paper of record. In Pride month, no less! Feature writer Emily Bazelon spent eight months reporting out the story, speaking to “more than sixty clinicians, researchers, activists and historians, as well as more than two dozen young people and about the same number of parents.” Her over-10,000-word article is framed around the forthcoming release of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health’s new Standards of Care guidelines, which are likely to prove controversial among both the pro- and anti-trans lobbies. It’s well worth a read.

Usually, Cockburn is somewhere on the pessimistic side, talking about how so-and-so isn’t good, how who-knows-what is corrupting society. But today he's feeling nice for once. Mark Wahlberg, in a recent Instagram video, congratulated his son Michael for getting confirmed and praised other young people who want to serve God by way of the Catholic Church’s teachings. And it's got Cockburn feeling light. “Congratulations to my son Michael on making his confirmation,” Wahlberg said. “All the young people out there who are confirmed and taking their relationship with the Lord into their adulthood, what a commitment you guys have made.

I pulled into the Walmart parking lot a little after midnight. Apart from the black Chevy Tahoe I was there to rendezvous with, it was almost empty. The driver, who I only knew as SouthernSigFan7 from the Texas gun forum we both frequent, was standing to the side of the SUV with a smartphone in one hand and a gun case in the other. The AR-15 I was about to buy from him was in that case. I could see he was getting his crypto wallet ready to receive the $2,000 in cryptocurrency I was about to send him to pay for the rifle. This sounds super shady — two total strangers meeting anonymously in a parking lot to exchange crypto for guns — but it’s actually far superior to the old instant background check system it replaced.