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Monday, September 07, 2026

The homophobic folly of banning ‘conversion therapy’

A former recipient and opponent of conversion therapy explains how trans mania is the true conversion therapy and homophobic, gives another example of how trans mania took over the gay rights movement (with lies about the author, to boot) and documents another instance of the slippery slope between gay rights and trans mania: 

The homophobic folly of banning ‘conversion therapy’ - spiked

"If the goal of legal bans on so-called conversion therapy – or in Britain’s case, a ban on ‘conversion practices’ – is to help end harmful treatments of same-sex attracted people, then these bans are not only failing, they are doing something far worse. They are codifying into law a new form of conversion therapy that medicalises away the same-sex attraction of minors before they have even matured into adult gay people.

I say this with the greatest remorse, because I advocated for these bans for years. I survived six years of psychiatric conversion therapy in the early 1990s. Since the late 1990s I used my story to fight for legal protections for gays and lesbians – and later, I thought, for trans people, too. I helped initiate Canada’s first municipal conversion-therapy ban in Vancouver in 2018 and testified before parliament in support of a national ban (Bill C-4) that became law in 2022. I believed these laws were necessary and just. But now I want to finally set the record straight...

There were early signposts that the movement to end ‘treatments’ of gay people was already heading in a direction I could never have imagined. One of the first occurred in 2006, while I was drafting ‘query letters’ for my memoir. These letters are pitches to publishers, in which writers routinely identify the likely readership for their book. I knew that gay, lesbian, and bisexual readers, among others, would be interested, so I was prepared to use the familiar acronym ‘LGB’. But then I noticed the letter ‘T’ beginning to appear in media and activist acronyms, turning ‘LGB’ into ‘LGBT’. I still understood ‘T’ to primarily mean ‘transexuals’, or those with profound, lifelong dysphoria with their sexed bodies – the sense of having been ‘born in the wrong body’. I knew this had nothing to do with sexual orientation, but with a sense of one’s ‘gender’. Like them, I had lived through a degree of body dysphoria as a child, something common among many who later grow up gay. The broader culture seemed to be conflating the two without much discussion or distinction. My unease with the conflation was personal. I could still recall how my psychiatrist had mistakenly believed that by changing my gender behaviour – what would later be called ‘gender expression’ – by decreasing my femininity and strengthening my masculinity, he could somehow awaken my dormant heterosexuality.

Ultimately, because my focus in 2006 was on ending all conversion treatments, I decided to include the full ‘LGBT’ acronym when naming the potential readership in my pitches. I pushed aside the twinge of discomfort I felt and marched forward with my goal: to use my story to help prevent others from enduring similar abuse.

A decade later, the conflation of sexual orientation and gender accelerated dramatically. In 2015, following the suicide of a 17-year-old ‘transgender youth’ (born male) who had been sent to Christian-based conversion therapy, US president Barack Obama called for an end to conversion therapy for both gay and transgender youth. Backed by the likes of LGBT advocacy group Human Rights Campaign, Obama’s intervention helped cement the two issues together in the public mind.

In late 2016, I sold my book to a press in California, with publication scheduled for the following summer. In anticipation, I began reaching out more broadly...

At that time, I still viewed ‘transgender youth’ primarily as kids who did not conform to traditional expectations for their birth sex – what would later be called gender-nonconforming. They were struggling with societal restrictions on expression, the same kind my psychiatrist had tried to ‘correct’. Many of them, I believed, would likely have grown up gay or lesbian if simply left alone.

My book was published on 17 May 2017. A few months later, the Vancouver LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee invited me to present my case at Vancouver City Hall. When the chair asked everyone to introduce themselves with their ‘preferred pronouns’, I was caught off guard. In 1980s dance clubs, nearly everyone bent gender norms, yet no one questioned their birth sex...

Another indication that the movement against conversion therapy was potentially heading down a dangerous path arrived in May 2018. At a library event to promote my book, I had arranged for trans activist Morgane Oger to interview me. During the Q&A, an audience member asked Oger about ‘trans surgeries on minors’. This was the first time I had heard the issue raised publicly. Oger responded that she was ‘not aware’ such surgeries were performed on minors. When the man pressed further, calling it ‘torture’, Oger grew defensive and evasive. The exchange left me confused and chilled. I had never heard of these kinds of treatments on minors. I told myself to stay focussed on my own story as a gay man – and on ending all treatments of anyone, regardless of age...

I travelled to Calgary for a panel discussion on their recently proposed municipal ban on conversion therapy. One of the other panelists was Kristopher Wells, then an associate professor at MacEwan University. Before the event, Wells took a call from community members concerned that the ban might lead to more minors undergoing ‘gender transitions’. On speakerphone in the boardroom, he responded firmly and repeatedly: ‘Minors do not go through gender transitions.’ I believed him. 

Bill S-202 did not advance past first reading. However, on 9 March 2020 (the same week Canada began shutting down schools and non-essential businesses due to Covid-19), the federal government introduced Bill C-8, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Conversion Therapy). The bill would have made it illegal to force someone into conversion therapy, to subject a minor to it, or to advertise or profit from it. But for adults, the only prohibition was ‘forced’ conversion therapy, implying that a competent adult could consent.

It was around this time that media and online coverage of gender identity exploded. Almost overnight, the conversation around gender seemed to shift dramatically. Definitions of sex and gender became increasingly confusing. What I had long understood as ‘trans’ – a condition involving persistent gender dysphoria in adults that might, after careful evaluation, lead to medical transition – was now being reframed as simple self-identification at any age, including for minors. 

I had heard the term ‘affirmative care’ before and assumed it simply meant affirming the existence of gay and trans people. Now I understood it meant fast-tracking minors toward ‘gender-affirmative care’ – puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and possible surgeries – with little or no gatekeeping. None of this made any sense to me, especially when self-identification could lead to permanent medical alteration of healthy bodies.

New terms and ideas that contradicted long-accepted scientific facts flooded the discourse. I kept encountering the slogan ‘trans women are real women’ repeated like a mantra, claims that biological sex was a spectrum or ‘assigned’ at birth, and that gender identity superseded biological reality. The more I watched and listened, my disorientation intensified. I wondered if I was missing something or if my own thinking was just faulty...

By late March, writing keynotes for my upcoming ‘LGBTQ’ events had become difficult. I no longer knew how to speak at gatherings that prominently featured the ‘T’. I wanted to remain true to what I had believed, stated and written for decades, but I could not support ‘gender-affirmative care’ for minors or self-identification leading to irreversible medical interventions. I was relieved when, in April 2020, all my speaking engagements were cancelled due to Covid travel restrictions.

The world outside felt like it was coming undone. The lockdowns brought isolation and fear. I worried daily about my 96-year-old mother. On 25 May, George Floyd was killed by police in Minneapolis, sparking riots and worldwide Black Lives Matter protests. The only unifying theme amid it all – the rise of gender ideology and the chaos in the streets – was a sense of everything coming apart.

My reading intensified that summer. Prominent voices in major outlets were openly questioning the very existence of a binary biological sex. Among the most cited were Anne Fausto-Sterling’s ‘Why Sex is Not Binary’ in the New York Times, Claire Ainsworth’s ‘Sex Redefined’ in Scientific American, Kim Elsesser’s ‘The Myth of Biological Sex’ in Forbes, and Allison Whitten’s ‘Untangling Gender and Sex in Humans’ in Discover. These pieces argued that thinking of sex as only male and female was overly ‘simplistic’, citing examples like intersex conditions, brain-sex differences, chromosomal variations, gene mutations and hormone irregularities. Claims that sex was a spectrum or merely ‘assigned’ at birth were everywhere. Encountering these arguments from so-called experts left me increasingly disoriented and unsettled...

As 2021 began, I turned to longer reading to understand the rapidly evolving claims around gender and ‘trans’ identities. I had bought Abigail Shrier’s Irreversible Damage when it came out in 2020, but left it on my shelf for months, too nervous to open it. When I finally did early that year, it validated what I had already suspected. Shrier documented the dramatic rise in young people – especially natal females – self-identifying as transgender, sometimes as young as pre-pubescent children. In the UK alone, referrals for gender treatments among girls had risen by over 4,000 per cent between 2009 and 2018. Once labelled trans, minors were entitled to immediate ‘gender-affirmative care’ based solely on self-identification, with no gatekeeping or exploration of underlying issues. Suicide threats were routinely used as leverage against concerned parents. Any kind of questioning or exploratory therapy was now labelled ‘conversion therapy’. 

Shrier laid bare the medical reality behind the euphemism: ‘puberty blockers’ chemically castrated minors, with risks including osteoporosis, loss of sexual function and near-certain infertility. Nearly all who started blockers proceeded to cross-sex hormones, which carried lifelong consequences including cardiovascular disease and cancer risks. Surgical interventions – mastectomies on healthy adolescent girls, phalloplasties, vaginoplasties – often resulted in severe complications, chronic pain and multiple revision surgeries. The more I read, the clearer it became that in no other field of medicine were patients, especially minors, allowed to self-diagnose and prescribe their own treatments.

Reading about the scale and speed of medical interventions on young females left me stunned. I wondered whether the sudden surge in girls identifying as trans and seeking to alter their bodies was a new manifestation of a much older pattern of female self-harm. I had engaged in self-harm myself during my youth as a symptom of earlier trauma and deep self-loathing toward my body during puberty. Questions like these led me to Marilee Strong’s 1998 book, A Bright Red Scream, which explored self-mutilation as a language of unbearable inner pain. The young females Shrier described – suddenly identifying as trans and pursuing hormones and various forms of surgical ‘cutting’ (mastectomies on healthy breasts, and in some cases phalloplasties) – seemed to belong on the same continuum as Strong’s ‘needle girls’ (young women in the 1880s who injured themselves by puncturing their flesh with needles) and ‘wrist-slashers’ (sudden waves of young women in the 1960s in Philadelphia and later in Massachusetts who cut their wrists). It seemed to me that behaviour once understood as pathological was now being rebranded as progressive ‘gender-affirmative care’, with surgeons and doctors doing the cutting on behalf of young women.

The same pattern was devastating young males as well. Many gender-nonconforming boys who would likely have grown up gay were being steered toward medical transition, often presenting afterward as ‘heterosexual’ in their declared gender identity. Stories from male detransitioners – including that of Yarden Silveira, who transitioned at 15, underwent vaginoplasty at 19, suffered severe complications, expressed profound regret, and died by suicide at 23 in May 2021 – showed the medicalisation was not limited to natal females.

Reading evolutionary biologists such as Heather Heying, Bret Weinstein, and Colin Wright in 2021 finally helped me articulate, even to myself, the simple, binary nature of sex – definable by gametes (small or sperm for males, large or eggs for females). Secondary characteristics and sex-determination systems (such as chromosomes) were consequences of sex, not its definition. Exceptions did not erase the binary. These and other sources confirmed what should have been basic: there are only two sexes; biological sex did not exist on a spectrum. Gender (behaviour, roles, norms) was far more variable, but gender was not the same as sex. 

Kathleen Stock’s 2021 book, Material Girls: Why Reality Matters for Feminism, helped clarify how the word ‘gender’ itself had shifted over time into four incompatible meanings – from a simple synonym for biological sex to a purely psychological sense of self-identification. The same word was now being used for entirely different concepts, creating widespread confusion. The word ‘trans’ had changed meaning just as dramatically. What I had understood in 2017 or earlier was no longer how it was understood in 2020 and beyond. Even my own earlier public statements supporting ‘trans youth’ could now be misinterpreted.

I began reflecting on my own past in a different light. The similarities between many of today’s ‘trans’-identified youth and the child I had been struck me forcefully. So-called trans healthcare was not just medicalisation, but medicalisation rooted in stereotypes: a feminine boy was now told he was probably a girl; a masculine girl was told she was probably a boy. The endless natural variations of male and female behaviour – including the well-documented link between childhood gender nonconformity and later same-sex attraction – were being pathologised and ‘fixed’ with hormones and surgery. Children with histories of trauma, like my own sexual abuse and body hatred during puberty, were being told their distress was gender dysphoria rather than receiving help for the underlying pain. If I had come of age more recently, I could easily have been labelled trans and set on a path of puberty blockers, hormones and surgeries.

Noah called before summer and asked me to join a small group of advocates working on new provincial legislation to ban conversion therapy in British Columbia. An academic called Florence Ashley, who I had participated with on a panel discussion a few years prior, would be drafting the bill, Noah said. When he sent me the draft, I saw Ashley had redefined sexual orientation as attraction to the ‘same gender’ or ‘opposite gender’, removing biological sex entirely. In meetings I argued that this made no sense for a law intended to protect gay people, whose orientation is based on same-sex attraction.

Between meetings, I called another group member, a gay man in his thirties. He repeated that he didn’t have an issue with the change. I asked if he had any issue dating someone who identified as a ‘trans man’. Without hesitation, he said he had no issue with it. I was stunned. I had always known that ‘trans men’ were still just biological females (and if attracted to men, were then also heterosexual), the same way that I never thought trans women were real women. They were biological males. How could someone be gay while being open to dating and sleeping with a biological female?

When I met continued resistance in the group, I withdrew. I supported bans on conversion therapy, but I had no interest in debating why erasing sexual attraction from the definition of sexual orientation was a bad idea. If they couldn’t see it, I was not going to try to explain it. 

As 2021 wore on, my horror at what I was continuing to learn grew tenfold. Many nights I lay awake, ruminating on how children were being sexualised under the banner of ‘trans healthcare’, which to me looked like mutilation straight out of Frankenstein. If minors could consent to surgeries on their sex organs, what would stop arguments for minors consenting to sex with adults? This should have alarmed everyone, not just survivors of childhood sexual abuse. For gender-nonconforming minors who would likely have grown up gay, ‘gender-affirmative care’ was clearly a new form of conversion therapy – medicalising their bodies and appearance to match an internal feeling now called an ‘identity’. This approach felt completely antithetical to the earlier women’s and gay-rights movements, which had fought to free people from rigid sex stereotypes rather than reinforce them through medical intervention. 

What I still did not fully see was how even the term ‘conversion therapy’ itself had become part of the problem. When I first began speaking out in the 1990s, I never reduced my experiences to a catch-all phrase. I simply described what had been done to me – drugs, ketamine injections, primal-scream sessions, aversion techniques – and why: to change me from homosexual to heterosexual. Later, when the terms ‘reparative’ and then ‘conversion therapy’ gained widespread use, I adopted them too, although somewhat nervously. Once a single phrase was used to describe these treatments, its meaning expanded dramatically—and so did the bans meant to end them. Those bans shifted from ending treatments aimed at changing sexual orientation to protecting, affirming, and enabling any claimed gender identity. In effect, a term originally intended to stop one form of intervention was stretched and inverted to enable another – ‘gender-affirmative care’.

Following a snap Canadian federal election in September 2021, the government introduced Bill C-4, An Act to Amend the Criminal Code (Conversion Therapy). On 1 December 2021, Bill C-4 was fast-tracked and passed unanimously in the House of Commons, which was virtually unheard of. On 7 December, the Senate also passed it unanimously, and on 8 December, it received royal assent and became law. I watched much of the process live, alone in my apartment. 

In the days that followed I felt nothing – no excitement, no sense of victory. A few long-time advocates, including Noah, sent brief, polite congratulations. I didn’t reply. By then I sensed what the new law would unleash, but I could not yet fully sort it out in my head. The feeling of dread was palpable.

Beginning in January 2022, the full implications of the new law started to become painfully clear. By including ‘gender identity’ in the protected categories and providing an exemption for ‘gender-affirmative care’, the legislation effectively criminalised attempts to change sexual orientation while codifying and protecting medical transition for anyone claiming a gender identity. What I had understood for decades as conversion therapy had now been broadened to include any challenge to a person’s belief that they were ‘born in the wrong body’. The law I had fought for had, in practice, legalised what I saw as a new and more invasive form of conversion therapy.

Conversion therapy for sexual orientation historically meant attempts to change same-sex attraction – through lobotomies, drugs, aversion techniques or the kind of psychiatric regime I endured. The goal was to make someone heterosexual, or at least to silence their same-sex attractions. 

Conversion therapy for gender identity worked in the opposite direction. By banning challenges to a claimed gender identity, the law effectively removed barriers to ‘gender-affirmative care’ – social transition, puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones and in some cases surgery. What was called a ban on conversion therapy for gender identity actually increased access to medical treatments that could sterilise, impair sexual function, weaken bones and create lifelong dependence. It facilitated conversion therapy on sexual orientation.

The irony was stark. Youth who might otherwise have grown up gay or lesbian were now being steered toward medical transition, often presenting afterward as ‘heterosexual’ in their declared gender identity. Because biological sex cannot be changed, it would be more accurate to say they had become mutilated homosexuals. Helen Joyce, in her 2021 book, Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality, described these treatments as ‘postmodern gay conversion therapy’. The ban – and others like it that bundled sexual orientation with gender identity – had not ended conversion therapy. It had simply given it a legal sanction under a new name.

This realisation hit harder when I remembered the 2018 Vancouver City Council debate. Across hours of presentations and discussion, the focus was almost entirely on changing homosexuality. There was almost no meaningful reference to ‘gender identity’, even though the final bylaw bundled both together. Most people – including the politicians who passed the law – likely did not foresee how that conflation would play out. I had strongly advocated for these bans to apply to all ages, believing even young adults needed protection. What I did not yet see was how that all-ages language, combined with the bundling and the exemption for ‘gender-affirmative care’, would ultimately put minors at the greatest risk.

In 2022, Florence Ashley’s Banning Transgender Conversion Practices: A Legal and Policy Analysis was published. It was promoted as the first major legal and policy analysis of ‘trans conversion practices’. The foreword, written by Victor Madrigal-Borloz, the UN Independent Expert on Protection from Violence and Discrimination based on Sexual Orientation and Gender Identity, celebrated Canada’s Bill C-4 as a landmark victory, and spoke exclusively about harms to ‘trans and gender diverse persons’. There was no mention of homosexuality, sexual orientation or conversion therapy against gay people – even though the bill had originally been crafted to protect them. 

In the first chapter, Ashley defined ‘trans conversion practices’ as any sustained effort to promote gender identities aligned with one’s ‘sex assigned at birth’ or to discourage behaviours associated with a ‘gender other than the one assigned’. Any questioning of a self-declared trans identity, or hesitation around puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, or surgeries, was labelled a ‘corrective approach’. I was surprised to see my own name in the index. Ashley referenced me alongside a publicly known trans-identified person, suggesting I had experienced a ‘conversion practice’ as a young adult and had ‘ostensibly consented’. 

The claim was false on multiple levels. I am gay, not trans. I had always described my experience as gay conversion therapy (or conversion therapy of my sexual orientation). And in numerous interviews, essays and my book, I had explicitly stated that I never consented to my psychiatrist’s treatment. Ashley’s misrepresentation was especially striking given that we had previously appeared together on a panel and she had told me she was familiar with my work. 

Early in the book, Ashley discussed ‘gender-creative’ children (whom she also called ‘gender-variant’, ‘gender-expansive’, or ‘gender-diverse’), noting that they ‘may grow up to be transgender’. At no point did she mention that these same children had historically grown up to be gay or lesbian. She framed historical ideas around gender variance entirely through a modern gender-identity lens. Her omission stood in stark contrast to earlier (and some of the first known) advocates for homosexuals like Karl Heinrich Ulrichs, who in the 19th century argued for the rights of same-sex attracted people – not to medicalise their bodies. 

Ashley’s book was so deeply immersed in a worldview built on falsehoods – about biological sex, about notions of gender and gender identity, about who grows up to be trans vs gay – that even attempting to analyse it felt like speaking in a language that was not real. Ashley made painfully clear how thoroughly the language and logic of conversion therapy had been inverted. Where earlier advocates sought to protect same-sex attracted people from coercive change, today’s gender ideology often medicalised the very children the bans were meant to protect. What began as an effort to end harmful attempts to change sexual orientation had, in practice, enabled a new and more invasive form of conversion under the name of ‘gender-affirmative care’.

After stewing over the ban, Ashley’s book and the growing damage I saw gender ideology inflicting on minors, I finally posted my first public statement on the subject in April 2022. I wrote that I struggled with how conversion-therapy bans had conflated sexual orientation with gender identity, and that the two should never have been bundled together because their developmental trajectories are entirely different.

The response was immediate and hostile. Several users called me hateful. Advocates I had worked closely with on the federal ban called me out online. One long-time collaborator responded publicly within minutes, stating that bans on trans-conversion therapy were ‘every bit as important as bans on conversion therapy for sexual orientation’. His tweet felt like a public rebuke.

In another comment posted days later, I explained why I rejected the label ‘cis’, which was now commonly used as the opposite of ‘trans’. The term presupposed that a person had never struggled with gender dysphoria. As a gay man, I was often lumped into the ‘cis’ category, yet I had experienced significant dysphoria as a child. That discomfort later resolved as I matured and accepted my homosexuality. Like many other gay adults who likely experienced similar dysphoria when young, being called ‘cis’ felt factually incorrect and incoherent to me.

Responses from Florence Ashley and others were swift and critical. One former member of the Vancouver LGBTQ2+ Advisory Committee tweeted that I was ‘undoing all that good’ and looking for ‘10 minutes of fame’. Her words stung. The last thing I wanted was fame. What I wanted – what I had always wanted – was to prevent further harm and to end what I now saw as a new form of conversion therapy. 

In a Quillette essay published early June 2022, I publicly stated for the first time that combining sexual orientation and gender identity in these bans was a mistake. In a second Quillette essay later that year, I laid out my opposition to many of the core tenets of gender ideology. I rejected the idea that a person could be ‘born in the wrong body’, that biological sex was ‘assigned at birth’, or that a person’s sex could be changed through hormones or surgery. I did not believe gender identities could supplant biological sex, nor did I support ‘gender-affirmative care’, especially for minors. These beliefs were incoherent to me and ultimately erased my gay sexuality. I also rejected the label ‘cis’ as meaningless and the term ‘transphobia’ as so broad and elastic that it now equated simple disagreement or appeals to biological reality with hatred. The pieces drew strong reactions, including from some of the advocates I had worked with for so long. 

A short time later, I removed pronouns from my social media profiles. I had previously included ‘he / him’, believing it showed support for trans people (under an older understanding of what it meant to be trans). But I now saw that displaying pronouns implicitly endorsed the newer idea that a person could change their sex or that minors should be affirmed in any self-identified gender.

In the wake of my essays, Noah contacted me directly. What began as a conversation quickly became confrontational. He accused me of spreading hatred, warned that my words could fuel violence, dismissed detransitioners as ‘like ex-gays’, and demanded I change my mind. I ended the call.

Several things became clear. First, many of those I had worked with had assumed we were all on the same side simply because we had fought together to end conversion therapy. We were all supposedly ‘on the left’. This was not true. I was on no one’s side. If I had been perceived as being on the left, it was only because the political left had historically fought for gay rights and free speech. With the rise of gender-identity ideology, the meaning of key terms had shifted dramatically. We had all been using similar language to mean very different things. 

Second, the casual dismissal of detransitioners as being ‘like ex-gays’ was deeply misguided. Detransitioners had been labelled (or had identified) as trans, often gone through medical transition, and later realised it was a mistake – sometimes a catastrophic one. Their error was believing they could change their birth sex. In contrast, ‘ex-gays’ had started out same-sex attracted and tried to become heterosexual. Their error was believing they could change their sexual orientation. The lie for detransitioners was that they could change sex; the truth was accepting their natal sex. The lie for ex-gays was that they could change their orientation; the truth was accepting their homosexuality. Birth sex and sexual orientation cannot be changed. For those detransitioners who had transitioned partly to escape emerging homosexuality, their experience was, at root, another form of homophobia.

Over the past few years, I have watched with growing distress as detransitioners recount their traumas and women lose their hard-won, sex-based rights to ‘trans women’ (biological males), and are then penalised for even speaking up. Minors, who lack full agency and are easily influenced, have been the primary focus of this new gender ideology. Instead of conversion treatments imposed on adults who are gay or same-sex attracted, legal conversion-therapy bans now effectively force a different kind of change on minors by medicalising their bodies before they’ve had a chance to grow up and explore their sexuality naturally. 

I still find it difficult to reflect on how much happened over so many years – decades of relentless effort, hope, crushing disappointment, public testimony, private pain and endless rewriting. Not to mention the psychiatric treatment I experienced, the consequences of which I still live with every day. Then came the slow, grinding realisation that the very thing I had fought so hard for had unintended consequences I could not have foreseen. 

I am profoundly disturbed. I survived a brutal, coercive treatment to try to change my sexual orientation that nearly destroyed me. I poured my story into fighting to protect others from similar abuse – only to slowly realise that the very laws I helped champion were being used, in ways I could never have anticipated, to enable a new and medically sanctioned form of ‘conversion therapy’ on a much larger scale. None of this is simply intellectual regret. It is a deep, existential horror. I fought hard to stop one kind of harm. I never intended to enable another. 

This reckoning did not arrive suddenly. Since 2023, I have been quietly working through these questions in a much longer manuscript. It was important for me to see everything laid out in one coherent, chronological document before saying anything of substance publicly. My current position is not a change of heart; it is more a statement of recognition about issues that were shifting almost daily, making them difficult to fully understand at the time. Until now, I was also scared – scared of being called transphobic, bigoted, or hateful, scared of losing friends and support. But children’s lives are at stake. 

After two decades of fighting what I believed was the right battle, I am convinced that these laws need to be revisited. Legal bans on so-called conversion therapy, if they remain, should never conflate sexual orientation with gender. Any laws that do should be repealed or amended.

Thirty years ago, I began a fight to protect vulnerable young people like the one I once was. Today I am still fighting for them – only now I understand that the greatest threat is not always the one I once feared. Sometimes it wears a white coat and calls itself affirmation." 

 

Clearly, the author is ignorant and doesn't understand how preventing TRAs from sterilising minors will result in gay people being lynched.

Of course, we are still told that minors do not undergo medical transition, despite the boatloads of evidence that they do.

In any event, even if you want to ban the traditional conception of conversion therapy for adults, this still runs up against the left's usual fetish for patient autonomy and non-interference in decisions made between healthcare providers and informed, consenting adult patients.

 

Links - 7th September 2026 (General Wokeness)

Threads - "I do not understand the flippant morality of conservatives. Apparently they need free speech to harass Christine Wonsley, mother of Nolan Wells, but we can’t quote Charlie Kirk word for word without being fired. Apparently they need to protect kids from “the liberal agenda” but not from ped*philes and the Epstein files. Apparently they do not want Sharia law but are okay with a Christian nation where women are controlled, schools have mandatory religion, and citizens are disappeared. Apparently conservatives want a government to be fiscally responsible but they’re okay spending billions for war, Isr*el, ICE, and gold bathrooms. Apparently a movie with violence and language is “destroying family values,” but criticize it, then “you’re weak” and “woke” and “kids are too soft these days.” Apparently DEI means white folks with no credentials but not Black or Muslim with all the credentials. I do not understand conservative morality except that it has no facts, only feelings."
Weird. Left wingers used to be very clear that private companies couldn't violate your free speech. This also shows the left wing playbook - obsess over "credentials" instead of achievements, merit or even simply whether someone is making sense. Because it's easy to just award credentials to undeserving people using DEI and then proclaim they are immune to criticism

Alex Godofsky on X - "There's a certain kind of person who sincerely holds to, roughly, "Woke 1 was crazy, but if you actually said Woke 1 was crazy DURING Woke 1, that's very suspicious"."
Swann Marcus on X - "People get so mad at me for pointing out I was right about literally everything when I said leftist violence in 2020 would cause the homicide rate to skyrocket, destroy urban social order, and cause a pro-policing backlash Whenever I bring up all the people leftists murdered that year I get a lot of "oh, that again? Don't you know those murders were 6 years ago? Who cares about those dead teenagers? Don't you realize all those deaths leftists in 2020 were responsible for have nothing to do with leftist ideology in 2026? They definitely won't kill thousands of people this time!""

Ecological restoration is like ‘gender confirmation surgeries,’ trans river scientist tells Princeton students - "A “queer-trans-feminist river scientist” discussed research grounded in a “queer and trans focus on love and grief for rivers and fish” at a recent Princeton University-hosted event titled “Underflows: Queer and Trans Among Rivers.” The featured speaker, Cleo Wölfle Hazard (pictured), is a “queer-trans-feminist river scientist” and assistant professor of equity and environmental justice at University of Washington, Seattle, whose work focuses on “how queer trans feminist thought can transfigure ecological science as it’s used by Indigenous and non-Native practitioners in river management,” according to Wölfle Hazard’s university page. Princeton students enrolled in the environmental studies course “Field Seminar in Regional Environmental Politics” were required to attend, according to Jerry Zee, the professor, who introduced the talk... Wölfle Hazard compared “gender confirmation surgeries” to ecological restoration, arguing transgender bodies are similar to bodies of water. “When I pay my surgeon to cut my penis into a neo-vagina, I am moving toward myself through myself,” Wölfle Hazard said, quoting gender studies theorist Eva Hayward. “What if restoration was the watershed becoming more itself through these different cuts and scars that humans might enact with bulldozers and rerouting channels?” Wölfle Hazard asked... The event drew upon the speaker’s recent book, which explains “why rivers matter for queer and trans life.” The book’s “core argument” is that “in order to become more adept at centering justice, sovereignty, and adaptability, river sciences should engage with queer and trans theory.” The book offered “innovative ways” to “disrupt settler colonialism and new visions for justice in river governance.” Wölfle Hazard began with a land acknowledgement: “[I’m] grateful to be an uninvited guest on Lenape territory here in Princeton.”... “I’m still trying to figure out what I just heard,” one attendee, an environmental engineer who graduated from Princeton, said in the question-and-answer period while asking a question about infusing environmental science with liberal arts. “I’d give it a B-minus,” he told The Fix after the event."

Claire Lehmann on X - "“Intellectual life used to be fun,” Mr. Haidt said. “There’s an emergent community, from center left to center right, of people who feel politically homeless and are recognizing that the big division is no longer between left and right, but between people who are on the extremes, who are humorless and aggressive and deluded by their passion and tribalism, versus the middle 70 percent of the country.”"
"Great quote from @JonHaidt As @jonkay says, the first sign of a cultist is someone who has lost their sense of humour"
Meme - Cathy Young @CathyYoung63: "Indeed. One of the first signs of the rise of toxic "social justice" was the 2013 feminist freakout over this NYT obit (seen as downplaying Bril's achievements rather than using a twist to highlight them). The Times caved to the shriekers and rewrote it."
"She made a mean beef stroganoff, followed her husband from job to job and took eight years off from work to raise three children. "The world's best mom," her son Matthew said. But Yvonne Brill, who died on Wednesday at 88 in Princeton, N.J., was also a brilliant rocket scientist, who in the early 1970s invented a propulsion system to help keep communications satellites from slipping out of their orbits."
Authoritarians have no sense of humour after all.

Meme - "MANILA *flattened in war, with impassive Jeremy Corbyn*
ROTTERDAM *flattened in war, with impassive Jeremy Corbyn*
WARSAW *flattened in war, with impassive Jeremy Corbyn*
HIROSHIMA *flattened in war, with triggered Jeremy Corbyn*
Jeremy Corbyn: "81 years ago, the US dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima - a crime against humanity.""

Tablesalt 🇨🇦🇺🇸 on X - "‼️JUST IN Canada sending 28 million dollars to South Africa and Rwanda for "gender-responsive Nature-based Solutions" to flooding."
Damn Poilievre wasting money for his by election that could've be used for healthcare!

The Lynchings That Aren't - "I guess that now, with the SPLC potentially sidelined from the business of inciting a race war, Pravda has to pick up some of the slack... Mississippi is now leading the country in turning around the literacy crisis in the black community, but that is not noteworthy to the media. Instead, the fact that black people are being fake-lynched is top of the headlines. It sure sounds bad that three black people have been found hanging from trees in the Southern state, and in human terms it certainly is a tragedy when people die by suicide or get murdered as if they were Canadians seeking healthcare, but none of this is caused by an outbreak of racial hatred from SPLC-funded Nazis or KKK members. More likely, it is a sad case of social contagion, where one incident sparks a series of others in people who are on the edge... The Left is deeply invested in the idea that America is filled with racists always on the edge of murderous outbursts of generalized hatred for minorities, when the fact of the matter is that the recent outburst of racial violence is aimed primarily at Jews and white people, inspired by hate campaigns the left itself promotes. It's now quite common to find leftists celebrating the violent deaths of prominent conservatives, or even screaming on camera about who deserves to be taken out next. While the media cheers it on or spins the story. "

The Lead CNN on X - "Police investigating after a Black woman was found hanging from a tree in Mississippi"
Sean Davis on X - "Her black boyfriend was arrested. You don’t hate CNN enough."

Michael Geist on X - "The replies to my posts about Canadian campus antisemitism read like a live enactment of its findings. The survey found 45% of Jewish students regularly encounter Holocaust denial; the replies pile on. Hate generated by calling out antisemitism overwhelms."

Plans to ban white swimmers from Berlin public pool trigger backlash - "The Volksbühne, a theatre in the city centre, was allocated €300,000 (£255,000) of taxpayers’ money to open a “people’s swimming pool”, which it initially pledged would be “open for all who are seeking to cool down in the increasingly hot Berlin summers”. But the Volksbühne advertised an event scheduled for Friday in which the pool would be open “exclusively to black communities” for six hours as part of a collaboration with the non-governmental organisation Each One Teach One... Elif Eralp, the Left Party’s candidate for mayor and the current front-runner in September’s election, defended the exclusion of white swimmers, saying: “On Friday, an association has booked the pool for its members legally. In doing so, the People’s Swimming Pool provides access for people who are frequently affected by exclusion and racism. Labelling this as a form of discrimination is very revealing.” Steffen Krach, the Social Democratic Party candidate, added: “One can debate the decision made by the [event organisers], but not at the expense of people of colour.” The event has since been cancelled, with the theatre complaining that it had become a “target of Right-wing and racist incitement”... After a spate of punch-ups and sexual harassment on hot summer days, Berlin’s swimming pools introduced a rule in 2025 that guests had to bring identification to be allowed to enter. In 2025 after a particularly violent incident, Friedrich Merz, the chancellor, blamed an “unbelievable lack of respect for women and police in particular cultural circles”, apparently referring to migrants from the Middle East."
If you are against racial segregation, you're racist and if you criticise it, you're right wing and engaging in "racist incitement"

The Democrats Can’t Just Laugh Off ‘Woke 1’ - The Atlantic - "Representative Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez made two striking remarks that seem related. First, she barely demurred when ABC News asked whether she aspired to run for president. “I haven’t ruled out the possibility,” she eventually said. Second, she tried to laugh off stances that progressives in her wing of the Democratic Party had taken in the preceding years: “‘Woke 1 was crazy,’” she said, echoing a comment that one of her allies had made about the heyday of ideas such as “defund the police.” Ocasio-Cortez represents an extremely liberal congressional district in New York City. The fact that she is declining to defend—and indeed wishing to move past—these positions shows how radioactive they have become. If only things were so easy. Over the past decade, Democratic politics have been reshaped by an ideology centered on systemic oppression and the radical policies ostensibly needed to correct it. The most common name for it is “wokeness,” which attained its cultural apogee in 2020—after the murder of George Floyd brought millions of people out to the streets to protest police killings of Black people. The established institutions of the meritocratic elite were swept over by the movement’s force: Members of Congress were photographed taking a knee while wearing African-inspired kente cloth. Companies rolled out diversity, equity, and inclusion action plans and donated huge sums to Black Lives Matter and other racial-justice causes. Universities denounced themselves as complicit in systemic racism. Staffers at news outlets revolted against colleagues they deemed counterrevolutionary, and nonprofit leaders and corporate executives treated the books of the anti-racism gurus Ibram X. Kendi and Robin DiAngelo as revelatory. The Democratic Party, ever more dominated by the college-educated, absorbed these influences and let itself be perceived as the party of causes such as rejecting law enforcement, abolishing ICE, and queering gender. Years after this collective effervescence passed, many ideas that once seemed weighty look flimsy. Cities that cut police spending reversed course after murders spiked. Elite universities built up large DEI bureaucracies to manage every oppression—yet embarrassed themselves in their inability to address campus anti-Semitism after the Israel-Gaza war began. But most members of the party’s elite apparently hope that the ideas from the period will simply recede from public consciousness, mostly through silence, without their needing to repudiate “Woke 1.” Some, however, have pursued other strategies, such as retconning: For example, Kamala Harris, a former prosecutor, remade herself as a leftist during her unsuccessful 2020 Democratic presidential campaign by, among other things, advocating for decriminalizing illegal border crossing. In 2024, she tried to revert to the center by prosecuting repeat offenders and restricting asylum, all while insisting: “My values have not changed.” Now Ocasio-Cortez is previewing a third strategy: laughing at past excesses. All of these avoidance strategies could fail. Woke 1 may be over, but progressives have not given up their attempt to take over the Democratic Party apparatus. Candidates aligned with the Democratic Socialists of America—who have proved ascendant in primary elections this year—still take radical positions. One DSA-aligned candidate who is expected to be elected to Congress, Darializa Avila Chevalier, is a prison abolitionist who cannot bring herself to say that murderers should go to jail. The front-runner for the Democratic nomination for governor in Wisconsin is Francesca Hong, a DSA-connected candidate who once criticized Thanksgiving for its colonialist associations. Although the DSA itself emphasizes economic policies, such as universal rent control and zero-cost health care, its national platform does not shy away from endorsing proposals widely seen as excesses of Woke 1, including paying reparations to descendants of slaves, “fully abolishing the police and prison system,” and granting amnesty to all immigrants regardless of status, along with an end to all visa caps and quotas. The rhetorical focus has shifted, but the support for old, unpopular ideas remains. Even if Democratic-primary voters were not endorsing DSA candidates, Woke 1 would still be menacing Democrats running for office, for a simple reason: Republicans will never let voters forget this. Republicans have presented themselves as the party of the common man against the party of the faculty lounge. Even as Donald Trump has, in so many respects, inverted what it means to be a Republican, anti-wokeness has worked to unify the party and has now become a core tenet of GOP dogma. By many accounts, the most effective campaign advertisement of the 2024 presidential election had the tagline “Kamala’s for they/them. President Trump is for you.” Since that election, Democrats have broadly understood that public opinion is against them on many culture-war issues, particularly when it comes to sex-segregated sports. But only a few, such as California Governor Gavin Newsom and Representative Seth Moulton of Massachusetts, have criticized trans women’s participation in women’s athletics. (Moulton, who is running in a Senate primary, has since walked back his remarks.) Most of their fellow Democrats seem to be waiting for the issue to blow over. Republicans have no reason to allow that. Ideas never die, but they can go dormant. The unwillingness to extirpate wokeness now may result in its resurgence later. The silence of conventional Democrats and the ascent of the DSA could make the party’s 2028 presidential-primary contest resemble the 2020 one. Then, candidates of all stripes competed to out-left one another, committing themselves to positions that caused their party electoral trouble for years. Should Ocasio-Cortez become the Democratic candidate for president, she may experience that painful lesson firsthand."
Of course, left wingers are now denouncing her for anti-black racism. Hilarious.

Meme - David Santa Carla @TheOnlyDSC: "White people commit so little crime that the biggest stories on X are a woman calling her stalker a slur and a kid stealing 2 Red Bulls."

Woke 1 was crazy. Woke 2 is worse and has already conquered Canada | National Post - "Woke 1 was rather ridiculous and provided great fuel for laughs and cheap entertainment across North America. However, Woke 1 implies Woke 2 is coming, and it will be far worse when it does. In fact, in Canada, at least, Woke 2 is already here, and the fact it is quieter is not a sign of weakness. Not only is Woke 2 turning the accommodation of Woke 1 into durable power, it is cycling in fresh causes post-pandemic. The second wave is being driven by the same people who insisted on gender-neutral washrooms, the relitigation of history, and the eradication of basic standards concerning appearance and hygiene. Now they are graduating from law schools and entering government. If Woke 1 was able to bludgeon the establishment into partial compliance, Woke 2 will complete the transformation as more and more inmates start to run the asylum. Woke 1 started in the mid-2010s, when the mediocre NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick was considered important for taking a knee during “The Star-Spangled Banner.” Alongside that came the rise of land acknowledgements and activist students ripping the gender signs off campus washrooms. The high-water mark of Woke 1 was the George Floyd riots and unrest of 2020, capped off by the first defeat of Donald Trump in the U.S. presidential election. There is no question that Trump’s victory in 2016 and the ascendancy of right-wing populism in western politics saw a parallel eruption on the left. People learned to roll their eyes as institutional panic gave way to corporate sermons, renamed universities, and plans to spend billions on “anti-racism” strategies. However, this was still accommodation rather than full-scale transformation. Woke 2 will have different ideological pillars on the surface, but the same agenda of deconstruction. New bosses and department heads who will swap out rants about “privilege” for removing “barriers,” which, in effect, means curtailing the career advancement for straight, white men to the benefit of everyone else. This is already happening, but Woke 2 will cement it with more professional, less politicized language, rather than leave it as a short-term circus. Persuading the public is no longer the goal of Woke 2. Rather, it will be about controlling money and sinecures and deciding who and what receives grants, contracts, and licences. Canada is uniquely exposed because, unlike almost every other western country that experienced a non-left interlude, it has not had a federal Conservative government since 2015. For almost 11 years now, the Liberals have happily incorporated Woke 1 into the “big tent” and twisted government policy to suit it. Whatever changes Mark Carney has nominally brought to the Liberals, the imprint of Justin Trudeau’s zeal for Woke 1 is found in the qualifications for Canada Research Chairs, academic advancement, and grant-making. In fact, Canada exited Woke 1 ages ago and is already deep into the quieter, more effective and insidious Woke 2. The Privy Council Office’s 2026–27 plan says “Gender-based Analysis Plus” will be thoroughly integrated into the affairs of government, including mandatory assessments in cabinet committee documents and memoranda to Cabinet. The Treasury Board of Canada Secretariat is pushing through an expansive DEI plan for 2026–29, and Canada’s Anti-Racism Strategy explicitly seeks a whole-of-government approach reaching housing, immigration, justice, health and employment. Canada and the United States both now host a powerful form of diasporic politics, in which North American money and political capital is looted in the service of foreign causes. This may represent less of a convergence than the U.S. catching up to Canada given Ottawa’s long history of pandering to ethnic voters, no matter which party is in-charge. Conversely, one of the most striking divergences between Canada and the United States is the decline of prominent Black American movements and initiatives that defined the previous wave. Woke 1 was deeply tied to racial tensions between Black and white Americans, especially regarding police conduct and the presence of controversial symbols like the Confederate flag. Woke 2 features less of that, and Middle Eastern affairs have instead come to dominate it, with Muslim Americans flexing their electoral power in cities like New York and swing states like Michigan. With no Donald Trump-type figure to smash the DEI initiatives of Woke 1, Canada has continued to entrench them while allowing Woke 2 to shape foreign and domestic policy. The cleverness of Woke 2 is that cabinet ministers and other officials will quietly normalize all of it and describe it in ways that sound responsible, lawful and eminently fundable to moderates. In lieu of a right-of-centre prime minister, Canada’s Conservative premiers have offered little more than skirmishes against either Woke 1 or Woke 2. There certainly has been no organized, large-scale counteroffensive. Alberta and Saskatchewan enacted meaningful parental-rights measures, while New Brunswick’s earlier Policy 713 controversy briefly became part of the same battle before its government was replaced by a Liberal provincial government. However, all of that resistance has been confined largely to schools, names, pronouns and parental consent. Nova Scotia’s own Progressive Conservative government, despite its name, has proudly introduced a whole-of-government Equity and Anti-Racism Strategy. With few exceptions, Atlantic Progressive Conservative parties never fail to make the first word in their names shine. Canada has undergone a steady laundering of controversial, radical left-wing ideas into neutral-looking administrative obligations. There has never been a federal election fought on these issues, and what voters never expressly approved or rejected can easily become the default setting of government. Woke 2 is already alive and well here in Canada, less a sequel to Woke 1 than its second act."

Dr. Maalouf ‏ on X - "Jean-Luc Melenchon, leader of the biggest far-left party in France, explains why the alliance between progressives and Muslims is necessary. “If you’re counting on white Christian workers to bring about socialism in France, it won’t happen. But our Muslim brothers and sisters will.” This is the same playbook being used by the left in all Western countries."

Academic with historic links to extreme group hired in the same Cambridge faculty as 'plagiarism professor' Jason Arday - "An academic with historic links to the now banned Hizb ut-Tahrir terror group has been recruited by Cambridge University to the same faculty as ex-professor Jason Arday. Dr Farah Ahmed wrote a chapter for a pamphlet published in 2002 by the group before it was proscribed, attacking 'western education' as a 'threat' to Muslims, it is claimed. The academic is now an assistant research professor at Cambridge's Faculty of Education – the same department that recruited Mr Arday, who has stepped down following a plagiarism row. During her time at Cambridge, she has also co-authored a How Islamic Is My School toolkit, which says the Islamic concept of education is in sharp contrast to 'gaining literacy and numeracy and other disciplinary skills demonstrated through qualifications'. In 2023, she helped organise a conference on Islam, science and education to 'recognise the role of science as part of a wider modernist and colonial project', and to 'consider challenges' to the view that 'sees science as 'objective knowledge'... Dr Ahmed's chapter for the 2002 Hizb ut-Tahrir pamphlet 'Education and Identity' was republished in 2017. Hizb ut-Tahrir was proscribed in the UK in 2024. The Spectator reported that in the pamphlet, she wrote: 'The Muslim community as a whole in Britain needs to recognise that western education is a threat to our beliefs and values.' She attacked schools' 'attempts to integrate Muslim children' as seeking to 'produce new generations that reject Islam' and added: 'if society is built on kufr [unbelief], it is our duty to tackle this challenge as a community in order to protect our young from its corruption.' She also wrote that the national curriculum is a 'systematic indoctrination' to 'build 'model British citizens' who will seek to actively take part in the implementation of the secular capitalist system in British society.' And she added: 'Naturally, such a system will not be suitable to the needs of Muslim students as the aqeedah [belief system] of the Muslim is in complete contradiction to this.' Her pamphlet chapter also attacked British schools for teaching that 'polygamy or marriage under the age of 16' is 'archaic and discriminatory to women', and for telling children that 'democracy… is the only way that laws should be created.' Democracy, she said, is a 'corrupt tradition'. She also criticised how religious tolerance is 'primarily pushed' in religious schools, meaning that 'Islam is taught as a religion like any other'. English, she wrote, 'is one of the most damaging subjects' a school can teach. Fairy tales 'reflect secular and immoral beliefs, which contradict the viewpoint of Islam,' and Romeo and Juliet 'advocates disobeying parents and pre-marital relations,' she said. She also said science was a problem because in 'teaching of evolution, Muslim children will be exposed to ideas that contradict Islam'"
Time to ban Christian schools to protect secularism

Blaine Pardoe on X - "So let me make sure that I get this right. Wizards of the Coast is removing slavery from their reboot of the Dark Suns setting because it's problematic? They actually think that they are protecting us from fictional slavery, in a game based on imagination? My favorite part of this idiocy is they employed "sensitivity readers" as part of their process. What a stupid and completely worthless job! I'm glad I made the hop to Castles and Crusades for my next campaign. At least they aren't trying to protect me from fictional things! @trolllordgames"
Daddy Warpig on X - "Slavery is part of the Black experience and nobody else is allowed to write about it. It's "insensitive." There was a Chinese woman who wrote a Young Adult fantasy novel about a Chinese-inspired culture. It had slavery, because medieval China had slavery. She was destroyed by an online mob. Publisher disavowed her. Book was canceled one month before publication. These are the current rules in the mainstream of publishing culture. It's why I was able to predict this almost two years ago."

The Reality of "Settler Violence" in the West Bank

Leah Zakh Aharoni | Facebook

For thirty years, I have raised my children in Judea and Samaria. If you ask people what the hardest part of mothering here is, they will guess it’s worrying about their safety.
 
They are wrong.
 
The hardest job, the one that keeps you up at night long after the kids are asleep, is teaching your children not to hate.
 
When you raise a family here, terror is not a newspaper headline. It is the physical landscape your children play in every afternoon.
 
My kids grew up playing in Gan Shalva, a playground named for Shalva Uzana, a 24-year-old kindergarten teacher murdered at the entrance to our community on her way to work.
 
They met their friends at Nethanel Square, named for 14-year-old Nethanel Riachi, gunned down in his school dorm alongside his classmate Avraham Setton.
 
Across from my children's grandparents’ house is Zalman Shlein Street. Zalman was a contractor who employed workers from Gaza in the 1980s. Every single day, he set a table and fed them dinner. He bought clothes for their kids. He sent gifts home to their families.
 
One afternoon, his own crew murdered him at the work site.
 
Almost every community in Judea and Samaria has its own version of Gan Shalva, Nethanel Square, and Zalman Shlein Street.
 
And then there is the Fogel family. In March 2011, in Itamar, two Palestinian Arab teens climbed a fence at night and stabbed to death Ehud Fogel, his wife Ruth, their eleven-year-old son Yoav, their four-year-old son Elad, and their three-month-old baby Hadas. Killed in her crib.
 
For six months after that night, I could not sleep. I would lie awake, getting out of bed a dozen times to check the locks, the window latches, the shadows outside. A hundred times a night, fighting off an armed intruder in my own mind.
 
And around all of this, the electric fence.
 
Almost every Jewish community in Judea and Samaria is surrounded by one. Sensors. Armed guards. Infiltration sirens that go off when someone climbs the perimeter. My children have run to safe rooms during infiltration sirens their whole childhood, the same kind of siren sounded on October 7.
 
We did not walk in the surrounding hills. We did not enter Arab villages. We did not stop at gas stations in the wrong areas. For safety and by policy, we lived inside a perimeter.
 
And during these thirty years, we have watched the neighboring Arab villages expand with no control, often stopping only at the fence.
 
You try to shield your children. You turn off the news. But trauma moves by osmosis.
 
It travels through school corridors, playground chatter, and the sudden, suffocating silence of a mother holding her breath.
 
How do you explain trust to a teenager when the school bus driver, who drove the special-needs kid next door every day for a year, suddenly became the gunman who walked into Merkaz HaRav and murdered eight teenage students?
 
You do not have an answer. So you tell them the only thing you know how to tell them.
 
For over thirty years, I have sat at my kitchen table having the exact same conversation with each of my children, over and over again:
 
"Mom, do all Arabs want to kill us?"
 
"No. That is not true."
 
"I hate them and want to hurt them back!"
 
"No. We do not use violence, and we do not hate."
 
"How do we know who to trust?"
 
"I do not know."
 
And then the hardest line of all, the one I had to repeat until my voice shook:
 
"The moment we start hating them, the moment we want to kill them just because of who they are, we become like them."
 
I did not fight that battle for three decades just to watch the world rewrite our history.
 
Today, a third generation is growing up in Judea and Samaria.
 
Young. Exhausted. Sick and tired of living in the shadow of fear. They carry decades of secondary PTSD in their bones. They watched their neighbors murdered. They ran to safe rooms during infiltration sirens their whole childhood. They walked to school past the square named after the 14-year-old boy shot in his bed. They grew up inside the electric fence.
 
For sixty years, Jewish blood in Judea and Samaria was treated by the international community as white noise. Nobody wept for our sleeping children. Nobody held press conferences for babies murdered in their cots. It was taken as an acceptable baseline: Arabs kill Jews, and Jews absorb the funerals.
 
The same international community that has spent sixty years using the words "apartheid" and "wall" and "confinement" to describe what Israel does never used those words for what we actually live inside.
 
The wire was around us. We were confined. We were behind the wall. And the world called us the oppressors.
 
Now this young generation is building open farms without fences. They are refusing to act like targets. They are standing up to defend their land. They are adopting Yosef Trumpeldor’s 100-year old slogan "Where the Jewish plow stops, the border begins." More often than not they are fighting off attacks.
 
And suddenly the entire global apparatus has found its voice.
 
Suddenly every diplomat, news anchor, and human rights group is screaming about "settler violence."
 
If you care about settler violence, I am asking you to do two things. Google "West Bank terror" today. See what comes up. It will be pages and pages of "settler violence" with hardly any mention of Arab violence.
 
And now ask yourself if you have ever heard of the Fogel family, Shalva Uzana, Nethanel Riachi, Avraham Setton, Zalman Shlein or any other one of the hundreds upon hundreds of Jewish victims of terror. Then ask yourself why.
 
Let me be unmistakably clear.
 
I am not ignoring or excusing Jewish civilian violence against Arabs. Those incidents happen. I do not support vigilante violence. I do not excuse lawlessness. I spent my adult life fighting to ensure my children never adopted the tactics of our enemies.
 
And as a society, Israel investigates them, prosecutes them, and condemns them. We investigate our extremists. They celebrate theirs.
 
What I am naming is scale, silence, and inversion, that decades of unceasing terror against Jewish children was treated as an acceptable baseline, while a fraction of a fraction of that violence in the other direction became the international community's obsession.
 
I will not sit quietly while a cynical global narrative converts sixty years of unceasing terror against Jewish mothers and children into a villain arc, while ignoring the generational trauma that brought us to this hour.
 
We raised a generation to value life in the middle of a war zone. We did our job.
 
It is time the world held itself to the same standard of truth.

Sunday, September 06, 2026

Links - 6th September 2026 (2 - General Wokeness)

Hunter Ash on X - "Hunger strikes are based on the premise that your hated enemy is so moral that they care if their enemy dies by their own hand, when the hunger striker themself probably wouldn’t care in the reverse situation. It’s an admission that your enemy is a better person than you."
Wilfred Reilly on X - ""If you don't give me what I want, I will KILL myself!!!" Same vibe. Ok..."

Meme - Mike Solana @micsolana: "you will never make me care about a hunger strike. mother fucker just eat!"

Sahalie Donaldson on X - "Mayor Zohran Mamdani defends his endorsements of Claire Valdez and Darializa Avila Chevalier, condemning recent attacks from Espaillat’s camp on the latter. “One thing I do want to make clear that I find unacceptable is the attempt to use the term Haitian as a slur,” he says."
Wesley Yang on X - "When minorities are openly racist toward other minorities, (which happens far more often than open racism by white people) the Woke simply claim that this a function of White Supremacy creating internecine rivalries between the races (and internalized self-hatred within minorities themselves) for the benefit of the White oppressor."

Meme - Ariel Troster: "This is inexcusable. Abandoning queer and trans kids when they government put the OCDSB under trusteeship and are calling the shots here. The school board is usually one of the biggest contingents in the Pride March."
"Ottawa-Carleton District School Board pulls out of Capital Pride parade. The OCDSB will not participate in this year's Capital Pride parade, drawing criticism from a trustee over the message it sends to LGBTQ+ students."
Taking part in Pride is obligatory, otherwise you're a bigot
Of course, left wingers would throw a fit if the government endorsed a political position they disagreed with. The cope is that pushing the left wing agenda is being a decent human being, and is not being political. Of course. Good luck if you support Jewish students, though, because that will become "supporting genocide"
Comment: "Not being in a parade isn’t abandoning anything. Unless you’re saying it’s a requirement as an ally to be in the parade and any group etc not is anti-lgbtqetc? If so, that’s exactly why they shouldn’t be a part of it , if it’s become some compulsory, pseudo-religious requirement"
"Good. We need to stop celebrating our differences and embrace our similarities. We need to stop placing people into divisive silos of hate and unite under one flag. People need to stop making their identity their personality. I wish you put half as much effort and time into economic issues as you do to Pride issues. Our city would be a lot more livable and affordable."

Alix on X - "Call a rich man broke, he'll laugh. Call a gym rat weak, he'll laugh. Call a genius dumb, he'll laugh. Call a libtard wrong and he'll argue until he's blue in the face explaining why you're a fascist. Fucking retard."

John Wright on X - "Nicklas Nilsson explains the difference between right-wing and left-wing people in spot-on text on Facebook:
"If a right-wing person is gay, then he is, and he doesn't care what others think. If a left-winger is gay, then he demands legal changes, protests against everything and everyone, and turns it into a political struggle.
If a right-winger is vegan, then he simply doesn't eat meat. If a left-winger is vegan, then he wants to ban meat, halt food production, and protest outside farms and chicken farms.
If a right-winger doesn't like guns, then he just doesn't buy any. If a left-winger doesn't like guns, then he tries to ban them, prevent everyone else from owning one, and hates those who do.
If a right-winger is worried about the climate, then he flies less, drives an electric car if it suits him, and sorts his waste. If a left-winger is worried about the climate, then he wants to ban fossil fuel cars, air travel, and meat for everyone else, protest outside factories, and demand that the state forces the change.
If a right-winger wants to give his children a good education, then he moves to an area with good schools, or chooses a private school, or gets involved himself. If a left-winger wants to give his children a good education, then he demands more tax money from everyone, equal results for all, a ban on charter schools, and protests against every inequality.
If a right-winger complains about his job or workplace.. he doesn't. He changes jobs or starts his own business. If a left-winger complains about his job – then it's the boss, the company, or the colleagues who are at fault. He demands collective agreements, strikes, changes for the whole community, and protests against the company so that it suits him.
If a right-winger is dissatisfied with his housing or rent, then he moves, renovates, or buys something else. If a left-winger is dissatisfied with his housing or rent, then he demands rent freezes, more subsidies, regulations for everyone, and protests against landlords and politicians.
If a right-winger fails with a business or an investment that goes wrong, then he gets up, dusts himself off, and tries again tomorrow. If a left-winger runs out of money on the 24th, then he blames the rich for having too much and needing to contribute more, blames the lottery win that didn't come home last week, and mutters that he has such damn bad luck.
If a right-winger sees this – then he sends it to a few friends for a good laugh. If a left-winger sees this – then he tries to argue against it, get it removed, and delete me from Facebook.""

Bachman on X - "Headline: cops kill man "in broad daylight", in front of "witnesses"
1st para: residents in "shock and anger"
2nd para: "historical trauma" from "officer-involved shootings"
Later on: man was "checking parked vehicles"
Finally: he stabbed a cop. Oh."

Madison police shooting victim identified as Corey Ruiz as protests continue - "With protests and demands for accountability growing louder in Madison, officials have identified the man who was fatally shot by a police officer this week. Corey Ruiz, who was in his 30s and a member of the Madison community, was killed Wednesday, officials said during a news conference Thursday. He was shot after he pulled out a knife during a struggle with four officers, police said. The news conference became heated, as Madison Police Chief John Patterson was interrupted by two protesters for about 20 minutes. One took over the microphone to condemn police brutality and demand the officer responsible be jailed... The mayor also called for answers about Ruiz’s shooting. “I want to be clear: It does not matter who you are or what your past is. You should not lose your life as a result of an encounter with law enforcement. That should not happen,” Mayor Satya Rhodes-Conway said Thursday, promising that the shooting will be “rigorously investigated.” Wisconsin public records show that Ruiz had 40 misdemeanor and felony convictions from 2009 to 2025. The crimes include robbery by force, strangulation, drug possession, vehicle theft and battery of a public safety worker, according to the records. It appears that Ruiz was most recently convicted of resisting law enforcement and drug paraphernalia possession, the records show... Ruiz pulled out a fixed-blade knife and injured an officer... Police said that a stun gun was used, but that it was ineffective. The officer who was injured with the knife then fired at Ruiz... None of the four officers who were detaining the man wore body cameras. Videos of the shooting were captured by bystanders and went viral on social media. One of them, verified by NBC News, appears to show officers holding the man as someone yells, “Let go!” Multiple shouts of “He’s got a knife!” can also be heard."
Predictably, left wingers are upset that he didn't manage to kill any police officers (not from a lack of trying) and are lying about what happened. Typical.

Meme - CaliRNG19 @CaliRN619: "Thug stabs a cop and his skinfolk are crying because they shot him. But...his rap sheet says he's white, so I'm not sure if the riots are on for tonight or not"
"Offender Detail
Name: RUIZ, COREY D
Race: WHITE"

Meme - Rachel Cheramy: "I know Corey personally - he was my ex - and he was abusive. His criminal record shows this isn't the first time he's chosen violence. He hurt me, he choked another ex, and he pulled a knife during a theft at Woodman's. He was always getting into trouble. This has nothing to do with race; it's about his behavior."

Fatal Madison police shooting lacks camera footage (aka "Why don't Madison police officers have body cameras?") - "frontline officers for the Madison Police Department are not equipped with them. Body cameras have been proposed in the city multiple times over the past decade, including less than a year ago... Jim Palmer, executive director of the Wisconsin Professional Police Association, said the WPPA has long supported the implementation of body-worn cameras across the state, including in Madison. "Body-worn cameras are not perfect, and no recording necessarily captures everything an officer sees, perceives, or experiences," Palmer said. "But they can provide critically important additional evidence and context. The absence of that evidence here underscores why the WPPA has long believed Madison officers should be equipped with this technology... The Community Policing and Body Camera Ad Hoc Committee rejected a proposed pilot program in September 2015 after community members expressed concerns about invasion of privacy and the manipulation of footage... The Common Council voted to implement the pilot program in 2022 and it launched in April 2024. For 90 days, officers on the city's north side wore the same Panasonic body cameras as Madison police's SWAT and motorcycle patrol units. Trial analysis showed that officer behavior didn't change while wearing body cameras and that reviewed footage did not lead to any added charges"
Time to blame the police for refusing body cameras

Meme - Smirkley @Smirkley: "I was told off for lumping liberals in w/ leftists, and classical liberalism & the left are indeed very different animals. But it's 2026, and they seem to believe similar things, at least according to Pew."
"Liberals and leftists split over money. % in each Pew typology group, ranked by gap
Diversity efforts made society fairer. Leftward Progressives 88%. Loyal Liberals 88%. No Apologies Right 1%
Violent crime is very big problem. Leftward Progressives 18%. Loyal Liberals 19%. No Apologies Right 65%
National effort to deport illegals. Leftward Progressives 0%. Loyal Liberals 3%. No Apologies Right 81%
People are too easily offended. Leftward Progressives 17%. Loyal Liberals 22%. No Apologies Right 89%
Raise tax rates on large corporations. Leftward Progressives 97%. Loyal Liberals 92%. No Apologies Right 21%
Billionaires are bad for the county. Leftward Progressives 82%. Loyal Liberals 61%. No Apologies Right 4%"
This doesn't stop commies fantasising about sending liberals to the gulags and/or guillotines over minor policy disagreements
The left wing agenda is all connected

Meme - Brad Polumbo: "The leftist streamer Hasan Piker, who infamously said "America deserved 9/11," has now mockingly framed a newspaper from the day after the attacks as part of his streaming set. I don't really have words for how grotesque I find that."
DSA Watch @DSA_Watch: "Hasan Piker now displays a framed 9/12 newspaper showing the Twin Towers in flames behind him on stream"
Clearly, he's just criticising his country and showing how much he loves it

American Debunk on X - "NYU Student explains to Nick Shirley why she would let rapists walk free This is an actual NYU student explaining, on camera to Nick Shirley, why she would prefer her own rapist remain free on the streets. Suicidal empathy.
Shirley: "Let's just say somebody who has raped a woman."
Student: "Totally."
Shirley: "Would you like them to be out in the street?"
Student: "I think my answer is yes. Even though that's a challenging answer to say."
Shirley: "So if you got raped, would you like your rapist to be out in the street?"
Student: "Well, let me finish, because I have been raped and they are out in the street, and I'm not sure them going to jail is a solution to whatever's going on inside their heart or even my own heart that contributed to that experience that I'm having. And I don't want more people to get raped, but I don't know for certain that going into a jail in the United States is going to shift anything inside of their operating system so that they'll make a different choice again."
Shirley: "Wow. Well, thank you guys so much for your time. And is there one last message you'd like to give to the people about potential the rise of communism or freeing the people inside the prisons?"
Student: "Just free yourself from the prison in your heart and then maybe we.""
What are the odds she hates men for supposedly being rapists?

Meme - ""Black's sold each other to slavery." Dumbass slavery has existed since the beginning of time however it was treated as a job. However the slavery white Europeans was pure wicked a..."
CEO of correcting Shion: "This mf be like:
Slavery done by Europeans: *hate*
Slavery done by non Euros: *love*
.: "Aww sorry my dude but slavery done by non euros was not dehumanizing so cope harder"
Left wingers just hate white people

Carlo Martin on X - (Translated from Spanish) - "🇬🇧 In some UK businesses, the penny dropped, and they found the solution to thefts by Africans, by hiring other Africans to beat them up and stop them from stealing, so they don't get accused of racism. They've gone back to the 19th century."
Marco I on X - (Translated from Spanish) - "In the 17th and 18th centuries, the owners of the haciendas would put one of the slaves to watch over the rest, offering them a club or a whip, because they knew that this way they got the most radical and bloodthirsty guard, to the point that they had to call them out for not being so cruel. The progressives are going to regret it when they discover what some are capable of doing against those of their own skin color if you just give them the right incentive."
Clearly, if black employees don't let other black people steal, it's internalised racism and they're Uncle Toms

Michael Shellenberger on X - "Germany was the powerhouse of Europe. Now, it is killing itself. Industrial output is 24% lower what it should be. Mass migration is bankrupting the state and destroying the culture. Thugs beat up reporters who dare ask questions. The Left manipulates guilt to destroy the West."
John Barton on X - "With the perspective of centuries, future historians may argue that WWII ultimately killed Europe by making it illegitimate to assert the idea of and act to protect national character, culture, & interests. Westphalia->west berlin, an epilog late 20th century, and that's it."

Germany’s Suicide Is A Warning To The West - "In my mind’s eye, present-day Germany resembles a large steamship that still appears to be sailing but has just run out of fuel. When the passengers realize what is happening, there will be anarchy aboard. We are, in that way, a warning to America and the rest of the West of what happens when a civilization decides to commit suicide. While I cannot predict the future, I cannot see how the catastrophe can be averted. The reason that our current trajectory seems hopeless dates back to an ideological problem that Germany has cultivated since 1945: guilt-based self-negation. Over the last 80 years, Germans’ natural self-identity, pride, and willingness to defend their country and culture have been suppressed. This suppression has spread and infected others. Not just in Germany but also in Sweden, France, Great Britain, and the United States, public spaces have become staging grounds for terrorist and anti-state brutality, the violence of rival gangs and ethnic groups, and the recklessness of left-wing mobs that fight any opponent of immigration. For the left, immigration is no longer a political question but a crusade for its secular religion of victimhood and salvation. This is where the extreme polarization and fanatical radicalism of the German government’s “fight against the right” efforts come from. As Paul Gottfried wrote in his 2021 book Antifascism: The Course of a Crusade, Germany today exemplifies “the elevation of antifascism to a state philosophy and program of mass reeducation”—with mass immigration as its most well-known consequence. Germany’s asylum system and its anti-fascist activism have combined as part of a state-funded industry in which more and more refugees are dependent on asylum seekers’ benefits while municipal budgets collapse under the burden of welfare spending. Germany’s 2026 federal core budget of €525 billion includes 90 billion of new debt. Combined with other debts (“Special fund”), the new debt amounts to close to 180 billion euros. Public-sector spending makes up more than 50 percent of Germany’s GDP, which means rich sinecures are up for grabs. But while Germany’s economic output is falling—a thousand industrial jobs are lost every month—asylum applications remain at high annual levels: over 106,000 by November 2025, plus 100,000 visas for family reunification. And NGOs and the German media want to ensure that the country continues on its current course. German politicians, meanwhile, attack “the right wing” as the country’s main problem even as they drive the country headlong into a brick wall. The right-wing populist party Alternative for Germany (AfD) has not yet been banned, but it is being denounced, paralyzed, and attacked in every conceivable way. In contrast, Antifa Ost, the notorious “Hammer Gang” of Antifa radicals that has attempted to murder German right-wingers with hammers, is regarded with public goodwill. The group has been branded a terrorist organization by the Trump administration for its attacks on cars, private homes, and members of Parliament, and it is probably only a matter of time before the first deaths occur. At the end of November, an anti-fascist street mob tried to prevent the founding of the new AfD youth organization Generation Germany in the city of Giessen. At least 25,000 demonstrators engaged in sometimes violent clashes with 6,000 police officers from all over Germany. Taxpayers finance both sides — the police and the anti-AfD NGOs —of these street battles. And things are even more absurd in the Bundestag. Chancellor Friedrich Merz of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU) has only two items on his agenda: to ostracize the AfD and to avoid upsetting his left-wing Vice Chancellor Lars Klingbeil of the Social Democratic Party (SPD), who was himself a member of Antifa as a young man. Once a pompous-sounding conservative, Merz has broken all his electoral promises in his desperate attempts to placate the SPD and keep his coalition afloat. His constant contradictions are a symptom of his self-imposed dilemma. The SPD, in turn, feels emboldened by Merz’s weakness and has become increasingly radical. Among its demands is that Merz maintain the “firewall” against the AfD. When a CDU Bundestag motion to limit migration won a majority thanks to AfD votes early last year, a left-wing street mob of SPD supporters occupied CDU party headquarters. After that, Merz fell into line. The AfD is a parliamentary pariah. The other parties refuse to let their members perform basic parliamentary functions such as chairing meetings or heading committees. One assumes the intention is to ban the AfD or to find a pretext to suspend upcoming elections. It seems unlikely the AfD will ever be permitted to govern. Even AfD’s leader, Alice Weidel, is said to be very skeptical regarding her party’s future. The same game is being played against right-wing populist parties in Paris, London, Vienna, Stockholm, Bucharest, and The Hague, albeit under different circumstances. President Donald Trump, too, faces ideologically motivated obstruction within the U.S. Congress and judicial system. This situation brings us to a sobering assessment: A decisive battle for the future of the West is being fought right now, both behind the scenes and on the streets. The violent Antifa mob is just one of many players in this game. Its advocacy for Muslim refugees (who comprise 76 percent of Germany’s immigrant population) coincides strikingly with the Islam-friendly attitude of European elites. Fighting Islamic Sharia law, femicide, and gender segregation will be just as much a part of the battle for the future as cracking down on terrorism, knife crime, and protection rackets that come with immigrant gangs."

The Drunk Republican on X - "Wokeness literally came out of nowhere. Just as race had largely become a non-issue over the course of the 80s and 90s, social science departments across the country began manufacturing cultural crises, complete with absurd terminology, out of thin air. Because without conflict the left can’t retain power we were suddenly bombarded with insane claims about “microaggressions,” “cultural appropriation,” and “intersectionality.” Peace was never an option, and with nothing to be mad about academics simply made a bunch of stuff up. Out of nowhere an entire movement was born, and it would sweep through our most hallowed institutions like a fire through Rome. Companies, universities, and government agencies would spend the next 15 years slaying imaginary boogeymen rather than accomplishing their stated missions. Corporations held struggle sessions; colleges illegally persecuted certain demographics when it came to acceptance; and governments of all stripes prioritized social justice over serving their citizens. It’s almost hard to remember how ridiculous it all was. They interrupted brunches with megaphones, put porn in elementary schools and, in the end, burned down entire cities. The price tag, in hindsight, was almost certainly enormous. How many qualified applicants were denied jobs, affecting the performance of the captured institutions? Would we have cured cancer by now? Touched down on Mars? We will never know because we were too busy ensuring that bisexual Filipino amputees could serve in combat roles! One can only imagine where we’d be if the last decade-and-a-half wasn’t stolen from us. And what did it accomplish? NOTHING! It was always doomed to collapse, of course, as it was nothing more than a pyramid scheme of oppression. But it hasn’t disappeared. Rather it has basically rebranded under the DSA. The left needs a struggle to survive and wokeness, which framed struggle in terms of race and sexuality, has fizzled out. But “eat the rich” has never been more in. Which is why we cannot allow the architects of these movements rob us of our rightful progress. Because the left doesn’t create, it only destroys. And perhaps nothing illustrates that better than our recent 15-year-long national nightmare."

Further Evidence for the Dark-Ego-Vehicle Principle: Higher Pathological Narcissistic Grandiosity and Virtue Signaling Are Related to Greater Involvement in LGBQ and Gender Identity Activism - "The dark-ego-vehicle principle (DEVP) suggests that individuals with so-called dark personalities (e.g., high narcissistic traits) are attracted to political and social activism that they can repurpose to satisfy their specific ego-focused needs (e.g., signaling moral superiority and manipulating others) instead of achieving prosocial goals. Currently, research on the DEVP is still rare. With two pre-registered studies, we sought further evidence for the DEVP by examining the associations of pathological narcissistic grandiosity with involvement in LGBQ activism (Study 1) and gender identity activism (Study 2). Socioeconomically diverse samples from the USA (Study 1; N = 446) and the UK (Study 2; N = 837) were recruited online via the research-oriented crowdsourcing platform Prolific. Individuals completed the Pathological Narcissism Inventory as well as measures of involvement in activism. Moreover, we assessed different covariates (e.g., altruism), and potential correlates within the narcissism-activism relationship (i.e., virtue signaling, dominance, and aggression). In addition, we examined potential relationships between other dark personality variables (e.g., psychopathy) and activism. In both samples, higher pathological narcissistic grandiosity was related to greater involvement in activism. As expected, virtue signaling was consistently involved in the relationship between pathological narcissistic grandiosity and activism. However, neither dominance nor aggression was related to individuals' involvement in activism. The results did also not consistently support a relationship between higher psychopathy and greater involvement in activism. Overall, the findings help to further specify the DEVP."
Woke activism is about narcissism

DR POOL on X - "🚨 TERRIFYING: These are Muslim Imams in FLORIDA “I want the governor of Florida to be Muslim. I want Muslims in the House, Muslim senators.” “We don’t apologize about jihad. We are not afraid of jihad. Jihad is who we are.” Repel Islam, Florida!"
Islamophobia!

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