Rule 4: Culture is Downstream from Chemistry

Andrew Breibart wrote that politics is downstream from culture. So what happened to American culture? We used to be the land of the free and the home of the brave. Now we are the land of Helicopter Parents, Trigger Warnings, and Snowflakes. Once upon a time America was barbarian and badass compared to Western Europe. We had football, guns, dangerous hillbillies, and a president who joked about bombing the Soviet Union. They had soccer, bicycles, coffee-swilling philosophers, and calls for Accommodation.

The image is reversing. We still have our guns, and our aging motorcycle gangs. But we also have our helicopter parents and social services departments ready to intervene at the first sign of free range parenting. Those cuddly European welfare states have bolder parenting practices than we do. And then there are the teenagers and college students who melt down in the presence of a funny joke or challenging idea.

And we’re turning gay. Really gay. The country is turning into San Francisco – even Trump supporting rural counties. Pride Month is becoming a bigger celebration than Christmas. Comics and children’s breakfast cereals are LBGTQPCWXYZ themed, and teenagers can choose to get a sex change before they are allowed a beer or a cigarette. Even the frogs are joining the transgender craze.

I’m a live and let live guy by nature. I dropped literature for Libertarian candidates that happened to be gay back when the sodomy laws were still on the books. But this is getting ridiculous. All this pronoun nonsense, mandatory cake baking, and actively pushing sexual deviance on confused adolescents is making me really miss Jerry Falwell.

But is this titanic shift in our national character the result of propaganda? Did the Hollywood homosexuals pull off a hundred year indoctrination campaign of extraordinary magnitude?

Or was our population this intrinsically gay all along, and we were keeping it in the closet out of fear of God, scorn, and/or prosecution? I haven’t done any hard stats, but it appears to me that the fraction of flaming queers and tranvestites in the younger generations is higher than the fraction of sissies that I remember from my school days. Maybe my gaydar is defective.

Or maybe it’s the chemicals. Remember the frogs. Frogs don’t take Gender Studies courses in college.

Get a copy of Estrogeneration by Anthony Jay and read it carefully. We have put our youth on estrogen “therapy” starting in the womb. There are estrogen mimics in our plastics, our fragrances, our weed killers (atrazine), our sunscreens, our personal care products, our grocery receipts, and our water supply. Birth control pills now contain a synthetic estrogen mimic which does not biodegrade, and neither our sewer plants nor our water treatment plants remove it from the water. Ew! Then there are the phytoestrogens found in soybeans, which we feed to our meat animals and our vegetarians. And our over optimized dairy farms are raping the cows to keep them pregnant most of the time. Milk from pregnant cows has far higher natural estrogen content. [link]

This, I submit, is why we have younger generations filled with gays and gurly-mans. Social conservatives, national defense conservatives, and concerned parents need to go bipartisan and team up with the eco hippies and PBS viewers. This is an area where Alex Jones and Mother Jones are on the same page.

Speaking of PBS, think back on the nature documentaries you’ve seen over the years. Think of the lions, mountain goats, seals, and gorillas. Compare their behavior to old Hollywood portrayals of heroic humans. The healthy alpha male is ambitious, brave, territorial, protective, and ritually aggressive.

Poison the country with artificial estrogens and you get a generation of half men. Their exact nature depends on which half got stunted.

• Take away aggression and you get Sensitive New Age Guys.

• Take away bravery and you get Snowflakes*.

• Take away ambition and you get slackers playing video games in their parents’ basement.

• Take away protectiveness and territoriality and you get open relationships and open borders.

• Take away the ritual but keep the aggression and you get...Antifa.

Be afraid.

Yes, I have seen the conservative memes comparing beefy Boomers on beefier motorcycles in contrast with the gurly-mans in black. And I’ve seen the pictures of impressive gun collections within those Republican owned McMansions. So what? That mutant Marxist with the boob job will fight like a girl: i.e., dirty. The same goes for the Social Justice Warriors working up the corporate ladder. They fight without honor.

This is an emergency situation! We need to roll back our chemical clock several decades, even if it costs us our Monsanto lobbyist dollars and our pristine golf courses. It’s time to tax, restrict, or outright outlaw a wide variety of estrogen mimics. See what Europe has outlawed and follow suit. Then do more. It’s time to make glass jars great again. Yes, they are heavy, but we could use the workout. Americans are getting too fat as well. (But even that could be due to the estrogenics. We are all a little bit pregnant…)

Speaking of pregnant, note that these chemicals are having effects on the girls as well. Sexual maturity is accelerating, which should disturb both social conservatives and feminists. And check out those C section stats. Is it due to impatient obstetricians eager to get out to the golf course? Or are we losing the ability to give birth naturally?

About Those Snowflakes

Once upon a more civil time, I took great pleasure debating ideas with intellectuals of the Left. The pleasure was mostly mutual, even though I could be quite an ass a times. These recreational debates included both women and homosexual men. Though they were on the Left, including borderline Marxists and Post Modernists, they were not Snowflakes. They enjoyed intellectual combat sport as much as I, and they had a John Stuart Mill attitude towards free speech.

And so I put an asterisk by the Snowflake phenomenon in the list above. While the estrogenics might be turning many of our youth into Snowflakes, the effect would be second order, not feminization per se.

There are other chemical assaults upon our youth.

Some months back I watched a YouTube video of some fairly mainstream conservative – it may have been Ben Shapiro – attempting to give a talk before an audience of college students. The talk was interrupted by a young woman shrieking and rocking in her chair – having a tantrum worthy of a two year old upon hearing a bit of what should be common sense. That performance did not look like excess girlyness; it did look an awful lot like autism in action. Think of the trantrum scene in the movie Rain Man when Tom Cruise's character want them to travel by air. (That playacted tantrum was mild compared to real autistic tantrums I have seen personally.)

Autism rates have exploded in this country according to official stats: from 1 in 10,000 in 1970 to 1 in 54 in 2020. And the entire nation is walking on eggshells. These two facts might be connected.

This is still speculation, not verified theory. There are serious problems with the official stats. The definition of autism has changed bigly since 1970, and not everyone on the autism spectrum is hypersensitive to arguments or challenging ideas. Just go to a decent sized state Libertarian Party convention and you will likely find yourself in a spirited debate with someone on the autism spectrum. Monologuing, yes; tantrums and hypersensitivity, no.

Still, that image of the college girl throwing a tantrum haunts me.

And the autism stats continue to rise even after the the definition has settled. According to the CDC, the rate has gone up from 1 in 150 to 1 in 54 over a 16 year period. Even if these stats are only a little bit correct, we are looking at a national tragedy that makes 9/11 a minor blip by comparison. And if my autism→Snowflake hypothesis is correct, we are looking at an existential issue. A nation walking on eggshells is not a free country; it isn’t even a functioning democracy. Rewinding our chemical (and electromagnetic) environment back a half a half century is a matter of national survival, even if it costs a trillion dollars a year in inconvenience.

If.

The stats are questionable even after the definition of autism settled: federal money is at stake. This could be a problem of Public Choice Economics.

My intuition says that there is something real going on. I hear stories through my personal network that are consistent with a growth in autism. And I am not the only one freaking out. There’s a rather large movement of parents refusing to vaccinate their children in hope of avoiding the tragedy of autism. They are willing to risk their children getting measles, whooping cough, and other grim diseases rather than have their children join the autism epidemic. This is Reveald Preference Extra Strength. These parent are willing to pay a high price – even higher than tolerating dandelions in the back yard – in order dodge the grim stats. And it’s a gamble: the autism vaccine connection is rather weak; there are other factors at play.

So how do we play this gamble? Do we risk a continued growth in autism and future generations incapable of reading history or debating ideas? Or do we risk wasting trillions worth of lifestyle downgrades, annoying regulations, and dandelions? Or is it possible to split the difference?

Maybe. It’s rather hard to settle the science without drastic action. We’ve already contaminated our control groups. To get a proper control group, we would need to decontaminate a sizable first world population somewhere. Shall we depend on Europe?

Or maybe we could get lucky get away with a partial rollback. I see five basic strategies:

1. If it’s cheap and easy, just do it.

2. If there is reason other than autism, do it. Cutting back on the estrogen mimics fits this strategy.

3. If it’s a matter of total quantity of the chemical, use taxes instead of regulations. The government needs the money, and the market can do better cost/benefit calculations than the government.

4. If the rollback is very costly, let a subset of the population pay the cost. Let a few states pay the price to be the control group, or use labeling and let Green Mommies do it.

5. And always, look for the most liberty friendly way to cut the toxins. Make sure that mandates are clear and deterministic, no months of litigation to figure out what a law or regulation means. Use positive incentives when possible. Make sure the government isn’t pushing a toxin on society. And finally, look for business opportunities (Rule 2). “Don’t buy Heinz ketchup; that funds liberals. Buy genuine Andrew Jackson’s Best Ketchup. Not only does it piss off those flag burning faggots, it comes in a glass bottle so it won’t turn your boys into freakish purple haired gurly mans. Andrew Jackson's Ketchup, the ketchup that makes everything taste like red meat!”

[Here ends Part 1 of Rule 4. In Part 2, we explore the possibility of rolling back the clock on our chemical environment in more detail.]