by Michael Hurley, TCW
I’VE READ a great deal and written a bit myself lately about transgenderism as a mental illness and mass shootings as but one of the many unsurprising sequelae of that illness.
In these cases, the point obvious to all but the most committed partisans is that boys who persist in the belief that they can become girls (and vice versa) are not on some fabulous journey of self-discovery but are, in fact, unwell; that those who pursue medication and mutilation to achieve a grotesque facsimile of their delusion are a danger to themselves, and that some of those who emerge from this nightmare filled with regret and rage for the society that failed to protect them are a danger to us all. The recent school shooting in Minneapolis proves this thesis only too clearly, as do other transgender-involved shootings in the recent past.
Then came the horrific murder of Charlie Kirk, followed swiftly by reports of a memo leaked from the Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives stating that transgender and anti-fascist messaging was engraved on the shell casings, and it seemed that this thesis was about to be proved sadly once again — until they caught the suspected shooter.
To everyone’s surprise, he does not, apparently, suffer from any gender delusions of his own. He has not, apparently, been tortured by a freakish identity that has brought him years of isolation and mockery and self-loathing. In fact he appears eerily similar to the kind of young men we used to call ‘normal’.
He apparently comes from a loving two-parent family, has siblings close in age, and is fit and trim and masculine in appearance. He is only 22. While he is said to have become more political of late, so has just about everyone in the age of Trump. It does not appear that he travelled to the present catastrophe via some long spiral of escalating derangement noticed by others. Yet suddenly he stands accused of committing an act of unspeakable violence and cruelty.
Why? I’m afraid the answer is rather bad news, and it serves to underscore the enormity of the crisis we are facing in the formerly Judaeo-Christian West: a great swathe of our society has utterly lost touch with objective reality.