Like a sapling wounded early, my life bent and grew around the gaping wound of abandonment. It became a part of me.

'Sex recession': Study suggests Americans have lost their mojo

Movies and television programs reportedly have significantly more sexual content, nudity, and immodesty now than those shown just a few decades ago. The so-called "adult entertainment" industry has, meanwhile, exploded, with one projection suggesting that it will grow from an estimated global market size of $58.8 billion in 2023 to $74.7 billion by 2030.

While depictions of sex are ubiquitous in the media, a new study suggests that the real thing is disappearing from the lives of everyday Americans.

The delay and avoidance of marriage appear to be another major factor.

Citing General Social Survey data, the Institute for Family Studies recently indicated that "Americans are having a record-low amount of sex."

Whereas in 1990, 55% of adults ages 18 to 64 reportedly were having sex at least once a week, that number reportedly dropped to less than 50% by the turn of the century. As of last year, the percentage of adults ages 18-64 having sex weekly had fallen all the way down to 37%.

Photo by Toronto Star Archives/Toronto Star via Getty Images

When it comes to individuals ages 18-29 who reported not having sex in the last year, the number held steady at around 15% of respondents until 2010. However, between 2010 and 2024, that number skyrocketed to 24% in the General Social Survey.

There appear to be numerous factors at play, including shifting social norms; libido-killing prescription drugs; the pandemic; decreasing alcohol consumption; the interpersonal impact of social media, gaming, and the smartphone; and pornography. The delay and avoidance of marriage appear to be another major factor.

Dr. Brad Wilcox, professor of sociology at the University of Virginia and director of the National Marriage Project, and Lyman Stone, director of the Pronatalism Initiative at the IFS, noted in a 2019 article in the Atlantic that married people have sex more often but that the share of adults who are married was falling to record lows.

Whereas 46% of married men and women ages 18-64 reported having weekly sex, only 34% of their unmarried peers reported the same, said the new IFS study. However, married couples are also facing a so-called "sex recession," as 59% of married adults ages 18-64 reportedly had sex once a week in the period between 1996 and 2008.

Photo by Heritage Art/Heritage Images via Getty Images

The new IFS study noted that younger generations are having less sex than their predecessors did in part because of a "decline in steady partnering, especially in marriage, and a decline in sexual frequency within couples."

This "sex recession" has some obvious implications besides youngsters' joylessness.

Data released by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in July revealed that U.S. fertility rates dropped to an all-time low in last year, with 1.599 children being born per woman. For comparison, the latest reported fertility rates in Australia, England and Wales, Canada, and China are 1.5, 1.44, 1.26, and 1.01, respectively.

The fertility rate necessary for a population to maintain stability and replenish itself without requiring replacement by foreign nationals is 2.1.

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How To Talk About Transgender Ideology With Your Kids, Neighbors, And Friends

Focusing on potential underlying traumas is precisely what the LGBT industry refuses to do.

Stop blaming dopamine — kids aren’t addicts; they’re bored

Nowadays, it seems we can be addicted to anything — not just alcohol and drugs, but pornography, random internet browsing, video games, and smartphones. Academic research papers have investigated a wide range of other behaviors including gambling, but also “dance addiction,” “fishing addiction,” “milk tea addiction,” and “cat addiction.” One cheeky paper used the standard medical criteria to show that young people are “addicted” to their real-life friends.

While this trend involves many factors, perhaps the single most important claim that has transformed what might be devoted or enthusiastic behavior into a presumed medical case of addiction is the presence of the neurotransmitter dopamine.

Parents and others are at risk of missing more fundamental mental health issues that could be at the root of the obsessive behavior, potentially harming the very children they seek to help.

Health experts and the popular press tell us that fun activities can give us “dopamine hits” and that overindulging can result in “dopamine blowout.” Indulging too much in naughty activities (somehow, it’s always naughty activities) may create a “dopamine deficit.”

To cite a few of many examples: A Washington Post podcast declared that “dopamine surges” explain why “you can’t stop scrolling, even though you know you should.” The Guardian reported that Silicon Valley is “keen to exploit the brain chemical” to keep us hooked on tech. Earlier this month, CNN told readers that “an addiction expert says it might be time for a ‘dopamine fast.’”

The problem with this scientific-sounding explanation for an alleged explosion in addictive behaviors is that it’s not supported by science. Solid research connecting dopamine spikes to drugs and alcohol — that is, the capacity of one chemical to ignite another — has not been shown to occur in similar ways with other behaviors. Drug use is fundamentally and physiologically different from behaviors that do not rely on pharmaceutical effects. This has been confirmed in humans: Technology, such as video games or social media, simply doesn’t influence dopamine receptors the way illicit substances do.

Experts say what we are seeing instead is pseudoscience that appears to legitimize a moral panic about behaviors that trouble certain segments of society. By falling for this pseudoscience, parents and others are at risk of missing more fundamental mental health issues that could be at the root of the obsessive behavior, potentially harming the very children they seek to help.

“Addiction is an important clinical term with a troubled and weighty history,” said Dean Burnett, a neuroscientist and co-author of a brief explainer of what dopamine does and doesn’t do. “People enduring genuine addiction struggle to be taken seriously or viewed sympathetically at the best of times, so to apply their very serious condition to much more benign actions like scrolling TikTok makes this worse.”

Burnett likens current narratives about dopamine and technology to “science garnish,” effectively adding a dash of scientific language to nonsense beliefs. “It’s the informational equivalent of sprinkling parsley on a lasagna that’s 90% horse offal,” he said. “It may look nicer, but it isn’t.”

The pseudoscience, however, does play a useful role for parents and others who seek to restrict the behaviors they find disturbing. After all, “don’t do X because it will dangerously rewire the reward circuits of your brain and cause addiction” is more compelling than “don’t do X because I don’t like it and think you are wasting your time.”

Growing mistrust of experts

At a time when science has been riven by a series of scandals involving unreliable and falsified research at universities, including Stanford and Harvard, the public is having a harder time distinguishing scientific truth from pseudoscience. As growing numbers of Americans question the veracity of many well-established findings, such as the safety of vaccines, the popularity of the dopamine myth amounts to another misreading of science to serve other purposes in a culture desperate for simplistic moral answers.

Such answers can be found in bookshelves full of titles like “Dopamine Detox” and “Dopamine Reset.” These experts warn us that activities we think make us happy are actually making us unhappy in the long term because we’re doing dopamine wrong.

Advice sites are quite explicit about this: “You can get dopamine either from rich sources like meditating, exercising, or doing something that is meaningful to you and that serves you in the long run. Or you can get dopamine from self-sabotaging activities like eating junk food, scrolling social media mindlessly, or anything that provides pleasure instantly or in the short term. The choice is yours.” At the extreme, people may go on “dopamine detoxes,” avoiding fun activities for some length of time in hopes of resetting their dopamine.

It’s time to put the pseudoscience on dopamine in the dumpster and let kids be kids.

It is not surprising that dopamine has been seized on as a ready explanation for human behavior. Dopamine is a naturally occurring neurotransmitter in the brain. It is involved in a number of behaviors and functions, ranging from movement to memory to executive functioning. It’s also involved in pleasure centers of the brain, particularly anticipatory pleasure. Think of it like the feeling of a child awaiting Christmas, the giddy excitement. That’s often different from Christmas Day itself, which feels less exciting, even if it’s pleasant.

The role played by dopamine in the brain, however, is complicated. Brain functions rarely work out to one-to-one relationships between a single chemical and some horrible outcome. And certainly not in ways that happen to coincidentally flatter people’s pre-existing moral conceits.

Much of what we know about dopamine comes not from humans, but from experiments on rats — which cannot, of course, peruse the internet or use smartphones. In a series of graphs produced by the National Institute on Drug Addiction back in the early 2000s, the difference in activation of dopamine for addictive drugs versus pleasant and normal activities is well documented.

They show that administering stimulant drugs such as cocaine and amphetamine causes massive elevations in dopamine after the drug is introduced. These levels spike to over 300% of baseline for cocaine and a whopping 1,000% for amphetamine.

By contrast, the increase in dopamine levels from routine activities such as food or sex is much lower, about 150% of baseline for food and 200% for sex. And this increase occurs in anticipation of the activity, not afterward.

So yes, there is a kernel of truth in the dopamine/addiction story. Some drugs, as well as routine pleasurable activities, definitely involve dopamine systems. But the key difference is the timing of when and how much of the dopamine is released — before versus after the activity — and this distinction is almost always ignored in scaremongering stories about rampant addiction.

“Addictive drugs are different from natural rewards (e.g. food, water, sex) in that [dopamine] will not stop firing after repeated consumption of the drug, the drive to consume is not satiated because they continue increasing dopamine levels, resulting in likelihood of compulsive behaviors from using drugs and not as likely when using natural rewards,” according to an article in the Journal of Biomedical Research.

Pete Etchells, a professor of psychology at Bath Spa University in England and the author of “Unlocked: The Real Science of Screen Time,” says research doesn’t support the claim that dopamine drives addiction in other pleasurable behaviors that don’t rely on pharmaceutical effects.

“The role that it plays is really complex, to the point that neuroscientists no longer really consider it the sole or universal factor to consider,” he said. “So when we try to say dopamine ‘surge’ = pleasure surge = addiction, that doesn’t really hold up under scrutiny.”

Is everything addictive?

Part of the confusion over the science comes from the widespread way the term "addiction" is used. Long-standing debates are still ongoing about whether the criteria used to identify substance dependencies still work when applied to everyday hobbies and behaviors such as work, exercise, shopping, sex, video games, or social media.

The problem is apparent when looking at the basic criteria the Diagnostic and Statistical Manual uses for addictive disorders. A person needs to answer “yes” to five of the nine questions below to be diagnosed. In this example, X is the sport or hobby you happen to be passionate about and spend some money on.

Do you think about X (i.e., your passionate hobby) when not doing X?
Do you feel bad (sad, anxious) when unable to do X?
Do you find yourself spending more time/money on X?
Do you notice you’ve kept doing X even when you meant to stop or cut back?
Have you given up other hobbies/activities to do X?
Have you continued to do X despite it causing obvious problems (i.e., health, work, family commitments)?
Have you deceived others about the time you’ve spent doing X?
Do you find yourself doing X to relieve negative moods or stress?
Have you experienced the loss of a job/school/relationship because of X?

If X is heroin, a yes answer to all of these questions leads to bad results. But it’s not clear that this is true for all the questions when X is eating pizza, reading a book, working out, or playing a video game. If the answer is yes to the question about reading books to relieve negative moods or stress, that’s good. People should do something to relieve negative moods.

The question is whether things like video games or social media are more like heroin or more like books. At present, the best evidence suggests the latter. Older adults may not like these activities, but there’s little evidence that they’re addictive in any analogy to substance abuse. There’s no tolerance and withdrawal from technology. They don’t interact with dopamine systems the same way.

Parents may believe that taking a smartphone or game console away will 'fix' their kids’ problems, leaving the real underlying issues unaddressed.

Making matters more complicated is the psychology of why some people overdo some pleasant behaviors. It’s widely believed that behavioral addictions are a feature of the thing that users are using. To be sure, smartphones, for example, are designed with elements like push notifications to hold the attention of users. However, users can easily adjust these settings, and they are hardly an innovation of modern technology. Books often end chapters mid-scene for the same reason.

But such addiction mainly appears to be a feature of the person exhibiting the problems, research shows. Cases of technology overuse can be a symptom of other underlying mental health problems like anxiety and depression, which tend to predate the specific technology addiction. Constant texting is not something done to teenagers by machines via dopamine. By contrast, time spent on technology is a poor predictor of mental health issues.

History of moral panics

As it purports to provide a simple explanation for complex issues, dopamine pseudoscience can be linked to previous moral panics, particularly regarding the new habits of youth. Fear sells, as Frederic Wertham showed in the 1950s when his book “Seduction of the Innocent” gained wide traction for its spurious claim that connected comic books to delinquency and homosexuality.

Today, many schools are enthusiastically attempting to shift blame for their own failures onto technology. At present, evidence suggests that cellphone bans in schools don’t work as well as expected, for instance. Public records requests have revealed that even as some teachers and administrators promote these policies, data from their own schools indicates that some student outcomes worsen after cellphone bans, rather than improve.

Photo by IsiMS via Getty IMages

The false narratives on addiction may end up hurting children in more profound ways, too. They can distract families from the real psychological issues youth face. Parents may believe that taking a smartphone or game console away will “fix” their kids’ problems, leaving the real underlying issues unaddressed. These efforts may even backfire, removing stress reduction and socialization outlets that youth rely on.

It’s time to put the pseudoscience on dopamine in the dumpster and let kids be kids. Some may have mental health issues that need to be addressed, and others, well, mostly need some freedom to explore the world on their own terms.

Editor’s note: This article was originally published by RealClearInvestigations and made available via RealClearWire.

Grief is a killer: New study details the toll a loved one's death can take

The death of a loved one can prove devastating for a surviving spouse or parent. A study published on July 24 in the journal Frontiers in Public Health revealed that the bereaved faced an increased risk of dying from grief.

Research has long shown associations between bereavement and increased cortisol secretion, sleep disturbance, immune imbalance, inflammation, blood clots, and heart conditions, including Takotsubo cardiomyopathy — also called broken heart syndrome — and arrhythmias.

Numerous studies have also indicated that those grieving the loss of a loved one are at higher risk of dying.

A 2014 study in JAMA Internal Medicine, for instance, showed "25% higher mortality in the first year after partner bereavement in older couples, with a peak in the first 3 months." Within 30 days of a spouse's death, the study found that persons ages 60 or older were found to face twice the risk of a heart attack or stroke compared to those who had not suffered such a loss.

Dr. Lisa Shulman, a professor of neurology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine, told American Heart Association News that the death of a loved one triggers the body's "fight or flight" response: "Your heart starts racing, your blood pressure increases, your respiratory rate increases, you become sweaty, as the body marshals defenses for you to protect yourself, one way or another."

Shulman indicated that in some cases, grief can leave widows and widowers in a state of permanent stress.

Photo by Spencer Platt/Getty Images

Dr. George Slavich, director of the Laboratory for Stress Assessment and Research at the Semel Institute for Neuroscience and Human Behavior at UCLA, indicated that prolonged grief can be debilitating for some individuals and is linked to serious health consequences, including increased risk for cancer and mortality.

The new study in Frontiers bolsters the connection between grief and mortality.

In the study, Danish researchers tracked the long-term health outcomes of 1,735 bereaved men and women over the course of 10 years. The median age of the participants at the time of enrollment was 62.

A national register of drug prescriptions tipped researchers off to which patients were recently prescribed treatments for terminal conditions. After identifying the corresponding moribund patients, the researchers invited them and their loved ones to participate in the study.

Among the participating relatives of the dying patients, 66% ultimately lost their spouse, 27% lost a parent, and 7% lost another kind of loved relation.

The researchers assessed participants' grief symptoms prior to bereavement, six months after bereavement, and three years after bereavement, and divided the participants into five common categories of trajectories with those suffering persistently "low grief" on one end and those suffering persistently "high grief" on the other end.

Those in the "high grief" camp stood an 88% higher risk of dying within 10 years than those in the "low grief" camp.

Those in the "high grief" camp saw 186% higher odds of receiving talk therapy or other mental health services, 463% higher odds of being prescribed antidepressants, and 160% higher odds of being prescribed sedatives or anxiety drugs.

During the 10-year study period, 21.5% of the bereaved relatives in the "high grief" camp died. Only 7.3% of those in the "low grief" trajectory perished.

Dr. Mette Kjærgaard Nielsen noted that, "The 'high grief' group had lower education on average, and their more frequent use of medication before bereavement suggested that they had signs of mental vulnerability, which may cause greater distress on bereavement."

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Labeling you ‘phobic’ is how the left dodges real arguments

No one wants to be called a coward. But fear is a natural and important human emotion. It gives us caution and hesitance in situations that pose a danger to oneself or others. Nevertheless, fear must be rational, and it must be controlled. Being afraid of the wrong things — or being excessively afraid of things that pose trivial risks — can be crippling.

Despite being a core component of human experience, fear is stigmatized in our society. Americans, in general, tend to be risk-takers. We instinctively recoil at cowardice. So it’s strange that the people who are dedicated to “destigmatizing” everything in our society are the same ones who work tirelessly to amplify the stigma attached to fear.

Don’t accept the framing. Don’t let the debate become a psychiatric evaluation. Don’t apologize for noticing reality.

Here, I refer to a common trend in political discourse — the left’s attribution of “phobias” to political opponents. You know the epithets: homophobia, Islamophobia, xenophobia, transphobia. Some may bristle at the claim that this fixation on phobias is a strategic tactic used exclusively by the political left. But it’s undeniable: What equivalent “phobic” label do conservatives use to discredit progressives?

We don’t have an equivalent.

Are we to believe, then, that the political left is without fear? Certainly not. Many progressives treat Christianity with the same suspicion that some on the right harbor for the LGBTQ agenda. No one calls the former group “Christophobes,” but the latter are routinely charged as homophobic. Globalists often disdain the nationalist politics of identity, referring to nationalists as xenophobes. But no one calls the Americans who disparage everything about our nation “oikophobes” (people with an irrational fear of home).

This double standard shows that the labeling of “phobias” is a rhetorical strategy. But how does it work?

Abusing the ‘phobic’ label

Start by asking who gets branded “phobic” — and for what. These days, it doesn’t take much. Express moral concerns about “gender reassignment” surgeries for children? You’re a transphobe. Feel fatigued by the endless parade of “Pride” observances on the calendar? You’re a homophobe. Object to the illegal entry of millions of unvetted foreigners? You’re a xenophobe — just another American unwilling to embrace people “searching for a better life.”

The ease with which the left assigns the “phobic” label undermines its credibility. Can someone oppose gay marriage without harboring fear of gay people? Can a citizen reject open borders as reckless policy without fearing foreigners? Can one favor vetting immigrants from Muslim-majority countries without fearing Muslims as a group?

Two answers follow. The first, and more reasonable, says yes — of course people can hold such views without irrational fear. That would make the “phobic” smear inaccurate. But if that’s true, why does the left cling so fiercely to these labels? The second answer assumes the opposite: that you must be afraid — of gays, of immigrants, of Muslims — if you hold such views. But if every opinion stems from fear, then “phobia” becomes a catch-all insult, not a diagnosis.

And yet the accusation sticks. Why?

Exploiting social fears

The power of the “phobic” label stems from how society treats fear. We treat fear not as a natural response, but as a sign of weakness or irrationality — especially when aimed at supposedly harmless things.

Admitting fear carries a social cost. Labeling someone “phobic” pressures the person to conform, not through persuasion but through social coercion. It’s a tactic, not an argument. It manipulates the desire for status and respect by suggesting the presence of a psychological defect. And it works — not because it’s true, but because it shames.

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Are unvetted illegal immigrants always harmless? No. Most aren’t violent, but some are dangerous. Yet the “xenophobic” smear exists to deny that fact and humiliate anyone who dares say it aloud. Does importing large numbers of military-age men from Yemen pose no threat? Some Yemenis are admirable people. But recent history offers proof that some have come here to commit acts of terrorism. Labeling such concerns “Islamophobic” is an attempt to gaslight the public — dismissing valid fears and punishing the act of remembering.

Diagnosing as ‘crazy’

The label does more than stigmatize. It diagnoses. “Phobia” is a clinical term. To call someone a homophobe isn’t just to accuse the person of bigotry; it’s to classify the person as mentally ill. Arachnophobes are “crazy.” Agoraphobes are crazy. And society doesn’t argue with crazy people — it ignores them. Once someone becomes “irrational,” you don’t debate that person. You dismiss him. His views no longer require engagement. They require containment.

Attaching a “phobic” label turns political opposition into psychological pathology. It justifies censorship and marginalization. Ironically, the only people the left eagerly diagnoses and silences are those it brands with a phobia. So much for compassion around mental illness.

Conservatives must reject this tactic outright. Don’t accept the framing. Don’t let the debate become a psychiatric evaluation. Don’t apologize for noticing reality. Push back, not only by refusing the label but by highlighting the contradiction. If leftists truly care about destigmatizing mental illness, they should stop flinging “phobia” at every disagreement. Expose the hypocrisy. Force them to play by their own rules — and win.

Overgrown 'Harry Potter' kidults still see Trump as Voldemort

Since at least the 1960s, North American adults have steadily become more childlike. What we call adolescence used to end at around age 17 or 18, but now we grant the right to be childish and irresponsible up until at least age 30.

And with the recent Canadian elections keeping woke crybaby Justin Trudeau’s Liberal Party in power, the full emotional immaturity of older adults was on display this week.

In fancy psychological terms, this kind of blame-shifting is called having an 'external locus of control.'

More on this below. First, we have to go back in time and set the stage.

Cursed children

It started in the late 1990s, when a children’s fantasy book series took the world by storm; the inevitable blockbuster movie franchise soon followed. In a somewhat surprising twist, fans were as eager to follow Harry Potter's adventures on paper as in the multiplex. With each new installment, breathless news reports showed mothers and children lined up around the block to get into bookstores on publication day.

Adults were delighted to see kids this interested in reading. J.K. Rowling had cast a spell on a generation already succumbing to the lure of constant screen time — even a decade before the smartphone.

But as in many a fairy tale, the spell came with a catch. The kids who were enraptured by Rowling’s saga of child wizards and witches stayed enraptured. Instead of graduating to more sophisticated reading, they chose to remain perpetual Hogwarts students. A 10 year-old immersed in a magical fantasy world is charming; by age 30, the magic starts looking like a curse.

Gryffindor vs. Hufflepuff

The most prevalent example was the tendency of fully grown adults to identify themselves by their Hogwarts "house." For those who may have forgotten their Harry Potter lore, upon matriculation, each Hogwarts student would consult a magical “sorting hat," which would assign them to a “house" or dormitory — Gryffindor, Hufflepuff, Ravenclaw, or Slytherin — based on their characteristics and abilities.

From about 2010, I started noticing 25-year-olds putting “House Gryffindor” on their social media profiles. At red lights, I’d see a car ahead of me plastered with stickers identifying their Harry Potter “house.”

The “grown-ups” were hauling themselves off to Harry Potter theme parks, throwing Harry Potter-themed house parties, and fighting with each other in cesspits like Tumblr over whose magic was better.

Don't be 'mean'

The slide from adulthood into adult infantilization in America has been slow enough that many older people either didn’t notice it or thought it was just a passing trend. As a young adult at the time, I found it baffling and embarrassing.

I was very much in the minority. Whenever I’d remark on how new and strange it was to see 30-year-olds publicly proclaiming loyalty to a movie series for 10-year-olds, other alleged grown-ups would tell me I was either being “mean” or “spoiling their fun.”

When I pointed out that these retorts also sounded like something a 10-year-old would say, you can imagine the response. I was half expecting to be called a booger-head by people old enough to have their own children.

Arrested development

Arrested emotional development is a serious, society-wide problem in America and across most of the industrialized West. In the 90s and early 2000s, we started to notice that young adults were living at home with their parents much longer, were failing to get driver’s licenses and full-time jobs, and spent a lot of time following hobbies and pursuits they developed before puberty.

And despite the insistence that the only reason for this was that it was “too hard” in “this economy” to expect an 18-year-old to go out and get an apartment, that wasn’t true. The helicopter parenting of the 90s, with its insane fixation on safetyism — this is when it became “too dangerous” for kids to walk to school — handicapped the Millennial generation and stunted their maturation.

What we might call “extended adolescence” has moved up in age brackets. Even adults of 50, 60, or 70 years today carry themselves more like what we expected from teenagers sassing back to Daddy-O in the 1950s. And the Canadian elections brought it to the fore.

Maple leaf rag

Back in January, it seemed that Canadians had finally had enough of Justin Trudeau and the Liberal Party's policies: the unchecked immigration, the forced vaccinations, the jailing and "debanking" of the Freedom Convoy protesters, the lies about nonexistent “mass child graves” at schools for Indian kids.

Trudeau's popularity had tanked so much that he resigned. The people wanted change, but Trudeau's replacement, Mark Carney, offered little to differentiate himself from his predecessor. Pierre Poilievre's Conservative Party was expected to win by its highest margin in years.

That didn't happen. Apparently Canadians were content with business as usual. Why did they throw away this chance to right the sinking ship?

Blame Trump

Trump, of course. At least, that's the reason countless adults on social media and in the news have given for the Canadian election results.

You see, Canadians voted as they did because the American president “made” them too fearful to do anything else. He said mean things. He “scared” the Canadians. His jokes about annexing Canada and making it the 51st U.S. state, you see, were “threats.” People were “terrified” of the mean orange man, and if it hadn’t been for his “bullying,” then Canadians would have been able to put a new party in power.

Consider this chart, posted on X by Jack Posobiec. The survey found that, for Canadian voters 60 and older, “dealing with Trump” was their number one election priority.

That’s remarkable. “Dealing with” the president of another country was more important to this set than the fact that their country has turned into a Communist hellhole.

The bogeyman did it

Here are some typical “thoughts” from Canadian voters and American onlookers taken from threads on X.

“Trump cost conservatives this election.”

“TBH, I dont blame them, when the world's leading superpower who sits on your border implies he's going to take over your country, yeah well it might affect people's decisions.”

“[Trump’s] interference with the Canadian elections was one of the most counterproductive acts I have ever seen a politician do.”

This is absurd. Nay, it’s pathetic. It’s babyish. It’s a child blaming his own bad decisions on some bogeyman because the child wants to escape accountability for his own behavior. Except these are alleged grown-ups.

In fancy psychological terms, this kind of blame-shifting is called having an “external locus of control.” It means that instead of taking responsibility for one’s own decisions and actions, one blames them on someone or something else. It’s a mark of arrested emotional development.

Can we have adulthood back, please?

How leftists think — and how you can change their minds

Doesn’t it seem like Donald Trump has been president for longer than seven weeks?

The administration has accomplished so much in such a short time that it’s easy to forget “we’ve only just begun.” So far, most of the changes that are de-wokifying American life are coming in the form of executive orders.

I never believed a man in a dress was a woman, and really, no one else does either. ... [But] I was afraid that not believing it would make me a morally bad person.

The most consequential moves — for example, protecting children from chemical and surgical abuse in the form of “sex changes” — need to be codified in laws passed by Congress.

Conservatives are celebrating the death of woke; I’m one of them. But if woke is on the wane, it is not dead. It may be in the process of dying, but actual death has not occurred. And its death may be much farther off than it looks.

Right now, less than two months into the Trump presidency, we’re seeing what I call an unveiling. Some call it an “extinction burst,” the idea that people act out their behaviors even more flagrantly just before the social environment changes enough to make their behaviors “go extinct.”

Whatever you call it, we’re seeing the depth of derangement in the woke minds of Democrats and leftists even more starkly than before.

The media is hyperventilating that free speech leads to Nazi pogroms. Leftists are gnashing their teeth over the deportation of noncitizen Mahmoud Khalil, acting as though he has a fundamental right to agitate against U.S. interests while he’s here as our guest (no concern at all for the effect of his agitation on their own countrymen, of course).

Democrat lawmakers shocked by the new reality that people are not going to call mentally ill men “women” any more just because they say they’re women are melting down in emotional tantrums in House committee hearings.

Inside the leftist mind

Here you are, a conservative, wondering just what these people are thinking. Why do they believe what they believe? Do they, in fact, actually believe what they say they believe?

I have these same questions, but I think I also have some of the answers.

Before a years-long process of changing my mind about politics and culture, I was one of them. The backstory that got me to being a leftist Democrat is a backstory shared by millions of people like me. It won’t describe everyone, but the generalizations I’m going to make are drawn from my own experience, and they do describe a large number of leftists and the woke-minded.

The first and most important generalization? Look into the past of any given leftist, and chances are you'll find some variation of ...

Fatherlessness

This is the single biggest factor that predisposes a child to mental troubles and leftist “people are victims of societal forces” ideology.

Not only is fatherlessness damaging to a kid’s normal ability to relate to the sexes, to regulate his emotions, and more, but it tends to coincide with single mothers with feminist attitudes. I never met my father, and my mother married a violent child molester by whom she had two more children.

She kicked him out after he tried to kill her, and the die was cast. To my mother, and by osmosis to me, all men were lazy deadbeats and scum. All the men in her life had victimized my poor, innocent mother, and nothing could be laid at the feet of her own choices.

Thus, the male feminist version of me was born, nurtured by those two companions of fatherlessness ...

Single motherhood and welfare dependency

One day in 1983, a college student stopped my mother on her way into the grocery store asking for her signature on a petition to end welfare fraud. My mother haughtily raised her nose, pointed at us three children, and said, “Do you see any welfare fraud here?”

At home, she’d scream at the television when Ronald Reagan spoke of “welfare queens,” saying there was no such thing and that Reagan was an abusive scum for trying to reform welfare. We were taught that our poverty was the fault of the government and that the government was cruel to give so little to single mothers like mine.

Thus was born my anti-capitalist sentiment that would flower into protesting against “greedy corporations,” my support for absurdly high minimum wages, and more.

As I discussed in my recent review of Adam Coleman's forthcoming book "The Children We Left Behind," modern America gives single moms the “you go girl/slay kween” treatment. We’ve made them heroines who cannot be criticized.

Of course, spending your whole life feeling like a victim of "the system" lets you justify all sorts of ...

Bad adult choices

Children who grow up in neglect and abuse as I did are far more likely to gravitate toward the left because the left embraces victimhood, hedonistic behavior, and self-centered, narcissistic choices dressed up as “self-care” and “self-love.”

As a young adult, I took up the stereotyped behaviors of abused children, living a promiscuous party life, becoming an alcoholic, and blaming all of this on anything but my own choices. Naturally, I surrounded myself with similarly damaged people. Every single one of them, to a man or a woman, was a leftist, socialist, or proud Marxist.

Once you realize the emotional disorder that leads people to adopt these beliefs, you might ask yourself ...

Do they really believe what they’re saying?

Democrat/leftist beliefs are so extreme and absurd in the 21st century that it baffles non-leftists. It’s been eight years since I started changing my mind to what it is today (conservative, anti-woke).

Even though I can remember when I was one of them, today’s leftists have gone farther than I ever did. For example, take the beliefs surrounding ...

Transgenderism

Do they actually, literally believe that a man claiming to be a woman makes him a woman?

Yes and no.

No, not in a literal sense, even though they claim very loudly that they do. The emotional urgency of their claims is used to cover up the fact that deep down, they know it’s insane.

I know this because it used to be me. I never believed a man in a dress was a woman, and really, no one else does either. So why did I say I believed it? Because I was afraid that not believing it would make me a morally bad person.

You see, children from abusive homes are forced into an adult role when they’re still little, trained to become emotional surrogate spouses to their damaged parent. So we grow up believing we are morally obligated to fuss and coo over any person who presents herself as a victim.

No, I didn’t believe these men were literally women. But I did believe I had a moral duty (it works as a religion because it is one) to say that I believed it and to act as if it were true. Fortunately for me, this cognitive dissonance was so severe that I didn’t keep this stance for long.

“Trans” was the first chink in the armor of my leftism. But rejecting it didn't mean letting of my conviction that ...

America is an exploitative, racist, misogynist hell

I’m afraid I did believe this in the literal sense. Looking back, I laugh at myself. How was it possible to believe that blacks in America were just as bad off after the civil rights era as they were during slavery? Given the reality that women in the U.S. can do anything they want for a career and enjoy absurdly generous legal protections and quotas, how could I believe we lived in a “misogynistic patriarchy”?

I'll tell you how: because the crowd around me believed these things.

Who made up this crowd? A disproportionate number of people with personality disorders. Pathological levels of narcissism, extreme emotional instability, and a victim stance toward the world.

Feminism and leftism preferentially attract the personality-disordered because they give mean, lazy, self-centered people excuses to act the way they do and blame their bad actions on outside boogeymen. Capitalism. Men. Colonialism. Heteronormativity. White people.

The point I’m trying to get across is that the beliefs held by people captured in a leftist frame of mind don’t, and don’t have to, have any relationship to reality.

You can’t break these beliefs by presenting objective facts, because these people don’t believe that objective facts exist. Or they do so only when those facts are convenient for their emotional goals.

This is why they get angry or tearful, or scream at you when you offer an article that questions their belief in vaccines, or in "the patriarchy," or in the idea that black people are systematically killed by police.

A deep part of their mind knows that what you’re saying is true, but that is intolerable. Therefore, they punish you with tantrums and reputational smears that get you kicked out of social groups or cost you your job.

Once you understand it as a social contagion, it's only natural to ask ...

Is there a cure for leftism?

The answer is also yes and no. Frustratingly, there’s no technique you can use on your leftist son, or wife, or best friend that will snap them out of it. Human mentation and emotion do not work that way.

We’re not dealing with ordinary political disagreements that we remember from a more collegial past. These leftists are in an actual cult. The same rules apply as do for any cult. They’re not tethered to facts, their commitment is entirely emotionally driven, and no presentation of facts will make any difference.

No one could have “changed” me from a leftist lunatic into a (I hope) saner conservative. I had to face the wall on my own, so to speak. I had to hit rock bottom, as we say of alcoholics.

For me, that came from a confrontation with the reality of how disturbed and morally depraved my own mother was, a confrontation that happened in 2016. A lifetime of abuse I’d rationalized away could no longer be excused. I saw my mother for what she really was — an unstable, vicious narcissist who exploited her loved ones — and my false but well-constructed view of the world started to crumble.

It kept crumbling. After I saw the truth about my family, I saw the truth about my chosen friends and political circle. Surprise! The same resentments, exploitation of others, false claims of being a victim when one is actually the perpetrator — all of these that I saw in my mother, I now saw in the social and political world I’d lived in all my adult life.

Becoming a small business owner dependent only on myself for my livelihood, and moving to the country, cured the last bits of anti-capitalism I had left.

As someone who made it out, I want the same for every poor brainwashed member of the leftist cult — especially people I care about. But experience has taught me that they have to want to be helped first.

In other words, when it comes to your leftist loved ones, the best practice is to ...

Be available, but don't tolerate abuse

Make it clear that you'll be there when and if they’re ready to talk. Be willing to explain your point of view, and offer them articles or videos that demonstrate why you believe as you do.

This may seem rather passive; unfortunately, it's really all you can do. You can’t make them have that final confrontation with reality. That either happens for them or it doesn’t.

At the same time, I urge you not to tolerate their abusive behavior. Expect the same level of respect and civility from them that you expect of anyone and that they demand from you (while giving you no respect in return).

If they won’t do it, stop talking to them. Tell them, “I will not be spoken to this way. We’re not going to talk until you’re willing to behave like a reasonable adult.” Then stop answering the texts, block their numbers, do not respond to attempts they make to engage you or provoke you.

They may be misguided, and many of them are indeed at least temporarily psychologically disturbed. But that is not an excuse for their bad behavior.

If we are to get society back on track, we conservatives have to be the adults who hold boundaries. Narcissistic, awful behavior needs to be objected to in front of others. We need to chastise those who take advantage of our loving feelings in order to treat us badly. We must dis-incentivize the greedy, grasping, histrionic emotional distortions of leftists if want this bulls**t to stop.

Good luck.

Psychology Today's unscientific mission to rebrand sickness as 'superpower'

Scientific American has long traded its credibility for ideology, declaring that biological differences between men and women are imaginary and insisting that sex is merely a social "construct." But if you thought the heights of pseudoscience peaked there, you’re wrong.

Psychology Today seems determined to one-up this lunacy.

One can only wonder what’s next in this circus of rebranding disorder as divine transformation. Perhaps colon cancer will be spun as the ultimate 'spiritual cleanse.'

Neurodiversity: The new snake oil

Consider the outlet's shameless peddling of “neurodiversity” — an ill-defined sound bite used to dismiss decades of research in favor of “affirmations” that feel good but hold no empirical weight.

At its core, neurodiversity refers to the idea that neurological differences, such as autism, ADHD, and dyslexia, are natural variations in the human genome rather than disorders to be addressed. While this perspective may comfort some, it dangerously romanticizes genuine struggles, brushing aside the critical role of evidence-based interventions.

Rather than promoting treatments that could genuinely enhance lives (and no, I don’t mean pharmaceuticals), the neurodiversity movement often prioritizes celebrating “individuality” at the expense of confronting real, debilitating challenges.

The idea is seductive. But it’s also insidious.

Reject rigorous studies, dismiss proven treatments, and replace them with syrupy platitudes. This isn’t harmless; it creates a culture where legitimate suffering is trivialized and essential interventions are framed as oppressive.

By dressing up illness in the language of empowerment, the movement dissuades individuals from seeking help, subtly convincing them that their struggles aren’t struggles at all. They are, in fact, superpowers. And these superpowers should be celebrated.

Worse still, it labels anyone who dares question this perverse narrative as a bigot — a backward fool unworthy of serious consideration.

Fairy tales for adults

But the absurdity doesn’t end there. Enter “lavender marriages,” where supposedly gay and straight partners coexist in blissful union, a fairy tale entirely unsupported by data.

Yet Psychology Today promotes this idea with a straight face, offering it as a plausible framework for relationships. It’s as though fairy tales have not only migrated from children’s books to self-help shelves but have now infiltrated peer-reviewed journals.

And then there’s the magazine's unrelenting advocacy for "trans-identified" men competing in women’s sports.

Here, Psychology Today confidently bulldozes through irrefutable biological realities in favor of ideological zealotry. The overwhelming physical advantages of male puberty — greater muscle mass, bone density, and cardiovascular capacity — are glaringly obvious to anyone willing to look. Yet these differences are blithely dismissed, replaced by a crusade against common sense that prioritizes feelings over fairness.

This is more than bad science; it’s a blatant disregard for women’s safety, equity, and hard-won opportunities in sports.

The pièce de résistance is a recent feature glorifying menopause as a “catalyst for psychospiritual development.” Forget the very real and well-documented symptoms — hot flashes, insomnia, bone loss, and debilitating mood swings. None of that matters when you can reframe this biological bombshell as some mystical gateway to enlightenment.

In this magical world, suffering isn’t something to be mitigated; it’s a spiritual calling, a chance to “evolve” as you lie awake at 3 a.m., drenched in sweat, wondering why life feels like a cruel joke.

One can only wonder what’s next in this circus of rebranding disorder as divine transformation. Perhaps kidney stones will become the “sacred pain” of self-discovery. Will migraines be hailed as “intense meditative opportunities”? Perhaps colon cancer will be spun as the ultimate “spiritual cleanse.” The sheer audacity of pretending that every form of human suffering is some sort of cosmic blessing is beyond absurd — it’s insulting.

Who cares?

Now, you might ask, “Who cares what a ridiculous magazine says?” But Psychology Today isn’t just any magazine. It’s the world’s most widely read psychology publication, shaping the views of psychologists who, in turn, influence legislative policies, educational curricula, and even court decisions. This isn’t just harmless, woke drivel; it’s a dangerous dereliction of intellectual responsibility.

Sadly, none of this should surprise us. Politics, as the saying goes, is downstream from culture, and our culture today is, quite frankly, unhinged. Moreover, science has been hijacked by political motives. The COVID-19 pandemic exposed this rot for all to see, with “experts” bending data to suit agendas and dissenters labeled heretics. The same unscientific philosophies underpin the trans movement, where ideology routinely trumps biological reality.

Psychology, once the pursuit of understanding human behavior through rigorous study, has become a parody of itself.What once aimed to help individuals navigate the complexities of life now offers little more than a curated buffet of half-baked theories dressed up as legitimate truth.

The field’s potential for redemption grows dimmer with each new foray into pseudoscience. Psychology Today’s reputation as an unimpeachable source of accessible and credible psychological insight now circles the drain, taking with it any hope for meaningful reform.

The magazine’s descent into irrelevance reflects a deeper crisis in modern science — one in which ideological conformity has replaced intellectual rigor. What remains is a hollow shell, propped up by institutions that prioritize virtue-signaling over genuine understanding. The damage now permeates our schools, our laws, and our collective psyche, leaving millions adrift in a sea of destructive lies.