political commentary

ilo Yiannopoulos has an interesting take on last week's Oregon mass shooter, whose gimmick was to ask the victims whether they were Christians. If they said yes, he killed them. If they said no, or if they told him to **** off and die (as I like to think I would have done), he only wounded them.

Even though the murderer was of mixed race and the victims were all white, we can't assume this was a racially motivated crime, or a religious crime, or that it was caused by our gun laws being too strict or too lenient. We also need more sophistication than to blame those evil males, as the feminists are doing. Dividing America further into atheists vs. Christians, men vs. women, or blacks vs. whites will only accelerate our social disintegration.

Ben Carson's I Am a Christian sign

It is a well known problem that our society grants these murderers a chance to air their grievances to the entire country. Their manifestoes and their poisonous ideas are widely read and discussed. They achieve permanent fame.

That is their goal. The average person can never hope to achieve such an audience for their ideas. Though the criminals are hated, the news media grant them the right to make a statement to the entire country. They get people like Piers Morgan and Barack Obama to talk about them as if they were important.

This must be an enormous temptation for someone whose life experience has been one of constant failure and rejection, and who cannot articulate his or her hatred.

But there is also the undeniable fact that the shooter was a male. Ignore for the moment the part where Yiannopoulos says if everybody could be a gay person like him this sort of thing would never happen. He makes a convincing case that society's oppression of males is the root cause:

“What's toxic is society's attitudes towards men. Masculinity only becomes ‘toxic’ when it is beaten down and suppressed and when men are told that what and who they are is defective. It becomes toxic when young boys are drugged in school because they don't conform to feminine standards of behaviour.”

“Men must be allowed to compete. To fight. To shoot things. Today's man-punishing, feminised culture is creating killers by suppressing these urges.”

“Society has got to start treating boys better if it wants to avoid more of this in the future.”

The scientific literature backs up this idea. Almost daily we learn of another bit of genetic programming that shows how the brains of men and women are different. There are differences in wiring. Male and female brains have different cells that produce molecules like BDNF that control the brain's function. These differences are not cultural. They cannot be erased with surgery and hormones; they are far deeper, and they are immutable. Any society that tries as hard as ours does to deny these biological truths is asking for trouble.

Feminists fantasize about a world with no men and how caring and wonderful it would be. Anyone who's watched how high school girls treat each other knows that such a world would be a living hell.

Feminists say that without men there would be no war and no killing. Yet women are responsible for having killed 50 million of their own unborn children in the United States since Roe v Wade in 1973. It is the real reason feminists have to be pro-choice. To admit that abortion is killing would force them to admit that women can kill just as easily as men can.

Yet killing is part of how we survive. We would not be on this planet if we did not have the capacity to kill. Society needs male aggression in order to survive. A society that tries to suppress it instead of channeling it and allowing it free expression will turn rancid with hate and violence, and their civilization will slowly die.

In a nuclear reactor, we have to add “moderators” to prevent the reaction from going out of control. Too much moderator, and nothing happens. Too little, and it blows up. Women are the moderators in our society, while men are the agents of change. In a world without women, humanity would explode. In a world without men, little would happen. Humanity would have just about finished knitting its first sailing ship by now.

People talk about improving access to mental health treatment. I'm not convinced there really is such a thing—after a century of research we still know very little about how the mind works and how it goes wrong. But we don't need a breakthrough in neuroscience to recognize that toxic social conditions lead to toxic social outcomes.

Societies need males, just as they need females. Denigrate one or the other, make one obsolete, or poison the relation between them, and society will self-destruct.

That may be why Islamic societies that oppress women are self-destructing in one way, and why Western societies that oppress men are self-destructing in the opposite way.

Both societies deny they're doing it. If we want to stop these crimes, we should start by facing the truth.