"You currently have one side willing to talk and extend a microphone to anyone, and one side that shoots to kill when they do." - Aimee Terese on X
By James Howard Kunstler - September 15, 2025
When Brian De Palma’s movie, Dressed to Kill, came out in 1980, this was a different country. Like Hitchcock’s Psycho before it (1960), both films depicted men seeking to become women who are murderously deranged by their wishful fantasies. Now, our country has become murderously deranged by the same fantasy writ large.
These derangements are acted out now by a segment of the population that calls itself “the trans community.” This is just another manipulation of language, of course, by the same organized agencies working to turn our national life upside-down and inside-out. You call them “Globalists” or “Marxists” or “gnostic anarchists,” but who-or-whatever actually directs this action remains an abiding mystery of our time. (The runner-up abiding mystery is how the news media was hijacked to go along with all that.)
You have learned the past ten years how fragile reality can become in a society under stress. But then there is the reality of things as they actually exist, and the group’s perception of reality, which is not the same. The group’s perception of reality requires a consensus, an agreement, that certain things of this world are so. If the agreement is sturdy, and comports with how things actually exist, then you have a high-functioning society. If the agreement is flimsy and doesn’t comport with how things actually are, you get Clusterfuck Nation, a society tortured by various compounded derangements.
It is hard to account for exactly how this happened to us, but the most visible manifestations of it these days come out of the political Left, the party that once defended the interests of the working-class, the laborers in their tough, uncomfortable lives seeking fair treatment from the comfortable class that employed and managed them. At least, that’s how things resolved for a while in our industrial society, the classes coexisting in a fruitful, balanced tension. That all peaked in the early 1960s.
Political relations between business and labor grew increasingly irrelevant after that as industry got moved out of our country, so the party of the working-class had to find something else to give its attention to. By the early 1960s, the Democratic Party had already rebranded itself as the party of the civil rights (having been previously the party of Jim Crow and the KKK). It was not an altogether cynical or insincere transformation. It was driven by a dynamic imperative: to prove that America, the self-styled Leader of the Free World after two great and ruinous world wars, was a fair and righteous country, deserving its post-war leadership role. And that imperative rode the tailwind of Franklin Roosevelt’s “progressive” legacy.
Increasingly, though, after the 1960s, the civil rights crusade lost its mojo. It disappointed the zealous. Try as it might, the effort did not lead to a nirvana of racial harmony. In fact, the miserable black underclass seemed to only grow larger and more dysfunctional, the cities they lived in (increasingly run by them) more broken.
The band-aid for that failure was multiculturalism. By the 1980s, the consensus about reality was fracturing, especially about standards of behavior. Too many “people of color” were “justice involved” — they committed crimes. It was an embarrassment to “progressives” (liberal Democrats). Multiculturalism’s premise was that a society could have different standards of behavior and different values for different groups. Henceforth, there was no need for a broad agreement about what sort of behavior was okay and what was not okay — no need for a common culture that applied to everyone.
From there, the Democratic party had to assiduously recruit and sort out all the various multi-cultures in America, and pretend to manage and justify their special needs in order to continue functioning as a national political party. In the 1970s, it was all about feminism, the entry of women into the managerial class, the board rooms, the law firms, the professoriate. Then it was all about gay rights, Stonewall and all that followed. That movement was badly derailed in the 1980s by AIDS, which killed many of its activists and made the group’s sexual activities look less than entirely wholesome.
After about 1985, the liberals had to write off Black men. Too many were crackheads and no accounts. All they had left was the likes of Al Sharpton (of Tawana Brawley infamy) and a few hundred millionaire sports stars. So, the Dems rallied over the plight of Black women. . . who were soon joined by the indigenous people (formerly “Indians”). . . the Pacific Islanders. . . . By the early 21st century, the Democrats had run out of oppressed ethnicities to recruit under the multicultural umbrella. All that remained were the “homeless” (formerly “bums,” “junkies,” and “the mentally ill”).
Actually, the mentally ill had gotten a multicultural jump-start in the 1970s when patients in hospitals for the insane were re-branded as an “oppressed minority.” Thus, the hospitals were all emptied out and closed down and the patients released to “freedom” on the streets with vague promises of “community-based treatment” to follow — it never did, of course. After several major Middle East wars starting with Desert Storm in the 90s, more and more damaged military vets joined the ranks of the homeless. It has apparently never occurred to anyone that re-establishing hospitals for the insane might be necessary.
And so it has gone, from one “marginalized” and “oppressed minority” after another until all that liberalism (and their official org, the Democratic Party) had left in the 2020s was the tiniest subculture in the country: people who fantasized about becoming the opposite sex. That group was much encouraged by the medical establishment so narcissistically enchanted by their surgical skills and manipulations of hormonal chemistry (and the money it generated) that they recruited ever more subjects for their experiments.
The doctors and their therapist partners, in turn, egged-on . . .
[SNIP]
