Barren Nation
A Weekend Round-Up on National Infertility (Of All Kinds)
Transgender-based child custody battles continue to crop up in red states. Last month it was Indiana. This month its Montana. The same story is being repeated so often now that it’s becoming entirely predictable. The broad message they deliver is not simply a war on children and families but a war on reproduction of all kinds: cultural, familial, national. A demoralized, infertile, androgynous de-cultured, ahistorical population is the goal.
A husband and wife from Big Sky country report that the state removed their daughter—publicly they are referring to her as “Jennifer”—from their custody because they were non-affirming of her newfound male identity. This time, pronoun misusage hasn’t been cited, like it was in Indiana, as evidence of parental wrong-think. (See also a recent New York case; custody cases are the newest front in the war on “bigotry.”) Central in the Montana case, protestation against hospital staff referring to Jennfier by her preferred male name, “Leo.”
To briefly recount the now near-boilerplate facts, the fourteen-year-old “Jennifer,” born a female, now claims to be a boy. In August 2023, her school reported to the parents that Jennifer was suffering from suicidal ideations. Per the parents (Todd and Krista Kolstad), Jennifer had been bullied in the past and has “some undiagnosed mental health concerns.”
In short order, Montana’s Child Family Services (CFS) went to the home for inspection. In an interview with Reduxx—it is noteworthy that mainstream outlets did not pick up the story first; Megan Kelly has now covered it—Jennifer’s parents recounted that during the CFS interview, “Jennifer claimed to have consumed toilet bowl cleaner and painkiller medications that day in an effort to commit suicide.”
This seemed highly unlikely since “Jennifer had expressed no symptoms of imminent illness that day,” an expected result of someone ingesting toxic chemicals and drugs. But, like good parents, they took her to the emergency room anyway where blood work later confirmed that Jennifer had, in fact, not consumed any harmful substances.
While at the hospital, Jennifer told staff that she was, in fact, a male named “Leo.” Her parents insisted that hospital records reflect Jennifer’s birth certificate, including her natural sex designation, and informed both CFS and hospital staff that doing otherwise was contrary to their “values, morals, and religious beliefs.” Both CFS and the hospital informed the parents that the patient’s requests were determinative even if the patient is a minor.
Jennifer was placed on 24/7 watch for her “safety.” Reportedly, a hospital aide stationed outside her door would regularly talk to the teen about so-called “gender-affirming care.” “I came one day, and she was talking about having top-surgery and being non-binary,” recalled Krista.
By August 22, Todd and Krista were told that Jennifer was being transferred to a facility in Wyoming where, the Montana doctors said, she would receive “better” psychiatric care and supposedly improve. Montana is one of the 15 states that just last year banned so-called “gender affirming care” for minors.
CFS then served the parents with notice of emergency removal from their custody. CFS would have temporary custody as they, allegedly, pursued appropriate medical care for Jennifer. Again, the self-diagnosis and delusions of a child would trump any parental insights or objections.
Jennifer was taken to Wyoming the next day and did not return to Montana for almost a month, at which point she was placed in a Youth Dynamics group home. By mid-January 2024, CFS had gained custody via court order. Currently, Jennifer reportedly wears chest binders, shaves her head, and continues to call herself “Leo.” Per Reduxx,
“We were told that letting Jennifer transition and live as a boy was in her ‘therapeutic best interest’ and because we aren’t willing to follow that recommendation, the court gave CFS custody of Jennifer for six months,” Krista says. “CFS is now going to place Jennifer in the care of her birth mother in Canada, who has never really been a part of her life. The judge said to us ‘you need to expect that reunification with your family may not be what you are expecting.’”
The ostensibly Republican governor of Montana, Greg Gianforte, has publicly defended CFS action in this case. Last year, he signed the law banning “prohibits transitional hormone treatments and surgeries” for minors reportedly against the objections of his “non-binary” son.
Of course, the law, if it survives the ACLU’s legal challenges, does nothing to stop the spread of the social contagion of transgenderism. Kids like Jennifer are still intentionally subjected to that cultural apparatus. Even though the Montana law is supposed to prevent public schools from changing the pronouns of students it includes no such restriction on medical providers.
Rightly, the Kolstad’s are accusing Montana CFS of “kidnapping” their daughter. Insofar as Jennifer’s transition is being aided and abetted by the state, the offense could more accurately be defined as murder—the cyborg theocracy won’t like that characterization, of course. This sort of “medical” human replacement corresponds to other expressions of the boundless, borderless life, of hatred for the preexistent and given, of providence and order.
The regime will insist that national borders are immoral and unjust—these things are always morally coded—that current demographics are unacceptable, that androgyny is true transcendence, and that restraint of lust is harmful and tyrannical. Abstinence from masturbation is worrisome and porn bans are creepy, regime-approved opinion informs us.
Notice the backwards (moral) logic embedded the hysteria surrounding Dusty Deevers’ proposals to eliminate no-fault divorce and porn. It is Deevers and those like him, says Jimmy Fallon, that are sex-obsessed and perverted because they advocate restraint on lust. The projection here is heavy. All the while, gay surrogacy, genital mutilation, and sexual voyeurism are relentlessly promoted by regime media. It is apparently now offensive to use AI tools to clothe lewd images of women. Deepfake porn is also offensive, obviously.
How is this circle squared by the zeitgeist? Sex and sensuality are about female empowerment and autonomy. No shame may come to them in any respect and whatever their decisions. No other end is in view for the psychological self in a feminized society. Sex has no telos apart from maximizing girl power! After all, how is a woman—whatever that is—able to have a career if she succumbs to biological-emotional natural impulses? Never fear! Bloomberg has the solution: don’t have kids!
Socially, this is all suicidal, of course, in a literal sense.
Childless, careerist women; anxiety-ridden, mentally unstable, drugged-up children with functionless genitalia; a working class addicted to imported fentanyl; unchecked flood of unvetted immigrants; men inundated with virtually simulated sex; child-stealing by perverse men who mock traditional gender roles; et cetera, et cetera.
All this goes together in one horrific package. Christians, in particular, must recognize that these things are not disconnected, and they are not organic in their proliferation.
Whether by concerted efforts at aggressive population change or self-induced moral decadence, it doesn’t really matter at this level. Birth rates are plummeting, and the American way of life is being eroded at an even more rapid pace. Reproduction on all fronts is depleted. Demoralization—being forced to live lies without apparent recourse—is potent. You can feel it. Successor cults mock American faith and tradition. Any protest against this onslaught is punished mercilessly and disproportionately. Allegedly, there are simply no available and adequate resources to address the border crisis or inner-city crime. But billions upon billions can be funneled eastward on a whim to fund the latest pet boondoggle.
America’s geographic boundaries may technically remain (at present), but this is not sufficient for a functioning nation. Reproduction of culture or population, the things that inhabit the physical boundaries, are more essential. Israel existed as a nation in the wilderness, but it did not exist apart from the obvious ingredients of peoplehood, the shared things: religion, culture, and lineage. The extent to which Americans will not construct and exercise mechanisms of reproduction on all these fronts will correlate exactly to the rapidity of their demise. Internal decay always proceeds external incursions. That such external assaults are already underway is a very bad sign, to put it mildly. It means the internal rot is fairly progressive.
Any renewal begins with acceptance of a central baseline culture, history, and traditions, and, yes, religion, around which all else can coalesce. There must be these things for population and cultural reproduction, for national longevity.
A practical point: Christians need to start branding—a cheap but useful word—legislative proposals like Deevers’ as not merely morally right, but as socio-politically imperative, in a survivalist sense. If we want to have a country, we must incentivize stable, reproductive marriages, restrict promiscuity and vice, and repel invasion. Stop trading in “rights” appeals except insofar as they remain provisionally useful. In general, the predominate conception of “rights” is constructed for our failure. We need to begin talking in terms of natural order and the hierarchy of authority. It is not that rights (natural and civil) do not exist but that the latter is more basic and supportive.
Distractions (moral and visual) must be eliminated; unfettered appetites cannot be bothered to care about social implosion. But, perhaps, stories like those coming out of Montana and Indiana (i.e., red America) will begin to inject urgency into a sedated populace.
We should return briefly to our original topic to further diagnose our ills. Assuming all the facts of Jennifer’s case as outlined above are true, a new trend is discernable. Even if your state has banned trans surgeries and hormone treatment, parental rights are still not totally safe from the gender delusion, especially since everything is medically coded in terms of psychiatric health and safety.
The Montana case is shocking because no suicide attempt took place and despite Jennifer’s claims to mental illness—which are increasingly normalized and socialized with status—and a history of being bullied in school, there was no indication that her home environment presented threats to her health or development. That is, except for the wrong-think discovered by the hospital workers.
The best interest standard by which child custody cases are judged, is completely captive to therapeutic anthropology. Such assumptions are entirely mainstream now. Harper’s Bazaar can flippantly and without citation state,
“Gender-affirming care is widely recognized by the mainstream medical community as being best practice for treating kids with gender dysphoria, and it has been shown in research to significantly reduce negative psychological outcomes, including suicidal ideation, in trans children.”
The case being made here is fairly easy. Do you want kids to kill themselves? No? Then you must affirm “treatment” for their delusions; you must affirm affirming treatment.
So long as this pathology continues to supply the predominate ethical-moral frame for society, you can expect adolescent well-being to be assessed similarly, to the detriment of sane, especially Christian, parents and families. Perhaps, at a deeper level, the sexual liberationism behind transgenderism is fundamentally a replacement ideology. Replacing natural familial relations and detaching sex from its teleological end are central goals.
Cases like the one’s mentioned already should not be observed with detached curiosity, as a remote manifestation of “insanity.” They are insane, but they are not insane in the colloquial, amusing sense. They are very real and very near, and their most fundamental effect goes beyond some kind of “worldview” analysis. Replacement, social death, is the bottom line and final cause.
This is why last year I instructed Christian families to get out of public schools. (And make no mistake, Christians are being targeted, in part, because they are the most natural target.) They should also ban the chief instigator of the social contagion from their homes: TikTok. (See the recent, chilling War on Children documentary.)
But it is also becoming clear that even “red state” environments will not save you. The “child welfare” and “health care” industries, as well as schools and the judiciary, are so saturated with true believer ideologues that, as the Montana case shows, they are willing and able to get creative, so to speak. Safety from forced transgenderism is not provided by bans on “gender affirming care for minors.” Much more must be done. Much more must be demanded.
That you, perhaps, think such things cannot be demanded and cannot, in turn, be achieved is a sign of demoralization. (Sober field analysis is not synonymous with, nor cause for, defeatist posture.) That real alternatives—applicable and achievable at least by analogy, controlling for differing conditions in cases—are decried by the regime is evidence of both concerted demoralization (and replacement) tactics and that, in fact, said alternatives are, again, very real and potentially viable. More on that momentarily.
I will remind you, once again, that our ills are rooted in a single ailment. I’ve cited the clip before and will do so again. Camille Paglia’s lecture, “Transgender Mania is a Sign of Cultural Collapse.”
“As a civilization is starting to unravel. You find it again and again and again in history.” The “it” is the defiance of sexual and gender boundaries, i.e., transgenderism. Participants in the delusion “feel that they’re very sophisticated, they’re very cosmopolitan.” Imbedded here, in androgyny and sexual ambivalence at scale, is damning evidence of civilizational decline; of diminished self-confidence; of identity crisis. Vulnerabilities give rise to reactions within this moral-cultural vacuum.
On the imperial outskirts are (intellectual and literal) migrants, differently conditioned, whether by the Eurasian steppe or Central America. They are, as Paglia describes them, “people who still believe in heroic masculinity,” which is to say, barbarians. (Rome itself was the victim of unchecked migration.) It is natural that a barren nation is vulnerable to repopulation from outside its geography and culture. Unoccupied territory, literal and figurative, is vulnerable to the claims of squatters. As they say, nature abhors a vacuum.
Total American collapse, in a sort of cartoonish apocalypse, is unlikely. Pay no attention to those longing for civil war—the left longs for it more, by the way; they’re literally making movies about it. But an array of new, previously unthought, because they are supposed to be unthinkable, options will emerge. History, old and more recent, suggests it.
Enter Nayib Bukele. Even if you do not like him, you know he is worth paying attention to because legacy media so badly wants you to dismiss him.
In the spirit of actual journalism, Ben Braddock (IM1776) has written a must-read profile of Bukele’s rise and success. A window into a possible future—I mean that both positively and negatively. Braddock recounts at length the conditions which precipitated the now two-term president’s political emergence in El Salvador, once the most dangerous and violent country in the hemisphere. His critics might call it unconstitutional, but Bukele has singlehandedly restored order and sovereignty to his country over and against the gang insurgency that effectively governed El Salvador only a few years ago, sometimes with foreign backing. None of this was easy. It took some serious political maneuvering on the part of Bukele just to stay on the ballot, even nimble were his efforts to gain popular support whilst avoiding violent revolution. Braddock’s words:
“Many of Bukele’s international admirers have claimed that he has shown that it is easy to fix the key problems of our societies. I disagree. What President Bukele did was simple, yes — put the bad guys in jail — but it was not ‘easy’. It took enormous will, courage, and dogged perseverance to accomplish what he did. It also took no small amount of charisma, and some trickery as well — as in the case where he had to outmaneuver his enemies to appear on the ballot.”
Few have the ambition and fortitude to come down as hard and swift as he has on government corruption and organized crime. Peace and security are often at odds, but interdependent and always costly.
To quote Braddock’s excellent piece at length:
“Now that there is finally peace, the work of healing and building can proceed. The gang members themselves are freer than ever before. Free from being trapped in lives of crime, free from drugs and alcohol, free from the threat of violence at the hands of rivals or their own gangs. I am told by several missionaries that there is a surge in former gang members becoming born-again Christians and the prison societies becoming gradually transformed from within into genuine spiritual fraternities.
For the kids who would otherwise be growing up into an environment that pressured them into joining the gangs, that pressure is gone and tremendous energy is going into empowering the youth of the nation to live good decent lives. The national homicide rate is now on par with Luxembourg. El Salvador is the safest country in the western hemisphere. Safer than the United States, safer than my own county, which has a homicide rate that is four times worse. Businesses no longer have the tax of extortion by the gangs, they are free to expand. Workers no longer have to pay extortion fees either, so that’s more money for them to invest in their families and enterprises. The psychic relief is incalculable. The security dividend is rapidly transforming the country… New public works and parks. New shops and restaurants. And a renewed sense of pride and joyfulness among the people.”
You really should read the whole thing.
If I have one criticism of Braddock’s account, it is that it does not sufficiently emphasize the Christian mood of Bukele’s administration. This is not to say that Braddock ignores it, only that it is underplayed, in my view. He mentions several times Bukele’s invocation of God, reliance on providence, and prayers for national wisdom, as well as for himself. But what captures the imagination, at least for a certain sector of America to which I belong, is the spirit of the inauguration speech, clips of which have circulated widely online.
What Bukele’s example offers is not a simplistically transferable model, but a certain desirable self-confidence and mood. Public recognition of God, of Christianity, for one, would be a big improvement for most western heads of state. (The lesson of the Putin memes this week following the Tucker interview is that a demonstrable comprehension of, and love for, the history of American civilization would be nice too.) More practically, it is the will to enact change, forceful change, for the national good, casting off the chains of demoralization and replacement.
This is, in part, why the true nature of American history must be recovered and promulgated. It is a source of national direction and self-confidence. In tandem therewith, American Christian consciousness must be pulled out from under the heavy stone of guilt and self-denial that has been placed upon it by its enemies so that it can be reinvigorated. Any other path forward will smack of historic incongruence. As I recently argued at American Mind, we cannot proceed hating our fathers; it means we hate ourselves. Self-hatred yields acceptance of, well, almost anything. Political will is evasive, absent solidified, national identity. It does not have to be this way. That’s what the case of Bukele teaches us. The question is, as my friend Clifford Humphrey has put it, do we have the will to live? Most importantly, we must remember that the barren nation has cause for rejoicing in hope of renewal only when the holy one of Israel is great among us.
Since the featured images of American Reformer articles have been afforded so much attention lately, some explanation for this article’s image, not approved by our managing editor, is relevant. Analogies between Rome and America are too often made–the image above itself is, admittedly, over employed. That’s the sophisticated take. The endurance of such analogies seems to cut against contrarian opinion. In any case, surely general lessons of empire can be derived therefrom–the cycles of regimes. Consider the description Thomas Cole gave to the most famous of his series (and featured above):
“Ages may have passed since the scene of glory – though the decline of nations is generally more rapid than their rise. Luxury has weakened and debased. A savage enemy has entered the city. A fierce tempest is raging. Walls and colonnades have been thrown down. Temples and palaces are burning… A barbarous and destroying enemy conquers and sacks the city. Description of this picture is perhaps needless; carnage and destruction are its elements.”
The analogy, intended for America by its author, in Cole’s painting is obvious. Will to avoid that harrowing outcome is all that stands between us and something similar, even if our “destruction” would be more modern and liberal, which is to say subtle and clinical as suits the tastes of its would be architects.
Image Credit: The Course of Empire–Destruction, 1833-1836, Thomas Cole.