Gender has become complicated now. Fatherhood is no longer something boys should aspire to, or be prepared to accept, because girls who have their breasts removed will do the fathering, from now on. Testosterone alone confers manhood. This new manhood does not pass between males, which makes it non-toxic masculinity.

See, look at this cartoon that The New York Times ran on Father’s Day. The children are already learning to accept the new reality that some dads have vaginas while two women, presumably their birthing parents, thank ‘him’ with their eyes for the conversations they were not ready to have with their children.

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‘Gender’ is not a fact, anymore, but a feeling. Male ‘gender’ is now a feeling that belongs to females who cut their breasts off and take testosterone. It does not belong to every boy, because some boys will want to be girls. Fatherhood is no longer connected to biology. Fatherhood is now ‘found family’, such as Bella Ramsey declaring “I’m gonna be a dad” to her pregnant girlfriend on The Last of Us.

Elliott, the child in Zach Ellam’s NYT cartoons, is already feminized. He has long hair and wears a unisex onesie when they go swimming. The idealized dad in the paper of record will let her son be the woman she didn’t want to be. A son does not need a man to make him into a man, he needs a woman to make herself into a man and then make him into a woman.

Paternity is deprecated in the paper of record™ these days. Matt Taibbi tweeted these recent offerings from the NYT. To get in the spirit of Father’s Day, they reminded dads that their kids are just waiting for them to die so they can finally go achieve things in life.

Fathers are so useless that their children must learn to forgive them. It’s okay to give up on being a dad, boys. Your kids will just hate you, anyway. No need to plan your life around success and excellence, or to pass those values on to another generation. We need less of that patriarchy stuff that makes civilizations. After all, we are building a perfect society in socialist New York City. We don’t need old geezers telling boys how to be men.

As much attention as the ‘manosphere’ gets for supposedly creating bad men, the absence of fathers has a profoundly negative effect on every aspect of a child’s life, including their mortality. Fathers are transformed by fatherhood into more productive and responsible men. The science of ‘dad brain’ is fascinating, but the NYT chooses to headline the depressed dads. Being a dad is depressing, boys. Who needs it?

In fact, your dad probably abused you. Fathers are men, and men are abusive and toxic (unless they are women who cut off their breasts and take testosterone). Men are babies who cannot take care of themselves, so who needs the responsibility of caring for an aged father? Let the state handle him. It’s the least he deserves.

Dear Dad, The New York Times hates you. It’s okay to hate The New York Times back. You could never possibly hate them enough, Dad. They want you dead and buried and gone so they can prepare your children for the gender nonconformity utopia of the future.

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“Although the SPLC has indeed done some good work in the past and still does some good work today, it has proven, time and time again, that it cannot be trusted in the business of identifying hate …

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Originally published in 2023 at The Distance.

Josef Mengele “liked the smell of the crematoria.” To him, it was the scent of progress. In her memoir Echoes from Auschwitz, Eva Mozes Kor tells the story of her incredible survival, along with a twin sister Miriam, at the hands of the infamous camp doctor. “Even today, none of us really knows what was done to us,” Kor wrote in 1995. Her allegations include grisly experimental sex changes on children.

The older girls told of being taken to a lab where blood from some boys was transfused into their bodies and their blood was transfused into the bodies of the young boys. Some of the doctors who were working on this project told the young girls that they were going to make them into young men. One twin had his sex organs removed in an attempt to turn him into a girl.

A eugenicist, Mengele was in fact determined to “resolve the secret of the reproduction of the race,” according to Gerald L. Posner and John Ware in Mengele: The Complete Story, published in 2000. Surviving inmates understood that he “wanted to find the cause of multiple pregnancies in order to be able to repopulate Germany,” and say that Mengele “spoke of it very freely,” according to psychologist Robert Jay Lifton. Conversely, Mengele was an advocate of ‘racial hygiene’ and he definitely took part in untold thousands of experimental sterilization procedures that were conducted on prisoners at Auschwitz, many of whom died afterward from complications and lack of care. Survivors were often left scarred and in pain, suffering lifelong health consequences.

In his 1986 study The Nazi Doctors: Medical Killing And The Psychology Of Genocide, Lifton notes that the more bizarre reports surrounding sterilization experiments can be garbled, and it is not always clear which camp doctor did the operation. Nevertheless, after first doubting such accounts, only to spend many years hearing them from survivors and witnesses, Lifton was “not so sure” anymore. “My belief is that each of these reports stems from some form of actual abuse,” he wrote, “usually experimental, even if there was confusion in details, including the question of which Nazi doctor was involved.” Dr. Mengele “exemplified the Nazi biological revolutionary” in Lifton’s words. Based on primary sources, Mengele was clearly a pioneer of pediatric sterilizations, including possible experimental sex change surgeries.

Of course, no perfect picture of the infamous infirmaries of Auschwitz could possibly be reconstructed. Not only are the survivors mortal, but so much evidence of what happened was destroyed in the fires of German defeat. “Isn’t it a pity?” Mengele said of his own records, lost to the Red Army when it liberated the camp. Gone were his collections of eyeballs, “pinned up like butterflies,” carefully curated by color.

Human aesthetics obsessed him. Every test subject was examined in detail by a trained staff of camp nurses who took careful measurements of every physical feature (anthropometry) and remarked on every blemish. German pseudoscience had produced an entire body of theory around racial attributes and this was all supposed to be empirical data which would prove it.

As Posner and Ware explain, despite being considered handsome Mengele did not fit the preferred racial stereotypes of Nazi “hygiene,” and was very conscious of his supposed shortcomings.

Mengele’s own racial classification by the SS had put him in the Dynarisch-Ostisch category, which meant that his predominant features were of “Eastern” origin. Since childhood he had been self-conscious about his slightly tawny skin, his penetrating brown-green eyes, and his dark brown hair. At school he had endured mild taunts from his classmates about his Gypsy looks. And in Bavaria, where Mengele grew up, the word for “Gypsy” had a derogatory meaning denoting an unstable and unsettled person. His home town of Günzburg, especially, was full of folklore about Gypsies coming to kidnap children who misbehaved.

Beauty standards had always shaped the proto-science of anthropology in the German academy. Johann Friedrich Blumenbach, the German naturalist who stamped the term “Caucasian” into our racial discourse in 1795, chose the “most beautiful” skull from his collection to be the ancestor of white Europeans. A full-blown pseudoscience in 1933, when Nazis took power in Germany, “racial hygiene” conceived of itself as a progressive movement, even an ethical one.

Mengele personified this mindset. He was clinical, dispassionate, and at the same time “on occasion he even examined and treated prisoner patients, rare for SS doctors,” according to Lifton, because it was his professional calling to do so. Mengele really believed he was making the world a better place, and his benchmark of success in “improving the human race” was a totalitarian imposition of highly-refined stereotypes. Among his most famous experiments were attempts to alter the eye color of living patients. Painful, blinding, these procedures were done without anesthetic.

Witnesses describe Mengele as “particularly cold and cynical” when he took part in the selection process, which he did as often as he could. Mengele was the rare selector who worked extra shifts in this role, which most SS officers found exhausting and demoralizing. Dr. Ella Lingens, a camp survivor, noted that unlike his peers, Mengele “performed the selections without stimulants of any kind,” except perhaps breakfast coffee. As unfortunates emptied from the cattle cars and came down the ramp, Mengele “had the air of a man who took great satisfaction in his work and was pleased with his calling,” according to one witness. He would carry a riding crop. While he examined the nude selections, Lifton records another survivor saying, he occasionally struck someone with his little horse whip, “not at all excited but … casual … just playing around as though it were a little funny.”

Stereotypical sex behaviors were another Mengele obsession. One camp doctor told Lifton he “recalled Mengele being much more concerned than the other SS doctors about lesbianism in the women’s camp as well as about homosexuality in the men’s camp.” Mengele lived his own stereotypes as well. On one occasion, he mistook a topless lesbian for a man. When she turned around to face him and answer his rebuke with disrespect, Mengele was so embarrassed that he fled the scene rather than punish her. Even his anti-Semitism had a stereotypical, and sexual, origin: a Jew had seduced his fiancée, once. He never mentioned the birth of a son to staff in 1944, so detached was his life in Auschwitz. The camp was “a paradise of delusions,” Lifton says.

Every so often, during the selections, Mengele would spot a pair of twins. “Zwillinge!” He would shout, sometimes running to them in joy: Twins! Mengele bargained with other selectors to save pairs of twins from the gas chambers for his strange research project. Lifton thinks that Mengele “probably came to Auschwitz for that purpose” of studying twins. As a student of Otmar Freiherr von Verschuer, a professor at the University of Münster, Mengele had been trained in the use of twins for so-called genetic studies. Posner and Ware conclude that at least 200 pairs of twins were selected for Mengele’s project, which Lifton describes as “a caricature of an academic research institute.” Dr. Lengyel, a prisoner doctor, rubbished Mengele as a “charlatan.”

Yet “whatever their hubris, and whatever the elements of pseudoscience and scientism in what they actually did, they identified themselves with the science of their time,” Lifton writes in his 2019 volume Losing Reality: On Cults, Cultism, and the Mindset of Political and Religious Zealotry. The science was settled, Mengele thought, and only the great experiment to understand it completely remained.

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Death was the purpose of Auschwitz and Mengele ultimately expected the twins he selected to die. Dr. Miklos Nyiszli, another prisoner-doctor who performed dissections on dead twins for Mengele, explained why Auschwitz suited Mengele so well. “Where under normal circumstances can one find twins who die at the same place and at the same time?”

For twins like everyone else are separated by life’s varying circumstances. One may die at ten, the other at fifty. In the Auschwitz camp, however, there were several hundred sets of twins and therefore as many possibilities.

Eva Mozes Kor only survived because her sister, the weaker twin, recovered from illness. Her memoir includes the harrowing details of how she procured food for Miriam, and then decades later, donated a kidney. If one twin died in Mengele’s care, so did the other. For science. Usually this was done with a bullet, but often enough it was done with chloroform injection. Mengele would have any prisoner dissected for any reason, for example over a disputed diagnosis. Surviving twins simply did not survive his experiments.

“Crude surgery and other painful tests were performed, often without anesthetics,” Posner and Ware write, reading from the Nuremberg trials.

There were needless amputations, lumbar punctures, typhus injections, and wounds deliberately infected to compare how each twin reacted. In the view of the West German indictment, all were devoid of “any recognizable knowledge being gained from them.” Scores of Mengele’s guinea pigs died at this stage, many of them from a particularly bizarre experiment in which the blood supplies of different pairs of twins were interchanged.

Twins allegedly had blood and sperm taken for injection into German women, to see if they had twins. Other “weird sexual experiments” involved forced sex of twin pairs to see if they also had twins, according to Nazi Doctors. Just as Mengele wanted to “resolve the secret of the reproduction of the race,” however, he saw his work as taking control over nature, a rejection of evolutionary progress. “Racial leadership” not only required the “cleansing” of Jews, it made killing out to be therapeutic, a way to heal humanity.

Thus “mysticism was given a biological and medical face” in Nazism, Lifton writes. One Nazi doctor told Lifton that he joined the party after hearing a speaker declare that “National Socialism is nothing but applied biology.” Jews and Gypsies and other undesirables were a sickness. Even Bolsheviks were a pathogen to be cured. “If you are curing sickness, anything is permissible,” Lifton observes. “Genocide itself can be understood as the purification of the world by means of eliminating a racial, ethnic, or political contaminant.”

Thus the experimental sterilizations. Altogether, historians think some 200-250,000 people were sterilized by the Nazis. It was as high a priority as war production. “Establishing widespread compulsory sterilization became a sacred mission,” Lifton says. To that end, there were attempts to industrialize the process, for example through bombardment of the gonads with X-rays. In order to determine the efficiency and efficacy of this procedure, the sex organs of the subjects could be biopsied. According to witnesses Lifton interviewed, Mengele was in the middle of it all. Emphasis added:

One survivor told me that Mengele “cut the balls” of a very young twin, and that he (this witness), in fact saw the testicles “lying on our table.” A Greek survivor, one of whose testicles had been removed, appeared in court against Schumann but held Mengele equally responsible and told of the latter’s supervising the crude method of collecting sperm from males involved in sterilization experiments.

One twin without his testicles, the other left with them intact to see what will happen, is very much like John Money’s experiment with the Reimer twins. Mengele was playing god, and in fact many camp survivors revered him as God upon their liberation, Lifton reports, for his sinister form of care offered privileges and a perceived chance of survival. Posner and Ware write of the “chocolate and special clothes” that Mengele distributed to his victims. Some survivors confessed to Lifton that their sense of receiving “genuine” affection from Mengele lingered for years afterward, that his crimes had to be “constantly described to me” before a numb acceptance could begin.

If the people who knew his crimes best could still not see his criminality, surely we cannot be certain of all specific crimes Dr. Mengele committed in Auschwitz. However, we know enough.

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Lionsgate says they will be making an all-female version of The Expendables. The proposed title, Expendabelles, is a terrific dad joke. The positives end there. Yet another gender-swapped ‘boy brand’ is being set up for failure on the wrongheaded assumption that women will t…

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Originally published in 2023 at The Distance.

Image curation was a major concern for the Soviets. Despite a vast censorship bureaucracy, however, truths still got out of the Soviet Union in the form of official photography. Truth could then appear as informed commentary on the official caption. When Robert C. Cook published the above photo in a 1949 issue of The Journal of Heredity devoted to “the genetics controversy” in the USSR, he included a tongue-in-cheek comment. “It is noteworthy that Lysenko, who has interdicted experimental controls and the use of mathematics in biological research, needs only eye-power and general impressions to ‘measure the growth of wheat,’” Cook explained. “The presence of that capitalist symbol, Santa Claus, in the center of the picture is purely coincidental.”

Contrary to popular framing, Trofim Denisovich Lysenko did not personally starve millions of people to death, nor was he personally responsible for Stalin’s purges, which included people in his own orbit. Rather, Lysenko’s impact on Soviet and Maoist agriculture was indirect. An applicable modern term might be ‘vaporware,’ for what Lysenko actually did was perform magic tricks and pretend they were science while the actual science languished; it was the Elizabeth Holmes Theranos act writ large. Joseph Stalin found value in Lysenko’s theories and ordered everyone to follow his instructions. Famines resulted from the sham pseudoscience crowding out the real, data-driven science that would have otherwise developed in Russia, much like an invasive weed taking over a fallow field. It simply failed to prevent or ameliorate famine the way real science would. Imagine that Ibram X. Kendi’s ‘Center for Antiracist Research,’ which imploded recently amid accusations of self-dealing and dysfunction, had been put in charge of the US Department of Agriculture. (Arguably, Kendi’s proposed ‘Department of Anti-racism’ would accomplish this exact goal.) Just imagine.

Reading about Lysenko today reveals clear parallels with our new moment of ideological institutional capture by ‘gender identity,’ social justice woo, and postmodern critical theory. “Scientific papers came to require extensive digressions on the significance of the topic at hand in terms of Marxism-Leninism,” William Dejong-Lambert wrote in The Cold War Politics of Genetic Research: An Introduction to the Lysenko Affair, published in 2012. “Scientists no longer criticized one another, they ‘unmasked’ and ‘exposed’ dangerous ideas.” Irascible, “Lysenko remained willfully ignorant of research outside of the Soviet Union, hated math and never passed a formal scientific examination.” In the context of Stalin’s Soviet state, though, “Lysenko’s ignorance and intolerance of dissent were assets.” When everything is political, leaving no room for anything but politics, ‘science’ is shaped by power, not evidence. It is possible to have no scientific background or education, say unscientific things such as ‘the science is settled’, and still have a serious image as a scientist — as long as you have the power to enforce respect.

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Lysenko’s power derived from his image as a ‘barefoot scientist,’ a part of the ‘peasant intelligentsia,’ but this image was not original to him. It was a familiar trope from Imperial Russia associated with Ivan Michurin, who was also uneducated and folksy and made the most of his outsider status. One approving colleague described Michurin as “so intimate with plants and has studied their life so much that one glance is enough, and he can already predict the qualities of a plant and its future fruit.” Measurements and record-keeping were elitist bougeois gatekeeping. Likewise, Lysenko judged results by eye alone. A contemporary report described him as an “extremely egotistical person, deeming himself to be the new Messiah of biological research.” He never published in the science press. His ‘theories’ were all based on unique examples, just like Michurin.

Lysenko’s conclusions derived from what would be called ‘lived experience’ or ‘other ways of knowing’ these days. “Michurin’s view was that plantsmanship was an art, incommunicable in abstractions or formulas,” Simon Ings writes in Stalin and the Scientists: A History of Triumph and Tragedy 1905-1953. Michurin produced dubious ‘hybrid plants’ through ‘vegetative blending’ and ‘mentoring.’ Some of the more impossible ones, such as a supposed cross between a melon and squash, “attracted especially negative attention” from horticulturists. His unlikely methods meant “there was no regularity in hereditary phenomena, and no coherent science to be had from studying them.” Michurin was making it up as he went along.

Opposition only hardened Michurin’s belief in his own theories. “When scientists conducted rigorous examinations of ‘mentors’ in Michurin’s nursery, their findings were angrily rebuked,” Dejong-Lambert writes. An impoverished aristocrat himself, “Michurin fumed that their performance was ‘slipshod’ and accused them of ‘undermining faith’ in what he had done.” Russia was newly-atheist, but still haunted by the ghosts of the old religion. Michurin was a guru demanding belief without evidence. His ‘scientific philosophy’ was in fact human moralism projected on plants, so the last thing he wanted was actual data.

Anthropomorphism formed the basis for Michurin’s understanding of the natural world, and he believed all living things were endowed with an intelligent ability to adapt in the struggle for existence. This infinite plasticity implied to Michurin a challenge not to wait on the kindness of nature, but to create new varieties even nature itself could not imagine. He dismissed scientists and academics who sought to understand problems to be answered by Mendel’s statistics, calling them “caste priests of jabberology.”

Michurin did not care for Lysenko. When he died in 1935, however, Michurin’s populist legend became “a bitter myth Lysenko would latch onto,” Dejong-Lambert writes. Lysenko owed no one, for he had grown from the earth itself. When a westerner encountered Lysenko in a cafeteria in 1968, years after his star had set, he was keen to reject any debt to anyone. Asked about Nikolai Vavilov, his former champion in the scientific academy who had died in prison, Lysenko insisted that he was a self-made man.

You think I am a part of the Soviet oppressive system. But I have always been an outsider. I came from a simple peasant family, and in my professional development I soon encountered the prejudices of the upper classes. Vavilov came from a wealthy family and knew many foreign languages. When I was a boy I worked barefoot in the fields and I never had the advantage of a proper education. Most of the prominent geneticists of the 1920s were like Vavilov. They did not want to make room for a simple peasant like me. I had to fight to be recognized. My knowledge came from working in the fields. Their knowledge came from books, and was often mistaken. And, once again, I am now an outsider. Why do you think I was sitting alone here at this table when you came up? No one will sit with me. All the other scientists have ostracized me. I sympathize with the Jewish refuseniks. They are scientists who have been ostracized by the Soviet establishment because they applied to emigrate to Israel, were turned down by the Soviet authorities, and now they have no jobs and no place to turn. They are alone like me.

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Michael’s X account is at this link.

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In 2019, James Talarico said that “prophetic voices like Jesus have helped me reckon with my own whiteness, my own masculinity, my own certainty, my own ego. It’s a never-ending process, and it’s a painful process.” Masculinity and whiteness are sins. White men have to feel pain for their sins. That’s what Talarico and the progressive Democratic Party want for white men: pain. Democrats want the white men of Texas to cry like Jesus and beg forgiveness for voting the wrong way, all these years.

Talarico also carries his bible upside-down, fingers to page edges. A symbolic choice, perhaps. As the rainbow-draped cross from the inside of his church shows, James Talarico holds beliefs that are bigger than the Bible and larger than Jesus. I say this having no dog in the sectarian fight. Rather, Talarico’s Christianity is a recognizable bricolage, a pastiche of beliefs in which the Bible and Jesus are but one element. I have learned to recognize them. They are common.

Today, there are six colors in the progress flag rainbow. Originally, there were eight, but the hot pink stripe was removed because the color was expensive. Bunting and hanging arrangements looked better with even-numbered stripes, too, so turquoise was removed to leave six colors. While the flag of sexual freedom was never the Seven Rays of a secret Rosicrucian brotherhood, it was from the beginning a nod to the ‘New Age’ of Carlos Castaneda, sex magic, yoga, and ‘vibes’. In the cross arrangement above, the twisted white and blue fabric stripes are the suffragette colors. Talarico’s Christity is postmodern. His Jesus is a queer feminist suffering for your sins, and he wants the gun-hugging white dudes to feel the pain they/them feel.

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In the latest example of the culture trending away from the woke era of intentionally divisive discussion, “multiple high-profile actors and jury members have avoided questions about domestic and international political crises” at the Berlin Film Festival this year, Deadline reports. “That despite the best efforts of journalists to engage actors and fil…

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You can find his books on Amazon at this link.

His X account is here.

Pedro Pascal is shooting a “subversive love story” called De Noche next month, according to Variety. “The story, which echoes classic noirs like ‘Chinatown,’ charts the passionate and unexpected love affair between a cop (Pascal) and a boarding school teacher (Ramirez) in 1930s Los Angeles, when the city is overtaken by cor…

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You can get the book from Amazon here.

My review of the book will be published at Genspect on Thursday.

Jo Bartosch’s X account is here.

Robert Jessel’s X account is here.

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The Generation Indoctrination podcast is here.

Brandon’s X account is here.

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In 2016, the NBA could cancel North Carolina for a ‘bathroom bill’. In 2026, transgender advocacy can barely make it to the men’s room. The decade of cultural and political ascendancy for ‘gender …

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This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thedistancemag.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thedistancemag.com/subscribe

This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit www.thedistancemag.com/subscribe