Desmond is Disgusting

Well, I probably should have said “the Desmond phenomenon (of which, more anon) is disgusting,” but I succumbed to the clickbait impulse.

The New York Times had a story on the explosion of child pornography — argubly doubling in a single year, 2017-18. I’m told it’s pretty horrific. I’m glad someone else read it (I saw it but declined to read it) and reacted in part as I would have:

Read the Times story, and tell me that the sexualization of children by our media and other elites is harmless. Here is Good Morning, America with a story celebrating Desmond Is Amazing, the child drag queen. These stories are everywhere …

Read the Times story and think hard about Drag Queen Story Hour, where little children are explicitly encouraged to think of themselves as sexual beings, and as sexually fluid …

Look: as a society, we are grooming children to be sexually abused, and we are grooming teenagers and adults to be sexual abusers.

More broadly, this makes me wonder if humanity can survive the Internet. I’m serious. When our most disgusting, savage, darkest fantasies can be indulged with a few clicks, what hope is there for us? The late media theorist Neil Postman said that when children can have instant access to all the “secrets” of adulthood, childhood (as a social construct) ends. He wrote that in the early 1990s, during the cable TV era. Had he lived to see the Internet, and the hardcore porn available to children there, Postman would have despaired unto death.

This demon is not going to be cast out voluntarily. It’s going to take a massive ramping-up of the state to deal with it effectively. If we don’t do it, though, this is going to destroy us.

In the meantime: parents, when I tell you not to give your children smartphones, this is why!

(Rod Dreher, second hyperlink added). Valorizing Desmond is Amazing pisses me off even more than Drag Queen Story Hour, and the inability of our elites to connect such things with the child porn epidemic is wilfull blindness.