Speaker 1: What's going on? Thank you so much for listening to
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smartphone or tablet, And again, thank you so much for
your support. How does one go about breaking somebody out
of a delusion? How do you do that? I would submit? Now,
I'm not a delusion breaking expert. I'm not a psychologist
or a psychiatrist. I didn't even stay overnight at a
specific hotel. I'm just saying that it seems to me
that the way you help break somebody's delusion is by
telling them the truth. And we actually have historical examples
of delusions being broken in exactly this way. I will
get to that, but in a completely possibly related story,
there is a piece by Eric Kaufman at unheard dot com.
Speaker 2: That documents some new polling data.
Speaker 1: And analyzes it and finds that since twenty twenty three,
there has been a sharp decline among gen Z's Generation Z,
there has been a sharp decline in people identifying as
transgender and as non binary, which I've never actually understood
what that is and why it's included in the rainbow
of colors. Because the non binary, like just the name
of it, gives away the game that there are only
two genders.
Speaker 2: I mean, like, wouldn't you be called like.
Speaker 1: Non omninary or something, or you would have to have
a different name, because non binary means that there is
binary and you are not binary, which, of course then
self defeats the entire name.
Speaker 2: It's just like all kinds of relativism, right, the.
Speaker 1: Moral relativism, for example, that there's no universal truth, no
absolute truth, except the very animating statement that defines what
relativism is is in fact an absolute right. If your
philosophy is that there is no absolute truth, that is
an absolute statement, and it is then self defeating. Your
entire philosophy goes out the window, because you're defining it
by the thing that you say doesn't exist anyway. The
Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression FIRE, or as I
call it FIRE, conducted a large annual survey of US
undergraduates pulled over sixty thousand students in twenty twenty five,
and according to Kaufman's analysis of the raw data, it
shows that in that year just three point six percent
of respondents identified as a gender other than male or
female three point six percent, okay. By comparison, that figure
was five point two percent in twenty twenty four. Okay,
So it went from five point two down to three
point six in just one year. And if you go
back to the two years prior, if you're looking at
twenty twenty three and then twenty twenty two, the number
of people that are identifying, or the percentage that are
identifying as a gender other than male or female, it
was up almost at seven percent. Okay, So it goes
from six point eight percent to five point two, then
to three point six. Why is this declining? What could
be the cause? The share of trans identified students has
effectively been cut in half in just two years, and
the trend is especially pronounced at quote unquote elite institutions.
What's going on? Interestingly, when the trans and queer trends
were at their peak, freshmen were more likely to be
non conforming in their gender and sexuality than seniors were. Again,
these are college students, right, so at the peak seems
like it was being driven by the incoming freshmen. Now
that BTQ, which is bisexual, trans, queer or questioning, so
I would think that would be BTQQ or BTQQ squared
BTQ squared anyway, now that this identification is in decline,
they're seeing the reverse is true. Younger students are less
BTQ than the older students in their colleges, which makes
sense if you think about it, right, when you've got
freshmen coming in and they are more likely to be
identifying in these quote non conforming ways, and then as
they proceed through their college career over the last four years,
you see now the seniors are over non conforming, right,
They've got higher rates of non conforming behavior and identification.
And so those are the freshmen they've just moved through
the system. But what you would expect to see, if
it was dare I say something real, you would have
seen these numbers continuing to go up or at least
to plateau. You would expect it to at some point
level out right, But it's not. It went back down.
And so now you have incoming freshmen that are not
identifying in nearly the numbers as their senior cohorts. So
why Kaufman says that it's tempting to speculate about the
reasons behind the rise and fall of trans and queer
identities mental illness. People may point to mental illness, right, Okay,
well he takes a look at that. But that has
fallen among teens since twenty twenty one twenty twenty two,
which makes sense. That's probably pandemic related, right, you had
higher rates of mental illness and such in this cohort
that was coming up during the lockdowns and the masking
and the paranoid hysteria. But also, this doesn't really make
sense either, he says, because the drop in mental health
issues encompassed every social group, including trans and queer youth. Right,
so all populations are seeing a decline in the mental
illness categories mental health issues category, So that doesn't really
explain it. What about online behavior? Okay, apparently no change
though in the online behavior of young Americans, So this
does not seem to be what's driving the retreat from
alternative gender and sexual identity either. Okay, what about a
shift towards more of an anti woke posture, right, or
a vibe shift as the kids would say, Well, Fire
and other data show little change in students' political ideology
or party identification over the past five years. Woke attitudes
such as support for shouting down speakers, punishing those perceived
as hostile to transgenderism or Black Lives Matter that has
not receded much since twenty twenty either. Okay, so that
doesn't really explain it. Okay, Oh, how about this religion?
Right religion now? Despite hints of a youth religious revival,
the fire survey data shows no major drop in the
share of non religious students, who still make up nearly
half of the sample in recent years. Woke progressives and
secular students are much more likely to identify as trans, bisexual,
or queer than conservative or religious people. So that doesn't
really explain the decline. What is going on here?
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dot Com got a message on Twitter from Russ who says,
regarding the stupid non binary thing, he says, my college
son says, it's largely two things. This is this is
the explanation from a certified college kid, one of two things.
One an easy way to be special in the current
environment without having to really do anything. You just claim
to be non binary, and people are.
Speaker 2: Like, oh my gosh, that's I really, you know, it's funny.
Speaker 1: I had a similar kind of experience when I was
in college and I was exploring faith and religions and
that sort of thing philosophy, and for a while there
I would identify myself as a dist because I wasn't sure,
you know, and uh, I remember it like people.
Speaker 2: Are like, oh hmm, yes, They're like, oh, that's so
enlightened and such.
Speaker 1: You know, that was the reaction I would generally get.
And then after the exploration led me to back to Christianity,
people were amazed how stupid I became all of a sudden.
It was pretty instructive, you know, Uh, Deist, Wow, you're smart.
Christian Wow, you got stupid all of a sudden. Yeah,
just kind of probably along the same lines as this.
But no, you also, I mean, you get you get points,
you get credibility, you get cachet among the among your
peer group when you identify as this special thing as
non binary.
Speaker 2: So that tracks. That makes sense.
Speaker 1: The other explanation he says is some people have been
raised with extreme caricatures of male and female roles. So
if you're not on either extreme, like an alpha male
or a demure female, well then you must be non binary. Yeah,
like this is part of the problem. We've we've taken
essentially personality, right, people's personality. People like maybe you're not this,
you know, alpha dominant dude, you know, and so therefore,
well I must be non binary because I'm not that. No,
that you just have a different personality and that's fine.
It's like being a tomboy as a girl. That doesn't
make you a boy. It's your personality and it's fine anyway.
That's that seems pretty reasonable. So going back to this
Eric Kaufman piece at unheard dot com, he's analyzing the
polling data from uh FIRE, which is the Foundation for
Individual Rights and express And they've been doing these surveys
on college CAMPI for years and the latest study they
did had sixty thousand students, and they have been tracking
a decline in self identification as trans and non binary
non conforming BTQ, so bisexual, transgender, and queer slash questioning
or whatever. And so why have these numbers now started
dropping for like the last three years.
Speaker 2: Why are they on the decline?
Speaker 1: And he runs through some of these potential explanations, but
none of them really explain. You can't really it because
they don't track together. He says, trans and queer identification
have declined among young Americans, even as levels of wokeness
and irreligion have not. For young people, gender and sexual
identity are now independent fashions that rise and fall separately
from other cultural and political currents. Yes, it's a discreete characteristic.
Whether trands and queer identities will drop to the levels
we saw back in twenty ten, that's still an open question, right,
we shall see. But the fact that both have declined
sharply in just two years is a startling and unanticipated
post progressive development that the education and media establishments will
be reluctant to acknowledge.
Speaker 2: All Right, So I'm just going to throw this out there.
Speaker 1: I'm just spitballing here, but I would submit that what
explains the drop is actually what I have been saying,
that this is a social contagion, and what we are
seeing now is an indication that the fever is breaking.
I think that explained, and it just so happens to
perfectly align with what I was saying for the last
you know, five years, So it makes me seem like
I know what I was talking about. So it does
fit quite nicely in my resume. So I recognize that
bias that I have, But when I read that, and
he doesn't say social contagion. He does not take up
that as a potential explanation. But to me, that is
the explanation. It makes perfect sense. At some point the
fever would break, and it has. That's what it seems like.
The fever has broken. And why has it broken? I
would submit it is due to the backlash. It is
due to parents, professionals, more and more people saying, you
know what, No, this isn't true. It's just man or woman,
And more and more people are now are speaking this
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Speaker 2: Here's a message from John it's a peat male.
Speaker 1: Also, the new administration is not fawning all over them
and given them special privileges, and in fact are saying
you get nothing. If you are a male dressed as
a female, you still compete against males. The other interesting
thing that shows it more of a environmental and not
biological is Hollywood having a trans kid. It's like the
latest accessory. They all need to have one. What are
the odds that less than one percent of the public
is transsexual, yet probably thirty percent of the Hollywood actors
have a trans kid. Megan Fox has three, and she's
at one hundred percent, well above the natural average. Yeah,
who is it, Cynthia and Nixon? You know who that is?
Of course you don't. She was one of the actors
in uh Sex and the City, the orange haired one,
the ginga and she at one point she was like
making some kind of half hearted run or maybe it
was just a threat to run for mayor of New
York City. And I remember like she was talking at
some rally or something, well maybe like screaming more than talking,
but she was saying, how you know, like one of
her kids's trans, her kid's best friend is trans. Some
other friends they have is trands. Like all these people
that are around her that are trands. And it's like
just the the statistical probability that you would have that
many people like Megan Fox has three trans kids like that,
that is, that's statistically impossible. That's why I say this
is a social contagion. There's also a little bit of
the Munchhausens by proxy thing going on here with parents
transing kids and such. In fact, here, let me play
this clip. This is Helen Joyce. I actually played this
clip several years ago. She made these comments on a
podcast hosted by Peter Bogosian. Peter Bogosian is academic guy
and one of the three co authors of the Grievance Studies,
along with Helen Pluckrose and James lindsay, they submitted a
bunch of fake woke papers studies quote unquote to these
various journals that are supposed to be you know, like
the expert class that peer reviews stuff, and like highly
credentialed journals in the fields of whatever, I mean, these
soft sciences and such. And they wrote these fake papers
and submitted them and got like almost half of the
dozen that they submitted actually published. And they did it
to prove that there is no actual scientific rigor at
the publications or that's propping up these theories. As long
as you say the right things, you get published, and
then once you're published, then other people cite your work
as scaffolding to support your quote research. At one point,
I want to say, they had translated mind komf Hitler's autobiography.
They translated that and they swapped out word they swapped
out like Jews for various other people, and they submitted
it for publication like that's what they were doing. They
talked about like dogs in a dog park being racist
against black dogs because they wouldn't hump the black dogs
or something like that. I mean, just they made up
just absurd studies and got them published. So Peter Bagosian
one of those academics, and he's interviewing Helen Joyce. She
is a writer and author and became this women's rights
activist or advocate in the UK. She's Irish and she
said for this interview with him, And again this was
several years ago, and so this clip is now making
the rounds and it is especially relevant now.
Speaker 4: There's a lot of people who can't move on on this,
and because that's the people who transition their own children.
So those people are going to be like, you know,
the Japanese soldiers who were on Pacific islands and didn't
know the war was over, They've got to fight forever.
That This is why there's another reason why this is
the worst, worst, worst social contagion that we'll ever have experienced.
A lot of people have done the worst thing that
you could do, which is to harm their children irrevocably.
Because of it, those people will have to believe that
they did the right thing for the rest of their lives,
for their own sanity and for their own self respect.
So they'll still be fighting. And each one of those
people destroys entire organizations and entire friendship groups. And now
you can't talk truth in front of that party, and
you know you can't, because what you're saying is you,
as a parent, have done a truly human rights abuse
of awful thing to your child that cannot be fixed.
There are specific individuals who are really actively against women's
rights here, and it's not known why they are, but
I happen to know through the back channels, so that
it's because they've trans their child. And so those people
will do anything for the entire rest of their lives
to destroy me and people like me, because people like
me are a standing reproach to them. I don't want
to be I'm not talking directly to them. I don't
spend my time bitching about them. But the fact is
that just simply by saying we will never accept natal
males and women's spaces. Well, it's their son that we're
talking about, and they've told their son that he can
get himself sterilized and destroy his sexual function and women
will accept him as a woman. And if we don't,
there's no way back for them and their child. They've
sold their child a bill of goods that they can't
deliver on. And I'm the one who has to be
bullied to try to force me to deliberalness. So those
people are going to meet the people who will keep
this bloody movement going, I'm sorry to say, because they've
everything to lose.
Speaker 1: Yeah, she was right back then, She is right right now.
The survey data shows that this social contagion appears to
be breaking, and there are going to be a lot
of people that are not going to be able to
admit what they have participated in. Remember when we had
Bill O'Reilly on the program a couple of months ago,
maybe a year ago, talking about the Salem witch trials.
I think the book was called Killing the Witches or something,
and same thing. It was the same thing. You had
this reward system inside of that society for these young,
predominantly young girls, you know, preteens, teenagers that would get
all sorts of attention, and then their peer group would
all act out together that they were being possessed, they
were being taken hold of by some witch. They would
make these accusations, and then people were put to death,
put to death, and then it finally broke, that contagion
finally broke. In fact, history is replete with examples of this.
Have you ever heard of the glass delusion? Happened about
four hundred years ago. The glass delusion people thought they
were made of glass. In the Middle Ages, people thought
that they were made of glass, which was a pretty
new technology at the time, and it particularly afflicted the nobles,
the elites. So when I was a kid, my grandpa
died with Alzheimer's, and before he died, my mom and
my dad took care of him as he got worse.
Forty years ago, there were no treatments and not much
support for caregivers and family. But things are different today
because of the work of so many people, including the
Alzheimer's Association of Western Carolina. It's a great organization with
awesome people with huge hearts. I've been a supporter for
twenty five years This cause means a lot to me.
I participate in the annual Walk to end Alzheimer's and
I'm leading a Charlotte team again this year and it's
called once again Pete's Pack. You can sign up and
you can join the team and walk with us. It's
on October eighteenth, that truest field. Sign up at alz
dot org slash Walk and then you can search for
my team name Pete's Pack. There's also a link at
thepetepod dot com. There's also a link in the description
of this podcast. Also, I'll be am seeing the Gastonia
Walk on October eleventh, and so you can make a
team and join that one too, or make a donation
and help me hit my goal of five thousand dollars.
If you do, I really appreciate it. There are a
bunch of other walks all over the Carolinas. You can
go to alz dot org slaw lash Walk for all
the dates and locations. We're closer than ever to stopping Alzheimer's.
Can you help us get there? Will you walk with me?
For a different future, for families, for more time for treatments.
Speaker 2: This is why we walk.
Speaker 1: This is from the Hellion who says social contagion with
suicidal empathy is an awful combination.
Speaker 2: Yeah, people just they.
Speaker 1: Just supported, they just affirmed right, and what people needed
to hear was truth. John from New Jersey says, fads
come and go. This fad is passing that and eventually
logic sets in and then a random seven oh four
number says it can be explained easy it was. It
is a fad, right, well, that I mean, a social contagion.
You can call it a fad if you want, but
like it means, you know, it means a certain thing.
It's like an irrational I mean, because a fad can
be something that has a rational basis why people start
doing something. An irrational fad, I guess, is more social contagion, right,
It's an irrational belief in something. In this case, it
is delusion, the belief in a thing that is not true.
And in that regard, it's very similar to the glass delusion,
which was a disorder that popped up in the fifteenth
century or no, yeah, well six no, seventeenth century, late
sixteenth early century, seventeenth century in the Middle Ages in Europe.
In fact, Princess Alexandra Amili and King Charles the sixth
both had it, and it's in popular plays from the time,
it's in literature over the centuries. What exactly was the
cause of this peculiar manifestation of mental illness. This is
at history dot Com at the time attributed it to
the now discredited diagnosis of melancholy, a kind of noble depression,
not like noble as in rich people right. Aristocracy is
often linked to the powerful, the wealthy, the geniuses. In
the case of the royals, contemporary psychologists speculate that believing
one was glass could have been a way of expressing
how vulnerable and fragile and exposed they felt in their
public positions. It was a way of expressing humanity, sensitivity,
and perhaps a desire to be left alone. So this
was one of the things people who thought they were
glass they would not allow you to come near them
for fear that you would literally break them. At the time, glass,
particularly clear glass, was a precious new commodity. It was
mostly found in royal palaces, churches, and government buildings. According
to Professor Edward Shorter, a historian of psychiatry at the
University of Toronto, fixations with innovative materials have been reported
throughout history. Before the glass delusion, there were people who
believed that their bodies were composed of earthenware, and during
the nineteenth century people started to believe that they were
made of the dominant construction material of that day, concrete.
Later on industrial Revolution, I would point out there were
people that thought they were machines, that they were these
big industrial machines, that they had been constructed somehow. Our
modern day delusions tend to involve technology. Sufferers may believe
the government has planted a microchip in their brain, or
that a computer is constantly monitoring. Well, that actually is true,
there is, yeah, So how do you break the delusion?
You break it with truth. There was one report at
the time, again four hundred years ago, that a doctor
beat one of his patients, just started wailing on him
because the guy thought that he was made of glass.
And to prove to the guy that he was not
made of glass, the doctor just beat him. See, you're
not broken. You would have been broken if you were glass.
And it seems to have solved the problem.
Speaker 2: All right. Let me go over and talk with John. Hello, John,
welcome to the show.
Speaker 3: Yes, sir, test your geniosity here do you remember, mid
to late eighties. I just moved here and there was
the daycare accusations against a particular owner of all the
just wild, crazy abuses of the kids, and it hit
several daycares here and it was all over.
Speaker 2: That was all over.
Speaker 1: There were a lot of them down in Florida. That
was a Yeah, that was the That was a panic.
It was tied into the Satanic panic as well of
the time, where every people thought there were Satanists, you know,
holding secret Satan rituals and such, you know, after hours
and all these businesses.
Speaker 3: Sure, how many innocents daycare owners went to prison?
Speaker 2: Yeah, no, there were, there were a few.
Speaker 1: There's I've seen a couple of documentaries over the years
about that panic as well.
Speaker 3: Yeah, I mean it is a invasion.
Speaker 2: I guess.
Speaker 1: So, yeah, I mean they call it a panic, so yeah,
I mean it could be. I mean, I think there's
probably an element of the panic because people weren't saying, like,
I'm a Satanist. You know, they're not saying I'm a
daycare abuser, right, they were accusing everybody else of being
that thing. They weren't. They didn't actually believe that they
were the thing. So I guess maybe that's a minor
difference in the in the application of the label, but yeah,
I mean it's it's of a similar kind.
Speaker 3: He's proven your geniosity.
Speaker 2: Well, thank you sir, Thank you. John. No, it's a
good example, same sort of dynamic.
Speaker 1: All right, that'll do it for this episode.
Speaker 2: Thank you so much for listening.
Speaker 1: I could not do the show without your support and
the support of the businesses that advertise on the podcast,
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patron at my Patreon page or go to dpetecleanershow dot com. Again,
thank you so much for listening, and don't break anything
while I'm gone.