Authored by J.B. Shurk via American Thinker,
Democracy invites despotism. When understood as majority rule, democracy means that fifty-one of every hundred citizens can have their way with the other forty-nine.
"But I want to keep my possessions, weapons, and children." Too bad, the majority have decided to redistribute your property to those lazy bums over there, disarm you before you can do anything about it, and indoctrinate your children in public schools, so that they learn to resent you and love the State.
Democracy is dangerous without guardrails. Unless a society has a strong sense of moral virtue that fosters personal discipline, duty, and honor, base selfishness becomes the driving motivation behind all political action. Unless certain constitutional protections exist to safeguard each individual's inviolable rights, democratic majorities devour those rights whenever expedient.
This should surprise no-one. Political philosophers such as Hobbes and Locke described humans' pre-government "state of nature" as a chaotic, violent clash of self-interest. Adam Smith's "invisible hand" regards self-interest as the engine of free markets. Consequently, it is easy to understand why forms of democracy that are unshackled from both moral and constitutional restraints prompt a society to descend back into a state of nature in which humanity's worst impulses are again indulged.
When Western leaders speak adoringly of "our democracy," citizens should prepare to guard their freedoms. My goodness, there is nothing inherently virtuous about democracy. North Korea's Kim Jong Un runs the most repressive regime on the planet, but his country is known officially as the Democratic People's Republic of Korea! China's Xi Jinping is the general secretary of the oppressive Chinese Communist Party, but his nation remains officially the People's Republic of China! Dictatorships around the globe claim to govern in the name of the people.
One might think that the blurry line between democracy and despotism would make Western leaders wary of singing democracy's praises. Defenses of majoritarianism embrace the notion that the votes of a hundred people will lead to a more prudent outcome than we could reasonably expect from the decision-making of a single person. But that doesn't make any sense. Would you rather live in a kingdom with a benevolent king or in a democracy filled with rapists, thieves, and murderers? If there is a 50/50 chance that any single dictator is good or bad, would there not be a 50/50 chance that a majority of citizens are good or bad, too? If one communist would take everything you have, wouldn't fifty communists do the same thing? Democracy is a coin toss. It is the veneer of legitimacy that makes authoritarianism look shiny and sparkly. That hardly feels like something worth celebrating.
Democracy is just a process. It shouldn't be idolized for its own sake. It can lead to just or unjust outcomes depending upon the moral virtue, shared culture, and general wisdom of the voters. Aside from these cultural attributes of a society, there is nothing more essential to a nation's long-term peace and happiness than the recognition of and protections for inviolable, natural, God-given rights.
Freedom of speech, freedom of religion, freedom of association, the right to self-defense - these rights and other natural liberties do not come into existence because of majority rule. Our natural rights exist despite majority rule. As the Founding Fathers articulated in the Declaration of Independence, "We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty, and the pursuit of Happiness." We aren't equal because of democracy; we are equal despite any democratic vote that might claim otherwise. Our lives, personal liberties, and connections to God exist because of His will, not the government's.
The idea that rights and liberties exist separately from the promulgations of government forms the foundation of our constitutional system and, more generally, of human rights.
The U.S. Constitution spells out quite succinctly what powers each of the three branches of government - Legislative, Executive, and Judicial - shall have. From where do our three branches of government get these powers? The Preamble to the Constitution lays out the source of government power plainly: "We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice, insure domestic Tranquility, provide for the common defence, promote the general Welfare, and secure the Blessings of Liberty to ourselves and our Posterity, do ordain and establish this Constitution for the United States of America." In other words, the government's legitimacy comes directly from the people.
Every power that one of the three branches exercises is a power that arises from and is borrowed from the individual citizens of the United States. Any power not specifically delegated to the U.S. government remains with either the individual state governments or individual American citizens. This is profoundly important. The Constitution is not a document that empowers the federal government to do whatever it wants. It is a document that says, "You get to do only these discrete things. Everything else is off-limits!"
During the Constitutional Convention, there was significant debate among the Founding Fathers about the need for a Bill of Rights explicitly defending the inalienable liberties of American citizens. Since the text of the Constitution clearly limits the delegated powers of each branch of government, some Founders resisted the inclusion of a Bill of Rights because they feared that later generations might incorrectly interpret Americans' inviolable freedoms to include only those rights specifically listed. Other delegates feared that, without a Bill of Rights, later generations might incorrectly reimagine the Constitution's limited delegation of powers to include additional authorities that directly infringe upon Americans' personal rights. Both fears proved prescient.
In order to clearly state their intentions to maximize the size of Americans' personal liberty and to minimize the powers of the federal government, the Founding Fathers gave us the Ninth and Tenth Amendments as part of the Bill of Rights:
Ninth Amendment: "The enumeration in the Constitution, of certain rights, shall not be construed to deny or disparage others retained by the people."
Tenth Amendment: "The powers not delegated to the United States by the Constitution, nor prohibited by it to the States, are reserved to the States respectively, or to the people."
Taken together, these two amendments provide a redundancy within the U.S. Constitution that is meant to preserve human liberty. First, the text of the Constitution restricts the authority of the federal government to a small number of specifically delegated powers. Second, the Bill of Rights repeats the framers' intent to reserve all other powers for the people or their individual state governments.
With this understanding in mind, a reasonable person should ask: How is it possible that the federal government is now so large and powerful that it encroaches upon nearly every aspect of our private lives? How is it possible that tens of millions of Americans either work directly for government agencies or receive taxpayer dollars in some form? How is it possible that there are too many administrative agencies, committees, and bureaucratic groups for any one person to name? How is it possible that three federal branches with a small number of delegated authorities have been replaced with a growing number of government programs with seemingly unlimited authorities?
The answer to each of these questions is the same: The generations between the Founding Fathers and our own progressively traded freedom for democracy. In the name of the people, lawmakers, presidents, and judges ignored the plain text of the Constitution - including the Ninth and Tenth Amendments of the Bill of Rights - to steal our inalienable rights and liberties.
In order to reject democracy's despotism, the American people will have to demand their rights and liberties back.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.
Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 23:40The U.S. military is expanding routine health checks to include hormone-related testing, with new Pentagon rules requiring testosterone screening for a large portion of the force. The requirements apply to both active-duty personnel and reservists and took effect immediately, according to CBC.
The biggest change affects men beginning at age 30. They will now have testosterone levels checked through bloodwork as part of the military’s broader effort to identify health conditions that could interfere with physical performance, energy or readiness. Younger men will not automatically receive the same testing, although doctors can order it when symptoms raise concerns or a service member asks to be evaluated.
Female service members will be assessed under a separate protocol rather than receiving universal testosterone tests. Medical providers will look for symptoms such as persistent fatigue or changes in menstrual cycles that could signal inadequate energy intake, hormonal disruption or related health problems.
"Dolce and Gabbana...hello?"CBC writes that the Pentagon’s framework also gives military physicians direction on what to do when potential problems are discovered. That includes further evaluation and possible treatment rather than simply measuring hormone levels and leaving the results without follow-up.
Testosterone treatment for women is addressed as well, although in much narrower circumstances. The guidance allows doctors to consider off-label testosterone for certain postmenopausal women experiencing abnormally low sexual desire rather than recommending the hormone broadly.
The initiative follows a push by Secretary of War Pete Hegseth, who announced plans for expanded testosterone testing in July and has spoken favorably about the hormone. Pentagon officials are framing the program as another tool for maintaining a healthier and more capable fighting force.
Not everyone in the medical community is convinced. Some doctors have questioned whether routinely testing large numbers of otherwise healthy troops will produce meaningful improvements in military performance. They have also warned that finding borderline or naturally fluctuating hormone levels could encourage treatment that provides little benefit while carrying potential side effects.
The debate is unfolding as federal regulators separately examine testosterone therapy more broadly. The Food and Drug Administration is scheduled to bring together medical experts in mid-September to discuss the appropriate use of testosterone and the evidence surrounding its treatment applications.
Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 23:05Authored by Dr. Robert W. Malone via Malone.news,
Back in 2020, Pew Research Center surveyed more than 11,000 Americans. Political scientist Zach Goldberg subsequently examined the underlying data and broke the results down by age, sex, race, and political ideology.
What he found was rather remarkable.
Among white women ages 18 to 29 who identified as liberal, 56.3% reported that a doctor or other health-care provider had diagnosed them with a mental health condition.
Not 15%.
Not 25%.
Fifty-six percent.
For white moderate women of the same age, the number was 28.4%.
For white conservative women, 27.3%.
In other words, young white liberal women were more than twice as likely as their conservative counterparts to report having received a mental health diagnosis.
Now, correlation is not causation. Perhaps liberals are simply more willing to seek psychiatric care. Perhaps conservatives are less willing to admit that they have a problem. Perhaps political ideology attracts people with particular personality traits rather than creating those traits. All perfectly reasonable possibilities.
But here is where it gets interesting.
Five years later, the numbers have not exactly moved in a reassuring direction.
Gallup found that only 15% of American women ages 18-29 surveyed from 2020 through 2024 described their mental health as excellent. In 2010-2014, that number had been 48%.
That is not a small decline. That is a collapse.
And the ideological divide is still there.
The 2024 American Family Survey found that only 12% of liberal women ages 18-40 described themselves as "completely satisfied" with their lives.
Liberal women were also nearly three times as likely as conservative women to report feeling lonely several times a week or more: 29% versus 11%.
So perhaps endlessly telling young women that they live in an oppressive society, that the world is on the verge of climate catastrophe, that words are violence, that disagreement is dangerous, that our President is evil, that the patriarchy is lurking behind every corner, that Western civilization is fundamentally corrupt, and that their personal unhappiness is caused by vast structural forces over which they have virtually no control is not actually a recipe for human flourishing.
Who could have guessed?
There is an important caveat. A 2025 study found that some of the apparent liberal-conservative mental-health divide may reflect differences in how people think and talk about "mental health." When researchers simply asked people about their mood, rather than their mental health, much of the ideological difference disappeared.
Fair enough.
But that doesn't explain away the extraordinary collapse in reported well-being among young women generally, nor does it make the life-satisfaction and loneliness data disappear. Maybe the question isn't whether liberalism causes mental illness.
Maybe the more interesting question is whether a culture built around grievance, victimhood, fear and powerlessness is particularly attractive to unhappy people, makes unhappy people unhappier, or both. That seems like a question worth asking. Even if asking it makes someone very, very upset.
There is, however, an uncomfortable counterpoint to all this discussion of female unhappiness and mental illness. Men are far more likely to actually die by suicide. In the United States, the male suicide rate is nearly four times the female rate, and men account for roughly four out of every five suicide deaths. The disparity exists globally as well. Perhaps that exposes a deeper truth about the modern cult of victimhood. We have created a culture extraordinarily skilled at teaching certain groups to name every grievance, diagnose every distress, identify every oppressor and demand that society recognize their pain, while other forms of suffering remain remarkably easy to ignore. Young women may be reporting extraordinary levels of anxiety, depression and psychiatric diagnosis, but men are quietly killing themselves at vastly higher rates.
That does not diminish women's suffering. It suggests that our entire framework for understanding suffering may be badly distorted. A society obsessed with determining who is the victim and who is the oppressor can become remarkably blind to the human being who doesn't fit the approved narrative, particularly when that human being is male.
There is another possibility here that deserves far more attention: the diagnosis itself has become part of the epidemic. When more than half of young women in a political demographic report having been diagnosed with a mental health condition, the appropriate response is not simply to declare that half the population is mentally ill. It is to ask what the hell the health-care system is doing. Psychiatry has steadily expanded the boundaries of pathology, medicalizing distress, grief, anxiety, loneliness, adolescent turmoil, and ordinary difficulty as diagnosable disease. A system that can convert normal human suffering into a billing code, a prescription, and a lifelong medical identity should not be treated as a neutral observer of this crisis. At some point, an exploding diagnosis rate stops being proof of exploding disease and starts becoming evidence that the diagnostic machinery itself may be broken.
Consider what we are now being asked to accept as normal. The 2026 Lancet Global Burden of Disease study estimates that 1.17 billion human beings, roughly one person in seven on Earth, are living with a mental disorder, and mental disorders now account for 17.3 percent of all years lived with disability worldwide, making them the single largest source of nonfatal disability. Women carry an even greater burden than men, with the female age-standardized mental-disorder burden about 18 percent higher. This is insane, not because hundreds of millions of people do not genuinely suffer from serious psychiatric illness, but because at some point a civilization has to ask what these numbers actually mean. Did humanity suddenly become catastrophically mentally ill, or have we built a medical system that increasingly converts sadness, fear, loneliness, grief, adolescent turmoil and difficulty coping with life into psychiatric pathology? When one in seven people on the planet fits into the modeled category of mental disorder, the diagnostic framework itself deserves scrutiny. A medical system cannot simply keep expanding the definition of sickness and then point to the resulting mountain of sickness as proof that it was right.
Toxic FeminismThere was a feminism that told women they should have choices. Then there is the more modern version of feminism that increasingly seems to tell women which choices an enlightened woman is supposed to make. Career is achievement. Marriage is dependence. Motherhood is unpaid labor. Men are potential oppressors. Traditional families are suspect. Finances should always be kept separate, plan for a divorce, financial independence is a must. Independence is liberation, and needing another human being is somehow weakness. Delay marriage. Delay children. Establish the career. Find yourself. Become independent. Never settle. Put yourself first.
There is just one rather awkward problem with this prescription for female happiness: human beings are profoundly social animals, and the scientific literature keeps rediscovering the importance of precisely the relationships that modern culture has spent decades teaching women not to need.
Femininity is RealThere is also an uncomfortable biological reality that modern ideology would prefer to treat as an inconvenience: women are not simply smaller men with different reproductive organs. Progesterone is central to female reproduction, but its effects extend into the brain and behavior. Human research has associated higher progesterone with affiliation, social bonding, sensitivity to relationships and even greater willingness to sacrifice for another person.
Estrogen, particularly estradiol, does far more than regulate reproduction. It acts throughout the female brain, interacting with oxytocin and other neuroendocrine systems involved in mood, sexuality, emotional processing, social attachment, and stress. Together with progesterone and oxytocin, estrogen contributes to the biological systems underlying bonding, maternal behavior, and caregiving. And that capacity for nurturing does not suddenly switch off when there is no baby in the room.
Women show stronger tendencies toward caregiving, empathy, and relational investment, although there is enormous individual variation. Biology is not destiny, but neither is it imaginary. To dismiss these deeply rooted female tendencies as merely products of the patriarchy, or to teach women that caring for and depending upon others is somehow incompatible with independence, comes at a real psychological cost, and we are witnessing this worldwide. A feminism that requires women to deny important parts of their own biology is a strange definition of female liberation.
The female impulse toward attachment, relationship and nurturing cannot simply be dismissed as a patriarchal social construct. There is biology underneath it. A culture that tells women that caring for others is servitude, that motherhood is an impediment to achievement, and that putting another human being ahead of oneself represents oppression may therefore be fighting something considerably older than the patriarchy. It may be fighting female biology itself.
Psychology even has a validated instrument called the Ambivalence Toward Men Inventory, developed specifically to measure hostile prejudices and stereotypes about men. And the hostility is measurable. In a subsequent study of 488 college students, women scored significantly higher than men on the instrument's Hostility Toward Men scale, 2.76 versus 2.25 on a 0-to-5 scale.
How a broader culture came to normalize the sweeping negative generalizations about men, male sexuality, male power and masculinity that would immediately be recognized as prejudice if the sexes were reversed is an interesting question. Hostility between the sexes is not liberation. It poisons precisely the trust, affection and intimacy upon which successful relationships depend.
The evidence surrounding work, family and mental health should make us reconsider what women have been sold as liberation. In one nationally representative study of 4,714 working women, high work-family conflict was associated with 2.29 times the odds of depressive symptoms, with some of the strongest associations occurring among younger, highly educated, higher-income and never-married women. Studies of female physicians and longitudinal studies of working women tell much the same story: when professional life and family life are placed into sustained conflict, mental health suffers.
The mistake was never telling women that they could become physicians, scientists, executives, farmers, entrepreneurs or anything else they were capable of becoming. Of course they could, and they should have been free to do so.
The mistake was turning independence itself into the objective, as though dependence upon people who love us were some sort of character defect. A husband and wife depend upon one another. Children depend upon parents. Parents eventually depend upon their children. Families are elaborate networks of mutual obligation. That isn't oppression. It is much of what gives human life meaning.
And perhaps most poisonous of all is the idea that relations between men and women should be understood primarily as a contest for power. Teach a generation of women to approach half of humanity with suspicion, to interpret ordinary disagreement through the language of oppression, and to view compromise as surrender, and then act surprised when relationships become difficult. Whatever one chooses to call that worldview, it is a miserable foundation upon which to build intimacy.
Girls do not generally sit through a classroom lesson entitled Marriage Is Bad. The message is subtler than that. From school through college, the language surrounding female success increasingly emphasizes independence, autonomy, empowerment, career, individual rights and self-realization. What is striking is what receives far less emphasis: interdependence, marriage, sacrifice, obligation, motherhood, building a household, choosing a good husband and creating a stable family.
Dependence itself has acquired an almost pathological meaning, as though needing a husband, wife, children or extended family represents personal failure rather than the normal condition of human beings. A girl is repeatedly asked what career she wants when she grows up. How often is she asked what kind of marriage she hopes to build, what kind of mother she hopes to become, or what sacrifices a lasting relationship will require? The lesson does not have to be written on the blackboard to be learned: success is something you achieve individually; family is something you fit around it later, and you would be stupid not to be financially independent before having children, cause men generally aren't to be trusted to hang around long enough to raise a family.
There is an enormous difference between telling a woman you do not have to marry or have children and telling her, explicitly or implicitly, that marriage and motherhood represent lesser ambitions than professional status. Biology also imposes a deadline that corporate advancement does not. A promotion can arrive at 42. A first child may not. Women deserve to know that when they are 22, not discover it when they are 39.
In our lives, we know two women in their thirties who are in the process of freezing their eggs; evidently, they believe that when they are forty or fifty, they will be in a better position to have a child? And we have another single friend, who at fifty, has decided she has aged out of ever being a mother. All of these women are college-educated professionals, never married, and are coming to terms with their biological clocks running out.
A culture that encourages women to postpone permanent relationships, prioritize professional status, regard dependence as weakness, and treat men principally as a source of danger or oppression should at least be willing to examine the results. If the promised liberation ends with unprecedented numbers of young women anxious, depressed, medicated, lonely and unable to form the families they later discover they wanted, declaring the experiment an unquestionable success is not feminism.
It is marketing.
The Big LieAnd then there is the part nobody is supposed to mention: this arrangement is extraordinarily good for industry. The intact family is an economic institution as well as a social one. Husbands and wives share labor. Grandparents care for grandchildren. Families cook meals, repair things, care for the sick and elderly, grow food, teach children, share houses, lend money, pass down skills and provide an enormous amount of economic activity that never appears on a corporate balance sheet. Break those bonds apart and suddenly nearly everything has to be purchased. Two adults maintaining two households need two rents or mortgages, two sets of utilities, two kitchens and twice the household goods.
Put both parents into full-time employment and families purchase more childcare, prepared food, transportation and other substitutes for work once performed within the home. Send rural children hundreds of miles away to college and then into metropolitan corporate employment, and another generation is separated from grandparents, land, community, and the informal economy of extended family. None of this requires a conspiracy. It requires only incentives. And corporations benefit enormously from this arrangement.
Corporations benefit when people become workers first, consumers second, and family members somewhere farther down the list. The Big Lie was convincing women (and men) that exchanging dependence upon people who loved them for dependence upon employers, banks, universities, childcare companies, and the consumer economy was somehow independence. The destruction of family and community did not make people independent. It merely changed whom they depended upon, and unlike a family, the corporation collected the dividends.
The Result is "Mental Illness"Going back to those numbers at the beginning of this essay, perhaps we have been asking the wrong question. When 56.3 percent of young white liberal women report having been diagnosed with a mental health condition, the immediate assumption is that something must be terribly wrong with these women. Maybe instead, something is terribly wrong with the culture they have been raised in.
For decades, young people, and young women in particular, have been sold a remarkably destructive definition of success. Leave home. Go deeply into debt for college. Build the career. Delay marriage. Delay children. Treat dependence upon another person as weakness. Treat compromise as surrender. Regard traditional institutions with suspicion. Learn to identify grievances. Put yourself first. And when the loneliness, anxiety, purposelessness and unhappiness arrive, there is an enormous medical industry waiting to provide the diagnosis and, frequently, the prescription.
Then we marvel at the epidemic of mental illness.
Perhaps a significant portion of what we are calling a mental-health crisis is actually a crisis of meaning, belonging and human connection. A pill cannot provide a husband or wife. Therapy cannot manufacture grandchildren around the Thanksgiving table. A diagnosis cannot replace friendship, faith, family, community, useful work, children who need you, parents who depend upon you, or the knowledge that one's life matters to people other than oneself. Medicine can treat disease. It is considerably less capable of treating a culture that has systematically stripped away many of the institutions that once gave ordinary people purpose.
And men have hardly escaped this experiment. While women report extraordinary levels of anxiety, depression and psychiatric diagnosis, men are killing themselves at vastly higher rates. That should be the flashing red warning light. The ideology of victimhood may teach women to describe their suffering endlessly while feminist teachings overlook the suffering of those assigned the role of "oppressor."
None of this means returning women to some imaginary 1950s existence or denying anyone education, independence or a career. It means admitting something considerably more radical in 2026: human beings need one another. Men need women. Women need men. Children need parents. Parents need children. Families need communities, and communities need people who remain invested in them. Independence was never the highest human good.
That may be the real Big Lie. We were told that liberation meant needing fewer people, carrying fewer obligations and being free to put ourselves first.
Instead, we became more dependent upon employers, corporations, universities, government programs, therapists, pharmaceutical companies and the marketplace to provide things that families and communities once provided for one another.
And now 1.17 billion people are estimated to be living with a mental disorder.
Perhaps the strangest response imaginable is to look at that number and conclude that the problem is simply that humanity needs more mental-health treatment.
Maybe people need more life.
More family. More marriage. More children. More friendship. More community. More responsibility. More people depending upon them, and more people upon whom they can depend.
That isn't oppression.
It is called being human.
We publish a variety of perspectives. Nothing written here is to be construed as representing the views of ZeroHedge.
Tyler Durden Sun, 09/06/2026 - 22:30