Mick Hartley

Ben Appel grew up in a cult in Baltimore, the Christian Lamb of God. It was particularly uncomfortable for a somewhat effeminate boy. Later, after realising he was gay, he enrolled at Columbia University to study writing. He found the same problem, in a different guise.

Julie Bindel talks to him, in the Telegraph:

But later, in the “Cult of the Progressives”, he encountered a new form of gender orthodoxy. Gender-nonconforming individuals were now assumed to be trapped in the wrong body. “We now chemically castrate boys displaying femininity,” he says….

In the three-and-a-half years he spent there, Appel saw fellow students becoming indoctrinated with pseudoscientific, anti-Western dogma sold to them as progressiveness. He began to see that what was happening was cult-like and “in many ways worse than Lamb of God”.

Any slight digression from the “trans women are women”, “death to the West” type politics was severely punished, he says. “Intelligent young people bent over backwards to be anti-racist, against imperialism and even embracing Islamic jihadists in the process.”

Social justice warriordom morphed into the cult of queer, and punishments meted out for failure to adhere to the creed were severe, involving bullying and ostracisation.

He had been indoctrinated in the view that sees white cis men (gays included) as the enemy. For these new puritans, the airing of grievances was the preferred blood sport, and there was an obsession with identifying the oppressor, rather than the victim.

He had the experience to recognise that he was dealing with a cult. Unlike the other poor saps.

Now a full-time writer, and non-aligned politically, Appel says: “You have to keep in mind that arguing with these people is like trying to argue with a biblical literalist, in that they believe that holding certain views makes them a good person and protects them from going to hell.

“Now I can say, there’s no third gamete, men should not be in women’s prisons, children are never in the wrong body, and not all white people are racist. I will be saying this even if they bring back the guillotine, right before the blade falls.”