Look at this story that emerged this week, out of the Houston Galleria, one of the poshest malls in America. This did not happen in a vacuum. It cannot be fully ascribed to random pedophile mall workers. And, not only that, it was discovered by Australia’s Centre to Counter Child Exploitation, which discovered videos of mall workers raping toddlers on the dark web. Only one man has been arrested. They gang raped a three year old and a four year old on a changing table and filmed it.
And, of course, this:
How did this start? How did it metastasize? Because it didn’t start at the bottom of the culture. It started at the top. It crept in on silent feet and normalized itself. It started where everything starts, in Hollywood. It began in its modern, second millennium version with the tragic tale of Britney Spears and the greed of her father, mother, sister and handlers.
Like millions last year, I followed Britney Spear’s Instagram in wonder. Tens of thousands of her fans fought for her freedom. The story of her conservatorship is chilling. Unlike most conservatees who can’t feed themselves (one of the requirements) for the 14 years of her quasi-imprisonment, she was making albums, headlining massive tours, and a Las Vegas residency, involved in every aspect of her productions. But her phone was monitored and often confiscated, her food intake controlled, she was forced to take psychiatric drugs several times a day and her contact with her friends sharply limited to the point where if she went to lunch at Iggy Azalea’s, say, a team would pre-search Iggy’s house. She had 24/7 security inside and outside and wasn’t allowed to drive. Or date. They forced an IUD into her so she wouldn’t get pregnant.
When she refused to perform anymore, they put her into a mental hospital and made her sit in a chair and not move for ten hours a day.
Released she seems to have regressed and become unaware of her presentation. While much is rainbows and butterflies, she is often near naked and not in a good way. Her feed is filled with recriminations against her father, sister, mother, baby daddy and sons, all of whose money comes directly from her work. It was they who imprisoned her, like a fairy princess, and commanded her to dance.
Along with Tristar Entertainment.
Britney chose her own pornification. Her ambition was hers and her parents encouraged it. It was she who worked through her childhood. And when she hit big with the now clearly pedo-attracting song and dance, “Hit Me Baby, One More Time,” which used a Catholic school girl theme, she seized it. Every song, album and show went further into the degradation of the sunny beautiful child, until she had become an outright bondage porn star, complete with all the moves, the whips, the chains, the writhing.
And then she went nuts. Reality break. Regressed to the point where she needs her mommy. Britney today holds her mother most responsible for her misery. The woman who could have stopped all this, didn’t. She cashed in.
.
Kris Jenner did it to Kim Kardashian when she was 23. According to Ray J, the male in Kim’s infamous sex tape which shot her to stardom, who has the contracts, the payouts, the signatures. “Kim even faked my signature on the contract,” he says today. “Look.” Jenner chose one of three sex tapes done by her daughter and Ray J, and sold them on for $400K to Vivid Entertainment. Kardashian was a full participant, her ambition just as fierce as Britney’s.
So far, in her orbit, the only people who go mad are the Kardashians’ men, most recently and spectacularly, Kanye. Nor do they seem to recover, which is weird.
What did these two women and their producers do to the culture? At the time of their appearance, people protested the vulgarity, the effect on the young, but they were making money – billions as it turned out, though Britney’s was clearly stolen, she has a fraction of what her earnings must have been. Jenner, smarter, more savvy has built an empire on the naked bodies of her children.
How does this link to the border?
This past weekend, Lara Logan introduced “Hacking the Border”, meant to bring together solutions. One of her participants was a woman border patrol officer who described what she sees every day. She doesn’t sleep, she says.
The case she remembers most is that of a six year old with a dirty face and dress and filthy shoes. “It meant,” she said, “that they were going to kill her. They didn’t bother to clean her up. We just missed saving her. .
“None of us sleep much.”
Another participant, a happy-go-lucky type, an engineer, a businessman who “solves problems for a living”, described how he figured out how to place thousands of small cameras throughout the border region. After a methodical presentation, with jokes, he broke down when he described watching a feed of a man crossing the border with two little girls, leashes around their necks. “We didn’t catch him the first time, or the second, but we did get him the third time.” He then broke down in sobs.
198,000 unaccompanied minors have entered the U.S. since the beginning of 2022. Eighty thousand are thought to have vanished, a reliable 68,000 in 2023. They are trafficked on Facebook, Instagram, Twitter. Apparently, HHS requires less than $600, if you want one, and they don’t have time to check you out. Many will be raped until they die, says the woman border patrol officer, they will last two years. The little boys are brutalized, beat up and killed. All of them are available for organ harvest. Logan reports that investigators have found containers of children in ports all over the world, meant to be sold on as sex slaves. Some of them criss-crossed with scars.
Their parents sold them. Or they are the children of trafficked women. If Kim and Britney are at the top of the trafficked tree, they are the bottom.
How did we become inured to this? How did the culture, we, become so stony-hard, so extractive that the most vulnerable come into our countries and are sold to be raped to death?
I think it began when women used their bodies to get money and attention and the digital revolution meant billions around the world could watch. It made it ok to sell yourself. It inflamed sexual appetites. And it became clear this was a source of massive profits. The more women did it, or had it done to them, the harder, crueler we, our culture, became.
It took a couple of decades but our our collective sexuality has become a degraded monster, in search of ever more thrilling experiences. Premium television is filled with what can only be called porn. The porn industry is a $100 Billion industry. The secure and lucky among us decided to ignore it while generations past would have stamped it out. Millions have become enmeshed. Marriages destroyed. Humans adrift, without love, without commitment, without spiritual consecration, their sexuality becomes a monstrous force. People who go all the way down that road - and hundreds of thousands have in the past twenty years - end up raping and killing children. On film.
All morality starts at the top. It is why for generations we insisted our leaders model lives of virtue. It is why the Queen is so revered, why Charles is still distrusted and his pedo brother Andrew, loathed. Bill Clinton was the first American president to break that rule, and from then on, these men are excused with a shrug, sexual degradation for profit is the rule, not the exception.
Britney escaped. She is the only lucky one. Kim will prostitute her children and grandchildren. When Candace Owen said she is a corpse with no soul, she was probably right. Her soul died the moment she, a privileged young woman, chose to sell herself having sex.
At least she had the choice. The landscape she helped create is littered with the bodies of children who didn’t.
Last week some readers called me to account for blaming all of us for what has happened. They weren’t responsible. But we are. The only way to change anything personally or out in the supposedly real world is to take 100% responsibility, whether you ‘deserve’ it or not. We allowed our culture to be polluted. We didn’t stand against it, because we either liked it or didn’t want to be called uptight and repressed.
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