It Looks Like Krafft-Ebing Started The Craziness

I woke up this morning for some reason with the name Krafft-Ebing hangng in my thoughts like a tune that won't go away. I don't think I'd thought of that name in years. Richard von Krafft-Ebing (1840-1902), an Austrian psychiatrist, was a pioneer of the modern notion of sexuality, so in the context of recent events, it probably shouldn't be a surprise that he'd pop up that way. Let's just do a quick review of recent news stories. On Monday,

Aidan Maese-Czeropski, the former Democratic aide best known for being filmed on the receiving end of a backdoor sex romp in a Senate hearing room in 2023, is finally speaking out about the scandal that cost him his job and prompted him to flee the country.

The Washington Free Beacon exclusively reported in February that Maese-Czeropski had moved to Australia to launch a new career as an independent sex worker who posts pornographic photos and videos on the internet. This week the disgraced Democrat, who was a legislative aide to Sen. Ben Cardin (D., Md.) when he was busted for (allegedly) being sodomized in the Hart Senate Office Building, spilled his guts in an interview with Gay Sydney News.

On Tuesday:

The U.S. Supreme Court’s conservative majority on Tuesday appeared strongly inclined to support the right of religious parents to excuse their children from a Maryland school district’s use of LGBTQ+ storybooks in its elementary schools.

. . . The storybooks currently in use in pre-K and elementary grades are Born Ready; Intersection Allies; Love, Violet; Prince & Knight; and Uncle Bobby’s Wedding—all feature LGBTQ+ characters and themes.

At least one justice appeared to bring copies of the books to the bench, and several quoted passages during the argument. Alito had a bit of a skirmish with Justice Sonia Sotomayor over Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, which tells the story of a young girl who expresses some reservations about her uncle marrying another man before coming around.

. . . [Jusrice Amy Coney] Barrett suggested the school district was going beyond teaching respect for LGBTQ+ students and families with books that were “validating the other world view here, the one that is different from the [religious parents] by saying no, no, no, this is right.”

When [counsel for the school district Alan] Shoenfeld said the goal of the program was teaching “mutual respect,” Barrett asked, “So it was part of the curriculum to teach them that boys can be girls … or that your pronouns can change depending on how you feel one day to the next?”

Two weeks ago, Nashville police released their final report on the 2023 Covenant School shooting:

Nashville police have released their final report on the Covenant School massacre – a targeted March 2023 attack on a Christian school by a transgender shooter who killed three third-graders and three adults.

Rather than a highly anticipated manifesto, the report found that killer Audrey Hale left behind numerous notebooks, art books and computer documents about her plans to commit the attack and gain notoriety, partly inspired by the Columbine school shooting in 1999.

Hale, the 28-year-old attacker and biological female, began "fantasizing" about and researching mass shootings as far back as 2017, according to investigators. A year later, she wrote "detailed fantasies" about shooting up the Isaac T. Creswell Middle Magnet School for the Arts, killing her father and killing her psychiatrist.

. . . "In short, the motive determined over the course of the investigation was notoriety," according to investigators. "Even though numerous disappointments in relationships, career aspirations, and independence fueled her depression, and even though this depression made her highly suicidal, this doesn’t explain the attack. As Hale wrote on several occasions, if suicide was her goal then she would have simply killed herself."

. . . "Most disturbingly, she wanted the things she left behind to be shared with the world so she could inspire and teach others who were ‘mentally disordered’ like her to plan and commit an attack of their own," investigators wrote.

Last month,

A 42-year-old transgender woman who allegedly threw Molotov cocktails at vehicles and spray-painted “Nazi cars” at a Colorado Tesla dealership lives with her mother due to “emotional problems” and calls herself “baby” online.

Lucy Grace Nelson, also known as Justin Thomas Nelson, is accused of hurling incendiary devices at a Tesla dealership in Loveland, Northern Colorado, and vandalizing the business and vehicles on multiple occasions with graffiti “offensive and hateful in nature,” police said.

. . . Nelson, who is listed as female on her driver’s license and Loveland Police’s booking sheet, has since been handed a federal charge of malicious destruction, and freed on a $100,000 cash bond.

Federal authorities who have taken over the prosecution refused to confirm whether Nelson is charged as a male or female, despite requests by The Post to clarify.

On Monday, I speculated that there's a powerful exhibitionist impulse common to the people who vandalize Teslas or firebomb Tesla dealerships, since it's been well publicized that Tesla cars have cameras that automatically record suspicious activity, but beyond that, common sense says that these days, doorbell and security cameras are ubiquitous. More and more crimes are solved with camera footage. That these people know they're filmed in the act isn't a bug for them, it's a feature. They want notoriety.

So does the Montgomery County, MD School District in the latest bizarro replay of the Scopes Monkey Trial, which itself was a publicity stunt. A poster on X said,

In 2025, an attorney for a government school district is able to make it all the way to the U.S. Supreme Court defending exposing children as young as three years old to books about sexuality. Imagine going back in time to any point—even just a few years ago—and explaining that this is considered a serious argument.

Isn't this in fact exhibitionism masquerading as virtue signaling? But let's go back to the mindset that produced this almost 150 years ago:

The modern notion of sexuality took shape at the end of the nineteenth century, especially in the works of Richard von Krafft-Ebing and Albert Moll. This modernisation of sexuality was closely linked to the recognition of sexual diversity, as it was articulated in the medical–psychiatric understanding of what, at that time, was labelled as perversion. . . . Against this background both Krafft-Ebing and Moll articulated a new perspective, not only on perversion, but also on sexuality in general. Krafft-Ebing initiated and Moll elaborated a shift from a psychiatric perspective in which deviant sexuality was explained as a derived, episodic and more or less singular symptom of a more fundamental mental disorder, to a consideration of perversion as an integral part of a more general, autonomous and continuous sexual instinct.

So perversion isn't that, it's just the natural expression of the continuous sexual instinct. So why does it have to be associated with notoriety? If it's all OK, why the apparent need to get attention by making it and the proponents transgreswive? Asssuming it's all copacetic among consenting adults, why does it nevertheless have to go on public display for adults and children who don't consent to it? Why do its proponents seem to want to associate it with violence like mass killing and arson, and why do they see the need to let it all hang out in public?

How is it anything but disordered?