Political correctness hits the Toastmasters club

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Last week I delivered this speech. My evaluator, a lovely young lady, was caustic. She works for an American company here in Kiev and seems to have embraced political correctness. This link, by the way, is to Rumble. YouTube allows inline links, but I fear they would censor this movie. Which goes to the heart of my message.

It is said, though Toastmasters International disavows it, that the three forbidden topics in Toastmasters are sex, politics and religion.

My speech was about my lifetime experience investing.  It did not touch on religion, but I did offer the opinion that I had to teach my son about managing my money because my wife simply is not interested, as was true of my first two wives as well. I went on to observe that the last great woman investor on the American scene was Hetty Green who died in 1916.

As far as politics go, I offered the opinion that the United States government was spending three dollars for every two dollars of tax revenue, and that government policy on climate change, immigration, education and diversity affect a great many private sector investment decisions.

I also touched on vaccines, saying that an investor could have made a lot of money on the way up, as the government strongly pushed mRNA vаccіnes, and on the way down as the public concluded that they don't work. I concede that I made it clear that I agree with the public on the latter point.

Toastmasters' mission is to teach people the art of public speaking. A speech objective can be to inform, to persuade, to motivate or to entertain. Though only a minority of our presentations attempt to inform or persuade with regard to major issues of the day, having the freedom to do so is essential. A recent Dark Horse podcast by Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying was entitled “Polite Society Can Kill You.”  It is true. In their example many people died by being polite as the Nazis took over Germany. Many people, including this author's daughter, died from politely accepting vaccines with the government's assurance that they were "safe and effective" and distancing themselves from malcontents like her father who said otherwise.

So, what are the other issues of the day that I might like to address in Toastmasters speeches? One of the most obvious is gender transition surgery. The practice in the United States, supported by influential organizations such as the American Psychological Association, is to convince boys that they are really girls unfortunately born into a boy's body and vice versa. Schools get behind the push and "support" such children by convincing them that things really are backward, and they they can be "fixed" by surgery.  Moreover, their parents don't need to know about it. Author Abigail Schrier wrote the best-selling book about this practice entitled "Irreversible Damage."  This topic involves both sex and politics and affects the future of humanity. We have to talk about it.

After the resounding success of this first book, Abigail Schrier wrote one about the prevalence of therapy in schools and its effect on young children's lives. In America, approximately 40% of schoolchildren are being treated by psychotherapists. It is fashionable. It gives them something to talk about with their friends. It also introduces them to the pleasures of victimhood. As my deceased daughter said about her now homeless brother, "You become your diagnosis." The therapy epidemic, in my opinion, has devastated my grown children's generation, rendering them marginally fit for work and mostly unfit for marriage and parenthood. The topic of course involves sex and politics. Maybe religion as well, as many regard psychotherapy as a kind of secular religion. Can we talk about it?

Peachy Keenan has a more upbeat message. Women should be looking for fulfillment in marriage and family. There is not that much to be found in careers. By the time most women realize this, in their mid-30s, it is too late to have a big family and often too late to have any family at all.

Brittany Pettibone takes it from a different angle with her review of the movie Barbie, in which the men are all vapid, self-absorbed stick figures. The movie is a commentary on life in modern America. Is this worthy of discussion? Is discussion permissible?

Many in the medical profession, and a number of pundits, believe that the "safe and effective" injectable biological products that were forced on the public over the past four years are really a measure meant to  decrease the population. Would the world be a better place if the population were smaller? Is it a topic we can talk about? Igor Chudov does. Can it be discussed in Toastmasters?

This is a dramatic time to be alive. There are a vast number of changes afoot affecting all of humanity. Many of us believe that our ability to speak openly is being severely curtailed. This video questioning the 2020 US elections has been vigorously suppressed. Should we be allowed to watch it and draw our own conclusions? Is talking about the fairness of elections themselves, rather than the merits of the candidates, political speech?

Although Toastmasters does not have a freedom of speech article in its bylaws, I believe it is fundamental that we have the freedom to express opinions that go against the received wisdom from government, and big corporations and the media.  This is my declaration of independence. I am going to speak my mind.

That's the opinion from Lake WeBeGone, where the strong man has been healthy for a month, the garden is being worked as it is every spring, albeit this time without the Russian Percussion, and the children are enjoying school and the good weather.

Graham