Seven states — California, Florida, Louisiana, Georgia, Montana, Oregon and Wisconsin — have laws in place requiring the chemical castration of men convicted of violent sex crimes. Oklahoma is attempting to become the eighth state to enact a similar measure. Time magazine characterizes these laws as “controversial” and Oklahoma’s ACLU chapter spokeswoman Allie Shinn insists such laws may violate the Eighth Amendment prohibition of “cruel and unusual” punishment. No doubt most progressives would heartily agree. Yet many of those same progressives support the symbolic castration of American males, promulgated as “toxic masculinity.”

Unsurprisingly, college campuses are leading the charge. “Duke University is famous for its science and engineering programs, as well as its dominance in college basketball,” Fox News reported in 2016. “Now, it may also become known as a great place for men to gather and contemplate why they’re such horrible people.”

The Campus Women’s Center launched the project, targeting “male identified” students and subjecting them to discussions about “male privilege, patriarchy, ‘the language of dominance,’ rape culture, pornography, machismo and other topics,” Fox adds.

The term “male identified” is a window into this poisonous mindset, one that first denies biological and chromosomal reality and then presumes that the default position for any man or boy who refuses to abide progressive assertions of gender “fluidity” is toxic.

And like every leftist effort to promote their odious agenda, a full-scale, coordinated propaganda campaign is an essential part of the mix. “The term ‘toxic masculinity’ has crept into the lexicon in the past 12 months, having appeared in mainstream news articles, popular feminist blogs and, as of November, the crowd-sourced online repository of slang words, Urban Dictionary,” columnist Hayley Gleeson explained in 2017. “Generally used to denote how some aspects of masculinity — such as entitlement, homophobia and sexual aggressiveness — can harm women and families and cripple men’s own health, toxic masculinity, at its most extreme edges, has been linked with acts of violence like mass shootings and university campus sexual assault.”

Cue the tie to the Parkland shooting. “As I read about [the assailant’s] passion for guns, I was not surprised,” declares columnist Ziad Ahmed. “As an American teenage boy, the gross glorification of violence, weapons, and arms in our culture is not the least bit surprising. In fact, it’s deeply entrenched into the idea of American masculinity, beginning as early as in elementary school.”

Really? American masculinity per se is at best entitled, homophobic and aggressive, and at worst homicidal? Such pernicious garbage can only be asserted by one almost wholly ignorant of American history. Boys were once allowed to embrace their natural rambunctiousness, but that now constitutes “abnormal” behavior requiring life-altering drugs such as Ritalin and Adderall to treat the nearly one in five children between the ages of four and 17 — overwhelmingly boys — who have been diagnosed with attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

As for guns, Spokane Sheriff Ozzie Knezovich said it best: “When I was in high school, every one of those rigs in the high-school parking lot had a gun in the gun rack. Why? We went hunting on the way home. None of those guns ever walked into a school, none of those guns ever shot anybody. … Did the gun change or did you as a society change?”

Society has certainly cultivated an unprecedented level of hypocrisy. How many of the same celebrities who attended last weekend’s anti-gun fest have starred in movies or written songs that glorify violence — and have armed security protecting them?

And while those very same purveyors of the pop culture glorify guns and violence, they also seek to undermine masculinity by producing entertainment containing “endless variations on the omega male, who ranks even below the beta in the wolf pack,” as columnist Hanna Rosin puts it.

Ironically, it’s most likely that the least hysterical progressive assertion about toxic masculinity is the one that is the most deleterious, as in the oft-stated feminist assertion that men are unnecessary. In their book, The Flipside of Feminism, authors Suzanne Venker and Phyllis Schlafly assert, “In the space of just a few decades American women have managed to demote men from respected providers and protectors to being unnecessary, irrelevant, and expendable.”

Unfortunately, more and more men are buying into that assertion. In 2016, NPR revealed more American men between the ages of 18 and 34 live with their parents than a spouse or partner, while the numbers for women are exactly reversed. In 2017, The Atlantic revealed that the 58%-42% ratio of men versus women attending college in the 1970s “has now almost exactly reversed.” A couple of weeks ago, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson illuminated an even deeper crisis, noting that men are dying younger, are fatter, kill themselves more often, and are imprisoned at far higher rates than women.

Government has aided and abetted the notion of expendability as well, and nothing did it better than Lyndon Johnson’s “Great Society” initiative. Before the Great Society, the Aid to Families with Dependent Children (AFDC) program was reserved for widows, as a means of funding once-married women who had lost the primary male supporter of the family. Johnson and Congress changed the qualifications, making any household where there was no male family head present eligible for taxpayer subsidies.

The resulting tsunami of men failing to take responsibility for their own children has become irrefutable. In 1965, 24% of black children and 3.1% of white children were born out of wedlock. By 2013, those numbers had skyrocketed to 72% and 29%, respectively.

“Males in particular have been neutered by the Entitlement Society and the Welfare State,” Forbes Magazine asserted in 2015. “Groups which have the most contact with the welfare state, especially through various public assistance policies … have seen the greatest amount of male neutering,” the article adds.

One might conclude such neutering is a bug in the system. That conclusion is naïve. Toxic masculinity, beta male-worship and the wholesale destruction of the nuclear family engendered by “unnecessary” men is a feature of the progressive project that is all about the acquisition and maintenance of government power by any means necessary, even if it includes tossing self-reliant men — a trait now deemed to be “associated with negative mental health outcomes” by the American Psychological Association — on the ash heap of history.

Tucker Carlson spoke to the “elemental biology” of men and women needing each other. Progressives speak to the necessity of completely eliminating the terms “men” and “women” in pursuit of a utopian society that is really about “tearing away the old in search of the new, evidence be damned,” as columnist Ben Shapiro asserts.

Not evidence, Mr. Shapiro. Liberty.

Toxic masculinity? Toxic progressivism is more like it.