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Authoritarianism

The Age of Bizarro Churchill, the Outsourcing of Wife Beating and the Creation of the Super-Id

Beginning in the 1890s during the Boer Wars, Winston Churchill had a consistent response to whatever ailed the British people: “Attack! Attack now! Throw everything we’ve got at them!” That plan did not work out so well at Gallipoli and caused him to lose standing among the Coalition Liberals and British people but nevertheless, when the future kingdom of what would become Saudi Arabia began his insurgency against the British puppet ruling the British mandate of Hejaz, Churchill was back on form. It was time to conscript the young men and send them into the desert to prevent the rise of the Saudis.

But the world changed around Churchill. And because the world changed, and kept changing for the worse, one day in the 1930s it came to pass that Churchill was finally right. The correct answer to what the British were facing had become, “Attack! Attack now! Throw everything we’ve got at them!”

So they made him Prime Minister and, the rest, as they say, is history.

Today, we live in the age of Bizarro Churchill. The old man who is finally right is the person we are most certain is wrong.

It has been more than fifty years since Enoch Powell’s 1968 “Rivers of Blood” speech, more than thirty since Preston Manning tried to sell Canadians on dramatic cuts to our immigration rates and nominated racist MP candidates like Herb Grubel, Randy White, Bob Ringma and Philip Mayfield. Back in those days we were right to see panic over immigration as mainly driven by racial animus and bad “slippery slope” reasoning. We called Powell and Manning racists; we held rallies against Powell’s racism and Manning’s promiscuous flirtations with racists; and we were not wrong.

Back in the twentieth century, we were still relatively prosperous; we had strong institutions; most people could still afford their rent; and we had a robust civic nationalism structuring our multicultural pluralism, with flags and outfits and festivals that included all of us. Back then, activists opposing increased immigration were overwhelmingly old and white and the movements were rife with discredited race science and belief in eugenics.

Today, a clear majority of both white and non-white Canadians want immigration levels to be reduced to where they were when Stephen Harper’s Conservative Party was in office, approximately 20% of current levels. Those most supportive of current immigration levels tend to be white seniors, those who remember the odious politics of people like Powell, Manning and Ringma most vividly. Those least supportive are young people can have been pushed out of entry level jobs by temporary foreign workers and kids from the Global South on student visas and young families unable to find housing they can afford.

But the response from the courtiers and commissars who run our societies is not the way the British people responded to Churchill in the 1930s and 40s. Instead, they argue that supporting any kind of reduction to any kind of immigration is axiomatically wrong, that no matter what the migration situation is in a country, it is, by definition morally and politically wrong to restrict it in any way for any reason.

Instead of engaging logically with people recommending temporary or permanent reductions in migrant flow, they simply label anyone with an objection a hateful bigot and their ideas “hate speech,” what they call “stochastic terrorism,” the idea that if you say or even repeat a statement deemed “hateful,” you are in effect murdering members of a minority groups to whom the statement might refer.

Similarly, many conservatives acquitted themselves atrociously during the gay liberation movement and AIDS crisis. Lifesaving medication was denied to innocent people; their same sex partners were spitefully barred from visiting them in hospital; their partners’ pension spousal benefits were confiscated; and marriage was placed out of reach. In the 1980s, Andrew Dice Clay’s and Eddie Murphy’s stand-up performances ended far too frequently with the men who had laughed at the homophobic jokes performed going out and beating up innocent gay men.

Just as I attended anti-Reform Party rallies, I fought for gay rights and organized with Svend Robinson, Canada’s first openly gay MP.

But, as I warned at the time, we were taking shortcuts for which we would pay later. Instead of arguing that people have a right to marry whomever they want, we should have argued that, extending marriage rights to gay couples was a pro-social move of intrinsic that would make our societies better, not the creation of a new kind of right. Similarly, when we argued that we should never judge people for the weird sex they like, I thought: “this is heading for trouble.”

But, the Bizarro Churchill effect is, of course, present on questions of human sexuality now. If men need to wear diapers and shit themselves in the street in front of us, dance provocatively in sexualized getups in front of grade schoolers and wave their junk teenage girls in locker rooms, who are we to judge them? After all, if objecting to one form of male sexuality showing up in public was wrong in the 80s, objecting to any form of male sexuality asserting itself in any context is inherently wrong at all times and places.

And so those of us who object to Genderwang and are trying to protect gay kids from being sterilized and mutilated are bigots, hatemongers and, most ironically, “homophobes.” Last fall, when the Million March for Kids took place, once credible journalists ran stories stating that those of us in the march were planning to hunt down homosexuals and beat them up, just like those Clay and Murphy fans in the 80s. The BC government even sent warning to daycare centres that we were coming to assault the gender-confused children there.

In the 1990s and 00s, we fought against Ronald Reagan’s Drug War, worked for safe injection sites, decriminalization of hard drugs, supportive housing for addicts and freeing those convicted of drug offenses from prison. Like my work on welcoming immigrants and civil equality for gays and lesbians, I remain proud of this work and glad I did it.

But now we face a situation where, as reported by Adam Zivo in the National Post, we have a government program in BC that allows teenagers to receive hard recreational drugs from the province and have the state act to keep that secret from parents, literally slipping children fentanyl and telling them not to tell mom, thanks to the terrible precedent set by administering Lupron to teenagers secretly.

But again, object to there being too many drugs out there, as the government increases the drug supply, as no credible academic study has ever recommended, or object to how young the people are that we’re giving addictive drugs to or even simply suggest that being a full-time unhoused drug addict is a less worthwhile life than having a job and a family and once again, one is accused of hate speech, bigotry and stochastic terrorism. The next overdose will be blamed on us—as though you can’t OD on “safe supply” fentanyl.

Again, because conservatives were wrong about something in the past, they cannot possibly be right about it now. And anyone who agrees with them now has become a “far right” “hatemonger.”

Violence Against Women and the Rise of the Super-Id
I used to think this was just some sort of cognitive error that was producing these three highly similar social phenomena where all problems caused by out-of-control immigration can only be solved by fewer immigration controls, all problems caused by drug use can only be solved by more drugs and all problems caused by Genderwang can only be solved by de-stigmatizing “minor attracted persons” and conferring on people the right to have their bodies made into surreal Japanese hentai monsters at government expense.

But a recent chat with a very important gender critical thinker convinced me that this is something darker:

The other thing that changed in our society in the 1980s was our fairly successful crackdown on domestic violence and marital rape. Wife-beating, of course, continued. But it had to be closeted in new ways. Even celebrities who publicly advocated it were smacked down hard or the media edited their backwards views out of their interviews. Male violence against women was attacked both by law enforcement with a new zeal and, at the same time, Hollywood and the news media came together to stigmatize this vile behaviour.

But we didn’t fix the men or address the underlying causes and so violent misogyny has been building up as behind a dam since the 1980s. And the inhibitions and prohibitions around white men and respectable men hitting and sexually assaulting women have never been greater, especially in progressive communities.

And so this violent misogyny has found a vent. Pakistani grooming gangs in England do have permission to rape, beat and traffic women; so do men in dresses; so do homeless men on meth. And that is why our governments are now admitting young, male rootless immigrants at a higher rate than other immigrants, proposing, as BC’s chief medical health officer recently did a chain of meth stores like our stores that market cannabis products in a friendly atmosphere, but for crystal meth.

White progressive men have outsourced their misogynistic violence to three groups of men. It is an exchange: these men enact the misogynistic violence and rage of the commissar class towards women and, in exchange, the commissar class describes them as victims and grants them total immunity from the consequences of their actions, not just legally but socially.

The Woke ideologies that enable this are a kind of Super-Id our society has built itself. A psychological force that uses ideology to push our collective behaviour beyond even where your average unrestrained male id would go.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

Breast Gropes, Rabbit Punches and the Politics of Fear at Versailles: How Machiavelli’s the Prince Helps Us Understand the Paris Olympics

Every single time I write a gender critical blog post, a feel a very familiar feeling: fear deep in the pit of my stomach, rising through my abdomen and reaching up to choke my throat. Despite having begun my gender critical writing almost five years ago, not only am I still scared every time I publish an essay like this, I am no less scared than I was the previous time. That is because there is always something to lose, always the possibility of new “consequences” as Wokes call them for expressing my opinion that men cannot become women; women cannot become men; it is wrong to sterilize and chemically lobotomize children; etc.

In today’s essay I want to explore that fear more thoroughly because I grow more convinced every day that almost everyone’s experience of the strange new social movement with which the West is wrestling is being primarily conditioned by fear; and the antics we saw at the Paris Olympics are just the latest demonstration of that.

And because I remain committed to continuing to try and awaken in my former comrades the courage necessary to challenge not just Genderwang but the larger authoritarian project as whose vanguard it functions, even though every time I pen an article like this I inevitably lose another few comrades and friends, despite my views on this subject being unchanged over the past five years. Just this week since the last essay, I lost a couple more. That’s because even though my views have not changed, the danger of being publicly associated with heretical views only increases every year in the Progressiverse as its inhabitants habituate themselves to the existence of an ever more demanding grassroots Holy Inquisition.

Re-reading Machiavelli in the 2020s
So, really, what this piece is about is what we might call “the politics of fear,” a profoundly misunderstood term today. The idea of a fear-centred politics was first strongly theorized in Nicolo Machiavelli’s The Prince in 1513. It is my view that, from the outset, the meanings and lessons of the text were based on a fundamental misreading of the historically contingent character of its arguments because later interpreters were unacquainted with Renaissance humanist readings of Roman history.

Throughout the text, Machiavelli invokes important Roman historical actors in a series of lessons about how to do politics successfully. Most readers understand The Prince as illustrating which the author believed to be hard, permanent proto-social scientific truths. But to one with at least a passing familiarity with Roman history and with the Renaissance humanist movement’s worldview, this does not seem quite right.

Typically, when Machiavelli refers to a past actor like the Roman general Scipio, who was both successful in their politics and laudable in their principles, he uses them as an example of what not to do if one wants to succeed in sixteenth-century Italian politics. Similarly, when he wants to use an historical example of politics that would work, he typically serves up the example of a villain, tyrant or, at least, a fatally flawed historical actor.

I take this highly strategic and self-conscious use of historical references to indicate not that he is talking about what makes a prince wise and successful irrespective of when and where he rules but to relay the following subtext: “Italy has entered into some kind of hell dimension in my time; if the best and most virtuous rulers and warriors of the past existed in sixteenth-century Italy, they would fail whereas the most venal and villainous of past actors would succeed.” In this way, I read The Prince both as a piece of absolutely sincere practical advice to the warlords and oligarchs of Italy in 1513 and as an absolute indictment of the time and place in which he lived.

Maybe this is just projection but I feel the same way about contemporary politics in the Global North. And that is because how to succeed at the politics of fear has changed to Machiavelli’s from its opposite in the space of a decade.

When I was growing up in last years of Cold War welfare state society, people believed that they were witnessing the rise of a new “politics of fear.” What this meant was that, until the mid-2010s, political candidates and parties focused increasing effort on making potential supporters fear their opponent. The term “hidden agenda” was used with increasing frequency, especially against conservative parties and candidates but was used across the board. The idea was that if you could make a group of voters fear what your opponent might do to them, they would vote for you defensively.

Single women in their child-bearing years were often the targets of the most successful fear politics. We are coming up on the twenty-fifth anniversary of the Liberal Party of Canada making the “hidden agenda” of their conservative opponents to re-criminalize abortion a centrepiece of their political communication every election. Conservative parties also did an impressive job, warning of the impacts of unrestricted immigration and “soft on crime” approaches to criminal justice.

Machiavelli would not have called this “the politics of fear,” nor would he have given such a politics much of a chance of success in sixteenth-century Italy. In fact, he would predict that in Renaissance Florence, such an approach would actually help one’s political adversary. In his chapter on fear as a political force, his argument was that a wise prince rejects the love of his people in favour of their fear, that the more the popular classes fear you, the more they will support you, and that while the people’s love can be sustained for only a time, their fear can be sustained indefinitely.

As the 2010s wore on and people’s sense of financial, environmental and social security continued to wane, the politics of Florence under the Medici family was reborn. And its midwife was Donald Trump. Of course, before Trump could become politically successful, the kind of fear and hopelessness that pervaded Machiavelli’s world had to creep up. And there were signs that a growing portion of the Global North would be ready for this kind of politics to return. People had to become more psychologically and materially insecure and frightened before Trumpism could work on them.

A true Machiavellian politics of fear works on a set of interlocking psychological bases in such an environment:

The Ivan the Terrible Effect
Ivan the Terrible was a popular Tsar and remained popular long after his death because he ruled in a time when Russians were extremely insecure as the Mongol Khanates that had ruled the Pontic steppe continued their violent destabilizing breakup, following Muscovy’s successful war of independence to separate itself from the Golden Horde.

Just like the Comanche or any expansionist equestrian pastoralist society, the imperial Mongol civilization was successful because they struck fear into the heart of local agrarian and agro-pastoralist populations, often by engaging in gratuitous acts of murder, property destruction and sexual violence.

Ivan the Terrible was successful in rallying former subjects of the Horde and incorporating them into the expanding Russian state not by sharpening the contrast between how things worked in his Christian kingdom and how they worked in the Horde but by reducing it by demonstrating novel forms of gratuitous cruelty and violence.

Ivan formed the original ancestor of today’s SVR. Before the KGB, before NKVD, before Cheka, there were the Oprichniki, an army of black-clad riders with rotting dogs’ and wolves’ heads tied to their saddles, completely above and outside the law, who conducted massacres of unspeakable and pointless cruelty and debauchery. Ivan often led this host, with an iron wolf’s head mounted on his horse. Ivan was not just “terrible” in this context; he was also known for having beaten his own son to death for no apparent reason.

Yet he enjoyed considerable popular support because his subjects felt that they were, on balance, safer being led by a monster because he possessed the capacity to strike fear into the otherwise fearless Mongols.

When you are staring down the barrel of something scary that you perceive to be a terrifying external or alien force, there is a terrible logic to supporting a leader who has proven his worth by perpetrating atrocities indiscriminately against his own people.

And this appeal is a gendered one, not one unique to women but one more concentrated in women because they are more likely to have been sexually interfered with as children or physically terrorized in a romantic relationship. People who have had these experiences, male or female, often seek out romantic partners not on the basis that they will be gentle and different but that they will be so “formidable” (a more accurate translation of Ivan’s actual title) that they will frighten off the other violent abusers.

Reaction Formation
People who voted for Trump because he would stand up to China, stare down Mexican migration or kick the drug dealers out of town, were conscious in their embrace of the politics of fear: Trump was a scary, seemingly invulnerable bastard whose aggression was largely directed away from them and towards the things they discerned to be threats. But those credentials did not just come from his affect. They came from how he had treated business partners, employees, investors and even his own family members, proudly calling his daughter “a hot piece of ass” on the Howard Stern show, for instance. The people who consciously imbibed this politics of fear were largely middle and working class white men to whom Trump was not that scary in the first place.

But for women like a former girlfriend of mine who grew up with a father, and major Republican donor I might add, who made his violent sexual fantasies about her a regular part of family dinner conversation, this kind of response is less conscious and rational, more instinctive, inchoate and hard-wired.

Survivors of child and domestic abuse and violence have an instinct to placate an emotionally dysregulated, powerful, potentially violent man, irrespective of whether that behaviour makes them safer. Reaction formation is a form of double consciousness that enables and conceals this.

Because those experiencing it feel profoundly unsafe but deem themselves unable to escape or reduce their unsafety, like an abused spouse or child, they become vehement, passionate and insistent that the thing that is terrifying them is VERY SAFE, 100% SAFE. If they cannot control their safety, they can at least control their feelings about it. I first made this argument when observing that the Canadians most insistent that anthropogenic climate change is not happening are those whose lives and communities are most endangered by it. The climate has to not be changing; that’s the only way to feel safe.

As I stated at the time, I believe that the two big poll surges Trump experienced among married white women, the day he accepted the GOP nomination and Election Day, were powered by his campaign’s brilliant mastery of the intuitive logic of reaction formation.

Trump chose to give his daughter an open-mouthed kiss and grab her ass on live TV at the moment he knew the most people would be watching. He understood, whether intuitively or consciously, that he could most effectively demonstrate his power by violating the incest taboo as publicly as possible and then watch as no one at the GOP convention attempted to stop or condemn him. As I wrote at the time,

And it is in this light that we must understand the programmatic, intentional and strategic marketing of parent-child incest by Donald Trump. Trump chose to give the convention address, reserved for generations for the spouse of a presidential candidate, to his daughter Ivanka. This choice was intentional and premeditated, as was his unambiguously libidinous kissing and ass-grabbing of his daughter on national TV before the address, the daughter about whom he has been making sexualized comments in the media since before her tenth birthday. Trump is direct, clear and unflinching in notifying America that he owns that girl’s ass and has since she was conceived.

Trump successfully activated reaction formation in survivors (not all survivors but many) across the country; they denied what they saw as abused spouses often do when they see their own children abused; they became more desirous of pleasing and complying with his will; and, most importantly, they became vehement in their denials that he was dangerous and predatory.

The sad fact is that survivors who have not adequately addressed their own experience of abuse, especially those still engaged in placating their abuser on a regular basis, are more likely to speak up in favour of the abuser, as a deep-seated subconscious self-protective strategy, and, to further protect themselves, conceal from their own consciousness what they are doing and why.

The next surge, one long-debated by pollsters and other psephologists, was the iconic photograph of Trump looking over his wife’s shoulder and watching her fill out her ballot on election day, 2016.

As I wrote at the time,

As we learn—but never accept—in countless failed rape prosecutions, people who have been sexually violated, especially people who have been sexually violated by adults as children do not reliably say “no.” They do not reliably ostracize their abuser or reject his future overtures. They do not reliably resist further infringements on their bodies, dignity and sense of self. That is because one of the most powerful lessons a survivor of sexual abuse learns is this: their abuser is all-powerful and nobody will help them…

For most survivors, the way forward would be clear: dissemble and comply. Somehow your abuser will know if you tried to thwart him. In all likelihood, your abuser wants you to generate a narrative that you have consented, that he has done nothing wrong. Ultimately, the greatest performances of domination are the ones that inspire feigned consent. What if the moment, America’s survivors placed their hands on that lever, they felt their omnipresent, omnipotent abuser leaning over the flimsy cardboard privacy partition, their eyes full of malice, and knew what they must do to survive another day?

The Politics of Fear Come to the Olympics
In my efforts to explain the Democratic Party’s unexpectedly good showing in the 2022 midterm elections, I suggested that it could be accounted-for by the Democrats adopting the fundamental logic of Trumpian campaigning, of seeking to make the voters more frightened of them, of presenting as their representative, the most emotionally dysregulated, abusive person in the room. Trump, in a way, has become obsolete. He is now replaceable because the logic of his political strategy has been embraced by all.

At the start of the Paris Olympics, many of us gender critical folks were anticipating a good week because two men were going to be boxing women on TV. These men, furthermore, checked none of the boxes that characters like Dylan Mulvaney use to distance themselves aesthetically or rhetorically from their masculinity.

Imane Khelif did not merely look just like a man, complete with Adam’s Apple and a hulking manly build; he “lived as a man” in Algeria and gave interviews about manliness and masculinity directed to an audience of other men; he did not wear a hijab, as Muslim Algerian women do; he had a deep voice; he walked like a man; he even adjusted the position of his scrotum in front of us on live TV; and he had been disqualified from international women’s boxing the previous year because he had been found to have XY chromosomes.

This was going to be a slam dunk, we thought: people will see a man punching a woman in the face. And that is what we saw. What followed, we did not expect: all kinds of people previously sympathetic to gender critical positions, including materialist radical feminists, became supporters of Genderwang and vigorously defended his status as a woman on social media. Even the Italian woman he savaged recanted her opposition to being beaten by a man and apologized for saying what happened was unfair. And that support grew throughout the week as a second male boxer also began beating women in the ring.

I want to suggest that this is best explained by two iconic images from the boxing ring:

In the first, Imane Khelif gropes the right breast of Angela Carini immediately after humiliating her in the ring. In the second, Lin Yu-Ting illegally rabbit-punches his female opponent on the back of the neck, using a dangerous attack that could have left even a male opponent permanently disabled. And the referee did nothing.

Now, whether these acts were carefully planned or merely serendipitous and intuitive is utterly irrelevant. This essay has no interest in the consciousness of Khelif or Lin. My interest is in the consciousness of the audience.

This was visual rhetoric on a par with the those two images of the 2016 Trump campaign. They said, unambiguously: men can abuse women under the justifying discourse of Genderwang in front of the entire world, surrounded by supposed professional arbiters of fairness and nothing will happen. Not only can they engage in this abuse with impunity; the will do so to thunderous applause, and even make their victim apologize to them for saying they were victimized.

Now I am not writing this to complain or lament the state of humanity today or even to grieve the latest batch of friends I have lost but as a wake-up call to critics of the authoritarians: we have to stop pretending that this is a battle of wits, of analysis, of information. Those things mean nothing at this phase of the debate. The worst argument and the best argument we can make will elicit identical reactions because if we actually put on our thinking caps and stop distracting ourselves by pretending that sounding smart and informed is going to move the needle, we have to recognize that this is a contest about human consciousness of power and safety. That’s it.

Our rhetoric must cease to address the fight we wish we were in, between the bad and good analysis, between bad and good information, and start addressing what is actually animating it: performances of power and terror, the Machiavellian politics of fear.

Authoritarianism Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

True Names of the Paris Olympiad: Humpty Dumpty and the Adam-God Heresy at the Versailles Olympics

I don’t think anyone doubted that the Paris Olympics or, as I prefer to think of them, the Versailles Olympics, were going to showcase the current state of the madness or morbidities of the world. But in better times, those debates circled around more intelligible things, like whether to boycott an Olympiad hosted by a despot or whether to bar from competition representatives of a pariah regime. Foreign delegations would try to strike a balance when interacting with local members of their country’s diaspora, how much to flirt with a local minority population with which they sympathized. One thinks not just of 1936 Berlin but the two boycotted Olympics (1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles) at the end of the Cold War, the slaughter and repression preceding Mexico City 1968, Chechen and gay solidarity activism at Sochi 2014 and the massacre of Israeli Olympians by the PLO in Munich 1972.

But, despite the Gaza punitive expedition now having escalated in a region-wide war from Sanaa to Tehran to Damascus and the ongoing slaughter in Sudan and Ukraine, Paris has focused the world’s eyes of the bed-shitting morbidities of the cultural crisis of the post-liberal societies of the Global North.

There is no shortage of commentators with wise words to say about the perversions of the West showcased at the event, so effectively demonstrated in the Last Supper drag act and the decision to put men in the boxing ring with women, leaving me with nothing especially unique to say on the subject of the actual events. Instead, I want to focus on radical and dramatic differences between how progressives and non-progressives in the Global North have debated these bizarre events and defended their respective positions.

Olympic-level Lying
I had not planned to pay much attention to the Olympics. I don’t find watching either the sports or the public art around the sports very interesting. But my interest was piqued as I watched the debate about a number in the opening ceremonies, a peculiar little dance number called “Last Supper on the Seine.”

The number, according to the cast, the official event program and the IOC, itself, was a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting. And it predictably offended evangelical Christians, as was its clear intent, which is fine. There is nothing wrong with doing a dance number that offends some people in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Nothing at all.

Where things got weird was when a silly observation by an art historian went viral. The art historian claimed that the piece was not a parody of the Last Supper but of a seventeenth century Dutch painting, Festin des Dieux, a painting likely, itself based on Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Literally piling insult upon insult, viral memes circulated by progressives argued that evangelical Christians were wrong to be offended because, in their ignorance and stupidity, they had mistaken a depiction of Festin for the Last Supper.

Except that any person who looked at both paintings would of course see that the dance number far more closely resembled the Last Supper than it did Festin. What fascinated me was that almost no progressive smugly circulating posts inveighing against evangelicals’ putative ignorance of art history had heard of the painting before they circulated the meme or looked at it before schooling us plebs on what we had really seen. Why would they need to? A person with a PhD in art history had told them what they were actually looking at. Why would they then need to use their own eyes?

Then there is an adjacent dust-up. One of the drag performers parodying an apostle and standing next to a child, was exposing his scrotum through a hole in his fishnet stockings. Again, it is not like the Genderwang movement has not, on numerous prior occasions defended drag performers flashing their junk at kids. They could have done so again on this occasion but instead, they began arguing that the scrotum we could all see was not a scrotum but “a spot of skin on his upper leg.” What does that even mean? Still, this phrase also started making the rounds among progressives. We were foolish and ignorant for mistaking “a spot of skin on the upper leg” for an obviously and intentionally displayed scrotum.

Again, rather than contesting the propriety of the display, the choice was to look at the same photo we were looking at and basically say “you are only imagining that is a scrotum, you ignoramus.”

Then, of course the crescendo came during the week when an Algerian man won a series of women’s boxing matches. The fact that he was a man was perfectly obvious to anyone who looked at his body or watched his fights. He had a man’s face, a man’s build, a man’s arms, a man’s neck, complete with Adam’s apple; he moved like a man; he punched like a man; he did not wear a hijab, as Algerian women generally do; candid photos of him living happily as a man back home surfaced on the internet; he even adjusted the position of his scrotum in front of all of us on live TV.

But what clinched it was that the International Boxing Association had disqualified him from women’s boxing in 2023 because a genetic test had revealed he had XY chromosomes.

But the IOC, quickly followed by a legion of breathless progressives decried any acknowledgement as “hate speech,” “bigotry” and, as they cycled through the usual list of stonewalling epithets, moving on later in the week to “disinformation” and “Russian interference.” I anticipate them blaming Donald Trump the “the far right” tomorrow.

The arguments progressives began to cobble together did not deny that this was his chromosomal makeup but rather that two other factors trumped any genetic test’s possible conclusions: his sex was listed as “female” on both his birth certificate and passport. A doctor had put the wrong sex on the form because he had failed to notice the minor genetic defect that concealed the baby’s penis and scrotum, which did not descend until he was in his early teens as he went through bog standard male puberty that built the body he inhabits today. And because Algerian passports are based on citizens’ birth certificates, this error was replicated on his travel documents.

Progressives then argued that he was a “biological woman” and “assigned female at birth,” based on what his government-issued ID said. Memes abound about how “far right disinformation” is causing people to believe Imane Khelif is a man when “she” is clearly a woman. These memes almost always included Khelif clearly looking and posing like the man he is.

And even when the XY chromosomes are acknowledged, Woke folk have gone on to argue that “some women have Y chromosomes” and “she has female Y chromosomes.”

Wokes Believe in the Adam-God Heresy
It is tempting to think that progressives are engaged in a broad-based grassroots effort at gaslighting the rest of us i.e. destabilizing our sense of what is real through a programmatic campaign of disorientation and deception.

But that would be a silly conspiracy theory because it would involve millions of people engaging in coordinated acts of bad faith. When I debate progressives on these subjects, I do not get a sense of bad faith. I get a disturbing sense of passionate sincerity, the sort I pick up from Young Earth Creationists, like the person arguing with me has something more than belief; they have faith; that this is true because it needs to be true for the universe to be as I need it to be.

So, how can we understand these three interventions as sincere representations of the Woke worldview? I think we have to go back to the understanding that just as the Second Great Awakening gave birth to the first American space religion, Mormonism, the Third Great Awakening has spawned Wokeness, the most popular of all American space religions, outstripping the original Sandinismo, the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Nation of Islam of Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan, and even Scientology.

American space religions have a number of common features other religions generally do not have. And I have written at some length about their common doctrine that we all have pre-existent spirits that possess a race and a gender before they are born into the material world. But that is not their most important doctrinal feature nor the one relevant to what we have witnessed this week.

Shortly before his martyrdom in 1844, Joseph Smith revealed his last and greatest cosmological revelation in the King Follett Discourse, our God, he explained, was not always God. He was once a man who lived on the planet Kolob and made himself God by learning the secrets of the universe, the powers of the priesthood, powers that inhere in his mastery of true name magic.

That’s the most distinctive thing about American space religions: they are essentially godless. They do not believe in God as ontologically distinct from humans; they believe that men can learn powerful magic and make themselves gods. That’s the goal in the LDS, NOI and Scientology: auto-apotheosis.

Mormonism did not emerge, fully formed, like Athena, from the forehead of Zeus. Historian John Brooke shows us that it was an agglomeration of folks beliefs of a group of English religious refugees known as the Cunning Men, the working class manifestation of the great Hermetic magi of the Renaissance, like Elizabeth I’s court astrologer John Dee. While they believed themselves to be practitioners of various magical arts they peddled to the popular classes, like astrology, love magic and divining, their greatest power came from their mastery of Hermetic true name magic.

True name magic refers to kind of magical practice premised on the idea that if you know the “true name” of a person or thing, you have a special magical power over it. The main Mormon activity, “temple work” i.e. the baptism of the dead, requires that LDS members compile the names of their dead relatives so that they can baptize them retroactively through a set of secret temple rituals. Without knowledge of the precise names of the deceased, the rituals do not work. All that genealogical work is about learning people’s names so that their spirits in the afterlife can be acted-upon.

It is in this context that we should also understand NOI’s practice of converts taking a new name, upon conversion, to reflect the fundamental change in the nature of their spirit. Having come up with the idea of “dead naming,” long before the trans movement was a glint in Pfizer’s eye, NOI adherents understand the use of their prior name as causing them not just public shame but a kind of spiritual damage.

American space religions share a common intellectual ancestry with the Kabalarian church, another movement practicing Hermetic true name magic: the myth popular among many medieval Jewish and Christian cabalists that Adam was actually God, that he had created the world by naming the objects in the Garden into existence.

This understanding the relationship between language and the world is what we are contending with now. In place of the Adam-God myth as the justifying discourse buttressing this view, we have vulgar postmodernism alloyed with the Humpty Dumpty Fallacy.  

Through the Looking Glass with Humpty Dumpty

“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’

‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’

‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’”

Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass chills us with its prescience here. Humpty Dumpty’s promiscuous, arbitrary and dictatorial control of language is power, nothing more, nothing less.

Woke apologists like Judith Butler vulgarize and redefine the linguistic constructionism of Jacques Derrida and the postmodernists and basically argue that reality, our shared world is made out of words and that if we change the words, we change the world. They also vulgarize and debase Michel Foucault and the poststructuralists’ idea of the “episteme,” arguing not that how knowledge is “made” and power is distributed are intimately related in a complex dance but instead simply that knowledge and power are either the same thing or completely interchangeable things.

In other words, Wokes live in a world in which the words on a birth certificate or passport absolutely do supersede anything their lying eyes might witness. The state and a certified medical doctor put “female” on that birth certificate. The Algerian state then confirmed it by putting it on a passport. What could be me more authoritative than expertise fused with state power? How could one’s senses or one’s common sense possibly compete in making authoritative claims?

If an art historian says “Last Supper on the Seine” is not about the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci but about an obscure Dutch painting called Festin Des Dieux, why would one need to bother looking at the painting? An expert opinion naturally trumps what one’s lying eyes might observe if one tried looking at both paintings and comparing them to the dance number.

But the case of the scrotum is the most disturbing because it demonstrates that this sort of thing has become such a habit of mind for progressives that their first move is to deny what their adversaries say they see, no matter how visually obvious. After all, just today, an MSNBC host posted to Twitter that that nobody tried to shoot Donald Trump the other week.

While progressives prefer it when experts or the state, more fully endowed with Hermetic magical powers, do their work for them and change reality by renaming what we see as something we do not see, grassroots devotees are growing more confident in their mastery of true name magic, their development as fully functioning magi, themselves. Through an act of naming, they can make a scrotum vanish, not visually, of course, but in the ultimate reality, the reality of true names.

Or, as Orwell put it, “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Authoritarianism Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

The Anti-Cosmopolitian City – Part 3: The Problem of the Self-Made

When we think about the term “self-made” we usually associate it with a semi-apocryphal Horatio Alger story of how a rich man made himself rich. But the reality is that bootstrap narratives are just one kind of self-making practice and, as our culture has come to prize self-making to an ever greater degree, they represent a smaller minority.

For this reason, as social scientists have grown more interested in the phenomenon, they have coined a synonymous term for it, “self-fashioning,” to refer to all social practices of seeing one’s reputation and image as something one primarily owns and controls, oneself.

While I am a highly attention-seeking person, I am not a self-fashioner probably because I am a lousy actor and am incapable of pretending to be anyone other than myself for any extended period of time. But I would also like to think that, like most reasonably well-adjusted people, I do not believe in self-fashioning as a practice nor in a worldviews that validate and underpin those practices.

The reality is that who we are to other people is something they own; we do not own other people’s thoughts and opinions about us. They are part of them, not us. Our identities are what I typically term “intersubjective.” Needless to say, I have spilled a fair bit of ink attacking the way Genderwang pronoun politics are a direct assault on that intersubjectivity, by arguing that our opinions about other people are part of them, not part of us. This is even framed in the discourse of “rights,” in which supposedly I have the right to be talked about by third parties in ways consistent with my self-image and to stop them talking about me in ways inconsistent with who I think I am.

But Genderwang is the exception, at least for now, in that most self-fashioning projects are not backed up by the long arm of the law or the threat of unemployment and public shaming. Most self-fashioning projects are conducted primarily through acts of persuasion, acting and, most relevant to this essay series, relocation.

We need look no further than the Gospels to see what an important tool urbanization is in the self-fashioner’s toolbox. When Jesus visits his home town of Nazareth, no one there will believe he is the Son of God or the Messiah; they won’t even believe he is a competent exorcist or interpreter of scripture. “And he said, ‘Truly I tell you, no prophet is accepted in his hometown.’” Luke 4:24. In other words, no one who watched you grow up is going to be convinced of your new special identity.

In healthy societies, prophets and other sorts of self-fashioners are few and far between. But, as Monty Python so brilliantly observed in The Life of Brian half a century ago, the culture of the New Left shares with Judea and Samaria in the era of Jesus, John the Baptist, Dositheus and Simon Magus a culture generative of self-fashioning projects.

In most healthy societies, who people think you are is not something people believe they have much of a choice about. Especially in village-based societies, your identity just naturally accretes to you. People form an idea of who you are based on their shared experiences with you, the associates you surround yourself with, the work you do to make a living. You discover who you are as people develop expectations about you, tell stories about you, confer nicknames on you. Your identity is not something you make but something you co-discover with the people around you.

In societies and subcultures where self-fashioning is more acceptable and valued as a behaviour, it tends to produce certain kinds of social morbidities. If you believe that who you are as a person can be and should be controllable by acts of persuasion, manipulation and/or coercion, people tend to have a more fragile, defensive sense of self. By conflating who one is with who one is considered to be and then stating that this is something one both can and should primarily control, one produces people who are less honest and more fragile, especially when we decide that our reputations are owned not by everyone but us but by ourselves.

Such societies often become obsessed with social rank and categorization, like the eighteenth century Spanish Empire, in which the empire’s original four racial categories mushroomed into dozens. Such societies also generate more complex and coercive systems of etiquette in which people are punished for such things as incorrect forms of address and levels of grammatical formality. They also tend to be prone to the pursuit of personal vendettas based around putative injuries to one’s social body, a kind of social system we call “honour culture,” in which the infliction of physical or financial damage is viewed as a reasonable and commensurate reaction to acts perceived as reputational assaults.

Those most committed to creating and burnishing their self-made reputations are naturally going to be over-represented among intolerant urbanizers. Not only does urbanization make self-fashioning possible; the very way intolerant urbanizers is part of the self-fashioning project in that it reifies the character, the nature of the place they have moved and then fuses that reified nature with the self. For the intolerant urbanizer, moving to a city like Victoria or Nelson is not just about getting to reset one’s reputation; it is about deciding that their new city embodies a laudable characteristic, like healthy living or a high THC tolerance, a characteristic they admire or aspire to and wish to incorporate into the self they are fashioning.

Furthermore, intolerant urbanizers are often genuinely escaping communities lacking in tolerance, diversity and heterodoxy. But while this means, on one hand, that they prize their own freedom from the confines of their former community, it also means that they have been raised with the habits of mind of an intolerant villager, habits to which they may naturally revert when stressed or confused.

For many years, cities have been awash in self-fashioning urbanizers with few adverse social effects. And, on the streets of our cities, aside from compulsory Pharma Pride signage and regalia, there is little immediately visible sign of our emerging intolerant urban honour culture. The modern phenomenon of the intolerant urbanizer is mitigated, opposed even, by the intrinsically cosmopolitan nature of urban space, with different sorts of people pushed together onto the same streets, into the same stores, the same government offices, etc.

It is primarily the synergistic effects of social media technologies and the rise of neo-McCarthyism that have transformed merely fragile self-fashioners into the backbone of the new urban intolerance. The politics of neo-McCarthyism is one profoundly concerned with questions of purity, pollution and contagion. I am not exceptional in that what actually triggered my cancelation was my defense of a canceled person. The sole demand of a cancelation campaign is for people to sever all social links to the object of the campaign lest they themselves become infected, polluted.

By giving their subscribers the ability, for free, to police this new politics of purity and pollution, to monitor, minute-to-minute the “friends,” and “followers” of those they know, Facebook, Twitter and their ilk have made possible forms of exclusion and ostracism inconceivable on the sidewalk of a cosmopolitan city but possible through the data networks covering that city. Worse than the “friends” lists are the photos. Appearing in photographs with me or other canceled people on Instagram or Facebook is socially costly to progressives because photos are indicative of a genuine social connection and ongoing relationship.

For self-fashioners, the consequences of one’s carefully curated public image being polluted, contaminated, goes beyond the material risks of cancelation. Not only does your reputation change against your will, the control over that reputation that you have carefully developed over years vanishes. It is not merely that your identity changes into one you like less; the control you exert over that identity is immediately and permanently diminished, undermining not just your current self-fashioning project but any future acts of self-fashioning.

It is not as much out of a greater commitment to progressive orthodoxy that intolerant urbanizers are the leaders in creating a new, more intolerant urban social contract as it is out of a greater fear on the part of this group. But because fear is the greatest chameleon of emotions, they can hide that fear behind acts of performative outrage.

Essentially, our social media has villagized, in unprecedented ways, key aspects of the urban social contract, just as it has urbanized, in equally unprecedented ways key aspects of rural social contracts. And so, what we are seeing in our newly intolerant cities, is the Janus face of Marshall McLuhan’s “global village.”

Authoritarianism Politics of Identity | fusangite |

Heresiologists, Censors, Exegetes and the Communications Protocols of Theocracy

In Defense of Marx and Foucault
Michel Foucault and, especially, Karl Marx are the two chief culprits responsible for Wokeness, according to far too many conservatives, whose intellectual camp is best represented by mathematician James Lindsay and psychologist Jordan Peterson. As I have explained in a previous essay, this blame is affixed largely affixed by way of a logical fallacy known as “begging the question,” which operates through a kind of intellectual cherry-picking.

My desire to defend both Marx and Foucault does not merely come from the fact that I am a Marxist, a socialist and a former academic who used both Marx and Foucault in my work. I defend their scholarship, their corpora of books and essays because they contain some of the most important intellectual tools we have for understanding and overcoming our present malaise.

Foucault is often abused by the establishment these days because he suggested that different social orders, “epistemes” he called them, have different ways of “producing knowledge.” Many opponents of Genderwang, climate denial, Young Earth creationism, indigenous neotraditionalism and other morbidities of our present age lay the blame for the ascendance of these ideas on Foucault’s way of talking about knowledge produced in different social orders. Knowledge is discovered, they point out, not produced.

But Foucault’s point is that different historical periods have different approaches to knowledge. Knowledge in the Enlightenment episteme involves a whole lot more discovery and a whole lot less creation than in the period preceding it, the Baroque. And it seems that in our current epistemological interregnum, memorably referred to by psychologist Seerut Chawla as “the Gaslightenment,” we are seeing an increasing portion of our knowledge being “made” through processes that involve precious little discovery.

While I have devoted much of this blog to examining post-Enlightenment conservative knowledge-making practices in my essay series (now twelve years old!) on the “authentic episteme,” and on climate denialism, I have not spilled nearly as much ink on the emerging practices of Woke epistemology, having been far more focused on progressive dynamics of social control than knowledge-making.

Of course, there are certain kinds of knowledge-making that we see in the ascendant socio-political cultures of the left and right that we see mirrored in each other, such as reverse-oraclism, whereby people decide that if their opponents deeply hold a belief, its opposite most, axiomatically be true. If bad people think the planet is warming, this, in and of itself, is absolute positive proof it cannot be warming. If bad people think that male bodies have an advantage over female bodies in sport, it is sufficient and positive proof that male and female bodies perform identically in sporting events.

But whereas, on the right, this is paired with the epistemology of “authenticity,” as epitomized in the Trump movement, it is associated, on the increasingly establishment-aligned left with what I might call a new politics of heresy and orthodoxy.

Life Under Orthodox Hegemony
As I have suggested in multiple essays, it is best to understand contemporary establishment-endorsed progressive thought not as an ideology but as an orthodoxy. That is because, when assailed, it responds in much the way the Roman Catholic hierarchy establishment responded to Galileo’s multi-front dispute with the Church. It does not counter claims made by heretics; rather it un-says them by arguing that their articulation should never have been permitted and therefore has not taken place.

It is not that my views on Genderwang are assailed as wrong. Rather they are assailed on the grounds that they are transphobic and should not have been allowed to be articulated. By proving they are “transphobic,” i.e. blasphemous, their veracity need not be contested because their status as blasphemous un-says them, meaning that no one needs to contradict them because we must all behave as though they were never articulated.

Not a week goes by that I do not read a Facebook meme or update by a progressive friend stating that Elon Musk is a fascist, a Nazi who has “ruined” Twitter and made it a platform for “hate.” This is obviously rot. In many ways, Twitter’s protections for individual users have steadily improved under Musk’s leadership. In addition to un-banning gender critical accounts, accounts are now suspended or banned if they threaten to rape or murder individual women and the “#KillTERFs” and “#PunchTERFs” hashtags have been disabled. Twitter now has across-the-board standards against death threats, rape threats and doxing, a far cry from the previous administration that fought Margaret Atwood in court over her doxing by Toronto trans rights activists.

What people object to is that Musk has fired 90% of the censors working for Twitter and got the platform out of the business of un-saying unorthodox things, and not just gender critical things. Tweets about Wuhan lab leak hypothesis, Hunter Biden’s criminal antics and a host of other issues are not retroactively deleted at the behest of Democratic Party fixers or US intelligence agencies.

Whereas conventional propagandists, both honest and dishonest, both left and right, have to job of contradicting opposing views, the censor’s job is different; it is not to contradict opposing opinions but to un-say unorthodox ones. The return of the censor has certainly been noticeable in the past half-decade and was not unexpected—although I will grant the vast popularity of the censors in certain quarters is not something I saw coming.

From Cultural Translation to Theological Exegesis
We have been so vigilant about the theocratic dreams of the Christian right that we failed to notice a novel American space religion, Wokeness, take over first the political left and then our society’s major institutions of both the public and private sectors. And now we find ourselves living under a highly orthodox regime that is secular in name only, running our schools, staging compulsory parades, affixing its holy symbols to everything, conducting witch hunts and staging new, somber otherworldly public rituals.

Given that this is our situation, we need to remember how knowledge practices work in a true orthodox theocracy. A theocracy does not just need censors and inquisitors as enforcers of orthodoxy; it needs exegetes and heresiologists to construct and maintain both the orthodoxy and the heresies that assail it.

In any healthy society or subculture, there is going to be coded communication, a way that someone can speak over the heads of people outside their discourse community and use a set of verbal cues to inform community members of an additional meaning to one’s words. The study of coded communication on the American Right was an important and legitimate practice of political scientists at one point.

For instance, a key reason that Harriet Miers’ Supreme Court nomination failed in 2005 was that Democrats made much of Bush signaling to his base that she was far more anti-abortion than she publicly claimed because “I know her heart.”

In the years that followed, a whole industry grew up to study and explain to the public the meaning of “right-wing dog whistles.” The original practitioners of this art were people who had spent years or decades immersing themselves in conservative evangelical culture, learning the unique and distinctive vocabulary of the culture. Once upon a time, it even employed senator JD Vance. But even as this industry expanded, as the cultural divide in America widened and the appetite for non-literal interpretations of seemingly incomprehensible or uncanny communications from the right grew, its most successful practitioners ceased to be social scientists.

Like the ascetics, the inquisitors and the censors, another venerable vocation of authoritarian theocracies returned with a vengeance: the exegete.

Exegesis is a religious practice that goes back to the Classical Mediterranean. Greeks and Romans had an understanding that every great civilization had a canonical text, one that contained the ur-narrative of society, which told of a culture’s founders, their heroic acts and the moral teachings on which the society was based. The truly great, venerable civilizations, the Egyptians, Babylonians and Indians had such texts; and the Jews were singled-out, despite their small numbers and lack of political power, as “the nation of philosophers” on the primary basis that they had the Torah, a text that shared the properties of a great founding text like Gilgamesh or the Bhagavad Gita.

Greeks but to an even greater extent, Romans, felt that the Iliad and Odyssey, their foundational texts, did not entirely measure up. While the Iliad does clearly engage in moral teaching, it does so not hagiographically but instead through the use of sarcasm and irony, such as the mocking tone with which Homer refers to Agamemnon as “shepherd of the people.”

The Stoic movement experienced this problem so acutely that it invented a new way of reading and interpreting texts known as exegesis whereby a text was read using a set of non-literal interpretive techniques incorporating symbolism, numerology, theology and a host of other tools to derive prophetic or hortatory meanings from what seemed like stories of petty, mean, vain people.

And when it became the job of early Christians to make the Torah congruent with the new teachings of the Gospels, church fathers Tertullian and Irenaeus imported a particular kind of exegetical practice into Christianity to render the acts of the prophets morally neutral or upstanding. The most famous example of this is in the redemption of Abraham as a moral actor and teacher through exegesis.

It was good that Abraham nearly put his son Isaac to death because the arrested sacrifice of his son was not really a narrowly averted murder in profane space-time but the prefiguration of God allowing his son to die for our sins. How could what Abraham did be problematic if its main function was to reveal to the universe, the Lord’s plan for our universal salvation?

Of course, such an interpretation would have been unavailable to Abraham, Isaac, Sarah or the community around them. It was only available based on the knowledge of a Christian after the death and resurrection of Christ. In this way, exegesis is a process of severing the meaning of words or events from their historical and social contexts and placing them inside the context of the contemporary orthodoxy.

Exegetes abound in today’s progressiverse. When Kelly Jay Keen did up the zipper on her pullover during a TV interview, exegetes immediately pronounced that she had communicated with her base using an obscure Nazi salute. When Pierre Poilievre visited a protester whose van had a scrawled sharpie drawing of a joke plan for partitioning North America from a right-wing podcast, it was decided that he intentionally allowed the image to be captured to signal to his followers that he supported a violent insurrection to unite the Canadian boreal forest with the states of Old Dixie in a single polity. Our national broadcaster, CBC, has many exegetes on staff to let us know all the different things that have become “racist dog whistles,” like our country’s own flag and anthem.

Whereas the top exegetes in a theocracy are engaged in burnishing and dignifying its canonical texts, most exegetes work on this sort of stuff: showing that within relatively innocuous unorthodox texts is an invisible substrate of Satanic heresy, carefully concealed by the servants of the Prince of Darkness in apparently simple or banal language. No knowledge about the text’s author or readership is necessary in such work. The knowledge one needs is the knowledge encoded in the magisterium, one’s own theological framework.

And exegesis has become such a common practice that progressive social media is overflowing with exegetes. When I say things like “no child is born in the wrong body,” progressive exegetes are quick to response, “so you’re saying trans people don’t have the right to exist and should kill themselves.” They are not lying when they say that. They have undergone hours of careful carrot-and-stick training to know that any person who says this really is planning the mass killing of all trans-identified adults and children. Because that is what their theology’s exegesis of such words necessarily concludes. And the response is so consistent because they do not actually use any knowledge about my community to know what I mean; their own theology tells them what I must mean.

Exegetes are, of course, very important in heresy trials, like Amy Hamm’s three year inquisition at the hands of the BC College of Nurses. So many social media posts must be reinterpreted as “hate speech” and “disinformation,” but those interpretations are not made by placing her tweets in the context in which they appeared, addressing the audience she was addressing but instead removing them from their context and audience to radically reinterpret and de-literalize their meaning.

Obviously, the work of high priests, grand inquisitors and censors necessarily depend on the creative labour of exegetes. But in addition, the return of the exegetes also enables the rise of a fifth theocratic guild: the heresiologists.

The Rise of the Heresiologists
When the CBC and others decided that Diagolon was an actual organization, a hate group with a paramilitary and plans to violently overthrow the Canadian government, they were not exactly lying. They were engaged in elaborating exegesis into something larger and more politicized, heresiology.

It is no coincidence that Irenaeus, one of Christianity’s first exegetes was also its first heresiologist. His book, Against Heresies, published in the late second century, purported to offer comprehensive list of the various heretical movements within Christianity; there were the Valentinians, the Ophites, the Marcosians, the followers of Simon Magus and Menander, etc. While some of the heretical movements were real movements, real competing churches, like the Marcionites and the Ebionites, most appear to have been creations of the mind of Irenaeus.

Irenaeus’ method appears to have been noticing certain unorthodox beliefs and rituals common among Christians, grouping together those that commonly coincided and then constructing a theology based on his understanding of the heretical beliefs. Once a theology was developed, it then followed, in the mind of Irenaeus that not only were these irregular beliefs and rituals united in a coherent theological system; these constructed theologies were then assumed to be practiced by an organized movement of practitioners who mutually recognized one another and participated in a shared leadership structure.

This is the work of organizations like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network in fabricating organizations like Diagolon or the vast white supremacist fascist network I am supposedly part of that organized the September 21st, 2023 national child safeguarding marches.

When progressives encounter the unorthodox today, they assume that we are colluding to hide our true beliefs and advance our shared, coordinated agenda of violently seizing control of the Canadian state so that we can murder homosexuals, immigrants and trans-identified people. Exegetes are interpreting our language for them to tell us what we really mean when we say innocuous things like “DEI trainings have been consistently shown to increase incidents of workplace racism.” And heresiologists are telling them about the vast shadowy transnational hate organizations we are working for.

This sort of thing has become so common as a progressive practice that rather than fighting against the Republican Party’s real and clearly fiscally, environmentally and socially irresponsible platform, online progressives have decided, with the assistance of their exegetes and heresiologists that the party’s “real” platform is a document by the Heritage Foundation, that does not enjoy the support of the GOP senate or house leadership and which Donald Trump has labeled “crazy” is the actual platform of the party. They know what the GOP “really means.”

The problem is that this approach is becoming less useful by the minute. Between the massive Trump takeover and cultural realignment of the party and the rapidly increasing proportion of unchurched Republicans, not only have Anglo American conservatives lost much of their capacity to communicate with one another in code; they have also lost their taste for it.

The Trump movement, and grassroots populists more generally, are not about coded communication and references to unstated symbols. That’s not their thing anymore. They revel in saying precisely what they actually mean, especially because saying unvarnished and impolite things about, for instance, immigration policy, speaking in ways unpermitted and unorthodox in the public square, is the more disruptive act now.

This is epitomized in their refusal to drop the term “red-pilled” from their vocabulary even as they learn that the Matrix was written as a trans allegory by the Wachowski’s about their own journey into sissy porn and self-mutilation. This is their style of rejecting context and imposing their own meaning on a text. They get to decide what red-pilled means, based on their reading of their movie, their associations, their memories, not the Wachowskis’.

In this way, we find ourselves returning to a key moment in the original MAGA campaign, Ronald Reagan’s 1984 re-election bid, which made Bruce Springsteen’s anti-conservative, anti-imperial, anti-militarist Born in the USA into the anthem for Reagan’s militarism and dreams of empire.

It didn’t matter that Springsteen was eventually able to get the campaign to stop playing it; it remained an anthem for a movement that would have had a big beef with the song if they had bothered to listen to the lyrics with any care or precision. But in 1984, the joke was not the Republicans. The joke was on us.

Anglo Americans outside of the progressiverse are fed to the teeth with being told what our gestures, our words, our flags and writings “really mean.” Because those declarations are made without reference to or interest in what we actually think, and instead based on the political exigencies of maintaining Woke hegemony.

It is this kind of social moment to which Foucault sought to draw our attention when he coined the term “knowledge production.”

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

The Spread of the Culture War and the New Politics of Denial and Superstition

Election Results from the European Union
Many of my former comrades are wringing their hands about the turn European elections are taking these days. They worry that various “far right” parties are taking Europe by storm and are about to create authoritarian fascist regimes that suppress people’s basic political rights, such as their freedom of assembly, speech and movement.

But the reality is that many of these parties, while historically right-wing and anti-immigration, are fueled by anti-authoritarian voters who are already experiencing progressive, globalist governments limiting their freedom of assembly, speech and movement. Parties like Alliance for Germany, Brothers of Italy and Reform UK certainly do have their share of disturbing supporters and do fan the flames of nativism.

But to everyday folks, these parties are the only ones promising to stop jailing people for refusing to use wrong-sex pronouns, stop working with Big Tech and the American Military-Industrial Complex to censor and surveil our everyday communications, explore a policy of détente rather than escalation on Europe’s Eastern border, safeguard people’s right not to be fired for political wrongthink and keep men out of women’s sports and spaces. They are the parties that express respect for farmers, veterans and other vocations admired by the working class but belittled by the commissars.

So I think the fear that these parties represent anything other than, at absolute worst, a lateral move, when it comes to people’s political rights and basic freedoms. Furthermore, these is no evidence to suggest that continuing to ramp up migration into societies unable to handle such high levels is somehow going to produce less “hate” towards minorities than the migration restriction policies of the European right. Let us remember that, when fascism was first on the rise in the 1920s, it was pragmatic reductions in migration that helped to calm tensions, reduce anti-immigrant violence and prevent the rise of fascism in many countries, including the US and Canada.

What troubles me about these parties and their rise is not that. It is the way in which they are expanding the reach of the most pernicious elements of the Anglo American culture war. Many of these newly ascendant parties on the right, and new parties trying to represent the Old Growth Left, like George Galloway’s Workers’ Party of Britain and Sahra Wagenknecht’s Reason and Justice Alliance of Germany, share a feature uncommon in European political parties, even highly conservatives ones, just a few years ago.

They take pseudoscientific positions on the climate crisis. I do not merely mean that they pursue policies that will increase carbon emissions. Parties across the political spectrum do that, with various justifications or, increasingly frequently, none at all. Indeed, as British Columbia and Germany have recently shown, Social Democratic-Green coalition governments can be the most effective at building pipelines, burning coal and fracking gas. Conservative parties wish they could match the kinds of alliances Greens and Social Democrats can make with Big Oil, like the $6 billion in new subsidies the NDP and Greens handed companies like Petronas and Royal Dutch Shell. As I have written before, nothing raises investment capital for a new pipeline better than a photo of Greta Thunberg posing with the leader of the jurisdiction in which it is to be built.

The battle between the British Conservative Party and Nigel Farage’s Reform Party (that guy has staged more political comebacks that I have ever attempted!) is a microcosm of the upsetting spread of the Anglo American culture war through the whole of the Global North, reshaping the First World’s epistemology and experience of community.

In the 1980s, political parties of all stripes accepted the Greenhouse Effect as part of a long-term scientific consensus and pledged to take decisive action to address it. The political debate was about which parties’ plans for dealing with the climate made the most sense and were most cost-feasible. But in the 1990s, that shifted. With the defeat of the regimes of Brian Mulroney and George H W Bush, a new kind of conservative climate politics came to the fore: leaders like Stockwell Day, Stephen Harper, Newt Gingrich and Ralph Klein did not deny that the Greenhouse Effect was real. They simply maintained that it wasn’t that big a deal and, besides, there was no point in doing anything because India’s and China’s economies were expanding and would increase emissions anyway, and besides, it would be way too costly to actually do anything effective anyway. I characterize this position as “climate nihilism.”

But in Europe, conservative parties remained in the state of 1980s American conservatism until recently, with leaders like Angela Merkel and Rishi Sunak still slinging the climate politics of a Mulroney. Farage eclipsing Sunak would constitute British conservatism leaping directly from climate action to full-on denialism, skipping a whole generation of nihilism.

The Rise of the Denialists
With the rise of Trump, climate nihilism was deposed as the normative position of the right. Climate denialism took its place. As I have discussed in other essays, I continue to use the term “denialism,” despite its pejorative connotations because it is descriptive of a particular way of structuring belief. Climate denialists have no shared or stable position on how the climate does work, only on how it does not.

As I have stated in other essays, climate denialists comprise four main intellectual tendencies:

  • individuals who believe that humans cannot, by definition, change the climate; some base this belief on a view that only God can change the earth’s climate; others base their belief on the idea that the earth is very very big and we are very very small;
  • individuals who believe that carbon atoms in the atmosphere do not have a highly efficient insulating effect but instead that they either (i) are incapable of producing an insulating effect at their current density, (ii) are incapable of producing an insulating effect at any density, (iii) are reflecting so much heat away from the earth that they are actually cooling it;
  • individuals who follow the new thinking of Patrick Moore that atmospheric carbon atoms do rapidly warm the planet and that we must increase global temperatures by ten degrees Celsius as quickly as possible because (i) we must do so to ward off an impending ice age (ii) the planet must be helped to reach its full life-supporting potential, which can only be realized under Eocene hothouse conditions;
  • individuals who believe that the inherent inaccuracy of long-term climate forecasting models for a chaotic, complex system like the atmosphere discredits the underlying science of the effects of atmospheric carbon and has demonstrated that there cannot be a Greenhouse Effect

I say “tendencies” rather than camps or groups because climate denialists will switch between these positions multiple times, often in a single conversation. When they do this together, they tend to feel affirmed and agreed-with, even if the person they are talking to is directly contradicting a claim they have just made. This is even more maddening when one is arguing with a denialist and they switch among these positions in the course of a single conversation.

So, the spread of climate denialism from the original Anglo white settler states, Australia, Canada, New Zealand and the US across the Atlantic, to the UK and onto the continent is a concern, not just when it comes to public discourse but because of the function denialism performs.

In other essays, I have written about how climate denialism does have clear pro-social functions, like the way it seems to reduce the celebration of child endangerment and abuse. But I want to suggest that its primary function is one of boundary maintenance, of community construction. Because climate denialism is not a stable set of ideas, an ideology or an alternative scientific theory, it is not persuasive, from a logical perspective. You cannot become convinced of denialism in the way you become convinced of an idea.

I have watched a number of people become climate denialists, people I respected and continue to respect. These people have a common story: they, like me, were progressives. They, like me, were canceled. They, like me, found a new and welcoming community on the anti-authoritarian populist right.

They, in other words, were people who had been traumatically rejected by long-term friends and communities in which they had felt safe, and were followed to their new community by feelings of profound unsafety. So, when they saw that contemporary Anglo-American conservatives use climate denial as a form of community boundary maintenance and identification, they were strongly motivated the make their position on the right secure.

Their motivation was, of course, conditioned not by how conservatives handle pluralism but how progressives have come to handle it. I work with conservatives all the time. Perhaps because they are constantly being inundated with refugees from the left, conservatives have developed a more pluralistic social contract. I can be their friend and comrade without being a conservative. My opinions on climate are not a firing offense, when it comes to our shared projects and relationships. But they do mark me as a non-conservative, a member of an ideological minority group temporarily sheltering in conservative society.

A key reason my friends and comrades have been so willing to adopt climate denial is their experience in progressive society. You see: over the past decade, just as conservatives have made the pseudoscience of climate denial their primary boundary maintenance condition, progressives have made their own pseudoscience, genderwang, theirs.

Like climate denialism, genderwang is a denialist community. It doesn’t deny the Greenhouse Effect. It denies something even bigger and more obvious: the existence of biological sex in the human species. And it, too, encompasses a set of mutually contradictory intellectual tendencies:

  • sex is assigned at birth by authoritarian genocidal medical personnel, not observed; there is no difference between male and female bodies other than the physically undetectable, immutable pre-existent sexed soul inside them; there are female penises and male vaginas; there is no way, from simply looking at a body, to know its sex; sex and gender are the same thing and people know their true sex, in their mind even in the womb and knowing it is their first conscious thought; people with vaginas lose races to people with penises because they are lazy, don’t try hard enough and are deliberately losing to make trans people look bad;
  • the invisible, undetectable, immutable, pre-existent soul inside people has a gender; a person’s gender can differ from their biological sex; in fact, with increasing frequency, the pre-existent gendered souls are born in the wrong-sex body; we must medically intervene to correct this birth defect by performing “gender-affirming” surgeries to make these bodies’ sex align with their gender; sex and gender are completely different things and people know their true immutable, pre-existent gender, in their mind, even in the womb, and knowing it is their first conscious thought;
  • we are all on a “gender journey” and our biological sex may change, sometimes multiple times, throughout our lives; thanks to new technologies, we can keep swapping out body parts and sex characteristics like Mister Potato Head, with absolutely no medical or psychiatric consequences; the only medical risk is not following a soul on its gender journey; sex and gender are sometimes the same thing and sometimes not, depending on what needs to happen next; and people’s knowledge of what their sex is shifts with their sex, itself, sometimes within a few hours.

As with climate denialists, sex denialists will only see these mutually contradictory ideas reinforcing each other. Like climate denialists, they might take all of these positions in the course of a single conversation or argument. But the consequences of noticing these contradictions are much more severe. They can lead to the loss of the custody of one’s children, loss of employment, loss of friendships and relationships, expulsion from churches and civil society groups and, in an increasing number of countries, incarceration.

As I suggested in my piece on the Donatist Crisis, the best community boundary maintenance is done with word salad, not sense, with pseudoscience and magical belief, not ideas or knowledge. Espousing belief in nonsense, in magic, in word salad can only measure one thing: allegiance to the community that shares this putative belief. The problem with making membership in a community contingent on a scientific belief or consistent ideology is the danger that someone espousing the belief is not a loyal member of the community because they might have simply been convinced of its veracity. Only magical belief and pseudoscience represent membership and loyalty, alone.

Straw Men and Only Straw Men
Another way one can detect that we are dealing with communities of magical belief is their tendency to never present the argument of their opponents but to always outrageously strawman it. There are lots of polarizing debates in which the adversaries clearly understand and accurately represent their opponents’ arguments.

Gun control comes readily to mind. Advocates for gun control focus their arguments on breaking down the idea that an armed populace is more effective at resisting tyranny. Gun control opponents focus their arguments on how little about the gun market law enforcement is capable of controlling, when the culture is hostile to that control. Looking back at the debate, it seems pretty respectful and responsible. People hear each other’s points and disagree.

Compare the popular gun control memes and claims of the Sex Denialist and Climate Denialist movements. They almost all entail presenting outrageous falsehoods about the beliefs of those outside the community, falsehoods easily debunked if there were any good faith direct interaction going on.

Common Climate Denialist claims include:

  • opponents believe every sovereign country has its own climate and atmosphere and any emission increases or reductions directly and immediately affect those in the country in which an emission originated’;
  • opponents claim that everywhere in the world is always hotter than it was the year before, that “average global temperature” means “local temperature everywhere”;
  • opponents all wish to end farming and switch to a diet of veganism and insects;
  • there was a scientific consensus in which opponents believed in the 70s and 80s, predicting an imminent global ice age;
  • opponents never believed in the destabilizing polar vortex or any other climate phenomenon that increases the number of unpredictable, unseasonable cold weather events, are completely taken by surprise by these events and are unable to explain them;
  • opponents believe that the climate has never changed before and have never heard of the Medieval Warm Period, Little Ice Age or Darkening of the Sun and cannot explain these things;
  • opponents believe that their individual lifestyle changes to reduce carbon emissions will cause their personal lives to be less afflicted by warming and extreme weather events; and
  • opponents believe that carbon dioxide and methane are the only things in the atmosphere that affect climate.

Common Sex Denialist claims include:

  • opponents advocate that everyone’s genitals be inspected before they are permitted to enter a washroom;
  • opponents oppose people of both sexes using single-occupant washrooms;
  • opponents demand that children and adults conform to stereotypical roles based on their birth sex;
  • opponents want to hurt gender-confused children, either by driving them to suicide, brainwashing or violently assaulting them;
  • no homosexuals oppose sex denialism;
  • opponents hate homosexuals and want them to be subject to mass violence and assault;
  • opponents are completely focused on the genitals of trans-identified people because nothing other than their genitals distinguishes them from the sex class they are trying to identify into;
  • opponents are all social conservatives and motivated by religious intolerance;
  • opponents are led by a Scottish children’s book author and do not form their own opinions, instead fanatically following her diktats; and
  • no opponent genuinely cares about prison rape, women’s sports, rape shelters, child safeguarding or the health of gay and autistic youth; people adversely impacted by genderwang policies do not exist, deserve whatever happens to them if they do exist (because they are only claiming to be hurt because they are bigots), and are not and should not be genuinely cared-about by anyone else.

Not only are these claims all false; many actually describe the positions taken by sex denialists themselves, situationally, when engaged in making demands or claims that serve them.

The Crisis of the West
Shortly after I got to Tanzania, I was giving some business advice to local businessmen about getting investors for a ship-cleaning service at the Port of Dar Es Salaam. The meeting began, like a fair number of my discussions with middle class residents of Dar this year, with a conversation about the unseasonable extreme weather events the city was suffering and how the Greenhouse Effect was to blame. Later in the meeting, they asked me about how to spin their efforts to mitigate the climate impact of the disposal business to foreign investors. I asked if they knew what political parties their potential investors belonged to. The question seemed bizarre to them.

I then had to explain that, whereas, in most of the world, the Greenhouse Effect is a scientific fact for which evidence mounds up every day in the form of record temperatures and extreme weather events, it is a cultural belief in Anglo America, that if the investors were supporters of the Republican Party, for instance, any mention of climate change would drive away their investment.

And, returning to the European elections, what disturbs me is that belief in both biological sex and climate change, are being converted into cultural beliefs throughout the Global North, that, as we saw with the reception of the Cass Review in England, no amount of corroborated, factual information can cause people inside the “culture war” to change their opinion about very physically obvious things. As the contagion spreads, our societies are reflecting the United States, a country where the two main socio-political factions, the communities in which most people have to live, are structured, bounded, based on belief in pseudoscience, in magic.

The “most advanced” countries in the world are fast becoming the most superstitious. One is reminded of the late Qing Dynasty destruction of maps, that as China got smaller and less powerful, elites acted to destroy as evidence of the diminution, of the decline, by attacking the maps showing it.

The Enlightenment legacy of the West is clearly failing in its core, traditional territory. But if there is one reassuring thing that has been reinforced for me as I have met with people working on climate from Kenya, South Sudan, Egypt, Turkey, Tanzania, Ecuador, Peru and other places, it is that not every culture has abandoned these ideals. The world over, people still aspire to the ideals of scientific truth, human rights, democracy, and they are bewildered that people in the traditional territory of the West have abandoned them. But that is actually the story of the West. It has always been on the move. It is not a place or a people; it does not live in the blood but in the human soul.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

The Hour Is Later Than You Think: Canada in the Shadow of the Prorogation Crisis, Sixteen Years Later

In 2008, I made my first foray into writing for a mass audience during a dark period in Canada’s recent past, known as the “Prorogation crisis” in a guest column for Rabble.ca. I did so because the events that unfolded did not just lead to a disappointing political outcome; they revealed both a deep institutional susceptibility to authoritarianism in Canada’s constitutional order and a deep, largely unseen, cultural authoritarian substratum in Canada that was more Russian than English. A central theme of my published work ever since, and of my blog since I started it in 2011, has been trying to warn my fellow Canadians about the creeping authoritarianism of our institutions and culture.

The First Threat: The Canadian Online Harms Act
With a bill before parliament to suppress speech and jail opposition figures that would make Recep Erdogan blush we have to stop living in the past and lying to ourselves about the situation in which we find ourselves. The hour is later than you think. And pro-tip to Justin Trudeau: proper dictators never make repression like this so explicit. Only the weakest dictators pass nor do they need to pass laws that so explicitly suppress opposition speech and jail their opponents. Proper authoritarians do this through extra-legal means and trumped-up charges. Normal authoritarians do not need to lean on the apparatus of the state in this way, nor are most so shameless as to lay before the public what they are doing.

To be clear: if I return to Canada after Bill C-63 is passed, I am effectively returning home with a price on my head. That is because any person who finds an essay like this “hateful” can anonymously report me to a tribunal empaneled by the Canadian Human Rights Commission and the Liberal government. This tribunal would not need to tell me who had accused me or what hateful act I was accused of, lest describing the act itself reveal the identity of my anonymous accuser. The bill sets the evidentiary standard for this tribunal lower than that of an ordinary court and explicitly states that (a) I would have no right to offer testimony or face my accuser and (b) simple accusation would be sufficient evidence for conviction.

If convicted, I would be fined $70,000 and $20,000 of that would be kicked back to my accuser. In other words, being offended by the online remarks of opposition activists and politicians could be a lucrative full-time job someone could do anonymously from the privacy of their own home. Of course, in my case, they wouldn’t get their $20,000 and I would end up in jail for non-payment of a fine.

Or maybe that would not even need to happen. Because the law also specifies that if the tribunal is convinced that a person is likely to make a “hateful” comment in the future, something like “no one is born in the wrong body. You are beautiful just the way you are,” they can be pre-emptively placed under house arrest, banned from using the Internet and subject to random drug-testing until the tribunal is satisfied that this person no longer presents a risk of uttering future hate-speech. Welcome to the Pre-Crime Division of the Canadian government.

Now, I am just a washed-up fringe left politician and failed child star nobody listens to. My life has mostly been Gary Coleman’s run against Arnold Schwarzenegger for governor of California.

But let’s think about Pierre Poilievre and all his candidates. Let’s think about Maxime Overdrive and all of his. How many times have the Prime Minister and his surrogates accused them of peddling hate speech, conspiracy theories and “unacceptable views”? And, worse yet, fervently believed themselves when they said it, as did many of their judicial and quasi-judicial appointees.

Has the Prime Minister not already asked “How long must we tolerate these people?”

While it is not the most likely outcome of passing C-63, which will more likely produce a slower diminution of free speech rights, it is not outside the realm of possibility that the bill will be used to incarcerate the leaders of the right-wing opposition parties and most of their candidates, enabling a default Liberal victory.

The Second Threat: Indefinite Prorogation
But this is not the only route by which we may be moving towards some kind of institutionally-anointed post-democratic authoritarian regime. And that is why we need to remember the Prorogation Crisis of 2008.

In 2006, when he received 36% of the vote and formed a minority government, Stephen Harper decided to govern as though he had a majority, using brinksmanship to stay in power. Trusting that at least one opposition party would be unwilling to face the voters at any given moment, Harper played chicken with Stephane Dion, Jack Layton and Gilles Duceppe for two and a half years. And time and again, an opposition leader, usually the Liberals’ Martin, Graham or Dion, would buckle and refrain from voting against legislation they purported to oppose in order to avoid an election.

Unable to goad the Liberals into toppling the government and giving him another crack at winning a majority, Harper eventually called an election himself in September 2008. The campaign nearly produced the majority he sought but came twelve seats short.

Following the election, in which the Liberals suffered major losses, the opposition leaders decided this could not go on. Assembling a coalition of parties who had won 54% of the vote and 52% of the seats in the election, Stephane Dion hammered-out a left-green coalition agreement with Gilles Duceppe and Jack Layton, a deal the business wing of the Liberal Party and the Central Canadian establishment found very troubling, with its massive funding for changing Canada’s energy system to a post-petroleum one.

Harper’s response was to demand that parliament be prorogued i.e. the Governor-General suspend the constitutional requirement that it meet shortly after the election and instead continue the pre-election government. Everyone knew what the subtext of this was. Harper wanted to give the business faction of the Liberal Party time to pull off a palace coup and replace Dion with someone who would continue giving Harper carte blanche to govern.

Initially the Canadian left thronged into the streets to support “The Coalition,” which seemed to be the collective expression of our shared dreams. I remember the rally at Nathan Philips Square in Toronto where I witnessed an example of the paradoxes of charisma whose like I had not witnessed since the 1996 Vancouver Film Festival when the stunningly beautiful, charismatic and talented Adrienne Shelley was unable to get a block of seats for herself and her three friends who watch her own movie, Sudden Manhattan at the Vancouver Film Festival. The cinematic opposite of Julia Roberts, Shelley seemed to small and unauthoritative in person that her own fans who had heard up to listen to her post-screening talk wouldn’t give her a seat at her own movie.

Watching Stephane Dion struggle through the crowd to get to the stage at Nathan Philips Square that cold day in December, while Mary Walsh vamped on stage, cracking jokes about his poor film-making abilities, I could see this thing was a house of cards.

That got clearer after the crisis did not conclude immediately. As Harper crafted his formal prorogation strategy and the Governor-General Michäelle Jean hit the law books, the stock market took a bad turn and, within a week, a found myself in an awkward conversation with my Communist Party member and trust fund heiress friend about how, while she had initially supported the Coalition, her finances were deteriorating and the country did need order, something Dion was not going to bring. She hated Harper and everything he stood for but…

This was reflected in the polls that came out in the ensuing days. A majority of supporters of every Coalition party except, profoundly ironically, the separatist Bloc Quebecois, now supported Harper continuing over their own party joining the government. It was these polls about which I wrote in Rabble, in which I suggested that this was not due so much to the kind of self-interest Canada’s Liberal elite were exhibiting but because their theory of political justice had changed.

“For Canadians, entitlement to rule comes not from the capacity to build a coalition representing the majority but instead from the capacity to discipline one’s core constituency. This is why, much as they find these attributes of Harper personally distasteful at a human level, Canadians appear politically undaunted by the image of a Prime Minister who rules his party by fear and centralizes power in his own hands. What offended Canadians about the likes of Randy White and other undisciplined, bigoted members of the Class of ’93 Reformers was not their bigotry, per se. It was the way their public statements demonstrated Manning’s inability to offer the discipline and control Chretien could.”

Resolve began to weaken, especially in the Liberal caucus, following Jean granting Harper’s request for prorogation. Harper, himself, was surprised by this turn of events. He was expecting the Liberal appointee to turn him down and to have to plead his case directly to the Queen. Jean was, after all, from the opposing, what we would now call “Globalist” faction of the elite.

But Harper was helped by a phenomenon over which my friend Kenneth lost his political life trying to warn us of back in 1999. In the fall of 1999, Jean Chretien broke with more than a century of tradition and appointed Adrienne Clarkson as Governor-General, Canada’s head of state. While the media were very excited that she was a non-white TV personality, Kenneth, speaking for the Monarchist League of Canada, publicly worried that we would, for the first time, have a Governor-General who was not a former privy councilor, had no legal training or experience and was completely unfamiliar with the operations of the complex interface between the government and the state in a Westminster constitutional monarchy. He actively worried about whether an untrained person could safely guard the most important valve in our entirely political system.

The New York Times decided to label his questions, “thinly-veiled racist thunderbolts” and suggested that he was the leader of an unseen network of Canadian white supremacists who did not believe a brown woman could be Governor-General. The story was carried on the wire services, and he spent the next two years contacting newspapers from Melbourne to Rio de Janeiro trying to get them to print the retraction his lawyer had wrung out of the Times.

Because Jean, like her predecessor, was utterly untrained and lacking both confidence and education in the core legal matters around which her job centred, she simply channeled the zeitgeist of her class when it came time to adjudicate the request that the new parliament be prevented from meeting until the establishment had re-established its control over the main opposition party.

While Mary Simon, the current occupant of Rideau Hall, at least has experience in government and the upper echelons of the civil service, she has never been a privy counselor, received a law degree or served as an MLA or MP. More importantly, cultural conditions, political polarization and class consciousness in Canada are in vastly worse shape than they were in 2008.

This is the Canada that used the Emergencies Act to stop a protest that more closely resembled an extended tailgate party than the insurgency the Prime Minister claimed it was. This is the Canada in which a drawing in sharpie based on a right-wing podcast joke on the side of a camper van Pierre Poilievre accidentally appeared near is being used as evidence of the white supremacist coup he is planning. The Convoy, the least violent, the least deadly, the most peaceful mass mobilization in Anglo America in the twenty-first century (compare to: Occupy, Free Palestine, Black Lives Matter, January 6th, Charlottesville) is routinely depicted by Trudeau and his ilk as a narrowly averted violent coup that required the suspension of Canadians’ civil rights.

I would argue that, although not the most likely outcome of his Liberals losing the election, there is a non-zero chance that, a completely sincere Trudeau might go to Mary Simon and request the indefinite prorogation of parliament and the continuation of his government until some future condition, like the replacement of Poilievre, is met, or new elections can be held uncontaminated by “hate” and “disinformation,” i.e. until additional censorship legislation can be enacted. And the residents of the progressiverse would applaud this as “saving democracy,” the way Rob Reiner keeps telling his twitter following that the US can only “save democracy” if every candidate except Joe Biden is removed from the ballot this November.

It is my most fervent wish that this article will be labeled in years to come as evidence that this was the moment that I lost it, when I was overtaken by paranoia and became consumed with fear of threats that were never present. But on the off chance that the hour is as late as I think, we need to start floating these scenarios in the public square if, for no other reason, than to get Canada’s progressive parties to convincingly assure Canadians that the things I fear they might do, they absolutely will not.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Our World Is Run By The Family Annihilator Patriarchs

A Discourse for All Communities
Due to the massive realignment our culture is undergoing and my distinctive place in it, I straddle multiple opposing discourse communities. As a person who is gender-critical, socialist and anti-authoritarian, a lot of my life entails code-switching because, to be effective, I cannot just work with the relatively small “gender critical” and “old growth left” communities where I feel most at home. And it is rare when I do not find myself engaged in an act of cultural translation, not carefully choosing different words to communicate the same idea to one audience that have used other words to communicate to another one.

Indeed, the fact that I do this was one of the justifying bases for the fifth cancelation campaign directed at me in 2023. Apparently, I was being immoral and misleading by communicating differently to my mainly anti-authoritarian populist audience on Twitter and my mainly eco-socialist audience on Facebook. Or so I learned from the clearly template-based correspondence I received from long-time friends and acquaintances last summer. Usually, this complaint appeared in paragraph two.

So, when I bust-out a term and it speaks immediately and clearly all the discourse communities in which I am present, to some degree, I take notice. I pay attention. And if there is one term I have generated in recent years that has done this, it is “Family Annihilator Patriarchy.”

One might expect my feminist, socialist, deep green comrades in Deep Green Resistance to like it but its most welcome reception has actually been among comrades on the populist right, people from whom I held the term back, thinking it would alienate them. But no, my neighbour, a producer of news round-up videos for grassroots Donald Trump supporters and beef importer-exporter and folks like him seem to be the biggest fans.

The Family Annihilator: A Peculiar Kind of Mass Murderer
Like many important ideas I have picked up over the years, I believe learned about family annihilators in a Law & Order script by Quebecois Quiet Revolutionary and Catholic Modernist René Balcer, the most prolific contributor to the franchise. Family annihilators are the most under-represented sort of mass murderer in our mass murderer-obsessed entertainment industry.

The Paul Bernardo-style serial killer sex fetishist, the David Berkowitz-style cop-taunting brilliant psychotic, the ruthless big score robber of the Die Hard franchise, the hostage-taking desperate man of Dog Day Afternoon, the man at the end of his rope pushed into a killing spree depicted in Joker and Falling Down: these are the staples of the mass murderers of the screen. Family annihilators make for more upsetting, more uncomfortably uncanny TV.

A family annihilator is a man who relishes his patriarch/provider role in his family. He is proud that his wife and children depend on him for their material and emotional needs, whether or not this reflects the material or emotional reality. Whether progressive or conservative, politically, in relational terms, he casts himself in the role of a retro, traditional patriarch.

Whether he does this as a put-upon, solicitous Woke dad who does all the cooking and cleaning as well as being the bread-winner, showing what a feminist he is or whether he does this as a pious, stern traditionalist “family head,” is not really of interest. The point is that a family annihilator sees his family’s happiness, success, even survival as contingent on him, his labour, his moral clarity.

And this is how he derives his sense of self-worth: the guy everyone depends on, who provides for everyone, who is to be admired not because of his intrinsic value but because he, alone, he personally upholds a whole family.

When such a man faces circumstances that will materially or reputationally depose him from his role as patriarch, especially if they entail public shaming, he snaps. Major financial losses, conflict with the law, unemployment, etc.: these sorts of things inspire family annihilators to murder their putative dependents.

Their logic in doing so is this: their dependents’ lives would be over without them. They could not possibly handle the shame, poverty, loss of status that is coming. So the only responsible thing to do, the only way to actually carry out one’s obligations as a patriarch is to murder them all before they can experience the shame, poverty and loss of status. They see this act of mass murder as altruistic.

Of course, it is anything but. It is narcissism crushed to a diamond. The annihilator is the one who cannot handle the shame. So he murders the witnesses to his shaming. The annihilator feels valueless. So he murders his putative dependents before they can realize how little they actually need him.

Conservative Annihilators: Trump, Bolsonaro and Duterte
I first developed the idea of the family annihilator patriarchy when I was in my final years as a left-progressive in response to the Trump Administration’s grudging compliance with an international demand for its emissions, climate and temperature targets more than a year into its mandate. When it finally did produce them, the Trump Administration inaugurated a new school of thought in the discourse community called “climate denialism,” by stating that its goal was to emit as many hydrocarbons as possible as quickly as possible to achieve its goal of raising global temperatures by 16 degrees Fahrenheit (“Eocene Hothouse”) by the end of the century, a rate of temperature change that has never failed to produce a mass extinction event.

When I read this, I thought of the first time I went bowling, at the age of six or seven. Having very poor hand-eye coordination, something with which I suffer to this day, I was completely unable to knock over any pins. Feeling increasingly frustrated as my peers were largely able to pull this off, I began bowling directly into the gutter, my only option for regaining my sense of agency over the humiliating situation in which I found myself.

No doubt inspired by this audacious discursive turn, Patrick Moore, whose entire professional career has been as a rent-a-quote man for eco-villains and has been dining out on his “co-founder of Greenpeace reputation” for nearly half a century, has developed a whole new school of climate denial, arguing that carbon emissions do indeed warm the planet and, because of an impending ice age, we have to warm it as fast as possible or we will all die.

But Moore’s refinement and pseudo-scientific justification of the Trump Administration’s position did not take place right away, even as it emboldened Trump allies to make similarly nihilistic claims. Jair Bolsonaro claimed that the Amazon Rainforest was not being destroyed fast enough and its indigenous people not dying-out fast enough. He promised to destroy the forest and its people as expeditiously as possible. And this was not limited just to environmental questions. Rodrigo Duterte, facing an epidemic of gang violence and vigilante murder in the Philippines promised to solve it with more extrajudicial killings by stirring pro-government vigilantes and police forces untethered from the rule of law into the mix.

This all struck me as family annihilator psychology:

Can’t come up with a plan to stabilize the climate? Fry everyone and everything as quickly as possible.

Can’t come up with a way to build a sustainable society and economy in the Amazon? Destroy the Amazon and eradicate its people.

Can’t bring law and order to Filipino communities and protect? Turn the communities into protracted street battles with more stray bullets flying in all directions.

These plans seemed underpinned by the idea that if you could kill the people you failed before they noticed you had failed them, this was as good as success because you could avoid shame in two ways, first, by eliminating the people who witnessed you failing them, and, second, by making their elimination seem intentional, not a failure but something you had intended all along.

Globalist and Leftist Family Annihilators
Around the same time this was happening, the new government of British Columbia was finalizing its climate policy. A coalition of social democrats and Greens, who appointed the former head of the Canadian Sierra Club its climate minister, had just been elected to govern my province.

They were and remain unmatched for high-flown climate rhetoric from Western Hemisphere governments and boldly rolled-out a plan called Clean BC to achieve “net zero.” Clean BC, in its present form, entails doubling BC’s coal exports, quintupling liquefied natural gas (LNG) exports, building five LNG export terminals and pipelines to the fracking fields of the northeast, increasing fracking at a rate of more than 10% per year, permitting the conversion of BC’s remaining forests into a new export product: fuel pellets that burn as a dirtier version of coal, doubling the exports of BC forest products, admitting Uber and Lyft to the jurisdiction, thereby increasing taxi sector emissions by more than 50%, doubling fossil fuel industry subsidies, exempting Big Oil from the carbon tax, etc.

At the federal level in Canada, we see the same thing: the former head of Greenpeace Canada announcing an immediate climate apocalypse and angrily shaking finger at all the people who haven’t found a way to finance a home heat pump yet while building the oil industry a free multi-billion-dollar pipeline and jetting off to climate meetings on a private jet as our Minister of Environment.

We see similar combinations of climate emergency hysteria messaging and rapid increases in extraction and emissions of carbon around the world. In Germany, the SDP-Green coalition government is expropriating the homes of Bavarian villagers and forcing them off their land at gunpoint to create new open-pit coal mines.

But this goes far beyond climate: the globalist hatred of agriculture, the attempts to reduce regional food security and food productivity even as their own climate models presage collapsing fish stocks and declining agricultural yield and of course the absurd veneration of Genderwang, which sees the sterilization of healthy children as the ultimate ritual expression of the moral good, provoking mass rallies and huge ovations for sterilizing, lobotomizing and amputating the healthy body parts of children.

The “it ends with me,” family annihilator mindset is actually stronger among progressives today because they led with the claim that they could, would and were solving our interlocking environmental and economic crises. Unlike characters such as Donald Trump and Vladimir Putin, the progressive elites who hold their annual booze-up and super-rich singles mixer in Davos every year, people like Klaus Schwab, Bill Gates and Al Gore, told us that they did have matters well in hand, that through technocratic management of a global neoliberal economic framework through multilateral international agreements, they were not just going to solve our environmental problems; they were going to make us all more prosperous, more equal and more democratic.

And so their shame, their humiliation, is even greater because they were not merely asleep at the switch; they magnified the problems even worse through their incompetence and hubris.

Their reaction, therefore, to their failure, is like my elementary school reaction: to bowl directly into the gutter, to warm the planet as fast as they can, to impoverish us as thoroughly as they can and to eliminate feedback mechanisms by which we can notify them of their failure by sabotaging the democratic process and refusing to even meet with those who disagree with them, instead characterizing their critics as conspiracy theorists and bigots.

Like true family annihilators, they are eliminating witnesses to their failure to deliver the prosperous, sustainable technocratic utopia they promised through a series of forever wars with no achievable victory conditions, by depressing fertility with endocrine disruptors and other pollutants, by reducing the birth rate by making it unaffordable to raise kids, by making lethal drugs like fentanyl more available, especially to children, by rapidly expanding euthanasia programs, like Canada’s MAID, by shutting down and smearing farmers, ranchers, fishermen and their work and by not just pushing but venerating our society’s most aggressive eugenics campaign since the 1930s.

Fortunately for us, the new censorship and myth-making industry made possible by the alliance between Big Data and the national security state, which has spread from China to the West rapidly, means that witnesses to failure can be reduced by more tightly controlling what people are able to learn, permitted to see and allowed to say they know, allowing elites to engage in witness elimination without actual murder.

Women of the Patriarchy
As in all successful patriarchies, some of the patriarchy’s work is being done by female leaders, characters like Chrystia Freeland and, I would argue, a larger amount than is typical of a patriarchal system, because, although men are always going to outdistance women when it comes to proficiency at and inclination towards murder (we’re just built to be better at it), the psychology of a family annihilator is a much more gender-neutral thing than that of a rapist serial killer who targets strangers.

The idea of being the sole provider of a family’s wellbeing is one women have readily taken on, often for perfectly good reasons. The 1970s divorce wave would likely have been more socially chaotic and cataclysmic if the female-headed family were not an idea with which humans were already comfortable to some degree, sociologically and biologically.

And so women’s protective tendencies towards their own children and others is being channeled into this increasingly normative elite psychology: family annihilation. Lupron for kids is care. Fentanyl for kids is care. (Yes, there is a BC government program that gives teenagers fentanyl to teenagers without their parents’ knowledge or consent.) Euthanasia for the depressed, disabled, the homeless is care. Shuttering farms and ranches is just good ecological stewardship.

Shame and Weakness, Not Malice and Competence
I do not want to suggest that our two teams of family annihilator global elites are aware they are family annihilators. As is typical of narcissism-related pathologies, most annihilators would struggle to even place themselves in a class or type of person because narcissists thrive on a sense of specialness and are notorious mirror-punchers, so awash in worthlessness and shame that any act of introspection is traumatic.

Rather, I want to suggest that the spread of family annihilator psychology is reflective of a growing senses of powerlessness, shame, weakness and doubt that are overtaking our elites. They are scared to admit their failures, unwilling to take responsibility, terrified to exposing how little they know and arrogant and foolish they have been. And they are scared of us and our disapproval.

The folks trying silence, starve and kill us today would prefer to be heroes who really did provide us with a clean, prosperous, fair society, who could honestly say they “saved the planet.” It is only their failure to do so that makes us targets of their displaced rage and shame at themselves.

The psychology of the family annihilator is unique among the psychology of murderers, except poisoners, in that it is about the avoidance of confrontation not fulfillment through confrontation. After all, these folks, are coming for us because they are scared even of confronting themselves, their own insecurities. Because if there is one aphorism our present age is proving out, it is this:

There is nothing more dangerous than a weak man.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Anti-Cosmopolitan City (part 2): The Intolerant Urbanizer

Real Problems and Crises in Rural and Northern Canada
Wally Oppal is probably one of the most accomplished people every to have served in elected office in BC history. He served, from 2005 to 2009, as Gordon Campbell’s Attorney-General, Minister of Justice and Minister of State for Multiculturalism. He was part of the one four-year stretch of benign technocratic liberalism the BC Liberal Party managed to deliver during the second quarter of its sixteen years in power.

He was part of the government that unexpectedly introduced English Canada’s first carbon tax, one that course corrected to the political centre, after four years of slash and burn neoliberal austerity and privatization. Having already made a name for himself as a Supreme Court and Appeal Court justice, following his electoral defeat in 2009, Oppal was deemed that ideal person to chair a government commission into one of the worst episodes of police failure and dereliction of duty, the 2010 Missing Women Commission of Inquiry into the multi-year reign of murderous predation serial killer Robert Pickton inflicted on the survival sex workers of Vancouver’s Downtown Eastside (DTES).

The does not stand alone. It is one of a half-dozen reports by different levels of settler and indigenous governments and international NGOs that investigated the larger phenomenon of missing and murdered indigenous women in Canada, including but not limited to Northwestern BC’s infamous Highway of Tears and Southwestern BC’s infamous DTES.

But while the report does not stand alone, it does stand out as the best of such reports. Like all others it has two main demands: (1) restore the bus and (2) close the camps.

If you want female members of the rural underclass to be abducted, raped and murdered less, they should probably have an affordable way to get from the Indian Reserve (i.e. brutally underserviced rural ghetto) to town for groceries, smokes, a movie, a trip to the pub. So, allowing the bus service to be withdrawn and then restoring only a fraction of it, with there being no bus service on most days and no on-reserve stops on most reserves is probably not a great thing. If only we could get the bus service back to 1997 levels!

The other demand, to close the camps, is equally obvious. Rural and Northern Canada is being emptied of towns and villages which are being replaced with temporary worker camps, known colloquially as “man camps.” Reversing Cold War policies that sought to settle workers in the industrial periphery in towns and villages with schools, hospitals and public amenities, neoliberal and post-neoliberal policies have sought to dismantle small towns and replace them with temporary encampments, single industry towns composed almost entirely of young men, without basic amenities, government services or an environment in which children could be raised.

Gone are the mining towns of the past with their community halls, small elementary schools and newspaper offices. Gone even are the restaurants and cafes as camp workers eat in enormous mess halls when not suppressing their appetites with central nervous system stimulants whose use is widely tolerated in the camps.

Because these camps are so dominated by energy sector workers, usually existing to construct pipelines, frack natural gas or build macro-hydro projects, enterprising academics in the US have found they can construct predictive murder maps just by knowing fracking and pipeline construction locations. The isolated, young, stimulant-using young men typically work two weeks in, two weeks out, spending the rest of their time in communities like Fort Mac and Fort St. John. To briefly reference an earlier article, this is why I tend to call the communities Rex Murphy idealized “Jeckyllvilles.”

Oppal’s Underappreciated Insights Into Self-Fashioning
But Oppal went beyond the usual “close the camps,” “bring back the bus” chorus to write in detail about how women and girls’ at-risk status follows them from low income rural communities in ways that have little to do with race. Oppal observed that the non-indigenous women targeted by Pickton and other predators shared key demographic characteristics: they were low-income and had migrated to the Vancouver as young adults.

Oppal argued that, for young, low-income migrants, urbanization is a crucial part of identity formation and self-fashioning, that becoming a fully agentive person with her own distinct identity and choices is strongly conflated with moving to the city for young women who find themselves in at-risk work, at-risk housing or in conflict with the law. To return to a rural community or even request help from people still residing in it is a shameful act for young adults who centre urbanization in the creation of their adult self.

In other words, the use of urbanization narratives in self-fashioning, in and of itself, places young women from the rural and remote communities at material risk by constraining their access to material and the range of places they can live. Not only is it shameful to return to one’s supposedly benighted community of origin or obtain aid from its residents; it is shameful to admit that one has experienced, violence, intolerance of exploitation in one’s new place of residence. It creates incentives for narrating painful, dangerous and exploitive work as more voluntary and less harmful than it actually is.

And this kind of thinking is hardly limited to survival sex workers and members of the urban underclass.

When one examines those most enthusiastic about stripping urban life of ideological pluralism, religious diversity, etc. we tend to see urbanizers disproportionately represented among the most intolerant. They tend to espouse the belief that the kind of community they left was not merely situationally problematic at the time that they but that rural communities are inherently benighted and that the kind of people who voluntarily live in such places are, axiomatically, people who are some mixture of ignorant, evil and stupid.

I am not, of course, referring to all people who move from small communities to large communities. I am referring to a particular subset in which the intolerance is most concentrated, although hardly universal.

Profiling the Intolerant Urbanizer
Most people who move to larger communities do so to take up a new job or attend an educational institution. These individuals typically do not centre their urbanization the same way when fashioning an identity and a life story. Those who move for college typically place their education at the centre of the adult identity they create; similarly, those who move for work typically place their new job at the centre of their self-fashioning project. It tends to be individuals who move and then find work or take up low-status employment prior to moving so as to finance the move.

Similarly, individuals who aspire to live in a particular city about which they developed an interest as a younger person and who move to a far-away city rather than the nearest major centre, are less likely to become intolerant urbanizers because their narrative is centred on attraction to a specific urban space, not their rejection of life in a small community. Intolerant urbanizers therefore tend to have come from lower-income backgrounds with fewer educational prospects and to lead adult lives with lower-education, lower-status jobs. Paradoxically, they often tend to accord greater respect to white collar work and higher education than those with more education and higher status jobs.

Because of this, they tend to see qualities in themselves that they value such as having high status friends and associates, being well-read and politically well-informed as arising primarily from their decision to live in a city. Consequently, they also tend to strongly associate rural communities with intolerance, ignorance, dead-end jobs, etc.

And because their decision to relocate is so central to their identity, it must always be viewed as an unalloyed and permanent good. For this reason, they are often hostile to positive news about rural and remote communities. An increasingly diverse and high quality culinary scene, the opening of a local university, these things annoy them but the news from home that intolerant urbanizers are typically most upset by is the election of non-conservatives by their former community. If their former community is expressing the same political views as the one in which they live now, its status as a benighted and unimprovable place that could never have been reformed, only escaped-from is compromised.

This is why “guns and religion,” “basket of deplorables” and “unacceptable views” discourse and quips by progressive politicians are so tempting to pepper a stump speech or interview with. They play so strongly to the intolerant urbanizers in the room whose self-fashioning narrative is premised this image of people from small communities as almost ontologically distinct from urbanites.

Obviously, there is considerable irony to this reality, given that intolerant urbanizers are leading the charge to make cities into the very sort of place they indict the countryside for being: rigid, unchanging, intolerant, pious and homogeneous.

While there have been intolerant urbanizers for as long as there have been cities, the authoritarian turn our society is taking amplifies their social power and encourages the ugliest, most problematic aspects of their worldview. Insecurity over this obvious irony, unfortunately, only magnifies the authoritarian impulse. Criticism of the widening gap between the ideal of the permissive, diverse, cosmopolitan city and the day-to-day reality of our increasingly authoritarian urban culture only increases the impetus for shunning, silencing and punishment of critics, a tightening of the circle and a further chilling of speech.

It is really the height of irony that the highest priority when it comes to controlled and coerced speech is the demand for a chorus of agreement about just how free, diverse and tolerant city life really is. From preschool onwards, educators, news media and opinion leaders relentlessly “celebrate” just how wonderfully tolerant the contemporary progressive city is. But those most committed to these celebrations are those raised outside of the cities, who have made changing their residential address in their teens or twenties the most important thing about themselves in the fragile identity that sits atop this migration story.

Self-made identities and self-fashioning projects are not equally important or present in all human societies. The intolerant urbanizer is part of a larger phenomenon about which I have written in the past: our society’s reversion to a baroque culture, one deeply concerned with social rank, one that transacts an increasing portion of social power through dynamics of honour and offense. Such societies tend to encourage and foreground forms of self-presentation as central to identity dynamics and the intolerant urbanizer is just one element, just one example of how these new social trends are curdling urban life in the Global North.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Politics of Identity US Politics | fusangite |

The Anti-Cosmopolitan City – Part #1: the Tolerance Horseshoe

The Tea Party and Trump Waves
I was living with an American woman, the daughter of evangelical Christians and major Republican donors. They had a framed wall-length signed portrait of George W Bush in their entry foyer and had FoxNews, which Rachel termed “the Jonestown loudspeaker of conservative America” running on the television in at least one room at all times. I moved to the US with my beloved in 2010 and continued residing in the US, even after we split up, through 2012. I celebrated Thanksgiving in 2010 at the home of a Tea Party organizer in Fort Worth, Texas. I was living in Kansas City when Rick Santorum won the Missouri GOP primary in 2012. And, from 2002 to 2022, I was part of a community of tabletop role playing gamers centred in Raleigh, North Carolina, one of the locations the America’s conservative and liberal tectonic plates collide.

So I want to make clear that I experienced the dark turn of American conservatism up close and personal, from the Sarah Palin nomination through Charlottesville. And there is no doubt that less dense, less urban, more rural and smaller communities led America’s descent into the various forms of intolerance and woolly thinking that blossomed in those years. Palin’s “real America” was more easily duped by conspiracy theories, more likely to blame outsiders for problems, more inclined to political hyperbole and polarization and grew more suspicious of the rest of America, leavened by all that Koch Brothers money.

But the Tea Party and Trump waves were not especially remarkable. Political scientists and historians expect reactionary movements to come from smaller, more rural, more remote communities, to be concentrated in economic sectors that appear to be in their sunset years. Scholars expect those with less education, residing in less demographically diverse communities to be more prone to nativism, xenophobia and “us versus them” thinking.

What is far more shocking, far more in need of explaining and far more pressing an issue is the way in which it has become the most educated, the most urban, the most progressive who now lead Anglo America’s charge against political pluralism, free speech, scientific literacy, religious tolerance, press freedom and representative democracy.

While history is full of intolerant cities and welcoming, pluralistic small towns, historical moments when rural areas are more culturally and politically pluralistic than urban areas in the same society are rare. Times are rare when educated people are more ideologically inflexible and hostile to new information than those with less formal education. If people are going to be beaten in the street for their unorthodox views, if books are going to be banned, if the places of worship of minority peoples are going to be burned, we expect small towns to commit those sins prior to and more prolifically than the big cities, not the reverse.

Yet, as of about half a decade ago, this is the reality into which Anglo America and much of the rest of the Global North has entered.

The Crisis of Intolerance in Our Cities
When Meghan Murphy, the gender critical feminist journalist, was driven out of her home town of Vancouver, a key moment was the day she left her house in the morning to discover her photo plastered on lamp standards around her neighbourhood, calling her a hate criminal and suggesting that violence against her was appropriate.

During her nearly successful bid for mayor of Ottawa, Catherine McKenney (they/them), then a city councillor, organized a public beating of “Billboard” Chris Elston, the children’s rights campaigner and following his public flogging, threatened a more severe beating should he attempt to return to Ottawa with his “children can’t consent to puberty blockers” campaign.

When the hundredth church arson attacking non-white Christians took place in Regina last month, directed against a Catholic congregation primarily comprising three racial groups, Africans, Middle Easterners and Filipinos, a Conservative motion condemning the burning was shouted down in parliament by members of the overwhelmingly urban caucuses of the Liberal and New Democratic Parties. And when David Eby, NDP premier of BC was approached through back-channels by those seeking stronger law enforcement around church burnings (perpetrators have only been charged in 2% of cases), Eby reacted by announcing new measures, not to prevent hate crimes against racialized Christians, but to criminalize the beliefs of the parishioners.

When the Million March for Children took place last fall and thousands of Canadians turned out to oppose government programs to chemically lobotomize and sterilize children without parental knowledge or consent, rallies were able to take place in rural communities but in urban centres, “counter protesters” did everything in their power not merely to stage their own protests but to drown out or disperse rally participants. Murphy, during one of her brief trips to Canada was charged by counter-protesters attempting to physically assault her. They failed to hit her but still managed to prevent the rally coming off and her from speaking. My comrade Lierre Keith, head of the Women’s Liberation Front, was not so lucky. She was punched in the face at two rallies in the Pacific Northwest while attempting to speak that year.

And as we saw in rallies from Melbourne to Dublin to Vancouver to San Francisco, it is not merely that the police failed to hold back violence against the protesters. Police officers were often shown assisting violent mobs in carrying out their beatings, in some cases being caught on film pointing and laughing as vigilante mobs beat unarmed protesters with fists and weapons.

And this goes beyond organized politics. Vehicular collisions are up. Pedestrian deaths at the hands of drivers are up. Stranger assaults are up. Exhibitionism and other contactless sex crimes are up.

Ancient Alexandria and the Urban Scale Horseshoe
I have long expressed outrage at the dark turn my city and so many others have been taking but it is long past time to go beyond that outrage, that we began thinking about both the short- and long-term factors that are giving rise to this curdling of the cosmopolitan city because there is no single force, no single explanation that can adequately or fully account for what is happening. A confluence of factors has made the increasing intolerance of our cities self-magnifying, as those fearing persecution and intolerance move to smaller, more human scale communities or out of the Global North altogether.

As a historian, the first place I naturally go when seeking to answer such a question is the past: when, in the past, has it been the cities that have led their rural counterparts when it came to intolerance?

The pogroms against the Jews of Alexandria in 38 CE under governor Flaccus are a striking example and one of the few times in Antiquity that urban Jews fared worse than rural Jews at the hands of pagans or, later, Christians. On the occasions that urban communities outdistanced the hinterland in their persecution of Jews and other minorities, up to Germany in the 1930s and 40s, there may be some patterns.

The cities in which pogroms were most enthusiastic and popular (as opposed to being driven from above) tended to have a geography segregated primarily by religion rather than by class. While all cities have tended to experience natural religious ghettoization, this has been tempered by countervailing and competing forces, like occupational and class-based segregation of “unclean” work and workers. The multi-confessional character of industries like butchering, tanning, fishing and logistics produced kinds of residential congregation and segregation that could undercut religious uniformity in an area.

There is also the question of scale. Alexandria was one of the few pre-modern cities with a population that exceeded a million. This scale permitted something highly problematic that Philo of Alexandria, the great Jewish intellectual, who leaves us the best written records of the 38 CE pogroms, which he survived, called out in his time.

Philo was concerned that many of his neighbours and coreligionists in Alexandria were falling away from the Jewish sumptuary laws, not keeping kosher, not honouring the Sabbath, etc. This was because, he observed, unlike a Jew in a smaller city, an Alexandrian Jew could experience his identity as a Jew just by rising in the morning and heading out the door. Everyone he would meet that day, everyone with whom he socialized, everyone with whom he worked, everyone from whom he bought something would be a Jew. In this way, living at such a massive demographic scale actually replicated the life of a Jew in tiny village off the Jordan River.

There was no need to maintain behavioural boundaries or to be behaviourally distinct; geography and economy took care of all that for you. And if that was happening to Jews, it was most certainly happening to the pagan majority which held political power in the city, backed by an imperial army and navy drawn from a military hegemon with forty million residents.

I want to suggest that one of the most pernicious elements of Diversity, Equity and Inclusion, “Queer”/Pharma Pride, the rise of social media “call-out” culture and various other forms of cultural authoritarianism is the way in which they help to recreate Philo’s Alexandria. Even if people in a workplace have diverse opinions and affiliations politically, they are increasingly required to express identical views in their workplace for fear of losing employment. Progressive urbanites on Facebook routinely see threats from friends and family on their screen, telling them what virtuous political position they must now express in order to be spared public humiliation and ostracism.

In smaller, more human scale communities, complete segregation from those who disagree with you is less feasible. Ideologically recalcitrant people cannot be wholly purged from or cowed within the labour system. The break room in a company in a smaller town is more likely to contain people who express unorthodox political views.

In other words, there is a kind of horseshoe effect when it comes to community size: make a city large enough and it can segregate its way to small-town religious and ideological parochialism, provided there exists a strong enough “us-them” dynamic and an enforcement system with the muscle to back it up.

Purity and Pollution in the Modern City
Key to such an “us-them” dynamics are ideas of purity and pollution. As I have been arguing the past two years, I believe that the class differences between the rural and industrial proletariat and the rest of the population have been magnified to the point where they exhibit the qualities of caste.

I have made my cultural arguments concerning race, economic sector, public health policy and a host of others concerning the amplification of cultural difference and the need to segregate “unclean” persons from the rest of us. Pseudoscientific myths concerning Covid vaccination and transmission, the re-description of unorthodox speech as “unsafe” the repackaging of anti-Métis racism as “anti-racism” and the growing state-sponsored conspiracy industry that labels me a hate criminal and Diagolon a white supremacist terrorist paramilitary have helped to give rise to moments like the East Vancouver anti-Truckism (Terry Glavin’s term, not my own) protest of 2022.

A solidarity convoy was organized in the dying days of the Ottawa convoy to show support for the increasingly nutty remnant of the protest in Ottawa and arrived in Vancouver but the people of East Vancouver were ready with a counter-protest. I asked a friend who supported the counter-protest what they were counter-protesting, given that the convoyists had basically stopped issuing coherent demand. Which of the trucker demands, I asked, were people protesting.

The answer was horrifyingly honest: people were not turning out to protest a political position the truckers were taking. They were protesting their existence as human beings, the fact that they were people who existed and wore the wrong clothes, worked at the wrong jobs, enjoyed the wrong recreational activities and lived in the wrong places. As Glavin had cleverly pointed out with a nonsense neologism, there was no “truckism” to protest.

That is why, when the two groups of protesters finally clashed at First Avenue and Commercial Drive, the truckers, forced to a standstill by the protesters honked their horns and waved their Canadian flags and the counter-protesters chanted “trans rights are human rights!” again and again.

But another way to examine this caste-making is to look at the function of caste within a market economy. Caste had made the Indian economy the most dynamic and productive in the world and, its spread to Europe and the New World, through the creation of “black” and “Indian” (the American kind) as heritable castes, is inextricable from the sustained growth and dynamism we associate with mercantilism and capitalism in the early modern world.

One of the reasons caste makes a market economy more effective is by reserving certain kinds of work for certain castes and constraining the labour supply for that work by rendering certain castes ineligible for it. Truckists cannot simply enter the commissar class simply by obtaining the right training and professional credentials. They must also at least appear to embrace the American space religion the commissars practice, with its veneration of self-harm, special grammar and usage rules, numerous novel holidays, special flags and costume, and complex system of etiquette.

An increasing number of professional degree programs now require the taking of loyalty oaths to the ideology of the commissars as do many workplaces. More difficult to fake than a loyalty oath are official records of regular Covid mRNA vaccinations. And, given the highly urban character of most commissar class jobs, aside from frontline elementary education, there is the matter of urbanization.

It deserves a whole article.

Authoritarianism Canadian Politics Landscape, Urban and Spatial Studies Politics of Identity | fusangite |