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Authoritarianism

Forget “ignorance is strength;” in today’s Canada, weakness is strength

On June 28th, 1988 Brian Smith, the Attorney-General of British Columbia dramatically resigned his position during a speech to the provincial legislature. Smith had been at odds with Premier Bill Vander Zalm over major policy differences with his boss. After the resignation and speech, he spoke to reporters and then attended the caucus meeting that debated the fallout of his move. He remained a leading member of that caucus for the next year and a half, at which time he resigned to accept a job in the private sector. A week later, Grace McCarthy, the deputy premier resigned, also citing concerns about policy and leadership. Both remained members of the Social Credit caucus throughout Vander Zalm’s premiership.

Upon Smith’s resignation from the Legislature in November 1989, Vander Zalm called a byelection for his seat of Oak Bay-Gordon Head. Oak Bay’s popular mayor, Susan Brice, who agreed with the criticisms of McCarthy and Smith resigned her position to seek the Social Credit nomination. She was opposed at the packed and hotly contested meeting by Kathleen Toth, an anti-abortion activist, Vander Zalm loyalist and future friend and comrade of mine.

Toth lost the nomination to Brice who would go on to campaign on the slogan, “Send a message to Bill Vander Zalm—and make me the messenger.” Vander Zalm dutifully signed Brice’s nomination papers after she won a large, democratic mandate from party members and encouraged voters to support her. She was narrowly defeated by NDP candidate Elizabeth Cull, whose ignominious future in BC politics will be covered in a future essay.

That is not to say that the Social Credit Party’s caucus survived Vander Zalm’s leadership intact. MLAs Graham Bruce, Dave Mercier, Doug Mowat and Duane Crandall all temporarily left the caucus, caucusing as “Independent Social Credit” from October 1989 to February 1990.

Vander Zalm had no love for Brice when he signed her nomination papers or for McCarthy and Smith as they grumbled from his back bench. But he suffered their membership in caucus and suffered Brice’s candidacy for one simple reason—to do anything else would have made him look weaker than he already did.

Only a generation ago, you see, democratic norms in Canada were such that not permitting a candidate to run because they openly opposed your leadership, expelling members from caucus because they did not like how you were running things would have made a leader look weak, fragile, unable to face opposition in a caucus meeting, willing to void the democratic decision of party members simply to silence dissent. The thinking was, back then, that a leader who couldn’t win a vote fair and square, couldn’t face down his internal opposition in a meeting was so weak, so incapable of the thrust and parry of politics that they were axiomatically unqualified for high office.

A true leader, a powerful person, was someone who could keep a caucus in line, a party in line, a government in line through old fashioned loyalty and charisma. If a leader were in danger of losing a vote, he would be shaking hands, slapping backs and cutting deals right in the open at a nomination meeting, party convention or caucus retreat.

If a leader were concerned about whom the members would choose to represent them in a tough seat or a seat he wanted for one of his buddies, that leader would drive or fly to the local nominating meeting, just as NDP leader Mike Harcourt did in 1990, when his preferred candidate in Nelson-Creston, Corky Evans, was facing an unexpectedly strong challenge from environmentalist Wayne Peppard, who had signed up more new members than Evans and appeared on track to win at the meeting.

Back then, candidate nominations in Canada worked like nuclear missile silos. Two keys had to be turned to launch a candidacy, one by the local members at their nominating meeting and one by the party’s leader. Typically, if the party leader didn’t like the local choice, they would suck it up and sign the nomination papers anyway, the way Vander Zalm did with Susan Brice. If the leader really couldn’t abide the local candidate, they could refuse to sign, the result being that no candidate was fielded under the party banner, not that the leader would simply handpick a local candidate.

So, Harcourt and his guys headed up to Nelson and shook the hand of every person who attended. In plain view of the assembled media, many who had followed them up from the coast, they intimidated; they negotiated; they slapped backs; they made promises; they used charisma and star power. And they won the meeting, proving that Harcourt was a strong leader, a man with the charisma and authority to change the minds and votes of local party members at a consequential meeting.

Indeed, that was how Andrea Horvath and Peter Kormos swung enough votes from the ranks of my supporters to leader-preferred Julian Heller in the NDP nomination meeting for the Saint Paul’s byelection in 2009. But that era was practically over by then. The following year, it would not be a charm offensive or Kormos trying to dislocate my shoulder from behind that would end by NDP candidacy in the federal riding of the same name. My candidacy was simply vetoed by the NDP’s newly-installed “vetting committee.”

Those changes had been underway for some time, first in the Liberal Party of Canada, where the party changed its constitution in 1996 to permit the leader to unilaterally nominate candidates without local nomination meetings. Stephen Harper’s Tories were quick to adopt the same practice in 2003, followed by the NDP in 2010, just in the nick of time to stop me!

By the time the NDP adopted these changes, the legacy media was demanding them because the theory of what made a leader strong or legitimate had wholly inverted in less than a generation.

Today, a strong leader, is understood by the Canadian establishment as someone who can and should silence all criticism within their party and expel from its caucus and its membership anyone publicly critical of them. Giving one’s critics a hearing, debating areas of disagreement, seeking to bring one’s opponents around to one’s side, tolerating different camps in one’s party and dealing fairly with all of them, resolving disputes by voting not barking orders: these things are portrayed by our legacy media as signs of weakness, incompetence and disorganization. Personalities that, in any other time, would be understood as those of petty tyrants are understood to be the epitome of democratic statesmanship, and vice versa.

This sea change in our theory of leadership may have started in party back rooms but is now everywhere. Legacy media attacked Pierre Poilievre for meeting with Freedom Convoy representatives. While he did not take up most of their demands, he has nevertheless been pilloried in the national press for three straight years for merely speaking with people whose political views are controversial. That was once the duty of every politician in a democracy. Now it is seen not merely as a political failure but a moral one.

Furthermore, he took months of abuse from the media for allowing some of his MPs to meet with visiting members of the Bundestag representing the Alliance for Germany, the government-in-waiting, as the chamber’s second-largest party. Sure AfD has some controversial policies but not long ago, (a) it was not a party leader’s business to regulate every single meeting members of his caucus took and (b) it would have been viewed as a serious lapse of political and diplomatic etiquette for a visiting delegation of foreign parliamentarians to be denied a meeting with every single member of our parliament.

What would have looked like cowardice, smallness, a lack of curiosity, a failure of basic politeness, decency and hospitality in 1995 is lauded as statesmanship in 2025. The behaviours our culture has, for centuries, belittled as weak and tyrannical are now somehow supposed to be understood as courageous, as showing leadership. People who cannot or will not face, will not confront people who have strong opinions of their own, who are comfortable only in rooms of toadies, sycophants and stooges are, by definition, incapable of leading us anywhere good because they are not true leaders.

These may be stupid, ugly, petty times but true leadership is what it has always been, no matter how hard the media works to make cowardice seem courageous and courage seem cowardly.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

“Sex Work” Apologism, Authoritarianism and DEI Policy: An Unexpected and Frightening Dance

Before “Trans Women are Women,” There Was “Sex Work is Work!”
When my oldest friend who would ultimately lead the cancel mob against me in 2020 first began to go funny, it was not exactly over genderwang, the issue over which our final conflict and my cancelation took place. Rather it was over an earlier but adjacent fad in the progressiverse, arguably the movement that functioned as the vanguard for genderwang.

An admirer and later collaborator with Billy Bragg, the anti-fascist turned anti-woman UK folk singer and activist, my friend returned from a stay in the mid-2010s, having had some solid face-time with Bragg and began, seemingly out of nowhere, banging on about how we really needed to “de-stigmatize sex work.”

Stigma, my friend explained, is why prostitutes are oppressed, well, that and borders. If we just had open borders, destigmatized and deregulated “sex work,” the oppression of “sex workers” would end. “But what about all the violent trafficking of women?” I asked. My friend explained that every sex trafficking bust we were reading about in the papers was a false flag operation by the cops and “big feminism.” No women were actually being violently trafficked or beaten by their pimps (this surprised me because he had been sure pimps were beating up prostitutes for the three decades preceding that conversation). It was all propaganda by organizations like ICE because the only violence sex workers were experiencing was due to the risks and violence they were exposed to because of the lack of an open borders policy.

Obviously, from this point forward, I became worried that my friend was experiencing something akin to cult indoctrination because he was developing a totalizing worldview. A totalizing worldview is one in which all evidence that would appear counter the worldview is read as evidence in support of it. The more sex trafficking busts that were reported in the paper, the greater the evidence of the scale and reach of the conspiracy against the sex workers.

Within a year, “sex work is work!” became the first of the “THIS is THAT!” ritually chanted group mantras the left took up. What was odd about this is that nobody was actually arguing that prostitution is not work. The beef that Vancouver Rape Relief and other feminists had with it was that it is work that should not be done because of its impacts on the individuals involved and on society as a whole.

Just as with “trans rights are human rights,” its primary function seemed to be an effort at strawmanning one’s opponents by vehemently insisting that something no one was arguing about was the centre of the actual controversy.

But I have, in recent months, come to realize that there is an additional sinister dimension to “sex work is work!” that had not previously occurred to me, making this mid-10s progressive fad not just the vanguard of “trans women are women,” but of the seismic shift in workplace social and legal norms associated with what is euphemistically called “Diversity, Equity and Inclusion,” i.e. DEI.

Prostitution’s Unique Harms
I do not want to do want to normalize prostitution as a kind of work in this essay, nor do I want to suggest that there is some kind of “degrees of sex work” spectrum. But to understand more fully the profound and far reaching adverse effects of this discourse, it is necessary to break down what components prostitution contains.

The first and most egregious component is this: like surrogacy, it is about men renting the inside of people’s, overwhelmingly women’s, bodies. There is no form of physical labour outside of prostitution in which the insides of people’s bodies are rented out so that their “client” can do things in there. This form of extension of the market into the body through an orifice and the commodification and alienation of the inside of one’s body for a set period of time is profoundly disordering for the owner of that body and produces bad effects on society as a whole.

But there is a second aspect of prostitution, which is almost as important and strongly conditions the rent that can be charged for one’s insides: misrepresenting one’s thoughts and desires. The most successful prostitutes figure out what it is that their clients want them to claim to think and feel, to lie convincingly about what they desire, what they prefer, what they enjoy. One’s client has written a detailed script that he hasn’t exactly let you read but he’s going to be very angry if you don’t know your lines.

Indeed, the ability of “high end” prostitutes to have “escorting” work as part of their gig, to get breaks from the orifice rental industry and just be paid as a companion or display object for some of their working hours hinges strongly on falsifying one’s preferences based on cold reading and the ability not only to fake preferences but to express fake enthusiasm for those fake preferences.

Timur Kuran’s Study of Authoritarianism
I began thinking seriously about the importance of preference falsification in present-day progressive authoritarianism with the emergence of Timur Kuran as a major critic of the two main cultural arms of Wokeness, DEI and genderwang. Kuran is a social scientist I have long admired who began publishing on the effects of authoritarianism on the functioning of economies in the mid-1990s. For years, I assigned his articles to my students, back when both he and I would have been understood as members of the academic left.

Kuran’s interest has, since the 1990s, been the effects of authoritarianism on societies’ prosperity and development. In 1996, he authored a paper showing that, contrary to his initial hypothesis, Islam was not, itself, producing underdevelopment in the Middle East. Comparing societies across the Islamic Levant, Arabian Peninsula and Persian Gulf, Kuran found that the major factor producing making societies less developed, less efficient, less prosperous, was lack freedom of expression and democratic elections.

Hyper-secular Baathist Syria and Iraq were the worst countries. Kemalist Turkey and Islamist Iran scored surprisingly well primarily because, while freedom of speech was limited in these managed democracies, where political choice and debate were restricted, simply based on the fact that some, even if not all government policies could be criticized in the press and public square.

The reason for this was simple, Kuran argued: error checking and error correction. The more citizens can report that something about their country is not working and the more power they have to punish or replace those responsible for the failure, the more likely and the sooner mistakes will be noticed and once noticed, the more likely to be corrected.

And, Kuran explained in his subsequent books and articles, the suppression of negative feedback about the state and actors aligned with it is just the beginning. Bad policies are not merely shielded from criticism; authoritarian regimes encourage constant “preference falsification.”

“Preference falsification,” is where people lie about their beliefs, desires and opinions to curry favour with those who hold power over them and will compete for status or protection with other preference falsifiers to do the best job of expressing enthusiasm not just for terrible new things or disapproval of positive or beneficial things those in authority oppose. And preference falsification does not merely affect how people talk about ideas but even to their own experiences.

And in an environment of habitual preference falsification, people do not merely become habituated to lying; they develop forms of double consciousness in which they are increasingly uncertain of what their own opinions and feelings actually are from one moment to the next.

Kuran came out strongly against DEI programs in 2023 on social media because he argued that were turning white collar workplaces into environments of constant preference falsification. People are strongly encouraged to express opinions they do not hold on pain of firing or workplace discipline. These opinions range from beliefs about individual coworkers to workplace initiatives to events in the new to electoral politics. Furthermore, when DEI initiatives fail and do not produce the outcomes they purport to desire, no one can report this for fear that they will be seen as critical of DEI itself and face shaming, discipline and possible firing.

And there is also no guarantee that workplace speech policing policies will not follow a worker into settings outside work, to union meetings, to social events, to church, to political meetings. This is especially true if one is a member of a self-regulating profession like nursing, teaching or counselling psychology. Increasingly, the main challenge of staying in white collar work is not meeting the demands of one’s actual job but of engaging in constant defensive preference falsification.

The authoritarian preference falsification culture that is emanating from our workplaces no longer extends simply to issues with which Woke thinking is preoccupied. Our whole white collar culture is becoming like that of the 1970s USSR and Warsaw Pact: any expression of an opinion different from one’s superiors’ is understood to be increasingly transgressive, even as the pretensions, claims and pageantry of workplace equality and democracy escalate. Telling your boss he might be making a mistake is viewed as ever more improper and disloyal. Instead of insubordination being understood as defiance of a workplace decision, mere disagreement is insubordinate in a growing number of places.

I was able to observe this on a small scale in a former workplace. As the toughest grader in my department, the marks I awarded were sometimes appealed to my boss, the chair of the department in which I worked. When he chose to overrule the marks I gave, which was about 80% the time, he would let me know and I would say, “no problem. You’re the boss.” Because he was. I never minded being overruled; it was the cost of doing business and being in a clear and transparent hierarchy.

But as the years went by and DEI culture tightened its grip on my university’s culture, things changed. It became increasingly important for my boss to convince me that his mark was correct and mine was incorrect. He grew increasingly insistent that I change the mark to the one he wanted because I had realized my previous evaluation had been incorrect. And yet, at the same time, he was unwilling to actually have a dialogue about the new mark. I was being indirectly asked to feign having changed my mind and to have suddenly seen the error of my thinking and the correctness of his.

White Collar Work Grows More Sex Work-Adjacent
Thinking this through in light of some recent experiences in my circle, it occurs to me that “sex work is work,” has had an additional impact, additional meaning beyond the culture of misogyny it has helped to foster. The constant celebration of “sex work,” is also about normalizing the ways in which white collar work has become, shall we say, “sex work-adjacent.”

Sure, white collar workers do not deal with the physical violence and violation of prostitutes when they show up for work. Today’s white collar workers might be the most physically coddled people in human history, but their work does increasingly resemble that of prostitutes because their main workplace activity is preference falsification and the rate at which they are remunerated, their status with the work hierarchy, their ability to negotiate professional relationships is increasingly based on one main proficiency, preference falsification.

Programs like DEI can only function in a culture that does not merely normalize preference falsification but celebrates it, as we when celebrities make tearful speeches praising “sex workers,” as a class and publicly admiring the work they do.

Authoritarianism Race | fusangite |

Fragility, Sensitivity and Canada’s Authoritarian Turn

Stupidly, I was in an argument about my support for the Freedom Convoy with an old acquaintance on Facebook the other day. I generally prefer to do my arguing on the Twitter because it’s easier to have arguments in which professional censors do not intervene. But, because it is probably the least socially partitioned platform these days, one can have experiences there that just don’t happen so much on Twitter anymore.

I suggested that, while the proponents of the dangerous ideology of Truckism might staged the longest, largest, loudest tailgate party to date, the Convoy was far less physically dangerous, far more law abiding  and, most importantly, far less lethal than comparable mass protests like the George Floyd protests, the Occupy movement or the Indian farmers’ march. It lacked the open air drug market scene of Occupy and consequently did not produce the masses of overdose deaths and close calls Occupy camps did. It lacked the vigilantism, vandalism and mob violence of the Floyd protests and so, did not get anyone shot, unlike the protests sponsored by Black Lives Matter.

So, why was it so much worse than these rallies? And why was it necessary to use emergency powers against it?

My interlocutor replied that it was because of all the horn honking at all days and hours. That would be annoying, I responded. No. It’s actual torture. It’s an atrocity. It’s banned in the Geneva Convention. (Of course, so is putting men in women’s prisons but no matter!)

One of the biggest problems I have speaking across the social partition with my friends who continue to reside in the progressiverse is that I often do not credit that they sincerely hold some of the beliefs they espouse, that saying obvious falsehoods is such an important boundary maintenance practice these days that I tend to go that route more frequently and more ungenerously than I should.

But I felt a real note of urgency, of sincerity. This person could not imagine suffering more profound than a couple of weeks of frequent and annoyingly loud car and truck horn blasts through the night in a major city. This was such extreme violence, such extreme suffering, such trauma that Nuremberg-style trials should possibly be empaneled to punish the Truckists for this heinous crime!

Having just spend a year living in Dar Es Salaam with my neighbourhood’s late night bars and pubs and my apartment complex’s chickens, I was tempted to suggest that your average Canadian could not handle the noise culture of any major world city, even when a massive protest was not going on.

On the same day—yes, I managed my time very poorly that day—I found myself in an equally useful but similarly illuminating debate about British Columbia’s Bill 7, an actual enabling act, one of many tributes to the original 1933 version, very much in the style of Nicolas Maduro and other authoritarian strong men who periodically ram a bill through parliament declaring a continuing state of emergency, necessitating that the head of government rule by decree. In this case, BC’s government wants two years to rule by decree, collect personal information unhindered, restrict speech and mobility rights and enact or amend any provincial law without resort to the legislature.

Why? Well, because these aluminum tariffs really hurt BC. In fact, they are causing such unprecedented disruption, such extreme hurt that of course the government needs unfettered powers. Canada, the story goes, has never faced so great a threat as the Trump Administration’s punitive and arbitrary tariffs. Donald Trump is the biggest threat to Canadian rights and liberty because he is depriving us of our fundamental right to sell Rio Tinto’s aluminum ingots to foreigners, unobstructed.

But again, I sensed the genuine fear, desperation, need for order.

But if we didn’t need this kind of legislation when the far more impactful softwood lumber tariffs went into effect four separate times through the 1980s, 90s and 00s, why do we need an enabling act now? Because this is worse. Because the real threat is what Trump says he wants to do, to annex Canada, to punish Canada—he’s revealing his mind to us, the fact that the tanks will be rolling across the border any day now.

But we didn’t need such sweeping authoritarian legislation even when we were fighting Hitler, Mussolini and Tojo eighty years ago. Why now? Because this is literally the scariest thing that has ever happened to Canada. Scarier than Ronald “Nuclear Warning Shot” Reagan was elected, scarier than when we headed to Vimy Ridge or the Battle of the Bulge, scarier than our actual war with the US back in the 1810s.

I think people are sincerely feeling these emotions because fear is contagious but also because exhibiting fear and panic strengthens authoritarian social impulses and that is what our leaders want right now. Rule by decree is saleable only to bullies and cowards, to the extent that the two categories are separable.

In other words, I believe that core to the rise of cultural authoritarianism among Anglo Canadians has been a new politics of personal fragility, one inextricable from the rise of Justin Trudeau and the new nationalism he hawked. I wrote about this disturbing trend and where it might send us in the early days of the 2015 election campaign following a striking and bizarre moment at the first federal leaders’ debate:

I was initially so surprised by Justin Trudeau’s sudden pivot, echoed in pre-rehearsed, stage-ready tweets and Facebook posts from campaign surrogates, to immediately assert that his continued feelings of bereavement surrounding his father’s death a decade and a half ago required some kind of disability accommodation by everyone else in Canada. Gerald Butts and other Liberal surrogates instantaneously reacted to Tom Mulcair’s assertion that the NDP’s multi-generation track record of standing up for Canadians’ liberty was demonstrated in their opposition to the War Measures Act in 1971. Apparently, this implied criticism of Trudeau’s dad was dirty pool and had hurt the prospective Prime Minister’s feelings. The recent emergence of medically invalid but nevertheless popular “trigger warnings” on US college campuses had, somehow, leapt across the border and now, fifteen of the past fifty years of Canadian politics were off-limits for fear of causing one rich white man to experience hurt feelings.

But I am no longer surprised. This bullshit is totally working. All kinds of random people, veterans struggling with amputations and PTSD, precariously employed minimum wage workers, racialized populations being stripped of their citizenship rights—these people, ordinary Canadians, are getting really concerned about how Mulcair was insufficiently considerate of Trudeau’s hurt feelings. How is it that the feelings of one attractive, privileged, successful, white adult male could become the object of so much sympathy that the entire narrative of the campaign changed in one day? How could Butts and the other Liberal strategists have calculated that so many Canadians whose easiest day is tougher than Trudeau’s hardest would have become so concerned about another national leader being inconsiderate of his feelings?

In hindsight, this scene was a harbinger of what would go wrong with this country over the past decade. The man who would later unconstitutionally use emergency powers against his citizens couldn’t be grilled on the subject because to elicit his opinion about the use of the War Measures Act during the FLQ Crisis because it might hurt his feelings.

But I want to go further: Justin Trudeau’s use of performative grief, of his own tears as the linchpin of his rhetorical strategy helped Canadians slide faster towards cultural authoritarianism. You see: Trudeau’s tears functioned as both sword and shield. They could be used to indict the behaviour of others not by demonstrating its wrongness but rather by how it impacted the Prime Minister’s emotions. The tears were, more importantly, a shield. They allowed Trudeau to dodge questions, not just those he was took choked to answer but, more importantly, all the questions his tears stifled in the throats or on the lips of his interlocutors, the passive-aggressive intimidation of a very powerful man crying.

As I observed in my original commentary, there is nothing new about linking social and political rank and power to a politics of sensitivity, fragility, even. The Princess and the Pea is, in some ways, the ultimate Enlightenment description of political legitimacy, that only a true princess would be so sensitive as to feel a single dried pea through seventeen goose down mattresses.

Last week, in Nanaimo, a criminal trial took place of a man who assaulted a woman on her way home from a parents’ rights protest. More than a foot taller than the fifty-two-year-old, the man who had more than a decade and a foot on his victim explained to the court that he had to punch her in the face because she made him feel “unsafe.”

Those present to support the victim were baffled that this appeared to amount to the sum total of the assailant’s defense. But he clearly believed (and the courts might agree with him), that feeling uncomfortable or whatever “unsafe” means to an individual like this was a nothing short of a threat to his very existence.

More importantly, as with Justin Trudeau in that fateful debate, it is clear that preventing certain people from experiencing unpleasant feelings, even if those feelings might only last moments is more important than Canada’s national leaders being able to debate emergency powers legislation and its abuse. After all, stopping certain people from feeling bad is enough reason to use those very emergency powers; it is even sufficient reason to breach our society’s state monopoly on violence to permit the dozens of unprosecuted assaults against women rallying and speaking in support of their rights and those of their children.

But, of course, the problem with the success of efforts to punish, chill and silence speech high-status individuals find hard to tolerate is that the more people are protected from speech that makes them feel bad, the less able they are to handle such speech when it somehow gets around the barricades. Consequently, offense-based speech restriction produces an ever-receding horizon of offense. And that means an ever-increasing demand for new legal, social and technological tools to manage the increasingly fragile personalities.

In essence, we are becoming addicts of censorship, state censorship, community censorship, self-censorship and even compelled speech and like addicts of all things, more censorship creates more tolerance (i.e. speech sensitivity) which then requires more censorship.

Those we coddle by acceding to their authoritarian demands inevitably grow ever more despotic and fragile. People who are so used to other people preventing them from having experiences that elicit negative or challenging emotions lose their ability to manage their own emotions and become increasingly convinced that it is the job of everyone around them to manage their emotions for them. Those who refuse to be conscripted into changing their speech and that of those around them to accommodate the acquired fragility of special persons are understood to be hate criminals, bigots who deserve whatever is coming to them, firing, beating, incarceration, whatever!

As this vicious cycle of offense-taking and new forms of punishment and overreaction, we are generating a society that genuinely believes that it is the president of the United States’ duty to make sure foreigners like us are prosperous, that believes our prosperity must be guaranteed by the US government and that it is not merely a nice thing but a fundamental right. We expect coddling in a widening set of contexts.

Canadians have experienced far greater hardships than these tariffs but, when one asks why the BC government did not require the ability to rule by decree during the Softwood Wars, the Salmon War or the two actual World Wars, the answer is “but Donald Trump keeps talking about the ‘51st state.’ Can’t you see the tanks are going to roll across the border and begin killing us!” Unlike our reaction to Reagan’s far more serious threats of a nuclear first strike, our interpretation a 10% duty on aluminum ingots, because these very fragile, sensitive folks all believe they can read Trump’s mind, is that it is identical to soldiers marching into town and shooting our family members and neighbours.

What an increasingly number of Canadians cannot handle and require unprecedented measures to handle is being taunted and trolled by Trump. Of course, we really need sweeping emergency powers because those powers must be used to prevent Trump from making us feel angry, scared, powerless, humiliated, insecure because we have lost the ability to manage those normal emotions and how need not just a media bubble lying to us about our ability to vanquish the US in a one-on-one trade war or even conventional war; we need the full coercive power of the state to shut people up, shut people down—anything to solve the emergency called “our feelings.”

Of course, not all Canadians are understood to deserve or can conscript the state and those around us into managing our emotions. Obviously, women and girls wishing to protect their sports, spaces, privacy, etc. must manage their own emotions, even “reframe their trauma,” to make sure that the Hearers of this Manichean system are the exclusive beneficiaries of this external emotion-management.

Our society is growing more authoritarian by the day and that authoritarianism is powered by inculcating novel and escalating forms of fragility, concurrent with the expectation that this fragility is everyone’s problem except one’s own. And when people see no difference between special, designated individuals hearing words they would rather not and such things as murder and assault, we know where that goes: exactly where Canada is going now, concurrently descending into both increasing vigilante violence and increasingly authoritarian government.  

Sensitivity is important; empathy is important; but so is taking responsibility for one’s own emotions, even if they are a reaction to the actions of others. This country needs a corollary to Pink Shirt Day, maybe Blue Shirt Day, the day where we celebrate those who are continent and responsible, who manage their own emotions and learn the most important thing about bullying: how to stand up to a bully. Because if you don’t learn to stand up to bullies, you are fated to become one, like the petty authoritarians with whom the Canadian establishment is replete and who constantly seek new means of lawfare, intimidation, threats and violence to prevent themselves experiencing feelings they have made themselves too fragile to handle.

Cue Flight of the Conchords!

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

The Class Contradictions of the Conservative Courtier

My old friend George Gibault, the director of Social Credit Caucus Research from the 1970s until the party’s ultimate collapse in 1994 was exceptional. He played a significant role in an internal coup against Premier Bill Vander Zalm in 1988, working with Finance Minister Mel Couvelier and Attorney-General Bud Smith to radically circumscribe the powers of the premier and place much de facto authority in the hands of Couvelier and Smith.

George’s involvement in that high-level decision was exceptional because he was a career courtier who had risen through the ranks of the party’s unelected activists and through the party bureaucracy in the Victoria legislature while it sat in government.

While courtiers have always been an important part of politics in any system of government, different social orders strongly condition who becomes a powerful courtier and how. When George was coming up politically, during the last decades of the Cold War, the most senior courtiers, especially in conservative parties, were not people who had risen through the ranks of junior courtiers. Premiers and Prime Ministers hired men—and it was overwhelmingly men—out of other careers, “successful” businessmen, academics, prominent lawyers, who would typically place their assets in some kind of trust to avoid the appearance of conflict of interest and self-dealing. They would also take a significant pay cut. The discourse was that they were “giving something back,” engaging in “public service.”

We all know that the trusts were not very blind and that the friends and relatives of the courtiers would soon find the government making decisions that improved their bottom line. Nevertheless, the public performance of virtue did condition our horizon of expectations. When these men were revealed to be self-dealers, hypocrites, we would be outraged, genuinely, because their authority supposedly came from their altruistic virtue. Men like Jimmy Pattison, the future billionaire, were given prominent jobs for a nominal or token salary; such jobs were an effective tactic for self-fashioning and virtue signaling for those wishing to graduate from a mere rich and successful businessman and enter the financial elite.

Conservative parties also had a healthy verging on unhealthy suspicion of civil servants. Indeed, provincial civil servants did not gain the right to vote in BC elections until 1972. The sense was that the civil service was a separate and hostile locus of power in a legislature. Both of BC’s major parties continued conducting gratuitous reorganizations and civil service purges until the end of the twentieth century. Political power, understood as a zero sum game, meant that every bit of power an unelected government employee gained came either at the expense of the liberty of the citizens or at the expense of the power of elected representatives.

Perhaps because of the outsized influence of Warsaw Pact refugees within Social Credit, the party, George especially, feared the political world in which we now live, in which the managerial class has become fully self-conscious and self-interested and has, as a cartel, seized state power from elected officials primarily through the courtier subset of the managerial class or, as they used to say out East, the commissars.

As the twenty-first century has worn on, our baseline has shifted and we have normalized the way that the courtier class has usurped the power of elected officials and how it has come to control its own promotion structures, making career courtiers the norm, for the first time, on the political right.

Ironically, this has also led to a decline in our expectations that our politicians, elected and unelected, will or should not engage in brazen self-dealing and looting of the public purse. If being a courtier is just a profession, like any other, expected to act in its own interests and make no pretense of a special virtue, altruism or sacrifice, how are we to object to them pursuing “their own interests.” And this has bled to our expectations of elected officials, especially as their wealth has increased so rapidly relative to the rest of the population.

But, especially since the advent of Trumpism and the other Bannonite movements around the world, parties of the right have developed a class politics utterly inimical to the courtier class. At a moment when their parties and governments, like all others, are in the vise grip of the commissars, conservative parties find themselves crucibles of class conflict. Courtiers inside conservative parties might strike the odd anti-Woke pose and try to sound like Andrew Tate but they are fundamentally motivated by the same class interests that motivate progressive courtiers and the permanent civil service.

In other words, to be a decent conservative courtier, one must be a supremely self-conscious, self-examining class traitor. At my job, I try to follow George’s example and be exactly that. But that’s the problem with neoliberalism: you cannot solve systemic problems solely through personal virtue. And so, the only other option is that conservatives must break the power of the labour system, smash its promotion structures, purge the ranks, slash the pay and install good old fashioned senior courtiers.

And this is why the managerial class hates Elon Musk more even than Donald Trump. Because the creation of the Department of Government Efficiency and Musk’s control of is something out of the Cold War, before the managerial class became self-conscious and seized huge chunks of state, social and institutional power. Not only does it place a wealthy, eccentric businessman with no government experience at its head; its primary purpose is to conduct a massive civil service purge and concurrent reorganization, seeking to break the hold of the commissars on the state.

And Musk is not the only “inexperienced” and “unqualified” Trump appointee. Nearly every cabinet nominee was assailed during confirmation for the fact that they had not come up through the supposedly meritocratic civil service. Again and again, Democratic senators implied or directly stated that a person who was not already a member of the courtier class, who had done work like this before inside the state, was simply incapable of being a cabinet minister.

Instead of concealing their belief that the state should be a meritocratic technocracy and not a popularly elected democracy, they bared their fangs, with Chuck Schumer suggesting that if the Trump Administration were not careful, they might be personally destroyed or even killed by an intelligence agency. Indeed, throughout mainstream media, we see that the term “democracy” has become its own opposite, now meaning Mandarinate. Those, like Rob Reiner, wishing to “save democracy” mainly mean by this that they wish to preserve the governing power of the commissars and protect the commissars’ authority from the democratic rabble full of unqualified people exercising common sense.

The problem for these putative saviours of democracy is that if Elon Musk or Robert F Kennedy or some other prominent wealthy outsider is actually competent to do their job and carrying it out competently, it is a standing refutation of the commissars’ claims of running an expertise-based, meritocratic outfit that produces uniquely and solely qualified experts for leadership positions.

And this is why we see such an odd political configuration: industrial workers, youth and the old school bourgeoisie in an alliance to restore some modicum of twentieth century representative democracy as the commissar class rushes to finish dismantling it. But this coalition has been able to get further in the United States precisely because, while the culture of political parties and of the judiciary has been captured, to a large extent, by the commissars, America’s robust and democratic political institutions have proven harder to tame.

A country like Canada has made substantial and devastating changes to its democratic institutions to ensure that its parties, across the spectrum, are controlled by the courtier class. As I have stated in previous essays, Jean Chrétien’s 2003 Election Act gave the office of the leader of every party direct appointment powers over candidates. And between 2004 and 2010, not only has an increasing proportion of candidates been directly appointed; all parties have established “candidate vetting” committees composed entirely of courtiers, with secret memberships that meet in secret and produce no minutes. These committees can veto any candidacy at will and without cause.

In a country like Canada, legislators do literally serve at the pleasure of the courtiers who can, with no institutional primary system, veto a legislator’s re-election bid with the stroke of a pen. And without a primary system, I do not know how Canada’s political system will confront the contradiction of interests between the interests of the conservative courtier class and the class alignment of the parties they serve. But that confrontation is coming, nevertheless. It is inevitable. I wish George were here to puzzle it through with me.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

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 |