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Religion and Eschatology in Politics

Religious ideas about the end of the world and other issues keep messing with our thinking.

From South Chicago to Lower Post, BC: The Contemporary Relevance of Richard Wright’s Native Son

Orthodoxy and Un-Saying
People often mistakenly call Wokeness and its component parts “ideology.” While there are certainly ideological aspects of this godless religion, they are often not the most salient characteristics. Certainly, there are religious doctrines associated with this cluster of social movements, but the mechanisms by which they are defended or justified are not ideological in character. Indeed, when a movement propounding a religious orthodoxy takes an authoritarian turn, as Wokeness certainly has, ideologically driven argument is rarely its preferred tool for imposing its beliefs on the skeptical.

For instance, when Galileo Galilei was persecuted for propounding his scientific discoveries, the argument of the Roman Catholic Church was not that his views were incorrect. No argument was mounted against his ideas. Rather, the church argued that stating his views was impermissible and because his views should not have been stated, they were effectively un-said. No argument needed to be mounted against them at all; the faithful were not asked to disbelieve them but rather to act as though they had never heard them.

To state that Central Asian Muslim migrant communities in England are perpetrating violence against girls at a significantly greater rate than their neighbours is not a position UK Labour politicians argue against. They simply state that making this observation is Islamophobic. Because it is impermissible to make the observation, its veracity need not be evaluated. To observe that transgender-identified males are three to four times more likely to commit acts of sexual violence than other males is not a position anyone argues against. Such an observation is un-said because to make it is transphobic. To observe that the main reason that black Americans are more likely to be victims of violent crimes is because young black males are more likely to commit such crimes than other Americans is racist. The veracity of the observation is irrelevant. The problem is not vulnerable black Americans being assaulted; it is people talking about who is assaulting them.

These practices of orthodoxy enforcement, of un-saying, do not impact all of us equally. As you can see from the paragraph above, this kind of retroactive censorship hits the most vulnerable people in our society the hardest, working class teenage girls, incarcerated women and black seniors are just some of the constituencies whose victimization it is impermissible to talk about. Furthermore, if we expand our optic, we might also consider how ill-served young black men or men compelled by an untreated mental illness to mutilate themselves also are by this state of affairs.

Author Wesley Yang cogently observed on Twitter last week that, thanks to this phenomenon, “the best way to obtain immunity from consequence in today’s media environment is to make one’s wrongdoing aligned with dark stereotypes adhering to one’s group—so that a neutral description of what you actually did violates a taboo against exclusionary tropes.”

This “shoot the messenger” policy is today so vigorously defended by those claiming to be “anti-racism” activists that many imagine these practices of silencing observations that risk reinforcing negative stereotypes have always been a practice of anti-racist movements. But this is just another example of Woke reimaginings of the past to serve the present.

Richard Wright, Native Son and the Black Communists
Richard Wright, whose grandparents had been born into slavery, whose parents were sharecroppers, who grew up in violent, impoverished homes and the occasional orphanage lifted himself out of poverty to become one of the greatest black American novelists of the twentieth century. An autodidact with little formal education, Wright did not merely teach himself the craft of writing but dialectical materialism. His credentials as a Marxist and literary giant, not to mention his membership in the Communist Party, ultimately led to his selection as editor of the Daily Worker in 1937.

Shortly thereafter, he began work on his next novel, Native Son. Its main character was provocatively named Bigger Thomas. Bigger—whose name Wright said he chose deliberately to rhyme with “nigger”—was a young, violent black criminal who epitomized the stereotypes of young American black men that are little-changed in the eighty-five years since the novel was first published. “Thomas” referred to the obsequious and weak aspects of his nature by way of reference to Uncle Tom of Uncle Tom’s Cabin.

Native Son was published in 1940 to great accolades from across the American left. The first novel by a black author featured by Book of the Month Club, it was praised by communists, socialists and civil rights activists; Hollywood made three movies of it, the first in 1951, starring Wright himself. Partly inspired by Dostoyevsky’s Crime and Punishment, Bigger, an uneducated violent petty criminal, murders a young, naïve, white communist woman and, in prison, discovers not Jesus but Karl Marx. Orson Welles directed its 1941 Broadway debut.

Much of the final part of the book is a structural analysis of the economic forces that have manufactured Thomas and his ilk that caused so many young men to become uneducated violent criminals. The fact was that too many black men were poor; too many were uneducated; too many were violent; too many were Uncle Toms.

One would think that in our Woke moment, when ideas of “structural violence,” “institutional racism,” “colonialism,” etc. seem hegemonic that Native Son with its highly didactic Marxist concluding chapters would be a much beloved text among progressives. But we all know the reality. Were Native Son published today, it would be assailed as a racist, white supremacist text that reinforced racial stereotypes. Wokes would burn copies and call for Wright’s assault or murder for suggesting, as an eye-witness, that America’s black community has problems with men’s violence that are common to all communities and has problems that are exceptional and non-universal.

You Cannot Cure What You Cannot Diagnose
If one cannot name a problem, the chances of solving it become vanishingly small. If one cannot take notice of the specific features of violence and other social problems in a place like South Side Chicago, where Wright grew up, what chance do we have of addressing these problems? We cannot protect people from today’s Bigger Thomases on their block if we cannot admit that Thomas exists in the first place.

Whether it is violence in America’s inner cities or addiction on Canada’s remote Indian Reserves, an establishment that will not let you notify it of problems because it un-says every report cannot and will note help you. It cannot and will not design rational public policy responses when its discourse insists that there is no such problem because you haven’t reported it because it would be bigoted and reinforce negative stereotypes to do so. Not reinforcing the “drunken Indian” stereotype is more important than helping indigenous communities struggling with addiction.

That is why, today, it is the local Indian Bands in places like Lower Post and Skidegate are taking extraordinary and extralegal measures to protect their communities from the blizzard of drug dealing unleashed by BC’s “safe supply” policies. They realize there is no help coming from the white progressives running the government and the cops because these coddled souls imagine that the worst thing that can happen to you is that someone says negative things about a group you are part of. Not, say, death from fentanyl or a collision with an impaired driver. The establishment is so focused on protecting vulnerable communities from having their problems named that it is doing all it can to ensure that their problems cannot be solved because they cannot be discussed.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Epistemology Politics of Identity Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

The Death of Parable: Another Perspective on the Cognitive Decline of the West

The Gaslightenment: a Multi-pronged Attack on Reason
Sometimes it feels like a zombie movie; sometimes it feels like a plague of contagious dementia; sometimes it feels like Genghis Khan has hypnotized the entire city (the only good line from Alec Baldwin’s The Shadow. But we all know the feeling, this sense that our neighbours have taken leave of both their empathy and their faculties.

We are dealing with a set of interlocking social crises that some collectively call “the Gaslightenment.” We are becoming a paranoid, unreasoning, authoritarian society especially in the peripheral states of the Anglosphere. This turn of events has myriad causes and multiple origins. It is a perfect storm of converging authoritarian and anti-thought projects and organizations.

Regular readers of this blog will be familiar with those forces that concern me the most, the collapse of internal party democracy in the West’s political parties, Genderwang’s capture of our major institutions, reaction formation in response to the climate event, etc. In the coming months I am going to try to cast light a little more broadly on a wider diversity of factors that have led us here, from endocrine disruptors, to 1980s changes to firefighting practices to today’s essay on the loss of the parable.

I was in church the other day, a different kind of church than the liberal churches I had attended (I attended the Unitarian Church when I was a child and the Anglican Church in my thirties). It was a conservative, scripture-focused church in the medium-sized farming community in which I am currently residing. Consequently, people in the church were far more inclined to speak about the immediate relevance and applicability of Biblical lessons and episodes in recounting and reasoning about their daily lives.

Two conversations stood out: one was a discussion of the parable of the wheat and the tares, another of the wealth of the Kingdom of Judah in goats. In both cases, the conversation turned to the practicalities of agriculture. The actual methods and activities associated with herding, milking and slaughtering goats, the challenges of maintaining a wheat field in the face of invasive species and weeds were crucial to our conversations about scripture.

These conversations would not have been possible in the Anglican church I attended on Bathurst Street in Toronto or at the Unitarian church on Oak Street in Vancouver because most congregants did not possess agricultural knowledge or practical and obvious knowledge of the natural world. One of the reasons I want to suggest that there is so much strangeness, so much error, so much de-literalization of scripture—not just from progressive churches but most conservative ones too—has to do with the changes in our economies and patterns of settlement over the past century and a half, leading to what I term “the death of parable.”

The Decline of Natural and Agricultural Knowledge
Aesop’s Fables existed long before the birth of Christ and similar texts, illustrating abstract concepts and relationships, teaching simple and complex moral lessons existed not just in the incipient West but in all significant literate cultures. The natural world and the wild animals therein, agriculture and its domesticated animals and plants were a naturally universal language for metaphor and relational thinking. That is because such a huge portion of the population worked in agriculture or pastoralism and lived near natural ecosystems with abundant wildlife.

This was true not just of slaves, peasants and yeomen but of elites, who even if they maintained a lavish urban residence, typically drew their wealth from the agricultural land they owned and administered. So prevalent was work on the land that knowledge of local plants and animals, domesticated and wild, was effectively universal. In propounding the gospel, parables were crucially important because they employed the only available universally decipherable metaphors.

A century ago, 80% of Canadians lived in rural communities; today, only 20% do. Furthermore, the proportion of rural and remote community residents involved in agriculture and bush work has also dramatically declined even relative to the declining relative rural population. A similar demographic story has unfolded all over the world, albeit at different rates.

I think this has a lot to do with why George Orwell’s Animal Farm (1948) will be last major parable until our societies undergo a massive economic, demographic and geographic realignment. Because the rhetorical and pedagogical efficacy of a parable depend on knowledge of agriculture and nature that most people no longer possess at a deep, practical level of knowledge.

While the death of parable has harmed our societies across the board, as we have become alienated from our foundational texts, traditions and metaphorical vocabularies, the effects have been especially adverse for Christian societies, because their most important text is more reliant on parable than other traditions’ canonical texts. Consequently, our ability to use metaphors, make comparisons and engage in complex reasoning, especially moral reasoning, is stunted because the natural world is no longer functioning as an interpretive index connecting culture, text and thought.

This has additional knock-on effects, especially in a society like Canada which, as observed by one of Canada’s greatest twentieth-century novelists, Robertson Davies, much of our literary canon is awash in Biblical references its authors expected their audience to be intimately familiar with.

Exegesis Without Animals and 1980s Anti-gay Social Science
In 1988, my father took me to Kenya on a packaged safari tour. I fell in love with East Africa then and have been back three times since. I vividly remember our first day out on the Masai Mara savanna. Our jeep driver, Sammy, spotted elephants in the distance and we drove towards them as fast as we could. As we approached, it became clear that both were young male bull elephants having very enthusiastic, aggressive sex with each other, with the largest erections I ever have seen or expect I will see in my life.

Despite being an avid naturalist, hiker, photorealist wildlife artist and voracious reader of all kinds of science, my father’s reaction was not that different than that of the other under-fifty men in the vehicle. He looked stunned, shocked, unable to categorize or comment on the situation. But this was not true of the three older men in the vehicle. The “Logan Boys,” seventy-something brothers from Texas and Ray Brandyberry all began chuckling and broke into full-blown laughter when the older Logan Boy remarked, “Why I believe those would be the San-Francisca elephants!”

My father, who was not a man for pets, despite his great tolerance of my gerbil-owning period, had spent years carefully stalking and photographing reclusive and rare wild animals, grizzly bears, doll sheep and the like. But he had no sustained experience of animals living at close quarters with one another as a person living in an agrarian society would.

This generational shift, as witnessed in the safari jeep, was beginning to wreck havoc on Christian thought back home in North America as suburban megachurches and televangelists began propounding a Christianity that could not pass muster at a 4H Club.

The significance and urgency of the modern gay rights movement, which had begun in the 1960s was massively amplified by the AIDS crisis. Until the AIDS crisis, the decision by most men who slept with other men to keep that information about themselves private was a personal choice; it was also a political one, and one hotly contested among gay men. But once this openness became an important aspect of prophylaxis during a lethal global epidemic, “coming out” ceased to be a mere ritual act to recast one’s personal identity. It became an important part of a coordinated effort to stop the spread of AIDS through social prophylaxis.

There were other new reasons to come out that AIDS created, like inheritance, death benefits, hospital and hospice visiting rights. The list goes on.

And this resulted in the sense, on the part of those outside the emerging “gay community,” that it was not just AIDS that was an epidemic, homosexuality itself was. It seemed, superficially, like a contagion. Homophobic jokes, anti-gay rhetoric and gay-bashing also seemed to be reaching epidemic scale, as gay-bashings followed Andrew Dice Clay’s and Eddie Murphy’s edgy homophobic stand-up routines around Ronald Reagan’s America.

As with abortion, previously uninterested or even neutral evangelical Christians shouldered past the West’s Roman Catholics in articulating a strongly condemnatory new discourse regarding homosexuality. But this new Christian social conservatism, even though not leavened by parable, suffered the same problems Biblical exegesis was now facing due to urbanization.

For centuries, Catholic polemics against homosexuality had argued that same-sex action was bestial because animals engaged in it often and guiltlessly. How could anyone with long-term experience tending animals in groups not know this? The Catholic argument had always been that human should not engage in homosexuality because we are fundamentally different from animals, that the immaterial soul that God places in our bodies at quickening, not conception, gives us the unique power to overcome our bestial urges for gay sex.

But this newfound ignorance of the natural order allowed a new kind of anti-gay propaganda, which stated that homosexuality was “unnatural,” that it came from Lucifer, not the natural order, because this was not something animals did. Only humans did it.

Farms, Fields and Field Trips
Some people argue that the loss of the natural, created world as the basis of metaphor, comparison, analogy, etc. can be addressed through comparisons to new universals, common technologies like cars and mobile telephones, common literary and cinematic experiences like Harry Potter and the Marvel Cinematic Universe.

But the problem is that these are not working systems. They are mere flights of fancy. Their rules of cause and effect, their patterns of outcome are even more disconnected from the natural world than we are because these things are the result of untethering our thought from physical reality, and more importantly, from the rules of cause and effect that underpin them and the systems of relationships they generate and are seated in.

If we want our children to understand Animal Farm, there is no short cut. They must watch pigs, chickens, horses, etc. interacting and going about their day. If we want them to understand that parable of the labourers in the vineyard, we should take them to the Hainle winery in Peachland, where the frosts came too soon and the grapes were frozen, resulting in the first modern crop of ice wine. They can hear about how, until 1978, such wine was deemed unsaleable and the panic the vineyard owner in the New Testament must have experienced as the day wore on and more workers had to be called at an ever-increasing hourly wage. You see: parables are not just a means of illustration but of reinforcement; the parable of the wheat and the tares is not just understandable; everyone would have a story of weeding, of the discernment it took them to distinguish a new weed from a new sprout.

There is no substitute for farms and fields and wild nature as the foundation of our metaphorical vocabulary, as one of the pillars, along with empathy, on which abstract reasoning rests. The dream of reinhabiting the land, reintegrating domestic animals and food crops into our daily lives is not a romantic fancy of the deep green movement. It is the only way we are going to clear our heads to face what we are facing as a species.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

“Adulting” at Christmas: the Decline of the Child-Centred Festivals of the New Deal Order

“What is a woman?” has become an effective refrain for opponents of Genderwang to bust out in public hearings, townhalls, etc. to wrong-foot progressives. Progressives are reluctant to reiterate what the laws they proclaim say on the subject which is “any person who says ‘I am a woman’ at any time, at any place and for any reason.”

Certainly, women have born the brunt of a lot of terrible progressive legislation concerning freedom of assembly, movement, association and speech. They have been locked in prison cells with serial rapists, made to compete against men in the boxing ring, had the violent abusers they were fleeing admitted to their women’s refuge, forced to receive strip searches and personal nursing from men cosplaying as women. The list goes on. It is well-rehearsed.

Ultimately, the progressive idea seems to be that the ways our bodies and minds have been shaped to meet our species’ reproductive needs is unfair and, therefore, somehow untrue or is something that we can and should cause to be untrue. I would argue that such an enterprise only becomes reasonable in a society in which reproduction, itself, is, as the queer theorists would say, “de-normalized” and “de-centred.”

And at no time is this more evident to me than during my two favourite childhood holidays, Christmas and Hallowe’en. The shift of annual gift-giving from New Years to Christmas and the rise of Hallmark and the greeting card industry in the 1840s, radiating out from the US, followed by the collaborative Anglo-American invention of the modern Santa Claus at the end of the nineteenth century created a whole new deity and ritual practice for a novel secular liberal Christmas.

Hallowe’en, which arose from new forms of consumption and settlement, enabled by the decline of sugar prices with the rise of the sugar beet industry in the American Southwest and the rise of row house streetcar suburbs was, similarly, a new festival and one which, like the new Christmas moved the centre of celebration and observance from otherworldly miracles to the miracle of childhood.

There were a few reasons for this shift, not least a rapidly expanding industry producing packaged sweets, fueled by massive increases in sugar supply and declines in price as American maize and beets produced a sectoral import substitution boom, a new industry in greeting cards and the rise of urban department stores, supplanting the catalogue distributorship model.

But there were also social needs to be met. The growth of the suburbs, the immigration boom, increasingly fueled by Eastern and Southern Europeans, meant that a whole new ethos of neighbourliness had to be built. Hallowe’en was an ideal mechanism for conscripting previously unconnected people into a neighbourly activity through dynamics of pressure and shame, as well as children’s enthusiasm, in that it also allowed them to be vetted based on their treatment of neighbour children. And by inserting a strain of benign paganism, Hallowe’en could also be used to vet for civic-minded religious tolerance.

In a way, child-centred Hallowe’en was to the neighbourly culture in which I grew up, in which my mom borrowed and lent butter, flour and sugar with the other women on our block, what the hajj was to medieval Islam. Mall Santa, I would contend, functioned in a similar way: no one would look too askance on a family that missed going to church on the twenty-fourth or twenty-fifth, to the extent that it was even appropriate to inquire about such things across denomination. But Mall Santa, the closest thing we have to the eponymous priest class of Pharaonic Egypt: that was the pilgrimage that every family had to make. A child could miss Jesus’ intercessory and redemptive sacrifice but not the materialist confession they made on the lap of a portly man who resembled more a medieval imagining of a man possessed by Mammon than the Saint Nicholas who punched Arius in the face at the Council of Nicea and whose bones Recep Erdogan has offered to sell us.

But worry was also a big part of what generated these rituals, twin demographic anxieties nearly identical to our own. Strange how when wealth rapidly polarizes and demand is fueled and maintained by massive increases in consumer debt leavened by increasingly conscriptive monthly instalment plans, people seem to decide that the solution is more cross-dressing and immigration. But of course, rapid, unsustainable rates of immigration were, just as they are today, part of the Global North’s strategy for maintaining increasingly precarious economic growth by creating shortages of jobs and housing, pushing down wages and pushing up rents.

The immigration increases were justified much as they are today, white Protestant birth rates were declining and, to maintain the constant growth capitalism demands, more migrants were necessary. Teddy Roosevelt propounded a natalist policy in response, seeking to ban contraception and create new incentives for families to have kids. We often mistake the “baby bonus,” like the public school system as a proto-welfare state policy that a party like Germany’s Social Democrats might introduce. But these policies are the sort we see coming out of the natalist governments of Viktor Orban and Jean-Francois Legault today. You see: public schools and baby bonuses were originally understood in natalist terms i.e. they were created because the state believed people should have more kids and sought to make that easier; they did not arise from a belief in universals material entitlements of minors to education or to clothing and shelter.

Ultimately, child-centred festivals addressed these anxieties, to an extent, in a number of ways. They had an assimilating effect on communities by conscripting them into universal activities through their children, dampening worries about immigration; both local Anglo creoles and newcomers were creating new shared civic rituals together; they helped to build trust and vetting processes for neighbours’ suitability to look out for free range kids, enabling the world of Our Gang and the Little Rascals to come into being.

The New Deal Order was only around for little more than half a century. It was largely sustained by the rise of the Soviet Union and East Bloc. Without them, there is simply no reason it was rational to keep that social contract around. It had served its purpose and won the Cold War. And universal material guarantees could be safely scaled-back.

And so, not just the material supports but the cultural and infrastructural supports for parents were stripped away. Instead of focusing gifting primarily on children and secondarily on other relatives at Christmas time, the idea of a nebulously-defined self-selected “family” of friends was relentlessly popularized in media, entertainment and popular psychology, making who was to receive a gift less clear and more fraught with anxiety likely to produce over-purchasing. Besides, with their knowledge and expectations, adults tend to prefer more expensive gifts. It made good money, good sense to replace a child and family-structured Christmas with voluntarist liberal associational Christmas.

The changes in Hallowe’en I found personally upsetting. I watched the festival from one centred on children to one centred on twentysomethings and then on adults in early middle age. It took me decades to outrun the damn thing. Every time I thought Hallowe’en parties would become age-inappropriate in my circle and stop being major events, they suddenly became age-appropriate for even older people, again a move relentlessly pushed by popular media.

Furthermore, as laws and the culture of the caring professions shifted in a more individualistic, neoliberal direction, on the one hand, and, on the other became gripped by an irrational safetyism that sought to shut down the very idea of free range kids, the Hallowe’en’s hajj-like properties declined. Instead of being a block-based processional festival, individual children were driven, by their parents, to the homes of trusted, pre-vetted people. Childless newcomers to neighbourhoods ceased putting out decorated pumpkins and buckets of candy. And so the integrative and vetting functions, crucial to the maintenance of neigbhourliness, disappeared. In its place were parties focusing on novel and fantastical forms of display by young women as wire-fu, manga and superheroines came to define new fads in my generation’s male sexual imaginary.

But today, on our streets, it is not young women with blue hair and shiny clothes that are exotic. Free range children sent to the Safeway to buy extra tomatoes, unsupervised kids on buses, kids on bikes: these are the surprising and transgressive sight of this society. Free range kids are not just a scary verging on impossible idea for us because we no longer vet our neighbours and there are no more “block parent” signs in houses’ windows.

They challenge us because we no longer believe that an adult behaving as an adult is an essential part of the social contract. When you live in a society where people have no experience of children, who have had their natural instincts to care and look out for kids beaten out of them, who believe not that a child is a protected class of person but that being a child is a right. Only a society that thinks about childhood as a privilege or right to which they can subscribe, that a person can pick up or put down, would verb the word “adult” and congratulate themselves on social media for “adulting” that day. Of course, this is a society that is engaged in trying to tell us that the “adult baby” fetish is benign.

Similarly to womanhood, childhood is being transformed from a particular embodied location in the human reproductive and developmental process into a feeling, a state of mind. How else can we explain our government’s insistence that children as young as twelve can and should obtain lethally dangerous drugs like Lupron and Fentanyl, behind their parents’ backs and at state expense? How else do we explain fifty-two-year-old York University professor Nicholas Cepeda being permitted to participate in middle school girls’ swim meets and wave his dick at the twelve-year-old girls in the locker room? His right to be a child trumps their right to experience the protections normally granted to children, just as his right to be a woman does.

While Cepeda is an outlier—although not as much of one as you might hope if you read the news on Reduxx—his entitlement speaks to where our horizon of possibilities has gone as our contact with children and, relatedly, our experience of age-appropriate behaviour has steadily declined over the course of my adult life.

It is not that progressive Canadian society has some sinister idea of what a child is, exactly. It is that it has absolutely no idea what a child is. And if you don’t know what a woman is, you can’t protect women. And if you don’t know what a child is, you can’t protect children.

In the crescendo of Tom Waits’1980s surrealist auctioneer song, Step Right Up, Waits chants “It turns a sandwich into a banquet / Tired of being the life of the party? / Change your shorts! Change your shorts! Change your life! / Change into a nine-year-old Hindu boy and get rid of your wife!”

Now that’s an option, a present you can buy yourself for Christmas after a hard year adulting.

Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

2024: The Year Canadians Said “Merry Christmas”

When I was a child, “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays” were common greetings in the world around me, in informal spoken language during the second half of December. They were not heard quite as frequently as “Merry Christmas,” but they were things people organically said. And they said these words with enthusiasm quite often. Their meaning was clearly not the same as “Merry Christmas” but the phrases were not understood by Canadians outside of conservative Christianity to be adversarial to “Merry Christmas” either.

In large measure, that was because they were about something positive. They did not, and have never, merely signified the mere avoidance of the term “Christmas.” Rather, they signified belief in something: the Cold War secularist civic nationalism we associate with the Great Society and the welfare state. Especially in Canada, where our welfare state arose the secularization of the Social Gospel movement and its leaders like Tommy Douglas, “Season’s Greetings,” was not simply a neutral expression. It signified belief in a project, the project of creating a liberal, universalist secular social contract that wove a thread through the churched and unchurched and through Christians and people of other religious faiths.

It was like our flag, our national anthem, our official multiculturalism, our welfare state. Sure, these things lacked deep cultural roots and were elite-driven projects handed down from on high but they appeared grounded in the ethos of reasonableness on which the great secular Anglo democracies of the twentieth century were culturally centred. One could comfortably say “Merry Christmas” and “Season’s Greetings” because they were complementary and compatible benedictions.

Of course, like so many aspects of white settler state liberalism, it actually concealed its own prejudices and cultural imperialism; fortunately, like many such prejudices of the age, they were relatively benign. Part of what held up “Season’s Greetings” and its friend “Happy Holidays,” was a major falsehood, a myth relentlessly propounded by the teaching profession, politicians and liberal religious leaders: that every major religious faith is like Christianity and that every religious tradition has two major annual festivals, one in the month following the vernal equinox and one in the two weeks surrounding the winter solstice.

Liberal secularists and neopagans like this myth for opposing reasons: liberal secularists like the idea that we are really just celebrating the climate, the seasons, the weather, that religion is simply an inefficient or nostalgic way of celebrating scientific laws and natural phenomena. Neopagans, one of the movements involved in the pernicious redefinition of “cultural appropriation” from the commodification and monopolization of cultural knowledge (as depicted in the Coen Brothers’ O Brother Where Art Thou? and dramatized by Monsanto’s patenting of basmati rice) to normal processes of cultural change and transmission, like this idea because it creates the false idea that Christians somehow stole the pagan festival Yule from Germanic pagans. Neopagans, being a white consciousness movement, if ever there were one, also share with atheists the dubious distinction of being the only people I have ever seen offended by “Merry Christmas.”

But the reality is, of course, that there is nothing universal about the there being two main religious festivals linked to the winter solstice and vernal equinox. Even North American liberal Judaism, the sole religion used to make this bold assertion, underwent significant modification to fit into this framework, elevating local observance the fairly obscure festival of Channukah above the far more significant festival of Yom Kippur.

Ironically, as we replaced our immigration with one that selected entrants based on class rather than colour, the obvious falsity of the universalist myth that every religion is excited about the vernal equinox became increasingly evident to us. And much of our enthusiasm for saying our secularist benedictions declined with it. We realized that we were not saying anything to our Muslim, Hindu or Sikh neighbours about their faith or seasonal experiences; we were just talking about the strange trip we were on.

Reactions to this came in a variety of forms: first, a growing negativity, a spirit of nullification, which had begun in the US, spread rapidly north. Lacking an ACLU  and First Amendment of our own, we nevertheless imbibed a new kind of bitter American secularism, complaining about the violation of our non-existent separation of church and state (the first article of our liberal constitution is “the Supremacy of God” and our king is the head of a major Christian church). And so we began complaining about Christmas displays, songs and greetings receiving too much state sponsorship, being too permissible in public workplaces and other public settings.

And so we also borrowed the moronic idea that Christians saying “Merry Christmas” to non-Christians was some sort of injustice, injury or offense. Needless to say, people from venerable world religions were not offended, and often took the lead in saying it to us. No. The only people who seemed to be offended were neopagans and white atheists i.e. apostates from Christianity who constructed their religious identity in opposition to Christianity.  

Another reaction was to attempt to astroturf new religio-cultural traditions that affirmed rather than contradicting the false premise of “Happy Holidays” universalism. Liberal churches, progressive school boards and other institutions dominated by liberal intellectuals invested heavily in the constructed festival of Kwanzaa, the black liberal secularist answer to Channukah.

The most pernicious reaction was proxy-offense culture, where identitarian whites take offense at people saying “Merry Christmas” to people of non-Christian faiths on their behalf. As I explained in my original series of essays on identity politics four years ago, proxy offense-taking is an important part of hierarchical honour cultures. Taking offense on behalf of a perceived sleight of one’s inferiors is central to maintaining and burnishing one’s identity as a powerful person in an honour culture like late eighteenth century Mexico, mid-nineteenth century Dixie or contemporary Coastal British Columbia.

The idea is that oppressed people lack both the knowledge and sophistication to be offended and the social capital to enact offense, even if they are. And so a crucial part of liberal white consciousness is taking offense on behalf of one’s inferiors, just as a lord might take offense on behalf of one of his servants if they were insulted on a public street in eighteenth century England.

In recent years, as the Pearsonian nationalist project was first betrayed, then hollowed-out, then inverted, all that remains is the offense-taking. And so, “Season’s Greetings” and “Happy Holidays,” have come to be perceived as combative slogans, as the precursor to a metaphorical duel in which today’s gentry, the commissar class, throw down a gauntlet, challenging their interlocutors to repeat back a meaningless and empty slogan or face the consequences.

Because I have been pushed out of Woke culture, I no longer even experience this. For the past two years, nobody has said “Happy Holidays” or “Seasons Greetings” to me at this time of year. Instead, “Merry Christmas” has made a remarkable resurgence as a greeting, one relished by both Christians and non-Christians alike. Because it turns out that moments of understanding and appreciating difference, of mutual recognition, of vicarious joy in others’ joy, of mutual agency are what bind a society together.

So I choose to remember 2024 as the year Canadians outside the Progressiverse, united in one small way: saying “Merry Christmas.” Arabs in keffiyehs said it; Zionists in yamakas said it; feminists supporting sex-based rights said it; Christians said it. And I say it: Merry Christmas.

Canadian Politics Religion and Eschatology in Politics | 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 |

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 Last Good Year: The Politics of Time Travel in 2024

In 1997, Canadian literary icon Pierre Berton published 1967: The Last Good Year. It was not his best work. It made him seem old, stuck in the past, yearning for a simpler time that probably never existed, seen through the rose-tinted bifocals of a once-great man of letters. The idea that one can reach back in time to find some past moment of pristine fairness or decency has been a popular one for as long as people have been conscious of social change over time.

In Classical Greece, this idea that we live in a fundamentally inferior order was already well-established and beautifully articulated in Hesiod’s Works and Days, which described a succession of ages, from Golden, to Silver, to Bronze to the Age of Heroes, ending with the Iron Age in which he lived.

This idea of somehow returning to a past age of decency has long been a staple of traditionalist and conservative politics. Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump channeled that idea with their use of “Make America Great Again” as their political rallying cry. But, as I have observed before, as progressive time consciousness has continued to collapse under the weight of its contradictions and the messy complexities of actual history, this kind of discourse has ceased to be monopolized by movements calling themselves conservative or traditional.

Indigenous neo-traditionalism, the ideology within which the Canadian judiciary effectively forces indigenous people desiring land reform to operate, has received a lot of cultural patronage, despite it being a family of beliefs held by a minority of indigenous people, and concentrated among those with strong financial and political incentives to espouse it e.g. indigenous academics, state-patronized entertainers and artists, and members of pre-colonial aristocratic lineages whom the courts have declared are the sole legitimate representatives of indigenous people’s interests on off-reserve unceded territory.

Nostalgia, traditionalism, neo-traditionalism: these are forces that have been with us for some time. But I want to suggest that a new kind of traditionalist discourse of history is emerging as a global force: Pierre Berton’s idea of a “last good year.”

I was disappointed by Vladimir Putin and Tucker Carlson’s conversation. I am sure that if I had to sit across from Putin, who has certainly personally killed people with his hands and has ordered the deaths of thousands, I would have come off as a cowardly sycophant too. But then I have never claimed to be competent to interview a man like Putin. Putin, for his part, seemed unable to understand that he was dealing with a submissive, supportive interviewer and engaged in all sorts of antics to gratuitously dominate Carlson, to show who was boss every second of the interview, no matter how that might play to the home audience in the West.

But the interview did have a highlight or two. Putin observed that it seems as though everyone has decided on some arbitrary year in the past when the international borders were fair. He then wryly added that if we were going to play that game, he was picking 1648, the year that the Cossacks overran Ukraine, seized it from Poland and established the Hetmanate.

While Putin spoke half tongue in cheek, the reality is that a new historical consciousness is sweeping through various social movements, who take this idea of moving millions of people around and stripping them of their political rights quite seriously if it can transport it back to the Last Good Year.

1648: The Year of Orthodox Slavic Unity and Heroism
While Putin clearly believes that Russia should be a multi-ethnic, multi-confessional state, he also clearly believes it should be one led by Eastern Orthodox Slavs like himself. This is not an uncommon or critical belief for a pluralistic order. All pluralism is structured by the theory of pluralism held by one of the groups in society more than another. The so-called “post-national” Canada is, after all, animated not by some kind of neutral compromise theory of social organization but by a minority who have converted to a novel American space religion during the Third Great Awakening.

For this reason, even as he sells off pieces of the Amur region to the Chinese government, he remains focused extending his territorial hegemony over Orthodox Ukrainians, Georgians, Moldovans and Armenians. Reincorporating the Russian exclave of Transneustria in Moldova and the Donbas and Crimean regions of Ukraine have extended into multi-decade projects this year, as has his relentless domination of Belarus through his satrap Aleksandr Lukashenko.

For Putin, the foundation of Russian greatness is clearly Orthodox Slavic unity. And so, it is not so much the territory of 1648 that he seeks to recapture; Russia was smaller then, not yet an empire, still struggling to challenge Swedish hegemony in the Baltic and eliminate the Khanates of Northeast Asia. What matters to him is the triumphant march of the Cossacks into Kiev, the way the Ukrainians welcomed their liberators who established a united territory encompassing present-day Moldova and Ukraine, under Russian patronage.

1763: The Year of the Royal Proclamation
Although “land acknowledgements” have become a cultural practice that has spread as a ritual act into the United States of America, the most repeated aspects of their ritual speech is based on a legal doctrine developed and propounded by Canadian courts. The term “unceded territory,” for most of the history of these ceremonial speeches was not about all North American land but specific land that had not been ceded by treaty.

Much of the East Coast of North America had been ceded by treaty by 1763. While we might have criticisms of the treaties with the Wampanoag, Narragansett, the Powhatan Confederacy, the Mi’kmaq, the Abenaki, etc. that they were signed under duress, poorly understood, not fully honoured—the list of legitimate grievances goes on—treaties were signed and land was ceded.

But, as the demography of North America became increasingly lopsided in favour of the English settlers, and following the cession of Eastern Louisiana to the British following France and Spain losing the Seven Years War, English settlers began moving into the new territories without any effort to conclude treaties. This had already been a problem was what had actually touched off the global war in 1754 with George Washington and Iroquois ambassador Tanacharison’s fateful confrontation with the French and their indigenous allies in Ohio Country.

Between 1763 and 1775, the British Empire rolled out a series of laws designed to calm tensions in its New World colonies and also to pay down the massive war debt through new taxes and fees. While we hear a lot about the Hat Act and the Stamp Act, we hear rather less about the Royal Proclamation of 1763, the first document to put forward the legal doctrine of “unceded territory.” The Proclamation only applied to the traditional territories of indigenous peoples who had no pre-existing treaty with the British.

One of the first things the new US government did, following their successful revolution was to tear-up the Proclamation. They would pursue treaties case-by-case, when they suited the United States.

But to the #Landback movement, 1763 is the last good year, the last fair year. People descended from African, European or Asian settlers living west of Nova Scotia, Newfoundland, New France and the Thirteen Colonies should be stripped of their democratic and property rights and either shelter in place with the consent of the local hereditary indigenous aristocrats or be repatriated to… wherever their family was living in 1763, I suppose. Because 1763 was that brief shining moment when land was fairly governed and distributed, somehow.

To deal with the fact that much of North America, with hunter-gatherer or village-based societies, ravaged by Virgin Soil epidemics of Eurasian disease, their populations decimated did not have the state capacity in 1763 to govern their vast territories in any kind of recognizable way, I have noticed that people who believe in this particular Last Good Year theory like circulating a map of indigenous language groups via social media, typically with the comment “we never learned about these nations in school,” falsely implying that our state education system has been covering up the existence of large, organized pre-colonial polities in places like Northern Saskatchewan and the Nevada Desert.

Unlike Putin’s “last good year,” which at least is based on accurate maps and a certain level of demographic consistency, the restoration of 1763 North America is, as I said in my essay on the #Landback movement neither possible nor desirable and is actually an impossibilist obstacle to the just and urgent need to reform Canada’s land tenure system and uplift rural indigenous people from poverty.

1947: Palestine’s Last Good Year
The only map I have spent more time fruitlessly arguing about on Facebook the past year is the map of British Mandatory Palestine in 1947. #BDS with its “right of return” doctrine takes a similar position to the #Landback movement: that we just need to move everyone in Israel-Palestine to wherever their family was living in 1947 because 1947 is the last year the borders in the region were fair. We would send the Sephardim to North Africa, the Ashkenazi to Eastern Europe, the Mizrahi to Baghdad and Cairo… oh wait… that might be a problem. Some of the Mizrahi were the descendants of the Jews of Israel, Judea and the Herodian state. Where to send them?

The map is often accompanied by the claim that Palestine has always been a country and will soon be a country again. This is an absolutely bananas fantasy, easily disproven by the most cursory reading of history. British Mandatory Palestine was a colony ruled from London by Englishmen. It was founded over the vehement objections of the ancestors of the Palestinians who strongly supported the creation of a state called “Greater Syria” which would have incorporated present-day Jordan, Lebanon, Syria, Israel, Gaza, Golan and the West Bank.

The decision to create Lebanon and Israel was taken not by residents of the region but by British and French negotiators at meetings held in Paris. France wished to create a country with a slim Roman Catholic majority, a group of Arabs in the Mount Lebanon region south of Beirut that the French had been patronizing since the days of Charlemagne. Although Beirut was a mostly Sunni Arab city, its annexation to the new Christian country of Lebanon was seen as necessary to make it more economically dynamic.

The British government of David Lloyd George was informed by some eccentric eschatological beliefs of held by the Prime Minister. He believed that the Zionist movement that had been buying up scrub land from the Ottoman Empire and settling European Jews in present-day Israel was a sign of the impending eschaton when the Jews would gather in the former territory of Israel and Judah and then be attacked by a neighbouring country from “the North.” (The “Tribes of the North” reading of the Book of Revelation has long informed Christian philo-Semitism and its role in the Reagan Administration was documented in Fred Knellman’s Reagan, God and the Bomb.)

But it also had practical reasons behind it. Arthur Balfour, at one time considered Lloyd George’s likely successor had promised to accelerate Ashkenazi Jewish migration and land acquisition if the Zionist movement supported the British during the Great War.

But let us be clear: neither Palestine nor Lebanon had ever been an independent state and they did not become so in 1921 when they were created by the stroke of a pen on another continent.

The ancestors of the Palestinians boycotted every election the British held in the territory, refused to co-govern a country they deemed an illegitimate fiction. And despite their differences with the Zionist newcomers to the region, both Arabs and Jews waged intermittent guerilla wars against the colonial government of Palestine from 1921 to 1948, when it was forced to withdraw thanks to their combined campaigns of bombing and terrorism.

The idea there was something fair about these borders or the government of this colonially occupied non-state seems to have welled-up out of nowhere.

634: The Last Good Year in the Levant
Sometimes if a stupid and unproductive idea becomes popular enough, people cease countering it with reasonable ideas, especially when reasonable positions have increasing political costs. The totally inappropriate application of the idea of “aboriginal” or “indigenous” to Palestinian Arabs and the conflation of North American colonialism of indigenous peoples and the social order of Israel and the territories it occupies has permitted a very stupid debate to take place.

Palestinian Arabs are not an indigenous people. Of course they mixed with local Greek, Jewish, Samaritan and other populations when they arrived in large numbers in the Levant during the expansion of the Rashidun Caliphate in 634 but that doesn’t make them indigenous in the sense of being an “original” people, like, for instance, the Maori of New Zealand. Also, unlike Polynesian and Amerindian colonized populations, their societies were not decimated (literally) by the arrival of new diseases. There were no virgin soil epidemics and no catastrophic population declines.

Unlike most supporters of the idea of Zionism, as espoused by people like Theodore Hertzl and Shimon Peres, I am sympathetic to the idea that if there is any arrangement to compare Israel-Palestine to, it is late-phase South African apartheid under PW Botha. Gaza and the West Bank are not unlike the townships and Bantustans of 1980s South Africa, in that they are populated by the residents of fake countries ruled by strongman dictators and who are required to use passes to enter Israel, the real country, where many of their jobs are but where they have no citizenship rights. Certainly, there are Arab citizens of Israel who do enjoy full democratic rights but they do not comprise the majority of Arabs contained in the territory Israel occupies.

The problem is that unlike Ciskei, Transkei and Kwazulu in the 1980s, Israel’s Bantustans and townships are shrinking, because Israeli politics has become a spoils system. It has become nigh-impossible to assemble sixty-one votes in the Knesset needed to form a government, without the support of the parties of land-hungry settlers.

Between the need to justify this constant encroachment on Palestinian territory and the eviction of Palestinian Arabs from their land, and because the discourse of indigeneity has been so effectively abused by Palestine solidarity movement, we are now hearing a mirror discourse: that Jews as the true indigenous people of the region should kick out those evil settler-colonialist Arabs and end their 1390-year “occupation.”

It is not just Kahanists and supporters of the Greater Israel fantasy pushing this. Where I am seeing it is from pragmatic fans Likud’s territorial ambitions and apologists for their punitive expedition to Gaza. Why should the Gazans have rights? Have meaningful citizenship? Have land? One moment tongue in cheek, one moment deadly serious, the assertion of Jewish indigeneity has become increasingly powerful rhetorically in this intellectual and humanitarian race to the bottom.

If we can go back to 1947, why not 634? If we can go back to 1763, why not 1634? Why is one year fairer than the other? These Last Good Year arguments are a morass of historical revisionism, submerged ethnonationalism, post-political rhetoric and outright fantasy. But we can’t cherry-pick which one we dismantle. They all have to go.

Canadian Politics Politics of Identity Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

The Ugly Symbiosis Between New Democrats and Church Burners

Three Years of Church Burnings
For more than two and a half years, since June 2021, a particular group of Canada has been targeted with a series of terrorist hate crimes: non-white churchgoing Christians. Beginning with the churches of indigenous people, starting in 2021 but soon branching out to include Filipinos, Copts and other racial groups, this group of Canadians has seen ninety-seven of its churches targeted by arsonists.

And yet only one has been brought to justice. Recently, another was captured on video, a young white man in a white hood who attacked a Catholic church in Regina, whose entire public-facing board of directors are non-white community leaders.

When the church-burnings began, supposedly staged as revenge for mass graves allegedly detected by ground-penetrating radar near former residential schools, indigenous leaders formed a united front in condemning the burnings. From the most woke-sympathetic neo-traditionalist conservationists to the most pro-development Christians, the leadership of indigenous Canada spoke with a single voice and called for an end to the targeted arsons of on-reserve churches.

They pointed out that indigenous people are one of the most Christian groups in Canada and that their churches are often the oldest and most sacred buildings in rural First Nations communities. Buildings that have served as every kind of community space, for political meetings, education, major gatherings and, of course, generations of weddings and funerals.

But Woke Canadians, especially white Wokes, continued to applaud the burnings until there was such palpable disgust among mainstream Canadians that a few of the most enthusiastic pro-arson civil society leaders, like Harsha Walia, were sacked. Funny how, when push came to shove, the sacrificial victim selected by progressive Canadian civil society leaders was one of the few non-whites publicly endorsing the burnings.

Although the full-throated enthusiasm for this targeted campaign of terror in the progressiverse has died down, it has not been replaced by any actual opposition to the burnings. As in 1960s Alabama and Mississippi, the respectable civil society leadership of the establishment may have stopped publicly cheering for their burnings but they are not saying a bad word about the continued campaign of arson by their irregular militia and instead work to suppress mainstream media coverage of ongoing efforts to keep non-white people of faith terrorized and intimidated.

And how have Canada’s so-called Anti-Hate groups responded to the targeting of a particular religious subset of racial minority groups in nearly one hundred separate acts of domestic terror? They refuse to talk about it and change subject if pushed. Like the rest of the progressive establishment, they work to ensure that while racialized people of faith know about this campaign, the volume is turned down in the public square and instead whitter-on about how it is people of faith who are violent hate-mongers planning to visit a reign of violence on trans-identified youth, funded by the Trump movement and leavened by ‘Russian disinformation’ any day now.

Why is this?

I want to make clear that I am not making the case that there is any kind of conspiracy directing these events, no grand puppet-master or thought-out plan. I am not even suggesting that there is any real coordination. (Although I cannot imagine that the Canadian Anti-Hate Network facilitating the networking of chapters of Antifa, the violent street militia, and maintaining lists of targets that they will not let the media see, is helping matters.) Nor am I suggesting that police and prosecutorial inattention is part of any sort of policy, just the natural outcome of Woke culture capturing police forces.

Instead I want to suggest that there is a set of incentives, a logic that encourages the present state of affairs. Today, when you look at those mobilizing against the sexualisation of children, the destruction of women’s spaces, the rights of parents, etc. You see Muslims, Sikhs and Hindus strongly represented, punching above their demographic weight. And you see white working class anti-authoritarian activists also throwing in strongly.

There is constituency who tell each other, their faith leaders and pollsters that they share the concerns of those mobilizing but you are largely demobilized in this fight: non-white Christians.

Because in the 2020s, everything is about everything else, and people are amazed that someone like me can see the Greenhouse Effect as an existential threat and yet not believe women have penises, this happy coincidence serves the Canadian establishment. The large-scale mobilization of non-white Christians in Canada’s culture wars would radically tip the balance. But this group receives messages every month that it is already outside the protection of the law and, if it looks uppity, the campaign extralegal violence is likely to intensify.

The New Democratic Response
It is in this context that we need to examine two extraordinary events that took place last week following the church-burning. The first took place in parliament when a Conservative MP rose and sought the leave of the house to make a unanimous motion condemning the ongoing burnings. No division was required because he was immediately shouted-down with “nay” from Liberal and NDP MPs.

My former party, the NDP, originally founded and led by churchmen, Tommy Douglas and J S Woodsworth, who believed that their policies were the expression of what was then called “the Social Gospel,” refused to condemn the burning of the churches. The party whose representatives once included civil rights activists from the Mississippi, like Sadie Kuehn, who hosted the Freedom Riders in the 1960s, now deems it wrong to condemn arson targeted at racialized people. The only party whose MPs spoke against Japanese internment in the 1940s wants non-white Christians to know they do not enjoy the equal protection of the law.

In the days that followed, many people of faith in British Columbia reached out formally and informally to the David Eby government asking the BC NDP to do better, given how disproportionately many arsons have taken place in BC. What followed was a slap in the face. Eby’s attorney-general, Niki Sharma, announced a new set of instructions to crown prosecution services to more aggressively target, not arsonists, not those bigoted against religious people but against people opposing the government’s doctrines on gender and child safeguarding.

People like Eby and Jagmeet Singh understand perfectly well the—for them—serendipitous effect of these burnings in suppressing the growing wave of opposition to their key social policies and will use them even if that use is absolute affront to everything generations of New Democrats have believed.

BC Politics Canadian Politics Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

Segregationists Who Burn Churches Are Who They Have Always Been

Unpopular authoritarian regimes often intimidate their subjects into faking popular enthusiasm and support through extortion, coercion and intimidation. But when such regimes are weak, the best they can do is to intimidate their subjects into silence, at least. This is the reality of modern Canada, a weak government, led by weak, authoritarian men, who lack the power to terrorize the populace into a fearful ovation and must settle for browbeating the majority into silence.

I grew up in a black family in Western Canada in the 1970s and 80s, and I remember the stories from my mother, aunts and uncles, as well as veterans of the US Civil Rights movement like folk singer Leon Bibb, friend of the great Paul Robeson, at the dining room table. One of Leon’s most evocative stories was of the first time he witnessed a lynching on a countryside drive with his father on the rural outskirts of Louisville, Kentucky, in the 1930s. He talked about how after witnessing the swinging corpse of a young black man, a silence descended over their car and followed him and his father into their house when they returned home.

Unable to compel ordinary, decent Canadian people into the kind of terrorized ovation a great authoritarian like Joseph Stalin might elicit in support of his government’s most depraved policies, Woke Canada must settle for the grudging silence of its non-white Christian population as its governments proceed with a set of bizarre and perverse policies opposed, by the vast majority of the Canadian public, a majority that has been cowed by relentless smears, threats and intimidation.

Yet, as the Kaufman report, just released by the MacDonald-Laurier Institute, states, when anonymized by pollsters, Canadians of all races, religions and cultures share a profound skepticism of the articles of faith of Woke Canada. While I do not share the report’s analysis about structural racism (indeed, this article is premised on the opposite belief), the data about Canadian public opinion, on which it is based, is indisputable. And it is no coincidence that the strategy we see being used to shut down opposition to the establishment is based on the one Woke lie that has been successfully sold to Canadians, according to the report: that there are mass graves of hitherto-unidentified bodies of First Nations children near abandoned residential schools.

Last week, a surveillance in camera in Saskatchewan captured a striking image. A Roman Catholic Church whose congregants are primarily of African, Middle Eastern and Filipino origin, in Regina, was the site of Canada’s ninety-seventh church arson since the start of 2020. But it is not the flames emanating from the gasoline poured into the church that was most striking. The camera captured an image of a young, white man, wearing a white hood performing the arson.

Having grown up as I did, such an image is an especially chilling one for me. We descendants of slaves know of the long tradition of white men in white hoods burning the churches of racialized people.

The Klan Is Not An Organization But A Property of American History
What historians call the First Ku Klux Klan, which flourished from 1865-89, burned the churches of their former slaves throughout the South during the violent process euphemistically called “Redemption,” whereby black voters were intimidated and murdered to allow white majority governments to seize power and disenfranchise black citizens. The Klan favoured the churches because they were typically the sole or primary place black people could congregate. Lacking community infrastructure and real estate, black churches played a special role as political meeting hall, community centre and place of worship.

So the irregular Confederate militias torched these buildings and often the people inside to intimidate black people, to let them know that the simple act of assembling on their own terms would not be tolerated.

That original Klan died out after it had outlived its purpose and restored Confederate rule to the South. But following the release and smash success of America’s first Hollywood blockbuster, Birth of a Nation in 1915, in which the original KKK were portrayed as the heroes, those responsible for America’s reunification and true ethnogenesis with the inauguration of the Jim Crow system. A new Klan formed, this time with broader interests, as a mass national organization that opposed Slavic, Jewish and Catholic immigration, as well as supporting ongoing racial segregation and its expansion to the national level.

In reality, the Second Ku Klux Klan was created as an insurance and mail fraud scheme and fizzled after a series of criminal prosecutions but, in its day, it nationalized tactics previously confined to the South. Black farmers in Upstate New York were lynched and mosques, synagogues, and orthodox churches became targets of arson by young, white-hooded white men.

My mother, aunts and uncles all remember the church bombings and burnings of the Civil Rights Era, after the Klan had reassembled, this time as the paramilitary of the White Citizens’ Council movement. The Third Ku Klux Klan was not so much an independent organization but the paramilitary wing of White Citizens’ Councils, its violence functioning as a kind of initiation process to vet ambitious young white men the Councils installed in leadership positions in state-level Democratic Parties to resist the national party’s efforts to integrate the party and end segregation and disenfranchisement.

This time, the churches were targeted not just because they had remained the primary civil spaces of black people in the South but because the Civil Rights Movement had decided its public-facing leadership should be churchmen like Martin Luther King Jr. and church activists like Rosa Parks.

That Klan fizzled-out when the last miscegenation laws were repealed and avowed segregationists like George Wallace recanted their white supremacy in the early 1980s. While individuals like David Duke continued to grab the odd headline by claiming to lead an organization that barely existed, the reality is that like its two previous incarnations, the Klan fizzled-out as an organization.

The thesis of this essay is that the Klan is that it is not so much an organization as a set of reactions inherent to the Anglo American racial system. Until the premises and structures underpinning this system change in profound and fundamental, ways, we will be overshadowed by the Once and Future Klan.

Four Years of Church-Burnings in Canada
In 2020, young white people began donning white hoods and setting fire to racialized people’s churches all over Canada in response to a controversy over whether there were undiscovered mass graves of indigenous children near former residential schools. Shockingly, despite nearly one hundreds arsons having been committed since this controversy erupted, only one arsonist has been arrested or charged.

Kathleen Panek, a young white woman who wore a conventional black hood, rather than a KKK-style face-covering white hood was identified through camera footage, charged, prosecuted and convicted. While her lawyer claimed that she was under the influence of drugs and upset with her boyfriends, Panek has remained closed-lipped about her motives for destroying a Surrey church whose congregants are Egyptian immigrants. 

So the only clues we have had about the other arsonists came from their social media supporters, who are overwhelmingly white and overwhelmingly Woke. The constituency least supportive of the burnings, which originally targeted indigenous Christian churches exclusively, before branching out to include Filipino, Coptic and other non-white urban congregations, were indigenous people. All factions of indigenous civil society, from the most neo-traditional and eco-conscious to the biggest pro-business, pro-development folks roundly condemned the burnings and begged the arsonists to stop.

This has had no effect. Woke, white Canadians continue to applaud or remain silent as the most sacred buildings of constituencies with whom they purport to sympathize are destroyed. Just four days ago, a Conservative MP seeking a unanimous motion of condemnation of the church burnings was shouted down by NDP and Liberal MPs refusing to grant consent.

Churches of indigenous people, churches of immigrants, churches of racialized people—their burnings have either been celebrated or Wokes have averted their gaze. No condemnations have emanated from supposedly “anti-hate” organizations like the Canadian Anti-Hate Network. They are busy sharing lists with Antifa so that when these non-white people of faith object to government policy, they can be more efficiently doxed and threatened.

I have found it telling that Woke activists were eager to label the participants in the Freedom Convoy as Klansmen and suggest, without the slightest evidence that they are led by the KKK. That is because fundamental to Wokeness is its use of projection as a rhetorical tactic to sow confusion in its adversaries.

There is one group of white supremacist, white-hooded, church-burning segregationists in Canada and we know who they and their friends are. Only one social movement is fighting to racially segregate university campuses and classes, the Wokes. Only one social movement is asserting that whites are intellectually superior to non-whites (the euphemism they use is “logocentric”); the reason non-whites just can’t do math as well and can’t even show up on time is that whites are uniquely logocentric, according to the ideology propounded by the Diversity, Equity and Inclusion industry. Only one movement in Canada is claiming that history is made exclusively by whites and that non-whites are just bystanders and victims.

As we have seen in the fiasco at Harvard, Wokes are not interested in appointing competent, intelligent minority tokens to represent them in their elite-level diversity projects. They want to see the least competent, the least qualified, the most dependent, the most precarious non-whites in token positions. Because that is all they expect of non-whites: inferiority.

Think of all of the brilliant black female academics who have out-published and out-taught Claudine Gay a hundredfold, the formidable black and Asian women of American politics who could out-organize and out-debate Kamala Harris in their sleep. That’s because, if a minority token goes off-script, their fall needs to be immediate and precipitous; so one seeks out tokens with the fewest accomplishments and the most skeletons.

Going off-script is, after all, highly consequential, when Wokes wield so much of their power through acts of extorted ventriloquism. As Cherokee author Thomas King observed, nothing upsets white liberals more than one not being “the Indian [they] had in mind.”

When Canadian Labour Congress officials assert that lesbians, women’s rights and child protection activists are white supremacists controlled by evil, shadowy American money, leavened by “Russian disinformation,” they need reality to resemble, at least superficially, their outrageous claims. And that means keeping down, keeping silent non-white Christians who are deeply concerned about the capture of our schools by genderwang and deeply racist teachings, asserting their children’s inherent racial inferiority as a host of disciplines and skills.

Indigenous Christians, immigrant Christians, non-white Christians need to be intimidated, to be kept silent, lest they contradict the white supremacist “narrative” of the Wokes, that they love all this tokenization, DEI racism and genderwang. And one of the ways you do that is a four-year campaign of burning their churches.

Does this mean someone is orchestrating the burnings? No. But I do think that we can now assume that the enthusiasm the Canadian establishment has for punishing the perpetrators is about the same as that of Dixie’s establishment during the last round, half a century ago. Those wielding the hammer, the commissar class are not trying too hard to stop this because they’re not sure that it’s wrong.

Am I asserting that there is a conspiracy here? No. Am I even asserting that Wokes are aware that they are white supremacists, that their whole tearful colonizer act is a giant racist humblebrag? No. What I am saying is that: I don’t care who the Wokes think they are; I don’t care how they self-identify, who they believe they are or what they think they’re doing any more than I care about the inner life of the supporters of the first three Klans.

What matters is this: if white people are putting on white hoods and burning the churches of non-whites who need to be kept in line to be kept out of politics and civil society, it doesn’t matter how they identify. If people fighting to segregate schools and propound doctrines of non-white inferiority, we already know who they are.

They are the Ku Klux Klan.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Race Religion and Eschatology in Politics US Politics | fusangite |

“Begging the Question,” the Kingdom of War, Newspeak and the Myth of “Cultural Marxism”  

Mao’s Linguistic Reform and the Perverse Effects of Deleting Words
In the 1950s, Mao Zedong embarked on a number of projects to remake Chinese society, some with disastrous consequences, such as the Great Leap Forward. But not all of these projects are remembered as atrocities or even failures. One of the best-reviewed of Mao’s initiatives was a major linguistic reform, which standardized Chinese characters, enabling them to be type-written, radically increasing the efficiency of publishing and circulating documents and making literacy more accessible. This was paired with the standardization of the pinyin system for transliterating Chinese into Latin characters, making Chinese easier to teach and learn as a second language.

Still, Mao could not resist also making this project serve his authoritarian ends of reshaping the human mind and soul to a proper communist one, albeit with Chinese characteristics. So, as many characters in the alphabet were being deleted, modified or simplified anyway, it was pretty easy to delete from the language most of the characters that referred to Confucian ideas. If, Mao reasoned, he could destroy people’s ability to write about pre-revolutionary political concepts, to even refer to them, this would result in his revolution attaining total ideological hegemony.

But this is not exactly what happened.

Because Confucianism had become so deeply ingrained in Chinese cultural life over two thousand years, depriving people of the ability to talk about it shut down people’s ability to describe how it continued to condition people’s values; the ways it conditioned their social behaviour, their parenting practices, their theories of justice and merit became harder to describe, to criticize, to even notice because the words for what was happening had been lost. The reform affected society almost randomly; in some places, Confucianism lost its power to structure people’s lives but in others, its power actually intensified.

The Murder of “Begging the Question”
It is dangerous, then, to deprive ourselves of the language needed to name, to describe, to criticize social practices, especially if those practices are widespread and possibly harmful. And one did not need to witness Maoist China to see this as a consequence of authoritarian linguistic reform. It had already been predicted by George Orwell in his descriptions of the pernicious functions of Newspeak in 1984.

That is why I became increasingly concerned a little less than a decade ago by what seemed to be a programmatic campaign of linguistic engineering by news anchors and reporters on Anglo American TV, a practice that was surprisingly culture-wide, FoxNews and MSNBC being equally likely to engage in it.

When delivering a monologue about the implications of a story, the reporter or anchor would say, “…and this begs the question:” and then ask an obvious question about the consequences of the news just reported. They could say “prompts the question,” “raises the question,” “makes us wonder,” etc. but suddenly “begs the question” became the sole term, as it has remained up to the present.

The reason this should concern us is that by redefining “beg the question” to mean “raise the question,” the thing to which “begging the question” used to refer is no longer linguistically accessible to us. There is no alternative term for the logical fallacy to which this term had referred for centuries prior to this act of linguistic sleight of hand.

And I do not think it is a coincidence that “begging the question” has become an increasingly common form of illogic in our public square since we have lost the ability to name it.

1421: Still a Really Bad Book
So, what did “begging the question” use to mean?

Let me offer an example that will meet an additional need I use this blog to meet sometimes: giving bad reviews to books and movies I have had a beef with for decades but never got around to denouncing before, in this case, the 2002 publication 1421: The Year China Discovered the World.

The author, Gavin Menzies, exemplifies a phenomenon common enough that members of my profession have recognized that it will always be with us: a highly successful, intelligent man retires from a long career for which he has received recognition and accolades and, upon retirement, decides that he is a fully qualified historian who does not need to learn anything about the historian’s craft, or the set of skills that were drilled into me during the ten years I spent receiving my three history degrees, culminating in a PhD.

I generally have no problem with amateur historians and am actually glad to be part of a profession where everyone does feel qualified to do my job, irrespective of their credentials. It’s a better class of problem than its alternative. Nevertheless, Menzies exemplifies one of the more odious characteristics of many amateur historians, especially highly confident male retirees who join up: he has all kinds of criticisms of the assumptions, practices and methodology of my profession, despite having absolutely no idea of what any of them are, nor having taken even a minute to investigate what they might actually be, in an evidence-driven way.

Having no idea about how professionals do historical research or analysis, except that they do it wrong, Menzies proceeded to base the analytical framework on a logical fallacy known, until ten years ago, as “begging the question.”

When someone begs the question, what they do is use their argument’s conclusion as its premise. Menzies traveled around the world to locations he had visited as a British naval officer and asked the question, “if we assume that the Chinese came here in a large treasure ship in 1421, can we find evidence supporting this hypothesis, provided we do not consider other possible explanations?” Menzies read extensively in the fields of history, archaeology and paleontology looking for evidence confirming his hypothesis and, lo and behold, found a bunch.

Because Menzies’ methodology was so brazen and irresponsible and inconsistent with other evidence, few academics even bothered to review his work but a handful did, not to specifically dispute his individual claims but to point out that his work was actually part of a literary subgenre they named “cult archeology,” a set of practices of evidentiary cherry-picking used by non-academic historians to hypothesize pre-1492 transoceanic voyaging by Eurasians, a genre that reached its crescendo in the Victorian era and early twentieth century, when there were a lot more books on Mu, Atlantis and Lemuria in mainstream bookstores.

Allow me to offer two examples of Menzies begging the question in 1421:

By making the 1421 global transoceanic voyage by Admiral Zheng He both the premise and conclusion of his book, Menzies “discovers” that the prehistoric mylodon did not die out 11,000 years ago during the Pleistocene extinctions but survived up to the sixteenth century. Why? Because Chinese sources reported that their mariners had encountered dog-headed men during the fifteenth century. Given that the mylodon’s original habitat was in a region of South America he believed Zheng visited, Menzies concluded that the mariners had mistaken this large, bipedal ground sloth for a dog-headed man.

Of course, if Menzies had not had this ready-made explanation and had he actually bothered familiarizing himself with pre-modern ethnographic and geographic literature, he could have easily found a less audacious explanation i.e. that encounters with dog-headed men had been a common trope in such literature since before Herodotus wrote about their presence in Central Asia. Indeed, dog-headed men were such an important intellectual fixture in Eurasian literature and thought from China to Great Britain that one of the most popular Catholic saints, Christopher, was understood to have been a dog-headed man, who lived for over two-hundred years before being executed for losing a debate to the Emperor Decius because he could only bark. The self-evident truth of the dog-headed men’s existence was used to address important philosophical questions about whether humans were subject to a single creation followed by a diffusion or whether the different peoples of the world were autocthonous.

Another example of Menzies begging the question was his handling of conquistador Bernal Diaz’ firsthand account of the conquest of Mexico in which he participated as one of Hernan Cortes’ men. Menzies makes much of Diaz’ description of an elite market in Tenochtitlan where he reports there are chickens for sale. How could chickens have got to the New World, Menzies asks, unless transported there by Zheng in 1421!? After all, there were no pre-Columbian chickens.

An author with an iota less of a commitment to cherry-picking could easily have generated an alternative explanation simply by reading and thinking about the rest of Diaz’ description of the market without a premise requiring confirmation. The description lists all kinds of other plants and animals unique to the Eastern Hemisphere whose meat, skins and feathers were available at the market… because Europeans had not learned the local names for these creatures nor made up new names, themselves. Consequently, jaguar pelts were identified as the pelts of African and Asian great cats; turkeys were called chickens; etc.

“Cultural Marxism:” A Pernicious Cherry-picking Project
Because we no longer have a term that refers to begging the question, now that “beg the question” means “ask the question,” people are getting away with a lot more question-begging in the public square because we can no longer precisely name their act of logical sleight of hand. One such movement is one to which I have found myself uncomfortably proximate in recent years: the critics of Wokeness who blame a force they call “cultural Marxism.”

James Lindsay and Jordan Peterson, among the most prominent propounders of this theory are, like Menzies, accomplished professionals and thinkers who have been successful researchers and analysts in disciplines I couldn’t just take up now that I’ve retired from the historical profession. I couldn’t assemble a clinical psychology trial like Peterson, nor could I even read, never mind evaluate the system of symbols Lindsay used in his work as a mathematician.

By the same token, I am not calling these men charlatans, exactly. But as a person whose PhD and peer-reviewed publications are all about how one tracks the history of ideas and figures out where they have come from forensically, their lack of interest in the actual methodology of intellectual history strikes me as, if not dishonest, at least irresponsible.

Since the formation of the Tubingen Institute for the historical study of the Bible in the 1840s, scholars have worked for generations to develop a set of principles for figuring out what prior texts were most influential on a later text and how that influence was exerted, and how to determine the facticity of historical events texts claim to chronicle. The “principle of inconvenience,” e.g. why we think the Jesus movement split off from the John the Baptist movement, the principle of “multiple independent attestation,” etc. have formed a robust set of practices for doing the kind of work Lindsay and Peterson purport to be doing when they pronounce authoritatively on the origins of Woke doctrines.

But really, they are begging the question.

They have already decided that the works of Friedrich Engels, Karl Marx, Mao Zedong, Leon Trotsky, Vladimir Lenin, Antonio Gramsci and a particular faction of Marxist interpreters known as the Frankfurt School are the authors of every distinctive, pernicious Woke doctrine. And, by cherry-picking from these texts, and massaging the meaning of excerpts they are absolutely able to find every single problematic Woke doctrine within this corpus. So, they declare, “there is the culprit!” without, of course, looking for other possible origins and influences and without ascertaining how influential, widely read or agreed-with the texts they cite actually were. Nor is any real investigation made of the methods of transmission, diffusion and popularization of these ideas. One does not have to worry about such things when your conclusion is also your premise.

Alternative Explanations of Woke Manicheism, Starting with Mani
Obviously, having now hurled the grenade, it is incumbent upon me to offer at least one example. Lindsay and company argue that the Woke idea that the world is divided between two groups engaged in a Manichean struggle between light and dark, good and evil, one in which it is foreknown that “the oppressed,” i.e. the good guys who are currently losing, will ultimately and axiomatically triumph over the oppressors comes from the Marxist idea of class struggle.

Our first clue as to the outrageousness of this claim should come from the word “Manichean.” This worldview was popularized from North Africa to Central Asia to Western Europe by a guy called Mani in the third century CE. His religion, named after him, was called Manicheism. Like contemporary Wokeness, it included basically three kinds of people: the Sons of Light, the Sons of Darkness and a subset of the Sons of Light, interpreters of the cosmology and those fully aware of the structure of the universe, known as “the Hearers,” in a system nearly identical to the Woke worldview that divides the world into the oppressed and the oppressors. The term “Woke” was coined by Wokes to describe themselves as the modern equivalent of Mani’s Hearers.

Manicheism has all but died out but many worldviews resemble it. Indeed, Christianity, especially Calvinist branches of Christianity have a very similar formulation and also see the world as being divided into the same structure and the same teleological history in which the world is currently in the hands of the iniquitous who will be overthrown by the good when Jesus comes back.

Even before Manicheism, worldviews like this were known. Persian Magianism gave rise to Zoroastrianism, which is considered to have been the main influence on Mani in fashioning his own religious system. And this kind of thinking strongly conditioned new religious movements and heresies, up to the present day, from Cathars to Westboro Baptists. And of course we find not just a Manichean worldview but a “hearer”-type tradition within Sufism, the elite Muslim mystical tradition that sat atop the Ottoman Empire from 1299-1922.

In fact it seems not merely audacious but breathtakingly selective to attribute the binarism of Wokeness to an ideology that has only existed since 1848, given that these ideas have structured several major world religions for millennia.

French Algeria and the Kingdom of War
So, let me offer an alternative explanation not just for the generalities of Woke binaries but for its specificities and peculiarities, many of which do not actually fit with Marxian ideas of binary social conflicts.

A major influence on Wokeness, Lindsay acknowledges, was French continental philosophy from the 1950s through 80s in the areas of postcolonial theory, poststructuralism and queer theory. A major early influence in this set of intertwined intellectual movements were veterans of the Algerian War of Independence, in which communists and liberals opposed to the Algerian colonial project made common cause and forged new political alliances with conservative Muslims who also desired an end to the colonial project. France had ruled Algeria since seizing it from the Ottoman Empire in 1840 and sent hundreds of thousands of French settlers to colonize it.

Jacques Derrida, the father of postmodernism and the practice of deconstruction was likely one such Franco-Algerian who supported the uprising, as was Albert Camus, the great existentialist writer. Frantz Fanon, father of postcolonial theory, moved from the French colony of Martinique to aid the rebels in Algeria as part of a larger project of decolonizing the French Empire.

Perhaps, then, before looking to the Frankfurt School, we might ask what the war that dominated the French public square, news media and politics from 1954-62 as the major poststructuralists came of age, might have contributed to their thinking.

I would like to suggest that far more than Marxian class struggle, the Zoroastrian struggle against darkness or Christian eschatology, the thing the Woke binary most closely resembles is the core of militant Islamic political theory: the idea of the Kingdom of Peace versus the Kingdom of War.

The idea on which the medieval caliphates were based was that since Mohammed, the world has been divided into two communities: the Kingdom of Peace, the places where Muslims control the government and the Kingdom of War, the places where Muslims do not control the government. The cause of all war, in this formulation, is the continued existence of the Kingdom of War, the places that insist on not being governed by Muslims. All the violence people experience when they reside in the Kingdom of War is not caused by acts of military or criminal aggression whether it emanates from individuals or collectives, from other states in the Kingdom of War or from the Kingdom of Peace is axiomatic to the Kingdom itself. People experience war and violence in the Kingdom of War not because of specific aggressive and violent decisions or acts but because being a victim of violence is inherent to and axiomatic from residing therein.

Does this not sound a lot more like the Woke theory of violence, of oppression, of democracy, of submission than anything Fred or Karl cranked out in the nineteenth century? And unlike the Frankfurt School of Marxism, such an explanation comes with a ready-made story of diffusion and popularization.

As some of you know, this essay is just the first part of a major research project by Los Altos Institute to dismantle the theory of cultural Marxism and show it for what it is: begging the question.

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