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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.

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.

Politics of Epistemology Religion and Eschatology in Politics | fusangite |

The Self-Harming Elect and the West’s Long-term Problem with the Athletes of God

This essay is a “big think” essay that makes a multi-part argument. If you have a background in metaphysics or religious history, you can probably skip more than half of it and just read later sections but it is present in its long form so that readers without any such background can trace my arguments about why social movements celebrating self-harm and led by self-harming people constitute the threat that they do in our present moment.

If you don’t want to read a bunch of philosophical and religious background, either because you already know it or because you just don’t care that much, I urge you to move ahead to the section entitled “Canadian content.”

The Mind-Body Dichotomy in the West

One of the most significant problems the Church faced in Late Antiquity prior to and during its incorporation into the Roman imperial state was that of the Athletes of God. Philosophical and religious movements whose intellectual genealogy includes Plato and Platonist readings of other philosophers has a very real problem based on something that does not actually exist: the body-mind dichotomy.

Possibly due to some sort of mild autism, one of Plato’s most influential philosophical contributions was the idea that our material reality was an inferior and corrupted reality, a distorted shadow of what he called the “World of Forms.” God, the true creator, had created and inhabited a perfect, immaterial world composed of pure and perfect ideas. But unfortunately, creation had got all screwed-up by a being called the Demiurge, which had created the material world, as a mistake. The World of Forms, the immaterial world, was actually more real than the physical world.

Unfairness, stupidity and suffering were caused by this state of affairs, in which human beings were uniquely positioned because our bodies resided in the inferior, material reality but our intellects, our thoughts, existed in the world of forms. This generated a form of Greek junk science so popular that we see it influencing even the earliest Christian texts, the Pauline Epistles, the idea of immaterial “spirits.”

The Pharisees’ (of whom Paul had been a follower) knowledge of this popular Greek belief likely came from the Samaritans, who had used the idea of “hypostasis,” the fusion of a spirit and a body into a single being to explain their own messianic tradition of the God-man, a title claimed by Samaritan holy men like Simon Magus and Dositheus. But whereas this idea was likely originally used to cast Jesus in terms comprehensible to the Greeks to whom Paul was selling Christianity on commission, early in his ministry, he adapted the Platonic idea that being a union of spirit and flesh was actually the universal human experience.

But this did not mean that all people were equally spiritually gifted in the ad hoc cosmology Paul sold his converts in the third quarter of the first century. “Spiritual gifts” were unevenly distributed in the human population, with those most able to distinguish and separate mind and body being the most gifted. These gifts were also variegated depending on the nature of one’s spirit, making some healers and others, speakers in tongues. This framework was propounded in his first epistle to his Corinthian followers in direct response to political exigencies.

The letter, after all, was a response to inquiries from his flock about how to handle dissident members within and the Petrine faction of the Jesus movement, without. In an effort to maintain control of his flock, he explained that he could detach his spirit from his body and instantaneously send it to Corinth to surveil his followers and make sure that they remained loyal and followed his instructions. That is the origin of the expression Christianity has long sought to deliteralize when one asks the meaning of “I will be there in spirit.” At the foundation of Christian tradition, in what is likely the earliest book of the New Testament we have (circa 51 CE), is the idea that the most spiritually gifted among us are actually able to sever their spirits from their bodies at will.

This naturally intersected with pre-existing traditions of asceticism prevalent throughout the civilized world. Christianity by no means invented fasting and other ways of physically punishing the body to achieve some kind of greater union with the divine. Holy men might walk across hot embers, swear off food or water or draw their own blood both to seek and hold the attention of crowds and to achieve union with the divine. And it is in Buddhism, before Christ’s birth, that we see the first critiques of this behaviour and the rejection of asceticism in favour of “the middle way,” of limiting asceticism to prevent self-harm.

From Gnosticism to the Athletes of God

There is little question that Christianity’s unique fusion of the Platonic theory of the body-spirit dichotomy with universal and pre-existing traditions of asceticism amplified the dangers internal self-harm movements posed. The Gnostic movement within Christianity suffered persecution by the other sects for a variety of reasons, ranging from its magpie-like heterodoxy, to a predilection for creating pseudonymous scripture, to its rejection of institutional authority in favour of charismatic claims of special revealed knowledge. But we should not understate the importance of the fact that it most thoroughly rejected the material world in favour of the spiritual and the greater tendency on the part of its adherents to engage in acts of self-mutilation, starvation and other forms of self-harm.

As Christianity drew closer to the state in the third century, prior to Diocletian’s persecution which responded to this development with violence, Church Fathers were looking beyond the Gnostic heresy, one whose appeal was largely limited to the most urban, literate and intellectual adherents to a related phenomenon that had a true popular following and which implicitly contested the authority of the bishop-centred hierarchical institution they were building. That problem was the Athletes of God.

The Athletes of God were individuals considered to be more blessed with spiritual gifts than others and who displayed these gifts through public acts of spectacular self-deprivation or harm. An example sufficiently moderate to retain his recognition as a holy man, by the Church, was the hugely popular Saint Simeon Stylites of Aleppo, who lived atop a small platform atop a pillar for thirty-seven years. Simeon was a hugely popular figure who drew thousands of pilgrims as a popular saint, while still alive. In his day, many considered him a Church Father and co-founder of the Church, itself and small fortunes were made by Aleppo merchants selling his effluvia and counterfeits thereof to pilgrims.

Monasticism and the Leashing of the Athletes of God

But the exhibitionism, self-harm and disruption of institutional authority all led the Church to recognize a social movement that would either replace or contain the Saint Simeons of the future: the followers of Benedict of Nursia, a contemporary of Simeon. As I briefly mentioned in my piece on the Donatist Crisis, some Christian ascetics like Saint Anthony the Great had already begun separating themselves from society and becoming hermits or forming small collectives in ecologically marginal places with little permanent human habitation. Following in the larger Judean-Samaritan tradition that included groups like the Essenes, these communities were not unlike the 1970s back-to-the-land movement. They tended to feature a sole, almost always male, leader who propounded a set of specific teachings and established some form of hierarchical communitarian mini-society. These mini-societies tended to collapse with the death of the leader, such as the community led by Saint Anthony the Great who spent his life wrestling the Devil in the Egyptian desert.

Benedict, with the endorsement and assistance of the Church, transformed these phenomena in several key ways through his compilation and publication of the Benedictine Rule, a codified, standardized set of written instructions for how such communities should run without the necessity of a charismatic leader and with a built-in succession process for leadership. The Church’s adoption of the Benedictine Rule, which spawned the Benedictine Order, the first order of monks in Christianity, did a number of important things designed to make the likes of Saint Simeon the exception in Christian asceticism, primarily a relic of the past. Ascetics were increasingly evicted from the public square and sent to become part of monastic (first Benedictine and then other orders with approved rules, like the Dominicans) communities.

Like the Buddhist traditions before them, “reasonableness and moderation” were at the core of these communities’ practices. In addition to prohibiting extreme acts of self-harm and instead forcing regular meals, rests, etc. on the monks, Benedictine monasticism moderated the Athlete of God tradition in other important ways.

First, their status within the church and the status of individuals in the monasteries were not determined by something as volatile as personal charisma, flair, endurance or daring but instead by bureaucratic promotion processes that placed abbots within the ecclesiastical hierarchy but not at its top.

Second, acts of asceticism were out of public view. Whatever social currency or charisma might be gained from astounding stunts of self-harm was limited to an audience of other monks engaged in the same program. What happened at the monastery stayed at the monastery and this was not simply limited to sodomy but to any other weird antics the men there might be getting up to. Placed out of public view, many of the exhibitionistic payoffs associated with the Athlete of God tradition fell away.

Third, monasteries were supposed to be self-sufficient. This entailed breaking land and engaging in a lot of practical physical labour. Shoveling shit and digging ditches do not leave a lot of energy for protracted acts of exhibitionistic asceticism. If you starve yourself, you don’t have the energy to carry out the menial duties spelled-out for you in the Benedictine Rule. If you injure yourself, again, this may impinge on the basic duties that are required of your by your community. This meant that engaging in acts of self-harm too extreme actually compromised one’s status as a Christian ascetic.

What this effectively meant was that during the centuries of Catholic hegemony in the West, those prone to acts of exhibitionistic self-harm were institutionalized and required to sleep regularly, take regular meals and engage in forms of work designed to make their asceticism as ordinary and uncharismatic as possible.

The Albigensian Crusade and the Social Contagion of Self-Harm

Of course, this tradition stared-down many challenges. One of the most significant was the Cathar movement, a neo-Gnostic movement that went further even than Plato himself in declaring that God created our spirits, angels and the heavens but that the Demiurge was, in fact, Satan himself, and that the material world was intrinsically evil, a creation of the Enemy. Anorexia and other epidemics or self-harm and body hatred followed Cathar teachings as they spread through present-day France and Spain. Human sex and sexuality were also understood to be part of Lucifer’s curse, something of which we would be cured if administered the appropriate magical rituals at the time of death. The body was a prison, as was the earth itself.

By 1209, the movement had become sufficiently threatening that the Kingdom of France redirected many of their crusaders from the Middle East to the Cathar-controlled areas, hastening the demise of the last Crusader States, already suffering from the Fourth Crusade’s betrayal of the Byzantine Empire in 1204.

There were many ironies to the Albigensian Crusade, the name commonly given to the Pope’s decision to declare those armies a formal crusade of equal weight to the various invasions of the Levant that had been undertaken under the same name and to formally affiliate the Holy Inquisition with it. Whatever brutality the Crusaders meted out in the Middle East paled in comparison to the savagery of the first “crusade” inside Catholic territory; far too popular among the Church’s strategies for preventing people dying by their own hand through starvation or flashier forms of suicide was to pre-emptively execute them.

But the urgency of the Crusade and the desperation of the Church in prosecuting it indicates that the prospect of facing whole armies of Athletes of God was something Rome thought could bring Christianity itself down, that self-harm contagions, leavened by Plato-influenced ideas of body-mind dualism, was an existential threat. Further evidence of this belief is evinced in the decision by the Spanish Kingdom of Aragon to pull many of its troops out of its protracted war with the Spanish Muslims, the Moops (couldn’t resist), and send them North to assist in the Crusade after France experienced some military setbacks.

But the lack of troops also proved a problem, making the Crusade dependent on local mobs more interested in settling scores and seizing the property of their neighbours than in enforcing any particular religious orthodoxy. But, again, the level of panic on the part of common people may also indicate not just a simple intolerance but a response to a harmful social contagion that might cause a friend or relative to suddenly begin engaging in acts of radical self-harm leading to premature death.

And people really were starving and mutilating themselves en masse, swept up in a religious enthusiasm that was shattering families, disrupting communities and shutting down economies.

And Now Some Canadian Content

Following the costly and brutally savage victory over the Cathars, the church became programmatically vigilant about self-harm movements, about the resurgence of the Athletes of God, not just because the “spiritually gifted” charismatic leaders of these movements were a competing locus of religious authority but because they appear to have had genuine humanitarian and theological concerns.

There is no reason to doubt that Catholic intellectuals, who comprised the overwhelming majority of thinking people in Europe for much of its history, did genuinely care about people’s physical and mental health. They constructed large, elaborate, hospital systems, ran medical schools and crafted “penitentials” which served as almanacs of suggested treatments for recurrent psychiatric problems in parishioners. Similarly, theologians appeared motivated by the genuine desire to see the natural world as a key piece of evidence of God’s existence, his grace and his love for his creation. The beauty and abundance of the natural world were clear, unambiguous evidence both of his power and his love.  

That is why the church was especially vigilant, as it expanded across the oceans, beginning in the fifteenth century, that it not permit anti-life, anti-creation or anti-body ideas enter it through the conversion process. As early as the fifth century, the Church had seen mission and conversion as a complex social process in which converts could only adopt new ideas and practices if they were allowed to bring some of their pre-existing beliefs and practices into the church with them. Indeed, the foundational document for missionaries was composed in the sixth century by Gregory the Great, who exhorted his missionaries not to build new churches but, instead, to gradually redecorate pagan temples so that converts’ habits of worship be disrupted as little as possible.

For this reason, after experiencing huge initial successes, the Jesuit mission to Japan was scaled-back and little opposition was offered to the Tokugawa Shogunate’s expulsion of missionaries and confinement of Christianity to Nagasaki. This was a direct result of reports from missionaries that Catholic traditions of martyrdom and imitatio Christi (embodying Christ) were being too easily and frequently conflated with pre-existing traditions of ritual suicide. While being indifferent to suffering and death was noble and Christian, self-inflicted harm for religious purposes, especially exhibitionist self-harm, set off alarm bells. Missionaries began meting out punishments and withdrawing the Eucharist from enthusiastic Japanese self-harmers.

In colonial Canada, missionaries faced a similar challenge with Iroquois traditions of conversion-by-torture, a tradition that was amplified by the “mourning wars,” whereby the Iroquois Confederacy and other Iroquoian military powers, such as the Huron Confederacy, were increasingly motivated to absorb members of adjacent ethnic groups to replace population lost through the Virgin Soil epidemics of European disease. War captives were tortured until, according to Iroquoian cosmology, their spirit left their body and the spirit of a dead comrade entered and replaced it. Thereafter, the war captive took on the name, job and, often, family position of the deceased person whose spirit had entered their body.

Consequently, endurance of torture and the stigmata left behind had a double meaning in Iroquoian society: the marks of torture on the body of a stranger might indicate that a miraculous event had taken place and that body was now actually the body of a beloved comrade, relative or friend; or, the marks of torture on the body of an escaped or ransomed war captive might indicate that will was so strong that their spirit refused to leave their body despite excruciating pain and that they had remained true to their people under the worst duress.

The first indigenous Canadian, Kateri Tekakwitha, to become a Catholic Saint attained this status because she became involved in something that should seem eerily familiar to contemporary readers:

Like many young women in Iroquoian society, exhausted by continuous martial law, and political crisis, and enticed by Catholic promises of a quiet, peaceful life Kateri chose to leave her community and become part of a church-organized settlement where young, indigenous women could try out the ascetic life and see if they wanted to become nuns.

Kateri and the other girls soon became subject to what we today term a “social contagion,” whereby they entered into a concurrently solidaristic and competitive pact of egging each other on to engage in increasingly extreme acts of self-harm. Although she was initially an instigator of these practices among the girls, Kateri grew increasingly uncomfortable as they facilitated and participated in each other’s acts of physical mortification, doing increasingly severe injuries to themselves and others, in a syncretic crescendo of extreme acts that concurrently fulfilled both Iroquois traditions of public torture and Catholic ideas of imitation Christi.

Eventually, Kateri took it upon herself to exhort the other girls to stop and, when they persisted, she appealed to the clergy running the compound to shut down what had become a danger to both the bodies and souls of the girls. Despite her best efforts, Kateri was unable to convince most of the other girls to stay within the community, abandon their vicious cycle of self-harm and comply with the moderate asceticism inspired by the Benedict and the monastic tradition.

Today’s Athletes of God

In 1996, historians of Canadian religion, Nancy Christie and Mark Gavreau, building on the work of earlier scholars like Ramsay Cook, argued that Canada had taken a unique path to secularization, through the Social Gospel movement, of which Canadian statesmen Tommy Douglas, JS Woodsworth and William Lyon Mackenzie King had been prominent members.

Christie and Gavreau argued that Canada did not so much secularize as preside over a massive institutional migration of Protestant clergy from churches into the caring professions in the non-profit sector and civil service, that declines in church attendance were so sharp and so closely synchronized with the rise of proto-welfare state institutions between 1900 and 1940 that the clergy simply migrated from one set of institutions to another, bringing with them a largely intact set of beliefs about the moral order of society, just with the state, rather than God, at the top.

Consequently, I would argue, Canada has been uniquely vulnerable to religious enthusiasms that grip Protestant Christian communities because Protestant theology is embedded throughout our civil society organizations, the state and all the QuaNGOs in between. It makes sense, then, that our country is uniquely vulnerable to common Christian heresies and religious revitalization movements.

This is why, when those charged with our social welfare and hygiene see prominently displayed and fetishized mastectomy scars on teenage girls, they see imitation Christi; they see an Athlete of God. When social workers and public health nurses see track marks on the arms of career heroin addict, they see the stigmata of someone in privileged contact with the divine.

Of course, troubled, self-mutilating children should be seen as special authorities on human sexuality and gender; of course, habitual drugs addicts should be the guides of Canadian drug policy. Spiritual gifts, according to Saint Paul, are not evenly distributed. We live in a time when we need only look to the most sickly and exhibitionist self-harmers to see who is most spiritually gifted. The real authority in the room is the person whose privileged knowledge is revealed by their stigmata.

Religion Without God

To understand why the grip of self-harm movements is so especially tight in English Canada, it is important to recall a salient feature of the Cathar worldview: that God was not god of the material world, that Satan was its god. Material creation was not just as mistake, as in original Gnosticism, but an evil, a wrong that merited correction.

It is only by depriving our worldview of the idea that the material order is good or divine but still using Christian cosmology and habits of thought to structure it, can we reach the conclusion that those who are most spiritually gifted are, naturally, those who are “born in the wrong body.” Of course it would be the spirits most at odds with their material being that would be greatest spirits in the world, to whom we should defer, morally and politically.

Those seeking escape from the material world through drugs, those seeking escape through surgery, those seeking escape by fusing with the machines through which they communicate are the most spiritually gifted. One can see this by the stigmata tattooed on their bodies in the form of scars, amputations and prostheses. The more at odds a body is with physical creation, the more that body commands authority in the bizarre religious revitalization movement that has seized control of my country.

Wokeness Is An American Space Religion

Today’s Athletes of God have not come out of nowhere. The incomplete and superficial secularization of Canada only explains our unique vulnerability to this sinister neo-Cathar movement. A series of religious movements have been refining the key ideas we see gripping progressive society today, a group of organizations and belief systems existing at the periphery of Christianity.

Mormonism, as propounded by Joseph Smith from 1830-44, first put forward the idea of a universe in which God was not the creator but simply an intelligent being who learned the rules of a godless pre-existing universe, enabling him to create planets and people them with ensouled beings. Smith gave us the idea that before our conception or birth, we were pre-existent immaterial spirit beings who possessed an inalterable gender before they attached to a body. The idea of us as spirit beings, imprisoned in an inferior reality, on a prison planet was then developed in Elijah Mohammed’s Nation of Islam and elaborated in L Ron Hubbard’s scientology.

These beliefs have been powerfully synthesized into a religious revitalization movement of fanatics and enthusiasts whose subconscious motivation is to undo the flawed creation that is Lucifer’s material world.

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

The Omnicide and the Level Boss: Thoughts On A Weekend With Deep Green Resistance

On the last weekend of August, I gathered with a group of two dozen extraordinary people. All of us are members of Deep Green Resistance. Like pretty much every group I join, I like DGR’s analysis a lot but am not sold on their eschaton, kind of like my relationship to Marxism and Christianity. I don’t think we actually have the capacity to make any plans about really big, complicated things, like, for instance the end of the world.

One of the things I like most about DGR is that Derrick Jensen is the Saint Jerome of environmental thought; they have turned a maelstrom of factional arguments and a disorganized, variegated body of writing into a coherent synthesis. Back in the 80s and 90s, during the first generation of Green politics, there were four (as opposed to zero, in the present) intellectual movements that vied to become the dominant Green philosophy: Bioregionalism, Ecofeminism, Deep Ecology and Social Ecology. Or rather, Bioregionalists were happy to work with any of the other folks and everyone else was having a fight.

Those were heady intellectual times, times that I, in my youthful exuberance, helped to shut down. Perhaps, had those philosophical debates continued into the present, there might have been some intellectual guardrails, some moral scaffolding to prevent the BC and German Green Parties from running brute squads for and handing sacks of cash to the fossil fuel industry. Oh well…

Like Saint Jerome and his associates, DGR has recognized where these philosophies actually reinforce each other and agree, where the power of their analysis has revealed some more predictive and relevant than others. And, instead of engaging in the massive cut-and-paste operation Jerome did, Jensen and his collaborators’ books synthesize these ideas into a single authorial voice as well. There is Dave Foreman’s biocentrism from Deep Ecology, the close connections between male domination of women and societies’ treatment of the land from Ecofeminism, and the belief in valley-scale society from Bioregionalism. And, fortunately, no sign of Social Ecology (our Gospel of Thomas, I guess).

DGR also has the distinction of being the first left organization to be canceled due to Genderwang, way back in 2012, and rendering their campaigns subject to sabotage by genderist-captured environmental groups, who would rather side with the corporations than tolerate non-Woke environmentalists succeeding at saving endangered ecosystems. Seeing the danger these folks pose, Jensen’s co-leader and author, Lierre Keith, spun off the Women’s Liberation Front, now at the forefront of fighting for the rights of incarcerated women.

Anyway, I encountered some amazing people doing amazing work. But, because of the authoritarian turn we are experiencing, many are secret members who, if exposed as DGR members, would lose their jobs, friends and connections to the mainstream of the movement, not because DGR advocates the total destruction of industrial civilization but because they do not believe women have penises.

Those who had come out not as members but merely as associates of members told stories of losing 60-80% of their organization’s volunteers, their funding and almost all of their mainstream media access. And that is not to mention the personal toll. Activists from around the Global North recounted the social carnage that surrounded them, most of their long-term relationships, friends, coworkers, romantic partners: gone.

It was there that I realized two very important things: (1) no one, no matter how brilliant, no matter how organized, has figured out how to either withdraw from or to confront rising authoritarianism that stops the authoritarians continuing to harass and sabotage them (after all, Keith was punched in the face on live video by ANTIFA last fall and not a single word of condemnation was uttered by anyone on the mainstream left) and (2) the first priority of any rational socialist or environmentalist should be to fight genderwang, not, because of facilitating prison rape, mass-sterilizing autistics, practicing FGM, cheering for conversion rape, beating women in the street and the host of other associated atrocities it entails, but because it is the means by which authoritarianism is being enabled. The point is that until you defeat the authoritarians, the only politics that exists is defeating the authoritarians.

Getting politics back is the prize we will win only if we defeat them.

To believe that politics can be carried out when people’s speech, association and assembly rights are being annihilated is simply naïve. Recall that in the early 1990s we were all surprised to learn what the actual political views were of people like Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn actually were. That is because as long as the USSR existed, as long as any authoritarian regime runs, there was only one political identity an opposition politician could have: dissident.

The authoritarians that ran the USSR and its client states conflated all opposition to party orthodoxy as capitalist stoogery, and contrary to what you hear these days, identities really are social constructions but actual social constructions, not personal fantasies, i.e. you are who society decides you are. You can’t identify out of the social construction in which you are placed.

In Wokeistans like Canada, Scotland, New Zealand and Australia, it does not actually matter what you think your political identity is. Everyone at the event who was an “out” DGR member was, like me, understood by the hegemonic ideology to be a member of the “far right,” along with Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Jimmy Dore, Russell Brand and Noam Chomsky.

Until this state of affairs changes, our first priority must be to dismantle the power of the authoritarians who have captured our political parties, news media, law enforcement and educational institutions, so as to make politics possible again. Until that time, society will remain in a post-political state and all projects that assemble broad coalitions that challenge the establishment will be impossible to form. Our only hope of that being possible is to form a coalition whose sole basis of unity is anti-authoritarianism.

In other words, we have to punch our way out of this corner.

This bums me out, obviously because I think there are some rather urgent matters that I have to place on the back burner to deal with this atrocious state of affairs. It is not like any part of our stressed global ecosystems has the luxury of time. This is, after all, The Omnicide. And that is not to say I will not keep doing environmental activism; I just have to recognize that society has placed stringent limits on those activities that I cannot just break out of by an act of will.

I have come to think of this political moment in videogame terms: you want to get up to Level Six where you get back to battling Royal Dutch Shell and its many minions but unfortunately, this is Level Five, the Woke level, where you have to defeat the Woke level boss so you can get back to the fight you came here to have. Of course, you should pick off any oil industry enemies you can on this level but recognize that most are going to be out of range until you defeat the exploding milk demon.

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Canada Is And Must Be More Than Its Past

I am a Canadian; I have been a Christian; I am a Marxist; I have been a Green. These forms of identity have something in common: they are concurrently descriptive and aspirational. In other words, they are descriptive of communities in multiple contradictory ways.

Each of these groups refers to a community that exists in the present day that has a variegated and complex historical track record. Canadians, as a people, have done some crappy things. We disenfranchised and forcibly re-educated indigenous people. We fought against liberalism and democracy in the American Revolution and War of 1812. We interned Japanese Canadians during the Second World War. We hanged Louis Riel and stamped out his movement. We turned away Jewish refugees trying to escape the Third Reich.

Even if one dodges some responsibility by taking refuge in the fact that the USSR, Warsaw Pact and Communist China can be described as “state capitalist” regimes or “dictatorships of the commissar class,” the fact is that, globally, Marxists have historically cheered for authoritarian regimes and looked the other way when Mao, Stalin, Deng, etc. committed unspeakable atrocities in the name of Marxism.

Christians, the oldest community I have been associated with have committed plenty of atrocities too, from the murderous ruthlessness of the Albigensian Crusade to Charlemagne’s massacres in the name of Christianizing Saxony to the conquest of the New World by the sword and the sanctification of African slavery based on the Church’s theory of “just war.” And then of course, there are the multi-generational pedophile grooming rings that have been given cover by a number of Christian denominations.

Even in their short history, the Green Party has, globally, done a number of shameful things from leading the charge to bomb Serbia with depleted uranium in the 1990s, to voting through massive fracking and fossil fuel increases during their three years in government here in BC, to the German Greens current support for the mass eviction of Bavarian villagers so that their villages can be turned into open pit coal mines right now.

But that is not the only way to define these communities.

Many people identify with these communities because they agree with the precepts laid down in their canonical texts. The New Testament, the Communist Manifesto, the Canadian Charter of Rights and Freedoms, Small is Beautiful: these are all great texts that describe a way of ordering society and solving moral questions that are compelling. Also, there are many great tributes to and interpretations of these texts, like the City of God and Imperialism is the Highest Stage of Capitalism, etc. Furthermore, there are great orators who have made compelling, inspiring speeches based on these communities’ principles; and then there are the communities themselves. There are lots of superb groups of people who congregate, meet and organize around these ideas even though their execution beyond the scale of a small group either never happens or goes terribly wrong.

But the most important way people identify as part of communities is based on what that community could be. “Make America great again,” the slogan of Ronald Reagan and Donald Trump epitomizes that ethos, that if one identifies, aspirationally with a community, it is not merely a way of experiencing loyalty, hope and solidarity. It is also a way of criticizing the errors your community is making in the present by describing a future that does not contain them. And this kind of loyalty as criticism appeals across all sorts of communities, whether it is Roman Catholic traditionalists praying for the conversion of the pope or Aaron Sorkin’s Newsroom lectureporn, “American isn’t the greatest country in the world anymore. But it could be.”

This last example, like “make American great again,” is also descriptive of another aspirational aspect of community identity, the idealization of a half-imagined past, or the presentation of a collage of past events that speak to the best angels of the community. While some of these curated pasts simply point to an ahistorical imaginary idyll, a self-congratulatory fiction under which a community chooses to bury the errors and atrocities of the past, not all such aspirational nostalgia is necessarily dishonest. Sometimes a community simply chooses to shine a spotlight on the moments in its history when it rose to the occasion over those that it failed to; as long as those moments of failure are not denied or blotted out. A community should focus on the moments when it overcame prejudice over those when it failed to; a community should focus on the moments when it made a shared sacrifice to achieve an important collective goal over the times it failed in those efforts.

A final aspect of aspirational identity that merits discussion is what I have termed “incarnational.” Based on the work of Mormon theologian and philosopher James Faucloner, I am using an idea I have previously used to argue against denunciations of “strategic voting.” It is an idea that resonates with my own experience of Pearsonian nationalism growing up as a CBC listener in the 1980s. Back then, I asserted that Canada only existed four hours a day, the four hours of every weekday you could hear Peter Gzowski hosing Morningside on CBC Radio, that Canada only seemed real, only truly existed while Gzowski was describing it; without his voice announcing it into being, it was little more than a legal fiction.

When it comes to any successful big, shared idea of community, one way of understanding being a Canadian, a Marxist, a Christian is that these communities do not exist at all points in space-time or even most; they only exist when they are being ritually celebrated, that one is only Canadian when one is singing O Canada, or celebrating Canada Day, cheering on some CFL team in the Grey Cup, that there is no global Marxist community except on May Day or at a communist meeting or on a pilgrimage to Havana, that Christ’s self-sacrifice, as Faulconer’s argument originally went, is real, not in the historical sense but instead, wherever in space-time the Eucharist is enacted.

It is my view that, of the five different ways we can be part of and assert the existence of big communities with broad membership, communities that have made and will continue to make lots of mistakes, by virtue of their breadth and complexity, the incarnational is most underrated in importance. In other words, much of the work and experience of a nationalism, a world religion a political movement of millions, are the moments of celebration and mutual recognition that occur within it. And the main way to judge whether these movements are pro-social is not to examine their grandiose plans for the future or the trail of mistakes stretching behind them into the past but instead to just how they are shaping the relationships of those participating in them in the present.

It is very clear that the nationalism of Justin Trudeau and the White Consciousness Movement, at this moment, in this country is making all of us into worse people, more isolated, more suspicious, more divided, more alienated, more disconnected, angrier and more confused. We need to fashion a way of being Canadians that functions as a countervailing force, that is collaborative, genuinely welcoming and inclusive, less hierarchical, more participatory.

I was inspired to put off my article about the Waffle movement and publish this because of an experience I had this weekend, attending the convention of the BC Conservative Party. Although I came away from the experience convinced that I am not a conservative and that, while I have many allies and friends among conservatives, they are not my tribe. Nevertheless, the weekend began with a simple yet profound experience: they began the convention not with a land acknowledgement but with the singing of O Canada.

First of all, the irony was not lost on me of a group of mostly rural Anglo Canadian social conservatives in the West belting out an anthem their movement had opposed replacing God Save the Queen, as atheistic, anti-monarchy social engineering by the liberals of the Laurentian elite half a century ago.

But more importantly, it felt so different than a land acknowledgement, which is an inherently hierarchical act of intermediation. A single individual stands at the centre of the room acting as an intermediating officiant in the relationship between an indigenous nation and a group of meeting attendees. Like a Roman Catholic priest administering the Eucharist, the land acknowledger has a hierarchical relationship to the crowd and an immaterial relationship to the nation (not just the nation in the present but concurrently through all of space-time). And its job is to emphasize the distance the acknowledger is covering and the incommensurability of the realities and communities on either side.

The Tory meeting opener, on the hand, was also easily comparable to a religious ritual, in this case more like a Quaker meeting or a small Pentecostal congregation breaking into an acapella hymn, everyone belting out the words slightly off-key from everyone else, slightly out-of-sync but all making a big, joyful noise together. That ritual was about building connection, sharing experience, dismantling hierarchy, reminding people they were starting with common ground, common knowledge.

The ephemeral effect of this was very important, as the room was full of long-simmering resentments and novel suspicions as new people came into the organization, occupying and contesting space, creating new upsets and confusion. But it really did appear that the anthem helped, as individuals being pushed out of leadership positions or forced to share them with new recruits took time present these occurrences as things they had long desired and the fulfilment of their past work and dedication.

And I cannot help but contrast this to how a meeting or a training session goes after a land acknowledgement, how co-workers behave after being forced to do a “privilege walk” to show how socially distant they supposedly are from one another.

It is my view that this imagined community we call Canada and the people with whom we share it will treat us better if we go back to celebrating it and them, if we return to symbols and celebrations that are as broadly shared and universally recognized as possible. Doing that will not change who Canadians have been; it will not make our national project seem any clearer or less absurd; it will not heal all wounds or solve all problems. But I do believe that the Canada we ritually enact, the Canada in which we live in the present and the future Canada we aspire to be will get better.

I am not simply saying that Canada is more than its past; in my view, it must be.

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Honey Boo Boo and the Fourth Punic War: How Gender and Climate Politics Are Linked

The Fall and Rise of Honey Boo Boo

Here Comes Honey Boo Boo, a deeply disturbing “reality” show took to the airwaves in 2012. It depicted the life of a child beauty queen, groomed by her mother to put on sexualized performances for audiences of grown men in her pre-pubescent body. The show’s launch was really the culmination of a set of bizarre pedophilic fads that had ripped through the heartland of American conservatism post-911. Shocking numbers of pre-pubescent girls got to experience a novel variant on Munchausen-by-proxy as abusive parents found a new way to seek attention by publicly hurting their children.

Closely coupled with this phenomenon were the father-daughter dates and dances, culminating in formal dress “prom” dates, in which men displayed their adolescent daughters as surrogate wives, again to receptive audiences that applauded these displays of Platonic incest.

But by the third season, however, ratings were falling as was the popular cultural practice the show represented. Father-daughter proms also went on the wane at around the same time.

Ironically it seemed as though, during the rise of Donald Trump, himself, an obvious abuser of his own daughter, that his base was quietly abandoning the very kind of exhibitionistic abuse in which he himself was engaging.

Today, it is the creature shambling around in the flayed skin of the Left that we most associate with pedophilic exhibitionism. We have trans child beauty queens and trans child reality shows. Dylan Mulvaney has moved on from making videos about his ability to show off his erection in a leather mini-skirt and holding summits with the leader of the free world to making videos of himself as six-year-old girl inviting you into her bed. And, of course, there is Drag Queen Story Hour, where progressive parents bring their children to watch transsexual strip club routines and slip $1 bills into the exotic dancers’ g-strings, when not being read stories from the Ally Baby series, which explains to pre-pubescent children that they can and should consent to sex acts.

I want to suggest that there is a logic to this bizarre dance with child safeguarding practices in which Anglo America has been engaged.

And, each year that goes by, less of this dereliction of child safeguarding duties is even being laundered through the discourse of the Gender Industrial Complex. School sex education curricula are teaching kids that the term “pedophile” is a stigmatizing pejorative and that the term “minor attracted person” should be used in its place. Progressive opinion leaders like University of Victoria professor Hope Cleves propound the doctrine that adults raping children is not, in fact, abuse but a mutually beneficial interaction she euphemistically calls “intergenerational sex.”

It’s the climate.

From 1996-2015, conservative Americans’ leadership acknowledged that the Greenhouse Effect was real, consequential, harmful and also not something they were going to do anything about. In other words, conservative Americans found themselves subscribing to a set of beliefs that forced them to conclude that failing to protect one’s children from a genuine threat that could ruin or impoverish their lives was okay. In fact, it was good.

“Children are resilient,” “children are hard to hurt,” “children can consent,” “children can make adult choices,” “it’s okay to hurt kids if you get something out of it materially,” “children are really just small, dimwitted adults,”—these thoughts became normalized. Publicly staging derelictions of parental duty, of the collective duty of adults to protect kids became something a huge swath of the population needed to applaud.

But by 2015, the mainstream view of the Republican Party’s leadership and of evangelical religious leaders was that the destabilization of our climate was a “Chinese hoax.” In fact, the person who most vigorously propounded the idea that there was no climate crisis was the person chosen not just as conservative America’s president but as its Caliph, a man who could also pronounce on matters of evangelical religion from his seat in the White House.

While the effects of the mainstreaming of climate denial have been devastating in many ways, they did, ironically, I believe, spare a lot of kids in places like Oklahoma from being turned into sexualized display objects by their parents.

Meanwhile, the statistics do not lie. As I explained in my previous post, governments that talk tough on climate and whose leaders march with Greta Thunberg actually build more pipelines and sink more new wells than those run by climate denialists. And, as much as progressives try to hide those ugly facts from themselves, the reality is that they cannot.

Everybody knows the German Green and Social Democratic parties are destroying people’s homes and fields, annihilating their property rights and civil liberties, assaulting and incarcerating villagers whose homes are getting in the way of the new coal mines they want to dig. They know that it was Justin Trudeau, not Stephen Harper who poured billions of dollars and hundreds of RCMP officers into forcing the Trans Mountain Pipeline through Western Canada, that oil exploration in the US is experiencing a renaissance under Joe Biden’s presidency.

In other words, progressives now hold the same position regarding climate that conservatives held 1996-2015. And so they are compelled to engage in practices of exhibitionistic, perverted child hatred to normalize their total dereliction of duty to their children, something that has only intensified since Biden returned to a level of nuclear sabre-rattling not seen since Ronald Reagan’s first term. If nuking Eastern Europe is okay; if the carbon-forced omnicide is okay; why not FGM and pedophilia?

That is why there is almost no overlap between people who believe the Greenhouse Effect is real and that it is wrong to perform hysterectomies on healthy teenage girls. Because I am such a person, engaging with this civilization is very challenging for me.

The Fourth Punic War and the Future of the West

While I vehemently disagree with Matt Walsh on gay rights and a host of other issues, I think there is one thing he and only he is saying right now that cuts right to the heart of the matter: the current progressive child endangerment movement is at war with Western Civilization itself.

While many trace the start of Western Civilization to the Iliad and the Odyssey and the civilizational competition between Greek and Phoenician city states in the Mediterranean that began in the seventh century BC, I argue that it begins a little later.

The Greek and Phoenician colonies that dotted the coasts of the Mediterranean and Black Seas, from present-day Gibraltar to Crimea were vibrant multilingual, multicultural societies that traded luxury goods and slaves. But there was a fundamental difference between the two kinds of city states. While both types of colony lived and died by the commerce that was transacted in the agora, the marketplace, the core of civic life was not there.

In Greek city states, the centre of civic life was the bouleuterion, where political decisions were made by a group of citizens through a process of deliberation and voting. While some Greek colonies has small bouleuteria that only included members of the wealthiest and most powerful families, others, like Athens, accommodated as much as 15% of their resident in enormous amphitheatre-style meeting spaces.

But in the Phoenician city states, the centre of civic life was the altar to the god Baal, where the priests sacrificed infants by heating the idol’s bronze hands so that they would literally fry the bodies of babies placed in their embrace. While the Greeks found this disgusting and condemned it, that disgust is as far as it went, and, as I have said elsewhere, it is not like the Greeks were the best advocates for child safeguarding, given their embrace of pedophilia as a natural and laudable part of their formal education systems.

It is my argument that Western Civilization truly began during the Punic Wars, between the Rome and Carthage, an empire composed of Phoenician city-states in North Africa, Sicily and the Iberian Peninsula. While these wars were largely motivated by the conflicting commercial interests of the two maritime powers vying for control of the Western Mediterranean, as the wars grew more costly, they also became more ideological. Increasingly compelling narratives had to be presented by Rome’s senate and consuls to mobilize the volunteer citizen-soldiers on which the Roman Republic relied to fill the ranks of its armies.

And the most successful and compelling narrative, the one that caused thousands of Roman soldiers to cross the sea and fight and die in North Africa was this: the Carthaginians are sacrificing their own children to their god, Baal and that Romans had a duty to protect the children of strangers.

Irrespective of the motive for doing so, it is this moment that I choose to see as the birth of Western Civilization, the radical act of imaginative empathy that makes you want to protect the children of monstrous people and exact revenge upon them for their crimes against humanity. No doubt this belief has led to much cultural intolerance, conversion at swordpoint and unnecessary bloodshed. But it has also produced a compassionate, empathetic universalism that we also associate with the West.

That is what is on the line as we stare down the climate crisis and the psychiatric comorbidities it is generating in the human brain. And there is only one way out of this: we have to build a movement that will actually confront the omnicide, not just one like, the world’s Green Parties that pay lip service to doing so, while flooring the gas over the cliff, or one that will not just throw cans of soup at it. That isn’t climate politics; it’s post-political climate nihilism. Because, like it or not, the battle against the Greenhouse Effect is also the Fourth Punic War.

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