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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 |

Silence Will Fall: Collective Repression and the Liberal Narration of Joe Biden’s Health

I always believed that repressed memories were hooey, a cultural hangover from the Satanic Panic. I believed that, anyway, until 2013, when my own repressed memories finally broke through. I will not be talking about my own memories here but I feel that I can offer some perspective on repression that may help us sort out current morbidities of today’s politics.

In 2019 and 2020, I was a supporter of Bernie Sanders’ second presidential bid. Naturally, but especially in this day and motherfucking age, a lot of the cohesion and conversation of a group of supporters of one candidate is occupied with pointing out the deficiencies of the competition.

So, naturally, I joined thousands of other Sanders supporters writing about Joe Biden’s declining mental faculties and the possibility that he was already in the beginning stages of a neurodegenerative condition of some kind. We traded videos of Biden freezing or wandering off in the middle of his own campaign’s livestream events. We shared videos of the bizarre confrontation in which Biden accuses a young female protester of being a “dog-faced pony soldier.” (An accusation he has made against two other young women since.)

But then our man, Bernie Sanders, dropped out of the race and endorsed Biden and many, though not all of us, were swept up in the campaign to defeat Donald Trump. While I supported those efforts, I was hardly “swept up” in them. I was already souring on the left, as a coalition, for other reasons.

Once Biden’s shakiness and decline showed up on camera, early in his presidency, I noticed a substantial difference in my friends’ reactions depending on how swept up they had been. Fed on a steady diet of MSNBC, CNN, CBC, John Oliver, Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, those most committed to the 2020 campaign began trotting out the “he has always talked like that. He’s had a stutter since he was a child,” “it’s ageist to say those things,” “he is healthier than the average man that age,” “that video is Russian disinformation,” etc. Those of us less swept up were a little bewildered. Did they really not remember what they used to think?

When challenged on these ideas they would fight back vigorously but be strangely non-receptive to new evidence. This is how one behaves when one is repressing a memory.

Stephen Moffat’s Doctor Who monster, “The Silence,” is the best metaphorical illustration of how repression actually works. It is a monster whose power is that every time you look away from its horrifying visage, you forget having seen it. But when you see it again, you remember every time I saw it before and forgot.

You see: you do not repress a memory once. One of the reasons people with repressed memories have very poor mental health is that they are constantly working, remembering something and forcing themselves to forget it again. But making yourself forget something actually requires constant vigilance and a kind of subconscious awareness. You are constantly sustaining a double consciousness, one part of you not knowing and another part of you working around the clock to conceal that information from the rest of you.

For the past five years, mainstream liberal and progressive Americans have been engaged in an act of collective repression, noticing some new sign of Biden’s decline, the act of noticing causing one to stop repressing momentarily and remembering all the other times you noticed, remembered and then forgot again.

In this way, repression intensifies over time. There are more and more memories to suppress and there is an ever greater desperation to keep them repressed. If you couldn’t handle the original piece of knowledge, after all, how are you going to handle the knowledge of all the events that temporarily broke through the repression and all the times you made yourself forget again.

On June 27th, an event took place so important, so public, so consequential that it broke through half a decade of progressive repression. No Democratic Party supporter was unaware of Joe Biden’s deteriorating condition and none of them is acting like someone who was genuinely surprised. Instead, the residents of the progressiverse are responding the way the children of a recently deceased pedophile might respond to the discovery of child porn in dad’s gun locker.

  1. “Why wasn’t I told!?”

Congressional leaders who are blaming Biden’s inner circle for withholding vital information from them fall into this camp. They complain that they were not given access to Biden after 4pm, that his handlers made it almost impossible to meet with him, that he almost never had unscripted events, that his wife and a small group of handlers hovered over him and would whisk him out of rooms. Given these incredible access restrictions, they complain, how could they have known how badly off the president was?

Except that those restrictions were, in fact, all the information they needed. Why would these restrictions be in place around a person unless their dementia had progressed to the point of causing regular sun-downing? The people saying “why wasn’t I told?” had every bit of information they needed to know the probably state of affairs and, had they been curious or inquisitive, would have sought to get to the bottom of things, what with their responsibility to ensure the nation was governed properly an all.

  • “C’mon, we always knew!”

Following the fizzling of his own insurgent bid against Joe Biden, Gavin Newsom has remade himself into the consummate Biden surrogate. Sure, Newsom and his ilk concede, the president is not quite the man he was. But he is the best man for the job, even despite what we know. That is because he is a great person who has assembled a great team. It’s almost as though we are in the early stages of the most brilliant living will ever written.

We are seeing this response from both elite and grassroots Democrats. They are responding to the collapse of repression the opposite way. Instead of feigning and indignant surprise, they are naturalizing their own repression, claiming always to have had a stable consciousness of the president’s mental state and never a double consciousness.

  • “How is this even relevant!?”/“I bet his buddy molested more kids.”

This is the response of individuals who are attempting to continue their experience of double consciousness and is represented more strongly in the party’s grassroots. The issue is stopping Donald Trump and any effort to relate the quality of one’s own ticket to stopping Trump is simple relabeled as either changing the subject or covert support for Trump.

In other words, the response is “Look over there!” The people engaged in this approach are trying to keep their double consciousness going long enough that Democratic Party elites can help them repress their memories again, so that they can forget about the nasty couple of weeks following June 27th, when Joe Biden was drugged by Roger Stone operatives because he is JUST FINE now.

In 2012, Salon magazine observed that Mitt Romney had practiced a new kind of political dishonesty in his presidential campaign. Like the corporate raider he was, he had contracted out the work of believing his lies to his audience and had ceased bothering to make them believable himself. I believe that our current moment reflects a further degeneration from that point, not merely a kind of programmatic, intentional gullibility but the kind of double consciousness that indicates not just morbidity above but profound stress below. Repression is a response to trauma and the more repression we see, the more traumatized a population it reflects.

But the thing about trauma that we learned from the 2007 Indian Ocean tsunami is that it is, in many ways, expectation-based. People with unreasonable, childish expectations are more easily traumatized. Two people can experience the identical loss and one will be traumatized, the other not. This difference is something people in the Global North call “resilience,” and think of it as a magical, mysterious quality to be studied, especially among supposedly oppressed and colonized people who seem to manage to lead perfectly satisfying, happy lives.

The problem is that resilience is actually the normal human condition. There is something wrong when it becomes uncommon enough in a society to even have a name. America lived through the end of Woodrow Wilson, Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Ronald Reagan. Their history records the Dowager Empress role the imperial consort took on in the last days of those presidencies. It did not traumatize the nation in the same way as the rule of Jill Biden currently does. And that, to me, indicates a profound lack of resilience, an emotionally coddled population whose unrealistic expectations are nurtured by a corrupt political class at the end of its rope.

Politics of Epistemology US Politics | fusangite |

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Common Climate Denialist claims include:

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

Common Sex Denialist claims include:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Could 2024 Be Decided By How Americans Think About Their Daughters’ Futures?

A Defense of Roe v. Wade
If we are to understand America’s culture war sympathetically and as the tragedy it is, I want to suggest that a good way in is to think about the parents of daughters in the 2024 elections. The Democratic Party had, it was thought, an excellent chance of hanging onto the presidency and Senate while regaining its House majority because the thing that has evolved into the supreme law-making authority in America, i.e. the Supreme Court, made an unpopular decision. They struck down Roe v. Wade, arguably one of the best-ever pieces of judge-made law on a social issue.

The genius of the 1970s Supreme Court was that it did not rule on whether a foetus, embryo or zygote had attained such things as personhood, viability or life. It simply rules that the coercive power of the state cannot pass into a body, that punitive laws cannot pass through the skin or through an orifice into the human body. It did not rule that abortion was good or bad, murder or not murder; it simply ruled that things inside a human body were not things over which the state should possess coercive power.

And it was a decision about which moderates in the anti-abortion movement, especially Democrat-voting Roman Catholics, initially, could live because the court had made no pronouncement on whether efforts to dissuade women from terminating their pregnancies were morally correct or incorrect. It simply constrained the movement from using certain tactics and powers to stop abortion.

And there are good reasons for this. You give up a lot when you create a society in which the state has a duty to closely surveil the bodies of women during their reproductive years, a society in which the police are obliged to investigate miscarriages and society that feels the need to radically restrict the mobility, assembly and association rights of women it fears might end a pregnancy. I remember the Fianna Fail’s authoritarian theocratic regime in 1980s Ireland, with the cops pursuing pregnant teenagers trying to board the Dublin-Liverpool ferry and returning them to Irish soil in handcuffs, facing charges. It is damn hard to organize a society in which people are free and abortion is meaningfully illegal.

The Democrats and the Burden of Government
Well, despite being supported by a clear majority of Americans, Roe v. Wade was overturned by the Supreme Court and, almost immediately, the Democratic Party began salivating over all those votes from affluent, educated suburban women they were finally going to bag, the Holy Grail of their political strategy every election since 1992. And initially, polls seemed to back up their theory of a great blue wave, sweeping them back into office with a renewed congressional majority.

But, perhaps inspired by the spirit of Bizarro Spiderman, “with no power comes no responsibility,” the party has behaved in ways that seem to indicate a desire to be relieved of the burden of governing the United States. They have chosen to re-nominate a presidential candidate whom over half of his own supporters believe to be mentally unfit to complete a second term in office. And, despite having a deep bench of competent campaigners and strategic thinkers still, they have deployed a rogue’s gallery of as his surrogates, with Batman villain Gavin “the Stoat” Newsom and Kamala Harris, who is clearly president in the Robocop timeline, leading the charge.

And if there has been a crescendo to this apparently suicidal course of political action, it is president Biden’s unilateral rewrite of Title IX, stripping women of the right to sex-segregated sports, prisons, shelters, restrooms, etc. If the Democrats were crafting a campaign to foreground women’s rights at home and abroad and to say “a Blue vote is a vote for women’s equality,” what could the logic behind the Title IX reforms possibly be?

I am going to shoulder past that question because that milk has already been spilled. There is no Title IX reversal in the Democrats’ future and no abortion reversal in the Republicans’. That table has been set and the question that will divide America and determine much about how its citizens’ vote will be based on how, both as individual parents and, as a society as a whole, how we think about our daughters’ futures.

The question America will answer this fall is this: what hypothetical dangers and challenges do we see in our daughters’ futures?

Democratic Voting and the Omnicide
Democrats, who are much more likely to share my belief in the escalating dangers of anthropogenic climate change and a host of interlocking environmental crises, like collapsing fisheries, plastics pollution, clearcut logging, endocrine disruptor pollution, etc. already have a bleak and pessimistic view of the children’s future. Increasingly post-political in their thinking, they are both more likely to believe that their children will have fewer economic opportunities and a worse physical environment and that there is little that can be done to change this. As I have argued elsewhere, this may have something to do with their membership in religious movements that exalt child sterilization as an expression of one’s elect status and moral virtue.

But the point is that America’s progressive, urban population is already thinking about bad things happening to their children, and wondering if it is even moral to bring more children into this world. For all we know, this might be a key hidden motivation for publicly celebrating the sterilization of children on the scale that we do.

But even leaving that aside, we see that predicting and either mitigating or weathering anticipated harm to children is the main way the left thinks about kids politically. Anti-bullying programs, whatever their efficacy, are premised on the belief that one’s child will be bullied. Environmental protection and education programs, again, are about anticipating something bad happening to kids and maybe getting out ahead of it.

Fundamentally, the left is pessimistic about the future of their children and structures its politics of childhood based on fear and disappointment. Preventing children from being harmed whether bullied, physically injured, misinformed, even merely contradicted, is seen as the governing principle in the politics of childhood.

And it is in this context that blue-voting parents of girls will be thinking:

“What will happen if my daughter has an unwanted pregnancy?”
“What if my daughter makes bad sexual and romantic choices?”
“What if my daughter is raped?”
“What if my daughter is too poor to house and feed a family?”
“What if my daughter cannot find a romantic partner with whom to form a family?”

She might need an abortion and we must protect her opportunity to do so.

Conservatism and Youth Sports
In 2008, one of the many political shifts that the Sarah Palin candidacy punctuated was the politicization of sports parents. To be a parent who was enthusiastic, supportive and exuberant about one’s child’s participation in sport has been transforming from a universal value, across the political spectrum, into a conservative one.

Law and Order: SVU, once a great Catholic modernist crime procedural, which has slowly been captured in the orbit of Wokeness has increasingly vilified parents who enthusiastically support their children’s sports. So, when it came time to enroll the main character’s son in an extracurricular activity, to help fill-out his personality, the only viable thematic option was ballet. Soon the character had to come out as bisexual, at the age of ten. How could he be sympathetic if he were tainted by team sports?

When the late Rex Murphy decided to write a series of puff pieces about the greatness of petro culture, featuring Fort McMurray, the centre of Canada’s oil sands, he waxed lyrical on the subject of petro parents’ interest in their kids’ sports. Always a feature of Northern Alberta culture, sports volunteerism transformed from the resting heart rate of the province’s capital, the perpetually NDP-voting “Red”-monton, the Austin to Calgary’s Dallas, which featured the highest rate of per capita volunteerism in a major Global North City for many years, into a parochial feature of its conservative satellites and outskirts.

Indeed, the argument that it is impossible to be a decent parent without a petroleum-fueled SUV or pickup truck because—how else could you get your kids’ sports equipment to games and practices?—became a staple of the Canadian climate debate.

By increasingly foregrounding future athletic success in conservative political understandings of the child, an optimism is cultivated. You don’t become a hockey mom or a soccer dad because you imagination is full of failures and defeats. Your inner life is full of your child winning in the future.

You don’t obsess over how to console your child when they inevitably lose. You think about how to give them and their teammates a leg up to win. And, for lower- and middle-income parents who want to see their child go on not just to athletic success but to academic and financial success, sports are not just a route to physical and psychological fitness. They lead to scholarships. They lead to prize money. They lead to public recognition and honour.

Materially, they can lead to a university education not fueled by debt.

While the damage the Title IX changes will do to incarcerated women, women fleeing domestic violence, women needing to use public locker rooms and restrooms is considerable, it will not fundamentally structure the election. But I believe the changes it makes to girls and young women’s sports will.

Optimistic parents, i.e. conservative parents, may be missing out on how many chambers we have left to discharge in our game of Russian roulette with our planet’s ecosystems but they will be asking compelling questions about their daughters:

 “What will happen if a man steals my daughter’s place on the podium?”
“What if a boy steals her prize money?”
“What if her team is disqualified for not playing against boys for during scouting season?”
“What if a boy pushes her off her field hockey team?”
“What is a boy takes her scholarship money?”
“What if a man steals her spot in university?”

Parents governed by these thoughts, even if they are pro-choice and support Roe v. Wade, are not going to be animated in the same way by the worry that their daughter might have an unplanned pregnancy, because they have optimistic thoughts about their children’s futures. Ultimately, the fears I just enumerated are premised on an underlying hope, a premise that one’s daughter will be identified by an athletic scout, a win a scholarship, win a medal, make the team she wants to join. And they also imply a theory of natural justice, in ways that the Democrats’ fears are not.

The campaign we are facing will be, like the previous two, among the most divisive, dark and pessimistic in modern American history. And I see a method in the Democrats’ madness: the darker and bleaker they make the future look, the more frightening the world they describe, the more people will vote based on fear for their children rather than hope.

As working class people of all races turn increasingly against the Democratic Party, it benefits from a lower-turnout environment. Already, in places where the working class is primarily white or Asian, GOP voter suppression laws have begun suppressing the Republicans’ own vote. That is why Democrats now enjoy a structural advantage in off-year and special elections.

But this strategy may be, as the British say, “too clever by half.” Those mysterious Obama-Trump switchers of 2016 were not, as characterized, urban socialist “Bernie bros.” The switchers, most evident in states like Iowa were regular people in medium sized towns whose imagination was captured by the way Barack Obama spoke to us, the feeling he called-up when he declared, “We have been warned against offering people false hope. But, in the unlikely story that is America, there has never been anything false about hope.”

With no candidate on the horizon capable of kindling a sense of hope in most Americans, this election will, nevertheless, test US voters, and especially the mothers and fathers of daughters. And those votes will be determined, in large measure, not by a rational calculus of the risks girls and young women face in their minds but the hopes and fears for them we hold in their hearts.

US Politics | fusangite |

American Campuses Show Us the Totalizing Logic of the National Security State

Speculative fiction author Ursula K Leguin wrote not that long ago that the reason her genre of writing will only grow more important in the days ahead is because possibilities of living differently than we do will grow more remote, become more repressed in our consciousness. We need a literary genre that can “remember freedom” because the primary project of an authoritarian social order is to destroy people’s memory of the past and, thereby, their ability to imagine a different future. A place that this reality has welled-up to confront us is in the various Palestine solidarity campus encampments around the United States.

I want to make clear that I am speaking specifically to the situation in the US and not to Palestine solidarity or campus protest dynamics elsewhere. That is not to say that none of my observations are applicable in those contexts but I think we are seeing something in a purer form in the US as a consequence of recent, US-specific events.

Pro-Likud elements in the Democratic and Republican parties, who insist that any criticism of the state of Israel is, axiomatically, anti-Semitic, even if made by a Zionist member of a Zionist party on the floor of the Knesset, were obviously eager to bust out all the fancy law enforcement and surveillance resources they could as soon as they got wind of these modern campus occupations.

But the thing is: the old bipartisan imperial foreign policy establishment crew are a lot smaller, older and less influential than they were. Their relevance is being temporarily shored-up in the present by the fact that a member of this group is currently the president. But he might well be the last such president. In both major parties, there is a growing number of isolationists, a growing number actively seeking détente with the other great powers and a growing number of foreign dictator fans.

But because domestic culture war issues being fought out over bodily autonomy (i.e. Team Prison Rape/Forced Jab vs. Team Forced Birth/Antivaxx) is the main structuring feature of day-to-day American politics, the détentists, isolationists and foreign dictator fans in the Republican Party simply could not resist throwing in with the old Military-industrial Complex buddies like Lindsay Graham and Joe Manchin on this one, given most protesters’ predilection for blue hair and to match their blue face masks. Almost on aesthetic grounds alone, governor Greg Abbott was drawn into calling out the troops to pointlessly assault a bunch of University of Texas students who, let’s be clear, were not going to show up for class that day anyway.

Throughout the US, university and college administrators responded to encampments with wholly unnecessary, gratuitous assaults on students and, more generally, on fundamental civil rights to free movement, assembly, association and speech.

I was pleasantly surprised to see that, aside from some as-yet-unfulfilled threats and sabre-rattling at the University of Toronto, no equivalent crackdown has taken place in Canada. I think part of the reason for that is that Canada’s populist right learned good lessons from the experience of the Convoyists and had no appetite for throwing in with the establishment authoritarians just for the chance to deliver a punch in the mouth to a social movement they find odious.

So, let’s be fair: campus protesters in the US have faced a more authoritarian response to their activities than elsewhere. Even campuses where local government and campus administration have not responded punitively or abridged the students’ rights, students reasonably feel a solidarity with their comrades on other campuses where this has happened and no doubt fear, to a greater or lesser extent, that just because they have escaped retaliation now, this may not hold indefinitely.

Nevertheless, what I find most upsetting about these protests is the way in which the occupations have instinctively and immediately acted to abridge people’s mobility, assembly, association and speech rights in the areas over which they have assumed control. Checkpoints, racial profiling, segregation, no-go zones, constant surveillance, security personnel patrols and a host of other practices are spreading through the territories controlled by the protest camps.

More disturbing still is that, unlike Black Lives Matter or Occupy camps, regulatory protocols are not coming out of some kind of quasi-democratic, participatory deliberation or out of a clearly identified leadership/organizer class. These practices are autocthonous, immanent properties of a 2020s protest camp.

Some people in the camps just feel naturally called-upon to set up check points at which they can check IDs, interrogate people and administer loyalty oaths. Some people just enjoy filming potential interlopers to their encampment as they sit outside their tents or on blankets. For people like me, who come out of a different generational protest tradition, it is as though we are watching the kids who used to report us for our protests organizing protests of their own, a bunch of hall monitors creating their own little surveillance state. These behaviours are coming naturally to them and require minimal coordination.

And I want to suggest that this is because the logic of authoritarianism is becoming so deeply embedded in the children of the commissar class, that their horizon of possibilities is becoming so curtailed, that they cannot imagine a successor or replacement society that is not also an authoritarian surveillance state. Consequently, their reaction to being subject to authoritarian overreach is to counter with authoritarian overreach of their own.

This is fundamentally different than the working class Convoyist movement of Canada, which responded to authoritarian overreach by the establishment and government with exuberance and defiance, with spontaneous breaches in noise, assembly and mobility restrictions. There are, needless to say, no bouncy castles, no hot tubs, no spontaneous song and dance numbers on these campuses.

There are certainly participatory activities, ritual chants, songs and other acts, dutiful assemblies for speeches, and performances. Even my favourite of the students’ activities, their Jewish-led Passover seders, which I note my pro-Likud friends avoid talking about, were sober, somber and highly ritualized. (I nevertheless think these events were important and pro-social in and worked to combat the anti-Semitism that is always a danger in such movements.)

You may view the protests’ intervention in the escalating region-wide war that is gradually engulfing the entire Middle East, from Yemen to Iran to Lebanon positively or negatively. That is a matter for another article. There are only so many friendship-ending divisive controversies on which even I am prepared to take a public position at once.

What I can say is that the news they are delivering us about the political horizon of possibilities of young, educated Americans is very concerning indeed.

Authoritarianism US Politics | fusangite |

Why Do We Think Doing Crack in the Hospital Is Okay?

Anxiety in the Age of Trump
Whether or not one was a Donald Trump supporter, the end of the primaries in the summer of 2016 inaugurated a new age of vigilance, anxiety and outrage for Americans. Whether by virtue of Trump’s boorish norm violations, intentionally provocative communications strategy and general emotional dysregulation, or whether due to the near-constant attacks on the Administration’s functioning and legitimacy, a new baseline level of rage and fear took hold in Anglo America and much of the Global North, a pervasive psychosocial state we have yet to shake-off eight years later.

America’s stand-up comics were, for the most part of group of liberals already skilled in mocking and belittling America’s populist conservative movements. And many did a great job of skewering the Trump administration over the president’s apparently unhinged public behaviour and revolving door of officials, each greasier and more bizarre than those they replaced.

But the comedian who best expressed the sense of anxiety that pervaded America was John Mulaney. He offered the following metaphor: “It’s like there’s a horse loose in the hospital… And nobody knows what the horse is going to do next, least of all the horse. It’s never been in a hospital before.”

I quoted that bit many times during Trump’s four years in office and have a few times since, especially as that feeling of anxiety has not gone away, what with the Bumpkin Putsch, followed by the failed impeachment, the prosecutions, the efforts to disqualify Trump based on a crime the impeachment trial had acquitted him of. The feeling that there is a horse loose in a hospital has never gone away.

But the reason this description of the situation plays so well with people like me who were steeped in progressive culture is that it plays to an unconscious belief that society, as a whole, is just one gigantic hospital.

The Rise and Fall of the Giant Agora
At the zenith of neoliberalism in the late 1990s, no matter what party one supported at election time, no matter what church one attended, no matter where one was located, socially, when neoliberalism enjoyed cultural and ideological hegemony, we saw society as a gigantic marketplace. The agora had swallowed the whole city. The schools, the hospitals, the council chambers, everything existed in the context of the marketplace. If we wanted to say that something was good, we looked around for words of praise and said things like “profit,” “efficiency,” “competition,” etc.

But as we entered a period of socio-political realignment in the early 2010s and the commissar class who dominate the Pharma and Data sectors began to eclipse the neoliberals as our cultural hegemons, our understanding of the world began to shift away from seeing everything through the prism of the market. Covid and the opioid crisis helped in this shift but the re-categorization of all pain and unpleasantness as “trauma,” and all responses to it as “triggering,” was just as important.

What had begun in the 1990s with the huge-scale prescription of third-generation SSRI anti-depressants reached its culmination as we came to redefine feeling bad as inherently problematic. Our identities began to shift, too. Those who have embraced the new progressive culture of the commissar class, have come to engage in self-fashioning behaviours of self-diagnosing oneself into a series of pathologies, with the assistance of the ubiquitous online psychiatric diagnostic quizzes, funded by a pharmaceutical industry eager to receive more orders for psychiatric drugs.

In British Columbia, the government’s policies of steadily reducing and restricting citizens’ access to free medical care have resulted in the normalization of psychiatric self-diagnosis, presented by telephone during ten-minute appointment telephone windows at clinics that charge cold hard cash to see a physician in person. More and more British Columbians are on speed as internet ADHD self-tests have come to be accepted by the province’s overloaded clinics and Adderall and other amphetamine prescriptions are dispense by phone and online. One doesn’t need to tell the government one is an addict to be prescribed meth substitutes, although that works too; one can just say that it’s tough to concentrate, what with a horse being loose in the hospital.

But it is not just during a doctor’s appointment that your average progressive British Columbian announces a set of psychiatric self-diagnoses. This is how people who have adopted the culture of the commissar class talk about themselves all the time; within a few minutes of meeting someone at a fashionable party, one begins to hear one’s new acquaintances list of mental illnesses, even before they get to their preferred pronouns.

Indeed, psychiatric self-diagnosis has become the linchpin of self-fashioning in the progressive world. As being unique and special in the sight of God is not a culturally or emotionally available option, the language one uses for both describing one’s uniqueness and begs not to be bullied in this, one of the most judgemental and predatory social orders of recent times, is to “identify into” a series of neurological disabilities and sexual fetishes.

The term “neurodiverse,” one that initially made sense only at the population level, has become conflated with “neurodivergent” and applied at the individual. If one can no longer be unique in the sight of God, one can at least be unique and special in the sight of an imaginary all-seeing doctor.

That is because what Mulaney was telling us is that we have stopped believing that society is a gargantuan, all-encompassing marketplace and has become one huge world-containing hospital.

However rational, well-intentioned and even life-saving Covid policies were, when the state began to regulate the size of the crowd you could meet for drinks, have over for dinner, even host at a backyard barbecue, a consequence was that the hospital made your home one of its rooms, your street one of its wards. The reason we have re-described ourselves as a bag of diseases and other conditions necessitating medical intervention is that we have accepted the logic of the commissars, that society is now an all-encompassing hospital.

Brad West and Doing Crack in the Hospital
It is in this context that we must approach Port Coquitlam mayor Brad West’s recent interview with the Vancouver Sun’s Vaughn Palmer. In response to the BC government announcing a review of its new policy of letting hospital patients carry weapons and buy, use and sell illicit drugs while in hospital, West suggested that the government could save its money. His review was done, “In a hospital, there’s no weapons and you can’t smoke crack or fentanyl or any other drugs. There you go. Just saved God knows how much money and probably at least six months of dithering.”

What baffled those outside the Progressiverse was how this could even be a thing, how it was that, in an environment where powerful drugs are being administered by highly trained professionals, trained in predicting and managing drug interactions, how addicts shooting up street drugs of unknown provenance or purity could possibly be remotely safe and not undermine the precise care they are receiving. How on earth did we get here? How could one reasonably administer opiate pain relievers when patients were also self-administering unknown types and quantities of opiates?

And weapons!? How could it be safe for people doing central nervous system stimulants and undergoing intensive, painful and disorienting medical treatment to be armed with hunting knives and boxcutters?

The answer is simple: if society is a hospital then the hospital is society.

And in the giant society-spanning hospital, everyone is a doctor or a patient, and as evinced in the increasingly ubiquitous signage about not upsetting and “triggering” receptionists and medical personnel at clinics, both.

If everywhere you go is the hospital, then whatever you are free to do in the world, you are, axiomatically, free to do in the hospital because if the world is the hospital then the hospital is the world.

Generally, when a society idealizes something, whoever or whatever is being idealized is actually being singled-out for special punishment. No society idealizes female virtue like Saudi Arabia or Iran. Similarly, our society grows ever more shabby in its treatment of people genuinely neurologically disabled. Autistic people have been pushed out of self-advocacy organizations and the public square by people who are merely a little quirky or socially inept. Their spaces have been invaded and their silencing has enabled, as Hillary Cass’s review most recently pointed out, a mass sterilization campaign to be waged against autistic youth in the name of genderwang.

Similarly, mental healthcare has all been all but withdrawn from people truly disabled by addiction and madness. Treatment has been replaced by “supportive housing” and tent cities. It seems that the only right of the addicted and insane we defend is their right to be miserable, to sleep rough, to defecate in the streets, to shoot up in parks and to scream at passers-by. And there is a logic to this too. The more ill health there is, the more society really does seem like a gigantic understaffed hospital.

Medicalized Societies Are Sick Societies
We are not the first society to decide to see everything through the prism of medicine and disease. In recent studies of Franciscan and Jesuit catechisms written in Iroquoian languages, we find that the societies embroiled in the “mourning wars,” of the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, wherein Huron and Iroquois warriors engaged in endless capture-oriented military campaigns to replace population lost to smallpox and other Eastern Hemisphere diseases also saw the world in medical terms.

Almost every positive thing Christian missionaries promised new indigenous converts was described in the Iroquoian languages, as a form of medicine. Every good thing in the universe, grace, salvation, sustenance, community was presented as “medicine.” That is because a society only decides it is a gigantic hospital if those living therein know that sicknesses of body and mind have metastasized into a social sickness, a society-wide cancer, in the case of the Iroquois, an epidemic not just of smallpox but of something they called “false face disease,” a consequence of centuries of continuous war, disease and martial law.

The way out of such a society, such a state of being is not more medicine. It is not categorizing more things as sickness and categorizing more activities as medicine. Prescribing chemical castration and lobotomization drugs to children may be called “medicine” but there is nothing healthy about it. Offering to murder disabled, homeless and depressed people through the MAID program is called “medicine” but it is anything but. Amputating people’s healthy body parts or adding prostheses and fake orifices so they can better resemble the Japanese cartoons they believe to be their “true selves” is not medicine by any reasonable definition, nor is secretly prescribing fentanyl to teenagers as part of some sort of Opposite Day “harm reduction” plan.

You see: the thing that makes our society sicker, more dangerous than the late-stage Iroquois Confederacy is that a hospital is a hierarchical, authoritarian bureaucratic institution that conflates power, expertise and medicine into a single authoritative principle. In this society, whatever the state does, is, by definition, “medicine,” irrespective of whether it makes you more or less healthy, irrespective of whether it makes you suffer, irrespective of whether it even kills you.

If there is a solution, I would suggest we can find it in the Tao Te Ching:

“He who is sick of sickness is well.”

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Politics of Identity US 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 |

Return to Oz: The Rise of the New Producerists

The Second Gilded Age
It is almost impossible to over-state the similarities between the First Gilded Age (the 1880s through 1920s) and the current one, so-named by US historian Thomas Sugrue (1991-present). By the 1920s, the wealth gap between rich and poor was the largest in human history. More women were in work outside the home than ever before. The continued growth of the economy was predicated ballooning consumer debt and stock market speculation.

Cross-dressing was really trendy and progressives were very excited about voluntary, incentive-based eugenics, whereby governments and civil society organizations encouraged homosexuals, the mentally ill and indigenous people to get themselves sterilized. And there was a massive public controversy over whether women should have their own sex-segregated competitive sports.

Authoritarian movements of both the left and right were on the rise while the sheen seemed to have come off good old fashioned democracy. And working people were paying for nearly everything on instalment plans that never seemed to end. But they appeared unable to bridge racial, sectional and rural-urban divisions to form a viable political coalition to reverse their immiseration.

Of course, that was the terminal phase of the First Gilded Age. And, of course, history does not repeat. It only rhymes. But you must admit, this seems a pretty catchy rhyme, as history rhymes go.

Free Soilers, the First Producerists and the Wizard of Oz
And yet, there is one area of comparison, one set of obvious parallels that commentators comparing First Gilded Age to the second seem to avoid: the Producerist movements. It is strange how the producerists have been excised from our social memory and political history, despite them having had a huge political impact which left many traces, chief among which is the Wizard of Oz, originally written not as a children’s pulp novel (this genre was just in the process of being born) but as a political satire of the 1896 US presidential election.

Dorothy, the novel’s main character, begins her story in Kansas, the crucible of American producerism. Kansas, a state founded on a prior movement with similar grievances and a similar constituency, the Free Soil movement, was a natural seedbed. Free Soilers were yeoman farmers of staple goods, especially maize. Despite working hard on their family farms every year and churning out a lot of food for the rest of America, it seemed that they could never get ahead. The costs of getting their food to market, via sternwheelers, canals and railways often left little money in their pockets.

Meanwhile, Down South, it seemed that the rich slave-holding land-owners, despite being soft-palmed and idle, were making money hand over fist. So, Free Soilers, like Abraham Lincoln, argued that the economy was being skewed by railway companies, milling concerns and other corporations, in cahoots with Washington’s political elites. This force they called “slave power” and they primary interest in bringing down slavery was not humanitarian concern for the slaves but the desire to alleviate the poverty in their own communities.

And yet, following the abolition of slavery, matters only seemed to get worse. None of the money Ulysses Grant’s administration handed the railway companies ever seemed to trickle down to the farmers and reduce the costs of shipping their products to market. Indeed, the railway boom drove canal and river boat companies out of business in many cases and consolidated railways into an increasingly small group of ever-larger corporations.

So, some of the farmers who remained unhappy with their lot began to embark on new political analyses and new political projects. They broadened their optic and began to see that it had not been the planter class but rather the whole national business elite: rail, finance, shipping, manufacturing that were against them. As in the Second Gilded Age, the First Gilded Age was characterized by rapid horizontal (i.e. firms doing the same kind of business merging) and vertical (i.e. firms that fed into each other’s supply chains e.g. iron, coal and auto manufacturing) integration. Business in the US was rapidly consolidating, merging into things called “rings,” “trusts” and “combinations.”

The little guy was being squeezed out, a feeling that intensified as new agricultural industries, like the sugar beet sector, began snapping up the land of economically marginal independent farmers and consolidating land into plantation-like operations, worked, in the southwest, by Hispanic debt peons and in the southeast by black sharecroppers. The banks clearly colluded in this process and then rail companies built special spur lines to these new latifundia.

The first political response was the Greenback Party, which ran candidates in the three presidential elections of the 1880s on a platform of breaking the power of the banks through something we today call “cryptocurrency.” The thinking was that the power of the vast conglomerates and the growing financial sector could be broken through the issuance of a new currency that was not pegged to gold.

The Greenbackers soon began electing members to the US House of Representatives and local town councilors, not just in farming communities but in the new single-industry mining towns that were popping up all over the West. The incipient industrial union movement in organizations like the Knights of Labour began drawing close to this coalition in the mill and mining towns of the West opened by massive rail development, and fueled by commodity rushes and booms like the Dakota gold rushes.

Like the farmers, the miners, loggers and mill workers of the West saw themselves as the true creators of America’s wealth, those whose hands transformed the country’s natural capital into the things that materially sustained its people. And they too lived at the whim of instalment plans, catalogue store monopolies, banks and railways, eking out a meagre existence while the wealth generated by their toil somehow vanished.

The Greenbackers and their successor party, the Populists, were not anti-capitalist. Rather, they believed that capitalism was being sabotaged by powerful business and government elites that colluded to rig the system against hard-working producers. In the 1892 presidential election, the Populists won Idaho, Nevada, North Dakota and Colorado but their biggest haul of electoral votes came from Kansas, pulling in 9% of the popular vote. The party also elected eleven members to the House of Representatives.

Major civic organizations backed the party, the Grange, a federation of farmers’ cooperatives and the Knights of Labour, a Christian proto-trade union that, like the Grange, was more interested in restoring the spirit of Adam Smith’s capitalism than upending it.

Yet for all the deregulation of the financial sector and trust busting producerists called for, the movement, from its inception, also pushed for socialization of the railways, the electrical grid and the education system, not out of an incipient or nascent socialism but because populists saw these things as necessary foundations for a level playing field in the marketplace.

The Road to the Emerald City
What the Populists could not do, it seemed, was break out of their core geographic region. After four elections, their party had been unable to make a dent in the political duopoly that dominated the East Coast and Midwest. Despite the Populists having moderated their policy from pure crypto currency to a position called “bimetallism,” which proposed to peg the dollar to both gold and silver, and despite there being widespread support in all regions of the country and within both major parties for bimetallism, the leaders of both major parties resolutely backed the gold standard, a position that had become synonymous with the elite policy consensus of the duopoly on a host of issues.

Naturally, then, as Dorothy arrives in Oz, concurrently afflicted by the wicked witches variously representing natural disasters and economic downturns, she realizes that her only hope is to follow the Yellow Brick Road to the Emerald City, Baum’s allegory of the gold-paved path to Washington.

En route, Dorothy gains the support of the Scarecrow, the personification of the Populist Party’s base, the maize farmers of the Great Plains, big-hearted but lacking in political savvy. While she personally wins over the Tin Man, who represents the industrial working class of the Northeast, he is never convinced of the project of the Scarecrow, or the Cowardly Lion, the representation of William Jennings Bryan’s insurgent entryist politics, about whose ultimate failure the Wizard of Oz was written.

Entryism Then and Now
Disappointed by inability of the Populist Party to crack 10% or break out of its core region, some producerists had begun to favour political entryism as a strategy after the disappointment of 1892.

Entryism is a political strategy we tend to associate with twentieth- and twenty-first century Marxists. The idea is that a radical group slowly, stealthily joins a more mainstream organization and gradually accumulates influence therein before fully uncloaking as a group conducting a take-over for the purpose of radically realigning the organization. Most recently, Jeremy Corbyn’s supporters in the British Labour Party were accused of being a coalition of far-left anti-Semitic extremists organized by the group Momentum, who had stealthily joined the party to radically change its trajectory. Similar accusations were leveled at the Dogwood Initiative and Canadian Centre for Policy Alternatives in their effort to realign the BC New Democratic Party’s fossil fuel policies through the insurgent leadership campaign of Anjali Appadurai.

Irrespective of the veracity of the specific accusations in the present, entryism is something we today associate with educated, urban environmentalists and socialists but, arguably, the most successful act of political entryism in the Anglosphere was Bryan’s seizure of the Democratic Party.

Bryan and the populists traveled to Chicago without his candidacy having been declared, riding a wave of general dissatisfaction with the pro-establishment, conservative policies of their incumbent president, Grover Cleveland, a strong supporter of the gold standard. With Cleveland’s potential successors trying to sort out just how much of their party’s legacy to wear and how much to repudiate, the entryists staged a floor vote on bimetallism which they won handily and which gave Bryan the opportunity to deliver one of the most famous pieces of American political oratory, the “Cross of Gold” speech, which he compared America’s farmers and labourers to Christ himself, arguing that they were being crucified by the banks and big business on a “Cross of Gold.”

And he won the presidential nomination on its strength, only having declared his candidacy moments before.

Bryan began the transformation of the Democratic Party into the party of the working man and the small holder with his presidential runs in 1896 and 1900 but his campaigns received a fraction of the financial support Cleveland’s did, as the banks and major industries had no use for a candidate that repeatedly denounced them, often by name. At one point, Bryan even named JP Morgan in a Democratic Party convention resolution, proposing the expulsion of any Democratic who took money from him or any of the nation’s other influential plutocrats.

Bryan did not just campaign to break the power of the banks and major industries; he also opposed American imperialism, Baum’s decision to represent him as the Cowardly Lion coming from the media attacks he sustained for joining Mark Twain and other early peace movement figures in opposing America’s invasion of the Philippines.

Bryan’s movement, which continued to hold significant sway in the Democratic Party, ultimately helped to shape the New Deal of the 1930s, was not informed by Marxism or any other explicitly socialist ideology. Rather it comprised rural labourers and farmers who believed the only way to get a square deal under capitalism was to bridle the power of big business.

Producerism in Canada
While Canada’s more conservative political culture enabled producerists to enjoy a comfortable home in the Liberal Party, the perpetual opposition in nineteenth-century Canada, this began to change with the election of the Wilfrid Laurier government, which began the party’s century-long project of alienating its original rural Western base. Following Laurier’s fall and the upheavals caused by the First World War and botched demobilization programs, there was a rapid radicalization of the Canadian producerists, which yielded dramatic post-war political changes.

Out of nowhere, it seemed, the United Farmers of Alberta swept the province’s farming communities and formed a majority government in 1921. Meanwhile, the province’s slow-growing Labour Party had split into pro- and anti-Marxist factions. The anti-Marxist faction won seats in Edmonton and entered the legislature as allies of the United Farmers, based on a shared producerist ethos, one that sought to bridle the greed of the banks, the railways and the subsidized manufacturing interests of Central Canada. The Farmer-Labour alliance remained in power for the next fourteen years.

The same year, at the national level, a producerist party, calling itself the Progressives, swept the West, from Vancouver Island to James Bay in the 1921 federal election, consigning the Conservative Party to third place and holding the Liberal Party to a minority. Allied with this mix of labourers and farmers was a more radical group, the Independent Labour Party, led by a key figure in the Winnipeg General Strike, JS Woodsworth.

Without strong leadership or a coherent program, Canada’s producerist parties gradually declined, primarily because they had thought little about reasonable policy prescriptions that could actually restructure the economy along the lines of the supporters’ class interests. And so, after forming a single provincial government in Ontario, the party was slowly reabsorbed into the Liberals and Conservatives.

Western Producerism and the Rise of the CCF
In the West, however, the decline of the producerists was more complex. The more urban, secular and socialistic labour factions of the parties and the more religious, rural and free market factions increasingly drifted apart, giving birth, in the 1930s, to the two regional political parties that dominated Canada’s three Western provinces: the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation (CCF) and Social Credit.

It must be understood, then, that while socialists like JS Woodsworth, Tommy Douglas and Major Coldwell were highly effective in recruiting not just labourers but farmers to the CCF, the party’s rank and file members and most of its elected representatives were not bespectacled readers of Marx and Engels but farmers and workers animated by the producerist ethos, the idea that industries like banking, electricity and rail should be socialized so that individual workers and farmer could get a fair shake financing their family businesses, keeping the lights on and getting the products of their hard labour to market.

That is why, when Canada elected its first CCF government in Saskatchewan, this was only possible because Saskatchewan was the least urban province in Canada, allowing Douglas and his producerist coalition to be swept into office, despite losing the province’s two main cities.

It is also useful to remember that during his seventeen years as premier, Douglas never introduced Medicare. The universal social programs his government delivered were a universally accessible electrical grid and highway system. It would be his successor, Woodrow Lloyd, who would fall on his sword over Medicare in 1961.

Today’s Producerists
Well, folks, it’s 2024 and the producerists are back. Farmers, truckers and rural industrial workers, the core of the original producerist coalitions of the US and Canada have returned, not just in Canada but throughout Europe. Big rigs and tractors are blocking highways from Berlin to Nanaimo, raising a host of grievances shared by the classes that raise our food, drill our oil, mine our coal, deliver our goods, etc. I do not agree with all of the demands of today’s producerists, nor is their coalition any more coherent or cohesive than the first producerist coalitions were.

But it is they, not the laptop class of soft-palmed urbanites looking down on them who are organizing the big anti-government rallies and anti-war demonstrations. They are the ones denouncing the big banks, the legacy media, the military-industrial complex and the pharmaceutical industry.

Just like the producerists who won the 1944 Saskatchewan election, the 1919 Ontario election and the 1921 Alberta election, they are being demonized, smeared and belittled as hicks and hayseeds, sources of ignorance, pestilence and disorder, in many cases by the successors to the very party they founded in Calgary in 1931, the CCF. They’re even being smeared with an accusation that was already tired in 1944, that they are dupes and stooges of a foreign strongman in Moscow and not just ordinary, decent people who want a fair shake out of this economy, however unrealistic that dream might be.

But maybe that message is starting to get through now that we see their demonization grow ever more extravagant, as terrorists, Klansmen and Nazis. Anything, I guess, to distract us from the man behind the curtain.

Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Jackie Robinson, Barry Goldwater and the Geomagnetic Reversal

Since the Earth first formed, its magnetic field has re-polarized several times. The North Pole has become the South Pole and vice versa. Sometimes these transitions have taken as long as ten thousand years; some have taken place in less than a hundred. All of these transitions, by the standard of geologic time, have taken place in the blink of God’s eye. Suddenly, south is north and all the molecules start realigning based on the new magnetic field structuring the matter and energy of the earth’s systems.

I want to suggest that, since the emergence of what is called the Second Party System, this is essentially how American politics functions, that it does, in human time, what the earth does in geological time: re-polarizes. US politics and its coalitions are highly dynamic, as dynamic as any in the world. But, especially since the introduction of the Primary System in the 1920s, this political dynamism has been coupled with a bipolar system. And even before the 1920s, for the previous century and a half, the emergence of a new party always led to the collapse of an old one.

This combination of a locked-in two-party dynamic with a highly dynamic politics constantly making and unmaking big, unwieldy coalitions means that, unless legally restructured from the bottom up, the United States is fated to undergo a series of magnetic reversals. And it is my view that we are at the crescendo of such a reversal today.

Furthermore, the way that news media have changed throughout the Anglosphere white settler states, the repercussions of this realignment, globally, are even greater than during the Cold War.

For those less acquainted with US history than I, let me take a moment to describe some other re-polarizations. Beginning in 1932 and culminating in 1960, the Democratic Party went from being the party of white supremacy, backed by the Solid South, running on a national platform of segregation and the maintenance of Jim Crow disenfranchisement laws to becoming the party of black America, steadily losing white majority segregationist states from 1944 until 1980 when not a single state in Dixie backed them.

Intimately related to this process, the Republican Party began actively courting southern segregationists in 1960, running against the Civil Rights Act in the 1964 election under Barry Goldwater, with the assistance of floor-crossing segregationist senator Strom Thurmond, and adopting Richard Nixon’s “southern strategy” in 1968, to actively solicit the votes of white supremacists.

In the 1970s, under the leadership of Gerald Ford, the Republican Party became, explicitly the party of neoliberalism, moving its progressive wing, which had long favoured greater state regulation of business, since the Teddy Roosevelt presidency, to the periphery. Free marketers eclipsed old school right-progressives and politicians changed their stripes accordingly, with long-time progressives like George H W Bush becoming evangelists of neoliberalism.

From 1932 until 1992, the Democrats had been the party of the New Deal, the Welfare State, having previously been the party of deregulation in the nineteenth century. But in 1992, they shouldered past the Republicans on their right and from 1994-2000 enacted an aggressive program of deregulation, free trade and social program cuts. Having previously been the party of Catholics, Blacks, Latinos and the white working class, the four most socially conservative groups in the country, the post-Clinton Democrats coupled their newfound love of free markets with a muscular social liberalism, focusing on aggressive secularization and hot button social issues like gay marriage.

Consequently, Republicans became aggressive in playing to Catholics and the white working class (even in the early twenty-first century, they feared actively recruiting racialized constituencies while trying to keep the last of the segregationist southerners on board.) First, they focused exclusively on social issues, abortion, gay marriage, the coerced secularization of private business, etc.

But with the ascent of Donald Trump, advised by Steve Bannon, this appeal to working class Americans of all stripes broadened. And, for the first time since the Clinton Administration ratified it, Americans were given the chance to vote against NAFTA in 2016, a hated agreement that had ravaged so many industrial towns, tearing the fabric out of communities and leaving industrial town after industrial town looking like a Bruce Springsteen song.

This brought more dividends than even imagined, for the GOP, in the form of working class voters of all racial backgrounds. Despite the largely cosmetic changes to NAFTA, working class voters continue to pour into the Republican Party.

Of course, everyone who has a progressive between 1992 and the present knows the Democrats’ counter-move: to vigorously, assiduously recruit upper-income, educated white suburbanites who have traditionally voted Republican but are disgusted not so much by the party’s policies but by its adoption of the most boorish, proletarian cultural affectations. Correcting the spelling of working class people and sneering at their belief that they could do research or form political opinions on their own became a staple of the party that had once propounded its core doctrine as the common sense and decency of the working class.

This is starting to generate its own set of problems for the GOP: in primarily white regions of the country, they are now at a disadvantage in special elections and other low-turnout contests, because the voter suppression laws could not name a colour and could only suppress people’s votes based on class. So, because Democrats are now richer and better-educated than Republicans in growing swaths of the country, the very laws Republicans enacted in the twentieth century to suppress Democratic voting is now suppressing their own vote, as they grow increasingly dependent on the white working class.

And, how long before, mere lip service to respecting working class people turns into policies that could materially benefit them at the expense of the Mitch McConnells of the world?

Curiously, possibly because of its incredibly incompetent and maladroit style from top to bottom, the 2016 Hillary Clinton campaign actually told us poignant and ironic story about this, a powerful piece of American history when they aggressively popularized video footage of Jackie Robinson and his cadre showing up at the 1964 Republican convention to denounce the nomination of Goldwater and the recruitment of Thurmond.

Robinson, one of the most important media surrogates for liberal, respectable black Americans, was an American icon, the much-beloved baseball player, the first black person to play on a major league team. Throughout the 1950s, he had been an active member of the GOP, “the party of Lincoln,” when American blacks were leaning Democratic but split between the main parties. He exerted an important influence on the Eisenhower regime in its reaction to Brown v. Board of Education and in the passage of the first national Civil Rights Act in 1957.

Robinson passionately expressed his absolute incredulity that the party that had freed the slaves would back an avowed segregationist for senate and an opponent of the Civil Rights Act for the presidency.

The Clinton campaign showed us this video as part of their sheepdog operation of snapping up that last handful of GOP-voting white, upper middle class, educated suburban liberals in the outskirts of Detroit, Philadelphia and Raleigh, an operation that was, even then, producing diminishing returns.

Looking back, in hindsight, as a reluctant Clinton supporter at the time, I now see how the video actually illustrates the opposite of what she hoped it would. Rather than focusing on equivalencies they wished us to draw between Goldwater and Trump, I am focusing on Robinson, a man living in the past, a man unable to accept the realignment he had been living through since 1932. To him, the Republican Party was not a dynamic, ever-changing force but something of a fixed essence that transcended the ravages of time.

The problem was not that the Republicans had changed but that Robinson had not. He was at the wrong convention. He should have been down the road at the Democratic convention, shepherding the floor vote on the Voting Rights Act and defusing the conflict between the two Mississippi convention delegations.

Unfortunately, since the Jon Stewart-ization of progressive news in the Anglosphere, this distinctively American polarity is now culturally if not politically enveloping society in the UK, Ireland, New Zealand, Australia and Canada. The political obsessions of Canadian progressives are those Stephen Colbert, John Oliver and Trevor Noah tell them to have. They are worried about militarized police forces, abortion laws, gun control and host of other issues, where the US and Canada are in very different situations with respect to our problems, our laws and the possible solutions. Unconcerned about the Trudeau government’s massive expansion of guest worker programs, they whitter on about needing to support illegal immigrants to the US. Unconcerned about the fake college shakedown we are running on the children of the global middle class, indebting families for generations, they are focused on American student loan forgiveness.

For this reason, the American realignment has come to Canada, not because of structural features of Canada but because of the cultural politics of the post-political Anglosphere.

You see, Canadian progressives, you are actually Jackie Robinson, people living in a nostalgic past to justify membership in parties that have long since abandoned the working class.

Canadian Politics Race US Politics | fusangite |