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The Groundhog: Life After the Tories

My Two Years as a Tory
As some of you know, I was deeply involved in the BC Conservative Party the past two years, an experience that I do not regret, despite it ending in easily anticipated disappointment. The reasons for my involvement I made clear: I am from a jurisdiction, British Columbia, whose governments, at both the provincial and federal level are among the most extreme in the Global North when it comes to

  1. shutting down democratic processes, violating democratic norms and draining the power out of legislatures into the hands of the head of government and his unelected courtiers (i.e. the current premier was appointed by the chief lobbyist for Royal Dutch Shell after she, as “returning officer” for his election, disqualified all other candidates),
  2. the Woke capture of institutions and the enforcement of the movement’s bizarre American space religion as the de facto state religion, including the administration of loyalty oaths to the religion’s tenets to obtain or keep most white-collar jobs,
  3. the continued escalation and expansion of programs to facilitate and encourage self-harm, suicide and sex crimes, such as the promotion and distribution of free chemical castration drugs and addictive opiates and stimulants to children as young as twelve, as well the promotion and expansion of state-facilitated suicide facilities and the genital mutilation of troubled children; BC even has a serial child rapist housed in our local prison mother-baby unit!

Like many other anti-authoritarian populists from across the political spectrum, I worked hard to elect BC Conservative MLAs in 2024. And I am glad I did so for a few reasons:

  1. there was a chance we could not pass up that the anti-authoritarian populists would set the course of the party and that of the caucus, containing, as it does, so many newcomers to the legislature who might resist the efforts of the establishment to capture the party and make it part of the One Party, Three Factions system that has run BC for the past generation;
  2. I had the opportunity to meet, work with and befriend an incredibly wide diversity of grassroots activists working hard to oppose our society’s ghoulish and authoritarian turn;
  3. I had the opportunity to work in the BC Legislature, a building the province’s establishment has worked hard to keep me out of the past forty years; and
  4. I had the chance to immerse myself in the present-day culture of the Convoyist, Christian Right and other social movements about which the mainstream media offers only distorted and outdated images.

But the sad reality is that the young courtiers with whom John Rustad, the party leader, insists on surrounding himself, came of age, politically, within the conservative movement under Stephen Harper and his successors, who have actually led the country, until recently, in the destruction of democratic institutions, processes and culture. And this has helped to create a fundamental structural problem in all Canadian political parties: because the leader and his courtiers, not party members or voters, primarily determine whether candidates are nominated and re-nominated, in practical terms, elected officials see themselves as serving at the pleasure of the courtiers, not the reverse.

As a result, it has been fairly easy for the establishment to capture the party and reintegrate it into the One Party, Three Factions system that governs BC. The party has since  proceeded quickly to shut down any level of internal member-driven democracy through mass disenfranchisements and mass expulsions. And party caucus members overwhelmingly see themselves as serving not party members or BC voters but rather the leader and his unelected enforcers.

While this was always the most likely outcome of the BC Conservatives returning to the legislature under the leadership of John Rustad, it was not a certain outcome and, even in the context of a larger failure, my work did help to result in an expansion of the Overton Window in BC politics. Some Tory MLAs, especially those who have since defected to the splinter party, One BC, have stood in the legislature to speak up for biological and historical truth and against the speech suppression efforts in which the establishment and captured institutions in our society have been engaging. And I was pleased to see today’s Mainstreet Research polls showing the Independent Conservatives and/or One BC receiving the support of 10% of voters right out of the gate.

Old Growth and New Growth
This spring, even as my relationship with Rustad and his Young Turks entered its terminal stage, I found myself noticing, almost every week, positive signs in the larger grassroots social movement world. My institute’s gender critical group had become large and committed enough for some members to exit and start a new feminist organization that better expressed their views and approaches and incorporated some of the new energy that has been coming into my group. While schisms are often sad, I was very pleased to see that we had regained the grassroots capacity to have another organization split off without killing us and that people were not in such a defensive mode that they were sticking together out of despair or fear.

I was also contacted by a former elected official about him running an anti-Woke campaign for the leadership of the BC Green Party. While those efforts were ultimately stymied by the party bureaucracy itself, fearing his potential success, it was exciting not just to see this individual attempting a return to electoral politics but to see the number of Old Growth Leftists who were eager to hop on board and start organizing with him.

Then there was the decision of the federal NDP to select its least-Woke caucus member as its interim leader, who began his leadership by issuing a statement repenting of the party’s turn away from class politics and affirming its purpose as politics by and for workers. I also saw my friends in Deep Green Resistance conduct a successful European tour and site their annual conference in Philadelphia, far outside their core territory in Northern California where I have been attending their conventions.

Not only have I seen various members of the Old Growth Left emboldened and reactivated, one of the most exciting things I have been discovering over the past couple of years is just how many Freedom Movement (e.g. Convoyist) and Christian Right activists share a lot more of my concerns than just genderwang, authoritarianism and censorship. If one is looking for peace activists who question NATO, they are to be found on the so-called alt-right; ditto opponents of free trade and investor rights, who favour import substitution industrialization and/or smaller, more locally self-reliant economies.

Furthermore, because the Woke environmental movement has basically lost interest in almost every environmental issue except climate change, there is more environmental concern and activism on the part of conservatives than I have seen in decades. This is true especially in areas of environmental activism the left will not touch for one reason or another.

Cobalt and lithium mining, along with other forms of environmental degradation associated with electric vehicle manufacture are one area of focus. Endocrine disruptor pollution is, again, primarily the concern of conservatives because, on the Woke left, believing that healthy, natural endocrine systems are good is viewed as “transphobic.” Similarly, forest practices that render forests more likely to burn, like the elimination of succession growth trees such as aspen, face greater opposition on the right because climate activists like to depict the increasing number and intensity of wildfires as caused solely by atmospheric carbon buildup. And, practices that cause adverse local, as opposed to global, climate change are, again, primarily within the optic of conservatives and not the Woke left.

But, aside from these culture war “gotchas,” there is just more of a sense on the part of conservatives today that the forests are too quiet, our windshields too clean and our oceans too empty than there has been since I was a teenager.

After three years of living as a pariah in a shrinking world on the left, followed by two years living as a kind of refugee on the right, I feel like I am in a social location where I can organize and speak about what I believe in again. The combination of changes on the political right and the sheer number of refugees from Wokeness, like me, that it has had to take in, has created opportunities to get on with the work of building parallel, replacement institutions on the conservative/alt-right side of our cultural partition.

Groundhog Day
As I suggested in my recent article, the Death of Parable, our lack of access to agrarian and natural landscapes and their creatures has impaired our capacity to engage in metaphor, comparison and literary reference. Such is the case with Groundhog Day. The term now refers not to Groundhog Day but to a thirty-year-old film about a TV reporter covering the festival. When people say “Groundhog Day” today, they usually mean that they are being forced to live in a time loop, to endlessly re-experience the same sequence of events. Many have forgotten that this day was originally about the arrival of spring and oracular beliefs about a particular animal.

As legend has it, when a groundhog emerges from his burrow after hibernating through the winter, if he is able to see his shadow, he retreats into his burrow and hibernates for another six weeks. If he does not, spring is arriving.

I guess what I am really trying to say in this article is that, for the first time in half a decade, I cannot see my shadow. I feel in my bones that spring is finally coming for the Old Growth Left after a long, long, cold winter.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

Canada 2025: the Election that Time Forgot

Geopolitics Is Not a Schoolyard
For an election that is supposedly about how Canada will respond to Donald Trump’s trade, investment and foreign policy, nobody seems to be actually putting forward a policy framework that makes any sense. Instead, our state-subsidized news media has decided that this is not a policy contest at all but about how will “stand up” and “talk tough,” who can “make Donald Trump behave,” or “put Donald Trump in his place.” “You always must stand up to bullies, no matter what,” apparently serious opinion leaders opine.

These are folks who used to remind us that saying “we need to run the government like a business” was an infantile and immature simplification of the task of governing because the state is bigger, more complex and has a different purpose than a car dealership are now eager to tell us that geopolitics is just like a playground. Just stand your ground and punch the bully because bullies always back down in the face of courage. Because countries are just like elementary school students, even the ones with gigantic nuclear arsenals capable of annihilating all life on earth forever with the press of a button.

While Canada is on an extra-stupid tear as a country right now and we are currently living through the Gaslightenment, it is nevertheless remarkable how little this election contains any actual policy responses to the tariffs. Instead, like spoiled children, Canadians seem mainly focused on making the case that Americans owe us unobstructed access to their steel and aluminum markets, that the president of the US owes Canadians continued prosperity, even if it contributes to America’s massive trade deficit with the rest of the world.

In essence, rather than putting forward a plan to adapt to America’s new trade, industrial, migration and foreign policies our opinion leaders and most of our politicians are instead simply demanding that America change those policies back to the way they were under the Biden Administration. While the Conservative Party has, just in the past couple of days, at least begun to go beyond that, the policies on offer are not impressive.

To understand this failure in both our national discourse and in our public policy imagination, we need to remember how issues like this played out a century ago.

The End of the Progressive Era and the Rise of ISI
A common theme in my writing the past few years has been the shocking parallels between the present and the world of a century ago, reminding me of Karl Marx’s take on the history of the West, that events in our history repeat, “first as tragedy, then as farce.” So, to review, the Progressive Era (1890-1930) was a period when the economy grew rapidly, as did the gap between rich and poor.

Labour costs were depressed and housing prices rose rapidly thanks to uncontrolled mass migration policies and rapidly consolidating private capital in the form of monopolies and oligopolies. Economic growth was maintained through this period through population growth, mass migration and major increases in consumer credit and consumer debt. Curiously, when our societies are run by a small number of tycoons and corporations who control the media and the major industries and reap massive profits leavened by consumer debt, cross dressing and eugenics seem to get awfully popular.

This was not an indefinitely sustainable state of affairs. And so, in the mid-1920s, countries like Canada, the US, Brazil and the new British colonial regime in Palestine enacted sudden and dramatic reductions in immigration. These dramatic reductions were likely essential in forestalling and ultimately preventing the rise of successful fascist parties in the New World, with the exception of the Vargas regime in Brazil, destination of the second-largest number of immigrants after the US.

Following the start of the Great Depression half a decade later, the other cornerstones of Progressive Era economic policy also gradually came to lose their credibility. Growth leavened by private borrowing, free trade, unimpeded investment and what Lenin called “financialization” of developed economies stopped delivering the growth and profits they had in decades previous. Trade declined and trade-dependent economies were required to pivot dramatically in order to avoid entering into a tailspin of debt and underdevelopment.

The countries that handled this era the best and experienced not just less economic decline but, in some cases, increased economic growth and stability were those that switched first and most aggressively from liberal trade and investment policies to what are called “import substitution industrialization” (ISI) policies. Whereas liberal/free trade policies seek to enrich an economy by attracting foreigners to purchase its exports and invest in its businesses, ISI policies seek to concentrate local consumer spending power on local production by diversifying the economy and producing more finished products for local consumers.

Naturally, if one is running a liberal free trade economy, when one’s trading partners switch from free trade to ISI, this deepens the tailspin in a free trading economy by redirecting foreign investment and purchasing power into a neighbour’s domestic economy. In other words, when the world, and, in particular, one’s close trading partner, turns away from free trade and towards ISI, it is important to adopt one’s own ISI policies expeditiously before too much foreign investment and purchasing dries up.

Argentia and Brazil were especially successful in the 1930s because they switched from free trade to ISI faster than other states, acting with an immediacy and a focus that spared their societies the depths of the Great Depression other countries went through. The United States’ pivot was slower, with the Roosevelt government only beginning ISI policies in 1933 and, despite the country’s greater size, it experienced a tougher Great Depression than societies that pivoted more rapidly on trade and investment policy.

Today, we face a similar situation to that of the Interwar Years (i.e. the 1920s and 30s). An era a free trade, open borders, unrestricted investment and economic financialization is ending. Free trade is giving way to protectionism and tariff walls, genuine walls are rising along borders and checkpoints and border enforcement are hardening, pro-foreign investment policies are being replaced by incentives for domestic reinvestment and economies that were financializing and offshoring industry are now reindustrializing.

But Canada is turning out to be a far worse policy laggard than we were in the 1930s.

Canada’s Generation of Living in the Past
Since the beginning of the twenty-first century, Canada has become an increasingly backward jurisdiction relative to global trends. Just as neoconservatism was running out of gas everywhere else, we elected the Stephen Harper government in 2006. By the time we finally gave him a majority in 2011, his was the last neocon regime on earth.

Similarly, just as the rest of the civilized world has been undertaking course corrections on policies like Genderwang and DEI, with these policies being rolled by in Norway, Sweden, Finland, New Zealand, the UK, Italy, the US, Argentina and a host of other developed countries, Canada is only intensifying these policies.

Canada’s commitment to functioning as a nostalgic intellectual and political backwater has real costs at this moment. Instead of reading the geopolitical room and moving quickly and decisively to enact ISI policies, diversifying our economy and redirecting local investors towards our economy, as is taking place in the US, we are mainly focused on explaining why we should not have to adapt and why it is dumb and wrong to bring an end to the era of neoliberal trade, investment and migration policies. Dumb or not, wrong or not, that is what is happening. And Canada has neither the credibility nor the power to arrest, never mind reverse, current global economic trends. We must adapt.

But the problem is that every single one of our national political parties has the same cutting edge 1990s neoliberal trade and investment policies. With the accession of Jean Chretien to the leadership of the Liberal Party in 1990, the party abandoned its longstanding support for ISI and wholly committed to neoliberalism. The NDP followed suit in 2006, following heavy criticism from the media for not being part of Canada’s policy consensus on trade and investment.

When the turn away from neoliberalism began throughout the Global North post-2012, the US saw the popular Bernie Sanders and Donald Trump presidential candidacies explicitly opposing NAFTA and open borders, assailing many aspects of neoliberalism and touting ISI. In 2016, we did not just see Trump take the presidency but the UK withdraw from the neoliberal Maastricht Treaty governing the European Union. And major conflicts over neoliberalism erupted in both Jeremy Corbyn’s Labour Party and Boris Johnson’s Tories, as Nigel Farage’s Reform UK rose in the polls, entering Westminster finally in 2024. These conflicts are playing out in Italy, France and Germany too as the different political systems grapple with the collapse of the neoliberal consensus.

While this era has seen the rise of new parties opposing the neoliberal consensus, like Germany’s AfD and BSW and the UK’s Reform and the resurgence of early 90s anti-neoliberal parties like Australia’s One Nation, Canada’s offering has been especially lame and anemic. Former Conservative cabinet minister Maxime Bernier resigned from the Tory party after losing a close leadership race and, since 2019, has been leader of the People’s Party of Canada, a party that, at first glance, appears to be Canada’s equivalent.

While it is true that Bernier’s party shares the migration, climate and Covid policy skepticism of these other parties, where it differs is that it is actually more fundamentalist in its commitment to neoliberal trade and investment policies, that its main message is that Canada needs to double down on neoliberal orthodoxy and anchor its policies more closely to the economic orthodoxies of the 1990s.

In other words, the reasons we are hearing such an utterly facile and empty debate about which leader will be the toughest and pluckiest when it comes to impotently wagging their finger at Trump or making hyperbolic threats and unhelpful personal denunciations of Trump and his cronies is that Canada has an all-party consensus in favour of continuing to beat the drum of neoliberalism, even as the number of free trading economies in the world continues to shrink precipitously.

Only this weekend did we see the first tentative efforts at a domestic self-reliance reinvestment policy with an announcement from Opposition Leader Pierre Poilievre to that effect. The rest of our political class has no answer to the present state of affairs other than to demand that a time machine be built so we can go back to competing in the global economy that existed between 1989 and 2015 and, frankly, it’s not like Poilievre has an answer that is remotely good or comprehensive enough.

Of course, Canada’s failed journalistic establishment is not helping, by insisting that geopolitics is a schoolyard and that personal pluckiness, seriousness and firmness are perfectly reasonable replacements for sophisticated economic and foreign policy on the world stage. But they are not. And, thanks to an ossified and out of date policy consensus, a media composed mostly of stooges and stenographers for the establishment, Canadians are in danger continuing down an economic path from which the rest of the industrialized world is turning back. And if there is one kind of policy on which you cannot go it alone, it is neoliberal free trade and investment.

Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

The Class Contradictions of the Conservative Courtier

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

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.”

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