I don’t think anyone doubted that the Paris Olympics or, as I prefer to think of them, the Versailles Olympics, were going to showcase the current state of the madness or morbidities of the world. But in better times, those debates circled around more intelligible things, like whether to boycott an Olympiad hosted by a despot or whether to bar from competition representatives of a pariah regime. Foreign delegations would try to strike a balance when interacting with local members of their country’s diaspora, how much to flirt with a local minority population with which they sympathized. One thinks not just of 1936 Berlin but the two boycotted Olympics (1980 Moscow and 1984 Los Angeles) at the end of the Cold War, the slaughter and repression preceding Mexico City 1968, Chechen and gay solidarity activism at Sochi 2014 and the massacre of Israeli Olympians by the PLO in Munich 1972.
But, despite the Gaza punitive expedition now having escalated in a region-wide war from Sanaa to Tehran to Damascus and the ongoing slaughter in Sudan and Ukraine, Paris has focused the world’s eyes of the bed-shitting morbidities of the cultural crisis of the post-liberal societies of the Global North.
There is no shortage of commentators with wise words to say about the perversions of the West showcased at the event, so effectively demonstrated in the Last Supper drag act and the decision to put men in the boxing ring with women, leaving me with nothing especially unique to say on the subject of the actual events. Instead, I want to focus on radical and dramatic differences between how progressives and non-progressives in the Global North have debated these bizarre events and defended their respective positions.
Olympic-level Lying
I had not planned to pay much attention to the Olympics. I don’t find watching either the sports or the public art around the sports very interesting. But my interest was piqued as I watched the debate about a number in the opening ceremonies, a peculiar little dance number called “Last Supper on the Seine.”
The number, according to the cast, the official event program and the IOC, itself, was a parody of Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper painting. And it predictably offended evangelical Christians, as was its clear intent, which is fine. There is nothing wrong with doing a dance number that offends some people in the opening ceremonies of the Olympics. Nothing at all.
Where things got weird was when a silly observation by an art historian went viral. The art historian claimed that the piece was not a parody of the Last Supper but of a seventeenth century Dutch painting, Festin des Dieux, a painting likely, itself based on Da Vinci’s Last Supper. Literally piling insult upon insult, viral memes circulated by progressives argued that evangelical Christians were wrong to be offended because, in their ignorance and stupidity, they had mistaken a depiction of Festin for the Last Supper.
Except that any person who looked at both paintings would of course see that the dance number far more closely resembled the Last Supper than it did Festin. What fascinated me was that almost no progressive smugly circulating posts inveighing against evangelicals’ putative ignorance of art history had heard of the painting before they circulated the meme or looked at it before schooling us plebs on what we had really seen. Why would they need to? A person with a PhD in art history had told them what they were actually looking at. Why would they then need to use their own eyes?
Then there is an adjacent dust-up. One of the drag performers parodying an apostle and standing next to a child, was exposing his scrotum through a hole in his fishnet stockings. Again, it is not like the Genderwang movement has not, on numerous prior occasions defended drag performers flashing their junk at kids. They could have done so again on this occasion but instead, they began arguing that the scrotum we could all see was not a scrotum but “a spot of skin on his upper leg.” What does that even mean? Still, this phrase also started making the rounds among progressives. We were foolish and ignorant for mistaking “a spot of skin on the upper leg” for an obviously and intentionally displayed scrotum.
Again, rather than contesting the propriety of the display, the choice was to look at the same photo we were looking at and basically say “you are only imagining that is a scrotum, you ignoramus.”
Then, of course the crescendo came during the week when an Algerian man won a series of women’s boxing matches. The fact that he was a man was perfectly obvious to anyone who looked at his body or watched his fights. He had a man’s face, a man’s build, a man’s arms, a man’s neck, complete with Adam’s apple; he moved like a man; he punched like a man; he did not wear a hijab, as Algerian women generally do; candid photos of him living happily as a man back home surfaced on the internet; he even adjusted the position of his scrotum in front of all of us on live TV.
But what clinched it was that the International Boxing Association had disqualified him from women’s boxing in 2023 because a genetic test had revealed he had XY chromosomes.
But the IOC, quickly followed by a legion of breathless progressives decried any acknowledgement as “hate speech,” “bigotry” and, as they cycled through the usual list of stonewalling epithets, moving on later in the week to “disinformation” and “Russian interference.” I anticipate them blaming Donald Trump the “the far right” tomorrow.
The arguments progressives began to cobble together did not deny that this was his chromosomal makeup but rather that two other factors trumped any genetic test’s possible conclusions: his sex was listed as “female” on both his birth certificate and passport. A doctor had put the wrong sex on the form because he had failed to notice the minor genetic defect that concealed the baby’s penis and scrotum, which did not descend until he was in his early teens as he went through bog standard male puberty that built the body he inhabits today. And because Algerian passports are based on citizens’ birth certificates, this error was replicated on his travel documents.
Progressives then argued that he was a “biological woman” and “assigned female at birth,” based on what his government-issued ID said. Memes abound about how “far right disinformation” is causing people to believe Imane Khelif is a man when “she” is clearly a woman. These memes almost always included Khelif clearly looking and posing like the man he is.
And even when the XY chromosomes are acknowledged, Woke folk have gone on to argue that “some women have Y chromosomes” and “she has female Y chromosomes.”
Wokes Believe in the Adam-God Heresy
It is tempting to think that progressives are engaged in a broad-based grassroots effort at gaslighting the rest of us i.e. destabilizing our sense of what is real through a programmatic campaign of disorientation and deception.
But that would be a silly conspiracy theory because it would involve millions of people engaging in coordinated acts of bad faith. When I debate progressives on these subjects, I do not get a sense of bad faith. I get a disturbing sense of passionate sincerity, the sort I pick up from Young Earth Creationists, like the person arguing with me has something more than belief; they have faith; that this is true because it needs to be true for the universe to be as I need it to be.
So, how can we understand these three interventions as sincere representations of the Woke worldview? I think we have to go back to the understanding that just as the Second Great Awakening gave birth to the first American space religion, Mormonism, the Third Great Awakening has spawned Wokeness, the most popular of all American space religions, outstripping the original Sandinismo, the Moorish Science Temple of America, the Nation of Islam of Elijah Muhammad and Louis Farrakhan, and even Scientology.
American space religions have a number of common features other religions generally do not have. And I have written at some length about their common doctrine that we all have pre-existent spirits that possess a race and a gender before they are born into the material world. But that is not their most important doctrinal feature nor the one relevant to what we have witnessed this week.
Shortly before his martyrdom in 1844, Joseph Smith revealed his last and greatest cosmological revelation in the King Follett Discourse, our God, he explained, was not always God. He was once a man who lived on the planet Kolob and made himself God by learning the secrets of the universe, the powers of the priesthood, powers that inhere in his mastery of true name magic.
That’s the most distinctive thing about American space religions: they are essentially godless. They do not believe in God as ontologically distinct from humans; they believe that men can learn powerful magic and make themselves gods. That’s the goal in the LDS, NOI and Scientology: auto-apotheosis.
Mormonism did not emerge, fully formed, like Athena, from the forehead of Zeus. Historian John Brooke shows us that it was an agglomeration of folks beliefs of a group of English religious refugees known as the Cunning Men, the working class manifestation of the great Hermetic magi of the Renaissance, like Elizabeth I’s court astrologer John Dee. While they believed themselves to be practitioners of various magical arts they peddled to the popular classes, like astrology, love magic and divining, their greatest power came from their mastery of Hermetic true name magic.
True name magic refers to kind of magical practice premised on the idea that if you know the “true name” of a person or thing, you have a special magical power over it. The main Mormon activity, “temple work” i.e. the baptism of the dead, requires that LDS members compile the names of their dead relatives so that they can baptize them retroactively through a set of secret temple rituals. Without knowledge of the precise names of the deceased, the rituals do not work. All that genealogical work is about learning people’s names so that their spirits in the afterlife can be acted-upon.
It is in this context that we should also understand NOI’s practice of converts taking a new name, upon conversion, to reflect the fundamental change in the nature of their spirit. Having come up with the idea of “dead naming,” long before the trans movement was a glint in Pfizer’s eye, NOI adherents understand the use of their prior name as causing them not just public shame but a kind of spiritual damage.
American space religions share a common intellectual ancestry with the Kabalarian church, another movement practicing Hermetic true name magic: the myth popular among many medieval Jewish and Christian cabalists that Adam was actually God, that he had created the world by naming the objects in the Garden into existence.
This understanding the relationship between language and the world is what we are contending with now. In place of the Adam-God myth as the justifying discourse buttressing this view, we have vulgar postmodernism alloyed with the Humpty Dumpty Fallacy.
Through the Looking Glass with Humpty Dumpty
“‘When I use a word,’ Humpty Dumpty said in rather a scornful tone, ‘it means just what I choose it to mean — neither more nor less.’
‘The question is,’ said Alice, ‘whether you can make words mean so many different things.’
‘The question is,’ said Humpty Dumpty, ‘which is to be master — that’s all.’”
Lewis Carroll’s Through the Looking Glass chills us with its prescience here. Humpty Dumpty’s promiscuous, arbitrary and dictatorial control of language is power, nothing more, nothing less.
Woke apologists like Judith Butler vulgarize and redefine the linguistic constructionism of Jacques Derrida and the postmodernists and basically argue that reality, our shared world is made out of words and that if we change the words, we change the world. They also vulgarize and debase Michel Foucault and the poststructuralists’ idea of the “episteme,” arguing not that how knowledge is “made” and power is distributed are intimately related in a complex dance but instead simply that knowledge and power are either the same thing or completely interchangeable things.
In other words, Wokes live in a world in which the words on a birth certificate or passport absolutely do supersede anything their lying eyes might witness. The state and a certified medical doctor put “female” on that birth certificate. The Algerian state then confirmed it by putting it on a passport. What could be me more authoritative than expertise fused with state power? How could one’s senses or one’s common sense possibly compete in making authoritative claims?
If an art historian says “Last Supper on the Seine” is not about the Last Supper by Leonardo da Vinci but about an obscure Dutch painting called Festin Des Dieux, why would one need to bother looking at the painting? An expert opinion naturally trumps what one’s lying eyes might observe if one tried looking at both paintings and comparing them to the dance number.
But the case of the scrotum is the most disturbing because it demonstrates that this sort of thing has become such a habit of mind for progressives that their first move is to deny what their adversaries say they see, no matter how visually obvious. After all, just today, an MSNBC host posted to Twitter that that nobody tried to shoot Donald Trump the other week.
While progressives prefer it when experts or the state, more fully endowed with Hermetic magical powers, do their work for them and change reality by renaming what we see as something we do not see, grassroots devotees are growing more confident in their mastery of true name magic, their development as fully functioning magi, themselves. Through an act of naming, they can make a scrotum vanish, not visually, of course, but in the ultimate reality, the reality of true names.
Or, as Orwell put it, “the Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”
