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Historical Blindness and the Intellectual Legacy of Canada’s Indian Residential Schools

On December 15th, Erin O’Toole, the leader of Her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition in Ottawa very cannily remarked on a Zoom call, a call he could be confident would be leaked to the media, that the Indian Residential School system was established by decent folks for the altruistic purpose of educating Indigenous people. The uproar was as predictable as the canned and obviously pre-written apology delivered at the beginning of the next news cycle.

Jagmeet Singh, Charlie Angus and a host of other progressive politicians and opinion leaders in the NDP, Greens and Liberals were unanimous: the people who created the residential school system were all—to a man—evil people with black hearts and bad intent who wanted nothing more than to exterminate every single indigenous person in Canada. How dare Mr. O’Toole suggest that anyone with good intentions could have been involved in the project, never mind fashioning it?

This reaction is of a piece with a larger dumbing-down of the Anglo left of which I have spilled copious ink elsewhere, a dangerous slide into stupidity that makes us disoriented, flat-footed and prone to unintended acts of destruction in the present.

Canada’s Indian Residential School system did not have a single underlying motive. That is because it arose from a broad national consensus including all major political tendencies in the country. People and organizations normally at loggerheads could, at least, all agree on this. It did not just arise from an elite consensus but an elite meta-consensus, a consensus among all the major elites in mid-nineteenth-century Canadian society.

One of the biggest problems with our current historical narration is that it pays attention to one group within that consensus: members of the Conservative Party bloc within John A MacDonald’s governments. It is easy to find quotations by MacDonald and his cabinet ministers describing the schools as the means by which “termination” would be most effectively achieved. Termination was a policy doctrine developed in the United States by members of the Republican Party that wanted to see an end to politically, linguistically and culturally distinct indigenous peoples. While some people in the future might include indigenous people in their ancestry, they would think of themselves in the same way as creole (American-born European) lineages thought of themselves, as good, upstanding white Americans or Canadians (many eugenicists believed that Indigenous people’s skin would lighten even without intermarriage simply by adopting European diet, dress and lifestyle). The point was the total termination, eradication of all indigenous separateness and distinctiveness.

While those people were important in creating the residential schools, the schools would not have survived for more than a century under the administration of a succession of Conservative, Liberal, Liberal-Progressive, Progressive Conservative, Conservative-Social Credit and Liberal-NDP governments without being backed by far more organizations and ideologies. Nor would every major mainline religious denomination, United, Congregationalist, Methodist, Presbyterian, Anglican and Catholic not just have supported the schools but run and staffed the schools themselves.

These churches did not just have conservative members; they produced the leaders of Canada’s socialist party, the Cooperative Commonwealth Federation, too. JS Woodsworth and Tommy Douglas came out of the same leadership class that designed and staffed the residential school system.

Canada’s protestant churchmen were over-represented among a larger group we call “reformers,” middle-class professionals who had adopted the new ideology of “progressivism,” and had become activists, campaigners for social improvements. Many reformers believed that, with the destruction of traditional indigenous lands, food sources and economies, assimilation was the only means by which to “save” indigenous people not just from starvation and extinction but from the total loss of their culture and identity.

At the zenith of Charles Dickens’ popularity, the largest group of reformers agitating for residential schools for both settler and Indigenous children were anti-child labour reformers. Just as violence was not part of a typical Indigenous child’s upbringing, farming, hunting and artisanal work were. These reformers saw little daylight between the racialized children of sharecroppers helping to bring in the cotton harvest in Georgia and those bringing in a maize harvest or drying the catch from a salmon run in the Canadian West.

Furthermore, education reformers noted that not only were Indian Reserves unable to find qualified, permanent teachers for on-reserve day schools, this was a larger problem. Rural schoolhouses, even in settler communities with road and rail access, were having trouble finding any staff, never mind qualified staff with experience or Normal School training. Some looked to the southwestern US where residential schools had been established to address the failure of the region’s settler and indigenous day schools. That is among the reasons many in the senior leadership of Indigenous communities, not just elected band council chiefs but traditional leaders initially supported the residential schools.

There was another, powerful reason many Indigenous leaders supported the creation of the system, even though they would later come to repent it: in 1858, Benito Juárez became the first person of fully Indigenous ancestry to become the leader of a post-independence state in the Western Hemisphere. A Zapotec Indian, he had not only been democratically elected to lead Mexico by a primarily white and mestizo voting population; he had served as chief justice of the Supreme Court, on his way up, and then, following his election, successfully repelled the Franco-Egyptian invasion of Mexico in 1861-67.

Juárez was a committed liberal and believed that the strongest forces holding back Indigenous people like himself: (a) Remember, these factors are necessary but may not be buy viagra sufficient to achieve the breakthrough. But the patent protection is now open for all and not taking the medication viagra cialis achat click this pharmacy shop as indicated by the security safeguards can have antagonistic impact on the individual’s wellbeing as opposed to inhaling a few large meals Consume food high in dietary fiber, which improves the health and function of your digestive system. 22. That’s because identifying and correcting https://www.unica-web.com/archive/2019/general-assembly/Friends%20of%20UNICA%20report.pdf commander viagra the underlying cause can help restore erectile function in many men. When and how does the role of sexologist come into play? A happy conjugal life viagra without prescription usa is required to stay hale and hearty for a long time. residential segregation on reserves and (b) missionaries translating scripture and catechism into Indigenous languages so as to teach literacy to Indigenous people in their native language, rather than the language of the colonizer. Juárez pointed out that literacy in a language different than that in which laws were written, judicial proceedings held and elections conducted, was a literacy that ghettoized his people. He therefore favoured the privatization and auctioning-off of reserve lands to and a new kind of education that provided linguistic immersion in the language of the colonizers.

Juárez, a figure of pride and hope to Indigenous people all over the Western hemisphere, suggested that reserved-based life and Indigenous languages were shackles holding Indigenous people back from the kind of successful life he had led, by running away from his village and teaching himself first Spanish, then law.

While it would later turn out that privatization of collective Indigenous reserve lands in the US and Mexico would only deepen Indigenous poverty and marginalization, this was not something initially known, in these early days of liberalism. The same was, of course, true of residential linguistic immersion programs like the Canadian Residential school system.

The system did indeed result in a veritable holocaust for Canadian Indigenous peoples—it produced madness, trauma, death, injury, permanent disability and scars that will remain for generations to come. It also produced catastrophic losses in language, culture, custom and family systems. These catastrophes, this holocaust continue to the present day.

One of the reasons this slow motion genocide, this holocaust continues is because of the defects in how we remember the residential schools.

By forgetting all the well-intentioned folks who designed, built and ran the residential schools and deciding that our ancestors were, all of them, black-hatted villains hell-bent on perpetrating a gratuitously cruel genocide, we exculpate ourselves and our actions in the present.

White guilt and colonizer tears are, today, the oil that keeps the wheels of our continued colonial project greased. An endless stream of false apologies and ancestor-blaming permit us to do the unthinkable: abduct more Indigenous children from their parents each year than we did at the height of the residential school system.

Not only do we abduct more Indigenous kids than ever; we incarcerate more Indigenous adults than ever; our non-officer army ranks contain more Indigenous people than ever; and the RCMP is able to continue its uninterrupted legacy of brazenly executing a certain number of Indigenous people year-in, year-out.

What is our excuse? We tell ourselves that, unlike our ancestors, we have good intentions; whereas they had evil intentions. And we con ourselves into believing that is a remotely legitimate way to think by forgetting our forbears’ aphorisms like “the road to hell is paved with good intentions.” No. We are good. Our ancestors were bad. No more questions need to be asked. We can just continue besieging Indigenous land with riot police, shooting Indigenous people in our driveways, tearing Indigenous babies from the arms of their parents.

Worse yet, we have actually incorporated the residential schools into the myths that justify continued colonialism. We tell ourselves, “Indigenous people are so damaged, so traumatized by the legacy of the Residential Schools and colonial violence, they cannot look after their kids, so we must abduct them; they cannot look after themselves, so we must incarcerate them.”

“Of course, they won’t be further traumatized, physically, psychologically and culturally because our good intentions will magically translate into good outcomes, just like our forbears’ bad intentions automatically translated into bad outcomes,” we half-convince ourselves.

By drawing an arbitrary bright line between our ancestors and ourselves, by labeling them bad people and ourselves, good people, we authorize ourselves to continue, uninterrupted, the holocaust, the genocide they began.

In this way, all of Canada’s leaders, Erin O’Toole, Jagmeet Singh and Justin Trudeau are actually in accord about continuing, in broad strokes, the policies of John A MacDonald’s governments when it comes to First Nations. The only difference is the historical myth they use to justify it, O’Toole’s myth of the white-hatted colonizer with only good intentions or Singh’s and Trudeau’s myth of the black-hatted colonizer with only bad intentions.

To quote Albert Einstein, “things should be made as simple as possible. And no simpler.”

Until we abandon convenient exculpatory myths and embrace the complexity of the motives of our ancestors, we will continue needlessly killing, jailing and traumatizing Indigenous people without accountability.

Canadian Politics Race | fusangite |

New Authoritarians #1: Cosmopolitan Societies, Populism and the Present Moment: What’s New About the New Authoritarians?

In the 1920s and 30s, we saw so many of the things we see today: financialization and deindustrialization in core economies, a fragile world peace fraying among rival empires, massive wealth disparity and concentration, economic growth sustained by rising consumer debt and increasingly irresponsible stock market speculation, people problematizing their gender and getting tattoos and the rise of populist authoritarians.

When very similar political, material and economic conditions obtained, we saw the same kinds of political and social phenomena that we do today. Populist authoritarians, anti-democratic strongmen nevertheless returned to office through elections were one of the key phenomena associated with that period. Ioannis Metaxas, António de Oliveira Salazar, Francisco Franco, Adolf Hitler, Benito Mussolini and Plutarco Calles were not unlike Donald Trump, Recep Erdogan, Victor Orban, Vladimir Putin, Narendra Modi, Jair Bolsonaro and Rodrigo Duterte in their time. And much has been written about the lessons we can learn from the successes and failures of the 1920s and 30s and how we might apply them to fighting populist authoritarianism in the present.

But we must also ask what makes today’s authoritarians new, and examine how they are different from their forbears a century ago. I want to suggest that one of the most notable differences has to do with questions of diversity and cosmopolitanism.

1920s Europe was a continent of new countries and old countries with new borders, following the treaties ending the First World War and the ethno-national partition processes established in their wake. The border of Italy had gelled just two years before Benito Mussolini took power in 1922, following an eighty-year process of partition, expulsion and amalgamation that pulled Italian-speakers into the boot-shaped polygon etched on the map and pushed Slovenes, Croats, Germans and others out. This Italy possessed an ethnolinguistic homogeneity all previous incarnations had lacked.

The Greece in which Ioannis Metaxas took power was just twelve years old, following a century-long process of partition and expulsion, with Greeks pouring in from Asia minor and Turks, Slavs and Albanians being pushed out east and north. The Weimar Republic that Hitler overthrew was similarly only fourteen years in age, with thousands upon thousands of Czechs, Poles, Germans and others being forced to relocate in a byzantine partition process that lasted years.

For fascists, the ethno-linguistic purity of their nations was insufficient. Roma, Jews, Catalans, Basques and others were early and easy targets for political movements whose paranoid style required the existence of internal enemies. And the fact that these groups were so thoroughly assimilated only helped to feed narratives of internal subversion and conspiracy.

For all the superficial similarity of their rhetoric, with the exception of Hungary’s Victor Orban, today’s authoritarian success stories are coming from states that are best-known not for ethnolinguistic homogeneity but diversity and cosmopolitanism. Not only are Brazil, the Philippines and the United States some of the most diverse countries in the world, they are only growing more so with time. The US is increasingly a bilingual country; Filipino Muslims and Fukien Chinese are more geographically distributed than every before; even as Brazil continues to boast German, Japanese and other non-Portuguese news media from settlers a century ago, English- and Spanish-speakers constitute larger chunks of the population.

Donald Trump did not just continue but amplified his rhetoric when it came to praising white supremacists, denigrating Muslims and abusing Latinx peoples. Narendra Modi’s rhetoric of Hindu supremacy and exclusivity has, similarly, not been tempered by high office. And Jair Bolsonaro’s race-baiting of Afro-Brazilians combined with continued calls for Indigenous genocide have similarly continued or been amplified in office.

Yet, when it came time to examine who the five million new Trump voters were this November, it turned out that this group of voters were disproportionately non-white, with Asian Americans and Latinx voters becoming more likely to positively reappraise Trump than white voters. Similarly, Modi’s successes at home in bringing Buddhists, Jains and Sikhs into his coalition, to make the BJP a more religiously diverse party are even being experienced in the Indian diaspora. Even former Khalistan activists and their children, who fled India in fear of their lives, with the dream of a Sikh homeland in Punjab are increasingly joining pro-Modi diasporic coalitions with Hindus.

When one delivers this news to Woke folk/progressives, there is the usual response: this should not be what is happening; the people who are doing it are stupid and because it is dumb and should not be happening, we should behave as though it is not.

But what if this behaviour is rational and based on people’s lived experiences? How can we explain what is taking place? Because if we cannot explain what is happening or why it is, we have no hope of stemming the tide.

First, we must ask this: what is supporting a new authoritarian movement an alternative to? For racialized people, ethnic and religious minorities, it is, among other things, an alternative to the way liberal societies and neoliberal economies manage questions of diversity, pluralism and cosmopolitanism.

Most visibly, our societies manage this through tokenism, a kind of neo-Ottoman social organization where people with minority identities are prominently featured in high-level government and corporate positions. Like a Greek Orthodox vizier in the Ottoman court or an Armenian Christian vizier serving an Abasside Caliph, the material interests of the vizier are a continuation of the dominant order. When medieval fellahin in the Nile Delta saw a Copt as the Caliph’s first minister, there was no celebration of impending Christian-Muslim equality, no talk of breaking glass ceilings. They understood clearly that, to keep his job, the vizier would work tirelessly for the supremacy of the Muslim Caliph who appointed him. Sadly, contemporary progressives lack the political sophistication of the average medieval peasant and are still wowed by the pageantry of false equality.

When Mexicans or Arabs move their support to Donald Trump, they are looking past the symbolism of exhibiting children in cages and American bombs landing on Yemeni cities and recognizing that the Trump regime is only a little more racist and Islamophobic in its policies than the Obama regime that preceded it. That, when one strips away the theatre of cruelty, the same Christian and white supremacist structures are continuous, maintained by Republicans and Democrats alike.

This might explain why the Trump regime might be seen as no worse, but why might it be seen as better? First of all, transparency and honesty; while Trump is honest and unapologetic about the way that the hierarchy of American cosmopolitanism is ordered, liberals and progressives constantly lie about an imagined equality, an imagined amity. Trumpism, on the other hand, recalls the rough and tumble pluralism of the First Gilded Age, of the Roman Republic, where competition among ethnicities was acknowledged, where neighbours traded racist jokes across back fences and rioted against one another.

Of course, some especially foolish folk might say that our goal is for a pluralism that is non-hierarchical, that is culturally neutral. Even leaving aside Karl Popper’s arguments about how pluralism must be governed by a value system that values and supports pluralism, it is also obvious that different dominant cultures organize pluralism different ways.

“Personality of law,” for instance, is a historically common pluralism that has been rejected by modern liberal Christian “secular” societies. In this model of pluralism, every person has the right to be governed based on the laws and traditions of their religion or ethnicity. Sharia law applies to Muslim citizens and canon law to Christian citizens. Only in the EU is personality of law incorporated into the Christian pluralist order—and it only applies to wage legislation i.e. most workers carry their country’s minimum wage with them. In modern Ethiopia, as in the United States before the 1860s, freedom of religion is exercised by towns, not individuals.

Modern liberal pluralism is not the only, or even most logical theory for organizing a religiously and ethnically diverse cosmopolitan society. And, I would argue that one of the most powerful forces animating modern populist authoritarian movements is not a desire to eliminate pluralism but to offer new models of pluralism that are more satisfying for their followers.

The Trump movement, like its Democratic Party opponents, recognizes the United States as a complex hierarchy of races and religions that enjoy varying degrees of wealth, safety and opportunity; these are not just groups of individuals but a complex system of institutions, secular and religious, that deserve varying degrees of state patronage and recognition, depending on the race and religion in question.

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But whereas the traditional party system cloaks this in a discourse of secularism and cultural relativism, the Trump movement is transparent in how it hierarchizes these groups and the institutions that purport to represent them. This transparency has proved attractive to white Christians, who receive the most state recognition and patronage but has proven increasingly popular with groups that are below the top of the hierarchy but still seek and obtain recognition and patronage.

For instance, it has not just been Christian charter schools that have benefited from the policies of Education Secretary Betsy de Vos. Madrassahs have benefited too, albeit to a lesser extent, as have Jewish and Hindu religious schools. And the movement’s popularity has grown in these communities as their leaders have come to hear Trump’s anti-Semitic and Islamophobic proclamations as indicative not of a Nazi-style genocidal policy but rather the rhetoric one associates with the rough and tumble hierarchical pluralism of pre-WWII America, the Ottoman and Roman Empires.

In India, we see a similar set of developments. Whereas Muslims are subject to increasing brutal violence and genocidal actions by Narendra Modi’s BJP and affiliated militias, Sikhs, Buddhists and Jains have enjoyed increasing state protection and patronage. For the Modi movement, there exists a binary: non-indigenous religions i.e. evangelical Christianity and Islam are facing increasing persecution and attempts at eradication. But those religions considered to be part of a larger Hindu-based family of religions descended from the one true faith are now inside the Hindu tent and organized into a hierarchy. In this way, there are substantial material and political payoffs that autocthnonous enjoy when their members join Modi’s coalition in greater numbers.

A similar phenomenon obtains when it comes to lower caste Indians. While most Dalits (ie. Untouchables) and “backward” castes have faced increasing violence from the Hindu fundamentalism being hawked by the Modiites, there is a paradox. Modi himself brags of being of “the most backward caste” and proudly shows the evidence of this coursing through his blood and written upon his skin. His personal rhetoric is not merely exemplary; it is instructive: by adopting the dress, politics and affiliations of his movement, other darker, lower caste Indians can whiten themselves.

Prior to Modi, there were processes of passing and whitening known as “Sanskritizing” that the old secular Congress Party worked actively against. Their goal was to the eradication of caste, not unlike the dreams of Latin and Anglo American liberals at the foundation of their countries. Individuals and jatis (large lineage groups) have always had a way of moving up the caste hierarchy. Under Hindu, Mughal and British rule, this process was negotiated by the brahmins, the priest class, permitting mobility for individuals and groups at the cost of reinforcing the overall caste structure. (Similar to the limpieza de sangre system I explain here.)

Under the rule of the Congress Party, following independence, Sanskritizing i.e. leaving one’s village, moving to a large city and falsifying one’s genealogy was the preferred process, not unlike “passing” in the United States during the same period.

But the Modi movement offers an alternative preferable to more and more low-caste individuals: joining the movement and using a rank in the party or one of its militias as a whitening influence on one’s lived caste position. Just as Rudyard Kipling’s fictive British Raj promoted private Gunga Din to the rank of corporal posthumously, despite him coming from a low caste ineligible for officer ranks in the army (unlike the martial lineages like Sikhs), because he better embodied the traits desired in a British officer than a man of the correct race and lineage, BJP and its militias are mass producing Gunga Dins.

In America, the Trump movement offers two models of personal whitening, both arguably imported from the more venerable and better theorized and strategized Modi movement.

If there was one event more uncanny in the 2016 US election than any other, it was the Donald Trump campaign’s Hindu diaspora campaign event. Building on the ways in which the colour line in the core of Dixie had already come to work, the campaign was explicit in its invitation to high-caste Hindus who, like Nikki Haley, are already situated above the black-white colour line in states like Louisiana and South Carolina. High caste i.e. white Hindus were explicitly recognized as part of a global Aryan nationalist white supremacist project in ways that had not been since the 1930s. While Trump, himself, was personally clueless, helpfully stating “I support Hindu,” during the bewildering event in which he was festooned in gold and received endorsements from temple priests, his advisors were clear-eyed.

And high-caste Hindus were just one part of a larger project. Many Latin American states have a long white supremacist history but none more than the two great “white settler states” of the Southern Cone, Brazil and Argentina. White Brazilians and Argentines from metropolises like Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo come from a civic discourse that is more explicitly white supremacist than that of Anglo America. And many have suffered indignity and confusion coming to Canada and the US, having led lives of benefiting from and praising white supremacy, only to find themselves situated below the colour line. These groups the Trump campaign targeted successfully.

And this is a paradoxical feature one finds particularly in the Bolsonaro, Modi and Trump movements: if one is located within the movement, the colour line becomes more flexible and moves lower to accommodate more folks.

In this way, the Trump movement’s use of regalia is especially powerful. Donning a red MAGA hat makes any person wearing it if not white than significantly whiter in the eyes of other MAGA hat-wearers. And this is not a wholly new phenomenon, especially in the US. Poles, Czechs, Irish, Turks, Greeks, Italians, etc. all became whiter by joining not the anti-racist Republican Party of Abraham Lincoln but the white supremacist Democrats of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. While the newly white and the nearly white joining a populist racist movement might make the country as a whole more racist, the lived experience of individuals is the opposite. A MAGA hat is more powerful than Kevlar when it comes to stopping police bullets.

What begins to come into focus with these comparisons is that unlike the fascists of the 1920s and 30s, or retro fascists like Victor Orban and the fourth and fifth parties of Western Europe’s parliaments and legislatures, the new authoritarians are not simple opponents of cosmopolitanism. Rather, they seek to refashion their countries’ pluralisms into systems that are more visible, more hierarchical, more dynamic and at peace with many long-term civic inequalities.

We see this too in Recep Erdogan’s neo-Ottoman term. Erdogan’s movement is pronouncing on a century of secular liberalism at gunpoint in Turkey and offering, in its place, a return to a pluralistic, theocratic, ordered hierarchical Ottoman past, offering permanent inferiority to religious and ethnic minorities as an alternative to assimilation at gunpoint that the Kemalist state offered in the twentieth century.

But most importantly, for traditionalists within any culture, there is a universal appeal in the figure of the authoritarian patriarch.

Bill Maher pointed out in 2012 that, as people grow increasingly cynical about the ability of their votes to arrest or even mitigate the destruction of neoliberalism, they begin thinking about political campaigns like a wealth seminar: Mitt Romney and Donald Trump are not going to govern to benefit individuals of their class. Rather, by joining their movement and following their advice, you might become like them—they will tell you “the secret” to becoming rich, powerful patriarchs like themselves.

In this way, there is an implicit, unstated promise, especially from a man dominating a large, attractive and accomplished family like the Trumps. Every conservative patriarch sees the election of a man like Trump as authorization to intensify his domination of his women, his children. Men that head families staging gender reveal parties, sending their kids to religious schools, engaging in surgery tourism to perform gendercide or FGM see a natural ally, even if he might say a few mean things about their church, their temple, their language.

As John Sayles wrote in the film Lone Star, “it’s comforting when you see one prejudice triumphing over another deep prejudice.”

Authoritarianism Politics of Identity Race US Politics | fusangite |

Cancelation, Neo-McCarthyism and the Civicminded Volunteer

Following my resignation from the BC Ecosocialist Party’s leadership, a few kind folks with podcasts reached out to interview me in greater depth about the larger context of what some are calling my “cancelation” from BC politics. I suggested that this plague of de-platforming and hounding people out of work for straying from left-Identitarian orthodoxy was possible because of a loss of cultural memory of the Cold War and, in particular, McCarthyism and the other Red Scares.

Current practices of policing the discourse by Woke folk are, whatever their ideological and cosmetic differences, in essence, McCarthyism. As in the Red Scare of the 1950s, the idea is that, embedded in organizations throughout society, there are evil people who believe in destroying everything good in society. But these folks are secretive; they conceal these views behind complicated academic language, or by only expressing them in private, or by encoding them in works of art. These people might be anyone: your teacher, your relative, your childhood friend, your co-worker, even your political comrade who appears to be on the same side as you. That is why it is important to be vigilant because members of the International Communist Conspiracy might be anyone anywhere.

While we often think of McCarthyism as a state-driven enterprise, with Senator McCarthy or J Edgar Hoover orchestrating the firings of thousands of Americans exposed as communists, the fact is that the vast majority of people who lost their job, their reputation, their marriage, their children, their political office through McCarthyism were people the US government was not even aware of.

That is because McCarthyism functioned like a contagious disease. Because if someone in one’s circle were exposed as a communist, a person might be asked about their friend, relative or co-worker. There was only one correct response: to condemn the person in question, ostracize them and take umbrage at being fooled by that wily communist. If one responded, “but what’s wrong with being a communist?” this would expose one as a fellow communist sympathizer. But responding, “I’m sure he’s not a communist; he seems a good guy” would have the same effect but worse: one was now aiding and abetting the conspiracy through lies. Most dangerous was saying “this person is a good and trustworthy person; I vouch for his patriotism”—everyone knew what that meant: “I too am a member of the International Communist Conspiracy hell-bent on the destruction of civilization.”

Today, we have a much wider variety of names to call folks on the left: one can be exposed as a “SWERF”, a “TERF,” a “Karen” (note that these epithets tend overwhelmingly to be misogynistic ones) but the epithets all mean the same thing: a malefactor walking secretly among us, colluding with other malefactors and seeking to lead good folk astray.

While I have experienced minor, minor consequences compared to most folks Woke activists have decided to try and cancel, I want to note that my controversial writing about identity-formation in late capitalism was not the text used to falsely indict me as a transphobe. The smoking gun was my declaration that Vancouver housing activist Judy Graves was not a transphobe. Friends of mine are now understood to be transphobes because they have said that I am not a transphobe. Declaring that a known TERF is not a TERF is the clearest evidence that someone is a TERF. And so it spreads, like a disease.

In this way, what some call “cancel culture” is simply neo-McCarthyism. We would realize there was nothing new or special about it if we were not so historically unmoored, if we remembered that rather than leading, Joe McCarthy and the US federal government lagged behind neighbourhood scolds, personnel managers, church deacons and ambitious union vice-presidents in identifying and rooting out the putative communist threats. While senator McCarthy’s inflammatory statements about communist infiltration fueled the 1950s Red Scare, they first produced a volunteer-led, grassroots McCarthyism from below. As in the present day, lawmakers sought to enact their own persecution campaign not as a project of their own making but as a means of placating or jockeying for the support of the grassroots activists who prosecuted most of McCarthyism.

And that is what so many people miss about Cold War authoritarian movements and governments: their popularity, their grassroots support, their ethic of volunteerism.

Of course, McCarthyism was hardly the greatest scourge on human liberty of the Cold War; it killed very few people and existed for a fairly short period of time in a single country. Far more significant were the “bureaucratic authoritarian” regimes that flourished in Latin America and Eastern Europe. The USSR, its European client states and America’s Western Hemisphere vassals lived far longer under far more brutal oppression.

While some were led by charismatic strongmen like Augusto Pinochet, most were led by uncharismatic bureaucrats; there were lots of examples of rotating leadership, collective leadership and leadership from behind the throne. Consequently, allegiance to these states tended to be a defensive, fear-based allegiance. The official rhetoric was that one’s country was an embattled bastion of something precious that must be defended at all costs. In Chile, that thing was the free market; in Argentina, it was Roman Catholicism; in Czechoslovakia it was socialism; in Yugoslavia, it was pluralism.

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While most bureaucratic authoritarian regimes were installed from above, often at gunpoint, almost all nevertheless began with real popular support. And it would be a mistake to assume that this support declined. Like Recep Erdogan, Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping, elections were not rigged or canceled because the government feared losing or had to abide by the results but because the rulers were ideologically opposed to democratic elections.  It is a mistake to assume that canceling or rigging an election is an indication of a lack of power or popularity; just as often it functions to demonstrate those things.

Yet despite the apparently sweeping and total power of these regimes over every aspect of their citizens’ lives, they, like McCarthyism, relied on the mobilization and support of thousands upon thousands of volunteers.

Even today, with cameras and satellites everywhere, with facial and voice recognition software, with increasingly invasive surveillance legislation, the state lacks the labour to utilize a hundredth of the information gathered by its own agencies, never mind its private sector partners.

What made it possible for the Argentine, Brazilian and Chilean regimes to “disappear” tens of thousands of their citizens was the work of volunteers. In these states, the role of the neighbourhood scold was elevated, empowered and trusted by the state to feed it the information it needed to know which tapped phone to listen to, what time of day to search a home, whose workplace supervisor to call.

Ultimately, these dictatorships became unstable or failed when they lost too many volunteers, when too many people stopped reporting on their neighbours, coworkers, friends and relatives. Because no authoritarian succeeds without mobilizing a sense of volunteerism and civicmindedness in its citizens. That is why internal propaganda is important; it is ineffective at changing the views of dissidents; its purpose is to mobilize and inspire the government’s essential volunteer labour force.

Today, many decent folks, myself included, admire and lionize Jane Jacobs’ idea of “eyes on the street” as the most effective public safety and crime prevention measure, a benign vision of elders on stoops shouting at young ruffians and making sure someone is watching when young women walk home at night. That vision is not a false one and I am not renouncing my support for the “eyes” principle of public safety any time soon.

But we must remember that there is a dark side, a Janus face of the eyes on the street in Jacobs’ Greenwich Village in 1965; it is the eyes on the street in Rio de Janeiro that same year, eyes watching for socialists, atheists and anarchists for the Brazilian junta.

Just as our cultural amnesia prevents us from remembering that residential schools were created by do-gooders and social reformers, who believed they were improving the lives of Indigenous people, our historical amnesia also immunizes us from seeing how little daylight there is between the impulses and practices behind Cold War social control and the forces that enforce the orthodoxies of the moment, be they the orthodoxies of the Fox News and the Trump movement or those of the Woke.

No campaign of repression from above succeeds without mass support from below, not just in the form acquiescence but in the form of labour, through surveillance and denunciations of the putative enemies of the people.

While much of this is powered by fear, fear that the volunteer army will turn on oneself, one cannot discount just how many people in 1955 looked at a long-time comrade, friend, colleague or relative and said to themselves “Wow! He’s a member of the International Communist Conspiracy too!? Who knew? I would never have guessed how many of my associates have actually been working to destroy everything I hold dear, all along! This betrayal cannot stand! How can I help getting his kids apprehended by the state?”

I am 100% certain that the primary architect of my attempted cancelation thought something very like that about me, that somehow I had been turned, changed by the forces of evil and now had to be torn out, root and branch, from the political left in British Columbia for fear that the contagion might spread, ensuring, of course, that it does.

Unlike Jordan Peterson and the other sad sack idiots who rail against the alleged totalitarianism of the present day, I do not believe that we have lost our freedom of speech or that there is some kind of authoritarian control of the discourse. Noam Chomsky’s consent factory is bigger and more powerful than ever, aided by Silicon Valley, the billionaire class, and their control of social media, their ability to shape the language and thought of both their allies and adversaries.

But I am suggesting that, as we guard against the authoritarianism coming our way, we refocus our optic, that we focus not on the small amount of monetized and automated labour needed to create a surveillance society and instead cast our eyes horizontally, that we pay attention to the lion’s share of the labour needed for such a society, the sincere, altruistic work of volunteers.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

It turns out the resignation letter is my literary subgenre

Comrades,

            I see that BC’s two counterfeit left parties have chosen their strategy for derailing our campaign. A slew of false allegations of transphobia are being circulated against me and being used to tarnish the party and derail the important work of the coming campaign.

            We cannot afford to have that happen. The primary voting issue in this election must remain climate justice. Nothing can distract us from what is truly at stake: the very survival of our species. Every day we spend discussing whether it was wrong for me to defend a local Vancouver activist from a campaign to blacklist her from employment is a day we do not spend discussing John Horgan using the RCMP as Royal Dutch Shell’s brute squad to drive a fracked gas pipeline through the territory of People suffering from sickle cell anaemia, get viagra overnight leukaemia and multiple myeloma. That’s to say, more and more people would like to face erectile dysfunction by buy generic cialis great pharmacy store picking up a conversation at work or health club, with friends, or they may even opt to speak to strangers on the Internet. In such cases, it is advisable to use twice a day for six to ninth super cheap viagra months. If you browse their website you will viagra online canadian see that they have very few differences. the Wet’suwet’en people. And we cannot afford that distraction.

            So, it is with regret and reluctance that I am tendering my resignation as director, leader and candidate effective midnight tonight. I know, from the sterling group of young people who have joined our slate and our board over the past eleven months that I am leaving this party is excellent hands. You folks will do a great job and I will be proud to cast a vote for whomever the party selects in Prince George-Valemount.

            Solidarity and courage,

            Stuart Parker

BC Politics | fusangite |

Sonia Furstenau’s Plan for the Green Party is Non-existent But Michael M’Gonigle’s is Something Worse

On August 31st, 2020, The Tyee published an article by Michael M’Gonigle entitled “It’s Time for Greens to Reinvent Themselves.” Originally submitted to the Tyee for publication, I am now printing my rebuttal here because the impending election will likely finish knocking this off the editor’s desk.

Beginning in 2014, when it entered the legislature, the BC Green Party began voting for government plans to increase fossil fuel extraction and emissions, first with Christy Clark’s “LNG budget,” and later for the Horgan government’s budgets, energy plans and throne speeches. Most recently, the party praised the current government budget as “systemic solutions for systemic problems.” This, despite it including a 26% increase in fracking, continued subsidies for Royal Dutch Shell and its LNG plant partners and the biggest-ever planned widening of the Trans Canada Highway for single-occupancy vehicles. Today, the party touts the “Clean BC” plan as its signature contribution, despite that plan including an increase in coal exports and doubling the rate of logging and mining in the province.

The justification the Greens offer is that if they brought the government down, they might lose their seats in the BC legislature. In an exercise in the most empty, tautological understanding of politics, the goal of having Greens holding elected office is an end in itself, the purpose of the party.

The party’s embrace of the crassest and most empty electoralism has had me working through a profound sense of personal guilt. You see, the Green Party used to be a party that understood its goals not in terms of electoral success, but of social change. I was one of the leaders of a generational shift in Anglo American Green politics in the late 1980s and early 1990s that transformed the party into a primarily electoral vehicle, focused on acting through elections to achieve change.

We didn’t mean to initiate a process that would empty the party of principle and meaning. But maybe the choices my comrades and I made in seizing control of the party and refocusing it on contesting elections had led, inevitably, to this counterfeit, this ugly parody of Green politics we see enacted not just in BC, but on the floor of the legislature in Prince Edward Island and New Brunswick. If only we had listened to the party elders of the 1980s, this descent could have been avoided and Green parties in North America would be a force for good today.

Maybe we should not have made enemies of the 1970s counterculture survivors and back-to-the-landers from whom we seized control of the BC Greens through a painful and embarrassing series of confrontations between 1988 and 1994.

Then I read Michael M’Gonigle’s opinion piece this week.

And it all came flooding back: why we did what we did and why the solutions offered by the party’s boomer leadership in its founding decade (1980-89) make even less sense today.

M’Gonigle, a great environmentalist, writer and scholar, was one of the founding members of Greenpeace International and claims to have been a co-founder of the BC Greens. As the guy who actually typed-in the names and addresses from the party’s rolodex of 1983 members and the faded dot matrix print-outs of the 1984 and ’85 members to the party’s new database software in 1989, I have some doubts about that second claim. Other Greenpeace founders were on that list, though: Paul Watson, Rod Marining and Jim Bohlen.

And although they loathed each other from Greenpeace days, both Bohlen and Watson were part of the fractious alliance I put together to oppose, if not M’Gonigle, then the many active party members who shared his thinking. From 1988, when it began losing control of the party to 1993, when it disbanded, this group called itself the Ecofeminist Caucus and it embraced not just Ecofeminism but many of the nascent ideologies popular among Anglo American Greens, especially Bioregionalism, the ideology that most strongly informs M’Gonigle’s piece, as well as Murray Bookchin’s two intellectual interventions, Social Ecology and Libertarian Municipalism.

When efforts to form a Canadian Green Party began with the candidacies of Elizabeth May, Anne Trudell and others in the 1980 election as the Small Party, its backbone was, as M’Gonigle nostalgically acknowledges, back-to-the-landers and residents of urban communes. This was an era of high unemployment and economic recession but also wof generous welfare state income support programs, student grants and easy-to-obtain white collar employment for those with advanced degrees. Unemployment was being driven, at this point, primarily by deindustrialization and the so-called “energy crisis” in which high oil and coal prices were combining with the early stages of neoliberalism to produce major layoffs in the manufacturing sector. This led to double-digit interest rates on mortgages and bank foreclosures that produced a major crash in real estate prices in the early 80s.

Whether still living in the original 1970s-style rural and urban communes or in more loosely-organized “intentional communities,” of discrete, proximate dwellings sharing resources, that were taking advantage of cheap rents and foreclosures in the deindustrializing rural periphery, this movement shared a general vision.

My intellectual mentor, David Lewis, the climate change activist, giant, firewood collector and founder of the FOOLs (Friends of the Ozone Layer) who lived in the midst of this scene in the Slocan Valley, was able to cut through the many differences in the founding party base to explain their essential basis of unity: the embryo theory.

Whether one were a Bioregionalist doing permacultural subsistence farming in the Shuswap or a Marilyn French-inspired Ecofeminist co-op house in Kitsilano, the idea was that one’s domestic space was the foundation of one’s politics, not merely to the extent that “the personal is the political,” but that our primary job was to create an embryo of the society one wished to create. Bioregionalists focused on living on the land in the way they believed our descendants would need to. Ecofeminists focused on living the non-hierarchical gender relations our descendants would need to. The idea was that if we created the future society “in embryo,” the embryo would grow to the point where these alternative living arrangements would come to encompass all of society, giving birth to a new order.

It followed, then, that the Green Party was to be the most ambitious embryonic project because it was not so much an entity advocating the creation of a new society but the embryo of its future government. The crew that Lewis disparaged as “embrymorons” held that the job of the party was to create a miniature model of the governance of the future feminist confederation of bioregions. Its work was, therefore, to be the new politics. The new politics had already arrived; it just needed to be refined through experimentation.

  • Electoral politics was to be replaced by participatory democracy, so the party would not elect a leader.
  • Voting was to be replaced by consensus, so the party held marathon meetings to achieve unanimity.
  • Countries and provinces were to be replaced by bioregions, so the party chose not to have a central mailing address or office in Ontario or BC.
  • Bioregionalism also meant that, because provincial ridings were not based on valley bottom-based eco-regions, the party would have no riding associations and hold no nomination meetings.
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This worked for a while because the social movements from which the party drew support were communes and intentional community networks. They had built useful, functional institutions like regional barter banks, locally. They came together regionally at gatherings like the Stein Festival and Hat Creek Gathering and, North America-wide there was even the North American Bioregional Congress (NABC), attended by thousands at its zenith.

But we know what happened as economic conditions changed. Land prices began rising again. Neoliberalism began stripping away income support programs like welfare and unemployment insurance. Professionalized music festivals replaced the summer calendar of participatory countercultural gatherings. Even for those with advanced degrees, jobs became scarcer, more insecure and more demanding of adherence to cultural mores and norms. Second wave feminism was fatally weakened by the “porn split” within and “the backlash” without. And the baby boomers got older, more jaded, more tired, more conservative.

Before the Ecofeminist Caucus and their counterparts outside BC lost control of the Green parties of Anglo America, the institutions from which they drew strength withered first. NABC died. Communes and intentional communities flew apart. The rural counterculturalists who remained had to make new accommodations and alliances in collapsing rural communities as mills closed. Former dissidents became the pillars of communities, chairing library boards, running local museums and accepting seats on the Chamber of Commerce and Cattlemen’s Association.

And there was a new wave of Greens, younger people like me, whose politics was motivated by a profound sense of science-based urgency. The Antarctic Ozone Hole opened, then the Arctic Ozone Hole. As the G7 smashed the power of OPEC, the “energy crisis” was replaced by rapidly rising carbon emissions from the coal and oil sectors. A mainstream politics of energy conservation and transition to renewables vanished with the Carter presidency. Not only was there a neoliberal consensus across the spectrum in favour of austerity; the NDP of Roy Romanow and Mike Harcourt were at the forefront of North America’s first fracked gas boom.

For us, it was not enough to work for long-term change. Human civilization was a car flooring the gas off a cliff and someone had to apply the brake. Immediately. And one of the few points where one could exercise immediate pressure was electoral politics. It seemed to us a gross act of negligence for those not interested in doing electoral politics to control a mechanism legally constituted for the purpose of running candidates in elections. Our response to the Greens who identified with M’Gonigle was “do your embryo politics in movement groups; just let us run candidates and try to move the mainstream political discourse, maybe even elect a few people.”

The counter-argument we faced was that somehow the Green Party running candidates was inhibiting others in the movement from practicing the politics of the embryo. But nobody has ever been able to explain how having a Green Party genuinely fight an election without tying both of its hands behind its back inhibits the kind of organizing M’Gonigle and company favour. But we didn’t so much win the argument for an electorally-focused Green Party; the embryo-ists were already collapsing, as a set of linked social movements, due to changing material conditions in North American society.

Today’s Green Party is worse than useless. But trying to construct a time machine to 1980 is not going to help. The reason the Greens are such a problematic force has to do with their decision to align with the emerging professional class produced by the Third Way austerity programs of the 1990s and 00s. Today, the Greens are a party of managers and aspiring managers of the QuaNGO (quasi-non-governmental organization) sector, organizations like BC Spaces for Nature, that blossomed under politicians like Mike Harcourt, under the patronage of family trusts like the Tides and Maytree Foundations or even the sponsorship of Big Oil, like the Pew Charitable Trust, which emerged as a major funder of BC’s environmental movement in the mid-90s.

Yet, despite the sorry state of green electoral politics in this country, we see the rise of a vibrant new, holistic green politics. Thousands of young people have been in the streets this past year, staging climate strikes, demanding a Green New Deal, shutting down ports to stop pipelines, making common cause with indigenous communities to protect their land and stop the genocide they face from a militarized RCMP. They have shouldered past the NGO executive directors, the Green MLAs and city councilors, past those who claimed to be leading them to forge a new politics that responds to the social and economic conditions of the present, and to the escalating extinctions, wildfires, droughts and storms that the climate crisis is producing.

That’s why, last year, four veterans of the struggles of the 1980s that M’Gonigle is seeking to re-litigate founded the BC Ecosocialist Party, not to be led by us, but as a tool, a weapon, that these young people can wield. Because, like the North American Bioregional Congress of the 1980s, the Green Party is a dead organization walking, a historical irrelevancy requiring not reform but a dignified burial.

BC Politics Canadian Politics | fusangite |

Sympathy for the Devil: Understanding Why People Become Anti-Vaxxers

These days, it is at least satisfying to see that, even if the world has not become a better place in the past decade, it has become a place I can predict better. Since my time living in the US during the 2010 midterm elections, I have spent a good amount of time warning people about the rise in anti-scientific belief and conspiracy theories in the US and their slow seizure of the public square.

Unfortunately, many on the political left seem to see identifying conspiracy theory and its wrongness as an end in itself, politically, a tactic for more comprehensively dismissing political movements that are gaining on us every day. As with other phenomena allied with Trumpism, progressive folks see empirical wrongness as some kind of Achilles Heel or sign of inevitable defeat, and therefore reassuring. An increasingly elitist, siloed and out-of-touch left rarely thinks to ask itself: “why are these movements succeeding?” or, more importantly, “what are people getting out of these movements?”

Fundamentally, people do not take on new beliefs or join new social movements if these movements do not meet needs that are not being met elsewhere. If we do not ask ourselves what false beliefs are being used for, we have little hope of competing against those beliefs and the movements that peddle them.

So, I thought I might use today’s post to think a little more creatively and compassionately about one of the movements out there whose teachings are not merely wrong but cause unnecessary deaths of children with some frequency. Unlike many movements that are astroturfed by corporate wealth, the “Anti-Vaxx” movement is the very opposite. Its adherents persist in their anti-childhood vaccination campaigns despite facing the opposition of Big Pharma, one of the most ruthless and powerful industry groups in the world today, bigger, scarier and more popular than Big Tobacco.

So, why is the Anti-Vaxx movement so popular and why are its adherents so willing to donate volunteer time?

The core of the Anti-Vaxx movement are parents of autistic children who believe that childhood vaccinations cause autism. Their activism is focused on convincing other parents not to vaccinate their children, thereby preventing them from developing this often-crippling neurological disability. Why would a group of cash-strapped parents, many already run ragged caring for disabled kids with negligible help from the state or their community, throw themselves into this work?

Exactly. What if this is not an obstacle to Anti-Vaxx activism but a reason for said activism?

One of the dominant feelings for the parents and guardians of autistic kids is one of powerlessness. No matter how hard they work, how much love they show, how many new or controversial treatments they try out, etc. they feel powerless over the child’s disability, in an endless process of triage in which, not just their child but their whole family suffers day in-day out.

They can attend support groups and talk about that feeling of powerlessness but it never goes away. They can commiserate with the other parents of autistic kids but such experiences of social solidarity and companionship, as often as not, serve to entrench those feelings of powerlessness as one meets parents who have been struggling with non-verbal or non-responsive kids into young adulthood, with no sign of improvement on the horizon.

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But let us imagine how different the experience would be if one could join a support group and, instead of sharing experiences of frustration and loss, the focus of the support group was to stop autism? Going to the support group would suddenly take on a very different character. Even if one’s own child could not be cured, the hope of an end to autism could be real, and one’s own loss could be balanced against achieving a greater social goal that would spare other parents from ever having to join such a group. That is what the Anti-Vaxx movement offers.

In many communities, seeing oneself as a victim or a member of a marginalized group requiring pity or accommodation is something shameful and plays to only certain kinds of personalities. Imagine an autism support group full of people whose primary self-image is not as victims but as heroes. Again, that is what the Anti-Vaxx movement can offer: a chance to create community with the parents in other families afflicted with autism based not on a shared victimhood but shared heroism.

In many smaller communities, there might not be a local autism support group but there might be a handful of Anti-Vaxxers. Furthermore, those who join the movement despite not having autistic kids but because they believe they have been screwed-over by Big Pharma in some other way, like survivors of benzodiazepine or opioid addiction are not just a source of camaraderie but people who can help lighten one’s burden as a caregiver in small, material ways.

So, let us be clear on some of the values that underpin the Anti-Vaxx movement: compassion, solidarity, camaraderie, heroism, altruism. In a neoliberal, individualistic society in which family support and help is becoming scarcer, people are coming together and offering each other not just material support and camaraderie but a psychological lifeline in the form a narrative of heroism for people struggling to put one foot in front of the other.

Another feature of communities brutalized by the pharmaceutical industry and of parents with negligible respite care and a school system that rations education assistants in school to the point where parents are routinely called to take their kid home when the SEA’s shift is over is the experience of being talked down-to by experts and authority figures.

Unlike the twentieth century, when we believed in Thomas Paine’s theory of common sense and people were allowed to explain science on the news, the twenty-first century is a time when the cult of expertise means that “it’s science; you wouldn’t understand,” is the stock response of the commissar class and the caring professions when questioned by lay people.

The Anti-Vaxx movement reverses this too. It believes, for better or worse, that anyone can read and figure out fairly advanced neuroscience; it has faith that if people “do their research,” they will come to the same conclusion, the very opposite of the movement responding to the climate crisis, which emphasizes expert authority and is deeply distrustful of any public debate of science. Furthermore, the movement gives its members the confidence to talk back to experts and authority figures, to stand their ground, to act like heroes and to proclaim a hope for a better world in the future.

If these folks weren’t killing all those kids, I might well join up!

For my earlier writing on autism, there is this post.

Miscellaneous Articles | fusangite |

Why Use Laws to Stop Covid-19 When You Can Have a Moral Panic Instead?

Statistically speaking, British Columbians have been a lucky lucky bunch so far in the Coronavirus global pandemic. Compared to our immediate neighbours, Alberta and Washington, we have enjoyed low rates of infection, low death rates and have not run out of hospital beds for Covid-19 patients once.

Given the relatively lax rules concerning the industrial, building trades and agricultural sectors compared to California, Ontario, Québec and New York, where things are going far worse, we have to acknowledge that at least some of this is a result of sheer luck. But luck can, by no means, account for all of the difference.

One reason we have been touched comparatively lightly so far is culture. Like so many people my age, when I think about the place I am from, I imagine it as it was when I first became an adult and developed impressions of it. For me, BC will, in a way, always be located in 1994. It will always be a rough and tumble place whose politics is dominated by its industrial hinterland, a culture where the populist demagogues of the right squared off with the populist demagogues of the left to capture the imagination of Williams Lake, Merritt and Port Alberni.

But it is not that place anymore. One of the reasons I feel so much more comfortable in Prince George than in my home town of Vancouver is that it is hard to find BC’s old populist, mill town culture, even when there is still a nearby mill. The huge urban majority of the southwest that dominates our politics and culture has changed a lot; its politics don’t follow the lead of Campbell River; they follow the lead of the Napa Valley. Our people are, for the most part, no longer a populist lot but are, instead part of the coastal progressive urban culture of Anglo America’s Pacific and Atlantic coasts.

Meanwhile, Ontario, which used to be the centre of Anglo progressivism in Canada is now full of angry, confused, politically volatile populists represented by characters like Doug Ford. Toronto may be Chicago-north but it is surrounded an Ontario that is far more Michigan than Illinois.

This was brought home to me when I was chatting with a guy in my building about a month after Covid hit and I asked him why he thought we were comparatively unscathed, compared to his relatives’ home, Toronto. He responded that it was because BC’s Chief Medical Health Officer, Bonnie Henry, had ordered major lockdowns all over the province, banned travel, banned evictions and shut down the entire manufacturing and building trades sectors. Ontario, on the other hand, hadn’t done those things. So they were reaping what they had sewn.

Except, of course, that the opposite was true.

Ontario had ordered an industrial shutdown and BC had refused to. Ontario had shut down most construction and BC had refused to. BC had even gone so far as to strip local governments of the right to enact more stringent emergency measures and forced travelers into jurisdictions unwilling to accept them. 

But, I realized, there was a way in which what my neighbour was saying actually was true. People in BC had acted as though nearly every piece of non-binding advice Henry had given them was a law being enforced at gun point. Meanwhile, Ontario’s industrial leaders and their workers just assumed Ford was blustering and grandstanding; he couldn’t really have meant for them to shut down.

BC has become such a progressive place, such a Approaching online drug store is more convenient viagra cheapest pharmacy rather than OTC medicines. The process starts with the sexual arousal, and the brain discount levitra online provides signals to the penile nerve actively. Once the sexual intercourse is over, these veins open up again and blood flows in a normal manner and the person is able to sustain erection properly and get rid of all kinds of difficulties regarding email and stuff. discount tadalafil Many people using this medicine do not have serious side cialis brand online effects. worshipper of technocratic authority that, in addition to making icons, shoes and beverages in tribute to Henry, they treat her word as something better than law, as gospel. Essentially, BC has, culturally, become a place that epitomizes the great neoliberal law enforcement principle, “voluntary compliance.”

This key aspect of BC culture is about to serve our government even better as we enter the next stage of Covid response, i.e. where we call low-wage workers back to work in dangerous and unnecessary jobs like restaurant wait staff to “reopen the economy.” To be clear, folks, “the economy” has never been closed. We just reduced the number of activities in the economy likely to cause pointless deaths. But, because some businesses might go under and our economy might shrink, we have decided to end special pandemic income assistance programs and tell bars, pubs and restaurants to reopen so that, even if people want to stay away from their old table waiting or night club bouncer or exotic dancer job, the government will force them to return to work by ending the eviction moratorium and CERB, giving them a choice to return to a high-risk job or be thrown onto the street.

Consequently, we know the number of Covid cases will continue to rise as the government makes more decisions to forcibly march people back to work at high-risk jobs.

As we watch these cases increase, a logical response might be to issue a new order to close restaurant and club table service; we might also close public space conducive to large, tightly-packed crowds gathering or, heaven forbid, enact laws at the provincial, federal or municipal level to permit ticketing and fining of events that violate our non-binding crowd guidelines.

In response to the rise in cases the past week following the “reopening,” the government could be making and enforcing laws that keep us safe and housed. Instead, there has been a pivot.

Remember when everything was on fire on a scale never seen before, when wildfires destroyed homes, towns and wreathed the West in smoke for months? There was the evacuation of Fort MacMurray as it almost seemed like God was forcing the tar sands industrial complex to reap what it had sown.

Canada’s capitalist governments and media began focusing on how young people were being careless by smoking when camping or violating campfire bans. A picture began to be painted, showing the true culprits: people in their early twenties, having too good a time, being self-centred and not caring about their elders, disrespecting authority and causing death and ruin with their youthful inattention and carelessness.

It is these images that our government sought to replace other images in our minds, of Stephen Harper, of Royal Dutch Shell, of Suncor, of Enbridge, the image of a field of oil wells, giving way to an image of scantily-clad young people smoking a joint in the woods, having too good a time at all our expense.

This is a kind of moral panic, a cultural phenomenon whereby a society becomes very concerned about something suddenly and seeks to exculpate itself from blame and instead blame contemporary youth culture for whatever the problem. Blame for increased property crime is shifted away from addiction, mental health and collapse of the welfare state and onto “youth gangs,” ideally racialized ones. Blame for a planet burning to death is shifted from Big Oil and onto young hosers smoking a joint and looking at the stars.

Make no mistake: BC’s establishment has decided to cover the fact that they are willing to kill people to make more money in the hospitality sector by creating a moral panic. Look at al those photos out there suddenly of all those attractive young people in bathing suits. (Don’t you wish you looked that good still? Don’t you wish those young people would sleep with you instead of each other? Isn’t a disgrace that they don’t even know who you are, much less respect you?) Look at their smug, indifferent expressions, smiling and drinking!

The government’s reaction to these kids is, of course, not to enact or enforce laws to stop them doing this sort of thing, as with other matters of life and death, seat belts or non-smoking areas. No. It is to beg them, plead with them, scold them, via a program they do not watch or listen to, to please please stop. Because, as I stated early in the pandemic, the scolding is the point.

Every day, we could issue an order or make a law. But we don’t.

In fact, these young people need to keep making these displays and then being scolded because that is the cover the local bar owner needs in order to recall his youthful serving staff, who are working madly to avoid eviction, and not at the beach at all. Those youthful serving staff can then serve the older, richer people who, by the end of the night, will often be too disinhibited to physically distance, even if they wished to. And when deaths begin to further escalate, nobody will be looking at the bar; everyone will be looking at kids at the beach.

And the best thing about our made-in-BC moral panic is that our province’s newly progressive culture of voluntary compliance will feel guiltless about blaming young hosers and their party on Okanagan Lake for the deaths of those forced back to work in a vortex of contagion, by heartless government policy decisions. In fact, we will happily conflate and confuse these two groups because of their youth and think that all those servers probably had it coming. After all, they were not voluntarily compliant; and that’s un-British Columbian.

Blaming youth culture for the results of systemic oppression and inequality: that’s BC!

BC Politics | fusangite |

The New Babel or How the Echo Chamber Became Its Own Opposite

In the Jewish Bible or Old Testament, one of the most memorable stories is that of the Tower of Babel, a story of human hubris. The people of Babel used their vast wealth and power to build a great tower that symbolized their hegemony over the lands they ruled. They build the tower so high and, consequently, placed so much of the world under its sway that the Lord confounded the languages of the people and destroyed the tower, shattering Babel’s hegemony.

Today, the story is taking place in reverse. The world over, new forms of authoritarian rule are arising through an increasingly close alliance between social movements that hold ideas of liberty and equality in contempt and an increasingly powerful oligarchic billionaire class. Prominent in this billionaire class is Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and he, like other media and communications oligarchs are making the construction of these new Towers of Babel possible by confounding the language of the people.

Our communities are becoming, as a consequence, increasingly separated by political alignment and identity. Political content and political debates increasingly dominate media that previously were focused on familial or aesthetic connections. While Facebook rewards people for performing all kinds of difference from one another, political difference often produces the greatest rewards. Of course, this is not limited to social media. Attempts by news organizations to draw audiences from across the political spectrum are all but over.

For many years, now, people have been saying that this is producing political “echo chambers,” except that this has entailed redefining what an echo chamber is. Supposedly, an echo chamber is one in which one says something and it echoes back verbatim, perfectly. Allegedly, in an echo chamber, one hears one’s own words, one’s own views repeated back.

Except that is not what echo chambers actually are, or were before the second decade of the twenty-first century. Echo chambers are actually the opposite. Echo chambers have long been used in music and other fields to make conventional sounds seem uncanny or incomprehensible. Sound is issued into the chamber from a voice or instrument and it begins a chaotic (in the mathematical sense), escalating process of echoing and reverberation with sound overlaying sound overlaying sound. After a few minutes, in a real echo chamber, there are no longer distinct words or sounds, just the complex interplay of increasingly distorted, unrecognizable echos.

An echo chamber, then, is the auditory equivalent of a funhouse mirrors at the carnival, except that the reflections iterate for so long and with such complexity that the reflections can barely be recognized as human.

Rather than producing ideological conformity and shared political analyses, forces like Fox and Facebook do not function so much as the hypothetical echo chambers of the present but like the literal echo chambers of the past. When we type words into Facebook threads, they transform from ideas to talking points to nonsense. And they grow increasingly nonsensical as they bounce off not just other people’s words but the words we have previously typed; in fact, they go beyond nonsensical; they become uncanny, familiar words distorted into something frightening and alien.

When we engage in the politics of small difference within a community bounded, if not by ideology, then, at least a set of shared political positions, one would assume that the combination of a shared critical vocabulary and shared aims would make debate possible. But the reverse is true. That is because “if-then” and comparative reasoning have been eviscerated by standpoint epistemology. An emerging consensus across, for want of a better word, ideological communities believes that truth-making and truth-seeking processes do not exist in the intersubjective space where our conversations reside. The truth is no longer the argument most participants in a debate, agree to, through the presentation of evidence and the practice of reason, because truth is no longer located in intersubjective space. The conversation is not the thing that produces truth; it is the place to which you report subjective truths already produced.

Conversation, then, tends to comprise competing claims of the validity of one’s subjective truth; this typically involves claiming membership in an identity group and then arguing that this identity group is the one vested with authority to report what is true. Among what I am increasingly tempted to call the “fake left,” this involves claims of membership in a marginalized or stigmatized identity group. An act of oppression calculus then takes place to review evidence not about the person’s argument but their claims of marginalization. Whether a person able to pass as white can make a claim to authority based on being a member of a racialized group must be adjudicated—it is here, ironically, the intersubjective truth-making does take place; the authority of the crowd is relevant but only insofar as it situates one’s identitarian credentials but not in whether one’s claim makes logical sense or is supported by evidence—and pronounced upon.

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On the right, the same ideas obtain, right down to the narration of victimization and marginalization. Except that the stories are of white male failure and white male victimhood. A man was passed over for a promotion in favour of a woman; a white person lost out to a person of colour; a business owner went bankrupt; a white Christian had to attend a Kwanza’a party for work. Once adjudged the biggest white failure in the room, the man—and inevitably it is a man—can then narrate what’s “really going on,” with Antifa and Black Lives Matter being paid millions of dollars by George Soros to destroy Christianity, or whatever.

Once one has won the argument as to the superior oppression calculus credentials, one may then report the truth. But truth, at this point, is increasingly presented not as an if-then syllogism but instead as a talking point or set thereof.

I have written about talking points before, a new speech style developed during the deregulation of 1980s neoliberalism to shield corporations from liability for increasingly frequent product recalls and industrial accidents. Following the Bhopal Union Carbide disaster that killed hundreds of thousands, the firm handling the file, Burson-Marsteller pioneered specialization in “crisis communications,” PR strategies designed to minimize the effects of corporate malfeasance.

Central to crisis communications is the use of “talking points.” Talking points are one or more mantras corporate representatives are taught to repeatedly intone during interviews with media. Their purpose is not to offer answers or inform listeners or viewers but instead to beat meaning out of conversations by repeating a slogan that appears, superficially, to relate to the matter under discussion but never to the question that has been asked. By breaking down conversational interchange, itself, corporate representatives could concurrently bore and confuse their audience, ultimately causing them to tune out because no sense was being made.

After all, the first rule of crisis communications is never to answer the question you have been asked but simply to present one’s talking points brazenly as a non-sequitur.

Talking points soon metastasized into electoral politics and were used to great effect by the apologists for neoliberalism to produce confusion and disengagement, the next best thing to actual consent of the governed. But either as part of Third Way popular front politics or simply because of the discourse environment, what passes for a left began to adopt talking points language but with no understanding of what it was for or what it could successfully do.

Of those on the putative left, organizations that identify as progressive are the most likely to believe in the use of talking points, believing that if one can reduce one’s ideas into a set of koan-like non-responses that roll off the tongue well, one is somehow meeting the right on its own field of battle, using its own weapons and can therefore win the day, not understanding that important Orwellian lesson that nonsense is not politically neutral; it serves the oppressor.

In this way, argument becomes impossible because an increasing portion of every conversation is both nonsensical and non-responsive. People are asked to “check their privilege,” as though there a privilege-check boy waiting them at some metaphorical coat-room, who could somehow relocate them closer to a subject position closer to ideal victimhood if tipped well enough. This is a talking point amongst talking points, impossible, non-responsive and designed to address solely the authority of the speaker, not the veracity of the argument.

And so the tower grows higher, Mark Zuckerberg standing atop it, its panopticon enabling the creation of a new kind of hegemony through the confounding of language itself.

Politics of Epistemology | fusangite |

“And that is why I have decided to call this album ‘Frank Sings Tunes that the Young People Will Enjoy'”: the Children of the Gentry Won’t Save Us

On May 22nd, 1982, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch in which Joe Piscopo played Frank Sinatra who, late in his career, had decided to make his music more relevant to young people. “And that is why I have decided to call this album,” Piscopo’s Sinatra shouted, “FRANK SINGS TUNES THAT THE YOUNG PEOPLE WILL ENJOY.”

I quote this sketch all the time because its thematic material is just as relevant to the business of left-wing activism as it is to music, perhaps more so. Doing non-monetized activism for socialist and environmentalist causes is hard, demoralizing work that is often characterized by simultaneous conflict with one’s adversaries and one’s putative allies. Often, in the chaos of an ever-changing matrix of movement groups, leadership classes and ideological fads, it is difficult to maintain one’s bearings and, relatedly, one’s relevance in the larger activist community.

A common solution to this problem is to associate oneself with “the young people,” a nebulous category that allows one to cherry-pick a set of allies from a wide diversity of youth movements that are engaging in the activist world at any given time. If one is associated with young people and their activism, it does redound to the relevance and popularity of one’s own. This, in turn, has led to a strange fetishization of associations with youthful people, language and culture on the left that often functions—in and of itself—as a source of legitimacy.

Lest people get me wrong here, let me make clear that I began not just as a young activist but as a youth activist; my longest-running activist campaign in the 1980s was fighting for abolition of the voting age, beginning in 1985. I desperately wanted to work, as an equal, with older activists than myself. It was at this time that I first noticed this fetishization, what youth were for in the larger left activist context: we were cultural and aesthetic props in the life narratives of older folks. As a profoundly uncool kid, devoid of musical taste, fashion sense or association with any youth cultural activity cooler than Dungeons and Dragons, I was quite useless for these purposes.

While I was able to build a movement of hundreds of young, fee-paying members, my total lack of youth cultural capital made this movement pariahs among older activists who were eager to patronize young scenesters who could confer the kind of cultural capital they sought.

Another thing that kept my movement and me safely away from more powerful, senior allies was our lack of association with the university system. I dropped out of university in 1990 to be an activist full-time and this had been preceded by a prodigious career of skipping school. Few of my associates, even the cool ones, went to university. So it was that even though my closest organizing associate, Paul, was a good-looking musician and smooth talker, he also found himself far from any patronage, being a full-time worker with no postsecondary credentials.

This is because the youth culture that is most likely to be fetishized on the left is the youth culture that is best publicized, richest in cash, whitest and highest-status, in other words, the culture of the children of the bourgeoisie. This culture is the most resourced to put on public events, the target of most youth-focused advertising and the For more information, please visit 99eyao website: Or see related articles like White Discharge after Urination or Stool Not Always Prostatitis: Prostatitis is a cialis canada cheap common andrology disease, and usually occurs in young adults, middle-aged men, the prevalence rate was nearly 20%. How can one buy kamagra? Every form is obtainable through sildenafil buy a registered drugstore;one can also buy Kamagra tablets or other product for good sexual health. The safe and all natural women viagra canada pharmacies sex capsule in India: Fezinilcapsule is the valuable and amazing sex capsule for female. Psychosexual therapy is one among the widely prescribed treatments for impotence in old cialis without prescription uk age. easiest to find: they are on the campus of your local North American liberal arts college, Centre, Brown, Bishop’s or Quest.

They have plenty of time during the day to stage small rallies and be interviewed by the media. They have institutional support to assist them in producing publications and holding events. They are often the ones with the gumption to shoulder-past other organizers to stand at the front of a march, literally and figuratively. They are not the kids organizing other Uber drivers to unionize, other cashiers to strike for higher pay, other illegal immigrants to obtain sanctuary; they are not even easy to find at your local polytechnic institution.

Back in the 1960s, the culture of this group did spread from the small elite colleges to the major public universities, giving rise to the counterculture and getting a lot of bodies to marches and protests. Children of the working class and petit bourgeoisie became, for a short time, a portion of that culture, but only at the zenith of the welfare state when student grants were plentiful and tuition fees negligible.

Nevertheless, people look back with fond nostalgia for what the Great Society and the Pearsonian Welfare State created in the US and Canada, this dazzling period of protest. And yet, in hindsight, when we look at the real political gains that were made, we credit the movements that were mostly not absorbed into the counterculture. The Southern Christian Leadership Convention stands out; the Black Panthers stand out; quiet revolutionaries like Therese Casgrain and Pierre Bourgault stand out; the Yippies do not.

Some scholars today feel that the spread of the Counterculture, i.e. the youth culture of the bourgeoisie, actually inhibited and foreclosed the growing revolutionary possibilities that the material and legal realignments of the Great Society made possible. This reappraisal has been part of a larger intellectual phenomenon to reassess the Baby Boomers as a generation and emphasize the similarities rather than the differences between today’s Fox News viewers and occupiers of university administration buildings demanding that they be able to grade themselves.

It is in this light that we might want to worry about making the same mistake again. Today, there are so many youth-driven movements on things that matter to older activists like me: the climate strikes, the unionization drives, Black Lives Matter and a host of others. But in our efforts to “sing tunes that the young people will enjoy,” we make two major errors that compound with one another.

First, we assume that the culture of the young people actually getting things done is the same as the youth culture of Centre College, Brown or Dartmouth. Second, we assume that because this culture views cultural conformity and the ability to enforce new cultural norms as highly important, that more relevant young activists do too. I fear that we are wrong on both counts and that, even as #OkBoomer has become a witty intervention against the sanctimonious bullshit of history’s most entitled generation, we are repeating the very error of Boomer era and confusing the culture of the children of the elite with revolutionary practice.

There are a lot of kids out there to admire. Let’s take some time to choose the right ones.

BC Politics Canadian Politics US Politics | fusangite |

What is Identitarianism? – Part IV

To recap, then, here are some key features of modern Identitarianism:

  1. It is a system of etiquette that shares with other etiquette systems the properties of being occult, complex and faddish
  2. It is a system of etiquette that shares with others a politics and practice of honour and offense in which misidentification of a person is the chief offense
  3. It is premised on identity and ontology being functionally identical, that one’s very existence is premised on identity and that misidentification is a kind of attempted or threatened murder
  4. Like other systems of honour and offense, it is mainly enacted when another person of equal or lesser rank to one’s own is dishonoured and satisfaction must be given
  5. It values traditional, conservative forms of identity linked to labour exploitation, i.e. race and gender and sees these identities as emancipatory rather than oppressive
  6. It sees traditional, conservative forms of identity not merely as helpful ways of constructing a self but as having exclusive possession of knowledge unavailable to those outside those identities
  7. It sees identity as how one imagines oneself in one’s mind’s eye, unmediated by society or the physical world
  8. It is democratic and seeks to make its social practices and experiences of honour and offense universally available rather than confined to a class

What this means is that if someone acts as though another person is not who they claim they are, that person has breached Identitarian etiquette and can then be subject to social sanction. This is part of phenomena I have previously identified as “privatized reputation” and “large, porous selves.” In this way, Identitarian offense politics can and do extend further than previous regimes of honour and etiquette. In other words, to say “you are not who you claim to be” or, equally offensively, “he is not who he claims to be” is a kind of death threat and merits an immediate expression of offense.

Three of these are exemplified in our society’s reimagination of transgender people in Identitarian terms. Pretty much every human society has had transgender members because schemes of gender are naturally incomplete, non-descriptive and, most importantly, oppressive. But in none of those societies has there been the kind of pronoun politics we have now.

In other regimes of etiquette, offense is caused by using the incorrect second person pronoun when addressing people i.e. “tu” is used in place of “usted” in Spanish or “vous” in French to debase the rank of one’s interlocutor intentionally or unintentionally. Today, offense-causing with pronouns comes from using the incorrect third person pronoun when talking about people. What this means is that a person’s honour can be attacked when they are not even present. Any person who knows the individual’s gender (i.e. the gender they see themselves having in their mind’s eye) can intervene and upbraid the offender for dishonouring the aggrieved party.

In this way, a gap between the correct form of address and the appearance of the person being addressed can be policed by any person and can fluctuate without the appearance of the person changing. While one’s gender expression takes work to change, through pharmaceuticals, clothing purchases, surgery, behavioural training, etc., one’s gender identity can change instantaneously and repeatedly with none of the lag experienced in changing one’s gender expression.

By severing “expression” and “identity,” the work of the Born Again movement is complete. It is explicit that who a person appears to others to be and who they actually are two independent variables that may fluctuate without reference to the other. In this way, an individual who has carefully observed another person’s gender expression and spoken about them on that basis when talking about that expression might be upbraided by anyone possessing the occult knowledge of the person’s true gender.

One can look from India to Japan to Montana to New Mexico to Mauretania from 1000 BCE to the late twentieth century and find no other society in which trans culture contained this theory of offense. And that is because it has nothing to do with being a gender-non-conforming person; it is tethered to recent elaboration of late-stage capitalism, Identitarianism.

Another place where we see Identitarianism hiding behind some piece of allegedly trans culture that has just appeared out of nowhere in less than a generation is the idea that people who do not reciprocate the sexual desire of transgender people are bigots who must work to change this view. This view tends to be expressed with the greatest vehemence about lesbians who only wish to sleep with other cis women and not with trans women. Organized groups of these lesbians have faced campaigns by Identitarians, putatively on behalf of trans women, to remove them from pride celebrations, dyke marches and other organized queer solidarity and feminist events.

But much more concerning is the idea propounded, with almost none of the push-back one would hope for, that cis lesbian women with no attraction to trans women should have sex with them anyway.

No one should want to sleep with people who are not attracted to you. A healthy person who lusts after another person wants them to experience the same attraction they are experiencing. But Identitarianism occludes that because it conceptualizes the feelings and thoughts others have about you, even when you are not there, as part of a package of rights you believe you have. It is your right to be seen as you see yourself in your mind’s eye and you are dishonoured whenever someone does not do that.

A third is a hyper-conservative element best described in the slogan “trans women are women.” Even in cultures that do not assign a third, fourth or nth gender to gender-nonconforming people, they nevertheless decide that a trans person is a kind of a woman or a kind of a man. The idea that trans people should have identical rights and experiences to cis people is rendered absurd quickly when gender identity is built in intersubjective or objective space. But when it is built in subjective space, one ends up with absurd situations like Jessica Yaniv demanding that her penis be seen-to by a gynecologist.

Trans people and cis people have different medical needs, have different social impacts on environments, different life narrative structures; recognizing these forms of difference is vital in creating a diverse, inclusive society that accepts trans people.

But, because Identitarianism is a set of etiquette practices is not a coherent, self-consistent theory or even something mainly made out of Wrong propaganda “Nonfat, no cholesterol” has brought Americans to high carbohydrate diet full levitra online sales of the sugars. This makes shopping simple and even trouble free pamelaannschoolofdance.com buy viagra for customers. There are two reasons behind this : firstly, viagra for sale mastercard is a prescription drug which can only be obtained with a prescription from your doctor. When it comes to ED problem, it has no linked with age and it can happen to men in their 40’s and 50’s, while Tadalafil is marketed with less than 5% of the marketing budget afforded to check out that pamelaannschoolofdance.com cialis generika. ideas, the very differences that must be accommodated can be effaced or denied at any time when an etiquette breach takes place.

Whereas traditional models of pluralism and accommodation of gender non-conformity have included acceptance of body-shapes, vocal registers and patterns of gesticulation that are not cliched or cartoonish representations of the two normative genders, this too, has been turned on its head. Because there is only one kind of woman and one kind of man, it is now considered a medical necessity for trans people to be taught the most conservative, conventional ways of dressing, speaking, walking, acting. Training in being “ladylike” or “manly” is now understood to be part of a liberatory agenda.

Furthermore, as state school systems adopt gender affirmation policies, it is increasingly the obligation of the state and its agents to police conformity to gender norms and to inquire of boys that do not have fistfights and girls who dislike dolls whether they are “really” boys or girls in their mind’s eye. If not, the state is obliged to assist them through surgery and pharmaceuticals into matching their mental image of themselves to physical reality.

This, to me, is a thought experiment that reveals much about the true underpinnings of Identitarianism. It is analogous to the common antebellum South thought experiment of asking a the child of a planter how his slaves would serve him when he went to heaven. The true function of the thought experiment is to make an oppressive class order seem so totalizing, so structuring that emancipation from it becomes inconveivable because it transcends time, death and the physical world itself. The point is to render inconceivable a revolution that throws off the shackles of race and gender by imagining those things as so universal that they are coterminous with existence itself.

But while so much of the debate about Identitarianism has swirled around trans communities and has cast disproportionate and unfair shade on them, I believe this is, itself, a misogynistic ruse.

At the end of the day, Identitarianism is a set of social practices that reinforce two of the darkest, most pernicious forces on earth.

First, it seeks to increase involvement in, support of and commitment to race and gender as not merely real but positive forces and it mobilizes literally millions of people into policing race and gender boundaries every day. Because Identitarianism is non-ideological and offense-based, these conflicts tend to be inconclusive and illogical, making them more protracted and divisive and increasing people’s investment in them. Because controlling what others understand one’s race and gender to be is literally a matter of life and death, there is a bottomless pit of offense and conflict into which one may descend. After all, knowledge, itself, is a property of identity so there can be no meeting of the minds even on the subject of valid evidence. Consequently, we see Identitarianism destroying solidarity and creating division, constantly generating new flare-ups of offense.

But let us look beyond the movement politics of liberals, progressives and leftists and look at the true ambit of Identitarianism. The systems of incentives that keep this new etiquette system in place do not live in contested restroom space or the Take Back the Night march.

They live in white suburban homes where patriarchs use violence to make their daughters wear dresses and their sons, trousers, lest their costume impugn the manliness of their father. They live in conservative evangelical schools where there is a new sense of urgency in making sure all the little boys fight and all the little girls have dolls. They live in the Trump movement where thousands of black and Latino voters wave racist signs because they are white in their mind’s eyes.

Similarly, the politics of Identitarian rape, in which other people’s attraction to you is a right you possess and not a feeling they have, the true beneficiaries are not the trans women who broke into Rape Relief Women’s Shelter and defaced its library with penis drawings, or even the male prisoners in the British prison system who change their gender identity (but not expression) to female to engage in sexual predation.

The true beneficiaries are the Incel movement. The overwhelming majority of Incels do not have prosthetic breasts and do not plan ever to obtain them. There is nothing feminine or gender-non-conforming about their gender expression or their gender identity. In the vast majority of Incels’ minds’ eyes, they are a virile, commanding muscular man being serviced not by a solitary lesbian but by seventy-two virgins or some evangelical Christian equivalent.

While our attention has been directed by our own desire to police boundaries, by services like Tumblr and by the news media to the way Identitarianism impacts small communities of feminists, queer and gender non-conforming people, this is a sideshow to distract from the primary beneficiaries: rapists and racists.

Identitarianism is the ultimate ideology of male rape because it places these two crucial liberatory statements off-limits “you are not who you say you are” and “he is not who he says he is.” Race is good. Gender is good. They liberate you. But the one thing you cannot do is question the claims a person makes about who they really are.

In this way, it is most descriptive not of liberal progressivism but of Trumpism. Donald Trump is stupid. Donald Trump rapes women. The Trumpites, as proper Identitarians, are deeply offended on his behalf when someone calls him stupid because they know that in his mind’s eye, he is a “very stable genius.” The veracity of the claim does not enter into it because the claim is offensive irrespective of its veracity and demands satisfaction.

Similarly, Donald Trump can call the neo-Nazi Charlottesville marchers “very good people” because, in those men’s mind’s eyes, like all generations of torch-wielding Klansmen back to 1865, they are “very good people.” And those who would say otherwise have dishonoured them because who they are is theirs. Finally, Donald Trump’s ability to rape and to keep raping—and that of most other prolific rapists—inheres in it being impermissible to say “you are not who you say you are” or, more importantly, “he is a rapist,” because in Identitarianism, Trump is not a rapist (a) because he doesn’t look like one in his mind’s eye and (b) because raping you was his right, not your experience.

You can register for my course here.

Politics of Identity | fusangite |