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Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence

This Drag Is Not Drag and These Queens Are Not Queens

The Struggle to Publish
I have dithered about putting this post on my blog for nearly two months, hoping against hope that someone else with my knowledge would write an essay that I could just point at. I say this, first, because I try to limit my posts about current debates around gender in our society to guest writing on other forums so that my blog can focus on longer-term writing projects like epistemology, environmentalism and socialism

I say this, second, because I have to disclose some things about myself that I find embarrassing, whether I should find them to be so or not.

But I have decided to break down and make this post here because the issue it is confronting remains highly relevant and because of the way cancelation campaigns against me have escalated in bizarre and new ways, increasing my sense urgency around child safeguarding.

The Redefinition of “Drag”

When you are staring down people who have achieved the power they have by mastering the art of Newspeak, it is important to examine the ways in which they tilt the table, discursively, in any debate they have with you. Those critical of the Gender Orthodoxy and other aspects of Newspeak-leavened Wokeness are better than many at spotting the embedded intellectual bad faith; nevertheless, I think some crucial points about the Drag Queen Story Hours are being missed by my comrades.

Drag is a problematic, arguably misogynistic art form that has existed for well over a century in the Global North. It was part of a larger suite of “impersonation art” that flourished during the Cold War and late twentieth century. While its origins were different than Elvis impersonation, that was the category into which mainstream culture placed it once it began to gain legitimacy as an art form in the late 1960s. Some drag performers were full time “female impersonators,” the polite term for transsexuals during the Cold War but most were gay men who did drag on the side.

Like stand-up comedy, drag acts came up through a raunchy club scene, full of profanity, sexual references and drug and alcohol use. But it must be understood that the way the acts functioned at the clubs was by way of contrast. While most clubgoers might be gay or bisexual men dressed provocatively, or at least economically, for the drag act, the drag performer, himself, would comment on this by way of contrast.

Drag performers did not merely hide any sign of their actual primary and secondary sexual characteristics; they presented in the sharpest possible contrast to their audience. This included hyper-feminized “womanface” mannerisms and make-up, in contrast to the hyper-masculine crowd before them. It also included floor-length dresses, enormous and elaborate wigs and high heels, the sort of ensemble normally associated with respectable female entertainers who performed on the Las Vegas stage in the era of the Rat Pack.

These drag performers perfected mimicry, as distinct from mockery, of the female performers they, as attention-seeking, straight-attracted gay men, aspired to but knew they could never actually be. Precision when it came to dance moves in heels, lip syncing and costume mattered. This tradition held into the early twenty-first century because that raunchy club scene of gay bars that hosted entry-level drag shows could graduate its most proficient impersonators onto the Las Vegas stage, or at least onto the stages of Reno and Carson because of the nature of Vegas. Not just drag queens but Elvis impersonators thronged into Nevada; Rich Little and the great mimics and impressionists also congregated there, in Las Vegas, an extension of the replica city aesthetic epitomized in its great pyramid of Cheops and its own Eiffel Tower.

The audiences for drag queens in Nevada were little different than those for other sorts of impersonators. As an extension of the “stays in Vegas” ethos and replica city aesthetics of the place, straight men and women comprised the vast majority of the audience in top-flight female impersonators, who compared the dance techniques, costuming and vocal ranges of performers.

While some drag show viewers were no doubt also sex tourists to Las Vegas, they would not have understood their enjoyment of drag shows as part of their sex tourism, which was taking place down the road at brothels and strip clubs.

But as the twentieth century finished, a drag-adjacent form of entertainment was on the rise; transsexual/“shemale” strip clubs began to pop up in North America’s major cities for men who missed their stay in Thailand or Brazil and those who could not afford to go. I remember when the first ones opened in the mid-00s in Vancouver and Toronto because I, a sexually ambivalent man, was a patron of these establishments for a number of years.

These were utterly unlike either the drag shows at gay bars or the top-flight drag shows of Nevada; and they did not claim to be like them. Capitalizing on increasingly available and successful cosmetic surgical procedures, these clubs were staffed by full-time sex workers whose main clientele were men like me: straight and bisexual men who were attracted to the both highly feminine and clearly uncanny physiological characteristics of the strippers who, as in most strip bars, made their real money in the lap dance rooms. These cosmetic surgeries were expensive and much of the money made went directly into servicing medical debt. Nina Arsenault, one of the most popular performers boasted a $45,000 body.

As a consequence, instead of minimizing masculine features of their appearances, the most successful of the sex workers there concurrently amplified both their masculine and feminine primary and secondary sexual characteristics. Because, unlike female sexuality, male sexuality has plenty of time for the uncanny or, less politely put, the grotesque.

Because it was so clearly work done by surgeons and carefully burnished by its sex worker recipients that had lured us to the basement of a straight strip club in Mississauga, the “dancing” on stage did not hold most patrons’ attention and was performed in a perfunctory manner. None of the vampish showmanship of drag was in evidence. We were there for the uncanny costumes and bodies and the opportunity to unwrap them to reveal forms every bit as uncanny as those in Nero’s Domus Aurea.

After all, let us remember that Dylan Mulvaney did not rise to prominence on TikTok by making videos of himself in evening gowns singing in a falsetto but by giving tips on how to show off the contours of one’s erect penis in a leather mini-skirt.

Children and Drag

So, I want to contest the idea that the thing we are calling Drag Queen Story Hour is a drag show at all. First of all, the performers are not the straight-attracted gay men of either of those bar scenes. They are, overwhelmingly, autogynephilic men, partaking of a kind of Gold Rush hypermasculine sexuality.

But beyond that, their acts resemble, in every way, the transsexual strip clubs of the 00s, not the Vegas drag shows of the 80s. The problem with these “story hours” is that they are mainly hosted by men in grotesque, hypersexualized sex worker work attire. They are no more appropriate for kids than if a professional female stripper and prostitute came in in her work clothes and did her act for a group of children.

How would we feel if that happened, if a female stripper performed her act with children, shaking her genitals at them, exhorting them to put dollar bills in her g-string and instructing them on fellatio techniques. The woman would be jailed and the town would drive her out with pitchforks and torches, and deservedly so.

So, why, exactly, is it okay for men, who commit over 95% of all sex crimes, to engage in this behaviour with our kids?

More disturbing still, and the events that provoked me to come forward about my own sketchy past to offer some firsthand evidence others might not possess, is the idea that if children watching drag is okay, then it is okay for children to do drag. I lost four multi-decade friendships in the past month because I objected to a CBC TV documentary celebrating the “career” of a nine-year-old boy working as an exotic dancer for adults and a vendor of fetish gear to adults at a sex shop.

Leading the charge in the furious denunciations, threats and harassment not just of me but of my close friends was an individual working for Carousel Theatre, a youth theatre company in Vancouver that puts on summer day-camps with government funding to teach performing arts to kids.

I actually attended such a camp in 1981, put on by a precursor organization to Carousel, when I was nine and struggling with having been interfered-with sexually as a child. And I was naturally appalled, as an alumnus of such a camp, that Carousel was running a state-subsidized “drag camp” to teach seven to eleven-year-old boys the fine arts of sexualized cross-dressing and exotic dancing for adult men.

And if someone thinks that this is something it is appropriate for children who still believe in Santa Claus to be doing, I will say of them, what I said of the ghouls at CBC promoting that Montréal child’s sideline in sex work, and what got me into such trouble a month ago, “anyone celebrating this should be dragged through the streets of Seville in chains.”

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

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

The Fall and Rise of Honey Boo Boo

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

It’s the climate.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Fourth Punic War and the Future of the West

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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Four Things Justin Trudeau Won’t Do But Should to Support American Women’s Reproductive Rights

Looking at Canadian Twitter today, the day the US Supreme Court formally struck down Roe v. Wade, and, consequently, limitations on the power of state and federal governments to fine, incarcerate or kill women for ending their pregnancies, I see that we are awash in the subject on which I wrote my last post, post-politics.

Justin Trudeau, our Prime Minister, and Jean Charest, the former Québec premier and no-hoper candidate for Leader of the Opposition were quick to their keyboards this morning with condemnatory words for the US Supreme Court and its latest egregious decision. Normally, when Trudeau and other Canadian progressives try to piggyback US news stories, like mass shootings, by staking-out popular positions with watchers of Trevor Noah and Stephen Colbert, I just sigh and put it down to the post-political era in which we live.

It’s not like there is anything Canadians can do about American mass shootings or Floridian children being prohibited from sitting on library drag queens’ laps during school hours, or whatever the issue of the moment is. Canadian politicians sound off and Canadians who have given up on politics but still like striking a certain pose on American issues cheer them on.

But this is not the case when it comes to the overturning of Roe v. Wade. It’s not a choice between Canadian opinion leaders either taking to Twitter to offer harsh words and witty banter to score meaningless points in progressive image curation or declining to do so. American women’s loss of their reproductive rights is actually something to which Canadian public policy not only can respond but to which we should respond.

When I first started listening to the news on a daily basis, I was about eleven years old and I listened to the big CBC Radio news programs that were produced at the zenith of state-sponsored Cold War liberal journalism. As It Happens, The World at Six and the extended 10:00pm news before Book Time were staples of my day. The struggle against Apartheid looms large in those memories of the mid-1980s, as does the terminal phase of the Cold War; rivaling that were the Liverpool Ferry stories.

Back in the mid-80s, Ireland was still a conservative theocratic state and the centrepiece of its claim to being a Catholic nation was its absolute zero tolerance for abortion. No matter how young a girl was, no matter who had inseminated her, no legal abortions were available in Ireland. While there were decent underground abortion doctors in Ireland, they faced stiff legal penalties if caught and were, consequently, hard to find, especially for young women who were not plugged into the underground feminist networks and trust-based referral chains that could connect them with reproductive healthcare.

Consequently, the most rational solution to the problem of an unwanted pregnancy was for young women to board the Dublin to Liverpool ferry and have English doctors terminate their pregnancies. Liverpool has long stood as a champion of human rights, all the way back to the eighteenth century when its courts began conferring legal personhood on escaped slaves from Virginia and Georgia. And, even during Thatcherite austerity, Liverpool doctors and hospitals stepped up to help these marginalized young women.

As a result, Ireland began prohibiting pregnant women from leaving the country until they had carried their foetus to term. Police began surveilling the Dublin ferry terminal, sometimes setting up checkpoints and they began greeting formerly pregnant young women returning from Liverpool by clapping them in irons.

Ever since I became transfixed by these stories of girls, some as young as I was back in the day, I have understood that abortion is, like so many other issues connected to women’s bodily autonomy, an international issue about which bordering countries absolutely do have a role to play.

Canadians have a choice today. We can either grandstand and virtue signal or our MPs can head into parliament and start passing laws that make the kind of material difference to American women that the judges and hospital workers of Liverpool made for Irish women in the 1980s.

First of all, we need to amend our refugee legislation. American women who are currently pregnant and wish to end their pregnancies and women who have terminated their pregnancies in defiance of state abortion bans should be accepted as refugees from sex-based discrimination and persecution. Will there be diplomatic consequences to reconfiguring our policies in a way that recognizes the existence of refugees from the USA? You bet. But apparently, we feel strongly about women’s rights; so maybe we should be willing to pay a price for trying to protect them.

Second, we can be the new Liverpool for women in border states like Idaho, where abortion is currently illegal and where the governor and GOP legislative majority are planning to append abortion to the murder statute, literally meaning that women who don’t have a good enough excuse for their miscarriage will end up on death row. Canada should be inviting American organizations that want to provide reproductive health services to set up in Canadian border cities. We should roll out the welcome mat.

Third, whether they are applying for refugee status or just staying for the day to get some outpatient medical treatment, we should be waving women of reproductive age across the border into Canada, including making ID requirement exceptions for women who have not been able to secure expedited passports.

Fourth, we should refuse to share information with federal and state American government agencies that attempt to prevent or track the migration of pregnant women with a view to stopping them getting reproductive healthcare outside their state of residence. Privacy rights are central to the abortion debate; after all, Roe v. Wade was not a court judgement about a medical procedure but about women’s right to privacy.

Canada could take some risks, show some courage and make a material difference in the lives of American women of childbearing age. And any MP from any party could introduce legislation to do what I have outlined tomorrow as a private members’ bill. We could be as courageous in our defense of reproductive choice as Margaret Thatcher’s Britain of the mid-1980s. But I’m not going to be holding my breath.

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Fighting Back

In recent weeks, I have faced a great deal of adversity. My relationship of nearly four years with my partner ended. The separation that followed did not just entail the loss of my beloved from my daily life but of my home and all of the members of the household that she and I built during our time together. Our shared life was undermined by many things, many my fault. But not all. There is no doubt that our current political climate made a significant contribution.

This was followed by the destruction of my campaign for a seat on the Prince George School Board. My campaign launch was attended and endorsed by my comrade Chris Elston, a courageous man who has made it his mission to challenge the rise of Identitarianism in our schools and, in particular, the provincial education policy known as SOGI. SOGI, among its many flaws, requires that teachers in our school system actively mislead parents about their children’s gender identity and has, in the past, resulted in the use of experimental “puberty blockers” and cross-sex hormones on students without their parents’ knowledge or consent. These “blockers” have never been tested on children for the purpose for which they are prescribed and, when combined with hormones and “gender-affirming” surgery frequently result in permanent and irreversible sterility and the loss of sexual function.

SOGI’s confidentiality provisions and full-throated endorsement of novel and disturbing aspects of Identitarianism deserve full public debate. Unfortunately, that is not possible in our current political environment. Indeed, questioning any aspect of the Identitarian orthodoxy has been re-described in our laws and our major institutions as “hate speech” that will allegedly result in the murder and/or suicide of significant numbers of transgender people if anyone hears these questions or entertains doubts about the policy. As a result, saying to a trans-identified person “nobody is born in the wrong body. Your body is beautiful just the way it is,” can now result in a prison sentence for the person saying those words.

It was, therefore, no surprise that my opponent staged a loud protest of my campaign launch because I had invited Chris to speak about the issue. When Chris tried to converse with protesters, they, typical of Identitarians, shouted him down. For some, this decision was a mere political convenience. But, true believers, I am sure, honestly believed that if people could hear Chris’s words, trans-identified children would die in unknown numbers.

But what followed was wholly unexpected.

Some readers of this blog know that I have run afoul of Prince George Citizen editor Neil Godbout on two occasions. The first time was when he endorsed an extralegal pogrom of homeless people in Prince George and joined a small group of conservative business owners in endorsing their mass expulsion from the city. In language heavily inflected with anti-Indigenous racism, Godbout and his friends suggested that “human rights have gone too far” and proposed the indefinite illegal detention of homeless people at some location outside the city. I am proud to have mobilized opposition to this absurd and repugnant plan.

I next ran afoul of Neil when I criticized his decision to run and prominently feature a letter to the editor of the Citizen entitled “I am a racist,’ in which a local reader explained that he was tired of the lack of resolution of settler-indigenous conflict and was now proud to call himself an anti-Indigenous racist. I criticized Neil for platforming these views and, as a result, he used his influence to cancel my radio show on CFIS, the community station of which the Citizen is an advertiser and sponsor.

Following the campaign launch, Neil was approached by the politically active husband of a former student of mine from UNBC who presented him with heavily, choppily and obviously agenda-driven edited footage of a class I had taught while suffering a personal crisis and psychological breakdown fourteen months ago.

You can hear my statement contextualizing the footage here. In the footage in question, I spent time inveighing against the prevalence of the sexual molestation of children and our society’s failure to protect them. As I was in no fit state to teach at the time, the footage contained considerable profanity, which I regret. But what was truly shocking was that, whoever the editor was, a tiny excerpt was taken to attempt to remove my statements of vehement opposition to child molestation and simply include my statements that our society rarely treats the abuse of children as a crime, unless the abuser is a stranger. Neil then chose to affix a grossly misleading title to the article and grossly misleading text claiming that I was confessing to being a serial child molester and exhorting others to molest children.

As a person who suffered from sexual abuse as a child and a person who has spoken out against sexual violence against women and children on this blog for the past seven years, I was absolutely gobsmacked by this development.

Since that time, I have received more than a dozen threats of murder and assault from Prince George residents.

While still reeling from this disgusting turn of events which I can only interpret as revenge, Jennifer Whiteside, the Minister of Education entered the fray. As the person in government responsible for the school board byelection in which I was running, she chose to demand that I leave the race on the grounds that I constitute a danger to the safety of every child in the district.

I have retained legal counsel and am suing the Prince George Citizen and the Minister of Education. And I have fled Prince George, given the continuing efforts of the BC government, the Prince George Citizen and a Twitter mob of Identitarians, including individuals well-placed in BC’s major political parties, the government and organized labour to convince Prince George residents that I am a dangerous, serial sex offender against children and incite violence against me.

In essence, I am the subject of what, in the Muslim world, is known as a fatwa.

With the exception of a few feminist activists and my father and stepmother, no one is offering any public defense of me of which I am aware. That is not because I lack for sympathizers. It is because people are terrified.

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Chris Elston is routinely assaulted by Identitarian thugs in his travels around the country. Police, even when present, do not intervene and are content to watch thugs beat him in the street. His family has been harrassed. And this is not atypical. Those who question this bizarre orthodoxy are routinely assaulted with impunity. People watch as those who stand up lose jobs, homes, relationships, church memberships and volunteer positions. Careers are destroyed as Identitarian thugs go after people at their workplace. Homes are destroyed as they go after people’s children and spouses. People are terrorized by doxxing on Twitter, with which the platform seems fine with. Even celebrities like Margaret Atwood and JK Rowling are doxxed with impunity, in addition to the hundreds of public rape and murder threats they have received.

And we must situate these developments in a larger Canadian context. With the rise of candidate vetting processes, members of political parties are only permitted to seek public office if they pass muster with secret committees of party staffers whose names are not published and which never have to explain why candidates are disqualified. A few dozen people in this country control who is permitted to seek the nomination to run for a political party and are subject to no oversight or regulation whatsoever.

Under the guise of Covid prevention the vaccination pass system has been introduced. Even though vaccines exert no significant effect on the transmission of the Covid strains and variants that constitute the vast majority of cases (they do significantly affect things like symptoms and mortality, hence me being double-vaxxed myself and seeking a booster as soon as it is available), a measure has been enacted to exert unprecedented control and surveillance over the movements of citizens despite lacking any public health justification. And there are mass firings of the unvaccinated in the public and private sectors.

At the same time, our government is proceeding, under the guise of stamping out inaccurate Covid information, with a massive increase in the regulatory scope of the state to control what people are allowed to say on social media.

And this is matched by the neo-McCarthyism of Identitarians or, as some call them, “the Woke.” All that is required to direct the attention of the mob to someone’s spouse, children, employer, landlord, church or non-profit is an individual’s refusal to denounce someone the mob has already destroyed. That is how I got into this fix sixteen months ago: I said that feminist elders Judy Graves and her associates were not guilty of the hate speech of which they had been falsely accused.

All this takes place in the context of the militarization of the unceded territory of the Wet’suwet’en people and an occupying force using escalating violence and intimidation against peaceful protesters to force through a pipeline to carry fracked gas for Royal Dutch Shell, the folks who mobilized even more deadly force against the Ogoni people in Nigeria and, of course, the African majority in Apartheid-era South Africa. This also has taken place at the behest of the BC government, which has not only jailed Indigenous and settler land defenders in unprecedented numbers but has also jailed journalists attempting to cover this obscene overreach.

In recent weeks, associates of mine have been threatened with a range of consequences from losing their rights and membership within their political party to losing their jobs, careers, livelihoods if they do not either denounce me or end their association with me. And Identitarian activists show up on my Facebook page to place “laugh” emojis next the to news of the next setback I have faced. They want me to know that they delight in my suffering and in the threats of assault and murder that appear on my public page every few hours.

Oddly, some people seem to think that the systematic destruction and confiscation of nearly everything of worth in my life over the past eighteen months and the fatwa that now has me in hiding should teach me a lesson, that it is time to stop speaking out.

If anything, I am convinced of the opposite. The question of what people will do in an authoritarian society is no longer hypothetical. The authoritarians have arrived; they have captured our major institutions, including our political parties. Free speech and political choice are being dismantled before our eyes.

The main lesson I have taken from the Christian Bible is that if you live a morally upright and altruistic life as a public figure, it should take the government about three years to hunt you down and kill you. I have been on the loose criticizing our social and economic order for thirty-four. A pretty good run, really.

Closer to the present, my grandfather Harry Jerome Sr. was fired by the railway companies and forced to relocate multiple times for his multi-decade fight for equal rights for black rail workers. My late friend and twentieth century folks music legend Leon Bibb spent many hours with me explaining to me what he called “the assassination of Paul Robeson,” the campaign during the last episode of McCarthyism which cut Robeson, the godfather of Leon’s children, off from work, from travel and from any venue where he might spread his message by speech or song.

Someone has to stand up. And, at this point it costs me less than it would most people because so many things that I treasure have already been taken, right down to my good name and physical safety. More importantly, I see so many people like Chris and my friends at Rape Relief Women’s Shelter who sacrifice more, are in more danger and have more to lose.

But I think I will leave off with the well-rehearsed Martin Niemoller quotation about a place and time not that different from our own:

“First they came for the socialists, and I did not speak out—because I was not a socialist. Then they came for the trade unionists, and I did not speak out— because I was not a trade unionist. Then they came for the Jews, and I did not speak out—because I was not a Jew. Then they came for me—and there was no one left to speak for me.”

Speak while you can, folks. The consequences for not speaking will only increase. This suppression of free speech and democratic rights will not end with Indigenous people, land defenders or feminists and others who question the Identitarian orthodoxy. It is coming for your community; it is coming for you. Fight back.

Authoritarianism BC Politics Canadian Politics Local Politics in Toronto, Vancouver, Surrey and Prince George Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

The Rise of the Canadian Porno Right: Making Sense of the Erin O’Toole “Poppers” Announcement

To some, Erin O’Toole’s “poppers” policy announcement this morning is just this side of a major political gaffe. Commentators are shaking their heads about how absurd and unserious the 2021 Canadian election’s campaign narrative has already become as the leader of her Majesty’s Loyal Opposition made a special appearance and announcement today about the need to legalize a grey market party drug popular among gay men.

The highest per-capital carbon emitter on earth is holding an election in the wake of an IPCC report essentially describing the probable end of human civilization and the extinction of most animal species in my lifetime and the campaign narrative on day three is dominated by a discussion of the sex drug amyl nitrate and its ilk.

But I want to argue that as absurd as the announcement and associates discourse are, the Tories’ poppers promise tells us something important about the dramatic shifts our politics are undergoing due to new debates about gender and sexuality.

So often, in contemporary politics, we tend to see novel political phenomena as a left-wing problem or a right-wing problem, especially here in Anglo America, land of the endless culture war. But the reality is that almost all phenomena we see at the social movement level are actually mirrored pretty closely on each side of the political spectrum.

Many people on the left see the split between trans rights activists and gender critical feminists as a scourge uniquely visited on their side of the political spectrum, paralyzing and splitting every organization the conflict touches. But in fact, the gender identity debate is, in many ways, shaping politics on the right as much or more. Take, for instance, this federal election.

In 2019, Canada had two right-wing populist parties, the mainstream Conservative Party of Canada and the upstart People’s Party of Canada. But despite the Conservatives losing the election, and the People’s Party scoring only 1% of the popular vote, less than two years later, there are two upstart parties, the People’s Party and the Maverick Party, each led by a former Conservative cabinet minister, Maxime Bernier and Jay Hill, respectively.

The People’s Party, which holds that biological sex cannot be changed women should be permitted to have single-sex spaces and single-sex organizations, has not merely held rallies opposing the current Gender Orthodoxy, it has reached out beyond traditional Christian Right allies and is actively courting gender critical feminists, even fielding feminist activist Karin Litzke in Vancouver East and actively reaching out to feminist leaders like Amy Hamm. Meanwhile, the Maverick Party proudly proclaims its support for the Orthodoxy in Article One of its constitution, which it highlights on its web site, recognizing “gender identity” as an unacceptable basis for discrimination, effectively foreclosing sex-based protections for women’s spaces.

We see this split in American conservatism too. Donald Trump’s first two Supreme Court appointees voted against each other in the first gender identity case to reach the court, with Neil Gorsuch on the gender identity side of the debate and Brett Kavanagh on the biological sex side.

Perceptive commentators in the United States have, for some time, been referring to this as an emerging split between what they have termed the Christian Right and the “Porno Right.” Indeed, Donald Trump’s selection of Mike Pence as Vice President can be seen as a direct strategic response to this emerging split.

While, until recently, the Christian Right utterly dominated the fiscal conservative, libertarian, isolationist and protectionist wings of the Republican Party, the victory of Trump and his allies in primaries over the past four years shows that it is this new alt-right approach to the politics of gender and sexuality that has presented the first true challenge to Christian Right ideological hegemony.

So, what is the Porno Right?

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While degenerate and pornographic patriarchs who treat their dinner guests to their private fantasies of sexual violence against their daughters, men like Donald Trump, are certainly the figureheads of the movement, they are not the primary constituency. The foot soldiers of the Porno Right are typically single or otherwise sexually unfulfilled natal males whose online world focuses on Reddit (the platform that banned de-transitioners and gender critical feminists for “hate” but continues to feature misogynistic porn in abundance, including an anal rape subreddit), 4Chan, 8Chan, Pornhub and its affiliates like XHamster.

In other words, the core of the Porno Right are Incels.

Incels are heterosexual natal males who believe that every heterosexual natal male deserves to have a sexually compliant female body awarded to them upon reaching sexual maturity and that some force is screwing up the rationing protocol, thereby causing an uneven distribution of those bodies and their hoarding by the undeserving. Some Incels focus their anger about this on wealthy, sexually successful males with more than one female sexual partner and inveigh against these men’s hoarding behaviour. Others focus their anger on the women from whom they want sex and who are withholding it from them for unfair reasons, maybe due to feminist propaganda, maybe due to being superficial about men’s appearances or caring too much about men’s wealth. Usually there is plenty of anger to go around.

Because Incels consume a great deal of pornography and often have very poor self-images, particular of their own bodies and finances (the things they think determine men’s attractiveness to straight women), many are autogynephiles i.e. men whose autoerotic activity is based on imagining themselves as women engaged in same-sex interaction. While autogynephile men have, for the past decade, been a key target of trans activists and the pharmaceutical industry in marketing gender transition as the solution to their woes, it must be understood that, even today, the vast, vast majority of autogynephile Incels have not undergone and do not intend to undergo any gender confirmation procedures. But this majority nevertheless identifies with the politics of gender espoused by its vanguard minority with respect to the unimportance and/or nonexistence of biological sex as a category.

Now, back to the election. Today, Erin O’Toole surprised and confused many by introducing the legalization of amyl nitrate and other “poppers” in the Canadian election. Poppers became known as a gay party drug in the 1980s and, until the past decade, was primarily associated with the gay club scene and online casual sex through applications like Grindr.

But in the past decade, the use of poppers has increasingly become associated with autogynephile Incels, used as an aid in autoerotic activity. Pull up Pornhub and any of their affiliates and search for “poppers” (if you dare) and you will find that autogynephile poppers content vastly outstrips gay content on most of these sites.

So, why would O’Toole get his health critic Michelle Rempel to raise the legalization of poppers in correspondence with the Minister of Health last week and follow up with a headline-grabbing poppers legalization announcement today?

Let me assure you: he is not going after the small overwhelmingly urban, overwhelmingly culturally liberal constituency of gay men who like to party. That’s just his cover. O’Toole is making his first intentional, programmatic, planned play for the Porno Right, the notoriously hard-to-poll, low-turnout constituency that turned out massively for Donald Trump and pushed him over the top in 2016.

Poppers safety is also a bigger issue for Incels than members of the gay party scene because, in the rare event that they cause cardiac events, solitary users are much more likely to suffer serious harm or death than social users. And you can bet that O’Toole is turning heads in online communities of frequent porn consumers as this announcement spreads to the darkest corner of the web.

Now I am all for legalizing poppers. They are not the drug for me but they shouldn’t be a grey market item like they are now.

But let us recognize that O’Toole’s announcement has very little to do with the health of gay men or even that of career masturbators. But it has everything to do with the Porno Right coming of age as a political constituency that, like its adversaries in the Christian Right, must mostly be courted through coded communication and dog-whistles, dog-whistles that arrived in Canadian politics this morning in Ottawa.

Canadian Politics Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 4: The Politics of Privatizing Reputation

It has been a while since I have written about the public discourse around sexual and gender-based violence and abuse. That’s because most of the points I would have wished to make have been made by more prominent, respected, articulate people than me, which is good. The point of these series on my blog is to fill gaps in leftist public discourse, not to serve as a microcosm thereof. Naturally, then, it is disappointing to feel the need to write anything about this. It suggests if not a total absence, a considerable lacuna in leftist thought on a matter. In this case, the absence pertains to embarrassing comeback attempts, something that, as the Gary Coleman of BC politics, I feel I have a special affinity for and might, then, offer a clearer and more precise contribution to.

In September 2018, Jian Ghomeshi wrote an article for the New York Review of Books; true to form, it was narcissistic, self-congratulatory and deceptive. In it, Ghomeshi asked rhetorically asked how long he should continue to be punished for his acts by being excluded from the public square as a public intellectual and broadcaster, given that he had not been criminally convicted of the assaults of which he had been accused. This viewpoint was echoed by trolls disguised as newspaper columnists.

There was context for this. Fans of Louis CK, who had admitted to using his financial power over several women to get them to let him masturbate in front of them and had offered a tepid apology for the affair, substituting “admiration” for “financial power” in his statement. People wanted to know: just how long before we “let” Louis CK get back to his career as a celebrity stand-up comic.

As typically takes place when questions of gender-based abuse and violence find their way into the public square, people quickly adopted a wholly inappropriate metaphorical vocabulary: that of the criminal justice system. Somehow, not getting paid to be on stage, on the radio or on TV constitutes some form of punishment or “sentence” that badly-behaving male celebrities are serving out when their shows get canceled after they do something inappropriate. And when the sentence is completed, it follows that they get to go back to being paid millions of dollars to be on screen.

This optic is, of course, an insane one to apply to highly coveted jobs that very few people ever get to do. People have a right to move about freely; only through a grave transgression of the law are they temporarily stripped of that right. But nobody has the right to be on stage; nobody has the right to be popular; nobody has the right to have their own TV show. And, central to the Louis CK case, nobody has a right to force anyone to watch them.

And yet, this metaphor of the “life sentence” has been used repeatedly to talk about male celebrities who crossed an important ethical or legal line in their treatment of women. The same metaphor is used, the same kinds of questions are asked about Roman Polanski, Woody Allen and a host of others. And yet, when one considers Polanski and Allen, the framing seems even more absurd: Allen and Polanski continue to be famous directors in whose movies major Hollywood and European stars appear; they continue to receive flattering interviews and other media attention; they even continue receiving major international awards for their work.

What punishment, then, were they actually suffering? What, exactly, was being described as a “sentence”? The answer is this: a lot of people have kept thinking they are creeps and some of those people have stopped watching their movies. And, at the end of the day, what this is really about is that there is a shockingly large number of people who believe that not being thought-of as a creep is a right that all men enjoy, that can only be revoked temporarily and only under the most extreme circumstances.

The Incel movement shares with the mainstream of North American society the belief that men own other people’s thoughts about them, that when someone thinks “that guy’s greasy,” that thought does not belong to the person thinking it but rather to the person to whom it pertains. This is the most extraordinary breach of individual selfhood and the liberal theory of the base unit and yet, such a view epitomizes the changes in social contract we associate with late capitalism and has been, from the beginning, embedded in the project of capitalist modernity.

One of the most underestimated thinkers in adumbrating the roots of the modern capitalist state is Irene Silverblatt, a holocaust survivor writing in the tradition of Hannah Arendt and Michel Foucault. Silverblatt argues that many of the seeds of an incipient capitalist modernity are to be found not in early modern Europe’s core but in its periphery, in the Viceroyalty of Peru. It is here that modern ideas of race-thinking first played out and here that modern understandings of bureaucracy – with the technocrat as transactor of knowledge – appeared at their most thoroughly elaborated.

The Spanish society that arrived in the New World was already accustomed to the highest levels of cosmopolitanism and diversity in Europe; it contained Basques, Catalans and many other ethnicities whose languages would eventually be subsumed within Castilian Spain. It contained Christians, Jews and Muslims who had been enmeshed in a seven-century religious war known as the Reconquista. Spaniards descended from Roman colonists, some from Carthaginians, some from Goths, some from Franks, Vandals, Berbers and Arabs. Medieval Spain had been a hierarchical place in which people were treated differently depending on honor or calidad; sometimes that honor was created by present-day behaviour, sometimes inherited from one’s macro-lineage group, one’s raza (the origin of the term and idea of race). Like the rest of Europe it was a world of knights, lords, kings, peasants, urban labourers and the beginnings of a bourgeoisie. Some of the labouring worked in high-status clean jobs like millers while others worked in “unclean” jobs like tanners (the clean-unclean distinction pervaded the whole civilized world and, in India, had resulted in the creation of the dalit or “untouchable” caste).

The society the Spanish discovered in the Andes was every bit as complex as their own, organized into macro-lineage groups called allyus, headed by a dead ancestor, the most powerful of whom were mummified and periodically consulted by the living allyu head. When the Spanish arrived they had to both dominate Andean culture and integrate it with their own, subordinate noble families and marry into them, perceive enough of Andean society to surveil and dominate it and yet radically simplify it legally, administratively and conceptually. Furthermore, the African slaves conquistadors brought with them had to have a place in this new world too.

One of the first consequences of this project was something known as a limpieza de sangre (purity of blood) certificate. This certificate acted upon one’s casta (caste). The Spanish crown had created six major castes in its New World colonies: Español (white), indio (indigenous), negro (black), mestizo (mixed white and indigenous), mulato (mixed white and black) and zambo (mixed indigenous and black). Anyone in possession of such a certificate was, according to the state, white, from a legal perspective, making one eligible for any political office, impossible to enslave (unlike negros) and subject to the jurisdiction of the Inquisition (unlike indios). (More on this aspect of Spanish imperial society two posts from now.)
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These certificates soon became a commodity in their own right. With the right amount of money, one could purchase such a certificate from a corrupt government official and make that money back within not too much time as one’s employment and entrepreneurial prospects expanded. And that is not just because of how such certificates acted in a formal, legal sense. Although Jews were not part of the North American caste system devised by the Spanish and their immigration was supposedly prohibited, it was understood that some had entered the territory as “Portuguese,” because the adjacent Portuguese Empire, which handled the slave trade for Spain, looked the other way when it came to Jews passing for non-Jews. A limpieza de sangre certificate did not merely attest to the European descent of a person—it attested to a lineage that had never been tainted by Jewish blood, Muslim conversion or work in an unclean industry.

And such certificates did not merely act on one’s fate when the law spelled-out caste-based privileges. They affected the credibility of one’s testimony in court and before the inquisition. They affected whether one was invited to a cabildo (the assembly of Spanish notables who constituted the city fathers of a self-governing town). They affected one’s marriage prospects and a host of other things to which they had no technical pertinence.

It is here, then, under the aegis of the Hapsburgs’ New World empire that we first see the large-scale and systematic modern commodification of reputation, the idea that one can, though good behaviour and good luck or though money, own the portion of others’ opinion that pertains to oneself.

But as with so many other things about the early modern world, what began in Spain came to be more fully elaborated in Britain. Whereas one can trace the spreading of false news or declarations likely to breach the peace as an offense against the state or society to the Age of the Antonines in second century Rome, the privatization of this offense in the form of defamation or libel came into being haltingly.

There does not appear to be any moment that the common law tradition from which English law descends did not recognize slanderous speech to be an injury. As I have suggested elsewhere, the Germanic wergild tradition of law, in which injuries to the person were quantified monetarily and justice meted out through financial compensation gave societies based on it a leg up in internalizing the logic of capitalism, having the foundation of a proto-capitalist legal system. But wergild quantified only one aspect of reputation: reputational depreciation. Changes in reputation that were positive or simply alterations in kind or type of status were outside the purview of the wergild system.

More importantly, the English legal system only compensated those whose reputations depreciated due to a falsehood being circulated about them. While the onus of demonstrating the truth or falsity of an accusation has moved back and forth between plaintiff and defendant throughout the history of libel and slander law, the veracity of an accusation has always had the capacity to vitiate the claim of compensation for lost reputation.

When the accusations against Jian Ghomeshi first became public, the representatives he engaged were not lawyers, rather, they were representatives of the public relations firm, Navigator, a company specializing in “crisis communications” as they pertain to people containing blood and organs, as opposed to the corporations for which the field was first developed. Under the slogan “Navigator: When You Can’t Afford to Lose,” the firm’s web site succinctly explains its purpose: “Corporations and individuals sometimes find themselves on the wrong side of public opinion. We quickly pull together the right team to manage issues before they escalate into major crises. When disaster strikes, our clients depend on our custom-built communications plans to minimize reputational damage.” The site goes on to offer a do-it-yourself program under the header “Sign Up for our Crisis Preparation and Reputation Recovery Program with Ivey Business School.”

Ultimately, Ghomeshi was too undisciplined for Navigator to handle, but many prominent Canadians like Michael Bryant, the Ontario Attorney-General who killed a mentally ill indigenous cyclist with his car, have benefited significantly from the expansion of reputational management from correcting falsehood to preserve reputation to burnishing it for the same purpose. Across the border, we recently witnessed the sudden reappraisal of a group of Catholic School boys’ confrontation with an indigenous war veteran at a protest in Washington DC. Columnists and news organizations quickly issued mea culpas for their portrayal of the young men as boorish racists, following a recontextualization of some video footage by RunSwitch PR, a Navigator-like firm hired by some of the boys’ parents.

RunSwitch, which goes by the motto “to ensure the right people know the right thing,” was able to perform a kind of reputational alchemy for a hefty fee. Whereas libel law and the work of firms like Navigator has traditionally been used to safeguard a reputation with pre-existing value against depreciation, the alchemy performed by RunSwitch transformed a boy whose name we did not know, with a forgettable face into an Anglo American media star who, for the first time, was given a platform to espouse the conservative views he had gone to Washington to help advance. In this way, RunSwitch’s work did not work like an intervention by Navigator or a libel lawyer but instead like a limpieza de sagre certificate.

While the name of the boy’s school had been known, his name, Nick Sandmann, was not, until RunSwitch entered the fray. In this way, something more than the defensive action of a Navigator campaign was in evidence: one individual was transformed into a celebrity with a national reputation because fashioning this spokesperson was the most efficient way to defend his school and classmates. But within this instrumentalist reasoning is something deeper: Sandmann’s presumed right to be well-regarded, irrespective of evidence before the very eyes of those judging him.

This is what Ghomeshi’s defenders desire too: to nullify the words of the women who described his brutal acts, to substitute our prior opinion of him for one that we have come to using evidence and our God-given reason because our current opinions hurt “his” reputation. This arises from a fundamental misunderstanding of what reputation is and what it is for. “Your” reputation does not and should not belong to you. It belongs to the people whom you encounter, people who are alone with you in elevators or alleys, people you split restaurant bills with, people in the passenger seat of your car. These people own your reputation because they build it; they maintain it; and they are the ones who need it. You see: the purpose of your reputation is to inform people of how to protect their safety when they interact with you. It was never yours, nor should it be.

Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |

The Identity Series – Part 3: Galloway, Khomeinism and Saul’s Christian “Body:” the Anti-liberal Theory of the Base Unit

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Of the perplexing figures of the past twenty years in politics George Galloway ranks highly. A British Labour MP originally admired by the international left for his hard line opposition to Britain’s entry into the Second Gulf War in 2003, Galloway has drifted further and further from recognizable left politics over the past decade and a half. This drift began with his creation of the Respect Party in 2004, a coalition of Muslim religious conservatives and socialists, loosely affiliated with the emerging Bolivarian-Khomeinist bloc, a situational alliance of leftist and Islamist petro-states seeking to end the petro-dollar system of US hegemony over global oil markets.

But whereas the Bolivarian-Khomeinist bloc, led by Iran’s Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Venezuela’s Hugo Chavez was an alliance based on mutual material interests and a shared enemy, the Respect Party was about more than this. Its ideology constituted a genuine fusion of key elements of the Marxist critique of capitalism and the theocratic ideologies of the Iranian state and its international paramilitary wing, the Hezbollah.

The Gallowayism propounded by the Respect Party sought to represent both the British left and a wide spectrum of ideological tendencies within Muslim diasporic communities in the UK. The party stood for greater community control of schools and education by diasporic communities, greater efforts to address racism and Islamophobia in the private and public spheres, a reduction in immigration restrictions between Britain and the Muslim world, an end of British alignment with US foreign policy, withdrawal from the European Union, reversal of tax and benefit reductions since the 1980s and the return of occupying forces from Iraq and Afghanistan. Galloway framed the British state as being “at war” with Islam and Muslims generally and sought to bring about an end to that war. In the predominantly Muslim constituency of Bethnal Green and Bow, Galloway re-entered parliament now representing Respect.

Ultimately, Respect fractured into two parties with most non-Muslim members moving to the Socialist Workers Party in 2007; this appears to have been related to their dispute with a key non-profit organization that functioned as Galloway’s main campaign surrogate in 2005, the Islamic Forum of Europe, an organization seeking not just the substantial self-government rights for Muslims in public education but a more general personality of law principle for diasporic communities. IFE believes in a legal system like that of present-day India in which Muslims are governed under a separate legal code from the majority religious population. This Muslim code would include a radical reformulation of family law allotting substantial powers to husbands and fathers over their female family members. Without the substantial left and anti-war movement support, Galloway was defeated in the 2010 election.

Galloway re-entered parliament in 2012 with the assistance of another conservative Muslim organization, the Muslim Public Affairs Committee (UK). In the byelection Galloway contested, the MPACUK focused its third party campaign on accusations of apostasy against the Labour candidate whom they argued was not, as he claimed, a practicing Muslim.

In 2012, Galloway joined many “anti-imperialists” in defending Wikileaks’ Julian Assange but did so in a highly distinctive way: he suggested that even if the testimony accusing Assange of rape were to be believed, Assange’s behaviour did not constitute anything worse than “bad manners.”

In 2015, Galloway attempted to return to parliament, this time opposing a Muslim Afghan candidate, Naz Shah, who had gained substantial prominence for her feminist activism following her harrowing and violently abusive experience as a child bride, married without her consent. Strangely, Galloway made this his central campaign issue, arguing that Shah was both dishonest and morally corrupt because she had claimed she was contracted into marriage against her will at the age of fifteen when, in fact, Galloway argued, she had been forced to marry at sixteen and a half, something to which he deemed it wrong for her to object. He attempted to demonstrate this with what he claimed was her marriage contract, which his representatives had obtained in Pakistan.

It may seem at this point in my post that I am simply telling you the story of a reprehensibly sexist man who is also a socialist. But while I think Galloway’s misogyny is indisputable, I want to suggest that something else is also going on, something pertinent to our understanding of the contested and unstable nature of the modern self.

The Respect Party, like many of the neo-traditionalist authoritarian parties that are rising around the world today, was actually saying something large and revolutionary, albeit extremely disturbing. What Gallowayism contested was the liberal theory of the base unit. The liberal junk anthropology that I took down in my last post has served an important, albeit ahistorical purpose: to argue that the fundamental base unit of society is the individual person.

This used to be the thing over which eighteenth- and nineteenth-century conservatives saw as the essential heresy of liberalism: the idea that the organic base unit of society was the solitary, atomized person. As anthropology suggests, this is a notion that is arbitrary at best and absurd at worst. And that is why most societies have understood some sort of larger unit as their base unit. Whereas a liberal sees a family as a collection of individuals, people outside this ideology see an individual as a fraction of a family.
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For the Inca, the base unit was the allyu, the macro-lineage that could be traced to one great ancestor; for much of Indian history, the jati, a guild-like macro-lineage structure was the base unit, the extended family a sub-unit thereof and the individual, a fraction of that; raza, in medieval, as opposed to early modern, Spain, (the cognate of “race”) used to refer to macro-lineages that could be traced to a single ancestral conversion (or moment of saintly patronage), to an Abrahamic religion. The raza, the allyu, the jati are just a few historical examples.

When Saul of Tarsus writes to his followers in Corinth, he is arguing that his intentional communities of like-minded believers, and not the individual, constituted the base unit, that the ways in which some had conceived of salvation as personal was wrong.

For just as the body is one and has many members, and all the members of the body, though many, are one body, so it is with Christ. For in the one Spirit we were all baptized into one body—Jews or Greeks, slaves or free—and we were all made to drink of one Spirit.

Indeed, the body does not consist of one member but of many. If the foot would say, “Because I am not a hand, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. And if the ear would say, “Because I am not an eye, I do not belong to the body,” that would not make it any less a part of the body. If the whole body were an eye, where would the hearing be? If the whole body were hearing, where would the sense of smell be? But as it is, God arranged the members in the body, each one of them, as he chose. If all were a single member, where would the body be? As it is, there are many members, yet one body. The eye cannot say to the hand, “I have no need of you,” nor again the head to the feet, “I have no need of you.” On the contrary, the members of the body that seem to be weaker are indispensable, and those members of the body that we think less honorable we clothe with greater honor, and our less respectable members are treated with greater respect; whereas our more respectable members do not need this. But God has so arranged the body, giving the greater honor to the inferior member, that there may be no dissension within the body, but the members may have the same care for one another. If one member suffers, all suffer together with it; if one member is honored, all rejoice together with it.

Now you are the body of Christ and individually members of it.

Just as we often fail to realize that what we think is a public policy debate is actually an epistemological debate, we often fail to realize that what we see as a debate about the relative rights of different kinds of individuals are actually debates about our social base unit.

At equal proximity to the ideological core of the modern Republican Party to the episteme of Authenticity is the theory of the nuclear family as base unit. Expressed religiously in the “headship principle” where prayers must be undertaken and led by the family’s head (the father), the fundamental argument of the GOP is that women’s bodies are fractions of a coherent familial body that have no essential independent ontology. The only way they can be severed from the body of the family is through marriage into another male-headed collective body.

Such a family has sweeping reproductive rights; it is just that the rights are articulated by the executive as opposed to reproductive part of the familial body. If one looks at the structure of abortion laws enacted to prohibit abortions and criminalize miscarriages, the ability to punish women for ending pregnancies is contingent upon the participation of the biological father. While getting a mid-term abortion may be technically illegal in many states, the only way the offense becomes prosecutable or actionable is if the male participant make a police report or files suit.

And we see similar approaches to women’s bodies in similar conservative social movements. Vladimir Putin’s United Russia party legalized marital assault and rape in 2017. Narendra Modi’s BJP and Recep Erdogan’s movements, similarly, do not so much view women as inferior members of society as inferior parts of a cohesive social body, that of the extended, male-headed family.

Gallowayism merits our study because it is the first of these neo-traditionalist ideologies to rear its head on the political left. One can effectively reduce Galloway’s political argument to a single unifying point: white, Christian men get to manage “their” women as they see fit; brown, Muslim men do not. There will be no fundamental equality all men enjoy an equal right to manage the bodies and minds of “their” familial or extended familial body. This is, fundamentally, the foundation of Iranian law, since the 1979 Khomeinist revolution and it came to be a sincere part of Galloway’s anti-capitalist worldview.

Gallowayism forces the left to once again confront the way in which its long-term alliance with liberalism has caused us to atrophy intellectually, to quit the field in one of the most central debates of our times. The choice between patriarchal neotraditionalism and the late capitalist theory of the independent, individual choice-maker is no choice at all. We need to rediscover elements of Second Wave feminist thinking and pre-Stalinist Marxist thinking about our own theory of the base unit.

Instead, I fear that the left is choosing to amplify the liberal characteristics of self-making in order to distinguish itself, to find ways to offer more atomized and solipsistic ideas of constructing a modern self. More on that in my next post on this subject.

Politics of Identity Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence Race | fusangite |

Did the Survivor Vote Swing the Election for Trump?

Republican presidential nominee Donald Trump and his wife Melania Trump vote at PS 59 in New York, New York, U.S. November 8, 2016. REUTERS/Carlo Allegri TPX IMAGES OF THE DAY - RTX2SKKG

There has been a lot of talk about how Donald Trump won over so many white women in his campaign. The general narrative is, and I am not saying it is untrue, that, for American women, white supremacy trumped female solidarity. I am sure that is the case. But it is useful to think about the other things that might also be true, truths that function synergistically with this one.

A terrifyingly large proportion of people in America have had sex to which they did not consent by the time they turn eighteen. It is just shy of a majority of women and as many as one in six men. And the Trump campaign telegraphed their candidate’s propensity—perhaps even preference for—non-consensual sex, especially given that his main rebuttal of the “grab them by the pussy” tape was to suggest his accusers were too ugly to have been the women he actually assaulted. Similarly, the campaign did the opposite of disabusing the public of the notion that at least one of his daughters grew up having sex with him, something to which he has alluded in multiple interviews over the decades.

What is, as I suggested in my piece on Trump’s preference for incestuous relations, this was an intelligent and rational piece of campaigning.

One of the best ways to treat erectile dysfunction in case of men this drug pattern has been viagra price australia launched with the various delicious flavors such as banana, strawberry, pineapple, mango, orange, chocolate and vanilla. This medicine contains the compound of sildenafil citrate and it cheapest viagra price takes a shot at the playoffs. The sildenafil cheapest liquid version can provide effectiveness in as little as 15 minutes. Be that as it may Kundalini Yoga postures do much more. buy viagra pill As we learn—but never accept—in countless failed rape prosecutions, people who have been sexually violated, especially people who have been sexually violated by adults as children do not reliably say “no.” They do not reliably ostracize their accuser or reject his future overtures. They do not reliably resist further infringements on their bodies, dignity and sense of self. That is because one of the most powerful lessons a survivor of sexual abuse learns is this: their abuser is all-powerful and nobody will help them. Even if unlikely help eventually arrives in the person of the state or a concerned relative, it is often too late to unlearn that fundamental lesson about what it means to survive: one’s only hope for safety is to curry favour with one’s abuser. In this way, Trump is the epitome of the abuser: no matter what happens, he is too rich, too powerful, too dangerous, a man totally above the law and impervious to shame or social disapproval.

What survivors have also learned from the failed rape prosecutions in our media is that a survivor needs to fashion a public image of themselves that either denies their past experience or portrays them as a Lifetime Network TV movie hero-victim, for whom sexual violence and abuse has been a crucible, forging them into an implacable warrior against their abuser and the system supporting him. The majority of survivors who have become more vulnerable, more involuntarily compliant, more calculating, dissembling and fearful are viewed as reprehensible beings to be derided or attacked for currying favour with past abusers or consenting to further abuse.

What if the Trump campaign activated this? What if this is what undergirds his decisive victory among white women is this? What if the more his violent, predatory monstrosity was displayed, the more it began being refracted through the emboldened misogyny of men in their own space, America’s survivors intensified their performance of divided selfhood. Trump, in a way, became the biggest, most inescapable sexual assailant imaginable. In all the ways that a child sees a sexually predatory adult as omnipresent and omnipotent, Trump actually was, his face on every TV screen, his words coming out of the mouths of so many proximate men, like the eponymous priests of ancient Egypt, embodying America’s fascist, rapist god-man.

For most survivors, the way forward would be clear: dissemble and comply. Somehow your abuser will know if you tried to thwart him. In all likelihood, your abuser wants you to generate a narrative that you have consented, that he has done nothing wrong. Ultimately, the greatest performances of domination are the ones that inspire feigned consent. What if the moment, America’s survivors placed their hands on that lever, they felt their omnipresent, omnipotent abuser leaning over the flimsy cardboard privacy partition, their eyes full of malice, and knew what they must do to survive another day?

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite |

Being Godlike in America: Incest, Impunity and the Presentation of Trump’s Autocratic Credentials

At the height of the gulag, purges, death squads and Ukrainian famine, Joseph Stalin’s underlings approached him about a deeply worrying concern that might imperil the regime. Reports were coming in from everywhere that most Russians believed that the vast majority of people who were being executed or sent to Siberia were innocent of any crimes against the USSR.

But Stalin reassured them. It was not merely inevitable that most Russians would realize that those being murdered, imprisoned, tortured and shamed were innocent. It was necessary. For totalitarianism to succeed, it was necessary for citizens to fundamentally alter their understanding of the state and its leader. Whereas every Russian emperor from 1454 to 1917 had been heir to the title of Constantine, Rome’s first Christian emperor, “equal to the Apostles and God’s vice-gerent on earth,” Stalin had to do better, to exceed this status in his project of remaking Russian society in his image. It was not enough to be God’s agent; he had to be a god himself.

God, Stalin reasoned, based on a clear understanding of Eastern Orthodoxy theology and scripture, could be clearly recognized as distinct from mortals because his mortal servants were sent to punish the guilty and the unjust. God, as revealed in the Book of Job and countless other scriptural narratives, was the sole moral agent who possessed the right to punish the innocent and just. And only being god-like could Stalin, with a tiny fraction of the resources, population and allies of the capitalist empires he stared down, possibly prevail.

Whereas liberal capitalism was advancing a political theory in which any adult person might be entitled to govern a state and mete out its laws in a fair and moral fashion, Stalin offered an opposing theory, one rooted in the origins of the Russian state and its antecedents, the Byzantine Empire and the Khanate of the Golden Horde. Whereas the rulers of the capitalist, liberal West were to be understood as “first among equals,” men entitled to no more and no less than their fellow citizens, Stalin would present himself and his deceased predecessor, Lenin, as ontologically distinct from mere human beings.

And so Stalin set about doing god-like things: persecuting his children, terrorizing his allies, engaging in unspeakable atrocities, carelessly and pointlessly murdering millions as though they were straw dogs. It is in this light that we must understand actions that appear to have hobbled the Russian economy, political system and even Russia’s physical environment. No mere man could conduct himself in such a terrifying, incomprehensible, unspeakable fashion. Stalin, people concluded, must be something more.

It is in this light that we must approach the Donald Trump campaign.

Donald Trump is a man uninterested in serving as America’s president, engaged in a constant, endless process of technocratic compromise, negotiation and brokerage, the very thing craved by his opponent. Trump is not running for that job and has no interest in it. Trump is running for Stalin’s job, Mao’s job, Hitler’s job: absolute and supreme leader of a vast, world-spanning imperium. There is nothing irrational about his election strategy. He wishes to be elected with a clear mandate to serve as America’s god-king; anything less is of no interest to him.
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And it is in this light that we must understand the programmatic, intentional and strategic marketing of parent-child incest by Donald Trump. Trump chose to give the convention address, reserved for generations for the spouse of a presidential candidate, to his daughter Ivanka. This choice was intentional and premeditated, as was his unambiguously libidinous kissing and ass-grabbing of his daughter on national TV before the address, the daughter about whom he has been making sexualized comments in the media since before her tenth birthday. Trump is direct, clear and unflinching in notifying America that he owns that girl’s ass and has since she was conceived.

And that is because he has been contemplating a run, not for the American presidency but for the role of American Emperor since before she was conceived. From her conception, she has been a prop, a means by which Trump can demonstrate his god-like status. A mere man, you see, couldn’t fuck his daughter and brag about it on national television; only a superhuman being could do that and walk away unscathed. Like taxes and contracts, the bedrock of the liberal social contract, prohibitions against the most monstrous form of sexual abuse do not apply to Trump because he is a god-being who can demonstrate this status by showing himself to transcend not merely our laws but our most fundamental social mores and taboos.

In writing this piece I was as reminded of the father of a friend of mine who killed himself this year (the son, not the father, sadly), a monster who began raping him when he was eighteen months old. That man was a charter member of the New Age movement, whose lifelong hustle has been photographing people’s auras for money. He begins each day with this affirmation: “I am a god-being, limitless beyond human comprehension,” like Ivan the Terrible, Russia’s most god-like emperor who is remembered best for beating his own son and heir to death – for no reason.

Like most survivors of programmatic and flagrant sexual abuse, my dear old friend was as powerless to retaliate against his abuser as is Ivanka Trump, a woman who has received the message loud and clear from over three hundred million Americans that they will not lift a finger to protect her. Her only hope of relative safety, like most survivors of sexual violence, is convincing her abuser that she is a willing, nay enthusiastic, participant in her own abuse. Victims of lifelong sexual abuse are at once ventriloquist and dummy, normalizing their abuser’s discourse while performing their accord with it as voluntary and enthusiastic, offering hagiographic descriptions of their abuser.

What we must understand is that, for Trump’s followers, their leader’s ongoing sexual violation of his daughter is what Slavoj Zizek terms an “unknown known,” in his tribute to the epistemology of Donald Rumsfeld, something we all know but refuse to permit our consciousness to see, a belief we concurrently deny and use as a premise undergirding our reasoning. Open secrets, unknown knowns, are the most powerful form of knowledge in a society because they represent the inchoate substructure of a social order. State-sanctioned torture, race- and gender-based violence, massive inequalities of wealth and opportunity structure our every interaction and so they must exist at the periphery of our consciousness.

By signaling that he is the incarnation of those very forces, Trump offers his followers what marginalized, desperate people in America desire, a literal deus ex machina. The invisible forces that are so terrifying that we cannot speak of them by name are incarnate in a man. Perhaps, they reason, this god-man might be more easily propitiated than the implacable invisible-handed deity that has laid waste their families, towns and workplaces.

Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence US Politics | fusangite |

What if #ElbowGate Isn’t About Canadian Politics At All?

In January 2013, I wrote a blog post on Tom Mulcair and the politics of Canadian masculinity. My basic thesis, premised on the seemingly reasonable, yet ultimately discredited, assumption that Mulcair would run for Prime Minister as “Angry Tom” from Question Period, was that the NDP had a real chance of winning the 2015 election because of the way English Canadians think about the masculinity of French Canadian politicians.

Anglos, and especially Anglo men, have accorded a special cultural role for prominent Quebecois politicians in our bicultural national political dynamic: they are permitted to express more aggression, physical violence and rage than Anglo politicians. Because middle and upper-middle class English Canadian masculinity remains entangled with Victorian ideals of reserve, continence and restraint, Anglo expressions of aggressive masculine behaviour has ambivalent, self-limiting effects on the national stage. The kind of physical aggression displayed by Pierre Trudeau, Jean Chretien or, most recently, by Justin Trudeau would be far more problematic and elicit far more criticism and concern if expressed by a politician of an equivalent class position coming from English Canada.

The roots of this double-standard are complex and multifaceted but it is worth noting that until half a century ago, Quebecois and Acadian Canadians were underserviced, unequal, racialized populations in this country, over-represented in unskilled, seasonal and migrant work, dominated by Anglo elites, and ruled by despotic, violent, theocratic regimes like Maurice Duplessis’ Union Nationale. (Indeed, one might want to rethink the politics of the niqab in Quebec in 2015 in the context of the province’s own experience of secularization and the role that religious dress played in that process.) In the US, a consolation prize for such historical wrongs is cultural permission to enact a more aggressive or macho performance of one’s male gender, including over-representation on the teams of the nation’s preferred professional gladiatorial sport.

Anyway, whether in Pierre Trudeau’s actions during the FLQ Crisis or his actions at the St. Jean-Baptiste Parade of 1968, Jean Chretien’s “Shawinigan Handshake” or pepper-spray remark, or in Justin Trudeau’s successful boxing match against Patrick Brazeau or his recent parliamentary gaffe, part of the appeal our French Canadian leaders have for English Canadians is that they are authorized, culturally, to participate in a more violent, macho, unproblematically aggressive masculinity than their English counterparts. In this way, one of the functions such leaders have is as people through whom voters, but especially male voters, get to vicariously participate in kinds of masculine behaviour, in which barriers of culture or power prevent them from engaging in daily life. And we need to place this understanding uppermost in our minds to understand the bizarre national debate that has been engendered by the events in parliament last week.

Last week, the Liberal government was attempting to rush some progressive legislation on end-of-life medical care through parliament. Whereas only the Conservative Party actually opposed the substance of the legislation, all opposition parties were upset that it was being rushed through the house without normal opportunities for MPs’ input. In response to this, NDP and Tory MPs used some venerable delaying tactics to slow the passage of the bill. In fact, these parties were so united in their concern over process issues around the legislation that they collaborated to effect this delay.

Visibly angered by these antics, the Prime Minister physically intervened, first by shouting at the NDP MPs who were failing to take their seats and then pushing his way through them to physically grab the Tory whip and drag him to his seat so that voting could commence. During the tussle, a small female NDP MP was elbowed in the chest, in an incident very similar to Toronto mayor Rob Ford knocking councillor Pam McConnell to the ground in 2013. Like McConnell, Ruth Ellen Brosseau had not been the intended target of the physical altercation but, as my friend Jeremy says, “accidents happen when people throw things.”

Almost immediately, the Speaker of the House and, to his credit, the Prime Minister himself, recognized that charging across the floor and inadvertently striking an MP in an effort to coercively manhandle another who protested “take your hands off me,” was all-out wrong. And so, the Speaker ruled that the PM had fucked-up and the PM apologized. To many of us, it seemed that the sorry, tawdry story of the most powerful man in Canada losing his shit was over.

But then, about a day and a half after the incident, it became clear that the story had entered a second, and far more unpleasant phase. My Liberal MP and several others began to suggest that Trudeau had been wrong to apologize, that he had been “set up” to elbow Brosseau in the chest and drag Gordon Brown to his seat because they were deliberately delaying a process. In this re-narration, Trudeau was understood to be a frustrated boss at a workplace with recalcitrant, attention-seeking employees who had provoked him, unjustly, into justly putting them in their place. It soon came to be suggested by many on social media that MPs moving slowly or standing still when a vote was being called was, itself, a form of violence and probably a criminal act. Soon a “defense of necessity” argument was being put forward that Trudeau was engaged in something like a citizens’ arrest in which we was heroically using his body to fight against “violent” opposition MPs engaged in an illegal act. And in all the social media posts and mainstream media comments pages I have read, this latter view comprises the overwhelming majority of opinion.

Now, many people are suggesting that this consensus around the fundamental rightness of the PM’s actions arises from high levels of support for the Liberal Party and a willingness to excuse any action by its very popular leader. In the minds of many of my long-time NDP friends, this is just the cynical old Liberals ginning-up public opinion in their favour, or people so attached to the idea of the PM being a “progressive” or “feminist” that they will justify anything he does. But this interpretation is inadequate and fails to answer some obvious questions:

  1. Why are so many NDP and Tory supporters still siding with Trudeau and against their own parties’ narratives of events?

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  2. Why are Trudeau’s supporters not agreeing with Trudeau’s own interpretation of what took place and talking about what a big, generous, dignified man he is for apologizing so readily?
  3. Why are Trudeau’s supporters disbelieving the account of events offered by the Liberal Speaker of the House which is in accord, not just with that of the opposition parties, but with that of the Prime Minister himself?
  4. Why are Trudeau’s supporters not touting how progressive the legislation was whose vote was being delayed?
  5. And, most bizarrely, why are so many pushing a conspiracy theory in which the Tory whip was not colluding with the NDP to delay the vote but was secretly betraying his own party and begging Trudeau to help him to his seat, even though this entails disbelieving everything Gordon Brown has said both during and since the incident about what happened?

Perhaps we need to consider the possibility that this debate is no longer about partisan politics at all. Perhaps we should consider the possibility that this is about something bigger, more universal and more disturbing than the gong show that went on in parliament this week.

What if what matters here is not Trudeau’s function as Prime Minister but rather his function as a means of experiencing vicarious masculinity for English Canadians? Haven’t we all, white collar, blue collar, service sector, all of us been in some meeting at work where we wanted to get something important done and it has been stymied by attention-seeking asshats who want to slow everything down for their own stupid, self-serving purposes? Haven’t we all been working on a project that ends up being late because some asshole is deliberately dragging their feet for some bullshit reason? And haven’t we all wanted to shout at those attention-seeking, self-serving little shits to get out of our way?

Haven’t we all been at work and seen a co-worker standing next to their desk or their tools instead of getting on with the job? And haven’t we all wanted to shove them down into their chair or push their tools into their hands and just fucking make them get to work?

Aren’t we all too sick of bullshit, meaningless process at our jobs, slowing everything down and rewarding shitty, lazy people at the expense of good industrious people? And haven’t we all wanted to grab those lazy people and drag them along with us whether they like it or not?

On top of that, there are some less universal experiences that insecure young and middle-aged men have, like frustration at how they have to accommodate the sensitivities and bodies of young women, especially young women they feel were accidentally and unfairly promoted into their jobs? Is Ruth-Ellen Brosseau, the paper candidate who made good not the epitome of that, one of only two NDP MPs who increased their margin of victory in 2015 due to good constituency work but who continues to be dismissed as “Vegas Girl”?

At this point, what Trudeau and the other politicians in Ottawa say about this issue is now irrelevant. Our Prime Minister is not part of this debate as an interlocutor; he is part of this debate as a symbol, whose words are now irrelevant. Our national #ElbowGate conversation is about the expression of universal and widespread frustration with our workplaces, homes and civil society organizations, and our flirtation with increased physical force as a solution to what ails us.

Like most people reading this, I too have come home from meetings and privately expressed to my close friends or romantic partner about how much easier some meeting would have been if only people were allowed to hit one another more. But let’s remember why we have those no-hitting rules, no matter how much they inconvenience us.

Canadian Politics Public Discourse on Sexual and Gender-based Violence | fusangite |