Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant № 4
Exposing Right-Wing Extremism at the Source
Unfortunately the right wing has been picking up steam in its culture war, often successfully bludgeoning the general public with confusing and conflicting information that, upon some reflection, makes very little sense. This is not only an American phenomenon, as I try to show in each one of these Disinfectant posts, but is also becoming a staple of Canadian life. These days, wherever you encounter someone using the word ‘woke’ in a derogatory sense, you’re likely to encounter someone who doesn’t even know what that word means. All they know that it refers to people who they don’t like and who they think are out to cause harm to them and to their children.
Sections: Apocalyptic Politics / Mainstreaming Satanism / Inciting Violence Through Tweets / Limits of Winsome Politics / An Interview with an Anti-Trans Physician
Apocalyptic Politics: Christianity and the New World Order - Carl Trueman - Public Discourse
This piece, adapted from a speech given by the author, is an interesting look at how a sophisticated conservative might theorize the various liberalizing changes that have gone on in the social and political world over the past 50 years. I’m not saying, of course, that Trueman has it right - I clearly think he doesn’t - but he’s come to the table with what he has identified as a real problem for those who think like he does. While he eventually falls back on his own certainty claims for justification of oppressive policies, he does a good job of identifying a real challenge in 21st century North America.
Trueman locates his concerns with the sexual revolution and with changing mores around sexual and gender identity in the rapid change of technology. He says that it is the advent of technology that has, at the very least, accelerated in humans the separation of the “who am I” question from the “what am I?” question, leading society to think that individuals could somehow overcome the necessity of tying one’s broader responsibilities as a human being to one’s individual identity and place in the world. Trueman writes,
The significance of technology in this shift can be illustrated through some contemporary political issues. Again, take the transgender issue, which connects to two broader questions. First, there is the obvious one concerning the authority of physical, biological sex over identity: Does bodily sex have a foundational, non-negotiable, given role in who we are and how we relate to each other? Second, there is the broader philosophical question of the status and authority of the body in general for identity: Is the body of the essence of what it means to be human, or is it rather something extraneous to who I am, something that should be overcome or transcended by me in a quest to construct my own freely chosen identity?
Both questions served to locate transgenderism within the broader context of transhumanism, a collection of movements bound together by a desire to transcend the physical limitations of the human body. Some transhumanists are engaged in a quest to defeat mortality, others in attempts to break through the limitations of innate sex, intelligence, or any other human attribute that can be enhanced, overcome, or transformed. Transhumanism can only be imagined as a possibility in a world where technology makes such a vision plausible. In the specific case of transgenderism, only in a world where hormone therapy and elaborate surgical procedures are possible can I come to imagine that the sexed nature of my body is accidental to who I am and that it must therefore bow to my inner psychological convictions.
For Trueman, this separation of identities accelerated by technology goes beyond the polarizing (but very real) existence of transgender people. Indeed, it cuts at the very nature of what it means to have a family:
… we should note that technology has transformed [family], too, in a number of ways. Reproductive technology has broken the monopoly of natural male–female relationships as foundational to the family structure, with its dependences and obligations. Surrogacy and IVF have shifted the cultural and legal understanding of parenthood in a functional direction that downplays or even denies the significance of biological relationships. The work of a cyborg feminist such as Sophie Lewis, with her call for the abolition of the family, is only the most recent and most extreme example of such. The same basic principle is at play in the practice of egg and sperm donation and of surrogacy. With the emerging potential to produce children from stem cells, traditional biological structures are set to become even more equivocal. The family, rather like the nation and the physical body, looks set to be demolished and rebuilt along very different lines.
He then proceeds to set up the famed Culture War in a very particular way, pitting Virtual Man, that is, humanity corrupted by technology that allows him to divide his own identity in socially destructive ways, against Real Man, a stereotypical salt-of-the-earth hardworking Man who contributes materially real things to his community.
Virtual Man, who works through his laptop and can thus work anywhere in general and nowhere in particular, found such restrictions to be far more reasonable than Real Man, who has to go to work in a particular time and particular place because he works with material, not virtual, reality. That is not simply a vocational divide. I would suggest it is an anthropological divide. Real Man experiences the world—and his own sense of self—in a fundamentally different way from Virtual Man. This is reflected in so many of the conflicts now straining western democracy, from the French Yellow Jackets to the rise of working-class nationalism to the Canadian truck protests. In each case, we see what Mary Harrington has dubbed the clash of the Virtuals versus the Reals. Underneath that divide lies a conflict of anthropologies between a technologically liberated view of human beings as disembodied wills who can transcend the limitations of the materiality of the world and a belief that embodiment and place are critical to survival.
While I disagree with much of what Trueman has to say, there is no denying that the rapid pace of technological change over the past 50 years has drastically altered our social world in ways that have far-reaching consequences. It would do progressives good to engage in some of their own critical analysis about how technology has changed society not only for the better, but also for the worse.
Mainstreaming Satanism - Rod Dreher
It’s Rod Dreher, so you don’t expect anything less than insanity from him, but his latest blog has it all, though the transphobia and an attempted satanic panic take front and centre. His ending retort is thus:
You can thank Target for bringing this sick, twisted woman’s trans-Satanic art to the American mainstream. Is there anything Woke Capitalism can’t accomplish?
Inciting Violence in the Name of God: Some Tweets
The Limits of Winsome Politics - James R. Woods - The American Conservative
I place this piece here in part because the author is none other than the Redeemer University professor who blocked me on Twitter after he amplified Walker’s incitement to violence. In this piece, Woods argues that protestant Christians (he is speaking largely to conservative evangelicals and fundamentalists) should discard the strategy of being ‘winsome’ in the area of politics, and instead pursue the use of power to fulfill the goals it thinks are righteous. Woods explains,
Politics is one way we love our neighbors. The idea that, because there are disagreements about theological, metaphysical, and moral matters, we must therefore leave others alone and restrict the pursuit of the true and the good to our private affairs is a failure of love. For instance: abortion, the disruption of the family, and the pushing of radical gender ideology on kids hurts them. Do you love your little neighbors? Politics must promote the good and protect the weak.
Yes, we are called to love our enemies. But winsome types struggle here, for their framework makes them extremely hesitant to even admit that we have enemies; but we do—Scripture says so. Here’s how Puritan Richard Baxter defines them: “he that hateth you, and seeketh or desireth your destruction or your hurt as such designedly.”
There are such entities that seek our ill in a systematic fashion. We must admit this, yes, and we must persist in loving our enemies. But does this entail letting our enemies get whatever they want in the social and political order? And might love of neighbor also include protecting them from enemies?
You cannot claim to love your neighbor while remaining indifferent to the things that destroy them. Within our love for our enemies, we need to restrict their ability to inflict evil on other neighbors. Letting socially destructive actions persist, letting enemies run roughshod over the polis and do harm to our neighbors, these constitute a failure of love.
As I noted in my screenshots of Andrew T. Walker - who is a Professor of Christian Ethics at Southwest Baptist Theological Seminary - when culture-warring Christians start talking about taking the reins of power and imposing their will on the general public, it emboldens people like the University of Waterloo attacker. Apparently James R. Woods didn’t appreciate his name being tied to the attack, and blocked me, without realizing - or perhaps with full awareness, I don’t know - that his talk of imposing culture-war social reforms from the top down inspires others to take matters into their own hands, causing violence and harm to real people.
Thrown to the Wolves - Christopher Rufo - City Journal
In this piece, Christopher Rufo, who is one of the original anti-CRT agitators in the United States, talks with an anonymous physician in the UK about what they disparagingly refer to as ‘transgender ideology’ in a Children’s Hospital. Again, the point of sharing this is not to spread the hate, but to make progressives aware of the hateful rhetoric of people like Rufo and his guest. The guest alarmingly ties COVID conspiracy theories with anti-trans hate, suggesting that there is an authoritarian plot to censor scientists and physicians who disagreed with the scientific community’s consensus.
I think the best way to answer that question is to talk about the cultural shift that happened in 2020, because transgender ideology and Covid are inextricably linked. Normally, doctors operate by the authority of the professional societies that govern our specific practice. That worked because the individuals in those institutions were reliable, intelligent, and thoughtful. But with Covid in 2020, we started getting medical decrees without peer review or evidence—you saw this with masks, social distancing, and emergency-use authorizations. These decrees were expressed as something that everyone had to do, without justification based on sound science. The other thing was censorship. If you were to ask questions or express doubt about these medical decrees, you would be ostracized within your department, and you stood a good chance of being publicly humiliated, severely reprimanded, or fired.
That’s when transgender ideology really took off. Within these academic institutions, so-called experts in the field of transgender medicine would simply declare that puberty blockers and other interventions were the gold standard of care. The evidence to support this is completely fraudulent, but no dissent was permitted. Everyone within the medical community knew that if he questioned transgender ideology, he would suffer the same type of repercussions that had happened during Covid. The best way to describe the environment would be as an authoritarian, censorious culture that discourages any meaningful debate and encourages the demonization of anyone who asks questions.
I share these pieces because it is important that right-wing commentators be called out for the false prophets and fanatical liars that they are. There is no left wing plot to force authoritarian communism on the American (or Canadian) public. There is, however, a growing stable of increasingly unhinged right wing rants that don’t offer anything to the conversation, but instead look to utterly destroy those who disagree with them. And as those rants find themselves in mainstream publications, the Overton Window shifts even further to the right.