Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant
FKA the What the Heck are They Thinking Anyway? Series on 21st Century Conservative Thought
It’s been a long time since I featured a post specifically on what conservatives were thinking and writing about. I have long believed that sunlight is the best disinfectant: it’s important to highlight the kinds of things that conservatives and right wing pundits are saying about and around the world, not because I want to amplify their bad ideas, but because I want to bring attention to where the dark places are. While these ideas may make sense to some people, I hope that folks will take a critical lens to what they read in pieces like this, just as they do any other piece. What worries me most about the ideas in pieces like these is that they are often demonstrably false, usually gross misinterpretations of decidedly democratic, and frequently scientifically-informed perspectives.
Elites Against Western Civilization - Joel Kotkin - City Journal
These gross distortions of reality can often be found in the publications of influential think tanks like the Manhattan Institute. Take this paragraph in a designed hit piece on higher education (all links are in the original):
Ethnic-studies programs are aimed at high schoolers who often lack even the most basic understanding of American history. Incapable of meeting national standards for basic grade-level English language arts and mathematics, many of these students would instead learn academic jargon like misogynoir, cisheteropatriarchy, and hxrstory—which ethnic-studies advocates, such as R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, a member of the advisory committee that worked on the draft, defend in the name of legitimating the discipline. “AP Chemistry, for example, has some very complex academic terms, difficult to pronounce, but it’s expected because it’s AP Chemistry,” Cuauhtin explains.
It doesn’t take a rocket scientist to see the strange twisting of reality that occurs in this paragraph alone. Not only are ethnic-studies programs - unhelpfully and unsurprisingly left undefined - not “aimed at high schoolers who often lack even the most basic understanding of American History,” but that very line imports a) value judgements about the kinds of students that enter ethnic studies programs, and b) an unspoken, but culturally significant and very particular interpretation of American History. The author then attempts to mock terms used by academics, implying that students who can’t read or write are being purposefully bamboozled by complicated and undefinable terms. Again, it doesn’t take a rocket scientist to realize that none of this is true, and that supposedly illiterate university students are not, in fact, being taken for fools by their propagandizing profs.
Or consider this broadside at climate activist Greta Thunberg:
Once largely a college phenomenon, progressive ideology is now being pressed upon elementary school students, a development that could transform our politics permanently. As authoritarians from Stalin and Hitler to Mao all recognized, youth are the most susceptible to propaganda and most easily shaped by the worldview of their instructors. This process has been most apparent in the environmental movement, which has elevated as its ideological battering ram the unlikely figure of Greta Thunberg, a seemingly troubled Swedish teenager. With her harsh millenarian rhetoric about the end of the world, she reprises the role played by youthful religious fanatics during the “children’s crusade” of the thirteenth century or, more recently, the Red Guards, whom Mao mobilized to silence his critics.
Again, the rhetorical tactics of the author deserve highlighting. Using the technique of sandwiching, the author attempts to paint Thunberg as dangerous and unhinged, another in a long line of apocalyptic false prophets, linking her directly, both at the beginning and the end of the paragraph, with Stalin, Hitler and Mao. Like the ethnic studies example above, it doesn’t take a genius to realize that a dictator, Thunberg is not. Instead of engaging with Thunberg’s ideas, which are those of a growing, teenage girl responding the the changing world around her, Kotkin resorts to smearing her with the legacies of some of the world’s most terrible authoritarians.
History Goes Woke - George Leef - National Review
Above I mentioned that discussions of American history by conservatives refer to “an unspoken, but culturally significant and very particular interpretation of American History.” The National Review, one of the most respected conservative publications, has devoted a number of articles recently to the idea of ‘woke history,’ particulary in the context of the Critical Race Theory controversy. At stake are two distinctive versions of American history, one of which valorizes the White American experience as a God-given right, where the United States of America is destined to be a City on a Hill, a perfect version of a Christian Nation. The other takes a dimmer, more realistic view of American history, noting that the many things that supposedly make America great have been systematically built on the backs of Black people and the original Indigenous inhabitants of the land. For many conservatives, this second view is not only false, but is treasonous and should be stamped out entirely. It’s hardly a surprise, then, when the National Review lashes out, alarmed that the academic discipline of history might be going off the rails as it looks to incorporate the views of marginalized researchers into the discipline.
Most academic fields have succumbed to some degree to leftist demands that scholarship and teaching be reoriented toward its obsessions (race, power relations, equality, “marginalized” groups, etc.). One that has gone furthest is history, where “woke” considerations now pervade almost everywhere.
A good piece of evidence is the American Historical Review, and, in today’s Martin Center article, David Randall of the National Association of Scholars looks into its most recent issue to see what it foretells.
Randall writes, “To begin with, a transcript of American Historical Association president Jacqueline Jones’s recent conference address reviews similar speeches by previous AHA presidents. Her judgment repeats the self-satisfied conclusions of the new historians: that the old historians were narrow-minded white men who delighted to write about other white men (pp. 3, 7-8) and that the new history is ‘inclusive’ (p. 2) and thus superior. Jones’s ‘inclusive’ history dovetails with a perception of current events that aligns remarkably well with every talking point of the Democratic party (pp. 1, 24, 27-28) and with an unselfconscious embrace of radical advocacy. Her presidential address dedicates the historical profession to the political agenda of the new radical establishment.”
In short, she means to transform history. What will be covered in the future will be those things that support the “progressive” view that our past has been one of unmitigated misery, calling for radical change in the present.
There are several things going on here worth pointing out. The first is that the article sets up its readers to take a particular view. It starts out, “most academic fields have succumbed to some degree to leftist demands that scholarship and teaching be reoriented toward its obsessions” which is a strange way to paint the fact that academic scholarship is, generally speaking, oriented towards discovering and learning new things, including about the past. The phrasing also sets the reader up to discount whatever said scholarship might offer, suggesting that leftist versions of history are nothing more than mere obsessions of a certain segment of the intelligentisa. Also at work here is the suggestion that the leftist version of history is akin to historical revisionism, that progressives are working to ‘transform’ history rather than to highlight portions of our past that have thus-far gone unnoticed by the broader population. This isn’t true, of course, but the truth feels increasingly irrelevant in the face of right wing rhetoric.
Antichrist and His Ruin - A Documentary
Lest Canada be left out of the picture, the Waterloo Region’s Trinity Bible Chapel, a fundamentalist and Christian Reconstructionist church, hosted a conference called The Church at War in November, 2022. Billed as a conference offering “strategy and hope for a church at war,” the film “Antichrist and His Ruin” was premiered. I hesitate to call it a documentary, since documentaries generally aim at transmitting true facts about the world, albeit often very incompletely. From what I can piece together from the trailer, below, the film aims to show, in part, how the Canadian government was actively engaging in violent persecution against legitimate religious freedoms during the COVID-19 pandemic. It also aims to sharpen its knives in the Christian Nationalist culture wars by making repeated derogatory and discriminatory references to 2SLGBTQ+ people, in an attempt to claim that sexual orentation and gender expression are weapons of tyranny wielded with violent force by the dictatorial Canadian state specifically against Christians - as such, a content warning is in order.
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.