Sunlight is the Best Disinfectant № 5
Exposing Right Wing Extremism at the Source
As the right wing starts to feel more comfortable saying the quiet things out loud - see the Jason Aldean controversy - they are publishing more and more incendiary materials, often under their own names. They’re no longer content muttering to themselves at musty family gatherings, but, just like in the early 1930’s in Germany and other parts of Europe, are beginning to organize themselves and take action. As we saw with the Holocaust of more than 6 million Jews along with an additional 5 million deemed by the far-right as disposable, the consequences of their words reverberate far and wide.
Sections: Defense of Western Christianity / Doing the Work / A Coming Revolution from the Right / A Primer on Repentance
A Defense of Western Christianity: A Glossary and Reading List
This is a one-off anonymous blog published in September 2022 that outlines some of the language that right-wing extremists use to describe the culture around them, along with an extensive reading list of far-right literature. I’m a firm believer in the idea that progressives should be aware of the language and terms being used, what they means, and the dangers that these words present to our society at large. As more and more folks leave the Aldean-esque dogwhistles behind, the rest of us are will be forced to call out hateful and dangerous speech.
Cucked Christianity (aka, Cuckstianity): A form of modern Christianity that promotes cuckoldry, such as mass third-world immigration, transracial adoption, diversity, and "racial reconciliation" (i.e. reparations).
Uncucked Christianity: A traditional form of Christianity that recognizes importance of genophilia, ethno-religion, identitarian religion, and ethnocentrism. Typically practiced by alpha males and high-status females.
Genophilia: Love of one's own race. A key tenet of traditional religion, which is adamantly rejected by Christian Cultural Marxists.
Christian Cultural Marxism: A Christian form of Cultural Marxism. The doctrine that people should deny racial / ethnic loyalties. Christian Cultural Marxists support mass Third World immigration into Western countries, diversity outreach, literal cuckoldry such as whites adopting non-whites, etc.
Identitarian Religion: An older form of religion that stresses ancestral obligations. Adamantly opposed by Christian Cultural Marxists (at least for whites). Throughout nearly all human history, identitarian religion (aka, ethno-religion), has been the norm.
Scientific & Philosophical Realism: Unlike both fundamentalists and Christian Christian Cultural Marxists who reject science, Christian scientific realists are pro-science. For instance, we realists accept the obvious truth of human biodiversity, which is adamantly rejected by Christian Cultural Marxists. Since God created human biodiversity, we should pronounce and celebrate it.
Christian Nationalism: The normal instinct of Christians wanting to live in nations and opposing globalism. Sovereignty is normal, natural, and healthy. The opposite of nationalism is globalism, an idea birthed by Marxism. Anyone opposed to nationalism is carrying water for globalists. There is nothing wrong with nation states refusing to let third worlders invader their countries and deporting those invaders already there.
Doing the Work - Ian Buruma - Harper’s Magazine
This piece, written by former New York Review of Books editor Ian Buruma, attempts to defend a traditionally leftist focus on economics over the ‘wokeness’ of ‘The Elite.’ His arguments ring even hollower than their presentation on the page once you realize that Buruma was famously ‘cancelled’ in 2018 after publishing an essay by disgraced Canadian media personality Jian Ghomeshi. Suddenly these words spilled in the famous Harper’s Magazine begin to feel more like an aggrieved but insanely privileged person intent on taking the wrong lessons from a predicament of his own making, using the thinnest of foils to dress up his whining as an intellectual argument.
During the Sixties, however, the left began to switch its focus from economic selfishness to social and cultural sadism. “The heirs of the New Left of the Sixties,” he wrote, “have created, within the academy, a cultural Left. Many members of this Left specialize in what they call the ‘politics of difference’ or ‘of identity’ or ‘of recognition.’ ” And the interests of workers, especially white workers, have never occupied a large part in this. …
The politics of difference were often initiated by black people, women, gay people, and others who felt the sting of discrimination. Only later were they taken up by members of the white elite. …
But the distance between the left’s cultural priorities and its economic agenda became a serious problem for progressives in the Nineties. By that time, the differences between liberal and conservative economic policies had become minimal. After the collapse of the Soviet Union, there was widespread disillusion among liberals regarding anything that smacked of socialism, or indeed anything that involved the state as a strong actor for socioeconomic improvement. Few people longed for a revival of labor power either. …
The Elect are fighting the wrong class war. Progressives should be on the side of all people who are vulnerable and in need of protection against powerful interests. The quasi-Protestant obsession with the morality of public figures won’t result in necessary reforms. Statements that affirm inclusivity, diversity, and racial justice sound radical, but often distract from the much harder challenges of improving public education and health care, or introducing tax reforms that create greater equality. This work will do far more for the welfare of poor and marginalized people than demonstrations of virtue.
Conditions are Ripe for a Revolution from the Right - Michael Bonner - The Hub
Writing for The Hub, a Canadian right-wing publication, Micheal Bonner argues that the time is ripe - and right - for a revolution from the right. Like the Buruma piece above, Bonner gets his wires crossed, bizarrely attributing the disastrous consequences of the laissez-faire capitalism of Reagan et al. to an imagined 21st century left-wing elite. This piece, ostensibly a review and exposition of Peter Turchin’s book “End Times,” points out the failures of capitalism thusly:
Throughout much of the 20th century, typical American wages grew much faster than inflation. But this stopped in the 1970s, when median wages began, on the whole, to stagnate. Even when they have risen in absolute terms (as they have in some cases), their purchasing power has declined. The price of labour has remained artificially low, partly because of a massive increase in labour market participation from the 1950s onward and partly because of low-skilled immigration in more recent years. The result of all this has been an enormous upward transfer of wealth away from the middle and working classes to the ultra-rich. But it gets worse. In 1976, the average cost of studying at a public university was $617 annually; in 2016 it was $8,804 and has gone up since then. So a typical person earning the median 1976 wage would need 150 work hours to pay for a year of university, but now you would need 500 work hours. Similarly, a median-wage worker must now work about 40 percent longer in order to afford a typical house.
Of course, on Turchin and Bonner’s view, capitalism isn’t the cause of this rapidly widening gap between the rich and the rest of us. That would be the never-dying whipping horse of the right, The Elite.
Amidst all this “popular immiseration”, Turchin notes a huge enlargement of the American elite, or “elite overproduction”, as he calls it. This can be measured by the number of people with higher degrees, as well as the growth in the top 10 percent of incomes—a state of affairs exacerbated by diminishing median wages, growing labour-force participation, and a growing economy. In other words, elite classes get richer and their numbers grow as more and more people try to leave the middle classes and join them. The problem is that the number of high-status positions within government and elite professions has hardly changed. There are too many elites, or aspiring elites, and not enough for them to do.
This calls for, Turchin and Bonner say, a show of force from the so-called counter-elites.
Turchin’s idea of a counter-elite is an interesting one. The archetype would be the likes of Julius Caesar or Robespierre—successful revolutionaries who degraded and overthrew a moribund patrician order. In our own time, we have the example of Donald Trump who embodied the “throbbing middle finger in the face of America’s ruling class,” in Turchin’s quotation. Incidentally, that phrase is from Tucker Carlson’s 2018 book ‘Ship of Fools’ which is essentially an exposition of all the elite failures that provoked the election of Donald Trump. …
With the idea of a show-of-force against the entrenchment of The Elites, represented, Bonner says, by the Likes of Obama, Romney, and Clinton, firmly in play, Bonner turns to Patrick Deneen, taking up some ideas from his latest book, the omninously-named Regime Change.
… both Turchin and Deneen seem to agree with the new American revolutionaries that the American elite is bloated, parasitical, and incompetent. And the insurgents are unanimous in attacking the elite’s ever more deranged emphasis on personal autonomy, total economic freedom, supremacy of market forces, and the doctrine of a borderless, globalised world as a set of self-serving and harmful ideas.
… Deneen’s vision of deposing the American elite rests on a broad philosophical basis. Regime Change revives the Aristotelian political analysis of the Many and the Few, and urges the balancing of antithetical class interests within a “mixed constitution”. The political recommendations all boil down to replacing a self-serving and ham-fisted elite with a new one that shares the virtues of the middle and working classes: love of stability, attachment to family and religion, localism, patriotism, and so forth. In Deneen’s view, this would mean “the raw assertion of political power by a new generation of political actors inspired by an ethos of common-good conservatism”.
Bonner teases the prospect of a civil war, before settling on a thesis around the re-organization of society by the counter-elites. Bonner concludes thusly:
I am thinking here of rising interest rates, reindustrialisation, and demographics. The rising cost of money should mean that investment in start-up jobs and hyper-financialisation, on which the elite have thriven, cannot be long for this world. Recent layoffs in the media and in tech appear to support this prediction. As America and the West re-jig supply chains away from China, off-shoring will mutate into “friend-shoring”, and money will flow into enlarging the American industrial plant. This will add to discontent, as technocratic elites grow less relevant, and gradually sink back into the middle classes. The demand for blue-collar skills will grow, and those jobs will become increasingly lucrative. Meanwhile, the cohort of the more rooted, more religious people favoured by Deneen will grow, since they tend to reproduce more abundantly than other groups. Meanwhile, the Baby Boomers—the largest generation ever, and over-represented in the American elite—will die out, making room for their children and grandchildren.
If I am right, the elite will shrink inevitably, though it may be hard going as that happens. The worst fears of Turchin and Deneen may not come to pass; but there will be radical change, whether we like it or not. But if there is one thing we should take from these books it is that the defenders of left-liberalism stand only for the status quo. They have become, in effect, conservative. The new revolutionaries are coming from the Right.
Whatever you think of Bonner’s thesis, there should be no doubt that the right-wing is on the move. They are out for the blood of the so-called Elites - the problem with this is that once the fire of revolution catches on, it’s hard to stop the proverbial blood from becoming literal blood.
A Primer on Repentance - Rosaria Butterfield - TruthScript
While you’ve probably never heard of Rosaria Butterfield, she has started to make quite the name for herself among anti-LGBTQ+ Christians. Her caché comes from the fact that, according to her, she used to “worship the gods of LGBTQ+” but has since come to understand that she was wrong, and has ‘repented’ of her sins. In a way, her appeal is the same as mine - she was once a member of the so-called enemy, and has now dedicated her life to exposing what she now sees as plainly wrong. Here she is in her own words:
By God’s mercy, I would soon learn I was lost in my sin, and my soul was rotting under the stench. I was spiritually dead, with my sins condemning me through every thought, word, and deed. I had broken every commandment under God’s moral law (Exodus 20: 1-17). I was an atheist (1st), I worshipped the gods of LGBTQ (2nd), I despised God’s truth and his name (3rd), I committed all manner of sin on the Lord’s Day and denied God respect and worship (4th), I despised authority (5th), I advocated for abortion (6th), I practiced and promoted homosexuality (7th), I stole glory from God and loved material goods (8th), I spoke untruth by believing that I was gay and that “gay is good” (9th), I coveted an influential career promising independence from all authority (10th). By God’s grace alone, He justified and adopted me, drew me to repentance, forgave me of my sins, and continues to lead me in sanctification, prayer, repentance, and joy in the Lord.
Not that long ago, Pastor Matt Shantz1 from Central Community Church in Chilliwack, B.C. did a podcast answering a few questions from listeners, who I assume to be mostly his congregants. One of the questions was about welcoming a transgender person into a small group.2 He repeated a number of things that simply aren’t true, namely that Christian belief about Queer people doesn’t contribute to suicidal thoughts in LGBTQ+ people (it does), before moving on to talk about Butterfield’s conversion story. He noted that she had formed a friendship with a pastor, who talked with her about Jesus and the Christian message. Shantz intimates that by becoming friends with a transgender person, by welcoming them into their small group, they are setting up an opportunity for repentance and conversion to Christ, which, it is assumed, following the example of Rosaria Butterfield, will result in them leaving the ‘transgender lifestyle.’ I’ve included the podcast link below - the section on transgender people starts at 32:00. For those interested, Shantz tackles the topic of cannabis at 7:05 - I have not listened to this section, as there was only so much of the podcast that I could handle.
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.
I went to Youth Group with Matt all the way through high school. He was one of the popular kids, one of two that eventually went on to become pastors of large churches.
Many evangelical churches have some form of ‘small groups,’ which are essentially smaller bible study cells that allow congregants to develop a more personal relationship with each other.