Americans need to plug their ears to the siren song of radical identity politics.
By Dr. Kevin Barrett
In the bad old days, choirboys were emasculated to stop their voices from changing. Imagine being a father whose sweetly singing son had been selected for the “honor” of mutilation. Could you stand against the powerful and connected—and against the dominant ideology of the age?
In today’s rational modern world, castrating a child would be viewed as horrific child abuse. Yet psychologically castrating boys as young as three by branding them with the delusional diagnosis “gender dysphoria”—defined as “mismatch between the gender assigned at birth (i.e., their actual, biologically determined gender) and the one they identify with”—is now a lucrative gambit for the multi-billion-dollar gender confusion industry.
One of the victims of that industry, Jeffrey Younger of Coppell, Texas, is fighting back. Younger’s seven-year-old son’s life took a wrong turn when, at the age of three, he made the mistake of dressing up as a female character in a Disney movie—and was subsequently dragged to the local gender confusion clinic to be “diagnosed.” Younger argues that his son is indeed his son, and that the boy’s mother, Younger’s pediatrician ex-wife, unhinged by transgender ideology, is turning the boy into an underage drag queen. The loonie left, boosted by a complicit mainstream media, is trying to paint Younger and his supporters as the crazy ones.
Why do today’s leftists worship at the idolatrous altar of gender confusion? In his books The Wandering Who? and Being in Time, philosopher and jazz legend Gilad Atzmon argues that identity politics has usurped traditional leftist ideals of social and economic equality, peace, and justice. Before the triumph of identity politics, leftists struggled for a more reasonable distribution of income between haves and have-nots. They protested for peace and against imperial wars. And even their most unrealistic and utopian programs, misguided as some of them may have been, were inspired by an abstract ideal of justice.
But as postmodernity eclipsed modernity, leftists stopped believing in such ideals as truth and justice. Their concern for the underdog shifted: Instead of trying to help the economically disadvantaged through progressive taxation, economic planning, and funding for education and infrastructure, leftists grew obsessed with fighting for allegedly oppressed identity groups.
Women—even wealthy criminals like Hillary Clinton or Ghislaine Maxwell—were always members of a victim category. Homosexuals, no matter how rich and powerful, were also “victims.” Likewise with wealthy, powerful, and/or criminal members of other “oppressed groups” whether blacks, Jews, Hispanics, Asians, Native Americans, or people confused about their gender. The only group that could never include any victims was white, heterosexual men.
The idea that reality is whatever you “identify as” is sheer lunacy. It opens the door to extreme phoniness and hypocrisy. Case in point: the politicians and other celebrities who “identify as” crusaders against climate change, even while living extravagant lifestyles responsible for vastly disproportionate carbon emissions. According to a recent study by researchers at Lund University in Sweden, outspoken climate activist Bill Gates was personally responsible for pumping millions of pounds of carbon into the supposedly endangered atmosphere—16,000 times as much as the average person. Other celebrities who “identify as climate activists” were almost as hypocritical. Paris Hilton was responsible for more than 12,000 times as much atmospheric carbon as the average individual, while Jennifer Lopez weighed in at “only” 10,000 times as much carbon as you or me.
Do Gates, Hilton, and Lopez have the right to “identify as” climate activists? Legally, yes. Delusion and hypocrisy are not crimes.
If you call them delusional, does that make you a bigot? Should people who don’t think Gates, Hilton, and Lopez are genuinely committed to reducing carbon emissions be forcibly silenced?
It sounds crazy. But that is the direction America is moving. Those who refuse to embrace today’s trendy orthodoxies are being vilified, shadow-banned, and deplatformed. If you refuse to worship the wealthy, glamorous avatars of climate hysteria and gender confusion, you may find yourself ejected from Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, and the rest of the digital commons. And even if you aren’t ejected, it’s likely that some right-thinking programmer working for the internet oligarchs will tweak their algorithms to make it harder for you to find an audience.
Cultures that worship illusion rather than reality are on a collision course with collapse. Like the Sirens in Homer’s Odyssey, the loonie left sings a seductive song promising us unheard-of pleasures that will be ours if we abjure masculinity, forget about reality, and embrace their world of illusion.
That castrato choir is quite seductive. To resist, Odysseus made his sailors plug their ears and tie him to the mast. Will our culture do likewise—or end up broken upon the rocks of history?
Kevin Barrett, Ph.D., is an Arabist-Islamologist scholar and one of America’s best-known critics of the War on Terror. From 1991 through 2006, Dr. Barrett taught at colleges and universities in San Francisco, Paris, and Wisconsin. In 2006, however, he was attacked by Republican state legislators who called for him to be fired from his job at the University of Wisconsin-Madison due to his political opinions. Since 2007, Dr. Barrett has been informally blacklisted from teaching in American colleges and universities. He currently works as a nonprofit organizer, public speaker, author, and talk radio host. He lives in rural western Wisconsin.
