A Strong Warning

Beware The Final Stage

“Destruction is thus always restoration – that is, the destruction of a set of categories that introduce artificial divisions into an otherwise unified ontology.”

-Judith Butler

“Pop’n’Olly materials are best described as adultification, an activity which normalises adult sexualities and niche ‘gender’ identities, and invites children to join in the discussion. Few schools are likely to say yes if an outside body offers to teach their seven-year-olds queer theory and about being transsexual. Yet this is what they will be doing if they use Pop’n’Olly resources or accept their free books.”

-Shelley Charlesworth

There are people who want to destroy society and build something much better in its place. There are far more people who find many of those people’s ideas attractive, even if they do not share the desire for destruction themselves-they are so deluded or naive or alienated from the streets and from normal life that they believe that society can function without police, or that there’s unlimited wealth for federal spending, or that nature is a perfect garden and humanity is a blight. These ideas seem more prominent now. Perhaps that’s just me. Of those people who want to destroy society, some subset are the ones who want to destroy and corrupt so badly that they truly do not care about the cost. They will pay any price for their imaginary utopia, and every new horror and failure and lurch down into the mud of human suffering will only intensify their desire for power. I think we see the barest hints of that impulse right now when we look at our cities and our campuses.

There are people so privileged that they do not understand society. These are the arrogant, the ‘reformers’ who believe that they know better and their schemes for bail reform or green transit or ‘zero carbon’ policies can only improve things… eventually. Then there are the hangers-on, the cowards, the narcissists, the psychopaths. They might not be sure about all of this, or they don’t care, but they will continue to say nothing and operate the vast machinery which eats societies in order to protect their status or the tenure or their jobs, or to gain some malign personal advantage.

I say all of this as a warning: good ideas are hard won. They have taken millennia to develop and birth. Bad ideas are rampant and there seem to be dynamics arising from the interplay of increasing luxury and consumption, increased social alienation, the advent of social media, and the increasing control and management of our lives by huge managerial systems which are worsening them and making displays of entitlement and fragility and vindictiveness more common and less restrained. Can you hear the whispers? Do you sense the trends I describe?

I could describe some bad ideas but if you’ve read much of what I’ve written you probably already understand the outlines of some of those. I want to keep this pointed, and brief, as I’m otherwise busy today.

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I’m researching and writing about Queer Theory, an academic corpus which has escaped the laboratory of university sociology departments and festers nationwide even now. It is quite literally a full assault and opposition against any categorizations or rules or norms, believing that all such things must fade away for the perfect society to come into being. If this sounds like Marx’s vision of Communism that’s because it is. Only… Marx was focused on the great economic trends of history and of liberating the workers by dissolving all economic roles and specializations and hierarchies and property into a single blissful mass. He was never able to articulate how this might work. This is a challenge which makes ALL Critical Theorists uncomfortable and, in fact, their failure to explicate even the barest outlines of their actual vision can be seen as a kind of defining feature. They are purely NEGATIVE ideologies. They only attack, they never support (unless supporting serves the larger mission of attacking something greater or deeper). They are the memetic acid of Western Civilization and they’ve eaten through the floorboards in certain places and are now dripping onto the pipes.

Marx was focused on economics. Queer Theory is focused on sex and gender and our social notions of appropriateness and taboo, innocence and corruption, male and female, adult and child.

This is something that I have known for many years: Queer Theory has a problem with pedophilia. It is baked into the very fiber of the ideology and while I have no reason to believe that most Queer Theorists are pedophiles, their attitude toward pornography and kink and age of consent laws and even sex/gender put them so far outside the mainstream that their ideas, if plainly stated, would enrage most adults in the U.S. I do not believe most Leftists are Queer Theorists, just as I don’t believe most of them are Hamas supporters. Unfortunately they have mostly committed to a strategy of obfuscation, minimization, and slander when the issues are raised. They are so invested in a project to liberate and normalize LGBTQ people that when they encounter a drag queen arrested for a sex offense or a teacher encouraging students to keep secrets from loving parents or an academic fighting to ‘de-stigmatize’ pedophilia their instinct is to hide the example, and never consider or explore the possibility that these instances might be part of a larger problem.

I do not necessarily think there is anything harmful about exposing kids to drag queens but I have read enough Queer Theory (the weird and insular world which created the concept of ‘Draq Queen Story Hour’) to be suspicious of the sudden and intense interest in organizing these events. I pleace absolutely NO faith in progressive parents and teachers to exercise discretion and protect their charges. When have they ever? Drag queens are arrested for crimes against children all the time, although you’ll never see these instances widely reported. They are adult men who put on adult performances dressed as women after all…

This is where we come to bad ideas. There are MANY educators and academic (researchers, faculty at teachers’ colleges, and others) who believe that LGBTQ people are still so oppressed by the structure of our society that we should be making every effort to normalize and reform in the directions suggested by certain activists, and part of this project (a huge part) is to re-educate children. I say ‘re-educate’ because this is a conscious effort to change cultural ideas and norms through mass indoctrination. Indoctrination has a bad flavor but every instance of socialization is really indoctrination: it is teaching young people the doctrines of our society. If you want to teach kids that bullying is bad or anorexia is harmful or ambition and respect are important you must indoctrinate them. Similarly, much of our modern educational system is committed to indoctrinating students with new and rather untested concepts: gender identity is an important reality; anyone who questions your subjective feelings or identity (unless those feelings incline against the lessons being taught, or the larger progressive project) is, at best, inappropriate and probably vicious. There are less pointed but more influential doctrines as well: gay, trans, non-binary, ‘gender fluid’ people are original and exciting; their lives and experiences have special worth and cachet.

No doubt most of the teachers who believe and teach these things really believe that they are helpful to students but there is no data to that effect and a great deal of emerging evidence that indicates the contrary. These new lessons are essentially a vast experiment upon society, as indeed all progressive ideologies are.

[ABOVE] One of the educational aids by which well-meaning, young people of mediocre intellect cheerfully try to provoke questions and doubts about sex and gender among children, who tend to understand the concept of ‘boy’ and ‘girl’ VERY well and almost immediately upon becoming verbal. Apparently that kind of intuitive and biologically-rooted certainty which has served the species for 900,000 years is a challenge and an obstacle to The Reformers

That is not my warning though. Remembering that there are indeed malcontents and utopians and revolutionaries (and predators) who have some degree of influence within this movement my warning is that once social concepts of biological sex and marriage and law and responsibility and virtue and civil equality have been weakened (as indeed they all have, perhaps some fatally) the final prize for such people is childhood.

I’m not going to predict that we will see a fast increase in efforts to ‘normalize’ pedophilia. It’s possible that such a move could provoke too much of an uproar and a backlash. I would have said the same about housing intact biological males with female prisoners, though, and that is now the norm, in New Jersey and California and Scotland and Spain and many other places. When women are threatened or beaten or raped they find an uninterested media and a hostile administration. They’re only individuals, you see… far less important than program or ideology. Prisoners might not be a great example, for they are truly marginalized and have no voice. Remember this lessons: even the marginalized and victims of the system will be happily sacrificed at the altar of ideology. If foster kids or poor public school students or female gym patrons must be endangered to satisfy (so-called) trans activists or immigration activists or homeless activists they will be and they have been. This is not about securing people or improving lives… it’s about victory for an ideology, and individuals and even groups will always be prioritized below the goals of the ideology. That’s the nature of ideologies.

I fear that we have begun a cycle of increasing radicalism (in a number of directions) because we now have a strong anti-normative and anti-institutional impulse embedded within our civilization, and the 30-40% of ‘less radical’ progressives usually seem to want to fixate on the Right as the real danger, and refuse to confront the issues of their own allies. A German AfD politician gets stabbed by an angry immigrant? The German Right gets blamed. Parents protest sexual content in their kid’s school libraries? Conservatives and ‘homophobia’ are blamed. People lose faith in the media and the wisdom of institutional elites? Disinformation is blamed. This is a movement without any brakes, and which includes enough young/radical/malicious/miserable members to embrace nearly any falsehood. Who’s to say that an erosion of the rights and protections we give to children are not next?

We are a civilization which is infantilizing adults. Adults are fragile, adults are traumatized, adults can’t struggle, adults can’t argue… certain (‘marginalized’) adults can’t even be held legally responsible for crimes and anti-social behavior. The converse of this change is to redefine childhood. With some reluctance and sadness I think we will begin to see a stronger push towards emphasizing the sexuality and agency and wisdom… of children. That is my warning to you. This is the final stage of the decades-long project to simultaneously strangle (dismantle) and remake our civilization. It is one slippery slope that we can’t ever explore.

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