I’m fairly new on Twitter but have already had the displeasure of witnessing the fury of faux-progressive backlash against feminism and feminists attempting to speak their mind in public places… in Canada. Canada?? The easy going, live and let live notions we like to believe in the more sensible regions of Canada seem to dissipate in our larger cities. Queer rights activists and trans activists have mounted a vigorous assault not on the arguments of gender critical feminists, but rather their character, the venues that host said feminists, and a rather hyperbolic set of straw assertions/mantras that serve as conversational dead ends/thought terminating cliches.
This is not the left that I grew up with, nor do I intend to ever associate with. These individuals seem to believe that their individualistic solutions to systemic social problems will somehow win the day. Not gonna happen.
The comparison between the regressive left and religious is worthy of examination. James Bloodworth makes the comparison in his essay on Unherd.
“But politics as religion invariably comes with a cost. There is, naturally, a constant hunt for heretics. Public denunciations followed by ‘cancellations’ are de rigueur. Rigid adherence to doctrine is celebrated, while those who err are pompously told that they are on the “wrong side of history”. Political spats focus on the moral character of a person rather than the content of their arguments. Public arguments in which, as Swift phrases it, “identity leftists spend a great deal of time expending venom… at fellow leftists with whom they have some minor disagreements” are ubiquitous on Twitter and other social media.
All of this takes the Left further into the echo chamber, away from the people it is supposed to represent. Attitudes which are held by the vast majority of Britons — that there should be some upper limit on immigration, that sex differences exist, that gender isn’t entirely a social construct — are enough to get a person ‘cancelled’ by today’s hobbyist Left. Moreover, the slippery equation of words — or even thoughts — with violence creates a censorious climate where activists feel justified in hounding people from public life completely.”
See the transactivists haranguing women and trying to disrupt two public (in Toronto and Vancouver respectively) gatherings that featured Meghan Murphy and other feminist speakers was solid proof for me of the parallel.
6 comments
November 6, 2019 at 8:56 am
tildeb
The psychological similarities are also quite striking as Valerie Terico writes about <a href="https://valerietarico.com/2019/01/24/the-righteousness-and-the-woke-why-evangelicals-and-social-justice-warriors-trigger-me-in-the-same-way/"here.
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November 6, 2019 at 8:57 am
tildeb
Oops, sorry about that broken tag.
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November 6, 2019 at 9:12 am
john zande
I liked it better when silly voices didn’t have access to the foghorn-like megaphones of the interwebs.
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November 9, 2019 at 11:32 am
bleatmop
This leaves a person in Canada with very little voice if they oppose neoliberalism and the regressive left at the same time. The NDP has fully adopted this religious thinking as evidenced by their elected members outright calling for deplatforming Murphy. Allowing people to speak should be the basic tenet of any democracy and anyone who thinks Murphy is so wrong should be willing to engage in debate with her to show the crowd whose argument is correct. Instead we get those who should be the champions of free speech become the judge, jury, and executioners for those they accuse of thought crime.
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November 9, 2019 at 11:44 am
The Arbourist
Well said Bleat,
Recently, I’ve been lambasting the CBC on twitter for its bullshit coverage of MM speaking in Toronto and Vancouver. They are making it hard for me to continue to support our public broadcaster.
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November 9, 2019 at 12:13 pm
The Arbourist
@ tildeb
Wow, what a great article. Thank you for steer. You are absolutely correct, the parallels are quite chilling.
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