This is an article under construction. The nuts and bolts are here, but I am crafting this discussion for use as the opening chapter of a three volume series on Biblical Worldview.
At the risk of making my consideration of Terry Walling’s book, Unlikely Nomads, even longer, I believe that it is necessary to explain why the things I’ve said in “A Rather Hostile Review of Unlikely Nomads: In Search of the New Church, by Terry B. Walling,” are import to consider.
At the end of this discussion, I plan to add a section about the impact that Critical Marxism and Postmodernism have had on a particular set of people who lay claim to being Christian. In danger of becoming bitter roots in the Church whose condemnation is spelled out quite clearly in books like Hebrews and Deuteronomy, these boast Christ, but have so radically altered their understanding of Him and of Scripture as to make them a wholly different breed of religionist than any part of Biblical Christianity would recognize. Some are on their journey away from such thinking as you can read with benefit from Alisa Childers’ testimony in Another Gospel: A Lifelong Christian Seeks Truth in Response to Progressive Christianity (Carol Stream: Tyndale Momentum, 2020) and others are on their journey in. Given Walling’s vocabulary, fixation on unraveling the historic Christian church (in the name of recapturing the true Jesus), and his heavy quotation and reference to known progressive Christians and many whose online presence seems to promise such perceptions it is here and not in the more obviously atheistic and nihilistic Critical Marxism discussed below that I fear one will find the real drive for Unlikely Nomads, whether known or unknown to the author himself.
He’s Not Heavy He’s My Brother
I take no joy in upbraiding a fellow Christian, either publically or privately, but the call to act for what I believe to be to the benefit of all is stronger than my desire for peaceful coexistence. There is a significant part of my soul that wants nothing more than to live out my days sitting contemplatively on my own dock on my own lake in my own woods, reading, writing fiction, theology, & commentaries, and cultivating my skills in various modes of artistic expression; I want to paint, draw, and learn piano. This is not my lot, however. Like Esther, I am drawn unwilling into a fight I did not want because the need is great and the hour dire. Wow… that sure was melodramatic wasn’t it?!
Wait! Marxist is Bad?
When I was growing up, it was pretty basic in the circles that I traveled that using words like Marxist, Communist, Fascist, or Socialist to describe something was, if accurate, an automatic, severe, and just condemnation. We were quite aware that the shared ideology that underpins them was, in one way or another, responsible for the murder (including mass starvation) of multiplied tens of millions well in excess of one hundred million. The only devastation that comes close to these numbers is Islamic Jihad. But the slightly greater numbers of those murdered and oppressed by Islam were tallied up over more than a millennia, while these socialist groups considered in the counting piled them up in less than a century. Now, these deaths were not in spite of the core ideology of these devotees, (which many foolishly paint as altruistic) but were a natural extension of it. The elitist leaders are all about power and control. Altruistic promises gain mass buy-in. There are true believers, “Useful Idiots,” but they are as dangerous, if not more so, than the rhetorical promoters because they are true believers.
Political Amigos
It is also important to understand that Marxism, Communism, Fascism , and Socialism, in all their forms differ only in slightly-varied administrative particulars. They are all only somewhat altered schemes for total government, planned societies, collectivist state worship. The continued attempts by the left/progressives to cast a right-left divide between Fascists and themselves is no more than agenda driven framing. This framing has, unfortunately, allowed them to evade responsibility in the eyes of the masses for the early exposure that the atrocities of the National Socialists gained during World War II. The result has been that almost everyone views NAZI as a slur, while through other framing believe that these are far afield from Socialists, Marxists, and Communists whose systems “have never really been tried.” Lenin, Stalin, Mao, Castro, Pol Pot and their ilk were “not true socialism/communism.” After all, Socialism, Communism, and Marxism are altruistic and promote sharing, caring, and equality… right?
The exploited, but misrepresented, historic hostility between these groups was not rooted in core beliefs, however, but only in issues of who would rule, and the fastest and best way to bring about their shared vision for total Statist control over global humanity. Should it be world domination leading to a humanist Utopia by using localized national identities as a launching pad, or should it launch from the cultivation of global class ties loyal to a localized power structure to conquer all? How is total State control over production best managed? Shall it be regulatory control, or taking actual possession of everything? Oh, yeah! And which of us is going to be king of the hill?! That’s it. Fascism, Marxism, Communism, and Socialism have fundamentally shared visions, processes, and goals, with nearly identical ideas about God, Man, and reality. The right-left divide is little more than a shell game.
Violence Never Fails to Solve Everything
The violence that came to characterize these movements is not incidental, but, rather, a necessary step sooner or later in their ravening desire for power/radical religious devotion[1] sought in the name of the collective good. Government IS A GUN! Some wanted to ride peaceful tracks as far as they would take them and then turn to violence as last resort, while others thought that they may as well get to the violence as soon as possible to speed things along. Some are numbed to the violence because of their unchecked avarice for power, others, however, are so convinced that something beautiful is on the horizon that they excuse the violence as an unfortunate but necessary step to bring foolish people in line for their own good and to eradicate those evil people standing in the way of total human happiness. The greatest evil is done in the name of good intentions wielded with unchecked hubris.
Never Let a Hurt Feeling Go to Waste
These figures promise equality of outcome, and exploit the inevitable inequality of outcome in nature and humanity to gain mass buy-in for their vision. They use oppression narratives to stir their “marginalized” groups to revolutionary fervor, convincing them that they are victims of some other group that they should hate and overthrow. There is always some type of Utopia ahead if only all the oppression groups can be eradicated as individuals and as categorical realities… even though the framework of their mission refuses to relinquish its dialectic in the face of gains… i.e. there is ALWAYS a new oppressor to hate and fight.
And the Alternative Is?
This shared struggle for the religion of Stateism in Socialism, Marxism, Communism, and Fascism has for the last century been waging war, cold and hot, against the systems of Western societies built up and thriving under “liberty,” thus liberalism, described by Pluckrose and Lindsay as a:
…political democracy, limitations on powers of government, the development of universal human rights, legal equality for all adult citizens, freedom of expression, respect for the value of viewpoint diversity and honest debate, respect for evidence and reason, the separation of church and state, and freedom of religion.[2]
It was built on:
“belief in objective knowledge, universal truth, science (or evidence more broadly) as a method for obtaining objective knowledge, the power of reason, the ability to communicate straightforwardly via language, a universal human nature, and individualism.”[3]
John Locke’s conviction that diverse peoples could only live peaceably when the mass of them agreed to secure that union in a vicious defense of natural rights finds it best hope in just such a place. The unprecedented success of Western societies thus-founded lends support to this conviction. In that world, Atheists and Christians alike must win the right to lead through the power of influence in a free market of ideas without violating each other’s natural rights. It is a disastrous form of laziness to prefer the silencing of opposition to the self-improving checks and balances of having to effectively engage opponents in order to win buy-in.
The happiness, stability, and prosperity of Western systems are a “problem” for devout members of the Statist religion, because they cannot match it through their own corrupt, unproductive, and oppressive systems. They have had to remove their focus from short-term promises of blessing, to apocalyptic promises, condemning the happiness, stability, and prosperity of “capitalism” systems as inauthentic and wasteful.
Well, That Was a Disaster, Now What?
As vulgar Marxism failed in its designs for global take-over, failed to produce a productive and happy society anywhere, and failed in its prophetic anticipation of the collapse of “capitalism” under the weight of its own corruption and greed, a phase of double readjustment took place: Postmodernism & Critical Marxism.
Critical Marxism Rises
In early Critical Marxism (A.K.A. Cultural Marxism, Social Marxism, Critical Theory) men like Antonio Gramsci (1891-1937), George Lukacs (1985-1971), and the Frankfurt School consisting of Max Horkheimer (1895-1973), Theodor Adorno (1903-1969), Herbert Marcuse (1898-1979), Walter Benjamin (1892-1940), Friedrich Pollock (1894-1970), Leo Lowenthal (1900-1993), and Eric Fromm (1900-1980) realized that the Marxism of Leninism and Maoism would not be successful in overthrowing the obviously more productive and human-thriving-inducing West. Global Marxist overthrow would require different tactics.
Those tactics were cultivated by altering the initial dialectic of “vulgar Marxism” in its focus on economic class tensions (Proletariat vs. bourgeoisie) as the source of revolutionary fervor to a broader inclusion of socially marginalized categories. Vulgar Marxism is:
Proletariat vs. bourgeoisie = revolutionary system change leading to a dictatorship (socialism) of the proletariat leading to a Utopia of equality of “from each according to his ability, to each according to his needs with free access to and distribution of goods, capital and services.” (“True communism”)
Early Critical Marxists used the same formula with different categories set in conflict (dialectic) and only slightly different Utopian hopes. Women, “Sexual Minorities,” Racial Minorities, and “National minorities,” were an early focus for growing revolutionaries by preaching discontent, envy, and victimhood narratives. We ended up with a Sexual Proletariat vs. a Judeo-Christian bourgeoisie, a Racial Proletariat vs. a White Supremacist bourgeoisie, a Female Proletariat vs. a Patriarchal bourgeoisie, and a non-Western cultural and national Proletariat vs. a Western bourgeoisie.
The very idea of Western cultural norms were presented as oppression woven into systems to “keep others down,” to “exclude others,” and became the basis for a call to a revolutionary collapse of those systems. These enemies were the paired opposites of any given dialectic. Women vs. Men, Blacks/Browns/Yellows/Reds vs. Whites, Poor vs. the Productive, Gay vs. Straight, Everyone vs. The West, Everyone vs. the Judeo-Christian everything, etc.
Postmodern Philosophers Take their Ball and Go Home… for More Planning
Under Postmodernism, radical skepticism took hold among a band of disappointed and resentful Marxists (Jean-François Lyotard (1924-1998), Michel Foucault (1926-1984), Jean Baudrillard (1929-2007), Jacques Derrida (1930-2004), etc.) who “despaired” of the very idea of truth and any objective knowledge of reality. The quotes around “despaired” is an important signal that when dealing with the whole band of Communist, Socialist, Marxist, and Fascist totalitarians, especially those who are driving its agendas philosophically, you are not dealing with honest people; you are dealing with power hungry souls, without moral founding, dedicated to Marxist advance by hook or by crook, who proved themselves disingenuous at every turn. They are philosophical gas-lighters seeking to unravel Western Society from within by using the University, infecting graduates starting with the soft-sciences and spreading like the virus their ideas are to the rest. They poisoned Philosophy, Psychology, Sociology, Anthropology, Journalism, political sciences, and law, and from these added devotees in every social institution connected to them in any way.
I’ve met many people in my life who do what they do for some unknown or at least undeclared purpose that remains hidden even when sought through questioning. What you do get when you ask them for their motives or designs is a dust storm of excuses tossed in the air for the rationale behind their choices, none of which seem authentic. They want what they want for some unstated purpose and will say anything to get buy-in from those with the power to help or thwart them in their pursuit.
Postmodern philosophers were close ideological friends of the early Critical Marxists and, like them, never relinquished their dedication to the Marxist faith. Hegelian and Marxist Dialectics are an atheist religion of state power and humanist Utopia dreams. They scorned the enlightenment, scientific analysis, theistic Religion, sexual morality claims, capitalism, beauty, order, family, and anything else that claims or produces systemic advantage in Western Civilization. There is your truth and their truth and that other guy’s truth, but no capacity for declaring THE truth, or even claiming a legitimate path for eventually discovering it.
For them, claims of knowledge and language paradigms are a form of power and oppression and every truth claim, deed, communication act, institution, tradition, cultural norm, and moral claim, needed to be problematized, deconstructed, and rejected. Even training children to control their “libidinal” impulses to function within society and remain within its moral or cultural values is deemed by them as an act of abuse and oppression by one generation on the next. Postmodernism became a weapon in the hands of Critical Marxists to radically multiply points of problematization and attack against the “hegemony” of all things White, Western, and Judeo-Christian.
There is power in knowledge claims and language construction through labeling and categorizing. So Postmoderns began a propaganda war to shame those with that power in order to get them to voluntarily lay down that power. They do not intend a vacuum of power… NO! Rather these postmoderns seek, no matter what they may claim during their shaming campaigns, to seize all that power in order to bring about the longed-for Marxist revolution. Not that old vulgar form that both Marx and they themselves once held dear, but a new sophisticated Marxism that will be able to succeed in the face of Western productivity, freedom, scientific-mindedness, and highly stabilizing Judeo-Christian everything.
A New Breed of Critical Marxists
The modern Critical Marxists were born and multiplied quickly under the tutelage of early Critical Marxists and Postmodern philosophers who had taken over the intellectual life of the universities, supplanting the liberality of their founding, and cultivating a critical consciousness instead. The dialectic conflict categories and perspectives for problematization expanded exponentially through the notion of intersectionality which has two applications.
First, intersectionality means that every conceivable combination of identity association within Critical Marxist conflict categories becomes its own special interest category. If you are black AND a woman, Black Woman becomes its own thing… so too if you are an impoverished immigrant overweight black trans lesbian who needs a wheelchair to get around.
In the Critical Marxist’s mind, this establishes a highly specialized and superior platform from which to announce your authoritative perspective on life and society. Those who do not share each and every category of intersection with you have no right to challenge you, or even to engage you from any position but submission. Anything that is done in society that does not include you and your particular life-experience perspective and permit equal outcomes with others who do not share your special set of intersections is deemed exclusive rather than inclusive (problematization) and needs to be deconstructed and cast aside.
Second, intersectionality means that if one lays claim to one or more association with an established Marxist pressure point (or choses to champion that cause), then, he, she, it, ze, or Unicorn Spirit, must present a unified front with ALL conflict categories against all posited enemies of those dialectics. It gets tricky, but a perceived break in alliance with any part of the Marxist assault is cause for “canceling” and for a focused targeting for destruction. For example, J. K. Rowling’s vocal “anti-racism,” feminism and LGB activism fell short in her refusal to declare Trans-women real women. By doing so, she has been made a prime target for denouncement.
An important caveat in all of this is that it is not enough to claim these identities and intersections. You must forsake your individuality in your perspective and experiences and lose yourself in the role assigned for you by Critical Marxist dialectic definers. Your individuality and moral right to self-definition is an excuse and tool for dismantling everything from Ableism to Xenophobia, but the whole band of planned society ideologies are first and foremost collectivist, seeking the establishment of a Statist religion in which individual freedom is disavowed.
You don’t matter; only your role as a representative in the dialectical drive toward Hegelian/Marxist Utopia matters. You are fodder to feed the beast to keep it energized in its work. Many promises of joy and fulfillment will be offered to you in your role, but you don’t matter. Your happiness doesn’t matter. Your prosperity doesn’t matter. Your life doesn’t matter. You are a disposable cog in a destruction machine setting the stage for some Utopian Phoenix to rise spontaneously from the ashes of the systems that this dialectic machine has destroyed. If you, the one in whose name this work is advanced, don’t matter, what does this dialectic promise for those at cross purposes with it?
Let’s Meet the Gang!
Now, of particular importance, one that early Critical Marxists anticipated with more than a little excitement, is the fact the Critical Marxist categories multiplied in the hands of modern Critical Marxists. What were vague areas of interest for discovering new potential pressure points for revolution with early Critical Marxists blossomed into more advanced dialectical movements that multiplied like a virus. This is a Critical Marxist metaphor that I took from their own writings. Because their goal is social collapse under revolutionary assault, they wear the metaphor of virus like a badge of honor.
Critical Race Marxism / Critical Race Theory
We have Critical Race Marxism and White Studies. Beginning in legal theory, and more traditionally connected to Vulgar Marxism, Critical Race Marxists put forward a highly racist “anti-racist” program to establish a dictatorship of anti-racist Marxists & socialists globally. They are quite specific about this goal. They’ll overthrow whites if it’s the last thing they do. Everything is first and foremost about race.
Using the undeniable historic realities of black slavery and racism in the British Empire and the United States, (and ignoring it in the rest of the world and history… and global present) Critical Race Marxists smudge the lines of fact and fiction through Marxist fables and longer works rooted in “critical pedagogy” designed to raise a critical consciousness in those exposed to them. We might consider for instance, the work of Marxist and anarchist Howard Zinn. His most famous work is his fabricious[4] A People’s History of the United States, popular in many educational institutions of higher learning. It has been labeled “one of the most widely known examples of critical pedagogy.”[5]
In the recently released and a-historical 1619 Project, Critical Race Marxist, Nikole Hanna-Jones claims that the real substructure of America is not the values woven into our founding documents like the Declaration of Independence, Federalist and Anti-federalist Papers, and U.S. Constitution (all of which they also misrepresent) but, rather, the class structures based on racial identity represented in slavery. Racism is in the DNA of all our systems, the project asserts, so the systems have to go. Hannah-Jones’ falsehoods begin the in title, claiming that slavery began in the Americas in 1619, and the work goes downhill from there.
Actually the first slaves in America were John Punch and John Casor, both black indentured servants of wealthy land owners whose terms of indenture were declared legally broken.[6] Lifelong indentured servitude was the punishment. While John Punch (1640) served Hugh Gwyn, a White member of the House of Burgesses, John Casor (1655) served another Black man, Anthony Johnson, who rose from indentured servitude himself (1621) to become a wealthy land owner in Maryland. Johnson has been dubbed “the black patriarch.”[7]
“What about 1619? Weren’t 20 plus Africans captured and traded as slaves by English Privateers for food supplies with Cape Merchant Abraham Peirsey in Point Comfort just south of Jamestown?” The Answer—Yes & No. Yes the exchange took place, but, No, those Africans were not slaves. Whatever the intentions of those who traded them for goods, they were embraced as indentured servants by the Virginians and were set free after seven years. So, not slaves.
Critical Race Marxists claim that every aspect of Western Civilization that fails to “permit” equal outcomes for ALL non-whites is proof of systemic White Supremacy in that thing. No matter the category, if any racial group lags in performance, then that thing is racist, be it math, merit, or money, grammar, grants, or graduations. We have big ones like free-market capitalism, our constitutional government, and property rights, but also things like logic, linear thought, natural rights, freedom of speech, self-defense, and the ability to arm yourself.
Any challenges to Critical Race Marxism’s presentations of the cause-effect structures of reality, are, of course, chalked up to racism, White fragility, fear of losing power over non-Whites, and an inability to understand that non-White perspectives are, by their very nature, authentic, lived experiences, while Whites’ own are the product of undeserved privilege and thus, inauthentic.
Now, if non-white people do perform as well as, if not better than, Whites in the West, it is proof that these people are race traitors and have become the “Black,” “Yellow,” “Brown,” or “Red” face of White Supremacy… Oreos, Bananas/Twinkies, Coconuts, and Apples respectively. So, White doesn’t actually mean Caucasian, it means the whole set of systems that “white people have made” along with all those race traitors who dare to support those systems.
There is an interesting suggestion in this claim that holds outcomes as tailored things forbidden or allowed by self-serving and self-referential systems, rather than as discoveries or disavowals of universal principles for the unified race of mankind. Some things work or fail because they tap into the most beneficial elements of human nature or defy human nature, not because some control group decided to make the system prosper this way and not that way of living. If all that was needed for prosperity was collusion by racial power groups then every system in history would have blossomed somewhere. Marxism in all its forms is revealed as a faith-based conspiracy theory about the causes of everything (language, knowledge, economics, production, etc), that utterly rejects the idea that outcomes are testimonials about the legitimacy or illegitimacy of values and processes when applied to a universal human nature in the real world.
In Critical Race Marxism, the first issue is who you are not what you do. The idea that there is a universal code of conduct that should be applied to everyone equally is deemed racist and has to go. Race Justice is about forcing all the systems at play in Western Civilization to artificially prop up underperforming groups and make them come out ahead of Whites, whether by knocking Whites down because of their unfair privileges in systems they supposedly designed to reward themselves for their Whiteness, or by overcompensating non-Whites for their non-White disadvantages. Not equality, but equity… i.e. payback. In their case, lady justice not only peaks, but she has been bludgeoned with her scales, strangled with her own blindfold and robbed of her sword so that Critical Race Marxists can use it to wreak vengeance upon those sporting the wrong identity labels.
Feminism
Feminism has “a dizzying array of camps”[8] whose goals range from Gender Equality to Gender eradication as a category. Gender equality can, of course, be a righteous desire depending on whether one defines equality as legal equality before the law, reasonable in a free society, or as equality of outcomes, an impossible, thus destructive, goal.
Feminism like all Critical Marxist categories advances on motte and bailey defenses in which the real goals of feminism (A consequence-free sexual free-for-all, complete moral autonomy for women, emotional rather than rational criteria for legal judgement, Critical Marxism, Gender redefinition, expansion, and XX/XY category eradication) are its weakly-defended bailey, and gender equality before the law its stronghold/motte. Attack feminism for the Critical Marxism that it has become, and its definition is merely “the radical idea that women are human beings.” Leave it be, and its radical Critical Marxist agenda runs amuck.
In modern Critical Marxism, gender and sex are only social constructs that enslave a population to the artificial reality and oppressive values of a particular set of power brokers. Why a new set of power brokers whose goal is some vague and unplanned Utopia via the wreckage of the most productive, efficient, and free societies in human history is better than the one that built these productive, efficient, and free societies is not to be asked and wouldn’t be answered even if you do. All you get are vague promises that it’ll be awesome and that you’ll thank them later… if you survive their purge.
The first enemy of these feminisms is the patriarchy, but through intersectional commitments the enemy expands to include Capitalism/Free Market economies, property rights, cis-gendered, hetero-normative hegemony, Judeo-Christian everything, anything deemed White by Critical Marxism’s own power brokers, like the functional and healthy, like math, logic, reason, morals, ethics, science, reading, grammar, all derogatory vocabulary related to sexuality, and the human status as omnivore.
An important element in feminism has been empowering women through “bodily autonomy,” which finds its telos (purposeful endgame) in sexual wantonness without social, physical, or economic consequences (i.e. all on the public dime), and, thus, the freedom to murder their own accidentally-created or intentionally-created children with or without the help of medical professionals.
(It is important to acknowledge, however, that bodily autonomy only counts when having sex and murdering children. When the left’s agenda for total government takeover of the medical industry is in play, they and not you should be empowered to decide what is and is not in the best interest of society for the common good. It doesn’t matter how foolish, disastrous and/or dysfunctional some treatment may be (Covid Shots, cough cough) if the socialist-minded governing body tells you to take it or do it, take it and do it you must.)
Margret Sanger (1879-1966), founder of planned parenthood (and who doesn’t love a plan, even if it involves murder) a devout Socialist, neo-malthusian,[9] and eugenicist, helped develop the phrase “birth control,” and promoted it under the banner “No Gods, No Masters,”[10] declaring that every woman must be “the absolute mistress of her own body.”[11] She publically condemned abortion (some say with a knowing wink) but also said, “If you are going to have an abortion, make up your mind to it in the first stages, and have it done. …It is for each woman to decide this for herself, but act at once, whichever way you decide.”[12] She later wrote, “The history of abortion shows that it was opposed by law, by religious canons, by public opinion,– and the penalties range all the way from ostracism to imprisonment; yet neither threats of hell nor the infliction of physical punishment has availed. The two million abortions annually in this benighted country[13] testify to that.[14] Women will deceive and dare. They will resist and defy the power of Church and State. They will march to the gates of death to gain that liberty…which the awakened woman demands.”[15]
Much of the public fight for abortion began in the name of special cases that tugged upon the heart strings of the public, presenting abortion as a necessary but tragic escape from dire and threatening circumstances. They wanted it “safe, legal, and rare.” They needed to protect women who, determined to murder their own child, might seek less safe methods in coat hangers, back alley abortion clinics, or other dangerous (for the mother) methods for forcing a miscarriage. It’s just a clump of cells, no different than a tumor really, so who cares. It’s just between a woman and her health provider. That aint no baby, that’s a fetus.
As they made gains in promoting abortion as common health care, they dispensed with rare, extended the period in which abortion must be obtainable, radically altered the rationale for this act of murder, and, as the Gosnell trials exposed, abandoned concern for safe. Safe is a motte for their ravening bailey of complete moral autonomy for women even as regards their dominion over the life and death of their children. Whereas I might imagine that a person who accidentally kills themselves while trying to kill someone else has gotten their just desserts, Critical Marxists who claim to desire safety for women in abortion matters, will sacrifice women to the ideology of abortion, viewing any attempt to limit or regulate its practice as intolerable. Watch the movie Gosnell: The Trial of America’s Biggest Serial Killer (2018) and Unplanned (2019).
Distress for “the life of the mother, or the more amorphous “health” of the mother, was also exposed as the lie that it always was when legalizing late-term partial birth abortions became a focus… infanticide even by the historic definitions of feminists. These abortions only have the death of the child in mind and no reasonable claims for being safer than waiting a few days or hours for nature to take its course and produce a living child. The clump of cells, lack of pain, and the fetus’ purported lack of awareness were also exposed as disingenuous excuses as medical knowledge increased and DNA categorizations grew more prominent. They dropped the pretense that the fetus was not human with some feminists fighting for the death of the child right up to the delivery date, and others arguing for the power of life and death beyond that time as well. According to these activists, the fetus is only a child when the mother says that it is a child, and they don’t want any visuals through ultrasounds to confuse otherwise-determined mistresses of their own bodies… now become overlords of life and death over the bodies of their viable and even born children.
Critical Marxist Feminists, even when they don’t know they are Marxists, will say anything to advance their cause without concern for truth, or even integrity,[16] so long as their tactics get them one step closer to what they have wanted from the very beginning—the granting of the power of life and death to a woman over her children whenever, however, and for whatever reason that the supreme goddess called woman deems desirable. They can’t agree on what a woman is, but whatever a woman is, she’s morally autonomous and should not have to answer for anything she says or does. Eradicating her discomfort and struggle should be societies chief goal.
Like all other forms of Marxism, Feminism focuses on the disruption of traditional roles, language, and values, advancing disruption for disruption’s sake… though true believers see themselves as heroes overturning unbearable oppression in patriarchal systems. They cast marriage as modern slavery and seek to convince women that other than for the purpose of personal sexual pleasure (which would be far better without concerns about the artifice called sex and gender) they have no need of men and should either dispense with children altogether or raise them on their own. Motherhood is a curse and an instrument for social bondage. But if they do reproduce, their children are to be their own and other than those circumstances in which financial obligations can be pushed upon men, sperm donors should be disenfranchised from systems of parental rights.
One feminist may baulk, saying, “that’s not what I want,” but they have no more actual freedom as individuals in feminism as non-whites do in Critical Race Marxism. They are dispensable cogs in a Marxist machine run by the ideological framers of feminism… they are to be cast aside when a more useful cog comes along… like men presenting themselves as morally autonomous self-creators who declare themselves women. More on that below.
Feminists no longer want equality, if they ever did, but are fighting for equity… which means payback and putting the top of the wheel on the bottom, in the mud, and keeping it there. As with other forms of Critical Marxism, Feminism insists that gaps in outcomes are proof that the systems of the West are highly patriarchal and should be overthrown. The fact that Western Societies have provided for opportunities for women in the face of the harsh realities of being human in a dangerous world is not to be entertained… life as it is presently is unbearable for women. Until Utopia comes, every act and institution sporting unequal outcomes between men and women should be problematized as patriarchal and pressured to overcompensate women and disenfranchise men in order to provide equity to exploited women… though through intersectionality they have abandoned belief in the ability to define what a woman is.
The value of women, whatever they are, is chiefly measured in their effective usefulness in overwhelming and toppling the systems that Marxists hate. They are not valued as part of families, as mothers working with fathers to raise healthy and stable children, but are assessed by their willingness and ability to outperform men (even artificially) in the Marketplace and displace them wherever and whenever they can. Some feminists have boldly denounced women who want to dedicate their lives to domesticity, and have actually sported the idea of legally requiring women to work outside the home… illegalizing house wives! Freedom of choice for women was never the real issue, though it was a convenient point of launch to gain traction in developing a Critical social consciousness in society.
It is important to note that in regard to women’s economic rewards in the Marketplace, special framing is used to maximize the perception of unfair compensation for women. Because of intersectional concerns even more careful framing is used to present “women of color” as especially exploited.[17] Skills, education, cultural inclination, and natural inclination are denounced as patriarchal excuses to conceal their culpability in creating a system designed to reward men and exploit women.
The fact that even into the 1980s, physical strength and endurance were paramount for most of the productivity in global markets is not to be mentioned… neither is the biological reality that men are by and large physically superior to women in regard to both. The hard realities of being biological agents with two different roles in that biology with diverse powerful and natural gender inclinations in those biological roles are deemed anathema.
The framing that feminists use to reveal systemic bias through wage gaps is shocking until one analyzes the actual reasons for these gaps including those just mentioned. The gaps are far less when proper comparisons of job categories are made rather than comparing all full-time working women against all full-time working men. Job preference by women who are free to pursue any path they wish explains much of even the most unfairly framed comparison. Women favor nurturing careers over physical labor jobs, especially dangerous jobs. Women prove inclined to choose jobs with more flexible schedules and tend to work, even in jobs whose promotion track demands excessive overtime, 25% few hours than their male counterparts… and for noble purposes. Women take more frequent and longer breaks from the Marketplace, hindering the momentum of their careers and pay increases… again, for most noble purposes. When confronted with these and numerous other distinctive choices made intentionally by women vs. men when free to make any choice they like, Feminists then blame the gender inclinations of women themselves on patriarchal systems which have colonized women’s minds and decision making capabilities. They denounce the very idea of natural inclination in women. Everything is regarded as the constructs of biased systems not biological impulse.
Multiculturalism is Anti-colonial Marxism
Anti-colonial Marxism and multiculturalism attack Western Civilization’s influence abroad and its cultural systems from within its various societies (enemies within the gates) in order to stir revolutionary fervor against one of the great resisters to global Marxist domination. The power of Western prosperity and the happiness made possible in Western freedom is the bane of Marxists’ existence. Though they once claimed that Marxism would outperform capitalism/free market economies, and that capitalist societies would collapse under the weight of individualist greed, both prophesies failed and forced dedicated Marxists to change tactics. They problematize prosperity as selfishness and happiness as self-deluded addiction to one’s own enslavement to systems designed by others to keep them down. Don’t worry, though, they will do everything in their power to strip you of both as soon as they can.
This brings us back to the tactics of Critical Marxism to keep their revolutionary hopefuls as desperate and worked up as possible, preaching hate not love, envy not emulation, and cultivating a perpetual mental state of ingratitude and victimization. They don’t want their revolutionaries happy, healthy, and prosperous, for they are useless to Marxist hopes in that state.
Rather than recognizing that there are universal principles that maximize or stifle natural human potential, inclination, and incentive, that are known or unknown, honored or ignored, in any given culture to one degree or another, multiculturalists promote the idea that:
(1) all cultures are equally valid (Except Western cultures which are regarded as inauthentic, hardly deserving to be given the honor of being called a culture). So non-Western cultures should be preserved like living museum pieces. Western cultures which must be dismantled. All present concerns about LGBT+ or women or poor or disabled must be set aside when discussing non-Western cultures.
(2) Any emulation of or adaptation to any element of Western Civilization by minority groups within Western Societies or by non-Western cultures abroad is a form of colonization that should be resisted at all costs. Again, all other concerns touted in Western Cultures are cast aside when dealing with non-Western cultures. The fate of gays, trans people, women, and disabled people are of no concern if their torments are experienced in a non-Western culture that is useful for Marxist purposes. Islam is useful for Marxist purposes in shattering the Judeo-Christian hegemony in Western Societies, so they can do as they please.
(3) Admiration by the West for a non-Western group’s anything (art, music, food, etc) is regarded as the dreaded and highly offensive “cultural appropriation.” There is no such thing as being too sensitive about this. There is also no need to be factual about it… feel in sufficient proof that cultural appropriation is taking place and causing harm.
(4) They spread the idea that trade is a zero-sum game in which one party wins and the other loses. And since the West has prospered beyond human imagining just a century ago, it must have done this by stealing the wealth and cultural treasures of the poorer nations. They are poor BECAUSE the West is rich.
(5) Being dysfunctional, violent, impoverished and oppressive is no reason to suggest that a cultural group needs help from anyone (especially Western Nations) save for the liberation offered by the oppressing, impoverishing, violent and dysfunctional socialists and Marxists.
Fat & Ableist Studies
The anti-science movements of Fat Studies, and Ableist Studies give us a new scientific awareness of the value of identity over health and physical functionality. It’s actually deemed wrong to seek health and increased function. It is the world that needs to change to make sure that obese is beautiful, which is more useful as a social crowbar than worrying about the physical health and longevity of the obese. They are oppressed by beauty standards rooted in actual human sexual attraction, because there is no such thing as beautiful or ugly, it’s all artificial constructs created by some to disenfranchise others. Fat people must be guaranteed equal billing in the sexual pool as everyone else.
It is everyone else’s responsibility to make sure that no matter how “alternately functioning” a person is, that they have the chance for equal outcomes with everyone else. Here, Critical Marxists leave an obvious stamp on the world dealers of death and suffering. They don’t care. The ideology is a religious faith and they are undeterred.
Trans Activism
Trans Activism denounces the value of XX and XY as a meaningful category for society or relationships. Validating feelings and confusing whole generations about their most basic features as biological entities beats the survival of the species every time. What is a little child mutilation, chemical castration, lifetime drug dependency, and skyrocketing depression and suicide rates in the glorious face of human dominion over nature. Self-creation is their greatest hope, even if it kills us all.
There is blood on the floor here. It is known that suicide attempt rates of “Trans-people” nears 50%, with an average success rate of 1 in 25. To intentionally sow gender confusion in GenZ and Generation Alpha (They are GenNext) is to literally sacrifice a skyrocketing number children to the religious convictions of Critical Marxists.
They tell themselves that they are saving children from suicide by offering “gender-affirming” care, which, per their usual labels, is actually gender-denying abuse. But no matter how much sympathy and support, surgery or supplements these confused people get, the suicide rate does not drop by more than a percent or two. When one considers that puberty naturally cures over 90% of gender confused children, the sacrifice comes into even starker light.
Specism
The human power over creation, boasting to be able to recode even human nature is a matter of pride of place in the order of the world by Marxists… unless we are using human hubris in the face of other life forms as an excuse to power. Critical Marxists deserve to reign because they promise to put the masses back in bucolic balance with other equally important species, like polar bears, the Huston Toad, or viruses. They have just as much right to thrive as people do, you vile specist! If you must save a dog or a human from drowning you better choose to save the dog to show your allegiance to the cause or else!
Some of these actually call for the voluntary self-extinction of people… though I’ve noticed that they refuse to lead by example. Others are content to call for the radical reduction of the human population and the limitation of human spreading. Many regard human reproduction as a sin against the planet and opt for infertility through chemistry, vasectomies, tubal litigation or the like.
Gender Studies beyond Feminism
Gender studies are now up to the recognition of 107 genders at Sexualdiversity.org, though its publication date of December of 2022 may leave them missing some exciting new ones. Gender, of course, has nothing to do with biological sex (except when it does) because they say so, and if you try to dominate them with all your constructs and norms while they are busy trying to dominate you with their attempts to create a normless culture (a contradiction) then you deserve whatever they do to you. And they want to do a lot to you.
Critical Marxist Gender Studies “questions the belief that certain gendered behaviors are natural, illustrating the ways that one’s learned performance of gendered behavior (what we commonly associate with femininity and masculinity) is an act of sorts, a performance, one that is imposed upon us by normative heterosexuality. Gender according to Butler, is by no means tied to material bodily facts but is solely and completely a social construction, a fiction, one that, therefore, is open to change and contestation: “Because there is neither an ‘essence’ that gender expresses or externalizes nor an objective ideal to which gender aspires.”[18]
So the individual choses the “gender” expression one wishes society to recognize, gives it a name, uses it as a source of conflict, and joins the ravening hoard of social colonizers seeking to unseat past power structures in order to replace them.
LGBTQ & any other letters they chose to add or redefine moment to moment
The LGBTQ+ “community” (They actually exhibit a great deal of distaste and hostility between the “letters” when the cameras are off) hopes for an amoral society, believing as the postmodern philosophers have convinced them that attempts to restrain libidinal impulses through the Judeo-Christian values underpinning the founding of Western Civilization is intolerable oppression and villainy. Few are worried about the fallout. What could go wrong when doing what feels good when you’re doing it?
The Marxist agents that have intentionally culled “sexual minorities” into their plans envision a society that will openly include pedophiles, polyamorous/open relationships, bestiality, marriage without limits in numbers or combinations (to disrupt marriage and corporate/government benefit programs connected to problematized conceptions of family), over a hundred genders swapping indiscriminately. Thus, drag shows are being put on specifically for children across the country, and activists are becoming school teachers who work double time to hyper sexualize children in order to groom the next generation (GenAlpha) wholly for this Utopia.
Queer Theory
Queer Theory, like postmodernism, throws a monkey wrench in every set of social gears it can. Queering finds dialectical pressure points for destroying Western/Christian/white/male/cis-gendered/straight hegemony and violently presses them. Oppression is always there, even if someone did something as breezy as saying, “Hi!”… so get out there, find it, even if you have to lie about it, exploit it and break something. Contradiction of claims and goals doesn’t matter so long as something is breaking, and norms are being queered.
Socialism
Socialism is an ancient system of total government that, in spite of its grand promises, has never delivered anything but poverty, oppression, mass murder, and starvation. But, according to Critical Marxists, Postmoderns, and the power hungry who see socialist promises as a path to power, socialism beats the inauthentic bounty and overconsumption that comes from Capitalism any day. Mao boasted that “The weeds of socialism are better than the crops of capitalism.” Who needs freedom and happiness when you can be part of something as aesthetically pleasing in description as Marxists’ and Communists’ and Fascists’ promise in their humanist Utopia? As soon as we can break the hegemonic power of cis-gendered, patriarchal, white, straight, Jewish/Christian systems all with be right with the world. We don’t have any plan for how socialism will work then, when it does nothing but fail and destroy now, but you will thank us when it happens. We’ve failed to produce thriving populations for millennia but this time it will be different. You’ll thank us later… if you survive the purges… and famines.
Hamas Petition
I watched a video recently of a young man going around with a petition to support Hamas in their “liberation” efforts for the Palestinians. Each person who happily said they would sign it were, before being allowed to do so, asked to check off the positions and activities of Hamas that they specifically supported. The list contained things like the total annihilation of Jews in the middle east and abroad, and the overthrow of all people’s to bring them under the rule of Islam. Some were specific activities like kidnapping, rape, beheading children, murder of homosexuals, stoning of adulteresses (not adulterers), etc. As each “pro-Hamas activist” read the list (all historically valid) not one single person would then sign the petition.
This is what should happen if ANYONE actually looks under the hood of Marxism in any and all of its forms, especially Critical Marxism and its band of raging, misfit mascots. They are not just marginal, they are marginalized… because society gets to choose what will and won’t produce healthy, happy, stable, efficient and prosperous societies, and they chose to sideline these people in favor of their own totally random values and procedures.
The success of Critical Marxists in the last 50 years in wheedling their worldview into the public consciousness has been extraordinary, being both well-planned and well-funded as well as being free from the hindrances of morals, ethics, or a sense of liberal-minded fair play. Like all Marxists, they have no talent for sustaining thriving populaces, or building happy lives, but they are good at self-promotion and seizing power from the unwary. They spin seductive and emotionally charged narratives about victimhood, unequal outcomes, gaps, and hurt feelings, going on and on about people whom society has unfairly marginalized and left behind, failed in some egregious way, and about what needs to be done to compensate them for that abuse or neglect. They, like Marx before them, manifest “the gift of dramatic imagery, cataclysmic prophecy, and an air of science.”[19] They, like their father the Devil, problematize paradise, and promise liberation from the oppressive rule of God’s path of life—in order to supplant Him—offering freedom, but dealing out nothing but death.
Many find tears brimming in their eyes over the suffering of the indolent, the ignorant, and immoral… the criminal and the malcontent. Indeed, God Himself, who is a consuming fire, does not rejoice in the death of the wicked which He himself orchestrates in the hereafter.[20] It is not surprising then that so many tender-hearted Christians fail to heed the multiple warnings in Scripture against pity in the face of the administration of justice against evil doers.[21] It is difficult to hold hard lines in the face of suffering, even if much of that suffering is self-inflicted.
Unfortunately, many who feel the call to charity, mercy, and grace (as I do) respond to Critical Marxists’ violins (which I don’t) and incorporate elements of their incessant bleating into both their theology and their perception of what it means to preach the gospel and make disciples. Liberation theology, for instance, is nothing less or more than the abomination “Christianized Marxism.”
When progressive Christians divorce their supposed concerns for “hurting individuals who need an authentic encounter with Jesus” from the establishment and maintenance of the divine order proclaimed from Genesis to Revelation, they, like the socialists whose message they have absorbed, are not the good guys… no matter how nice they are.
~Andrew D. Sargent, PhD
[1] If you want a technical consideration of Marxism and Critical Marxism as religious devotion consider James Lindsay’s Critical Race Marxism: The Truth about Critical Race Theory and Praxis, (Orlando: New Discourses, 2022) and John H. McWhorter’s Woke Racism: How a New Religion has Betrayed Black America (New York: Random House, 2021).
[2] Helen Pluckrose and James Lindsay, Cynical Theories: How Activist Scholarship Made Everything about Race, Gender, and Identity—and Why This Harms Everybody (Durham: Pitchstone Publishing, 2020) pg. 11.
[3] Pluckrose and Lindsay, Cynical Theories, pg. 30.
[4] Yes, I made this word up. I’m trying it out here. What do you think. It is obviously built on the notion of that which has the quality of being fabricated and thus, false.
[5] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Howard_Zinn; You may enjoy the rebuttal of Zinn’s driving fallacies in Dinesh D’Souza’s America: Imagine a World Without Her. Here D’Souza challenges Zinn’s foundational claims about the systems of Western Civilization and more particularly the United States. It is not in its presented form dissertation quality research, but it is accurate and entertaining in its contradiction of the notoriously biased and erroneous claims made by Zinn throughout his work.
[6] It is true that Punch’s life-long indentured status was more severe than two white indentured servants who ran away with him. They were given only four more years of indentured servitude. The extenuating circumstances for this difference in sentence is not known, but will naturally be boldly declared as racism by the judge by people unduly influenced by Critical Race Marxism.
[7] Philip S. Foner “History of Black Americans: From Africa to the Emergence of the Cotton Kingdom,” Oxford University Press, 1980.
[8] Lindsay and Pluckrose, pg. 136.
[9] A doomsday scenario about how everyone is going to die unless we radically diminish the global population in the next 10, 20, 30… errrr… any day now. These are still going strong in their predictions. And that has got to be a record for dedication to a constantly failing theory… wait, there are Marxists too… let’s call it a tie.
[10] Sanger, Margaret, The Autobiography of Margaret Sanger, Mineola, New York: Dover Printing Publications Inc., 2004, pp. 111–112; https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qWIXf9Rk8yT24YOpqQeek4dNdFBp4_5t (11/21/2023).
[11] Engelman, Peter C., “Margaret Sanger”, article in Encyclopedia of Leadership, Volume 4, George R. Goethals, et al (eds), SAGE, 2004, p. 1382. Engelman cites facsimile edited by Alex Baskin, Woman Rebel, New York: Archives of Social History, 1976. Facsimile of original; https://drive.google.com/drive/folders/1qWIXf9Rk8yT24YOpqQeek4dNdFBp4_5t (11/21/2023).
[12] Family Limitation, 1 st Edition [New York, 1914], 3 [MSM S76:842].
[13] This is an ongoing claim by these self-imagined elites that any place that resists Socialism, Marxism, Communism, or Fascism is “benighted,” a bunch of uncultured clods lagging behind. They are contemptible or pitiful in their moral or intellectual ignorance.
[14] There is no basis for this number save the leftist desire to use numbers manipulatively. When made fully legal the numbers topped out at 1.2 million. Granted, birth control methods were more available in 1972 than they were in 1914, but the number still appears to be deceitfully wielded.
[15] “Woman of the Future,” Sept. 1933 (MSM S71:492); I will say that while I might have certain sympathies with Sangers fight for non-murderous conception preventatives, her general thrust in life was eugenic and Socialist and depopulationist. I am also less certain about the long-range consequences of seemingly innocent inventions by humanists like Sanger to seize control of and recode nature itself. They often pushed forward in reckless hubris and merely assume that nothing bad can come of something so well-intended. In the wake of Sanger’s success for instance, America’s birthrate as of 2017, according to Fairus.org, fell well below replacement level.
[16] I am not saying that feminists don’t believe what they are saying, but rather, that their ravening desire for an ideology leaves them pursuing a course in utter defiance of rational, moral, or ethical concerns. Most will override any fact they are present, shift like sand in the hand when cornered, and say anything that needs to be said to cling to the ideological framework that has come to define their sense of self.
[17] At this stage of the game “women of color” is deemed less racist than “colored” even though “colored” was once the preferred term—i.e. NAACP = National Association for the Advancement of Colored People.
[18] Dino Felluga, “Modules on Butler: On Gender and Sex,” Introductory Guide to Critical Theory, Purdue University, 2002;https://www.cla.purdue.edu/academic/english/theory/genderandsex/modules/butlergendersex.html#:~:text=Gender%2C%20according%20to%20Butler%2C%20is,ideal%20to%20which%20gender%20aspires%3B (11/22/2023).
[19] Thomas Sowell, “Unnatural Resources,” Barbarians Inside the Gates and Other Controversial Essays, (Stanford: Hover Institution Press Publication, 1999)
[20] Ezekiel 33:11
[21] Deuteronomy 7:16, 13:8, 19:13, 19:21, 25:12.
