Join me in the war against nonsense
Ours is not an age of conservatism against liberalism, or between capitalism and socialism, or even between libertarianism and authoritarianism. It is an age of reality versus nonsense in which an increasing number of those on the traditional right and left have untethered their political objectives from facts. And not simply in the way politics has always twisted and distorted the truth to serve an ideological goal. Rather, a complete denial of the truth has become an end in itself.
Some of this nonsense peddling should be wild enough for people of all political persuasions to recognize it for what it is, but that is not a given. After two men initially charged with conspiring to kill an RCMP officer during the Coutts, Alta., border blockade were released on lesser charges earlier this month, People’s Party of Canada Leader Maxime Bernier said the ordeal was engineered by the government to justify declaring a national emergency in early 2022.
“I am now convinced the whole thing was a false flag operation set up by the RCMP to give (Justin) Trudeau another pretext to unconstitutionally invoke the Emergencies Act,” Bernier posted to X.
There is no evidence of this conspiracy whatsoever. It is pure fiction concocted entirely by Bernier’s imagination. His followers, of course, responded by heaping praise on him. Hundreds pledged their votes for the PPC, or demanded the prime minister be jailed for treason. The ones that did criticize Bernier were complaining he took much too long to get behind this “truth.”
It might be easy to dismiss these ravings as belonging to what is little more than a fringe political movement. That would be unwise, not because the persistence of COVID-ERA conspiracism is worrying, but because political movements whose beliefs are just as nonsense-fuelled as Bernier’s are treated as positively mainstream and count large segments of academia, media and government as members.
Take the utterly unhinged reaction to Alberta Premier Danielle Smith’s new policies around treatment for children with gender dysphoria. Her plan restricts access to hormonal therapy and bans surgical treatment altogether for minors, along with requiring parental consent for in-school pronoun changes. For that, she has been accused of declaring war on transgender people, and even of committing acts of genocide.
Reasonable people can disagree on whether hormone therapy should be restricted to those 16 and over, but only those swimming in pools of nonsense would try to declare, as many of Smith’s critics do, that biological sex is on a spectrum or that biological men have no advantage in sports over biological women.
Transgender people exist and deserve our respect and acceptance, but it does no one any good to deny basic scientific facts. The objective of gender activists is not, it seems, to persuade people to accept and accommodate transgender individuals. Their objective, instead, is to persuade others that they must accept a range of beliefs that reject reality and accept that any failure to do so is an act of unforgivable bigotry.
When this is the “mainstream,” is it any wonder why some people might find comfort in Bernier’s party?
As with policy around transgender people, reasonable people can disagree about the right approach to ensuring Indigenous people, Black people and other minorities are not discriminated against. But only those whose motives are entirely ulterior to equality, even equality of outcomes, would suggest the problem lies inherently with “white” people who must quite literally repent for their skin colour, or that “whiteness” itself must be eradicated.
Yet, this is where we have landed.
Anything those of European descent value, even if other racial groups also value them, is considered to be part of a racist structure. So called “anti-racists” have dismissed “norms and standards” such as “perfectionism,” the “written word,” “individualism” and “objectivity” as features of white supremacy.
“All of this is fairly disastrous just as theory,” British journalist Douglas Murray wrote in his 2022 book, The War on the West. “But trying to put it into practice is catastrophic.” Murray outlines several examples in education, specifically attempts to “decolonize” the teaching of mathematics. This includes Ontario, which “has tried to weed out ‘Eurocentric mathematical knowledges,’ ” as if mathematical concepts developed by westerners were inherently suspect.
Most ludicrously, Murray points to academics who reject two plus two equalling four as a “hegemonic narrative.” One mathematics PHD candidate posted to Twitter in summer 2020 that “the idea of 2+2 equalling 4 is cultural and because of western imperialism/colonization, we think of it as the only way of knowing.”
The only purpose to have this debate is to persuade people that being fastidious about how many physical units add up to four is unique only to white people, and therefore upholds white supremacy.
As commendable as the pursuit of equality in our society is, it should not require the complete acceptance of nonsense, but when the alternative is being labelled a racist or a transphobe, it is easy to see why people so often capitulate.
In reality, the nonsense pedlars of the left are not all that different from anti-vaxxers, flat Earthers, or those who believe Donald Trump really won the 2020 U.S. election.
What is truly needed is a reality revolution, a recommitment to rationality, where a genuine dispute over the facts does not lead to tossing the very idea of facts out the window altogether in favour of nonsense.