The Stuart Smally clip shared above is funny and enlightening—prophetic even (so is the one shared at the end of this blog). What happened to Al Franken in real life isn’t funny, though. It was a harbinger of things to come. You may recall that Franken was an early victim of the #MeToo moral panic, one in a string of mass hysterias that have plagued the western landscape of late. You may also remember from that hysteria the slogan “Believe women.”
However, what you may not have understood is that this was a propaganda project aimed at (or at least functional to) conditioning the masses to believe the subjective projection of individuals elites find useful for undermining the public’s grasp of reality, an essential part of perpetuating systems that serve their interests over against yours. We saw a similar thing with the slogan “Believe children” during the Satanic Panic of the 1980s and 1990s, where impossible things believed by children were supposed to be taken on faith, not on evidence (as if evidence of demons were something that could ever be produced). We are being asked today to believe children when they believe impossible things.
What I am about to say is obvious, but we often have call attention to the obvious to build mutual knowledge about it. The politics and purpose of “affirming the person” is a similar technique to the “believe the victim” technique. Both are designed to undermine your grasp of reality and your obligation of truth. It constructs a religious-like worldview and eventually demands you to live in it.
When a person asks you for your opinion of him, he is often not asking you to be honest and truthful with him. There is a popular joke about this. The wife asks you, “Does my butt look fat in these jeans?” You know how you’d better answer that question if your marriage is important you. (Seinfeld made a memorable episode about an ugly baby to note this phenomenon. “The Hamptons,” season 5, episode 21.) The man is asking you to affirm the way he wishes to think of himself and how he wishes others to think of him. He is asking you to validate his desired self-image. He wants you to participate in his desire—in his delusion. This is why, for some people, failure to affirm their fanciful image of self is akin to insulting them. If they are consumed by their self-image, they risk feeling erased when the answer returned is not validating. And they will let you know if that happens. Because it is your fault if it does.
Matt Walsh makes an observation on his podcast recently about the rapper Lizzo that was helpful in understanding what is going on here. Lizzo wears revealing clothing that accentuate her body, as well as writes and sings about her body. She puts herself out there for comment. As Walsh points out, when a person says “look at me,” she is asking for a response. Lately, Lizzo has been angered by some of the responses she has been receiving. You can guess which ones. She wanted people to affirm her belief that she is attractive and healthy. But some people disagree that she is either of these things.
Those who disagree with Lizzo’s self-assessment—or fail to affirm her obesity as attractive and healthy—are bigots. They’re condemned as “fatphobic.” This same thing happens to those who disagree with those who declare themselves to be another gender and then demand others affirm that self-declaration. If you do not affirm the person’s chosen gender identity, then you are a bigot. You’re condemned as “transphobic.” In other words, you’re indirectly blamed for an uncomfortable truth another person is trying to rationalize. Lizzo needs your help in rationalizing her uncomfortable truth and you’re not helping. Why aren’t you helping? What’s wrong with you? You must be a bad person. Lizzo is threatening to quit the music business and it’s your fault if she does because you did not affirm her self-image. It’s a case of emotional blackmail.
Here’s a case of what happens when somebody refuses to affirm the delusions of others and rejects the ideology that rationalizes these delusions. Ray Shelton is accused on this program of being hateful for refusing to deny the facts of biology. Worse, must worse, he has now been suspended from his job as an award-winning teacher for claiming that transgenderism is harmful. (I have appended the end of this blog with more details about Shelton’s case.)
Have you picked up on the fact yet that “affirmation” (Al Franken was ahead of the curve in mocking this idea) is the new word for “validation”? Remember years ago when a consensus emerged telling us that we shouldn’t rely on others to validate our feelings? Demanding validation from others marks an unhealthy relationship, what in therapeutic jargon is often called a “codependent” relationship. You are not responsible for other people’s feelings. A man who wants to make you responsible for his feelings is a man who wants to control you for his own sake. If we want to be free and autonomy individuals, the only feelings any man should have control over are his own. (If he doesn’t, then he has work to do.)
In other words, in a free society, people are emotionally responsible for their own feelings. When it becomes the business of governments and other institutions to make people emotionally responsible for the feelings of others, a situation of tyranny develops because persons in positions of power must decide for everybody which feelings are valid and must be respected, and which are not valid and can be discounted. When we are scolded for invalidating a person’s beliefs or feelings, we are being told that our actions send the message that a person’s subjective emotional experience is inaccurate, insignificant, or unacceptable. But maybe the person’s subjective emotional experience are these things! Shouldn’t truth decide and not some person empowered by state and law who would make us deny the truth and act in bad faith? You may tell the parents of an ugly baby that their baby is cute. But you shouldn’t be forced to.
When a desire or delusion is exposed as self-serving and controlling, and the majority pushes back against it, those who wish to keep the desire or delusion going find other words to use. This evolution of language works for ideological projects, as well, which is why developing a working knowledge of propaganda is vital for understanding the mind control tricks people play on us. As Orwell pointed out in his essay “Politics and the English Language,” propaganda often works through euphemism. And so we are not being told to validate those whose emotions and perceptions are unjustified or imagined; we are instead told to affirm those emotions and perceptions or else we are bad people who are hurting and even erasing others. But it is the same thing.
Orwell exposes euphemistic language as a tool employed by politicians and propagandists to conceal or distort the true nature of their actions and projects. Euphemisms mask the true nature and consequences of the actions they describe. Euphemistic language allows politicians to repackage morally questionable, personally injurious, and socially harmful practices in a more palatable and acceptable commodity. By substituting terms for other terms, the propagandist manipulate public perception and reduces resistance to the program. Orwell argues that the use of euphemisms not only obscures the truth but also corrupts the language itself, eroding the capacity for clear thinking and critical analysis. For Orwell, clear and honest communication is essential for preserving democratic principles and fostering meaningful public discourse. Indeed.
Sometimes, elites become so confident that they eschew euphemisms and say the quiet part aloud. Today, everything is ideological, and conformity to that ideology is effected through the punishing logic of the bureaucratic machinery, increasingly in a frank manner. They come to you in employee handbooks. You don’t have a choice if you want to thrive. But you won’t thrive. That’s not the goal of the program.
Consider the above video in which the chair of asset management and CEO of the transnational investment management and financial services firms BlackRock, Inc., Larry Fink, brags about establish and his campaign to legitimize in the corporate world CCP-style social credit systems that compel corporations to conform to political-ideological agendas. BlackRock can do this because the firm manages 8 trillion dollars in assets.
The Corporate Equality Index, the CEI-score, published by the Human Rights Campaign, the largest LGBTQ+ political lobbying group in the world, drives business to BlackRock. CEI isn’t the only social media score used. ESG, or environmental and social governance, is another benchmarking project. BlackRock in turn demands from corporations who want investment funds driven to them that they conform to the terms of these social credit systems. In the clip, Fink touts BlackRock’s project to force behavioral change through financial reward and punishment.
The Human Rights Campaign is one of the organizations socializing the idea that individuals should be compelled to act in bad faith by punishing them for failing to affirm the chosen gender identities of other persons. These are the organizations that also push the ideology that gender identity is not chosen. But it is not your responsibility to affirm anybody’s subjective identity. You may wish to judge a person by what the person says about himself. But if you wish to live in truth and not in the delusions of others, you judge a person by what he is and what he does. Rules that tell you must affirm or validate the subjective projections of others—that is, rules that punish you for refusing to participate in affirming the desires and delusions or others—are inherently tyrannical.
* * *
Ray Shelton is a gay man. He teaches—or used to teach—at Mark Keppel Elementary School. He has been named the Glendale school district’s “Teacher of the Year” twice and earlier this year won the PTA’s Golden Oak Award. After 25 years teaching elementary school, his employment was terminated for saying the following at a school board meeting:
“Two plus two equals four. The world is not flat. Boys have penises; girls have vaginas. Gender is binary and cannot be changed. Biology is not bigotry. Heterosexuality is not hate. Gender confusion and gender delusion are deep psychological disorders. No caring professional or loving parent would ever support the chemical poisoning or surgical mutilation of a child’s genitalia. Transgender ideology is anti-gay, it is anti-woman, and it is anti-human. It wants to take away women’s sports, women’s rights, women’s achievements—it is misogyny writ large. And I can also say this as a gay man, the gay people—”
At this point, someone muted Shelton’s microphone and a board member informed the teacher that his time was up.
A fellow teacher, Alicia Harris, filed a formal complaint against Shelton claiming that he was “showing off a swastika” during the school board meeting. Shelton says during the board meeting he held up four “Progress Pride” flags arranged in a pattern to form a swastika. He did this because this is a familiar meme on social media meant to criticize progressives by arguing that authoritarian measures to compel speech are fascist.
freedom and reason 