“Converting to Islam has become the latest trend on TikTok. Purple-haired influencers, including one who identifies as a ‘leftist queer gremlin,’ are donning the hijab in the wake of the Israel-Hamas war,” writes Julie Burchill for Spᴉked. Some of this fascination with Islam is attributable to the viral video of a TikTok influencer declaring an existential crisis after reading mass murderer Osama bin Laden’s “Letter to America,” which garnered over 14 million views on the social media platform before TikTok acted to remove them. The Guardian likewise scrubbed the letter from its platform, which had been the major source of the document. But mass receptivity to a superficial rant by the long deceased al-Qaeda leader comes in the context of a growing fascination among Western youth with a clerical fascism that dovetails with their secular one. Censoring the writings of bin Laden and other Islamists won’t stem the disturbing trend the moment highlights. Indeed, censorship will only make the kids more curious. We need a better solution to the problem.
The trend did draw some attention in legacy and social media in the United States, but a consensus quickly formed that doing so would feed the trend, so the coverage was light or the trend was repurposed. The latter was the case over at Salon, where Amanda Marcotte exploited the phenomenon to pivot to the desired moral panic over Christian nationalism, telling her readers to worry less about TikTokers and bin Laden and “fret more than Mike Johnson shares the terrorist’s views.” The governor of New York, Kathy Hochul, used the opportunity to vow action against social media companies while announcing new strategies to prevent young people from having their “minds polluted by the venom that is being spewed on these sites.” She ordered the director of Division of Homeland Security and Emergency Services to develop “media literacy tools” for k-12 in public schools to teach students and teachers to “understand how to spot conspiracies, theories and misinformation, disinformation and online hate.” Readers of Freedom and Reason know the focus of such literacy tools will be much less on the problem of clerical fascism and much more concerned with portraying conservative Christians and populist and patriotic Americas as “domestic terrorists.” (I have written about this extensively. See, e.g., The Establishment Project to Demonize Conservative White Males. What’s This All About?)
What lies behind this fascination with Osama bin Laden and Islamism and the conversion of young Westerners to Islam? Burchill quotes Lorenzo Vidino, director of the Program on Extremism at George Washington University, who theorizes that this trend symbolizes the ultimate form of youthful rebellion. “At this point, what’s more rebellious, what’s more anti-Western and anti-capitalism and anti-establishment, than a conversion to Islam?” Describing the result as “a sort of collage that makes very little sense,” he notes that the desire for rebellion moves youth to pick and choose among “different aspects of different extremist ideologies that are completely incompatible with one another.” This is correct albeit superficial and reductionistic. It won’t do as an explanation to chalk this up to youthful desire to rebel against authority and tradition. The sociological question is why Western youth desire rebellion and why they choose Islam.
Freedom and Reason is on top of things. Just this month I’ve published several essays explaining the how and why of the phenomenon (see The Peril of Left-Wing Identitarianism; “You’re All Sinners!” The Religion of Critical Race Theory; The Woke-Islam Alliance and the Threat to Secularism; Why the Woke Hate the West; Woke Progressivism and the Party of God; and We are the Rebels Now). November’s fury of writing builds on years of analyses concerning the problem of woke progressive praxis and the clerical fascism Islamism seeks to impose on the world—as well as the role played by transnational corporate power and the Chinese Communist Party in socializing the anti-Western ideology that fuels all of this. That TikTok could have this effect should come as no surprise to those who have studied its function and purpose.
As for media analysis, it tends to stay focused on the superficial. Burchill writes in her Spᴉked piece, “One does wonder what strange psychological kink would make someone feel this way—to worship people who would hurt them. We see it most clearly with our short-sighted chums, ‘Queers for Palestine’.” Later in the essay, we find Burchill getting close to something: “Perhaps the worst kind of magical thinking is what I call Commie Colonialism—the left’s insistence that all non-white people are, at heart, liberal or woke.” She correctly observes, “When someone is in the grip of this delusion, there are no limits on the outlandish things they might say.” Reaching for an example, she quotes Susan Sarandon who suggested that fearful jews are “getting a taste of what it feels like to be a Muslim in this country.” (For her suggestion, Sarandon’s talent agency dropped her, a move with which I disagree.) But, again, what is the source of the delusion? (Also, as an aside, why do the folks over at Spᴉked consistently mislabel progressivism—and themselves? The first thing that should strike one when reading that publication is how liberal it is.)
These deluded young leftists—deluded by socialization in an institutional web organized by corporatist logic and the obsession with diversity—see Islam as the non-white religion and therefore the good religion. White and nonwhite youth hate whiteness, with whites loathing their race assigned at birth. Unlike their gender, which they are encouraged to deny, they are told that race is an inescapable caste relations, and so Islam becomes the way to escape from freedom. Islam allows for virtue signaling around racial self-loathing. Of course, Islam is not a good religion. Of the Jewish-based traditions, Islam is the worst. But there’s a bad premise in all of this: While there are Muslims who are nonwhite, Islam is not a non-white religion. Arabs are white.
That’s right, Middle Easterners and North Africans are caucasian. I have written extensively on this subject going back to 2019. See, e.g., Race, Ethnicity, Religion, and the Problem of Conceptual Conflation and Inflation; As a White Person I Could be Anything Ideologically—Even a Muslim; Almost Everybody in the Bible is White; The Work of “People of Color” and Other Abstractions; and Muslims are Not a Race. So why are Academics and Journalists Treating Them as if They Were? (Several of these articles have embedded links to many more of my writings on this topic, so take some time to check them out). To be sure, there are non-white Muslims, but they’re Muslims because of the long history of Arab colonization of their lands and their forced conversion to Islam. Today, Western youth are so screwed up they don’t need to be forced to escape from freedom into Islam.
But the ignorance of Western youth doesn’t end there. What about the hundreds of millions of non-whites counted among the 2.4 billion Christians in the world? Christianity is far and away the largest religious faith in the world, its congregation represent a third of all humans on the planet. Christians outnumber Muslims globally by several hundred million people—people of all races and ethnicities found throughout the world. There are tens of millions of Christians in sub-Saharan Africa. Most black Americans are Christian (nearly 80 percent). The brown people of Central and South America (albeit still caucasian) are Christian. And there is an untold number of Chinese Christians not counted because the totalitarian People’s Republic of China won’t allow them to freely practice or acknowledge the extent of their existence.
Western youth have been made so dumb by the educational system that they don’t know even the most basic things about the world. Yet the rest of us are supposed to cater to their (ironic) fear of progress and pathological need to have impossible things affirmed as real and righteous. To be sure, the deluded youth are victims of a mass indoctrination program designed to turn them against the West to facilitate the transnational corporate restructuring of the world capitalist economy. But the offspring of any mammalian species possesses the same inherent capacities as its parents, a fact to which tens of millions of young Westerners who haven’t succumbed to the madness testify. Hope lies with them. Still, the elite amplify the voices of the deluded and use the loudness to crowd out reason and cow the sensible. There’s plenty of blame to go around.
All this makes it all the more important that those of us who have the courage to speak the truth never lose our confidence to do so. “Courage is contagious,” as Billy Graham was fond of saying. If Graham’s explicit devotion to Christianity troubles you, remember what probable-atheist Winston Churchill told us (and Steve Bannon garbles): “Courage is the most important of all the virtues, because without courage you can’t practice any other virtue consistently.” To be sure, many of our youth eschew virtue (choosing instead worship of the self), but there is enough of us still standing, religious and nonreligious, to reclaim Western Civilization. But we need to move quickly and forcefully.
freedom and reason 