Countering The Great Illiberal Subversion

My Approach - Read. Write. Organize.

Photo by Diane Picchiottino on Unsplash

Many times throughout my life, after people have come to know me a little, they have made comments on the schedule I keep, or asked how I manage to balance a number of different things without either burning out or imploding under the pressure of the demands permeating my life (all of course because of my own doing). I usually don’t have much of a satisfying response. That I have a lot of energy and don’t require much sleep is helpful, but I don’t think that is it.

For me, the most important source of whatever it is that drives me is gratitude. Every morning I go through a short private ritual that is all about being intensely thankful that myself and my children were born in Canada.

This intense gratitude accompanies an equally intense awareness that many other countries offer nothing but pain and misery. Living in a situation similar to present day North Korea would be terrible enough, but witnessing my children live through it is not something I could bear. 

For this reason I am desperately engaged in an all-consuming struggle to do absolutely everything in my power to contribute to the nation’s much needed course-correction, by organizing with others and adding productively to several discourses in Canada (and the West) - which are currently conflating the comparatively trifling social issues of peaceful, prosperous, and abundant liberal societies, with non-Western oppression that offers neither civil nor human rights. 

This is an existential crisis. The liberal democratic order of Western society is based on many foundational principles; perhaps most vital is the prioritizing of individual over collective rights. In a nutshell, the great illiberal subversion - as it has been termed by one of the research groups I’m involved with - is a movement, a grand subsuming of democratic liberal imperatives (designed to protect individuals from collectivist mobs) into a new set of Theories indicative of academia’s postmodern turn (from the 1960s forward) which hold principles based on intersectional frameworks of Western oppression. In other words, this great illiberal subversion represents a discardation of individual rights, in order for “cis-gendered white men” to be “othered” as power-holding oppressors, and everyone else assigned victim status in varying degrees (depending on the configuration of intersecting identities a given “victim of oppression” can claim).

Western democracies should by all means self-critique and aim to improve. But self examination has long ago turned into a destructive oikophobia, a self-loathing that defies logic, especially when one considers that it is oppression most often accused of being the source of society's ills. The West, where there is the least oppression, is under the most scrutiny by a home-based activist class that does not want to contribute to the project of enlightenment rationality, they want to dismantle it. They demonstrate their irrationality with a constant churn of emotive pleas for decolonization and anti-oppression - but none of their chatter is based on logic or materialism or facts - Critical Theorists start from far too many assumptions, prefer the subjectivity of postmodern relativism over objective truth, employ ahistoricism, and reduce complex human interactions into unnuanced anti-human and illiberal politics of identity - which are sure to further divide everyone past the point of irreconcilability.    

If this movement to subvert liberalism pushes through its revolution, dismantles the “systems of oppression” and burns it all down (as proponents are a little too fond of saying), what will fill the empty space after the last ember has cooled? This movement has no idea. It only deconstructs and dismantles. It has yet to construct anything, save for more of its own illiberal  ideology. Below are the three ways I deal with the great illiberal subversion.

Here Is What I do about it:

1. I read and think...a lot. Technically speaking, I’m an Independent Scholar and Citizen Journalist. I’m an autodidact in most ways, but I have had and still have many teachers. From great teachers I have received both knowledge and inspiration. The latter possibly more important because inspiration (curiosity really) catalyzes my will to act. Without that, I’m literally a useless blob.

2. I Write…a lot. It is my preferred medium of expression. I study things first, which compels me to write other things, that then inform and instruct on still more things I’ve figured out, or patterns I’ve recognized, or arguments I wish to make that I believe are needed to correct the course of human civilization. Yep, I’m a lot to take, have a lot to say, and will probably write way more than any of my most dedicated readers could ever schedule enough time to read.

3. I network and organize with others. I both join and create groups (or teams) of people, for a variety of reasons, related to the work of resisting the great illiberal subversion. While much of my research and writing is done alone, without the discussions and sharing of ideas and research in the groups I mentioned, the work I do would not be a tenth of what it is. Some of these groups are more focused on action and less on research. I have a post coming soon regarding organizing around political actions (like campaigning for non-woke candidates for school board trustee positions).

In the coming days I also plan on writing a post dedicated to the ideology (wokeism) driving the great illiberal subversion, that will break down the more descriptive - reified postmodern identity politics (with totalitarian characteristics). But there still is utility in simple and recognizable terms, like Woke. So in the meantime, Woke Watch Canada’s Corrie Mooney wrote this great piece - Why we need the word ‘Woke’ - by Woke Watch Canada (substack.com)

The next section deals with some of the people who I consider among the richest sources of knowledge and information guiding my work. These are the people I read, and their ideas are a lot of what I write about. Just read anything I’ve written on Woke Watch Canada or here on The Turn to get a sense of this.

Some Of The Brilliant Thinkers (Mostly Canadian) That Blow My Mind!

Some of these people I know. Some I don’t. Sadly, some have passed. Some of them I correspond with regularly, some I’ve never spoken to. One thing that is a consistent thread through all of the compelling individuals I’m about to list, is that they are all my teachers, and they don’t know it. I never asked for permission (that’s not how I roll). They publish their thoughts and philosophies through various media, much of it written text, and I have taken up the study of what they have to offer. Some of them, who I correspond with, answer my questions and in many cases help develop my ideas and arguments.

These people create fireworks in my brain. And the fact that I commiserate with some is a priceless blessing. For now, I have left off my influences from the literary world (which do provide quite a bit of material relevant to identity politics), because I think its best if that gets its own post.

Anyway, I’m going to give just a quick listing of their names and say nothing more. I don’t need to. My work is full of discussions of many of their great ideas, critical examinations, theories, and critiques of the postmodern West. A small group on the list has not yet been mentioned in my work, but that will soon change. My writing on woke identity politics is largely informed by what I have extracted from the lessons and work of these “teachers.” That is why I continue to study them, and will continue to cite their work in future writing.

Marshall McLuhan, Harold Innis, Thomas Sowell, Barbara Kay, Frances Widdowson, Albert Howard, Gad Saad, Michael Rectenwald, Bruce Pardy, David M. Haskell, Tom Flanagan, Mark Mercer, Eric Kaufmann, Brian Giesbrecht, Peter Best, Hymie Rubenstein, Christopher Nagle, Shannon Lee Mannion, Jordan Peterson, Douglas Murray, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Bruce Gilley, Jacques Rouillard, James Flynn, Rodney A. Clifton, Mark DeWolf, Tom Holland, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Daniel Schmachtenberger, Michael Shellenberger, Charles Murray, Janice Fiamengo, Matt Taibbi, Glenn Greenwald, Ian James Gentles, Jonathan Rauch, Jonathan Haidt, Tristan Harris, Jaron Lanier, Terry Glavin, David Harvey, Rex Murphy, Conrad Black, Adolph Reed, Erec S. Smith, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn …that is all I can think of right now (I bet I’ll come back to this list in the future and add more).

Another name is Noam Chomsky - who is a very complex thinker, but I do not agree with him on many issues. But to not include him would be to deny that I’ve read a big pile of his books, and in the case of his linguistic theories, and especially in the case of his and Edward Herman’s book Manufacturing Consent, I’ve thought a lot about Chomsky’s ideas, and many of them are brilliant. At some point maybe I will tackle some Chomsky-specific essays.

In the coming days I will have more to say about organizing with others - the third aspect found above on the “What I Do About It” list  (midway through this diatribe). Until then gentle reader, we have reached the end for today. You are very much appreciated for following along with me and supporting my efforts in all the ways you do. You have my gratitude. All I ask is please let's continue with our grand errand friend. Spread the word, liberalism isn’t dead yet, because Canadians know what they have, and won’t let it go without a struggle! You can count on that! 

Can Canadians count on you? Reach out to me through Twitter or Facebook if you would like to organize with other Canadians and become part of the pushback against the great illiberal subversion.

And last thing friends, since this post had a lot of personal details, here are even more, if you care to discover them -  Before I Realized How Messed Up Everything Is: A Small Part Of My Story.

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