The ideological absurdity which has descended on Vermont through so-called “progressive” initiatives is only properly understood as a cult. Whether it is “race theory,” “climate emergency,” “ending all violence against women” or even “getting vaccinated with a dubious injection,” each and every political issue is not assessed or advanced based on facts and logic, but on superstition and a misplaced “faith.” This diseased thinking has thoroughly saturated Vermont’s public schools — and it is time to extract children from the cult if we can’t protect them from its institutional advance (a clear violation of the church-state separation).
I hope this sounds extreme; what they are doing is extreme. A new book by scholar John McWhorter unveils the truth about this absurd new far-left theology:
Something must be understood. I do not mean that these people’s ideology is “like” a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it is actually a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism. … With the rise of Third Wave Antiracism we are witnessing the birth of a new religion, just as Romans witnessed the birth of Christianity. The way to get past seeing the Elect as merely “crazy” is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not to wallow in derision, but to genuinely grasp what they are. (pp. 23-24)
Analyzing the racist tropes of the left, McWhorter is concerned specifically with the “anti-racist” sleep of supposedly “woke” acolytes of the new religion of hate. He identifies specific attributes of this racist faith, that extend equally to other areas of the far left cult including climate change, women’s rights, even COVID — everything is “an existential emergency” for which rights and free speech are a hurdle to solve (salvation). McWhorter identifies these shared traits as “superstition over facts,” (such as belief that all discrimination is caused by racism); a new clergy (“On race, the Elect cherish certain top-rate thinkers” p. 30); original sin (“white privilege”); evangelical (“Key to being Elect is a sense that there is always a flock of unconverted heathen. Many of the heathen are, for example, the whites “out there,”); apocalyptic (“the fantasy of an America ever just a half inch past Plessy v Ferguson creates an urgency that justifies extreme action. Catastrophizing the current moment is a hallmark of ideology”); crusading (ban the heretic: “The Elect are members of a religion, of a kind within which the dissenter is not just someone in disagreement but is a kind of environmental pollution.”); supplants old religions (“the agenda of a body of people united around a new religion they seek to found a new America upon.”)
McWhorter argues not just that this is a religion, but that it can only be comprehended, and opposed, with that understanding. This is why facts don’t matter; why civility is vanishing; why physically assaulting people in the name of “justice” is a self-righteous trend. The truth of what he writes is easily extended to the entire panoply of modern far-left “causes.” There is no room to “agree to disagree” about gay marriage or transgender pronouns — the new secular morality demands that fantasy genders and sexual perversions be acknowledged as core to identity, or one is denounced as homophobic. Similarly, to support the Second Amendment’s protections translates to being labeled a murderer; to stand for the rights of a child butchered in the womb in the third trimester is to hate women; to oppose pornography is to stifle freedom; to observe that solar panels are regressive and accelerate the generation of CO2, to be labeled a hater of the Earth.
Rhyszard Legutko, the Polish Professor who was denied the opportunity to speak at Middlebury College warned in his book “The Demon in Democracy” that all of these “causes” were of one piece (as is seen in the political arm of the new hate religion, Black Lives Matter), that the ideology choked the oxygen out of traditional “liberal” worldviews built on individual rights, and that it has already largely swept Europe, and the world looks to America to withstand its fiery winds. He is proved correct daily.
Consider this 2012 description of the developing climate change movement (presaging AOC’s laughable “Green New Deal”):
The great salvific religions proceed, first by presenting sinners with a description of their case that seems to allow no remedy but only despair, and then by offering hope in the form of a total doctrine, the path of purity and submission, which is the unique way to redemption. … Once the salvationist illusion has triumphed politics turns to witch hunting, faction forming and pursuit of “the enemy within.”
Global warming is … a transcendental issue, concerning the state of mankind as such. Like original sin, it weighs on us all, and like original sin it might seem to require a salvationist solution. … Climate change hovers above the sinner in his sports utility vehicle like a vision of judgement, and it is a vision that comprehends the whole world. Hence climate change has been not merely believed in but seized upon, as a convenient way of turning a political problem into a moral and spiritual challenge, a wake-up call to mankind as a whole, which can be addressed only by action so radical as to amount to a change of life. … Global warming sounds in their thinking as a call of angelic trumpets from the sky. (Roger Scruton, “How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism,” pp. 86-88).
This fact-hating religion even feigns to be scientific — masks work, the unvaccinated spread infection, one has no “right” to infect others — common sense and rights being inverted using bunk science. It is the exact reverse of science, and of logic. Those who think facts matter have not drunk from this new cup of ideological salvation.
This far-left insanity is the New American Taliban, melding with government to enforce its insane edicts, untested, on our nation and children. It must be opposed as the Jonestown cyanide cult that it is. Teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats who are converts to this new faith must be held accountable for their lies that “it is not being implemented.” The truth is very evident, and that truth is the only thing that will set us — and our children — free.
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