Luke Ford

Why are some identities valorized and others despised?

Eric Kaufman wrote Sep. 19, 2023:

Wokeness is about making historically marginalized groups sacred. This religion reinforces an ideology I term “cultural socialism,” which holds that the highest aim of society is to equalize outcomes for disadvantaged identity groups and protect them from harm, such as hearing America described as “a land of opportunity.” How did this ethos, which hides under innocuous labels such as “diversity” or “inclusivity,” wind up as the pinnacle of our culture?

English historian David Starkey said Aug. 7, 2024 about the UK riots: “You heard constantly this word ‘community.’ Now what is this wonderful community whose values we are preserving?”

“These are specially protected [Muslims] groups. Police handle them with kid gloves. They negotiate with them as groups, with community leaders unelected. There is only one group that is not allowed to do that — the white working class. That is why they are rebelling. They are not allowed to have a community, to have their community leaders consulted. ”

Fraser Myers writes for Spiked Aug. 9, 2024:

Two-tier policing is not a myth

Identity politics is at the heart of modern British policing.

The widespread claims that Britain has a problem with ‘two-tier policing’ have clearly touched a nerve with the establishment. Earlier this week, when a Sky News reporter asked Mark Rowley, Britain’s most-senior police officer, if he would ‘end two-tier policing’, Rowley grabbed the mic from the journalist’s hand and dropped it on the ground. He later issued a statement claiming that it is ‘complete nonsense’ that police would treat anyone differently according to their race, religion or political leanings. I dare say Sir Mark doth protest too much.

The media have also declared, in unison, that there is no bias to be found in our police. Almost every major media outlet has carried an article purporting to ‘fact-check’ and ‘debunk’ the claims around two-tier policing. The Times ran with ‘Two-tier policing: the claims fact-checked’. ‘How has the “two-tier policing” myth become widespread?’, asks the Guardian. ‘What is two-tier policing? Nigel Farage and Elon Musk’s claims debunked’, announces an Independent headline. That ‘two-tier policing’ is a myth, invented and spread by the far right no less, is simply taken as a given.

This is a bit strange, no? In some cases, the very same outlets that, until now, have been running near weekly articles on how the police are institutionally or structurally racist, riddled with some ‘-ism’ or ‘-phobia’, proclaim that any suggestion of unfairness in policing is preposterous. Apparently, if you dare to use the words ‘two-tier policing’, or ‘two-tier Keir’, then you have probably fallen under the malign sway of Tommy Robinson…

What the deniers of two-tier policing miss is that differential treatment for different ethnic groups is an unseemly, but inevitable outgrowth of the system of multiculturalism. From the late 1980s onwards, the British state has increasingly related to its ethnic-minority subjects via self-appointed ‘community leaders’ who, in turn, can have a great deal of influence over police and local-authority decision-making. Perhaps the most egregious examples of two-tier policing relate to the ‘pro-Palestine’ marches that have been held almost weekly since 7 October last year. The Metropolitan Police – usually keen to bundle Londoners into a van for using offensive language – haven’t just been turning a blind eye to much of the rank anti-Semitism on the streets. No, they have also actively tried to appease and excuse the most hateful Islamist elements of these marches.

Back in October, members of Hizb ut-Tahrir – now a proscribed terror organisation – gathered outside the Turkish Embassy in London screaming ‘jihad, jihad, jihad’ and calling for ‘Muslim armies’ to invade Israel. In response, the Met put out an extraordinary tweet trying to reassure the public that jihad ‘has multiple meanings’, while chiding those who associate it ‘with terrorism’. In this instance, the police didn’t just turn a blind eye to this call for terroristic violence and war, they were effectively doing the Islamists’ PR for them.

Meanwhile, the Met seem to have a zero-tolerance approach towards anything that might cause offence to Islamists and anti-Semites. Niyak Ghorbani, an exiled Iranian dissident, has been arrested on multiple occasions for holding up a sign that accurately describes Hamas – the anti-Semitic terror group behind the 7 October massacre – as ‘terrorists’. Clearly, the police are aware that opposing Hamas is a provocation to the many anti-Semites and Islamists who attend these ‘peace marches’.

Similarly, last year, volunteers for the Campaign Against Anti-Semitism were threatened with arrest for a ‘breach of the peace’ over a mobile billboard displaying images of the children who had been kidnapped by Hamas. Police officers have even been photographed tearing down posters of Israeli hostages. The excuse for this anti-Semitic vandalism? To calm ‘community tensions’ – a cowardly euphemism for appeasing Islamist bigots.

What makes for a winning narrative? And what happens to those groups who don’t win with their narrative?

The liberal narrative about civil rights is that it expands human dignity. For example, Humanrightscareers.com notes:

The original meaning of the word “dignity” established that someone deserved respect because of their status. In the Universal Declaration of Human Rights, that concept was turned on its head. Article 1 states: “All human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights.” Suddenly, dignity wasn’t something that people earned because of their class, race, or another advantage. It is something all humans are born with. Simply by being human, all people deserve respect. Human rights naturally spring from that dignity.

What rarely gets attention is that this universal liberal expansion of human dignity always ends up diminishing the dignity and power of less favored groups as it simultaneously lifts up other groups.

Feminism, for example, has expanded sexual choices for women (they are more free now in more feminist societies to have sex with each other, and with people outside of their race). They are more free to display skin publicly, or, on the other hand, to take less care with their appearance.

Dissenters to feminism have argued:

* The feminist goal is removing all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality.

* Women in HR discriminate against beautiful women, not handsome men.

* No matter how “conservative” a girl is, the inner SJW always waiting to leap out if deemed advantageous…

* Every woman has an inner crisis actress waiting for the slimmest pretext to surface.

* The ol’ strong independent woman/helpless victim switch.

* Theory: As campuses skewed more female past 30 yrs, rape culture myth served as nifty bogeyman to explain shitty dating dynamics for women.

* Women are such strange creatures, willing to abandon their race and their religion when they fail to find a good bf in the one they were born into.

* The only relationship that works is where the man dates downwards, if the woman thinks she is on even footing with the guy, even in her mind she will grow to resent him and look for something better.

* Once a society becomes feminized, it cannot react to threats to it from patriarchal societies. The feminized society instead allows itself to be conquered instead of putting up a fight to go back to its pre feminist roots. There is no record of a society becoming feminist and then returning to patriarchy without being conquered first. Feminism is a one way ticket to destruction by an outside patriarchal force.

* Feminists want a return to primitive times, where they could share the 10% of alpha males while the rest get nothing.

* You can see it in third wave feminism. Marriage, monogamy, religion and tradition are all under attack, because they regulate female activity. But that’s a good thing; society is built on monogamy, polygamous societies are unproductive violent shitholes. Men will do nothing but fight over women. Under monogamy, every man gets a woman, thus everyone has an incentive to work hard, innovate and excel.

Also all feminists ultimately have a yearning desire to submit to dominant men. It’s why they agitate for importing aggressive, less civilised foreigners. Feminists, and a good deal of women, are literally anti-Western civilisations.

* Women naturally slide down the cocks of the conquering tribe. It’s basic evolutionary biology.

* Peter Drucker, in his famous essay Managing Oneself, advised strongly the need to understand your strengths and weaknesses, and observed that you can never win by improving your weaknesses, only by improving your strengths. In broader socio-economic terms, we have given women the opportunity to build on their weaknesses (ability to compete against men) and discouraged them from capitalizing on their strengths (youth and fertility). They compete through artifices of fairness and inclusion that are borne on the backs of an ever-dwindling pool of male supporters. We have weakened society as a whole by building on women’s weaknesses in attempts to make them the equal of men, rather than encouraging them in their natural strengths. And while this charade is going on, men are encouraged to adopt feminine attitudes and lifestyles at the expense of their own natural strengths, now deemed unnecessary in the new gender-neutral economy. In most states, the potential child support profits from a one-night encounter are roughly the same as the profits from a short-term marriage. … “Women who want to make money from the system aren’t getting married anymore,” said one lawyer. “The key is recognizing that it is a lot easier to rent a rich guy for one night, especially if he has had a few drinks, than it is to get a rich guy to agree to marriage.”

* All women can be mercenary given strong enough incentives, but luckily (for men) most women still strive to have children within a marriage. Single momhood is not (yet) a desired life outcome for psychologically healthy women, despite its inglorious rise over the past forty years. What this means is that for the typical man, the odds of getting fleeced by a woman pulling the ol’ gotcha pregnancy maneuver are low.

* Steve Sailer writes: “One thing that has changed is that topics for humor have narrowed, with men being the main safe choice left. For example, mother-in-law jokes were huge up into the 1970s (think Henny Youngman or Rodney Dangerfield), but I’ve never heard a single joke about the current President having to live with his mother-in-law in the White House. After all, how could anybody find any humor in that?”

* Women can be shamed into behaving and looking more feminine. Which is a good thing. Too bad we’ve lost that lesson and do the opposite now: shame women for being feminine and looking thin and pretty, and glorify women who act masculine and look like dump trucks.

* Small useless pets like indoor cats are child substitutes. There’s no flim-flamming away that obvious conclusion under a fog of try-hard White Knight rhetoric. The cat provides the single in the city cock carouseler the outlet for her maternal nurturing instinct (however weak) that a real child of her own can’t, because she hasn’t gotten pregnant in the fifteen years she’s been on the Pill.

From Chateau Heartiste:

This is a video of Dutch women at an airport singing a song welcoming Muslim rapefugees to their homeland.

…most of the women are middle-aged hags and depressed-looking hippie retreads who probably stink of patchouli and practice cat yoga. The one young girl in the video glances around wondering wtf is going on.

One outcome of the modern sexual market… was the growth of the demographic of unmarried, unloved, childless, aging, bitter White spinsters who sacrificed their prime fertility years riding the cock carousel (or riding its close cousin, the social media attention whore carousel). The French author Houellebecq has also tackled this theme of a fractured, and fracturing, sexual market, most notably in his book The Elementary Particles.

When women reach a certain age, and the lustful leers of men have abandoned them for younger lure, they realize the best is not yet to be, and a nagging sorrow settles on their hearts. For aging women who don’t have the comfort of a husband or children or supportive family network, this sorrow is very near grief. Some women will respond to this insult to their femininity by turning inwardly, finding release through self-help books, gardening, or arts and crafts. Others will vent their rage at the world, despoiling the political sphere with nonsensical feminist boilerplate.

And then there are those spinsters who react to their dispossession and displacement from the sexual market – and the maternal market – by exacting revenge on their outer world (homogeneous White Europe) with a summoning of succubi from their inner world. These are the women in the video above: benumbed, loveless rejects throwing open their butthurt hearts to trashcanistan migrants, expressing through their imbecilic kumbaya chanting a dual longing for sexual and maternal satisfaction. Merkel falls into this category, but unfortunately her psychological spinster distress could mean the destruction of Germany.

Childlessness greatly exacerbates this state of despairs. A societal decline in fertility means fewer children to care for, watch after, and guide through life, either one’s own children or the children of relatives and even close friends. After an unkind dismissal from the sexual market robs women of their instinct to arouse desire in men, a kinderfrei society robs women again of their other awesome love and yearning: fulfillment of their maternal instinct.

From the Chateau:

Masculinity is invasive, femininity is invitational. Funny how the most fundamental biomechanical sex differences play out similarly in the bedroom and on the geopolitical world stage. A comment from Steve Sailer’s:

When men make a mistake, they invade somewhere they should not have–due to male desires blinding their reason.

When women make a mistake, they invite someone they should not have–due to female desires blinding their reason.

May 12, 2024, Times of Israel noted:

Fighting and dying alongside men for decades, female soldiers finally get their due

According to Women Warriors, 47 female IDF soldiers were killed on October 7, and five more have been killed in the line of duty near Gaza, on the northern border and in the West Bank in the months since.

Martin Van Creveld wrote Feb. 11, 2016:

No Israeli woman does [go through full infantryman’s course], and of those who tried to do so on a more or less experimental basis many have been injured, some of them very badly…

Ultimately the reason why there is something deeply wrong with having women guard men and sacrifice themselves for them, instead of the other way around, is rooted in our mammalian biology. As everyone knows, the mammalian female’s investment in conceiving the young, bearing them, and bringing them into the world is huge. Not so that of the male who takes just a few minutes to do what has to be done and withdraws. Females can only have so and so many offspring during their lifetime; for males, so large is the number as to be practically unlimited.

The mathematics of reproduction explain why, among many mammalian species, the lives of males count for much less than those of females. When there is a threat it is the males which defend the females, never the other way around. Among us humans, the dangers surrounding delivery—at one time, one woman in four used to die in or soon after childbirth—provide another reason why women should not be heedlessly sacrificed. Briefly, nature itself has made women the indispensable sex. Compared with men, in any society they are a biological treasure and must be preserved.

Martin van Creveld wrote April 7, 2016:

Women’s inferiority to men in respect to physical strength, aerobic capacity, endurance and, above all, robustness, is obvious to all. The price is paid by their male colleagues; when a female trainee in a mixed unit breaks down, as often happens, guess who is going to carry her and/or her weapons and pack? But the price women have paid for serving in “combat” units has been much higher.

…Less than 3 percent of IDF “combat troops” are female. However, over the last few years they, or the lawyers acting in their name, have served 10-15 percent of the suits concerning compensation for injuries suffered while on “operational activity” (whatever that may mean). In proportion to their numbers, women sue three to five times more often than men.

Now let’s take a closer look at what “combat” actually entails. The largest group, 442 out of 1,593, serve in three mixed battalions named “Caracal,” “Leopard,” and “Lions of the Jordan” respectively. In each of these they form 60 percent of the total. What all three have in common is that they are permanently deployed along the borders with Egypt and Jordan. Those in turn have this in common that, over the last forty years, they have seen hardly a shot fired in anger. The remaining women are divided between “combat intelligence collection” (meaning that they look for all kinds of interesting things after the battle is over), border police (meaning that they stand guard against terrorists), civil defense, and artillery.

It so happened that, a day after I completed this article, I watched a clip of artillery troops on a route march. The men, heavily loaded with equipment of all kinds, sweated, grunted and did their best to keep up. One or two female soldiers were marching along, carrying a much smaller pack and looking as if they were on a lark. Whatever they may have been doing there, clearly they were not being tested as the men were.

Neither the infantry, nor the armored corps, nor the engineers, nor the special units, which between them form the bulk of the IDF’s “teeth,” have any women at all. Scant wonder that, during Operation Protective Edge back in the summer of 2014, out of 66 Israeli troops who died not one was female.

Why does all this matter? For four reasons. First, as the term “not hot” implies, in Israel as in all other modern countries armed forces the presence of women has contributed to the decline in the prestige of those forces and, with it, their ability to attract high-quality male manpower. Presumably that is why the “Lions” (arayot, in Hebrew) battalion, in spite of being made up mostly of women, is not called leviot “Lionesses.” Or else surely any proper man would have shot himself rather than serve in it.

Second, in Israel as in all other modern countries that presence has led to “gender norming” and, with it, falling standards which, in case of war, could be dangerous. Third, as the above figures show, too many women who, whether out of idealism or sheer penis envy, volunteer to serve in “combat” units are injured, with bad consequences both for themselves and, since they have to be paid pensions, the defense budget. Fourth, outside Israel quite some people, being misinformed about the true state of affairs, still take the IDF as an example to follow.

There are clear differences between men and women, as well as between northern Europeans, West Africans, East Africans, and north-east Asians. These different peoples create different communities and have different life history results.

Seeking equal results, equal rights and equal responsibilities from groups with different abilities and proclivities is insane.

There are many political analogies to this Chateau Heartiste argument: “The feminist goal is removing all constraints on female sexuality while maximally restricting male sexuality.”

For example, over the past 75 years, those fighting “imperialism” such as Palestinian terrorists have succeeded in removing all constraints on their own behavior while maximally restricting the responses of their targets. In her 2023 essay, Revolutionary War and the Development of International Humanitarian Law, legal scholar Amanda Alexander wrote:

Under Rule 106 [the International Committee of the Red Cross’ (ICRC) list of customary rules of IHL (International Humanitarian Law], combatants must identify themselves preparatory to attack to be eligible for prisoner of war status.

…The revolutionary writings on people’s war, put into practice in Vietnam, shaped a new language and paradigm of a just war, while advocating for the legitimacy of guerrilla warfare.

This language was adopted by Palestinian movements, which presented their struggle as analogous to the Vietnamese people’s war. Support for the Palestinians and the Palestine Liberation Organization led to a series of United Nations resolutions, proclaiming the rights of national liberation movements and their fighters in a quasi-legal language that would later be repeated at the Diplomatic Conferences.

There was also growing support for the Palestinian and the Vietnamese resistance in the West. Wars against imperial powers were increasingly accepted as just and the means used to oppose them seemed shocking. Popular and academic commentary in the West questioned the lawfulness of counterinsurgency techniques…

In his work in progress, Conservative Claims of Cultural Oppression: On the Nature and Origins of Conservaphobia, Rony Guldmann writes:

* Given that the symbolic realism is invariably intertwined with the biological functioning of a symbolic animal, liberalism’s efforts to mark off a sphere of “real” harm-tracking morality from the realm of airy cultural grievances is necessarily parochial, the product of an ethnocentrism that cannot recognize how liberals and conservatives partake of a shared humanity one side of which liberalism discounts.

* We now believe our freedom ends only at others’ noses. But pre-moderns saw things, and had to see things, very differently. That deviant conduct created no tangible harms and transpired out of sight was not dispositive because facially private misconduct was a transgression, not only against others’ sensibilities, but also against the order of things. Given that everyone’s place in this order depended on its continued sustenance, a transgression against it was a transgression against all.

* Steven Smith observes that the harm-principle—according to which the state may only regulate harmful as opposed to merely immoral conduct—has served as “a trusty weapon in the arsenal of liberalism.” Though conservative defenders of liberty-restricting legislation have sometimes acceded to the principle’s premises and emphasized the harmful “secondary effects” of facially harmless conduct—e.g., pornography’s contribution to urban blight—these arguments have generally been ineffectual, and are also suspected as disingenuous rationalizations for moralistic motivations. Thus, in practice the harm-principle has nearly always yielded liberal prescriptions.

* Much of the legislation that liberals would veto under the harm-principle as unduly coercive can be defended as a response to the “psychic harm” and “communal harm” which the targeted conduct obviously causes. After all, “psychic distress is a kind of mental pain” and “is plainly something that people prefer to avoid.” There is thus an obvious sense in which conduct that causes it—like the consumption or dissemination of pornography—is “harmful” and falls within the ambit of the harm-principle, irrespective of secondary effects. The same holds true of communal harm: “If people get satisfaction or happiness from living in a particular kind of community, then conduct that subverts that kind of community and thus reduces such happiness inflicts a kind of ‘harm.’

* The triumph of the harm principle is a merely rhetorical triumph, however. For liberals have by “sleight of hand” engaged in “rampant equivocation, trading on more ordinary senses of ‘harm’ for rhetorical purposes while importing technical or artificial conceptions of ‘harm’ in order to secure their desired conclusions.” They have “rigged” the concept of harm by exploiting its commonsense “subject-oriented” meaning—which includes psychic and communal harms—in order to establish the harm-principle’s commonsense rhetorical appeal while then narrowing its application to physical invasions of others’ autonomy when dealing with specific controversies, thus securing liberal outcomes. Liberals are thus “like people who insist that an issue should be resolved by democratic vote while working behind the scenes to disenfranchise groups who might be inclined to vote against their cause.” Their professions to the contrary notwithstanding, liberals do impose their values on others, because their tendentious conception of harm disguises the “quintessentially illiberal practice of treating some people’s ideas of the good life as less worthy,” concealing “how harm principle rhetoric actually works to obfuscate the deeper issues, to conceal real injuries, and to marginalize some conceptions of the good life.”

* Amy Wax observes that rationalistic liberals are unmoved and unimpressed by social conservatives’ “[v]ague premonitions of erosion or unraveling” of the social order, which they dismiss as “an inadequate basis for resisting changes that satisfy immediate needs and urgent desires.” And this is because they understand these vague premonitions as symptoms of a lingering pre-modern sensibility, which cannot be allowed interfere with modern “fulfillment.” Hence Justice Blackmun’s dissent in Bowers v. Hardwick, where he argued that homosexuality in and of itself “involves no real interference with the rights of others, for the mere knowledge that other individuals do not adhere to one’s value system cannot be a legally cognizable interest.” This is how moral opposition to homosexuality must be conceived within a strategic perspective—as mere Hobbesian “annoyance” rather than some disequilibrium in the order of things. Thus understood, the desire to regulate others’ unobtrusive personal conduct out of concern for the “moral fiber of society” is a disingenuous gambit to arrogate state power in the service of merely personal preferences.

* If the desire to place a crèche on public property is a purely symbolic aspiration, then so too is the desire to remove it.

* What some women will dismiss as harmless sexual innuendo acknowledging the basic fact of animal attraction may be experienced by feminists as a denial of their personhood, a degrading fall from the lofty heights of that personhood into merely animal passions.

* [Dan Kahan writes in The Cognitively Illiberal State:] “We moderns are no less disposed to believe that moral transgressions threaten societal harm. This perception is not, as is conventionally supposed, a product of superstition or unreasoning faith in authority. Rather it is the predictable consequence of the limited state of any individual’s experience with natural and social causation, and the role that cultural commitments inevitably play in helping to compensate for this incompleteness in knowledge. What truly distinguishes ours from the premodern condition in this sense is not the advent of modern science; it is the multiplication of cultural worldviews, competition among which has generated historically unprecedented conflict over how to protect society from harm at the very same time that science has progressively enlarged our understandings of how our world works.”

* For liberals’ concern with “substantive” equality inevitably draws them into the ambit of leftism, at which point they become no less willing to deploy state power to meddle with a wide array of social practices. Given that the “various maldistributions ”which concern liberals are only another name for what leftists call “social powers,” what get sold as limited correctives to isolated “kinks in the system” always harbor the seeds of leftist totalitarianism. Liberals claim to demand only a “level playing field.” But since there will always be another hither to undetected “maldistribution” waiting to be “discovered” by the anointed, liberalism must inevitably devolve into leftism, which is why conservatives often speak of “left-liberalism” or employ “liberalism” and “the left” interchangeably.

* Alan Kors writes that “[d]espite the talk of ‘celebrating’ diversity, colleges and universities do not, in fact, mean the celebration, deep study, and appreciation of evangelical, fundamentalist, Protestant culture; nor of traditionalist Catholic culture; nor of the gender roles of Orthodox Jewish or of Shiite Islamic culture; nor of black American Pentacostal culture; nor of assimilation; nor of the white, rural South. These are not ‘multicultural.’”86Just like diversity, “sensitivity” is a facially universalistic ideal that is unobjectionable in the abstract. But Kors observes that universities’ solicitude for diverse group identities does not extend to those who reject the dominant dispensation. Campus speech codes protect the sensibilities of left-wing students, but they allow these same students to label conservative blacks “Uncle Toms” and label anti-feminist women “mall chicks.” Students who believe homosexuality is sinful can be charged with harassing their gay and lesbian cohorts. But pro-choice students who surround a silent pro-life vigil and chant “Racist, sexist, antigay born-again bigots go away” are seen as engaged in protected speech. Liberals ask us to put ourselves in the shoes of the less fortunate, so Kors proposes the following thought-experiment:

“Imagine secular, skeptical, or leftist faculty and students confronted by a religious harassment code that prohibited “denigration” of evangelical or Catholic beliefs, or that made the classroom or campus a space where evangelical or Catholic students must be protected against feeling “intimidated,” offended,” or, by their own subjective experience, victims of a “hostile environment. Imagine a university of patriotic “loyalty oaths” where leftists were deemed responsible for the tens of millions of victims of communism, and where free minds were prohibited from creating a hostile environment for patriots, or from offending that “minority” of individuals who are descended from Korean or Vietnam War veterans. Imagine, as well, that for every “case” that became public, there were scores or hundreds of cases in which the “offender” or “victimizer,” desperate to preserve a job or gain a degree, accepted a confidential plea bargain that included a semester’s or a year’s reeducation in “religious sensitivity” or “patriotic sensitivity” seminars run by the university’s “Evangelical Center, “Patriotic Center,” or “Office of Religious and Patriotic Compliance.”

If an “Office of Religious and Patriotic Compliance” sounds sinister and totalitarian, we might instead envision a new regime of diversity training that encourages incoming college freshmen to examine their conservaphobic prejudices and overcome these to the extent possible in a conservaphobic culture. The goal would not be political indoctrination. This conservative-friendly diversity training wouldn’t call on liberal students to become conservative any more than standard diversity training calls on straight students to become gay. They need only explore their latent fears and biases in order to create a more tolerant atmosphere for all students. But liberals will not accept even this moderate solution. And this demonstrates to conservatives that they are unwilling to play by the same rules to which they hold others.

* radical feminists can treat the “social construction of gender” as established fact, and need not contend with the neuroscientists across campus who study the biological hard-wiring of sex differences. These scientists are not members of “the relevant discipline.” …unlike liberal academics, Christian fundamentalists do not have the privilege of exalting their own echo chambers as respected academic disciplines. Fundamentalists who ignore what scientists say about the evolution of human beings in general are disdained as anti-intellectual. But feminists who ignore what scientists say about the evolution of sex differences in particular are just being professional. Unlike fundamentalists, feminists have been culturally credentialed to disguise their hero-systems as disciplinary rigor. Having embraced the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, they have been credentialed as “the knowing, the knowledgeable, the reflexive and insightful,” and so they are allowed to invent their own intellectual rules.

* progressives have “undermined manliness, feminized your culture, elevated fretful safety and excessive caution into virtues instead of weaknesses.” Following Lakoff, liberals will diagnose the conservative invocation of manliness as yet another symptom of Strict Father morality, for which strict gender differentiation and masculine strength are how one defends “Moral Order” against a threatening world. The Strict Father model, says Lakoff, “takes as background the view that life is difficult and that the world is fundamentally dangerous.” And as liberals see it, this background view is really a pretext for conservative authoritarianism, which is sold to the public as a solution to dangers that liberals in their fretful safety and excessive caution refuse to confront. By contrast, conservatives see manliness as an anti-authoritarian impulse, a force that disrupts rather than upholds established convention. Harvey Mansfield writes that whereas rational control “wants our lives to be bound by rules,” manliness “is dissatisfied with whatever is merely legal or conventional.” Whilst rational control “wants peace, discounts risk, and prefers role models to heroes,” manliness “favors war, likes risk, and admires heroes,” Manliness “seeks and welcomes drama and prefers times of war, conflict, and risk.” It “tends to be insistent and intolerant,” just as it is “steadfast…taking a stand, not surrendering, not allowing oneself to be determined by one’s context, not being adaptive or flexible.” Manliness must “must prove itself and do so before an audience.” It seeks “to be theatrical, welcomes drama, and wants your attention.” By contrast, rational control “prefers routine and doesn’t like getting excited” and therefore aims to keep manliness “unemployed by means of measures that encourage or compel behavior intended to be lacking in drama.”113Manliness so conceived is the very antithesis of the buffered distance, a visceral rejection of its “ordering impulses.” It is most fundamentally a protest against the rationalizing forces of the modern world, against the peculiarly courtly rationality, which is what has made us “adaptive and flexible.” The liberal culture is unmanly because it is hostile, not only to actual contests of swords, but also to the entire range of virtues and identities which these once embodied—which is what the conservative celebration of manliness aims to resuscitate. Rather than pursuing the “new form of invulnerability” promised by the buffered distance, manliness embraces the vulnerability of the pre-modern dispensation, our exposure to the “anti-structure” that relativizes and destabilizes the conventional social world, revealing the precariousness of all merely human designs. As relative pre-moderns, conservatives are attuned to anti-structure—the inherent flux and fragility of all mortal things—as liberals are not, and this is why they think themselves more manly. This conception of manliness is part of what animates conservatives’ embrace of the free market, whose association with conservatism is not as obvious as it seems… These elements include the chaos, unpredictability, and insecurity of the pre-modern condition of porous selves opened out to anti-structure. These are what enable manliness and the anarchic will of free men. And it is these discounted values that imbue untrammeled laissez-faire with its existential resonance for conservatives. Laissez-faire symbolizes the anti-structure denied by the disciplines and repressions of the buffered identity, affirming our submersion in forces we do not control, our openness to powers that transcend our will and upset our designs. Liberals reject this openness as the relic of a barbarian past of less fortunate peoples, which they in their superior enlightenment have overcome… Cold War conservatives looked upon the Soviet Union and the welfare state as “the ultimate symbols of cold Enlightenment rationalism,” by contrast with which the free market stood as “the embodiment of the romantic counter-Enlightenment.”

* Feminism is a struggle, not by all women against male patriarchs, but by an elite minority of powerful women against a majority of women who never felt compromised by traditional gender roles.

* Feminists now dismiss traditional gender roles as arbitrary. But it was feminists who first engineered these perceptions by enforcing a regime of coerced androgyny. The feminization of men, writes Graglia, was among “the seeds from which women’s discontent grew and which blossomed into the women’s movement.” Absent the support and encouragement of a masculine man, women naturally became disenchanted with a traditional female role—feminism’s ultimate objective. Their dissatisfaction here wasn’t just there waiting to be named by those who courageously spoke truth to power. Rather, it had to be created in order to socially vindicate the self-image of an elite minority of women. To this end, feminists have waged a largely victorious “war against the housewife,” employing any means necessary to denigrate her character, intelligence, and social status.

* While feminism claims to have liberated women from antiquated sexual ideologies that formerly subordinated them to patriarchy, it has in the process instituted a new sexual ideology that subordinates them to feminism itself, reconfiguring gender relations in order to socially vindicate feminist identities and discredit others. Women could never have been drawn into the feminist fold were they not first deracinated of their femininity, which is what feminism pursued. By cultivating a dissatisfaction it could then promise to relieve, feminism turned itself into a self-fulfilling prophesy, concealing all the manipulations by which it finally earned the grudging assent of women.

* what purports to be autonomous self-determination is in fact one historically constructed understanding of human agency among others. The “inner base area” of the buffered identity isn’t something that was lying there all along, albeit concealed underneath various collectivizing illusions, but the product of specific social forces which have conditioned the human organism into its present self-reflexivity. The buffered identity is an imposition for whose sake our “default” human dispositions must be tamed and disciplined. This affect show we see feminism. The subtraction account casts feminism as a revolt against the historical repression of female agency. But the mutation counter-narrative locates feminism as among the forces that created female agency (as understood by feminism). For feminism is merely another extension of modern liberalism’s disciplinary agenda. It was feminism that molded women into the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, repressing the “lax and disorganized folkways” of traditional femininity, integrating them into the extended chains of social interdependence presupposed by the buffered distance and symbolized by the careerwoman. Feminism claims to upholds respect for women’s personhood. But as John Gray notes, personhood is not the essence of humanity, but merely one of its masks. Persons “are only humans who have donned the mask that has been handed down in Europe over the past few generations, and taken it for their face.”

* gender feminists’ motivation is powerfully enhanced by the “faith that they are privy to revolutionary insights into the nature of knowledge and society.” This “inspires them with a missionary fervor unmatched by any other group in the contemporary academy.” “An exhilarating feeling of momentousness,” she notes, “routinely surfaces at gender feminist gatherings,” as feminist theorists invoke Copernicus and Darwin to symbolize the importance of their own discoveries, basking in the “exhilaration of feeling themselves in the vanguard of a new consciousness.” Feminists are seeking to express, not merely a set of doctrines one might or might not accept, but, more fundamentally, a consciousness one might or might not attain. They understand themselves, not only as liberated from traditional expectations and stereotypes, but furthermore as special participants in a privileged epistemic and spiritual dispensation that affords them a special lucidity unavailable to women who stubbornly resist feminism.

* Indian practices “related to food, sex, clothing, and gender relations were almost always judged to be moral issues, not social conventions.” Unlike their American counterparts, Indian children did not assign any special status to harm-tracking morality or distinguish it from mutable social convention. For them, “the social order is a moral order.” These children “were not figuring out morality for themselves, based on the bedrock certainty that harm is bad.” Instead, they showed that “almost any practice could be loaded up with moral force.”

* Notwithstanding their ostensible egalitarianism and pragmatism, the liberal elites are committed to their own particular brand of identity politics, complete with its own special kind of otherization. The “bitter clingers” who stand in the way of gun control are not merely criticized as misguided, but despised as occupants of a lower moral and cognitive order, atavisms of a barbaric past that liberals alone have superseded. Whereas now eclipsed traditionalist hierarchies revolved around perceived differences in things like sexual purity, work ethic, religious affiliation, family pedigree, and ethnic bona fides, the new status hierarchy of liberalism is rooted in “cognitive elitism” and centers around a morally charged division between those who are “aware” and those who are not. The former have the psychic maturity to accede to liberalism. The latter lack it and must be reformed. This kind of identity politics will always take refuge in some pragmatic-sounding pretext—e.g., the dangers of firearms or the drawbacks of home schooling. But conservatives dismiss this pragmatism as an elaborate façade for a status hierarchy that liberals refuse to acknowledge.

* The liberal virtues are in truth gestures of identity-assertion designed to come at the expense of conservative ordinary Americans.

* The modern liberal identity is not an unvarnished naturalistic lucidity, as liberals are wont to see it. For it embodies the contingent historical forces that first generated it, a new uniformization, homogenization, and rationalization that liberalism’s Enlightenment narratives conceal or discount.

* Given that the symbolic realism is invariably intertwined with the biological functioning of a symbolic animal, liberalism’s efforts to mark off a sphere of “real” harm-tracking morality from the realm of airy cultural grievances is necessarily parochial, the product of an ethnocentrism that cannot recognize how liberals and conservatives partake of a shared humanity one side of which liberalism discounts.

* the emergence of a conservative identity politics, a conservative politics of recognition. The tropes and ideals of the Left are being marshaled, not simply to advance one or another conservative cause, like ending abortion or untrammeled free markets, but moreover in defense of conservatives themselves as an unfairly maligned social group. This is what defines a conservative claims of cultural oppression.

* Social meanings can constrain us because they ground our identities. To preserve identity is to contain freedom—to limit the range of possibilities that one can seriously contemplate. This narrowness is the sine qua non of taking oneself seriously, which is what social meanings allow us to do.

* A biological male is within his rights to self-identify as a female and attach more importance to this inner self-conception than to his biological sex. But he cannot reasonably expect others—for who many such disjunction between biology and identity is foreign—do the same and recognize him as a female. His sexual self-identification is a private matter, but his biological sexuality is a public one, and others will respond to what they can see and hear. His perspective is legitimate, but so too is theirs. Both express equal but ultimately incommensurable frameworks of identity. He is on the losing end of this conflict, not because he is morally inferior, but because of a utilitarian calculus resting on 1) a social consensus that the sexes should use separate restrooms, 2) the fact that he is in the minority and3) the fact that the resources available for the construction of public restrooms are finite. Someone is going to be left feeling uncomfortable, and it is the greatest good of the greatest number that determines who this will be.

* The liberal identity is premised on the ethos of disengaged self-control and self-reflexivity, and this places it in direct conflict with those whose patriotism resists that ethos.

* most people’s need for cultural identity affirmation is largely defensive in nature…