All great truths begin as blasphemies. By Brendan O’Neill.
‘We shall soon be in a world’, wrote GK Chesterton, ‘in which people will persecute the heresy of calling a triangle a three-sided figure’.
We’re in that world now. …
Rolling back the Enlightenment into intolerant woke religion:
Across the Western world, establishments are rechristening truth as heresy. Refer to certain men as ‘he’ and you’ll be accused of the sin of ‘misgendering’. You might even find yourself exiled for life from social media, our era’s public square. Say only women have cervixes – as Labour MP Rosie Duffield did – and you will be shamed as a witch. Speak the truth about a person’s past – that Caitlyn Jenner was once Bruce, a runner; that Elliot Page was once Ellen, an actress – and you’ll be denounced as a ‘deadnamer’, the unholiest of heretics.
The elites are at the very front of this mob that despises fact as heresy. ‘It is something that shouldn’t be said’, said Keir Starmer of the statement ‘Only women have cervixes’. Kamala Harris wrote a gushing letter to Dylan Mulvaney to congratulate him on ‘living authentically’ as a girl — a delirious untruth that would have appalled every generation before ours. …
Epic gaslighting:
We are being gaslit morning, noon and night. We see a man and they tell us it’s a woman — literally, legally a woman. We see a dude with a beard and they say it’s a lesbian. ‘Let her associate with other lesbians’, they say, every word a lie. We see a pregnant woman on the front of this month’s Glamour magazine and they say it is a ‘pregnant man’. The truth — that only women get pregnant; that no man has ever been pregnant or ever will be — is cruelly overridden. It is burnt at the stake of ideology. The delusions of the elites carry more weight than truth itself — that is how arrogant the new authoritarianism has become; how determined our rulers are to remake reality in the image of their own fevered opinion.
Gaslighting is everywhere. We see an industrial society that has extended life expectancy, reduced poverty and afforded us ever-greater protections against nature’s violent whims; they tell us it is a ‘climate catastrophe’, the harbinger of the death of billions. We see, and love, the vast improvements in racial equality gifted to us by the 20th century; they tell us white supremacy is as rife as ever. We see, and worry about, acts of Islamist violence; they say it’s ‘faith-claimed terrorism’, as if these are nameless horrors, belonging to no one, signifying nothing. Say ‘Islamist’ and you’ll be branded phobic, a heretic.
Not long now
The new heresy-hunters deploy numerous tactics of demonisation. That accusation of ‘phobia’ is one. Deviate from their truths that say Islam is a perfect religion, that sex is changeable, that same-sex marriage is morally equal to opposite-sex marriage, and you’ll be damned as an Islamophobe, a transphobe, a homophobe.
‘Denier’ is another sign hung round the necks of modern heretics. Question climate-change alarmism and you’re a climate-change denier. Those who bristled against lockdown were called ‘Covid deniers’. …
We need to start speaking up and speaking out. To start saying the things we know to be true. We’ll be damned as blasphemers, but that’s okay. As George Bernard Shaw said: ‘All great truths begin as blasphemies.’ That’s enough gaslighting, enough thoughtpolicing, enough punishment of truth-speaking. Heretics, assemble.
One of the great “insights” of postmodernism is that there is no such thing as truth. Rubbish! Anyone who tells you that is warning you that they are going to lie to you.
