How Blue the Sky Was
Blog and Mablog
Saturday, April 25, 2015
By Douglas Wilson
All right. I suppose I should explain to you all what was up with my near-week-long involuntary hiatus from blogging. There were various factors in play, but the central one was my misguided belief that I was somehow included in all that free speech business that Madison wrote about in the First Amendment. You see, say I were to write a “controversial” post about the homo-jihad, and say this post went nuts on Facebook with people reading it and stuff, suppose something like that.
One of the things that usually happens when I misbehave like this is a series of cyberhack attacks on my server, conducted by the Anarchist Brotherhood in their ongoing fight for the Free Exchange of Ideas. In the aftermath of one such recent post, my blog’s server wound up getting around a million hits a day, designed to crash the server. It did have that intended effect, and took down other web sites with me. My host company had no choice but to suspend my account.
Like I said, there were other factors involved as well. Initially, when I thought it was simply a series of techno-glitches, I was tempted to be exasperated, a temptation which I manfully resisted. But when it turned out that I had not tripped and fallen, but had rather gotten knocked clean out of the saddle, I cheered up considerably. It is quite an honor to be thought a worthy enough opponent that they decide to shiver some of their more expensive lances on you. Unhorsed, and with a split helmet, and flat on my back, I was able to notice how blue the sky was.
So . . . at the end of this very exciting week and transfer process, I am now currently ensconced in a gray granite cyber fortress, and it is my purpose here to do a little trash talking from the top of the wall. And this I will do, God permitting, provided I don’t take one of Rabshakeh’s arrows in the neck. One doesn’t want to pull one of those Josiah/Pharaoh Necho thingies, so one must be careful to keep one’s trash talking within the recognized boundaries of decorum.
Liberals really hate freedom of speech. They loathe it. They are currently involved in far more than just trying to shut down speech that is inconvenient to this particular project of theirs or that one. They are engaged in rejecting the whole idea of free speech in toto. They have gotten to the point where they object to freedom of speech in principle. William F. Buckley once said that liberals give great lip service to the idea of hearing other points of view, but then are shocked and offended to discover that there are other points of view. That tendency, which Buckley observed, has now officially metastasized.
So in pursuit of gratifying this strange animus, they will employ any number of tricks to silence dissent. But I will content myself here with simply listing two or three of them.
The first is the straightforward jackbooted assault. You say something they don’t like, and they will do what it takes to shout you down. I have seen this in my own experience in a number of different ways. They don’t care how ugly it gets, and they don’t care how ugly it looks. All they do is pitch a fit in order to get what they want. Their play is simply raw, open, naked power, and if it works, it works. If you want to tell me that liberals are committed to free speech, please remember you are talking to someone who once needed an entourage of around twenty cops in order to be able to say something in a classroom at a state university. Those remaining classic liberals — all six of them — who are still committed to free speech have a great deal to be embarrassed about.
Another trick is to play dirty behind the scenes. That’s the kind of thing we see in these cyber-attacks. “For behold, the wicked bend the bow; they have fitted their arrow to the string to shoot in the dark at the upright in heart;” (Psalm 11:2, ESV). They love it in the dark because their deeds are evil. They lurk in anonymity. They don’t have to worry about anyone seeing them there in the dark because there is no God who can see them there. Or so they’ve been told.
And a third technique I have been seeing a lot of lately is what might be called china doll feminism. Feminism began by insisting that women could do everything the men can do, I-am-woman-hear-me-roar stuff, and has ended by weepily entreating all their sob sisters to repair themselves to the fainting couches, where trained counselors in crinoline skirts will cluster around with the smelling salts. A recent lib conference asked the attendees to show their appreciation for the talk through an adroit use of jazz hands because the applause was upsetting to some of the delicate ones present. It must have been some kind of post-traumatic reaction from too much applause at a third-grade assembly.
Then there are the microagressions that make the lives of feminists such a dark, hellish place. There is, for example, the plague of manspreading, which insolent males perpetrate by sitting on subways with their legs apart. For myself, I believe the best response to microagressions should be a good dose of micro-caring.
A university recently had to go through the calamity of allowing a conservative speaker to speak somewhere on campus, and they responded by creating a “safe” zone where people could come to deal with the trauma. The trauma of what you say?
Well, the trauma of somebody out there saying things that unsettled them, you know, things that conflicted with what they already thought. That official safe place included trained counselors, videos of puppies, coloring books, and, like Dave Barry, I am not making this up. Somebody out there is saying things that do not comport with the Supremacy of My Feelings. All of this is, of course, just passive aggressive manipulation, and an assault on freedom of speech. Feminists have come full circle and are now the shrinking violets that their great-grandmothers despised.
I recently had an email exchange with a woman who wants to identify as a “Jesus feminist.” This is a woman who, when it comes to thoughtful engagement with positions she finds distasteful, couldn’t hit the rear end of a bull with a snow shovel. But the reason she cannot analyze an argument she differs with is that actual differences make her feel a certain way. This is what I wrote to her in my last communication.
“You cannot state what I actually think because what reads ‘ugly’ to you make you feel a particular way, and you cannot see clearly around that feeling. But in order to justify that feeling, you have to twist what I am saying.”
So she wrote back and said that her husband had said that she shouldn’t read any of my emails, and so she didn’t read the last one. So there. Feelings are paramount.
Rachel Held Evans wrote the Foreword to a book called Jesus Feminist. In that Foreword, she gives us a wonderful description of the frail feminist. She says, “Sarah does what all good storytellers do: she gives us permission — permission to laugh, permission to question, permission to slow down a bit, permission to listen, permission to confront our fears, permission to share our own stories with more bravery and love” (RHE, Foreword to Jesus Feminist, by Sarah Bessey, Loc. 99 of 2485).
Permission, permission, permission. There is a very brave feminist bumper sticker out there that says that well-behaved women rarely make history. And yet, here we are at the lunatic end of this feminist meander, having to get permission for absolutely everything. And if you think or say anything untoward, permission will be denied. If there is one thing RHE cannot afford to do, it would be to give me permission to laugh.
“A movement is underfoot, a holy rumbling. And things will never be the same” (Loc. 88 of 2485). This is a high adventure indeed, the high adventure of finding your emotional cozy spot. And when we all get there, we will be able to share a mug of warm tea with that Obamacare pajama boy.
Teacher, can I go to the bathroom? I need permission to hurl.