The Right To Be Reactionary
Conservatives attempt to own the libs by making a series of rods for their own backs.
One of the most common rhetorical lib-owning jabs you will see among conservatives is to mock the “Queers for Palestine” phenomenon. Very simply put, progressives in the United States champion the cause of LGBT liberation and simultaneously push for increased political rights (or privileges) for Muslims in America and abroad. Yet many of the ethnic groups they champion are hostile to varying degrees to Ls and Gs, and Bs, to say nothing of Ts, Qs, I, As, and anything implied by “+.” Interestingly, this observation is aimed primarily at the Gay-Muslim intersection and not the Trans-Black intersection, or the Gay-Hispanic intersection.
For those interested, below is a video by Corey Gil-Schuster interviewing a variety of Palestinian men-and-women-on-the-street on the question of what they think of the idea of Queers for Palestine. He interviews eight people, 5 men and 3 women. You should watch it twice, once just to hear all of their answers, and the second time really looking at the people who are giving the answers. How old are they? What social class do they seem to come from?
There are three main takeaways from the video. First, that neither Khaled nor Khader have even heard the English words “gay” or “queer”. Khaled has never heard its translation into Arabic either, and requires a full explanation. Meanwhile, Khader, who otherwise speaks English, hears the Arabic word and says “Oh I know that, I have a Masters [Degree] in Mental Health.” No comment, just interesting.
The second thing that jumps out are the most “extreme” answers given in either direction, by the last two respondents. Note that all male respondents are ambivalent at best to the idea of homosexuality in the abstract, with most of them politely answering that while they personally don’t like it, they nonetheless accept the support. Meanwhile, the women are considerably more excited at the prospect, with the exception of Khader, who simply says that “It’s OK. I don’t think anything about it.” But the most stark contrast is that between Ramzi and Sana.
Ramzi is unambiguously hostile. “This is unacceptable. We are against it. It’s against our religion, it is not healthy. Frankly, it’s not healthy even for children to hear about it. For them to support us… our society would be ruined, and young people would be following that.”
Contrast Sana. “I know all about that!” she gushes.
Corey, the gay Israeli Jew interviewing her, excitedly notes that he “knows [his] people.”
Sana continues, and bemoans that “when people here hear that you are a supporter of their rights, they automatically think that you are a vulgar person, someone who does not believe in culture.” She continues extolling the virtues of diversity and inclusion for two more minutes, before even declaring that “hopefully, one day, I will walk in a parade actually!” I’m not going to break down her response sentence by sentence, but really listen to it and you will find that she is left-of-center on this issue even by Western standards.
One should finally note that while the distribution of opinions is different from our society, the range of opinions expressed is fully in line with what you would see at any gathering of Republicans twenty years ago. There is inherently a selection bias in that everybody Corey speaks to is in a major city, and nobody he speaks to seems to be over forty-five (though the median Palestinian age is 21 for reasons that I am not going to explain in this article). But notice that Ramzi, who is making no attempt to hold back his hostility, is not expressing any homicidal intent. He’s not elaborating on the Islamic punishment for homosexuality, nor making any comments about throwing homosexuals off of rooftops. If you replaced the word “Islamic” with “Christian,” his view wouldn’t be out of place on an old episode of Hannity, much less Rush Limbaugh.
The purpose of this article is not to justify Palestinian views on homosexuality in either direction. Ultimately it it up to the reader to listen to what these Palestinians are saying, look around the society in which them themselves live, and decide for themself whose views they sympathize with more. No, the purpose of this article is to explain why those views require no justification by anyone, left or right.
Let me explain the Mystery of Queers for Palestine once and for all. Any group of progressives that agitates against imperialism, colonialism, racism, apartheid, in any way, shape, or form, whether real, or imagined, is going to be agitating for the rights of people less progressive than themselves. That is a fact of the game. Historically, occupiers have almost without exception been more progressive, urban, and liberal than their victims1. Networks of trade, urbanization, technological superiority. All of these are necessary to build up the necessary population (to say nothing of the economy) required to maintain a powerful empire. The Roman citizen who opposed constant military expeditions into Gaul and Germania would have found himself defending the dignity of Vandals and Barbarians by definition.
If progressives only supported freedom and democracy in other countries for as long as they expected the people of those countries to vote in a progressive way, they wouldn’t be progressives, they would be neoconservatives.
This is not to say that progressives are universally men and women of principle to be emulated in full. For them, one often finds that the right to be reactionary does not actually extend to white countries, even ones that these selfsame progressives do not have to suffer the indignity of living in. Further, certain ethnic groups may find themselves, after independence, slowly reinterpreted as whites as they continually fail to get with the liberal program. Consider the curious case of the Chechens. In the nineties, Chechens were an indigenous Muslim ethnic group whose valiant aspirations towards independence were stymied by evil Russian ultranationalists. In April 2013, after the bombing of the Boston Marathon by the Tsarnaev brothers, Chechens suddenly became white. In 2017, when allegations circled that the Chechnyan administration was putting homosexuals into concentration camps, Chechens became Russians.
Further, we see that in most cases progressives really do expect a left wing regime to take control of the autonomous or independent government at the earliest opportunity, even if they have to force that outcome. Consider Hillary Clinton’s comments to The Jewish Press in the aftermath of Hamas’s surprisingly surprising victory in the 2006 Palestinian elections: “I do not think we should have pushed for an election in the Palestinian territories. I think that was a big mistake. And if we were going to push for an election, then we should have made sure that we did something to determine who was going to win.”
If you find yourself thinking, “Why to progressives support this cause? Don’t they know that if they do, it will advance conservatism?” you should be open to the possibility that you are not dealing with complete idiots, and that progressives will pull out every trick in the book to politically neutralize their conservative opposition wherever it might be, even if that means rigging elections to put Sana in power over Ramzi.
In Palestine, of course. They’d never do anything like that in the US.
Now that we’ve addressed the matters of the Palestinians, and the Queers For Them, we must finally discuss the million dollar question of the Conservatives who keep bringing them up.
First, allow me to explain the concept of a “shit-test.” The term originated in the “Pick-Up-Artist” community to refer to a phenomenon that can be broadly defined as when a person (contextually a woman) says or does something to test a man’s strength or character.
Besides among women, shit-testing is also common among incarcerated criminals where it is called “G-checking.” An example of which is stealing food off of a stranger’s plate to see if they will humbly accept the insult, snatch it back, or start a brawl. To accept the insult is to fail the test. To start a brawl is to pass the test, whether they win or lose, as long as they don’t get knocked out before guards arrive. If the food is simply snatched back, the ball is still in play. Since nobody loses status in a brawl unless they lose badly, brawls are pretty common.
Shit-tests are common in politics. There are things that people say and do just to test the other side’s moral confidence and convictions. For example. “What are you, some sort of communist?” is a shit-test. A person has come out in favor of some policy, like universal health care, paid maternity leave, unionization, or some other commie bullshit, and you’ve just asked them if they are willing to hold fast to that belief, even if it causes you to openly accuse them of communism.
There are many ways to fail this shit-test. The most obvious way is to back down from the position entirely. Another way would be to begin to explain why the communist policy they are advocating for isn’t actually communist. By doing so, they have lost frame. The discussion has shifted from one surrounding whether their policy proposal is good, to one surrounding whether or not they have violated the taboo you’re referencing.
Likewise, there are multiple ways to pass this shit-test. The first, and most obvious, is to simply say “I don’t care if you think it’s communist. Here is why my policy is good.” By doing this, the person displays moral confidence. A second way to pass this shit-test is to laugh in your face and make fun of you for being the sort of political neanderthal that goes around accusing people of being communists like an extra from Dr. Strangelove.
The easiest way to shit-test a conservative is by calling them racist. Same as before: You come out in favor of some racist policy like requiring voters to show ID or not allowing people to destroy the local supermarket. A liberal informs you that by doing so, you are outing yourself as a white supremacist on par with Thomas Jefferson, Nathan Bedford Forrest, and HP Lovecraft. Here is the same question as before: Are you willing to hold firmly to your moral convictions, even if this person calls you a Nazi?
Political shit-tests are not limited to one-on-one conversations either; they can happen in front of an audience, and they can involve material demands beyond backing down from a rhetorical position. Demanding that a person or organization disavow an associate is a type of shit-test. In the 2008 election, Republicans were able to successfully browbeat Barack Obama into disavowing his own pastor for saying that America has a racist government that murders and enslaves people at home and abroad, and after 9/11, “the stuff we have done overseas is now brought back into our own front yards. America’s chickens are coming home to roost.” By today those views are essentially mainstream, and opposition to them is almost as racist as a peanut butter and jelly sandwich.
The most important consideration when issuing a shit-test is whether your target will even respond one way or another. Once your opponents build up a habit of ignoring you without consequence, you lose even more than if they simply rose to the challenge each time. The second consideration, once you plan on politically operating at an intellectual level above that of the average convicted criminal, is setting up challenges such that even if your opponent wins the status contest, you still win in another, more important way.
Consider the bully who challenges someone to a fight, and pressures their opponent by calling them a chicken. His victim passes the shit-test by standing tall and affirming that he isn’t afraid of anything… and promptly gets wrecked in the actual fight. His victim doesn’t walk out of the fight a total loser. After all, everyone saw him stand up for himself, and that does indeed count for something in the schoolyard. But there are no Es for effort in politics.
In politics, this means that if you are a conservative, you should issue challenges from a right wing frame, punching left. You should never ever offer a challenge that implies validity to left wing views, or challenges people on the left to move further to the left. The challenge should always be to fight you on the field of being Right.
One of the worst cases of conservative myopia on this front came with the collapse of the US collaboration regime in Afghanistan. In advance of the Taliban victory, Twitter saw a flurry of increased engagement with the Taliban linked accounts, most notable of which was that of Malang Khostay. Malang himself, when he was an active propagandist for the Taliban, understood perfectly well the premise of this very article. Almost all of the content he shared affirmed and reaffirmed the premise that the Taliban was based and trad and redpilled, and that anyone, anywhere, who opposed them for any reason was a bluepilled beta liberal cuck who was probably working for Israel. This included, in his framework, alleged ISIL remnants engaged in active hostilities with the Taliban. He did not do what many other apologists for Islamism do, by trying to contrive an argument for how Islam is actually a feminist religion. He didn’t try to fight on the plane of progressivism. His message to the already demoralized Toby Keith fanbase was that America and its woke generals were fighting for the right of Afghani women to start OnlyFans accounts.
Multiple conservative twitter personalities and republican politicians howled in despair for this.
When you say things like this you are implicitly reaffirming the moral framework that got Trump banned in the first place.
Demanding that Twitter ban the Taliban is a form of a shit test. Twitter has outlined a moral conviction, in this case that “right wing extremist terror” has no place on the platform. Conservatives are then asking them “Oh? You have a moral conviction? Well, would you still keep up that moral conviction even if it meant deplatforming the Taliban?”
This is shooting yourself in the foot! Twitter could EASILY pass this shit-test by doubling down on their convictions and banning the Taliban. As it is, Twitter can simply ignore conservative complaining without consequence.
By issuing this test, by giving out a command which will not be followed, conservatives only reaffirm their own weakness. Worse still, if the command were to be followed, it would only put conservatives in a worse position, because it would build upon the precedent that “right wing extremists” should be banned from Twitter!
Instead, conservatives should affirm that that Taliban has the right to be reactionary. This doesn’t mean reframing the request as “if the Taliban are here, then we demand you bring back Trump.” In practice, the shit test is the same. Conservatives shouldn’t bring up the Taliban twitter presence at all; Trump belongs back on Twitter, end of sentence.
In the end, there are only three reasons to rhetorically attack the Taliban. The first and most obvious is that twenty years ago, they provided aid and comfort to Osama bin Laden. The second is that in their fight to remove a foreign occupier from their land, they killed, maimed, and emotionally traumatized thousands of US servicemen (and women!). The third is that they are sexist and backwards.
If you are a conservative, you should think twice and then ponder three times again before you criticize anybody, anywhere for being a backwards sexist. You are, to paraphrase Hitchens, making a series of rods for your own back.
Conservatives must continuously reaffirm, at home and around the world, a universal and inalienable right to be reactionary. Palestinians, Pashtuns, Poles, and Phillipinos have the right, in their own lands, to reject American progressive norms on race and gender. Americans have the right, in our own lands, to reject American progressive norms on race and gender. We all have the right to say no to Drag Queen Story Hour. We have the right to say no to Woke Capital. We have the right to say no to the lies and threats that emanate from Washington DC and the NGO industrial complex.
You think Queers for Palestine is weird? You know what else is just as weird a phenomenon? Conservatives for Gay Jews in the Middle East!
“Oh these LGBTs in the United States support Palestinians? Don’t they know that if Palestinians had their way, gays would be disowned at best and thrown off rooftops at worst?”
Since I’m assuming my audience here is a bit right of center, and as I point out in the about page, I write these articles with an eye to helping my audience engage with boomer conservatives, here’s a challenge:
Go ask your grandparents how they think homosexuality should be viewed in an ideal society, assuming they feel safe enough to answer you. Compare them to the Palestinians Corey interviewed. Consider the stance of the Republican party on homosexuality a mere twenty years ago. For the love of God, Montresor, one of the enduring memes about the most recent Republican Vice President was that he was a longtime supporter of curing homosexuality with electro-shock therapy.
When you rhetorically attack Palestinians for being homophobic, you are fashioning rods against your own grandparents, and when you challenge Twitter to ban the Taliban, you fashion rods against yourself.
A few exceptions immediately come to mind, for example, the white supremacist German regime’s successful occupation of the almost equally white supremacist French regime during the Second World War. The quasi National-Socialist regime in Syria’s occupation of Lebanon in the 90s, itself a country that while normally more liberal and cosmopolitan was at that moment experiencing an unraveling of its civil society among sectarian lines as well as an occupation of the southern half of the country by Israel.
Further exceptions to the rule can be found deeper into the historical record, usually of the rough pattern of roving bandits unifying under one leader and carving an empire out of the terrritory of their neighbors as stationary bandits. For example the unification of the Arabian Peninsula under Islam and the ensuing push into the Levant and beyond. Or for another example the Mongol conquest of China. Or Viking expansion into England and France. Of course in both of those cases, the conquerors assimilated relatively quickly into the political and administrative norms of their victims. By the time the Mongols had reached Persia, they were trying to compel their latest conquest to utilize paper money. Within a century of living in France, those Vikings had become “Normans.” The Rashidun Caliphate moved its capital from the Peninsula to Iraq within thirty years, and no ensuing caliphate ever looked back.
So we see the historical trend is that the forward and urban conquer the backwards and rural, and in the event that the trend is reversed, the triumphant rurals become urban and forward within a generation or two.
Excellent piece. This is partly why I avoid appeals to hypocrisy. If the leftists weren't hypocritical as often as they are we would actually be in a much worse state.
The Gay-3rd World-Muslim-Commie axis is the greatest threat to civilization.