The Other McCain

"One should either write ruthlessly what one believes to be the truth, or else shut up." — Arthur Koestler

‘Alexa, What Is an Ideologue?’

Posted on | March 26, 2022 | Comments Off on ‘Alexa, What Is an Ideologue?’

This week’s Judiciary Committee hearings for Ketanji Brown Jackson were eye-opening in a lot of ways. Sen. Marsha Blackburn — whom I’ve considered a 2024 presidential contender for a long time — managed to embarrass Jackson with a very simple question:

Blackburn: “Can you provide a definition for the word ‘woman’?”
Jackson: “Can I provide a definition?”
Blackburn: “Mhmm, yeah.”
Jackson: “No, I can’t.”
Blackburn: “You can’t?”
Jackson: “Not in this context — I’m not a biologist.”

The “not in this context” part has been somewhat overlooked in the general point-and-laugh reaction to her “not a biologist” reply. As someone said, I’m not a veterinarian, but I know what a dog is. Nevertheless, as Byron York notes, the “context” is important because Blackburn prefaced her question by referencing the 1996 Supreme Court case of U.S. vs. Virginia, which declared that the all-male status of Virginia Military Institute was unconstitutional on Fourteenth Amendment grounds. It so happens that I believe that case was wrongly decided — a legal travesty, as the authors of the Fourteenth Amendment obviously had no such intent at the time the amendment was ratified.

In the hands of ideologues, the Fourteenth Amendment becomes an omnivorous predator that swallows whole the rest of the Constitution, like a great white shark gobbling up baby seals in shallow water. If you want to know how we got to the point that Will “Lia” Thomas is NCAA women’s swim champion, you can look back to U.S. v. Virginia as a milestone on the road to this madness of “equality.”

Anyone who directly opposes the radical egalitarian agenda can expect to be smeared as a “racist,” etc., as I remarked earlier this week (see “The Problem With ‘Equality’”), and it is therefore scarcely surprising to hear Democrats attacking Marsha Blackburn (“Can we just go set Marsha Blackburn on fire?”). Neither should we be surprised that academic “gender experts” rushed to defend Jackson.

Cited as “experts” by USA Today were Rebecca Jordan-Young, “a scientist and gender studies scholar at Barnard College,” Sarah Richardson, “a Harvard scholar, historian and philosopher of biology,” Juliet Williams, “a professor of gender studies at UCLA who specializes in gender and the law,” and Kate Mason, “a gender studies professor at Wheaton College who studies social inequality.”

The prestige of their positions as professors is thus thrown into the balance on Jackson’s side, and we are supposed to be so awed by this display of academic prestige that our critical faculties simply cease to function and we mutely accept the assertion that only “experts” are qualified to tell the difference between male and female. This consensus of academic “experts,” however, is an artifact of the ideological conformity that prevails in our nation’s education system which, in turn, is enforced through federal Title IX authority. Any university employee who expressed skepticism toward contemporary “gender theory” would face severe career repercussions, and might even become unemployable in academia. An ambitious young scholar is not going to find many opportunities to publish research that doesn’t support the prevailing gender theory narrative, so the artificial consensus of “experts” is maintained by the simple mechanism of silencing (or excluding from membership in the professorial guild) any would-be dissenters.

This regime of conformity has been enforced with increasing rigidity for the past three decades. Back in the late 1980s and early ’90s, there were still university professors who were outspoken in opposition to the ideology of radical egalitarianism, but those dissenters have retired, and the growing conformity of the academic system has prevented them from being replaced by like-minded scholars. Meanwhile, the fanatical beliefs that once were shocking when expressed by elite university professors (e.g., Judith Butler at Cal-Berkeley) have trickled down and become pervasive among nearly all college-educated young people. This is why, for example, you have elementary school teachers promoting LGBTQ ideology and telling them to keep it secret from their parents.

It is almost certain that the Senate will vote to confirm Judge Jackson’s nomination to the Supreme Court. If Joe Manchin won’t vote against her, that more or less guarantees her seat on the court. But we have learned something valuable about the beliefs of those who would rule over us.




 

Category: Constitution, Senate, Supreme Court

Comments

Comments are closed.