The Other McCain

The phrase “deranged transgender teenager” may be somewhat redundant, and especially when you add “Canadian” to the phrase. Is there any such thing as a normal transgender teenager? And isn’t everybody in Canada more or less deranged? Nevertheless, perhaps we can all agree that 18-year-old Jesse Van Rootselaar was not even normal by Canadian standards. Notice my use of the past tense.

Roostselaar (who also has been called Jesse Strang, because that was his mother’s surname) began his Tuesday murder rampage in Tumbler Ridge, British Columbia, by killing his mother and stepbrother, then went to the nearby elementary school where he killed six people and wounded 27 others before dying of a self-inflicted gunshot. And what’s really important, of course, is not to “misgender” the mass murderer:

The Royal Canadian Mounted Police described the suspected shooter as a “gunperson” in a presser on Tuesday’s attack at Tumbler Ridge Secondary School in British Columbia.
CTV News aired the press conference, during which a reporter asked about a “gunperson” and RCMP North District Commander Chief Superintendent Ken Floyd responded by referencing “the deceased gunperson.” . . .
The BBC noted that an alert went out when the incident was reported that described the alleged shooter as a “female in a dress with brown hair.” During the presser, Floyd confirmed that the shooter was the same individual described in the alert.

Ace of Spades points out that in Canada, mental health professionals are forbidden by law from expressing doubt about a patient’s desire for gender treatment. If a schizophrenic declares himself to be “a woman trapped in a male body,” a psychiatrist must “affirm” the patient’s gender identity, without regard for how otherwise crazy the patient may be.

Weird how he looks like every glam-metal guitarist from the 1980s, but Jesse Van Rootselaar apparently didn’t spend his time in the garage with a Gibson Les Paul plugged into a Marshall stack, the way long-haired teenage boys used to do. Instead he was plotting mayhem:

The teenager who murdered his mother and step-brother in a mass shooting in a Canadian town had tried to kill his family before, a neighbour revealed. . . .
Melanie, who lives several houses down from the home Van Rootselaar shared with his mother and four younger siblings, said he had previously deliberately set fire to the house in 2023.
She told The Telegraph: “A couple of years back, he lit their house on fire because he was trying to kill his own family… it almost completely burnt down.
“He was just sitting out in the front when the fire trucks arrived.”
Melanie, who only provided her first name, described how “everyone on the street saw the blaze”, which she said destroyed most of the inside of the wooden plank home.
However, the incident was later “dismissed” by police, she added. Authorities have not confirmed the incident.
The troubled teenager had a history of mental health issues and was struggling to transition to a female. Police had made numerous call-outs to their home over the last several years, related to mental health and firearms incidents.
Van Rootselaar had mentioned the arson attack in a social media post seen by The Telegraph, saying he did it under the influence of psychedelic mushrooms.
The gunman, who discussed using illegal hallucinogens several times online, wrote on Oct 28 2023: “I went crazy and burnt my house down the second time trying shrooms, but still have the desire to try alternatives.”
He said he had a “complete break from reality and did a lot of irrational things, I felt like I was dreaming. Many consequences ensued.”

Why are we expected to have sympathy for this weirdo? Why did Canadian authorities and most of the news media feel the need to avoid “misgendering” a mass murderer? It has to do with how the liberal belief system is organized around sympathy for Victim Groups.

Every time I use the word “liberal” to describe the ideology of the Left — the motivating belief system of the Democratic Party — some pedant is sure to pop into the comments lecturing me about classical liberalism, as if he’s a college professor and I’m an ignorant sophomore who signed up for his Political Science class. The pedantic comments always annoy me, with the insulting implication that I don’t already know this distinction. And then you have another bunch of know-it-alls who want to make distinctions between liberal Democrats of the old-fashioned Walter Mondale variety and those left-wingers (e.g., AOC) who nowadays call themselves “progressives.” These fine points of nomenclature, however interesting they may be, are not relevant to the phenomena at issue.

Have you ever read Up From Liberalism by William F. Buckley Jr.? If not, you should order a copy immediately. It was published in 1959, the year I was born, but is still very valuable as a study of rhetorical methodology. Buckley was a fine writer who knew how to construct an argument. On page 4 of Up From Liberalism, Buckley remarks:

I detect a little discomfort, here and there, when the word “Liberal” is bandied about. Many people are not satisfied to be unique in the eyes of God, and spend considerable time in flight from any orthodoxy.

He solves the problem by reference to Eleanor Roosevelt:

Because Liberalism has no definitive manifesto, one cannot say, prepared to back up the statement with unimpeachable authority, that such-and-such a man or measure is “Liberal.” But one can say that Mrs. Roosevelt is a Liberal, and do so confident that none will contradict him.

For you kids out there, it is perhaps necessary to explain that, after FDR’s death, his widow continued to be politically active. Her syndicated column was published in newspapers until her death in 1962, for example. Buckley’s point was, if Eleanor Roosevelt was not a liberal, nobody was a liberal, and the category “liberal” could thus be given actual meaning. Buckley went on to name other individuals and institutions (e.g., Arthur Schlesinger, Jr., Edward R. Murrow, the Washington Post) as examples belonging to the category “liberal.” It is not necessary for me to repeat Buckley’s exercise with updated examples in order to demonstrate the continued existence of the category “liberal,” although I might cite Hillary Clinton, Mika Brzezinski, and others as such.

Having disposed of that chore — to preempt you damned pedants from lecturing me about liberalism, as though I were a schoolboy in need of your tutelage — now I will proceed to the main task of explaining the underlying psychological mechanism of liberal belief. Here I make no claim to real originality. Anyone can grab a copy of Thomas Sowell’s 1995 classic The Vision of the Anointed and see how he shows that the Anointed worldview involves dealing with “mascots” (groups for whom the Anointed pose as advocates, e.g., the homeless) and “targets” (the villains in this political melodrama, e.g., the U.S. military).

There is a syllogism hidden behind all liberal rhetoric:

• A. Group X are victims of wrongful oppression;
• B. Democrats want to help Group X;
  therefore
• C. VOTE DEMOCRAT!

It really is as simple as that. It is as true now, as much as it was the year I was born (when Buckley was examining the phenomenon of liberalism), that there is a symbiotic relationship between liberal beliefs and electoral propaganda of the Democratic Party, so much so that a chicken-and-the-egg question of causality arises: Are Democrats advocating a particular policy because a significant element of their constituency demands it, or have these constituents been persuaded to support this policy because prominent Democrats have told them it will help them win elections?

Leaving aside such questions, the point is that liberal beliefs are a matter of categorical sympathy — certain groups of people are classified as victims of social injustice, and are therefore deserving of sympathy merely because of their membership in the category. In the beginning (if I may plagiarize the Book of Genesis), liberals professed concern for the plight of “the poor,” who were said to be victimized by “the rich.” Sometimes this was expressed as a conflict between “workers” and “industry,” but however it was described, the rich/poor dynamic was liberalism’s original version of categorical sympathy.

After World War II, however, liberalism began to de-emphasize this economic warfare rationale for two reasons: First, postwar prosperity made the middle class a far more important constituency than “the poor,” and second, the Cold War cast a shadow of suspicion on anyone who spoke of “workers” as possibly being a Communist sympathizer.

Dwight Eisenhower’s presidency represented the pinnacle of 20th-century middle-class politics. Ike was neither an ideologue nor much of a partisan, and conservatives like Buckley grew dissatisfied with the moderate bipartisanship of Eisenhower-era Republicanism. Liberals, meanwhile, were grasping for something — anything — to replace the political leverage they’d lost with the decline of the rich-vs.-poor rationale that won the Democratic Party landslide majorities in the New Deal era.

You can never understand liberalism if you do not view it in the context of partisan politics. It is true that there were, and to some extent still are, conservative Democrats and liberal Republicans, but at least since 1964 — when Barry Goldwater presented the electorate with what Ronald Reagan called “A Time for Choosing” — political controversy in America has been largely a matter of liberal Democrats vs. conservative Republicans. It is foolish to pretend that ideology (a belief system or worldview) transcends partisanship (electoral politics).

Civil rights (blacks oppressed by whites) became the crusading issue for liberals in the 1960s, with feminism (women oppressed by men) subsequently ascending to an equal prominence in the pyramid of priorities defining categorical sympathy. Adding these two vectors to the liberal Democratic worldview, you come up with this basic formula:

VICTIMS vs. OPPRESSORS
Poor vs. Rich
Black vs. White
Women vs. Men

The ultimate victim was a poor black woman and the ultimate oppressor was a rich white man. It is nevertheless remarkable that a lot of the most prominent Democrats promoting this worldview were rich white men like Ted Kennedy and Al Gore. In the 1980s, the AIDS crisis boosted gay rights as a priority for Democrats, so that a new categorical sympathy vector of gay-vs.-straight was added to the pyramid of oppression, and more recently, transgenderism has become a another priority.

It is important to emphasize that the political priorities of liberalism make the requirement of sympathy categorical — all black people are entitled to sympathy, simply by their group membership, without regard to their individual behavior or other factors. No matter how rich a black person may be (e.g., NBA stars), they must be regarded as sympathetic victims of racial oppression, and never mind how this may conflict with the original rich/poor dynamic of liberal belief. For similar reasons, although white males are automatically regarded as villains in the liberal worldview, one may not criticize Pete Buttigieg, who is gay and therefore entitled to categorical sympathy by his membership in a victim group.

The term “intersectionality” was coined by black feminist Kimberlé Crenshaw in 1989 to reconcile such apparent contradictions in liberal beliefs, arguing for a sort of “Popular Front” strategy against the dual menace of racism (white supremacy) and sexism (patriarchy). Then in 1990 Judith Butler published Gender Trouble, the founding document of postmodern “queer theory,” which had the effect of adding transgenderism to the intersectionality formula:

VICTIMS vs. OPPRESSORS
Poor vs. Rich
Black vs. White
Women vs. Men
Gay vs. Straight
Trans vs. Cis

Ru Paul is now the ultimate victim, except for the fact that Ru Paul is very rich, so that a poor black cross-dresser must be considered as sitting at the apex of those entitled to categorical sympathy. Like all other dynamics in the liberal worldview, their advocacy on behalf of transgenderism comes with a set of rules — a protocol of victimhood etiquette, as it were — including for example taboos against “misgendering” or “dead-naming” any member of the category.

Here, at last, we arrive at the explanation for why officials and media were so careful in discussing the “gunperson” Jesse Van Rootselaar. Even though Canada does not have the same Democrat/Repubican partisan divide that shapes liberalism in the United States, one finds that throughout the English-speaking world — including the U.K., Australia, etc. — a similar symbiotic relationship between ideology and partisanship prevails, liberalism having become one of America’s major exports.

Categorical sympathy means that those considered to be members of victim groups are to be regarded as saintly heroes, no matter what they do, and that is why everybody is required to tiptoe lightly around the issue of Jesse Van Rootselaar’s transgenderism, lest we somehow stigmatize the mass murderer of innocent schoolchildren.

What terrifies me is if ISIS were to detonate a nuclear device and kill 50 million Americans. Imagine the backlash against peaceful Muslims?

— Norm Macdonald (@normmacdonald) December 16, 2016