Chris Rufo deserves a Silver Star for battling this mendacious nonsense and for willfully subjecting himself to the ugliest most depressing duty of all—wading through the toxic obscurant anti-thought called "Queer Theory".
I guess if Marxism spawned Marxist-Leninism then Marxist-Maoism the next iteration and American derivation was/is Marxist-Narcissism, where the oppressive alienation of Western Civ moves from material exploitation to its endstage, which is almost literal navel-gazing, where the radical professor becomes a nihilistic ourobouros and disappears up his own backside.
In this version of Marxism, which has to ignore or wave away the fact of our amazing prosperity and freedom, oppression now becomes about the reversal of stigma, or more or less, until every last personal perversion becomes as lauded as a patriarch of multiple generations once was, we still live in some sort of dictatorship. Or, as Foucault may have put it: until I can sodomize children not just with social acceptance but with full applause, this free society you claim to have is really a prison.
There are so many rich ironies here but I just want to point out 2:
1) All these lauded "theorists" with their multiple degrees and their mastery of guild gibberish moved their eternal Revolution into the library so they could still climb the career ladder while play-acting as radical, seem to have read book after book and yet never cracked one text about Biology or Evolution. They build their sky castles of Gender and performativity etc and never once seem to mention that humans are sexed animals and that every aspect of human sexuality has been sculpted through millions of years of natural selection, sexual selection, mating and reproductive strategies etc. Has any other supposed area of scholarship ever been founded on a willful rejection (if not demonization) of reality?
2) I just wanted to end with: all this supposed scholarship was almost entirely funded by American tax dollars, whether state or federal, as 2 generations of academic trustees and administrators turned a blind eye to the rot that is Leftist academia. Has any other country in history ever funded its own demonization and dismantling, ever subsidized the barbarians who hate it and want to destroy it?
The long march through the institutions has been a smashing success and has moved from colleges into high schools and now into homes and kindergartens. Hopefully the excellent Chris Rufo represents the start of a counter-revolution.

This is the best comment on any topic anywhere that I've read all year.

Hey thanks!
I went to college to study Literature but was met instead with something called "Theory", which is basically when the world's most miserable people try to convince you that nothing exists but Power and Oppression and the only reason you love say Shakepeare or Tolstoy is because of "hegemonic structures" or some such nonsense.
I hated them then and I hate them now.

Do you know what's funny? If all there is is Power and Oppression, then the only question is who get's the power to oppress..... So these people have no real moral or ethical reason to do what they do other than to have the Power to oppress their enemies.

Who whom - said some famous guy whose name escapes me.

Yes, whom. Because who could have thought it could have been any other than whomever.

"If all there is is Power and Oppression, then the only question is who get's the power to oppress."

...and if there is nothing to say who is "right" to hold that power, it probably isn't going to turn out well for relatively small groups that are conspicuously outside of the mainstream, like drag queen storytellers. By their own philosophy, they are pursuing a dead end.

That's a beautiful description of Trumpism.

Thanks for demonstrating your lack of perception and understanding.

Right back at ya, good buddy.

This stuff is over your head stick to such intellectual bastions like Daily Kos

Just stay in your bunker and we'll all be fine.

Prove it

Prove what?

I was at an Ivy League school in the 1980s, and when I first encountered the notion of literary works as "texts" that could be willfully misinterpreted according to some weird theoretical scheme, I thought it was a bunch of BS.

More than thirty years later, nothing has changed my mind, on the contrary, a vast mountain of evidence has accumulated that it was nothing more than BS from the very beginning. Toxic, divisive, anti-intellectual, sinister BS.

As far as literature goes, it may well be that in order to restore the culture, a complete razing and rebuilding of university humanities departments will be required, to totally eliminate theory-focused gibberish in favor of programs that actually train students to write well, more like creative writing courses, and also literary appreciation courses, shorn of all the absurd ethnic and gender tokenism, which in practice mostly promotes box checked mediocrities at the expense of real greatness.

Rigorous, fundamental writing skills. Nothing else, at least in the beginning. That will weed out the riff raff.

Wonderful comments by you with a an insightful understanding of the pervasive expression of the seemingly nonsensical in our midst. Please continue to write more and perhaps consider writing a book yourself on this very subject.
The Left deftly found the way to fund their diminishment of our traditional values by use of our very own tax dollars as you pointed out so well This is an important point that must be emphasized increasingly to rally the push back against their deception. Thank you for your own contribution in doing this very thing. Kind regards to you.

Agreed

Thanks!

Your insightful remarks have reminded me of the wonderful book
"Intellectuals: From Marx and Tolstoy to Sartre and Chomsky" by Paul Johnson, where he conveys the phoniness and hypocrisy of the intellectual Left, by examining what they each professed in contrast to what they actually did and how they conducted their personal lives. He really made the clear case as to why we should absolutely distrust the so called Intellectuals in our society, and particularly those of the Left.

is a great book, i love Paul Johnson

I'm reminded of Daniel Patrick Moynihan's phrase, "defining deviancy down", or Ratzinger's "dictatorship of relativism". In moments of candor some of these clowns will acknowledge that what they do is perverted, but they can always say, "look, there's worse". But usually the candor is nowhere to be seen, and the only people to be considered perverts are pedophiles. I regularly thank my dear departed dad for insisting that I go through a Great Books program at a school with an Aristotelian-Thomistic, holistic view of the human being. In that context, the intellectual deficiencies of Marxism leap off the page, and the anti-intellectual aspects of "Critical Theory" elicit the derision they deserve.

Only one correction: he should get a Medal of Honor.

Only awarded for military service.

quite: Has any other country in history ever funded its own demonization and
dismantling, ever subsidized the barbarians who hate it and want to
destroy it?

Yes, Rome. Way back in the days of the Caesars. Caligula and Nero were light years ahead of these current perverts. Wne we know where that whole Empire ended up. UNDER the distbin of history.

God used the infinitely corrupt Rome to destroy the almost as corrupt Jewish system when He caused General Titus to utterly destroy not just the corrupted Temple in Jerusalem, utterly, not one stone left upon another preciesly as Jesus had predicted some forty years earlier, but the entire city of Jerusalem and all it encompassed religiously, politically, economically, culturally, militariy, The whole of what once was Jerusalem and all its surrroungind territory became a desert wasteland for decades, if not centuries. And God used Rome as His tool to accomplish that.. then took apart the Roman system a little later on. BOTH are long gone And good riddance.

You aiming for a fiction prize? The Romans are long gone, but the Jews are still around, and if you haven't checked out Jerusalem lately, it's a pretty thriving place. BTW, it was never a desert - the desert starts just east of Jerusalem.

Amen!

You can support his work by going to his website and signing up to be a "patron". He's seeking financial support. After all, the mortgage needs to be paid.

I have been a longtime supporter of Chris and his work. Thanks!

What an ironic comment from someone using Mapplethorpe's self-portrait, one that he made months before his AIDS-related death in 1989 and following a careers worth of self-portraits as a masochist, sexual being, and gender performer, as their profile picture.

Good catch!
All i can claim is that I love art, the imagination and free expression, and I loathe fundamentalisms of every stripe, including the conquest of "theory" over culture and especially Gender and other Leftist theories, which sell slavery disguised as liberation and rigid ideological dogma instead of free play of the mind.
Mapplethorpe means joy, love and freedom to me; Judith Butler their opposites.
Unless I'm just a hypocrite!

I guess. Jordan Peterson did most of the talking - would hardly let Chris get a word in edgewise.

Parents are not "caught in the middle". They are either repulsed by the whole idea or accepting of it and participating. I cannot imagine an actual parent who is so confused as to not see what is going on. These fringe actors only thrive because people support their efforts. It is almost certain that there are more media members and activists in attendance than actual uncommitted parents/kids. The problem is not so much the trannies, but the activist parents who want more of this stuff and breathe life into it.

They are either repulsed by the whole idea or accepting of it and participating.

You can't forget the left's use of intimidation. Parent's "caught in the middle" certainly know what's going on but are also fearful about job, social standing, kids in school and so on.

There are many times when there is a choice...to do what is right, OR do what is expedient. However, for this one, it is a no brainer....

You can't forget the left's use of intimidation.

^^^THIS^^^

Call-out and cancel culture have increased exponentially in the last 8 - 10 years.

The regressive left has silenced countless critics of the CRT/Trans/etc. ideologies being forced upon our children these days.

It's hard to fight back against these movements when you (and possibly your immediate family) have been harassed endlessly online, attacked by Twitter mobs, fired from your job, demonized by the media and basically kicked out of society altogether.

Once the "March through the institutions" (entertainment/media/schools/government) was completed, there was/is little you can do against the entrenched regressives...

You know we just watched “the help” many didn’t stand up because they wanted to fit in, we are here again and instead of only black families being at risk is every child of every race who is in danger, will you stand up and protest? The protagonists of the story risked jail time to write a book.

I think this idea can be expanded to the entire spectrum of woke ideology. The reason this stuff is so pervasive is that around fifty percent of American voters support it - either directly or indirectly. Stop blaming the politicians. The real blame lies with anyone who votes left. All of them. They want this.

The great majority of Germans were not members of the Nazi Party - they just kept their heads down and went along with it.

Evil triumphs when good men do nothing....

>around fifty percent of American voters support it

Actually the true number is considerably lower. When Americans are polled about things like Drag Queen Story Hour the support is never more than 25% at most.

The regime is very good at inflating the perception of its support level far beyond reality. Several factors contribute to this:

1) biased polling
2) the total lack of media coverage of the left's mistakes and excesses, which misleads many decent people to continue to support them even in the face of remarkably deranged behavior
3) blatant cheating in elections using dozens of different methods
4) the dilution of the US population by illegal immigrants who are then allowed to vote (why convince Americans to change their minds if you can just replace them with people who already agree with you?)
5) the nearly complete isolation of the media-political class in thought bubbles such that they genuinely believe the public supports woke policies and initiatives
6) amplification of extremism by social media algorithms

I could go on, but the point is that the true level of support is far lower than the regime wants people to believe.

Oh I know plenty of left-of-center types who would claim NOT to support any of this nonsense. And I believe them to a point. But they continue to vote left anyway. They are not stupid, they know what they are doing. We must give them the credit they are due.

Well, I identify myself as a conservative, but I do not support any of the excesses coming from my "side"; yet I am not going to vote Democratic.

“ the total lack of media coverage of the left's mistakes and excesses, which misleads many decent people to continue to support them even in the face of remarkably deranged behavior”

NPR’s business model.

Reuben, it is simply not possible that "around fifty percent of American voters support" this garbage and still this greatest nation in the history of man, functions as efficiently, or inefficiently, if you prefer as it has after two centuries. The people to whom you refer as supporting "it...indirectly" are pathetic, uninformed, inhabitants, and either do not vote or vote in unpredictable ways, but they certainly do not constitute "fifty percent of
American voters.": I would shoot myself or move to Antartica if I thought we were in that condition;

No, a bit over 50% of the population are UIs....according to the last election. No other way to explain the election of a moderate dementia patient to the Highest position of power in the United States.

Excessive mail in ballots over a months time allowed the big cheat. That's more of a reality.

While this turned the election in favor of our pal Brandon, the fact remains that the popular vote (although it has nothing to do with electing a POTUS) swung more towards electing a dementia patient. The reality is that there were more UIs, than sane Americans in 2020.....I'm waiting to see if PAIN has brought them to their senses....but I'm not gonna hold my breath.

Pain has not.

From the luxury of hindsight (I'm responding in April of 2023), this is exactly what the mid-terms have shown us: that despite having every reason to clean house--this has been the common response to economic (inflation, etc.) and social problems (crime, public homelessness)--the voters generally chose pain.

Maybe queer theory has already normalized pain, huh?