Butlerian Jihad: from culture war to nuclear Armageddon
According to the Equity Action Plan released by the State Department in 2022, “Addressing systemic racism” is a “core tenet” of President Biden’s foreign policy. The report stated that racial equity would be “embedded” into the State Department’s foreign affairs work “as a strategic National Security imperative”. Furthermore, racial equity would “permeate all strategic planning, program and project design, consular activities, and procurement practices to steer U.S. foreign policy development and execution.”
What’s the outcome of this radical policy realignment? According to usaspending.gov, an official website of the US government, the State Department has funded “anti-racist pedagogical tools for use in Italian universities and high schools” and drag shows in Ecuador. In both cases, the stated rationale used exactly the same language: “To support the achievement of U.S. foreign policy goals and objectives, advance national interests, and enhance national security by informing and influencing foreign publics.” Exporting critical race theory and gender ideology around the entire globe is now a key foreign policy goal of the U.S.A, and it’s been wildly successful. There have been Black Lives Matter marches in most European countries — even those with miniscule African populations, an unarmed police force and little history of police brutality.
Kori Schake, Director of Foreign and Defense Policy at the American Enterprise Institute, writes “Recent protests in Amsterdam, London, and elsewhere show that what happens in America matters for the advance of human rights and civil liberties elsewhere… Our struggles are the world’s struggles, because the values that form our republic are universal values.” Wokeness is not a campus malady confined to academia and the far-left but the guiding principle of the entire policy-making elite. Kori Schake is not a Democrat. She was a foreign-policy adviser to the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign and served as director for Defense Strategy on the National Security Council under George W. Bush. In an article titled This Upheaval Is How America Gets Better, Schake celebrated the violent riots of 2020: “We are now seeing America becoming better than it was. This churning, disputatious, and even sometimes violent dynamic is what social change in America looks like”. She praised the military for “modeling how to amplify black voices” while linking to a video of Dave Goldfein, Chief of Staff of the U.S. Air Force, talking about turning the force into a “safe space”.
Wokeness is the core ideology of American Empire and a prime justification for American foreign policy. Take a look at the Twitter account of Karen Decker, chargé d'affaires in Afghanistan, for some particularly cringeworthy examples:
“Are Afghans familiar with #BlackGirlMagic and the movement it inspired? Do Afghan girls need a similar movement? What about Afghan Women? Teach me, ready to learn. @Beyonce @lizzo @ReginaKing”.
“Abe Lincoln born today in 1809. He did some stuff. It's also NAACP Day - home of grassroots activism, inclusive communities and making sure Black voices are heard. What does that look like for Afghans struggling to be heard? #BlackHistoryMonth”.
These are the emissaries that America sends to all corners of the world. After trillions of dollars spent and much blood spilled, this was the endpoint of 20 years of war.
Redefining democracy
What happens in Ukraine has no bearing on the lives of Americans. The rationale for NATO’s participation rarely articulates itself with the language of national interests or security. Instead it’s sold as a war over “our values”. In the words of Joe Biden, “We are engaged anew in a great battle for freedom. A battle between democracy and autocracy. Between liberty and repression.” Rather than a regional territorial dispute, its a cosmic struggle for democracy. But in this grand battle, democracy might not mean what you think.
Ukraine is a deeply corrupt country that has banned rival political parties, shut down television news stations, and passed a law to drastically limit press freedom. The very meaning of democracy has been silently reconceptualized. If once it meant voting and a free press, now it means something altogether different. Italians voting, democratically, for Giorgia Meloni, was viewed by President Biden as a threat to democracy:
“Democracy is at stake… You just saw what’s happened in Italy in that election. You’re seeing what’s happening around the world. And the reason I bother to say that is we can’t be sanguine about what’s happening here either”.
Biden expressed a similar view about Poland and Hungary while giving an assessment of then-President Trumps foreign policy: “You see what's happened in everything from Belarus to Poland to Hungary, and the rise of totalitarian regimes in the world, and as well, this president embraces all the thugs in the world." This way of speaking of Poland and Hungary is far from unusual. Gladden Pappin, writing in Newsweek, summed up the media response:
“No firestorm broke out in English-speaking media—and for one very simple reason. To the media class, the categorization of Poland and Hungary as "totalitarian regimes" was not a gaffe at all. It did not lead to fact-checking or hasty denials. (Notably, no EU diplomats defended their member states, either.) Rather, it points to new levels of laziness in American foreign policy thinking, where vague impressions of "totalitarian" (read: nationalist, culturally traditional) rule are enough to cast aside countries that have been allied with the United States for generations. For these viceroys of global liberalism, the new hostility is fully intentional… The real problem with Poland and Hungary, though, is not that Andrzej Duda and Viktor Orbán have charted supposedly authoritarian political courses... Rather, Poland and Hungary are successful countries that insist on maintaining their national identities and traditional values—and doing so with the use of democratically earned political power.”
Democrat Congressman Jamie Raskin, an enthusiastic supporter of the proxy war in Ukraine, summed up what democracy means now, and what’s really being fought for in Ukraine. Accusing Moscow of being “a world center of antifeminist, antigay, anti-trans hatred, as well as the homeland of replacement theory for export” he concluded “In supporting Ukraine, we are opposing these fascist views.” Framed in this way, it is unsurprising that the proxy war finds its most rabid adherents among Democrats.
Writing in The Atlantic, Dominic Tierney, a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute, made a similar point:
“Russian President Vladimir Putin is the antithesis of everything the left stands for. Not only did he launch an unprovoked attack on a sovereign democratic nation, but he has also disparaged LGBTQ rights, multiculturalism, and immigration, and claimed that “the liberal idea” has “outlived its purpose.” … LGBTQ protesters in Berlin also demanded that Germany step up arms shipments to Ukraine, so that a Pride parade can, one day, be held in the Russian-occupied city of Mariupol”.
“Nation building” means teaching Afghans about the artistic merit of latrines, “democracy” means trans rights, and “a rules based international order” means America doing whatever it wants.
A professor of strategic studies at the University of St. Andrews expressed the typical delusions of Western liberals:
“Just as the ability to absorb information is better than lunkhead hypermasculinity in a modern army, diversity and societal integration also bring major advantages. As Ukraine has become more diverse and tolerant, its army has benefited. In contrast with Putin’s homophobic military, the Ukrainian armed forces include LGBTQ soldiers who have incorporated “unicorn” insignia into their uniforms. The valor of these soldiers, and the rallying of the Ukrainian people around a vision of a tolerant and diverse society, have led to an overall increase in Ukrainian support for gay rights”
Judith Butler, the primary originator of radical gender ideology, donated to Kamala Harris’s failed presidential campaign. Harris is now a primary saleswoman for arming Ukraine and escalating the proxy war.
America has consistently painted the conflict in Ukraine as a literal culture war and Putin is happy to reciprocate. In an Address to the Federal Assembly in Moscow, Putin promised to “protect our children from degradation and degeneration” emanating from the West:
“Look what they are doing to their own people. It is all about the destruction of the family, of cultural and national identity, perversion and abuse of children, including paedophilia, all of which are declared normal in their life. They are forcing the priests to bless same-sex marriages… Reportedly, the Anglican Church is planning to explore the idea of a gender-neutral god. What is there to say? …Millions of people in the West realise that they are being led to a spiritual disaster. Frankly, the elite appear to have gone crazy.”
While in office, British Prime Minister David Cameron coined the term “muscular liberalism” to describe his approach to multiculturalism. In his foreign policy, he was responsible for something more extreme — militarised liberalism and weaponised human rights. Nonsense wobbling upon stilts while carrying a nuclear arsenal.
Through invoking human rights Western governments have claimed limitless jurisdiction. “Human rights must always be defended, regardless of where they're violated in the world,” says President Biden. “The fight for equality cannot stop at our borders” says Texas representative Colin Allred. “In 2006, when they wanted to go from Baghdad to Tehran”, writes Glenn Greenwald, “they started flooding the media with stories of abuse of Iranian LGBTs.” Since the Second World War it’s been a common misconception that it is nationalism that drives war. In this century it will be the liberal conceit of human rights that will usher in a global maelstrom. The convergence of social justice activism and hawkish foreign policy has led the world closer to a nuclear exchange than its been since 1962. Just as French liberalism led to the terror, 1968 led us here.
Patriots and conservatives, for so long stalwart supporters of the armed forces, are left in a strange predicament. At the Miami National Conservatism Conference in 2022, Donald Trump’s former speechwriter Darren Beattie spoke of this relationship as “battered wife syndrome”:
“It is safe to say that the globalist American empire is the primary incubator and disseminator of woke ideology... There's a profound disconnect between the well-being and flourishing of the American people and the geopolitical dominance of the globalist American empire. As Trump himself said, their victories are not our victories. And so at the very least I would encourage would-be American nationalists not to fall into the battered spouse trap of supporting the very institutions that have been repurposed for the destruction of American nationalists.”
When the Soviet Union crumbled, conservatives felt triumphant. America, then viewed by many as a bastion of free thought and Christianity, had prevailed against a radical egalitarian dogma. Yet now it is America that is the primary exporter and armed purveyor of a deranged ideology. The “evil empire” was defeated only to be replaced by an American empire pursuing a policy of Butlerian Jihad. Wokeness, like communism and fascism, won't just be fought in the “marketplace of ideas” but on physical battlegrounds. As one anonymous Twitter account put it, “No one in uniform is protecting anything other than the interests of an occupational regime that acts against all the concepts of patriotism”.