Join #TheResistance if you like to hit women

“She would have liked to tell them that behind Communism, Fascism, behind all occupations and invasions lurks a more basic, pervasive evil and that the image of that evil was a parade of people marching by with raised fists and shouting identical syllables in unison.”

-Milan Kundera, The Unbearable Lightness of Being

For about 10 years or more I have shied away from identifying with any one ideology, even if at times I have taken stock of my stances on various issues and accepted that by default I was either somewhat left or vaguely center.

Instead, my mantra has been "ideals, not ideology" - this doesn't mean ignoring the fact that the sum total of your stances on individual issues happens to line up with a pre-defined ideology (i.e. capitalism, Marxism, libertarianism, etc.), but simply that you let your ideals determine your ideology, rather than filtering them through some ideological algorithm, or knowingly altering your stances away from what is in your heart in order to conform to someone else's program.

The benefit of this approach is that it means allowing yourself permission to change your stances over time when presented with new information that calls for re-evaluation. The new information allows you to be identified (by default) under a different political stripe without deviating from the ideals you have always upheld.

The danger of ideology, as I see it, is in allowing yourself to be seized by groupthink, and thus only pay lip service to the ideals you claim to uphold, while also viewing those whose views differ from yours as being outside of the tribe, and thus not worthy of human dignity. (One's ideals may change or mature over time, but that's fodder for another post.)

Concrete examples of this abound in these days of gender-based hysteria, particularly against the unfolding backdrop of the drama surrounding Brett Kavanaugh's U.S. Supreme Court confirmation hearings. One of the professed concerns of feminism is the spectre of male-on-female violence, whether the violence is verbal, physical or sexual. This ideal, that a man should never engage in violence against a woman (legitimate cases of male self-defence notwithstanding), is one that should apply equally to all women, and not just those who happen to subscribe to the complete tenets of contemporary feminism. All women are entitled to equal protection from male violence in the feminist world view, right?

Not exactly.

If you follow the news in Canada (or manage to transcend whatever filter bubble has been placed around you), you may recall an incident where Sheila Gunn Reid was assaulted by male "feminist" Dion Bews at a women's march in Edmonton, Alberta in January 2017 while reporting on the event for The Rebel, a conservative media outlet.

As you'll see from the video above, the attack was unprovoked, and rather than ask if Gunn Reid was okay (or even scold or rebuke Bews for hitting a woman), the crowd merely closed ranks to protect the male attacker and told the victim to "calm down". At the 0:55 mark, we even see an older woman in a pink "pussy" hat telling the victim that she is "part of the problem, not the solution". Maybe I'm wrong, but if Bews had done the same to a female reporter from The Huffington Post while covering a conservative/non-feminist event, the incident would have scandalized all of society, and a renewed national conversation about violence against women would have been the order of the day.

As victims go, however, Sheila Gunn Reid simply wasn't useful to the cause, and therefore there was some mainstream media coverage, but barely a twitch on the nation's political Richter Scale.

In other words, the safety and human dignity of the victim hinged on her politics and that of her employer.

(Eventually, she was awarded $3,500 in a civil suit against Bews.)

As a more recent example of groupthink gone wrong (and I can't imagine it going anywhere else but wrong), pro-life demonstrator Marie-Claire Bissonnette was the victim of a roundhouse kick by now-unemployed hairdresser Jordon Hunt at a pro-life event on September 30, 2018. (Hunt describes himself on his Twitter profile as a "pro- choice warrior and a part of the #resistance", assuming that said Twitter account is authentically his.)

Although the event occurred on September 30, and although police were reportedly on the scene shortly after the attacker courageously ran away, the Canadian mainstream media have only started begrudgingly covering the incident as recently as a few hours ago, at least as far as I can tell by a Google news search for "Jordan Hunt". (If this is wrong, then please correct the record with links to earlier news coverage in the comments section.) Again, if the victim had been a feminist or otherwise ostensibly #prochoice, a nationwide hue and cry would have have been immediate.

By Hunt's own sick logic, his actions put him in the same league as Martin Luther King Jr., Mahatma Gandhi, and Susan B. Anthony, and that by committing an unprovoked physical assault he was only "defending women's rights". Never mind that none of the heroes he cites ever engaged in nor advocated unprovoked physical assault. Not only were his actions not passive resistance, they weren't even self-defence.

And so in Dion Bews and Jordan Hunt we are presented with but two examples of where any ideology can lead if left unchecked - in this case it happens to be what passes for feminism, or at least feminism when adopted as an uncompromising ideology. There are endless examples throughout history of right wing ideologues gone rogue, and appropriately enough they have been acknowledged and covered extensively in the mainstream media, so there is little for me to add here. But with the current focus on female victimhood and the #MeToo zeitgeist these days, I feel it is important to point out that all is not what it seems when it comes to movements purporting to fight on behalf of women in general.

It would take a boatload of wilful ignorance for anyone to pretend that it is necessary to punch or kick a woman in order defend women's rights - to believe otherwise means following a groupthink herd as it marches along its own Möbius strip parade route of moral self-contradiction.

As for me, one of my central ideals is that all human beings are entitled to protection from unprovoked violence of any kind, regardless of their professed beliefs or political affiliations. This ideal is a constant, irrespective of whatever ideological labels others would pin on me, or what it makes me in the eyes of those carrying signs.