John Klar: America’s Taliban — the unfolding religion of the far left

The ideological absurdity which has descended on Vermont through so-called “progressive” initiatives is only properly understood as a cult. Whether it is “race theory,” “climate emergency,” “ending all violence against women” or even “getting vaccinated with a dubious injection,” each and every political issue is not assessed or advanced based on facts and logic, but on superstition and a misplaced “faith.” This diseased thinking has thoroughly saturated Vermont’s public schools — and it is time to extract children from the cult if we can’t protect them from its institutional advance (a clear violation of the church-state separation).

I hope this sounds extreme; what they are doing is extreme. A new book by scholar John McWhorter unveils the truth about this absurd new far-left theology:

Something must be understood. I do not mean that these people’s ideology is “like” a religion. I seek no rhetorical snap in the comparison. I mean that it is actually a religion. An anthropologist would see no difference in type between Pentecostalism and this new form of antiracism.  … With the rise of Third Wave Antiracism we are witnessing the birth of a new religion, just as Romans witnessed the birth of Christianity. The way to get past seeing the Elect as merely “crazy” is to understand that they are a religion. To see them this way is not to wallow in derision, but to genuinely grasp what they are. (pp. 23-24)

Analyzing the racist tropes of the left, McWhorter is concerned specifically with the “anti-racist” sleep of supposedly “woke” acolytes of the new religion of hate. He identifies specific attributes of this racist faith, that extend equally to other areas of the far left cult including climate change, women’s rights, even COVID — everything is “an existential emergency” for which rights and free speech are a hurdle to solve (salvation). McWhorter identifies these shared traits as “superstition over facts,” (such as belief that all discrimination is caused by racism); a new clergy (“On race, the Elect cherish certain top-rate thinkers” p. 30); original sin (“white privilege”); evangelical (“Key to being Elect is a sense that there is always a flock of unconverted heathen. Many of the heathen are, for example, the whites “out there,”); apocalyptic (“the fantasy of an America ever just a half inch past Plessy v Ferguson creates an urgency that justifies extreme action. Catastrophizing the current moment is a hallmark of ideology”); crusading (ban the heretic: “The Elect are members of a religion, of a kind within which the dissenter is not just someone in disagreement but is a kind of environmental pollution.”); supplants old religions (“the agenda of a body of people united around a new religion they seek to found a new America upon.”)

McWhorter argues not just that this is a religion, but that it can only be comprehended, and opposed, with that understanding. This is why facts don’t matter; why civility is vanishing; why physically assaulting people in the name of “justice” is a self-righteous trend. The truth of what he writes is easily extended to the entire panoply of modern far-left “causes.” There is no room to “agree to disagree” about gay marriage or transgender pronouns — the new secular morality demands that fantasy genders and sexual perversions be acknowledged as core to identity, or one is denounced as homophobic. Similarly, to support the Second Amendment’s protections translates to being labeled a murderer; to stand for the rights of a child butchered in the womb in the third trimester is to hate women; to oppose pornography is to stifle freedom; to observe that solar panels are regressive and accelerate the generation of CO2, to be labeled a hater of the Earth.

Rhyszard Legutko, the Polish Professor who was denied the opportunity to speak at Middlebury College warned in his book “The Demon in Democracy” that all of these “causes” were of one piece (as is seen in the political arm of the new hate religion, Black Lives Matter), that the ideology choked the oxygen out of traditional “liberal” worldviews built on individual rights, and that it has already largely swept Europe, and the world looks to America to withstand its fiery winds. He is proved correct daily.

Consider this 2012 description of the developing climate change movement (presaging AOC’s laughable “Green New Deal”):

The great salvific religions proceed, first by presenting sinners with a description of their case that seems to allow no remedy but only despair, and then by offering hope in the form of a total doctrine, the path of purity and submission, which is the unique way to redemption. … Once the salvationist illusion has triumphed politics turns to witch hunting, faction forming and pursuit of “the enemy within.”

Global warming is … a transcendental issue, concerning the state of mankind as such. Like original sin, it weighs on us all, and like original sin it might seem to require a salvationist solution. … Climate change hovers above the sinner in his sports utility vehicle like a vision of judgement, and it is a vision that comprehends the whole world. Hence climate change has been not merely believed in but seized upon, as a convenient way of turning a political problem into a moral and spiritual challenge, a wake-up call to mankind as a whole, which can be addressed only by action so radical as to amount to a change of life. … Global warming sounds in their thinking as a call of angelic trumpets from the sky. (Roger Scruton, “How to Think Seriously About the Planet: The Case for an Environmental Conservatism,” pp. 86-88).

This fact-hating religion even feigns to be scientific — masks work, the unvaccinated spread infection, one has no “right” to infect others — common sense and rights being inverted using bunk science. It is the exact reverse of science, and of logic. Those who think facts matter have not drunk from this new cup of ideological salvation.

This far-left insanity is the New American Taliban, melding with government to enforce its insane edicts, untested, on our nation and children. It must be opposed as the Jonestown cyanide cult that it is. Teachers, administrators, and bureaucrats who are converts to this new faith must be held accountable for their lies that “it is not being implemented.” The truth is very evident, and that truth is the only thing that will set us — and our children — free.

John Klar is an attorney and farmer residing in Brookfield, and the former pastor of the First Congregational Church of Westfield. © Copyright True North Reports 2021. All rights reserved.

Image courtesy of Wikimedia Commons user: The All-Nite Images

10 thoughts on “John Klar: America’s Taliban — the unfolding religion of the far left

  1. It always boils down to Christ’s Kingdom versus Satan’s Kingdom. They don’t know they are participants in Satan’s.

  2. Don’t forget to factor incrementalism into this. The Taliban, Hitler.. they didn’t just come out of the starting gate like that. It got worse over time slowly.. **Just like the Democrats have done**
    How many JFK Democrats are around anymore?

  3. Lord, keep me in the company of those searching for truth and protect me from those who feel they have found it.

  4. Those who burned and looted all summer for their religion and took over six city blocks in Seattle with guns were allowed to do this and given a slap on the wrist.

    Some who were present at the Capitol on January 6 and were let in by police (while paradoxically, police were clashing with protesters where the news cameras were rolling) were arrested by Swat teams in early-morning operations, placed in solitary confinement for a time, and many are still in jail for what are basically trespassing and vandalism violations. https://capitolpunishmentthemovie.com/

    The government is sending a clear message that you can smash things all you want if you adhere to doctrines of hatred and attack the police, but if you’re on the side of liberty and tolerance and protest that the liberty of the people has been violated, then you’ll feel the full force of government’s jackboot.

    This is what aspiring totalitarian regimes do.

    Aspiring totalitarian regimes also deliberately create fear in the population, the better to control them.

  5. As usual, John’s right, here, witness the Front Page of today’s (dying) BFP re: “Violence Against Women” where an accused wife-killer is beaten upon some 3 yr.’s after a dating “incident” by a woman who availed herself of this tattoo “artist”, saying his texts were “creepy” but nonetheless being in a “really dark place..liked the attention” and on their 3rd “date” had sushi & smoked weed then “blacked out”, woke up being raped claiming the food, water, or weed had been “spiked”..Maybe it’s just me but I’d advise ALL my female friends to NOT smoke weed w/a stranger at HIS home nor anywhere else? Of ALL the other new “secular religions” John skewers & rightly so, the biggest takeaway is REMOVING one’s children from the grip of the state as there is NOTHING more important, and shoving “Pre-K” at small kids, when damn near every psychologist concurs that “unsupervised play time” & being outdoors w/peers is NEEDED over screen-time indoors, seems cruel & unusual especially when their next 12 years will be spent chained to a desk being indoctrinated, not educated. Just compare per-pupil costs vs. test scores, if ANY of us FAILED over 50% of the time at OUR jobs we’d be FIRED so why allow the thug unions their POWER? Everything else pales by comparison to proper, necessary, & TRUTHFUL education & “critical thinking”, learning how to LEARN. Also, in a sane state, John would be running for Pee Wee Welch’s Congressional seat, but then he’d have to “live” down in DC, a fate worse than death for an outdoors person & native Vermonter, but even a term or two could publicize sanity & maybe even help our little state, who knows? Now that Leahy won’t shower Vt. w/endless “grant money” anymore many “ultra-liberal” carpetbaggers will return south to NYC & environs or be forced into REAL jobs & work, depriving to Left of a massive voting bloc. Hope springs eternal!

  6. Points are well taken in comparisons to religion but equating the two does a dis-service to real faith in a higher being. I prefer to think of “liberalism-left-progressivism” more as a mental illness, specifically a delusional disorder. Before the psychological and psychiatric community was itself hijacked by the left, their objective analyses concurred that most behavior exhibited by the hard left was textbook pathological.
    Since these professions have been wokified, they no longer are guided by objective science, but instead by politics and political correctness. They now treat conservatism as a pathos and homosexuality and gender identity issues which were once considered “disorders” are now celebrated.

  7. While I agree with you that the prog left has all the fixings of a religion and as such, affords no room for discourse of any kind relative to its imagined and invented tenants and is a destructive force to civility and participative citizenry. However, this still smacks to me of a case of the pot calling the kettle black – both sides of that coin need to be marginalized for this country to once again work for all its citizens.

    • Maybe you mean, both sides need to be put in there place by rational people to follow our constitution and understand that it is the people they serve and not whatever cult they have created. You acknowledge what John said about the progressive religion then go on to claim that both sides participate in parallel but opposite activities which couldn’t be farther from the truth. Most people want their government to deal with items listed in the US Constitution and be left alone to live their lives. While politicians of both stripes have figuratively raped the constitution, it is the left that wants to abolish it to create a system of control. We can bicker back and fourth about who did what and get no where like we are now. Nothing will save our country until the left/progessives are stopped from any further destruction of our institutions, our freedoms, our customs and our constitution. While you think you have thrown a wrench into Johns article, you have actually shown the left sympathy by injecting the viewpoint that conservatives have been just as bad and that is not true. We have never seen such a time when all of our institutions and government are under the control of a political cult/religion that has come this close to destroying our country. Now is the time to put up to shut up. Once the threat is neutralized the conversation can begin without the fear of being censored or doxed. That should be the goal in that order.

      • Edit button, please. Once it’s submitted it can’t be corrected. We can read over our misspelled words because we wrote them by phonics instead of the right spelling. Thanks for letting us contribute!

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