An Existential Conflict
It’s difficult to believe, but at one time left-wing politics involved serious discussion by serious people about serious topics such as the nationalisation of industry, union rights and working conditions, or the creation of new towns and transport links. Earnest people got into the complexities of big issues. Today woke left-wing politics seems to embody catastrophic reactions to every cause.
If you don’t think a woman can have a penis, you are murdering trans children. If you drive a petrol car, you are causing the oceans to boil. If you don’t want biological men to compete in women’s sports, you are participating in genocide. These may be crazy, but are reactions we have all witnessed in the media.
Reason has fled and the woke brook no debate because all opposed to leftie woke campaigns are ipso facto wicked, hateful people who want to drown polar bears, put drag artists into zoos and re-establish apartheid. Every issue is an eleventh-hour conflict between the woke forces of good and the monstrous evil of normality.
Books critical of gender ideology have been removed from public view by staff at council libraries in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, and stashed out of sight in an off-limits storage space. Helen Joyce, whose work has been hidden away, responded: ‘They think it’s incumbent upon them to educate those they think of as racists, homophobes, colonialists, and transphobes.’
Left-wing Instability
When we consider that there is evidence that left-wingers, particularly left-wing young women, contribute disproportionally to the increase of those reporting mental health issues, we are faced with a chicken-and-egg situation. Does being left-wing contribute to mental ill-health, or does mental ill-health contribute to being left-wing?
The simple answer is ‘both’ because today the left is an incestuous mess feeding on itself and spiralling downward into chaotic absurdity. However, if forced to decide I would tend toward the idea that being left-wing contributes to the mental ill-health epidemic.
It used to be the stuff of cartoons, the earnest Christian with a sandwich board proclaiming ‘The End Is Nigh’. Today it is the commonplace cry of our media, politicians and establishment elites. The progressive left has taken on the form of a doomsday cult where everything is a catastrophe or about to become one. We are about to face a climate Armageddon and the planet has only a few years left unless we take immediate action and return to medieval modes of transport.
Constant Fear
The present woke insanity lives and grows on fear. This goes beyond big issues like the fear which has changed ‘climate change’ to ‘climate crisis’ and colours weather maps red, purple and black: it even drills down to children’s books. Roald Dahl’s works have been bowdlerised as the language is thought ‘harmful’ to readers. For the racially obsessed, some of Dahl’s words are culturally insensitive. So, in The BFG, the Big Friendly Giant no longer wears a ‘black’ coat and characters don’t turn ‘white with fear’.
Universities treat their students as fragile children liable to be terrified by ‘microaggressions’. These are small actions or word choices that seem on their face to have no malicious intent but nonetheless are thought of as a form of violence. Microaggressions can be so subtle that neither the perpetrator or victim are aware of them: they have to be taught how to recognise them in order that they can be offended.
Speakers are no-platformed and professors are even sacked in the name of student safety. Students embrace their fragility and play up to this coddling. Law students at Harvard asked their professors not to teach rape law or, in one case, even use the word violate (as in ‘that violates the law’) in case it caused them distress. Perhaps someone should explain to these trembling souls that the law involves dealing with people who sometimes do naughty things.
Their delusional world is retreating from reality into a land of wishful thinking
Leftist activists imagine that science succumbs to language and that by changing the language used to define sex, they can change reality. According to their terminology, the sex with which a person identifies is that person’s sex, regardless of his or her innate physical characteristics. They assert that an intact male who identifies as a woman is an actual woman and to deny this is hateful prejudice. They think that chromosomes have been harnessed to the white-normative cis-gender patriarchy, or something. It doesn’t really matter, because their delusional world is retreating from reality into a land of wishful thinking where what they want to be true is what has to be served up to them, however bizarre and unscientific it may be.
The Real World Intrudes
Reality can’t be wished away. A thorough 30-year Swedish study found that people who underwent sex-reassignment surgery had a suicide rate 19 times higher than their peers. The best studies indicate that when children with gender dysphoria are given time to process their internal conflicts without puberty blockers or cross-sex hormones, 80 to 95 per cent of them will naturally embrace their bodily sex.
One of the most widely used and effective treatments for depression and anxiety is cognitive behavioural therapy (CBT). This is a talking therapy which helps people to adjust harmful ways of thinking. It works on the idea that your thoughts, feelings, physical sensations and actions are interconnected, and that negative thoughts and feelings can trap you in a negative cycle.
The way out of the negative cycle is to adjust your negative thinking. Yet many prescriptions of woke ideology are the exact opposite of what cognitive behavioural therapy recommends for patients with anxiety or depression. For example, CBT advises patients to avoid catastrophising or seeing everything in the worst possible light. It teaches the patient to reject emotional reasoning and encourages them to ‘face their fears’. Woke ideology reverses this. It tells young people that they should always trust their feelings, that even innocuous words can harm them, and that the best way to deal with sources of anxiety is to run away to a safe space and avoid them completely.
There Is Hope
The constantly offended activists are looking for meaning, for a purposeful role in life that validates their existence. They look for something to believe in, a higher calling, a vision of something better. Not having a belief in God, they find authenticity in the woke causes promoted in their colleges and social media. This leads idealistic young people into a downward spiral of fear and the rejection of reason and reality.
If they can’t face CBT, perhaps a prescription of taking John 8:32 three times a day before meals would help: ‘Then you will know the truth, and the truth will set you free.’
A Grain of Sand 
Infiltration of our schools by those who seek to indoctrinate young children with their deviant message must be addressed. Baroness Nicholson, despite severe deafness, highlights these issues courageously, disregarding much orchestrated vitriolic hate mail. Yesterday’s interview in the Sunday Telegraph by Hayley Dixon is well worth reading. ‘This movement isn’t actually for trans people, it is for liars who don’t need science and truth’.
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There is a good leading article by Tomiwa Owolade in today’s Times about the dangers of the introduction of American critical race theory into UK primary schools. It is difficult to credit but five year olds are being taught about their ‘white privilege’.
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Reason and reality has fled, and along with it, common sense and rational thought.
Common sense is the basic ability to perceive, understand, and judge in a manner shared by most people, i.e., the majority. Yet the woke brigade want the majority of sensible people to shut up and embrace the absurd opinions of the minority.
Rational thought is based on evidence. Where is the evidence to support the view that an intact male can pretend he is a female regardless of the biological evidence to the contrary?
Thomas Reid, who founded the Scottish School of Common Sense, promoted the idea that common sense is a type of self-evident knowledge and that whatever is manifestly contrary to that we call absurd.
The rational, evidence-based reality is that God created us male and female (Genesis 1:27), and no amount of wishful thinking can change that biological fact.
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Congratulations Lesley, you are the first person to refer in the comments to one of my heroes Thomas Reid, successor to Adam Smith as professor of Moral Philosophy at Glasgow University. Sadly, although very influential in his day, especially in America, he is too much neglected in the present. Thank you, you have cheered me up and given me hope that all is not lost.
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My pleasure, Campbell. Looking into this subject, I learned something new today – which is always a good reason for getting out of bed! So thank you.
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Not all of us lefties are nutters, just as not all of us who abhor the woke culture are fascists of Trump groupies, Campbell. Keep them coming!
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Anne, you have brought up a very important issue. When you get down to calm conversation over a cup of tea, or your beverage of choice, there is a great deal of common ground. Most of us want pretty much the same things and are fed up with the polarisation of Right vs Left which only benefits the professional politicians, political nerds and the media which thrives on conflict.
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We see a lot of the gay and lesbian community scratching their heads and saying, “This is not what we are about – this whole woke business has gone way off the charts!”
A note I made to myself while moseying on my daily walk recently: “The woke aren’t too far from denying the reality of their own existence. They’ve denied the reality of everything else. Maybe this is the new philosophy du jour – nonexistentialism. Talk about navel-gazing …”
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The gay and lesbian community find themselves in a bind. No longer are they at the top of the oppression Olympics, now they find gay or lesbian youngsters being told that they have actually been born in the wrong bodies and need irreversible surgery and medication to be fulfilled, Their existence has been cancelled by the latest woke crusade.
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Until the Church and Christians wake up to the fact that what we are witnessing is spiritual warfare we will get nowhere. There is still a tendency among Christians to think that with a few deft new laws we can reverse the insanity we see all around us. Spoiler alert: this is not going to happen. For those Christians praying that Labour wins the next election as the party of reform, hope and salvation ask yourselves: if you were around in the days of Sodom & Gomorrah what reforms do you think could be made to make the place acceptable to God? Abraham tried this when he asked God to stay execution if he could find 100 righteous people, later whittled down to 10. God agreed but 10 righteous men could not be found. We all know what happened next.
Now ask yourselves, how can our 21st century Sodom be reformed to be acceptable to God? Repeal SSM, role back LGBTQ+ and mutilation of our children, call a halt to MAPs right now before they get a grip on our institutions? We all know it ain’t going to happen. And we all know what happened to Sodom & Gomorrah.
Time for the Church to stand up and be salt and light.
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As I indicated many of these youthful protesters, however misguided they may be, are actually idealists trying to find meaning in life and finding it in woke causes. They are a witness to the abject failure of the mainstream church over the last 50 or 60 years to present a biblical understanding which is both accurate and coherent. The church cannot escape its responsibility for the way in which our society is crumbling.
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“In that day” – coming to a place near you – Isaiah 3
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