The Progressive Freak Out: Performance to Root Out Heretics

Recent data from the Cooperative Election Study shows 20% of atheists have participated in a march or protest compared to 6% of white evangelicals.  40% of atheists have contacted a public official compared to 24% of white evangelicals.  52% of atheists have donated to political candidates compared to just 26% of white evangelicals.  Pull back further and the divide between progressives and conservative evangelicals shows the former, not the latter, more actively involved in protest and politics.

As progressivism secularizes, politics becomes religion.  Virtue signaling replaces a Christian ichthus fish on the back of a car. Outrage becomes a signal for identifying heretics.  If one is not outraged, one just might be a heretic to secular progressive religious zealots. 

This past weekend, college students took to stadiums across America to experience the joy of fellowship and football.  Across television networks and social media, progressives decried the activity as unsafe.  Outdoor festivities again became super spreader events in ways mass protests and ransacking small businesses did not during the George Floyd riots.

The Supreme Court let a Texas law stay in place because the plaintiffs in the case sued the wrong people.  The Supreme Court refused to halt the law because the Court does not stop laws.  The Court only stops people from enforcing the laws.  When the wrong people are sued, the Court has no power to stop them.  Progressives insisted, despite the dereliction of duty by the plaintiffs, that the Court should stop the law anyway.  While four justices would have done so, they would have deviated from legal precedent.  

Undeterred, instead of blaming the plaintiffs for their collective screw up, progressives assailed the Court, Texas, Donald Trump, conservatives, and babies.  They fixated on the worst case scenario — rape.  According to progressives, women who are victims of rape will have to carry their babies to term and face untold psychological trauma.  They patently ignored that Texas cannot stop a woman from traveling to another state to terminate her child.  Nor did they care to point out that rape accounts for, at most, one percent of abortions.  To listen to the commentary on television, one would think rape and pregnancies therefrom happen constantly.  Meanwhile, one doctor admitted to killing dozens of children in the run up to the law taking effect, none because of rape, but because of the mother’s convenience.

As the remains of a hurricane went up the east coast, sending flooding with it, progressives freaked out about climate change.  Never letting a crisis go to waste, politicians and supposed experts paraded onto television screens across America demanding Americans give up their way of life to stop storms.  Storms will not be stopped by a battery powered car.  One would be hard pressed to realize that from the media coverage.

Podcaster Joe Rogan received ivermectin from his doctor.  The inventors of the drug received the Noble Prize for ivermectin’s contribution to human progress.  The drug has saved billions of people from blindness and parasitic infestation.  It is also used in livestock and a few people have tried to ingest dosages meant for horses.  Rogan, however, got it from his doctor.  Some doctors believe the well documented anti-inflammatory properties of ivermectin can help prevent or combat the so-called cytokine storm where by COVID triggers a release of inflammatory proteins called cytokines into the bloodstream.  The FDA has discouraged ivermectin prescriptions pending further study.

Progressives freaked out about Rogan and his doctor while assailing Texas for getting between a woman and her doctor.  All of the freaking out is theater.  In the post-modern age, one demonstrates one’s commitment to a particular truth or cause through performance.  The screaming and wailing on social media and television is performance designed both to signal one’s commitment to a supposed truth and also identify the heretics who choose not to perform.

As progressives continue making secularism a religion, the ritualistic outrage will get more intense, but will also help discredit the progressive cause.  Most people don’t have time for outrage these days as they struggle to get by thanks to progressives closing schools and causing inflation due to massive spending binges.