What We’re Up Against

Imagine the scene: You’re applying to be the head of Twitter’s “Trust and Safety” division, the department historically used to censor. Your prospective boss, Elon Musk, in one of the biggest news stories of 2022, spent $44 billion on the company to save civilization from the “woke mind virus” — Musk’s move was provoked by Twitter’s suppression of The Babylon Bee for calling a man, “Man of the Year.” (The old Twitter deemed the joke censorship-worthy because the man in question says he’s a woman.)

You’re now interviewing for the post that is key to Musk’s multi-billion dollar investment to transform Twitter into a haven of free speech; you manage to assure him that you share his passion. Then, within months of taking that job, the center-right Daily Wire contacts you about disseminating their documentary “What Is a Woman?” through your platform. You take a look at it, shocked by the “harmful conduct” displayed. A man is called a man and a girl is called a “she.”

But Golden Gate University and your leftist friends taught you all about hate speech, which this film certainly is, because the “man” says he’s a woman, and the “girl” has preferred pronouns, which are “he/him.” Everybody who’s anybody knows “misgendering” is barbaric. When you assured Elon you shared his vision of an open marketplace of ideas, you assumed that every civilized person understood there were limits. Don’t threaten to kill the president and don’t choose reality over sexual confusion. Don’t publish the schematics of nuclear weapons and don’t call a man “he” if he’s in a dress. Don’t post child porn and don’t neglect to use preferred pronouns. In your world, it’s a matter of common decency. You can’t imagine how anyone could see it any differently.

Christian (and conservative allies), that’s what we’re up against. A corps of people like Twitter’s former head of Trust and Safety Ella Irwin, so certain of their tolerance and love of freedom that they are able to convince the richest man in the world who staked his wealth on your job, that they’ll carry forth his vision. Then at the first chance they get, they slap down a conservative documentary.

It’s not that they’re necessarily hypocrites or liars. They genuinely believe they are champions of free speech even as they suppress differing opinions. The warp in their character is not just a staggering lack of basic self-awareness, but they assume their opinions equal truth, and any deviation is not just falsehood, but hatefulness. And they’re permitted to condemn what (and who) they deem hateful, which means you. At the heart of their philosophy is the conviction that they are the way, the truth, and the life, and no one comes to truth but through them.

Maybe you’re not worried because that’s the small potatoes of social media, not the levers of real power (as if stifling speech isn’t real power). But consider U.S. District Judge Jay Moody, empowered to issue decrees that veto acts of legislatures. On June 20, 2023, he issued a permanent injunction against an Arkansas law protecting children from the permanent harm of Orwellian-named “gender affirming care.” In his ruling, he listed twenty-one “findings of fact” which weren’t fact at all, but rather leftist pseudoscience. In these numbered “facts” the judge asserts that “gender identity” is an individual construct; seriously uses “cisgender” in defining non-delusional people; speaks of “sex assigned at birth” as though sexual identity is merely a subjective perception; denies that “gender incongruence” is a product of environment; claims that “gender identity is not something that an individual can control or voluntarily change” and then states the “only” treatment for gender incongruence is “gender transition.”

Finally, the judge assures us it will never go wrong. The wise professionals lopping off breasts and genitals, even of “adolescents” will never make a mistake, claims the judge. They would never diagnose some impressionable child who is swept along by the social contagion as a genuine case of “gender dysphoria.” The impressionable children, we’re assured, “would not meet the criteria” for the sterilizing drugs and irreversible surgeries. The infallibility of gender transitioners is so trustworthy, the judge lists it as his final “fact.” So, don’t worry.

That’s what we’re up against. They are so lacking in humility, they will state out-right absurdities, as if sexual identity is “assigned” like you’re assigned to take Dr. Jones’s English 101 class, in a judicial ruling as “findings of fact.” The judge states with absolute certainty, giving his errors, confusion, and arrogance the force of law, and willing to risk the lives of children on his hubris. He’s not aware it’s even a risk, so doubt-free is he.

They’re so certain they are right, they lack the capacity to consider otherwise. William Butler Yeats warned us that in the coming times the best would “lack all conviction” and the worst would be “full of a passionate intensity.” What he didn’t see was that the worst would be unquestionably convinced that they are the best and that we are the worst. So, they’re not going to be persuaded by reason. “What is a Woman?” is persuasive to a reasonable person. The idea that sex is “assigned at birth” is absurd to a reasonable person. They’re not reasonable. They won’t even admit that an alternative deserves to be listened to. They’re hardly aware different reasons and ideas exist, imagining them to be raw, heated impulses like hate. To differ from them is, by definition, they assume, to hate. The mutilated bodies, destroyed lives, suicides, rage-filled activists, and miserable, lonely, insult- and profanity-spewing internet trolls left in the wake of their ideology no more registers with them than the murder rate in Baltimore or Chicago impacts a leftist politician.

They’re not going to change their minds without a miracle, without conversion. That’s God’s doing and the church’s prayer. The aim of political and moral debate with them, then, should be to save as many people as possible in the mushy middle from catching a full-blown case of their “mind virus.” We need to strive to ideologically quarantine them and make their fanaticism as repugnant as leprosy. That starts by relentlessly telling the truth.

John B. Carpenter, Ph.D., is pastor of Covenant Reformed Baptist Church, in Danville, VA. and the author of Seven Pillars of a Biblical Church (Wipf and Stock, 2022) and the Covenant Caswell Substack.