Kris Ashton

In 2018, I attended the book launch of a colleague and friend who had gone back to university to complete his Masters of Creative Writing. His story featured amongst an anthology of fiction from his graduating class and the launch involved selected writers getting on stage to read passages from their work.

The MC for the launch – I’ve forgotten his position but he may have been a student representative – introduced one of the readers and started talking about how “they” were this and that and what we could expect from “them”. It was, of course, an individual, but she “identified as non-binary” and so the MC had to stand up and talk this ungrammatical gibberish while a room full of notionally sane adults pretended nothing was out of the ordinary.

Universities have been renowned for promoting counter-culture ideas since the late 1950s and young people are especially interested in exploring their identities, so norm-smashing on campus is nothing new. I’d read about gender theory before this day, but its precepts were so wacky, so counter to reality even by academic standards, that I just shrugged my shoulders and dismissed it as a fad. Even at that book launch, I didn’t properly grasp the shift in zeitgeist universities were unleashing. My prevailing sentiment after meeting the ‘they/them’ girl (who was lovely, by the way) was pity. I knew how cringe-inducing it could be to look back on one’s late-teenage actions from a distance. I imagined her twenty years later smacking herself upside the head and wondering, “What was I thinking?”

But more and more, I noted with alarm, people were taking the gender fluidity claptrap seriously. Worse still, those who dared speak up against transgenderism – to point out that a man who puts on make-up and has his penis surgically altered to roughly resemble a vagina is not and never will be a woman – were being reprimanded, deplatformed, even fired.

While it is often framed as a feminist issue in 2024, I took exception to transgenderism as a writer and a realist long before women realised their identity and right to privacy were under siege from mentally ill men and post-modernist loons. One of my published stories, ‘Night Feeds’ in Andromeda Spaceways #60, includes a subtle reference to gender dysphoria: “If a man thinks he’s Hitler, you don’t send him down the barber to get a short back and sides.” And an individual is not a ‘they’. I don’t care how many personalities a person claims to have, that’s still one person. I issued a big grammatical ‘fuck you’ to gender theory from the very start.

As the lunacy rolled on – as companies installed ‘gender neutral’ bathrooms and insisted on pronouns in email signatures and held ‘education sessions’ for anyone who dared to question the New Gender Orthodoxy – I started to notice a pattern. Dumb ideas weren’t limited to gender and they didn’t only proliferate in university campuses and the corporate world. Everywhere one looked there was evidence people had abdicated logic and reason in favour of conformism. This applies at a global level (Joe Biden’s supporters and the media insisting he wasn’t in cognitive decline, the International Olympic Committee allowing an ‘intersex’ person with obviously male characteristics to compete in women’s boxing) all the way down to simple civics (modern Australians being told they’re responsible for events that happened 200 years ago). In each case, even a cursory assessment of the evidence points to an obvious conclusion, yet somehow these conclusions are ignored and dumb ideas perpetuate. As podcaster Joe Rogan put it recently, “People are willing to gaslight themselves.”

Prior to the COVID lockdowns, I ascribed this behaviour to Hanlon’s razor: “Never attribute to malice that which is adequately explained by stupidity.” Sure, I thought, every university, company, and government department cultivates morons and weirdos, you can’t weed them all out, but generally these institutions know what they’re doing. Following the COVID experience – after watching politicians, artists, journalists, celebrities and academics cheer as freedoms were trampled and the world economy suffocated – I, like a lot of people, woke up. We weren’t operating under Hanlon’s razor; no functional society could make and persist with so many poor decisions by mere chance.

Just how true that was became abundantly evident when Elon Musk bought Twitter and the stew of media bullshit in which the world had been percolating for years suddenly dried up. We now know a sizable number of the ‘bad decisions’ that have plagued modern society were by design; endless foreign wars and COVID chief among them. (Who in their right mind does research into making viruses more transmissible to humans unless it’s for Machiavellian purposes?). Like Dilbert cartoonist Scott Adams said, once you see the gears of the media-corporate-political machine and the attendant propaganda, it’s impossible to unsee them. More and more ordinary citizens are aware now, and because of that the powers-that-be have started to justify censorship as a virtue, usually claiming it’s to combat misinformation or disinformation.

While fostering dumb ideas might be intentional, that’s not to suggest idiots no longer play a role in society’s downward spiral. Corporations and organisations such as the WEF, the WHO, the UN, to name just a few, can only exert so much control; gullible and obedient fools are required to make it stick. As the pandemic experience also taught us, those are abundant.

Most of what I’ve written above lays responsibility for the world’s ills at the feet of those on the political left and, while that’s true, if one takes a broader view what we’re really seeing is an over-correction against the rank conservatism that ruled until the 1960s. Social media acted as an accelerant for the left-wing march through the institutions, resulting in a woke conflagration the magnitude of which the ‘moral majority’ types could only have dreamed about when they were trying to censor everyone and force them to interface with the world through a filter of pious strictures.

Cancel culture – the most pernicious form of censorship – sits right at the pinnacle of the ‘dumb idea’ mountain. It’s like the cold war concept of mutually assured destruction, only in this case one side spent years dropping nukes on the other before sulking up a storm when the first ICBMs came its way following the attempted assassination of Donald Trump. What the younger generation likely doesn’t understand is that cancel culture is a modern phenomenon. Persecuting someone and trying to destroy their reputation and livelihood because you disagree with something they said is unique to the past decade or so. “Actions have consequences”, a popular refrain following each cancel culture nuke drop, is merely a self-serving justification of censorship.

The common denominator behind every dumb idea (or ‘mind virus’ as Gad Saad calls it) is typically a bad actor (or actors) – someone who stands to benefit from silencing critics and perpetuating the outcome of that idea, which in generations past would have wilted under the harsh light of reason. The benefit is usually money, power or – more and more in the social media age – public acclaim. Denying Biden’s obvious dementia was a ploy to retain political power until those with skin in the game could devise a way to discard him and move on. ‘Coloniser’ guilt-trips are multi-billion-dollar cash cows in Canada, Australia, New Zealand and just about every other nation that emerged from the British Empire’s conquests two centuries ago. Drug companies made obscene profits from mRNA ‘vaccines’ that we now know offered scant protection against a virus cooked up in a Chinese laboratory and funded in part by the US government.

With all that in mind, ask yourself if an ideology as wacky (and potentially dangerous) as gender theory could have survived without the shelter of censorship… then consider who might be promulgating its tenets and why.