Dr. Jordan Peterson and Dave Rubin were banned from Twitter for so-called “deadnaming,” a term unknown to most Americans. The word reveals so much about the progressive mindset that it provides a lens through which to understand the ongoing leftist censorship and culture war on America. People are not allowed to talk about the founding principles and ideals of the United States because that is deadnaming America.
Deadnaming Background
[signups align=”right”]Peterson and Rubin were banned for the mortal sin of referring to transgender actor Elliot Page by the old name, Ellen Page. Twitter classified it as hate speech called deadnaming. To fully appreciate the disturbing nature of this term, consider if someone referred to Hillary Clinton by her maiden name Rodham. Would anyone call this deadnaming, let alone hate speech? Most would think of it as absurd.
The term implies a transformation through death. Only through killing one’s previous identity does deadnaming make sense. Although the word is recent, dating back to 2010, the idea behind it is old and known under the name of alchemy.
Alchemy
Alchemy is the mystic tradition that most of the world is built from mundane filth but contained within it is a highly diluted noble substance, typified through gold. The alchemists believed that through a process of destruction, one could refine and concentrate the ideal material.
One prominent German thinker, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel (1770-1831), turned this idea into a highly influential philosophy. He saw the world as an alchemical process of thesis and anti-thesis, resulting in a more refined synthesis. In his view, God was discovering himself by acting through crucial historical figures whose role was to burn down and destroy the existing system through revolution and war to allow something new and better to emerge from its ashes. Progress was a continuous process of killing the past.
Hegel is one of the most influential thinkers of the left because he made the tools that enabled a new secular religion designed to appeal to academics. He profoundly influenced Karl Marx, and his ideas laid the foundation for what later became the Frankfurt School, postmodernism, and identity Marxism, of which queer theory is one of the latest outgrowths.
Silence of the Lambs
Although social revolution has been the appeal of Hegelian alchemy for most of its existence, the mystical aspects have been individualized in trans-ideology. Instead of a society-wide revolution to destroy existing systems of oppression, one can wage that war on the human body through hormonal treatments and scalpels. Instead of killing history, one kills a former identity.
Interestingly, Thomas Harris captured this theme in his 1988 novel Silence of the Lambs. In it, a gender dysphoric serial killer named “Buffalo Bill” kills and skins women to sew a dress from their skins. He places a moth in the throats of his victims to symbolize, in the words of Hannibal Lecter, “Caterpillar into chrysalis, or pupa, and from thence into beauty.” The act of killing becomes an alchemical quest for transformation into the utopian ideal.
Unfortunately, the novel has become seen as depicting a misleading and damaging stereotype of people who suffer from gender dysphoria. Transgender people are not like Buffalo Bill, but the book symbolically portrays Hegelian philosophy and its modern outgrowth queer theory accurately through this serial killer.
Deadnaming America
Now consider the alchemical transformation of America in the hands of the progressive ideologues. That involves surgically removing the past and replacing it with new implants such as the 1619 project, white supremacy, systemic racism, and patriarchal oppression of women. The constitution is transformed into a tool of tyranny that must be replaced by empathy and compassion.
Every institution must be burned to the ground; the past must be killed so that something new and beautiful can grow. Anyone who dares to defend the old ideas attacks progress and must be shamed and banned into silence for deadnaming America.
