Originally posted 2017-02-15 07:11:48.
Events of recent months contributed to a discussion between myself, Rod Fleming, and Karis Burkowski. Karis carried out the role of editor and eventually co-author of our book ‘Why Men Made God’. In reviewing the book for a second edition, we encountered several points of discussion that highlight the difference between enlightened culture and regressive-left Snowflake Culture. I thought our discussion was worth sharing.
Today, the term ‘Snowflake Culture’ has passed out of popular usage, as is has become clear that it is nothing other than the extreme Left and is popularly referred to as ‘wokeism’. I was still an atheist when this was written, too. Ihave not changed this article, however.
Karis Burkowski (KB): The climate catastrophe is inevitable, but can still be somewhat ameliorated. How our cultures rebuild themselves in a post-catastrophe world is a valuable discussion…Self-serving cults, particularly those with medieval attitudes, must not be allowed to gain ascendancy. We must change as a species, like we did post-Toba, and do better next time.
You mentioned that the friends of atheists are Christians. That may be so in Europe, but it is far from true over here. Atheists are still ‘closeted’ in many parts of the US and for good reason…The antithesis of Islam is not Christianity, it is secularism. Both groups would destroy atheists if they could.
(This article was written in 2016 and I have not updated it, although in fact, my position is significantly harder now than it was then. In the end, Trump was one of the best US Presidents ever and I am proud to have supported him. Pence was predictably invisible as VP. I sincerely hope Trump will return to high office soon. The book under discussion, Why Men Made God, was withdrawn from publication after agreement between the publisher and myself, as principal author. Part of its content has been rewritten into a new book, which will appear soon.)
Rod Fleming (RF): As atheists, Christians are our allies against the most dangerous cult on Earth, Islam. Suggesting that atheists and secularists alone can defeat or even accommodate this cult is beyond naive. That is exactly what they tried to do in Sweden and Sweden is no longer able to provide the basic protections that citizens of a state require. In other words, it is a failed state. It will be followed by others. When Germany collapses, as it will, the contagion will spread. By contrast, the European countries that are standing up to and resisting the Islamic colonisation are those with strong Christian backgrounds, like Hungary, Austria and Poland.
We must realise that while religiosity is indeed a major problem, it comes in different flavours. At the core of Christianity is the doctrine of forgiveness. At the core of Islam is war. A Christian who kills is acting against his faith, while a Muslim who kills is carrying out the specific instructions of his cult. Further, due to the disparate nature of the source texts in Christianity, for any given political or theological position, there is a counter; so to those who would abuse gays we can say ‘love they neighbour’ or ‘let he who is without sin cast the first stone’.
See here: https://www.rodfleming.com/islam-cannot-change/
Because the Koran is held to be the work of one man and specifically of the Doctrine of Abrogation, there is only one possible reading of the Islamic message, and this is always the violent, bloody one. Muslims are also required to lie, to dissemble and to pretend to integrate into host societies. This is ‘taqiyya’. Due to the rigid nature of Islam, there is no ‘moderate’ form. There is Islam and apostasy. Salafists or Wahhabists are funded by Saudi Arabia and Qatar to spread the doctrine that the only true message of Islam is war (jihad) and that those who deny this are apostates who must be killed. This is why Maajid Nawaz has a price on his head.
KB: (US VP Mike) Pence…signed the “religious freedom” law that said Christian businesses didn’t have to do business with gays or atheists. He has openly stated on many occasions that he wants to “marry his religious views with his politics”.
RF: How would I feel if I were to be asked to produce publicity material that promoted anti-Semitism? I should refuse. I should not be coerced by law into doing work that I morally disapprove of. What about a tobacco company? Can I refuse to work for one on grounds of conscience? Why should my name go on something I totally oppose?
But if it’s okay to refuse to do business with a Nazi because of his views, then it clearly must be okay to refuse to do business with an atheist or a Muslim, or for that matter a gay, for the same reasons. Otherwise we are not being egalitarian.
Suppose I were to be asked to do work for a mosque? I should refuse too — why should I feel that I have committed a crime for acting on my conscience? Freedom is freedom and Pence is absolutely right. If baker A won’t bake you a gay wedding cake, go to baker B. The market will ultimately sort it out.
KB: Waves of immigrants were allowed in (to Europe) due to Enlightenment thinking and Enlightenment values. The problem was that these mostly-Muslim immigrants came from cultures that were not yet enlightened. They brought with them deeply patriarchal attitudes. Had they arrived in a slow trickle in which each family was carefully helped and integrated, we might have seen the kind of result that the Enlightened people who wanted to help them would have desired (as we see in Canada). Instead, they came in a mass, were either ghettoized by the host countries or self-ghettoized, and they clung to their tribal mind-set. Being unemployed or under-employed, their frustrations festered and they entrenched, radicalized and acted out.
RF: In France, the UK and Germany, Muslims have been arriving ‘in a trickle’ for decades and, in France at least, were well integrated with very little racism. But we add a few hardliners and all the rest follow suit; now we have Islamic insurrection. This proves that Islam must be isolated. It can’t be integrated.
KB: Now that they are in, what should be done?
RF: Mass deconditioning and the total ban of any teaching or expression of Islam. Demolition of all mosques and the outlawing of all masjids. Controls on assembly of Muslims. If they must have religion, they can convert to Christianity. Otherwise, wholesale removal to point of origin, or, failing that, containment in dedicated city-sized facilities. 
KB: Trump lost the popular vote by 3 million votes. Nobody on this side of the pond, except for Breitbart, Fox and a few extremist rags aimed at readers with a limited worldview, hears otherwise without an eye-roll and a chuckle.
RF: Not true, though it is a central lie in Snowflake Culture mythology. Pew Research, a reputable source, released a report earlier this month that found that a million votes for Clinton in the election were illegal. That, knowing Pew, is likely to be conservative. We further know that the ‘popular majority’ is accounted for by a number of counties in California — guess which ones?
In fact the Electoral College system worked perfectly in preventing the election from being hijacked by a small number of areas in a tiny minority of states. And well done too. Clinton’s ‘popular vote win’ is at best suspect and in any case, it doesn’t matter. The USA is a republic and the proper constitutional procedure was followed. Trump won by a landslide. However it is crucial to Snowflake Culture’s distortion of the truth that his win be delegitimised in order that the violence of snowflakes themselves be condoned.
KB: To say that blacks are not oppressed in the US is simply false. Look at the incarceration rates for the tiniest infractions. Look at the differences in sentencing for the same crimes.
RF: Laws obviously should be applied fairly and in equal measure to all. No egalitarian could oppose that. But that is not what black supremacists like the odious ‘black lives matter’ group want. What they want is preferential treatment, and this has to stop. Why should an Asian or a white have to score significantly higher in tests to be considered for the same college place as a black? I have no issue with targeting funding into public education to address social problems, but preferential treatment is not equality, or fair.
KB: You and I have two ‘lived realities’ in terms of Muslims. I absolutely see the dangers and I agree that the religion is deeply flawed – like Christianity was back in the days of the Inquisition and the Dark Ages…You attribute the problem to some sort of organized and intentional effort to destroy us, led by some kind of intelligent leadership with a plan.
RF: The problem is the core Islamic theology that the whole world must be brought under Sharia to form a global Caliphate ruled by the closest descendant of Mohamed. This is totally irreconcilable with enlightened thinking. Islam represents the most grave threat that civilisation has ever faced — as it always has. The ‘plan’ is clearly described in the Sunna: wage jihad until the whole of Dar al-Harb (Land of War) is brought under Islamic control and becomes Dar al-Islam (Land of Submission). The methods — of deceit, of infiltration, of insurrection, of terrorism, outright war and genocide are all described in the Koran and the Hadith. You just have to read them to know what they intend to do — and they have been doing it for 1400 years.
KB: I see the problem as a result of our Enlightened efforts to help people in need without sufficiently considering that they bring their un-enlightened attitudes with them.
RF: You cannot enlighten people whose faith considers enlightenment to be apostasy punishable by death, except by deconditioning. Snowflake Culture wilfully refuses to accept reality.
KB: The Muslim women I know have university degrees and are secular, feminist and outspoken. Some still wear hijabs, some don’t. The men work in science or technology and are productive citizens. We do not need to fear these people. There is a difference between this sort of Muslim and the radical Islamists.
RF: No, there is not. Either they are ‘radical’ as you call it, or they are not really Muslim. We might call them ‘cultural Muslims’. However, Islam forbids freedom of thought and so such people are easily returned to the ‘true path’ of war by committed religious preachers. This is what we see all over the world.
Muslims are required to lie, dissemble and cheat in the furtherance of Islam. In addition, they are obliged to follow the example of Mohammed, who, in his early Meccan phase, was so outnumbered that he too appeared to integrate, while he gathered strength. When the authorities in Mecca realised how dangerous he was, they banished him. He was given refuge by the Jewish city later called Medina. Within five years he had slaughtered, enslaved or forcibly converted every single person who lived there. And this is exactly what Islam requires its followers to emulate.
As soon as the numbers are high enough, Muslims are required to move to the violent forms of jihad and seize control of the territory they live in. This is exactly what we see in France today, and elsewhere, as ‘no-go’ areas are purged of natives.
KB: Contrary to the hopes and dreams of the Enlightenment, patriarchal religions have refused to die. Enlightenment values are under attack in Europe from Islam and in the US from fundamentalist Christianity.
RF: No. Enlightenment values are derived from Christian ones. The debate with Christians is about the extent to which churches should have power in society. Islam is totally opposed to Christianity and all its successors and fully intends to kill, enslave or forcibly convert all non-Muslims, and to appropriate their land. These are not even in the same ball-park. One is an argument between positions within the same culture, the other is the attempt, by one culture, to totally destroy the other.
Regressive left Snowflake Culture refuses to read Islam’s texts or accept the existential threat that it presents to civilisation. The doctrines in Islam that render it toxic are there for anyone to read.
How can one be a feminist and support Islam, when Islam says a woman is worth a quarter of a man? That a man may beat his wife — and provides instructions on how to do so? Or enlightened and accept that Muslims are taught that they should kill the unbelievers, wherever they find them? That non-Muslim women must make themselves sexually available to Muslim men, and if they do not, then a Muslim is obliged to rape them? (Only Muslim women are protected from rape under Islam; it has nothing to do with human, but instead property, rights.) How can an enlightened person accept that slavery is condoned, or that land in Islamic control may never be returned to freedom, and any that is must be the focus of violent jihad (this is the real reason for the Israel situation; that war will never end as long as Islam exists.) Snowflake Culture is unable to answer these questions. It has only violence.
KB: The recent election has done one good thing – it has awakened a disengaged and complacent public to become politically aware.
RF: It has encouraged a small group of people to challenge democratic institutions and due process through violence, insurrection and sedition. While these are not the totality of Snowflake Culture, they are its Brownshirts. The ideologues behind them make sure to stay out of harm’s way.
We have already seen the collapse of matriarchies in the face of patriarchal attack, in Mesopotamia and in the Celtic world to name but two, and it has happened again and again. We are seeing exactly the same thing happening in Europe today. Emasculated cultures are simply unable to deal with, or for that matter even recognise and address, the threat from a hostile patriarchy totally committed to their destruction.
Enlightened cultures can only go so far in their own emasculation before they become subject to takeover by others. Think of it like hostile corporate takeovers: the fittest and meanest will prevail when the market tightens up. The factor driving that tightening is climate change.
If humans survive the climate catastrophe, Islam should not be allowed to accompany them. It is an anti-human, misogynistic, patriarchal cult. It is racist, misogynistic, anti-individualistic, anti-science, anti-reason, anti-art…it actively promotes and carries out honour killing, wife-beating, floggings, murders of gays, slavery, rape, child abuse, FGM, terror attacks, kidnappings…the list is endless. While it is indeed possible that a post-apocalypse world might invent its own equivalent, we should not allow this curse to survive to infect it.
KB: “‘Evil prospers when good men do nothing’… ain’t that the truth,” Streep said Saturday night at the Human Rights Campaign’s 2017 Greater New York Gala Dinner. “We shouldn’t be surprised that fundamentalists, of all stripes, everywhere, are exercised and fuming. We shouldn’t be surprised that these profound changes come at a much steeper cost than it seems would lie true in the 20th century. We shouldn’t be surprised if not everyone is totally down with it. … if his catastrophic instinct to retaliate doesn’t lead us to nuclear winter, we will have much to thank this president for because he will have woken us up to how fragile freedom really is… The whip of the Executive can, through a Twitter feed, lash and intimidate, punish and humiliate, delegitimize the press and imagined enemies with spasmodic regularity and easily provoked predictability.” ~ Meryl Streep.
RF: Streep here articulates the most egregious lies of Snowflake Culture: that to oppose leftist totalitarianism is to be fundamentalist; that a duly elected President of the United States can be mocked and traduced with impunity by a class of entitled elitists with no political mandate; that democracy only counts when it suits their political views and in any other case it is to be reviled; that a strong man in a position of power is necessarily a threat; that a biased and clearly prejudiced media is to be protected from legitimate criticism; and that the officers of state, elected in accordance with constitution and law, may be obstructed in carrying out the manifesto upon which they were elected, because it doesn’t suit the losers for them to do so.
Streep is an actor who once made some films that women liked. That is the entirety of her platform. She has not stood for election, or worked through the judiciary, or held public office in any way at all. Her career has been based on how well she articulates words and thoughts written by other people. Her opinions are of no more value than any other randomly-selected person’s.
Snowflake Culture believes one thing fundamentally: that the freedom of speech, that they use to castigate those who do not agree with them, must always be denied to their opponents. Snowflakes may never speak of ‘freedom’ for they don’t subscribe to its basic tenets. Yet Streep, in apologising for Snowflake Culture, presumes to do just this, lacking any democratic, judicial or professional mandate. And that is her right; it is the right of us all.
The difference between free-thinkers, be they egalitarians like me or hold some other position, and Snowflake Culture is that we do not shout her down when a Snowflake like Streep makes political statements. We do not riot or assault her peaceful supporters. We do not accuse her of ‘hate speech’. We do not abuse, insult or defame her. We do not destroy other people’s property or impede them from going about their lawful business, because we dislike what she has to say. We allow her to speak.
Snowflake Culture
Regressive-Left Snowflake Culture thrives on silencing opposition, not through argument and debate, but through violence, verbal abuse, language control, individual shaming, thought-policing and ‘no-platforming’. It lives on lies and Postmodernist fantasies, in a world that doesn’t really exist and never could.
Most of all, it despises free-thinking and free-thinkers, who do not accept its herd mentality and simplistic, immature solutions without question. Snowflake Culture is totalitarian and hostile to enlightenment. That is why it is infatuated with the totalitarian, unenlightened creeds of Marxism and Islam.