William had to go and remind me that CFI still exists. I used to have to roll my eyes at Ron Lindsay’s editorials, but now that Robyn Blumner is in charge, they’ve gotten even worse. Take a look at their latest: Identitarianism is incompatible with humanism. I agree with the title! But we immediately run into some problems. She starts by defining her terms (good), but her definition is insane.

Identitarian: A person or ideology that espouses that group identity is the most important thing about a person, and that justice and power must be viewed primarily on the basis of group identity rather than individual merit. (Source: Urban Dictionary)

Wait, what? Her source is Urban Dictionary? That might be find for some obscure slang, but not for a topic that a presumable rationalist is about to jump headlong into with an op-ed. Who are the people she’s addressing here? I’m confused already.

If we take a small step upwards and look at the definition on Wikipedia, it’s radically different.

The Identitarian movement or Identitarianism is a pan-European nationalist, far-right political ideology asserting the right of European ethnic groups and white peoples to Western culture and territories claimed to belong exclusively to them. Originating in France as Les Identitaires (“The Identitarians”), with its youth wing Generation Identity, the movement expanded to other European countries during the early 21st century. Building on ontological ideas of the German Conservative Revolution, its ideology was formulated from the 1960s onward by essayists such as Alain de Benoist, Dominique Venner, Guillaume Faye and Renaud Camus, who are considered the main ideological sources of the movement.

Identitarians promote concepts such as pan-European nationalism, localism, ethnopluralism, remigration, or the Great Replacement, and they are generally opposed to globalisation, multiculturalism, Islamization and extra-European immigration. Influenced by New Right metapolitics, they do not seek direct electoral results, but rather to provoke long-term social transformations and eventually achieve cultural hegemony and popular adhesion to their ideas.

Some Identitarians explicitly espouse ideas of xenophobia and racialism, but most limit their public statements to more docile language. Strongly opposed to cultural mixing, they promote the preservation of homogeneous ethno-cultural entities, generally to the exclusion of extra-European migrants and descendants of immigrants. In 2019, the Identitarian Movement was classified by the German Federal Office for the Protection of the Constitution as right-wing extremist.

By the way, it begins with an important note: “Not to be confused with Identity politics.”

Anyway, that’s what I associate with the word Identitarian, far right nationalism and ethnocentrism. Not whatever she found on Urban Dictionary. And then she starts writing, and it’s clear what she’s really targeting: it’s those danged Wokeists again, who are not Identitarians, who oppose Identitarianism, who think Identitarians are racists and fascists.

Here’s who she’s whining about.

Today, there is a subpart of humanists, identitarians, who are suspicious of individuals and their freedoms. They do not want a free society if it means some people will use their freedom to express ideas with which they disagree. They see everything through a narrow affiliative lens of race, gender, ethnicity, or other demographic category and seek to shield groups that they see as marginalized by ostensible psychic harms inflicted by the speech of others.

This has given rise to a corrosive cultural environment awash in controversial speakers being shouted down on college campuses; even liberal professors and newspaper editors losing their jobs for tiny, one-off slights; the cancellation of great historical figures for being men of their time; and a range of outlandish claims of microaggressions, cultural appropriation, and other crimes against current orthodoxy.

Oh. You know, these people who hate freedom (and are probably also ugly and smell bad) don’t exist. There are people who object when some people promote objectionable ideas. The humanists I know with ‘radical’ ideas about justice, for instance, don’t see simple discrete categories that deserve special protection, they see everyone as unique, with variations that ought to be respected and not judged through the lens of “good” and “bad” or “superior” and “inferior”, and insist that no one deserves to be singled out with a simplistic label. Everything about culture and experience and biology contributes to identity, and you don’t get to erase it. Blumner is taking the familiar “I don’t see color” claim of the privileged and trying to white every variation out.

Humanism should not reduce everyone to generic plastic people. It should recognize the variety of social forces that shape us all and make us each different. That’s not identitarianism, it’s a basic recognition of the diversity of human experience. She should have ended the essay with this:

There are a couple of tells in her complaint. losing their jobs for tiny, one-off slights; who is she to decide what is a tiny slight? Some of those slights are long historical slanders that have deeply harmed people! men of their time; there’s a poisonous phrase, suggesting that it was OK for slavers, for instance, to oppress and torture other human beings because, well, everyone else was doing it. There are humanist principles that are the next best thing to universal, and ‘treat others as you would want to be treated’ is one of them, and once, I would have thought, central to humanist thinking. And then, current orthodoxy. Is the status quo and orthodoxy something atheists and humanists necessarily support?

Then, who are the victims of this corrosive cultural environment? Name them. Give specific examples. As it stands, this is just bad essay writing, showing that she’s afraid if she did get specific, someone might track down the examples and find that the slights weren’t so tiny, that other men and women of their time were quite vocal about the wrongs they were doing, or that the microaggressions were severe enough that everyone should know better. And she’s right to be afraid, because she does name one person, and her motivations are clear.

Good people with humanist hearts have been pilloried if they don’t subscribe to every jot and tittle of the identitarian gospel. A prime example is the decision last year by the American Humanist Association (AHA) to retract its 1996 award to Richard Dawkins as Humanist of the Year. The man who has done more than anyone alive to advance evolutionary biology and the public’s understanding of that science, who has brought the light of atheism to millions of people, and whose vociferous opposition to Donald Trump and Brexit certainly must have burnished his liberal cred became radioactive because of one tweet on transgender issues that the AHA didn’t like.

Oh, yes, keep in mind that Robyn Blumner was appointed to her position by Richard Dawkins, and that she is the executive director of the Richard Dawkins Foundation for Reason and Science. Conflict of interest much?

It was more than one tweet, and it exposed that he had a bigoted perspective on those transgender issues. It is correct that the American Humanist Association didn’t like the idea of having given a distinguished award to a bigot, and one who has gone on to consistently take the wrong side in every matter of trans rights. He just recently got together with Jordan Peterson in a mutual back-patting session to say that he “totally agrees” with him that those transgenders are oppressing good wealthy white cis-het men like themselves. That wasn’t some trivial slip of the tongue, it’s what Dawkins actively believes and promotes, so why should AHA ignore an ethical violation like that?

But then, Blumner, and by association, CFI, have a crude and biased understanding of gender issues themselves. The clue is in the image they chose to illustrate the essay.

Get it? It would be unnatural to plug your VGA port and a USB cable together. Used to illustrate an article defending the primitive and simplistic views of a man on gender issues. The subtext is not very sub.

She might as well have illustrated it with this.

To make excuses for myself, it was a court case, and my perspective wouldn’t have made a difference — I’d have just been one of the thousands or more yammering on the internet about a trial. I’d been through this before, in the OJ Simpson case, where the cacophony of noise did not contribute to justice, but almost certainly skewed the fickle court of public opinion in unfavorable ways.

I’m speaking of the Amber Heard trial, which was decided yesterday in favor of Johnny Depp. I’ve avoided news of the case because enough snippets had leaked through to leave me sickened. On YouTube and social media, it was made clear that Depp was the affable rogue who made light of Heard’s case; Heard, on the other hand, was the conniving sociopath who could turn on the waterworks at an instant’s notice, and then, moments later, revert to stone-faced heartless bitch. Obviously, she was lying. Obviously, Captain Jack Sparrow was a misunderstood rascal.

Except…whenever I watched a clip of the trial, what I saw was a woman in pain, controlling herself because she didn’t want to play into the public perception of women as hysterical, while Depp was just an asshole. Even more poisonous was the Depp camp, which seemed to consist largely of the usual bros who were gleeful about an opportunity to shriek insults at a woman while not getting the usual social opprobrium. It was a repulsive spectacle. While I averted my eyes and avoided the trial news as much as I could, Rebecca Watson dug deeper, and I agree fully with her take.

Now the case has been settled. Depp won. This is going to have serious consequences.

…on Wednesday after a jury in Fairfax, Virginia, found Amber Heard guilty of defaming Depp in a 2018 op-ed for the Washington Post, in which she identified herself as a public face of domestic abuse survivors, without explicitly naming Depp. Despite presenting photos of her injuries, video recordings of Depp’s meltdowns, and witness testimony supporting her claims of abuse, Depp was awarded $10 million plus $5 million in punitive damages. Heard was also awarded $2 million for winning one point in her countersuit.

But in truth, the highly publicized trial was decided in the court of public opinion weeks ago. As it played out over the last few weeks, with people on social media overwhelmingly aligning with the beloved Pirates of the Caribbean star, millions of stans and even brands and celebrities have excoriated Heard and accused her of fabricating the allegations against Depp, causing hashtags like #AmberTurd and #JusticeForJohnnyDepp to trend worldwide.

“This is basically the end of MeToo,” Dr. Jessica Taylor, a psychologist, forensic psychology Ph.D., and author of two books on misogyny and abuse, tells Rolling Stone. “It’s the death of the whole movement.”

As the verdict came in, sexual assault survivors expressed their disappointment with the decision, even if they were not surprised by it. “I don’t think it’s unexpected. But it’s horrible,” says one survivor, who herself faced a defamation claim after coming forward against her own abuser (and requested her name be withheld for legal reasons). She says the claim was dropped, but that watching Heard be dragged through the mud during the trial brought back memories of her own experience, which she says was traumatic and led her to consider suicide.

“I feel really glad to think my case didn’t go ahead. And stupid to think I could have won it,” she says. “Men always win.”

And I kept my mouth shut throughout. I’m always disappointing myself.

Rebecca didn’t mention the one case that impressed me with her point, that I mentioned at the beginning: the “trial of the century”, the OJ Simpson murder trial, which OJ won, because “Men always win.” Even after brutally chopping up Nicole Brown Simpson, he got off.

Well, sort of.

We all knew he did it, and his behavior after the trial confirmed it. His career in movies was dead, and you can’t even watch his old movies anymore without cringing deeply. I’m sure not going to watch a Naked Gun movie, ever again. It’s a similar situation now; knowing that Johnny Depp is a wife-beating arrogant dudebro means I’m not going to ever be able to watch a Pirates of the Caribbean movie, or any movie starring Depp, without feeling a little bit of disgust at the main character.

Not that that could be the slightest consolation to Amber Heard or especially Nicole Brown Simpson. At least Heard has escaped without being stabbed to death. This verdict makes it a little less likely that other victims of domestic abuse will get away with their lives.