Rust Never Sleeps: And Neither Does the Woke Left

Trump regains pen licence

Rust Never Sleeps

With one stroke of his pen, Donald Trump confined a decade of gender confusion, social contagion and ideology to the dust bin of history. Or so we are being told.

As the author of the brilliant book Irreversible Damage:The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters Abigail Shrier has just written, history will look back at this time with a “What was going on?” incredulity. Well maybe. Maybe not. But more of that later. But regardless of what I think of Trump (insert usual caveats inserted here to assure people I am not MAGA or whatever), that move came none too soon.

And it wasn’t just about gender identity. The “vibe” has shifted, as the likes of Niall Ferguson and Brendan O’Neill, and just about anyone else will tell you, around politics and the culture wars. There’s a definite reckoning being had, and for those on the more conservative end of the political, cultural and theological spectrum this is good news.

And more to the point, being one of those people, this is also good news for young children who were the thought – and action – experiments of an increasingly creepy bunch of people. So good riddance to that.

But have things changed forever? You’d be a fool to believe so. You may have heard the saying “Rust never sleeps”. Painting over the surface of a rusty metal object will not solve the problem. The rust will continuing rusting. So too, cancer will continue cancering. Left untreated, rust and cancer will not go away.

And the same is true of the so-called woke Left and the agenda that has been pushed, and pushed and pushed over the past decade or so in the public square across the West.

Without some intervention, this stuff will not go away. And if it takes the somewhat brute-ish intervention of a boorish US President and his official gender policy statement, then that’s an intervention some are willing to take. Given how hot and horrible this debate has been, why wouldn’t you? The Left fought this as a zero sum game, and now cries foul. The Right says “take your licks”.

So what can the Left do?  As of this moment it is trying to navigate this new world that reoriented the madness around trans, and regain some of its traction. In other words, to keep rusting. To keep cancering.

I mean it’s not like the ideologues would not have loved a President to issue an official gender policy statement making it illegal to state that there are only two genders. They were well on their way to that one before a presidential debate between a narcissist and a demented old man punched a hole in the side of the Good Ship Trans.

One Picture: Thousand Words

Now it is true that the general vibe has shifted isn’t it? And had been shifting for some time under the waterline. In that sense Ferguson, O’Neill, etc are totally correct. And I could write thousands of words on this (and may in the future). But I haven’t time, so a couple of pictures will do the heavy lifting for me.

A photograph tells a thousand words, right? What about two photographs? That’s not two thousand words, that’s exponential!

So below, we have a photograph of a geeky, earnest Mark Zuckerberg in 2017, all ready for the progressive picking. All ready – well two or three years away – for shutting down debate about a significant health matter at the behest of government. And doing so with his monkey army of fact checkers.

Yes sir, no sir, three bags full sir.

I looked at that pic and thought “Hey, even I could take him!”  On a good day perhaps, but definitely I’d give him a go for his money, given he’s a good 20 years younger than I. But now?  Look at this below just a few weeks ago in 2025! Man’s been working out!  And using product! And changing up the wardrobe!

Zuckerberg’s all bro-ed up and everything!  He could put me across his knee and give me a whooping. Although my 5km time is still a couple of minutes faster than his PR, so there is that. But, nevertheless, he’s roundhouse kicking that fact-checking (ergo censorship) to the kerb.

Meanwhile apologist and evangelist, Wes Huff is theologising lyrically on Joe Rogan, both men filling out their tees at the top-end rather than the midriff. And Joe is “wowing” all over the place as Wes unpacks the evidence for the resurrection. Once again, they’d both give me a whooping, while Wes would also give me a theological whooping. He’s an impressive guy, er, bloke.

From this vantage point, and you can ask UK podcaster and author, Justin Brierley, the tide of faith is coming back in. The long melancholy roar is giving way to a triumphant roar as teens, from a place of cluelessness, start investigating church for the first time, and Baby Boomers start to nod off and then drop off.

Reframing Wokeness

But rust never sleeps. And nor does the woke Left. The cancer cells are nestled in the humanities departments of our universities. And rather than seeing what has been happening as a chastening, a chance to realign, pull their heads in, be less hubristic and more humble, such types view what is happening as a confirmation of their ideas.  The permanent revolution is, well, permanent. And so it’s simply a case of burrowing tunnels underground, much like Hamas did with Israel.

The first sign that the Left woke was not for backing down, was simply the reframing of “wokeness” as a right wing thing. Now we have “the Right woke” – something that I have been called several times on comments on my blogs. Perhaps I am a late adopter, but I hadn’t gotten my head around it.  And then I realised it was because the Right is supposedly cancelling as much as the Left did.

Or at least that is now the narrative of the Left. The real cancel culture, they say, is actually you, and you’re fundamentalist, Supreme Court loving, Gilead types.  You see, the Left has always sought to gain control primarily of how language is used. Capturing the language means you capture the culture. And as the long term purveyors of the written, spoken and filmed word in the USA and beyond, they became the gatekeepers of cultural meaning.

Hence the word “woke” is now so thoroughly discredited, and it should be abandoned. Yet at the same time, when it was used of the Left there was a clear counter narrative that there was actually no such thing as “woke”, and that what conservatives labelled as such was simply a rejection of what should be normal life. “Wokeness” was just such an obvious way of doing normal life, that the term itself meant nothing.

But now that the shoe – the vibe shoe – appears to be on the other foot,  that is not how the Left is operating. Rather than abandoning the term and leaving it to desiccate out in the open air by all and sundry, the Left is now refashioning it and reshaping it to apply it to the meanness and nastiness of its enemies.

It’s enemies on the Right. “Woke” can now be turned into a pejorative term to fling at conservatives. The Left has always been committed to the rubberiness of language. That’s never going to stop. Always has been. Always will be (see what I did there?).

And that, of course, is how propaganda works. Totalitarians do that all of the time. For years you think you are on the right side of the revolution and you employ all the language it has told you to employ.

Nek minnit you’re up against the firing squad wall protesting your innocence, shrieking vainly about how all of your peer-reviewed papers utilised every terminology the revolution required to!  Alas to no avail. Your fate is sealed. Bang! Bang! Bang!

So, for the Left, the long term strategy is to ensure that, like so many of the foibles and downright atrocities it has held to in the past, the idea that “woke” ever was a label attached to itself rather than to its enemies, will disappear down the memory hole. That’s how the Left works.

Much like the Hunter Biden laptop scandal, or the fact that The New York Times scorched anyone – up until mid last year – who suggested Daddy Biden wasn’t totally done.

Or that they had scorched anyone who suggested that the COVID virus may have escaped from a lab, something all the agencies in the USA are now admitting with “low confidence”. I could go on. All that goes down the memory hole as of today.

Language Control

Whoever controls the language controls a lot. And language, being theological – as I have written about here almost ten years ago – is always the battleground. That’s why we have the “Right woke”. That’s why the Left has to have the Right woke. The narrative will be “See what those nasty conservatives did, shutting down debate!”

But here’s the rub. The strength of the conservative, orthodox position on gender didn’t come about because the so-called “woke Right” shut down debate. It came about because an alliance of the Right, brave liberals, second and third wave feminists, and lesbians refused to have the debate shut down by the Left. And often at the cost of their livelihoods and threats to their very lives (hello JK Rowling).

The orthodox position was so confident in human catogories of reality and science, and so confident that what was going on among the gender ideologues was dangerous, unscientific, and devastating to the lives of children and their long term viability as sensible adults in the world, that they kept speaking. And keep speaking. And keep speaking.

They kept saying “Throw your arguments up, challenge us! We will debate these ideas long and loud, and proud and clear!” And what happened? They kept being pummelled by their opponents. And they kept being encouraged (privately) by those cultural cowards who agreed with them, but who would never stand up for them when it actually counted.

And, sadly, secular writer that she is, Abigail Shrier points out how many clergy were either part of the problem (affirming what they should not affirm and using ropey theology to do so), or refusing to stand up to the bullying of others.

That seemed to be the problem of a certain type of middle-class, urban Christian leader who felt that they too often had to rub shoulders with people who, if they had known what the vicar really believed about end-of-life, start-of-life, and much of what life should probably look like inbetween, would have recoiled in the manner of a trail runner encountering a snake.

I recall being assured a few years ago, when discussing this very matter that “Anyway, we’ve reached peak woke,” to which I didn’t reply, but should have, “Yes, but no thanks to you!”

Not that I begrudge good Christian people a share of the spoils. If you weren’t in the fight, you’ve probably got energy enough to mop up the battlefield and tend to the wounds, even if you can’t reattach body parts. The gospel requires us to tenderly care for the victims of this fight. And to put little store in some sort of vibe shift.

If the progressive vision of the future was, in Mark Sayers’ term, “the kingdom without the king”, then do we really want a conservative vision of the future that is “Christendom without Christ”?  Surely not.

Schadenfreude

Yet the ideologues have brought this upon themselves. What was the woke Left’s response in the past to calls from their opponents for a proper debate about this matter? Harassment, threats, pulling of books off shelves, Stonewall, doxxing, isolating, vexatious legal claims, job-loss threats, that’s what. And the list goes on.

The woke Left was not willing to bring its arguments into the public square to be debated. Ever. As far as it was concerned, the debate was over. And you were over, indeed you were on the wrong side of history, if you demurred. Well, as it turns out, history seems more multi-sided than the Left presupposed. And that’s where the Schadenfreude has kicked in. Let’s give as good as we got!

But here’s my point. Rather than that, let the debate begin! Because rust never sleeps. It must be treated. If we are going to cut out rust, then just suppressing it is not the solution. The so-called “woke Right” is a waste of time. And the reason it’s a waste of time is that power will once again shift away from it. I know, I know, it’s heady days for some, and I don’t want to be the Eeyore who spoils your party, but that’s how these things work.

I am confident enough in the orthodox view of humanity, indeed the biblical vision of what it means to be male and female, and why that matters, to bring that argument even into the secular space and argue it. Bring me your “woke Left” and let’s battle out the ideas in the light of day.

I have no qualms that what I hold to correlates to reality. And I have no qualms that what radical gender ideologues hold to does not.  No need to be “woke Right” when basic biology, human interactions, and history itself are strong indicators that you are probably headed in the right direction (notice how cautious I was there? How humble my epistemology? I’ve taught myself to do that over the past decade).

But the cut and thrust of public debate was never what the woke Left wanted. So ingrained as an ideology was the trans agenda that to even countenance a counter-argument was to commit heresy.  And now they are paying the price. The vibe shift has left them out in the cold, and those who never once wished to argue with their opponents are suddenly finding themselves hoist on their own petard.

Is that a good thing? Not really. I’m all for public debate about such matters, as I’ve said. There’s nothing “woke Right” about me.  Never has been. The pendulum could swing the other way. I remember reading about how, when the Taliban originally lost Afghanistan a decade or so ago, they were running around begging for mercy from Afghan troops that they had shown no mercy to.  Schadenfreude kicked in real deep that day.

And here we are Talibaning all over again. Swings and roundabouts.

So the cultural Talibanistas of the Left will most likely be back. Badder than ever.  That doesn’t mean we should not put a proverbial sword to their necks.It’s not simply that bad ideas don’t work, it’s the case that bad ideas hurt people. And a lot of people have been hurt by this particularly pernicious ideology that has been so compelling to so many confused young people looking for meaning and purpose and a stable identity.

But the Trumpian/vibe-shift air cover that has been given to the traditional view of human identity (and yes, it is the traditional view held across time and space), needs to do some deep surgical work in the community to cut out the cancer.

It needs to do some painful scraping of ideas from the halls of our institutions, and it needs to do so with deep argument, clear legislation, a scientific rigour backed up by actual data and not ideological hear-say dressed up a such, and a certain level of empathy. Yes we need to care for those who are gender-confused. But we don’t need to pander to an ideology that will parasite off the back of this confusion

Which means that whatever is done in the coming years will need a cold-eyed reality that is both restorative and reconstructionist. Because rust never sleeps.