In which our regular writers toss around subjects a little more volatile than usual.
In this four minute YouTube video on the subject of gender, race and identity, Douglas Murray has a word to the wise about Google, Facebook and Twitter: Big Social is actively trying to change how you think about these issues through a variety of means, including the results you see when you use a search engine online. Spoiler alert: corporations do not have your best interests at heart.
Tom: It’s rarely an effective strategy to announce to your audience, “Here’s a big plateful of tedious propaganda. Chow down.” Our would-be societal engineers are a little smarter than that, aren’t they, IC?
Politically Corrected Search Results
Immanuel Can: Yes, they are quite devious. Just for those who don’t want to click on the link and watch the video, maybe you should briefly outline a couple of examples of what they’re actually doing, Tom.
Tom: Well, there’s quite a list. On YouTube, Facebook or Twitter, they’ll tell you certain words will get you banned, but the list of things they are actually banning is much broader than the list they publish. YouTube will make certain users invisible to people who might be interested in what they are producing while hotly denying they are doing it. Where Google is concerned, its search engine does not actually represent legitimate results. They are the adjusted, politically corrected results. Their algorithms or their human staff look at what you are searching and use it to decide what sort of lecture you need to be given about the world.
Did you want more specifics?
IC: No, I think that gives us the flavor of what they’re doing.
Things to be Normalized
What’s the problem here for Christians, as you see it, Tom?
Tom: I guess whether we see it as a problem for Christians depends on whether we are okay with being manipulated, and okay with having our children’s thinking about the world manipulated. Are we comfortable with the deliberate promotion of interracial relationships as the dominant form of romantic self-expression, or with the attempt to normalize sexual deviancy? Those may seem like two very separate issues, and ones on which Christians may legitimately hold quite different positions, but I suspect it’s worth asking why Big Social would be pushing both these lifestyle choices (and others) at the same time. Because they are certainly doing it; that seems beyond question.
IC: Yes, they definitely have an agenda of some kind, and it does seem to involve particular sexual preferences. However, it seems to me that long ago many Christians have given up trying to control television, the internet, video games and cell phones in their children’s lives. It was just too demanding a thing to do — to have the stuff, and yet to be continually saying no to parts of it, while their children object. They could have eliminated some of the technology altogether, but they seem to have bought into the line that kids won’t be “prepared for the real world” if they don’t have unrestricted access; and this means, in practice, that the world is simply allowed to say whatever it wants in our children’s ears, while we are not around to hear it.
Misleading and Indoctrinating
We might say that Christians have made that choice: the fight, or the selectivity about technology, is not worth it to them. Given that that is the baseline, what is to be done now?
Tom: Valid point. I suppose it is still worth pointing out what is happening if it makes some Christians more alert to how they are being programmed. There are more than a few evangelicals who associate the slightest reluctance to wholeheartedly embrace the globalist agenda with white supremacy. Sorry folks; the issue is not that simple and binary.
IC: No, it’s not. And I think something else worth thinking about for Christians is that there is an active campaign to mislead the public and indoctrinate children being conducted not merely by content providers but from the “unseen hands”, the organizers and classifiers behind our so-called “neutral” web information. The days when you could sit back and just trust media to be impartial and “out there in the public interest” are long gone.
Consequently, an aware Christian must be much more vigorous about educating himself and his children in sound doctrine, or else we will simply find we, and the next generation, are swept up in this propaganda wave. Either get smart or you’ll go under. There’s no other choice now.
Try Googling “White Couple” ...
Tom: Since this is our forum for dealing with edgy topics, let’s talk about race a little bit. Murray points out that when you search Google Images for “white couple”, the results will probably surprise you. I experimented with it this morning just for fun.
Of my first 100 pictorial results, I got 34 (arguably) white couples, 27 interracial couples, five black couples and a bunch of results that weren’t couples at all but had the word “couples” in the caption. So maybe Google’s algorithm is just not very good, right? Wrong. I googled “black couples” and it nailed 96 of the first 100 results bang on. This has been happening for several years now. Google is obviously aware of it. Murray not unreasonably concludes it is deliberate. Google’s algorithm produces the results Google wishes you to see.
Back in the real world, interracial couples made up 10.2% of the U.S. population as of 2016. What possible reason would Google have for wanting us to think they are more than four times more common than they really are? Why not have a comparable percentage of interracial pairings show up when you search for non-white couples?
IC: One of the great sacred cows of the Left is “diversity”. They always say, “Diversity is our strength.” It’s a funny saying, though. “Diversity” only really means “things with differences”. What is it about a bunch of different things that actually produces strength? Things that are diverse from each other tend to be poorly fused together, like iron mixed with clay. Fissures develop along the joints between them, and they tend to break apart again.
Reflecting vs. Transforming
Now, I’m not saying having a mixture of couples is a bad idea. I’m just saying it’s not a panacea, a miracle solution for society’s ills. In some cases, it may turn out to be okay, but it may also maximize the tendency of a society to fracture; and in fact, more often the latter than the former. But for some reason, the ideologues at Google appear to think they’re doing a favor to society by influencing people at the subconscious level to tend toward diversity, for no other reason than that it is diverse — and as the Left is obsessed with the “race” issue, that is the form their idea of “diversity” has taken. Well, that, and sexual “diversity”.
Tom: Like all very effective lies, it sells itself to gullible people because it contains so much truth. It presents things the way we would really like them to be. Who wouldn’t like to think we can all just “get along”? I’ve seen a number of successful marriages between people of different races, particularly Christians. I’ve also seen statistics that show exactly how unlikely Google’s favorite pairings are. 11% of whites are currently interracially married, not 44% as Google’s search engine strongly implies, and the vast majority are the fairly successful white male/Asian female combination, not the much rarer black male/white female combination or the exceedingly rare white male/black female combo Google tells us is all but ubiquitous.
IC: They’re not so much interested in how society DOES look as they are in how it SHOULD look, according to their own ideology. In other words, they’re not reflecting the world back to you; they’re distorting it and trying to manipulate it.
Numbers That Don’t Add Up
Tom: Right. As you say, there is nothing scripturally wrong with intermarriage, except of course Christians intermarrying with nonbelievers. But marriage is difficult even where couples have minimal cultural differences and default preferences to overcome, and much more difficult as those differences increase.
Currently, the divorce rate is 10% higher for interracial couples than non-mixed, and remember, that’s with most intermarriage occurring between people of different races who have lived in the same society for their whole lives. Start to add in marriages between legacy North Americans and first generation migrants from all over the third world, and you increase your difficulty of success incrementally. Add in regular attempts by groups like #BlackLivesMatter to maximize racial divisions in North America, and you increase it even further.
IC: Yes, I’ve seen that: couples in which the partner of color is so obsessed with the thought of being “of color” that he/she cannot believe that the world isn’t busy hating him/her, and can’t even really believe the other partner could possibly love him/her. The Left’s increasing of the victim-of-racism narrative makes such marriages much more disrupted and troubled than they ought to be; which is ironic, because the Left is pretending to be all in favor of them. What they should really do, if they want racial animosity to disappear, is take the advice offered by actor Morgan Freeman and just stop talking about it, circulating it and reinforcing the sense of hostility and grievance. Nowadays, the Left is making most of the problem themselves.
What Works and Why
Tom: Very true. Now, none of this is to say to Christians, “Don’t marry someone from another race.” But if you do, you need to both be aware of the inevitable potential areas of conflict and prepared to commit yourself to the Lord to overcome them. What you don’t need is to enter into such a marriage with your eyes shut to the difficulty of the task you are attempting because Google’s social programmers are telling you your world is chock full of happily married mixed-race couples. It just ain’t so.
IC: I know several so-called “mixed” Christian couples who just couldn’t care that they’re “mixed”. And they’re the happiest I know. I don’t think that’s coincidental. The more one obsesses about one’s physical particularities, the unhappier one is bound to become. If modern media has shown us anything, that is surely it. The Lord doesn’t care about “historical grievances”: neither should we.
Tom: I agree. But I suspect those marriages work not because husband and wife share a philosophical outlook that historical racial grievances and cultural distinctions should be blissfully ignored, but because they are both pledged to serve a higher cause, one which eclipses such concerns entirely. Only the Christian faith has the Spirit-given power to consistently and successfully break down racial barriers.
IC: Oh, absolutely. It’s more than the absence of prejudice and grievance; that’s just the negation of a bad thing, not a positive good. Rather, it’s the positive presence of a spiritual commitment that makes race completely irrelevant to the couple.
Marketing Change
Tom: As for the general population, Google can “re-educate” them all it wants, but race will always remain a powerful source of division. In the natural world, God designed it that way, and we are foolish to try to overcome those differences with nothing more than human effort. States who thought they had successfully integrated particular ethnic subgroups repeatedly find these same citizens suddenly radicalized in the next generation. Ask the Roman Empire about it. And Google knows this. Why do you think when you google “black couple” or “Chinese couple”, you get precisely what you’re asking for? It’s because the notion that people of all cultures are basically interchangeable under the skin can only be successfully marketed to liberal whites. They’re not even attempting to try it on anyone else.
IC: Right. Ironically, the vast majority of “social justice” Leftists are economically-privileged, white people. Meanwhile, the people they claim to be acting for, the “oppressed”, are far more conservative politically than the white liberals, and on the average, do not want the white Left to be speaking for them.
Tom: In the absence of hard evidence about motive, it would be foolish to speculate in great detail about exactly why Google and the other social media monopolies are doing what they are doing. Still, it is pretty hard to miss the fact that conditioning a mostly-white population to embrace mass-intermarriage with other races fits very well with the philosophy of open borders, free trade and a global government, which necessarily involves the movement of employable bodies across traditional dividing lines. And globalism is something all Christians should recognize as dangerous and opposed to God’s order. The Tower of Babel has taught us that lesson at least, I hope.
Deviancy and Its Implications
IC: It’s not just their racism. It’s their complete devotion to sexual deviancy. What do you think is driving that, Tom?
Tom: I’ve thought about that a lot, and I can’t say yet with confidence. One suggestion I’ve heard is that sexual deviancy breaks down the family unit, which is another anticipated source of resistance to globalist fascism. A fragmented, individualistic, isolated society is a controllable society. Instead of depending on others, people have to look to their government for everything, and can be managed more easily because they have become dependents of the State. There may be something to that. Or it may just be that people who are actively anti-God in their politics are actively anti-God in their personal choices too. Which is chicken and which is egg there I’m not sure.
IC: I’m convinced it’s primarily personal. The people who support this are just wanting to say, “Whatever I want to do, I have to be allowed to do. I never want to have to have a conscience about anything, and I won’t let anybody restrict my options.” So anything that puts any guidelines around sexuality is pegged immediately as discriminatory and evil. But they word their selfish desire in terms of defense of universal freedoms, because that sells way, way better than open amorality. And in this process, they don’t care whom they hurt — families can all be fractured, pornography can run rampant, prostitution can become common and approved, men, women and children can be enslaved and debased, and even entire destruction of the body and of society itself can be celebrated as evidence of freedom … so long as we can do whatever we, personally, want to do, without conscience.
Personal and Political
Tom: For the Leftist, the personal is always political. If some policy doesn’t suit them personally, it’s oppressive and needs changing, and therefore everyone who opposes those changes is the enemy and may need to be exterminated.
IC: Well, that axiom, “the personal is the political” is even more insidious than that, Tom. It doesn’t just mean that what they personally want should be achieved politically; it means that everything that you personally do — your entire private life — is the subject of their political scrutiny and regulation — so that you cannot even say “That’s private” anymore. And you can’t even hold a private opinion against what they believe, or practice personally your freedom not to participate in their political projects. Nope, everything you thought was your private concern they now claim is their business, because it has political implications, they say.
Yikes.
Tom: Agreed. But my point is that for the Leftist there is no relevant distinction to be made between the two arenas. Christians don’t have to think like that. Not at all. We can distinguish the macro from the micro, if I can put it that way. We can genuinely cherish our immigrant neighbors while voting against open borders and their tremendous destructive potential. We can recognize the value of gays, lesbians and transgender people as human beings in need of a personal relationship with Jesus Christ while opposing laws that allow them access to minor children and the right to tell the democratic majority how we must live. There is no inconsistency there.
IC: No, none. And we take our cue from Christ, from the overriding fact of the value of every individual person to God, not from the point of view of advancing our own political advantages or maximizing our own sexual opportunities.
The Only Cure
But we’ve got to be careful, because it’s clear that these massively influential internet media companies are not on that wavelength. They’re here to sway both us and our children, and to turn us into tools for their social reconstruction ambitions.
Once again, the only cure for this is listening to the word of God. There are more and more voices out there persuading us contrary to that. We need to be more deliberate than ever about comparing those messages with God’s truth. And we can only do that if we really know God’s truth.
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