Call Him Daddy! Doug Wilson and Bulverism

Within the left-right paradigm, one of the recurrent themes is that the Right understands the Left whereas the Left fails to understand the Right. To a fault, media pundits on the Right have dissected the Left’s positions to “own the libs.” Meanwhile, Obergefell proved that the Left could win by calling their opponents ists and phobes, and of course, Nazis, so they never actually needed to understand the arguments of their opposition. They controlled the media, academia, corporate America, and most other institutions, so why would they need to learn their opposition when they could simply weaponize their institutions against them?

This same phenomenon is demonstrated in the ongoing Woke Wars II between the camp of Joel Webbon and the Christian Nationalists against Doug Wilson and James White. Despite a leaked two-hour conversation between Tobias and Joel, the latter refuse to concede that they slandered Webbon, instead doubling down with the embarrassment called The Antioch Declaration. As the CN camp embraces Reformed political theology, classical anthropology, and political theory, the latter has derided these attempts as worldly. White particularly took issue with Aristotle’s lack of “Christian anthropology,” despite the truth that all political science has its origins in Aristotle’s three (or six) forms of government, but Aristotle is objectionable because he rightly acknowledges that a nation is a people and place. Prior to the 20^th century, it was a self-evident truth, both within the Christians and Pagans, that a nation was a people and a place, or blood and soil. Because “blood and soil” is a phrase associated with the Third Reich, this means the underlying truth must be ignored because the Austrian Painter said the same thing.

At the core of this conflict is what is commonly called the Post-War Consensus, which makes WW2 the defining event in our shared history which is then used to advance globalist liberal democracy. As institutions start to fail and immigration becomes the foremost political issue across the West, this ideological system is collapsing upon itself, which is why Christian Nationalism has arisen as an alternative, amongst other systems among Christians.

Where Doug Wilson grievously errs is that he fails to actually listen to his opponents; instead castigating their motives via conjecture, especially when the subject of the Jewish Question arises. Last year, in a sit-down with Andrew Isker, Doug Wilson argued that people despise Jews because they are a “high performance people” and since they are successful, they are the subject of much envy from those who are unsuccessful. Andrew Iskar casually and poignantly retorted, “What if it’s not envy?”

While the “high performance people” is an overstatement, Wilson ascribes envy out of conjecture, not evidence. The JQ is not the result of envy, but pattern recognition over behaviors that are exhibited by Jews relative to the society which they dwell within. People see that one group is responsible for pushing every form of degeneracy while being at the foundation of various ideologies, and there is hardly a shortage of video testimony where members of this group talk about it. Rather than acknowledge Isker’s arguments, Wilson has largely doubled down on this fallacious strategy to argue against noticing.

In response to the poor reception of the Antioch Declaration, Wilson blamed anger and fatherlessness:

A lot of people see that the anger of young men on the right is something that is driven by fatherlessness. They are an army of orphan soldiers, armed and ready to fight the commies, which is good. The problem is that they are spiritually 12-year-olds, and their generals are 14-year-olds. The Revoice for Nazis approach sees all of this, and desperately wants to help. But here is the problem. These young men do need a dad, which is why it is so sad to see them offered the comfort of a mom.

The generation of fatherless men is largely a trope that manifested in the movie Fight Club, but in the context of internet culture, this is entirely conjecture. The Anons on the internet are ordinary people, many of them successful in their daily lives with families of their own. Sure, there are terminally online anons that have no life outside the internet; but regardless, Wilson is creating a strawman rather than addressing a steelman.

C.S. Lewis called this Bulverism:

You must show that a man is wrong before you start explaining why he is wrong. The modern method is to assume without discussion that he is wrong and then distract his attention from this (the only real issue) by busily explaining how he became so silly. In the course of the last fifteen years I have found this vice so common that I have had to invent a name for it. I call it “Bulverism”.

Essentially, Wilson is psychologizing fatherlessness as to why young men are angry, which both assumes that they are angry and that they lack fathers; therefore, they are wrong about issues pertaining to the PWC, the Antioch Declaration, Aristotle, JQ. etc., so they need to “sit down and shut up” and listen to the voices of Doug and James. Rather than address their actual arguments, he accuses them of being wrong because they, in his eyes, are fatherless and angry. Ironically, Doug Wilson could learn much about Bulverism from Wade Stott, who under the Canon banner released a video on this very fallacy. Stott is probably the only person in the Moscow camp who understands political theory while packaging it in a short-form, digestible format.

The left does this all the time where they label the right as Nazis or more recently, Incels. The latter insult was more ironically used, as they called JD Vance, a father, and Elon Musk, a billionaire lady-killer, both incels. The basic argument is that because they lack success with women, they lash out at the world, even though neither lacks success either in the world or with women.

Doug Wilson is inserting himself to be the father to the fatherless men out there, much like a Christian Jordan Peterson, yet he assigns for himself a right he has not earned. He assumes their motives, their immaturity, and even their ages—as many of these anons are fathers with children. Many of these anons are probably better adherents to the Westminster Confession of Faith than Wilson.

Much of this debate is over the Stone Choir podcast and its host, Corey Mahler. Now, are there legitimate concerns over Mahler’s beliefs? Yes. Mahler is wrong on certain aspects of race and often limits the use of Nation to strictly ethos, which reflects a deficient understanding in categories of nations.  But the reason people go to Mahler is because he is willing to touch subject deemed taboo by the likes of Wilson and White—the subjects that these men would ascribe motives of envy, hatred, and anger, for even confronting. Much like Rogan, Mahler is willing to have real conversations.

Throughout the last century, great men have noticed, from Walt Disney, GK Chesterton, Richard Nixon, Howard Hughes, Winston Churchill, Henry Ford, Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, and even Billy Graham. Were they all angry, envious, fatherless men? Elon Musk is a combination of Hughes and Ford, and he too is a noticer. Strange how brilliant, successful people are noticers. Must be a coincidence.

Failure to address actual issues with seriousness will only push people to podcasts like Stone Choir.

The Moscow LARP

Doug Wilson was famous for his serrated edge, but it is only permissible when he uses it. “White Boy Summer is gay,” so one must take up No Quarter November instead. James White notices issues in the Black community, but one cannot notice issues with the Jews. In the end, they are castigating their very audiences who supported them over the years. There is a variety of cynical motives that could be at play, but regardless, there seems to be a coordinated effort to gatekeep within Christian spheres. Perhaps this is to maintain access to certain circles, like Con Inc., where Wilson has been recently platformed.

It is no small irony that the Boomer generation is accused of pulling the economic ladder up behind them, which is to say they are actively denying subsequent generations the privileges they enjoyed. They do not want voices like Webbon, Isker, or Sauve to rise. Thus, they echo the leftist rhetoric using Bulverism, woke right, and Wilson’s personal descriptor, “Revoice for Nazi” rather than arguments. The latter is especially ironic coming from the man who, contrary to the Westminster Confession, denied that homosexual desires are sin.

Doug Wilson was always a pioneer, perhaps to a fault, but he established Moscow as a force within the church. He built up a loyal following and a media alternative to Big Eva. It was quite commendable that Moscow took a bold stance on Covid at a time when much of the church was rife with cowardice. But as time went on, the Moscow Mood devolved into the Moscow LARP.