When I was in college, there was an incident involving my fraternity that required the members of our executive board to give statements to the dean’s office — the issue was serious, but did not directly involve members of the executive board. However, as representatives of the chapter, the executive board members are the ones who have to account for the chapter if something happens. I was the Vice President of the fraternity at the time and so I was one of the members asked to do so. The other members of the executive board were asked to give verbal statements to the dean’s office in-person, but for some reason I was asked to submit a written statement via email.
Weird.
When the incident happened, I was the one to call the police so I thought that perhaps they needed something more concrete from me than from the others. However, I didn’t really want to be the only person with a written statement about this connected to my name — it just didn’t seem smart or necessary — so I asked why I needed to provide my statement in writing. The answer was something completely unexpected and totally absurd: The dean’s office couldn’t figure out which Alex Jimenez I was. Apparently there were five Alex Jimenez at the school at the time.
Now, my whole life I’ve always gotten surprised looks from people when they hear my last name for the first time because I’m a white dude. I’ve never met another white Alex Jimenez, and I guess neither have they. I get this especially from Latin American people, and not in a bad way. It’s usually a funny thing and we laugh about it.
But in this case, it wasn’t a funny thing, because this was a serious incident. I wrote an email back to the dean’s office asking them if they’d possibly checked whether any of the other four Alex Jimenez were white guys, and more specifically whether they happened to be the one registered to our fraternity. Maybe, with the combined evidence of my student ID number, matched to my fraternity membership as reported to the college, matched to my student ID photo, matched to my fraternity member photo they might just be able to confirm that I was the right Alex Jimenez to provide an in-person statement. Moreover, how would a written statement be a better way to identify me than showing up in-person?
I didn’t get a response from them after that, and I never provided any form of statement either. In my time at college I’d realized that in the entirety of a public university’s administrative staff there are probably only 3 smart or helpful people on the payroll. Obviously, they weren’t involved in the great Alex Jimenez manhunt of 2013 and I wasn’t interested in meeting them.
In the last two decades, the concept of identity transformed into a sizzling political battlefront. If you are on the right, identity is a core component of a functioning society. It sets apart upstanding people from vagrants and criminals. It gives you a reason to have a stake in the world and treat other people with respect. What you do and when can be traced back to you. If you are on the left (which means the Democrat party, mainstream media, most university staff, virtually every activist group, Hollywood, and virtually all federal bureaucrats), identity is something that you question and explore. It changes with any new movement, or doesn’t even have a concrete foundation in the first place.
My experience in college has stuck with me as a simple illustration of how important your identity is. A major university isn’t really that big of a place. It only has a couple thousand people to keep track of. It’s even supposedly run by smart people. But with all those advantages, it still couldn’t be sure who was who — and the people who lose out are the ones lost in the shuffle. Therefor I’m very interested in why the American left has aggressively dismantled the idea of every person having a firmly-grounded identity.
For as long as the Democrat party has existed it has wanted to tamper with elections by redefining or non-defining who and what people are. The key to the tactic is redefining a person’s identity in a way that lets Democrats get the power they want without needing the consent of that person.
Foremost is slavery and later, Jim Crow. The Democrats prevented black Americans from voting or having any rights by defining them first as non-human, then as second-class. The modern left’s go-to attack against the American founding is to say that the Three-Fifths Compromise was enshrining blacks as only 3/5ths of a human, but that was never the vision of anyone involved — let alone the proto-Democrats of the time. They wanted blacks to count as a whole person only for apportioning congressional seats, but it’s comical to pretend that they wanted to give blacks even 3/5ths of their human dignity or civil rights beyond that. Like the Nazis later who branded Jews with a serial number, the only identity they cared about as far as blacks were concerned was a number on a paper that would give them power.
The left has cheated elections in other ways that are more relatable to modern times — by simply making it hard to say who is who. In the late 1800’s there was a common phrase among Democrat organizers: “A bearded man is good for four votes.” He could show up with a beard to vote, come back latter with mutton chops, again with a mustache, and finally clean-shaven. With poll workers on the take who wouldn’t question it, this was a superb way to drum up fake votes and virtually impossible to check with pre-digital technology.
In 2020, the Democrats in multiple states changed election procedures via Democrat-appointed Secretaries of State, in violation of Article II of the Constitution, in order to favor looser means of verifying voter legitimacy. They allowed earlier voting, later voting, later counting, harvested ballots, selectively corrected erroneous ballots for Democrat voters only, separated ballots from their certified envelopes, removed signature matching procedures, removed signature requirements, and failed (more likely, refused) to segregate late mail-in ballots for the purpose of auditing even when ordered to by the U.S. Supreme Court. All of these actions physically destroyed any paper trail that would allow the identity of voters to be verified. Again, once the means of power were attained, the identities and rights of the voters were superfluous or worse, incriminating.
The Democrats and the leftwing as a whole are ardently against voter I.D. laws despite repeated proof that access to various proofs of identity are easily acquired and that there is no large community of legitimate voters who lack it. The left says that voter I.D. is racist — but they skim over their own history. It was the Democrats preventing blacks from entering polling centers. Access to voter I.D. and the ability to assert one’s God-given rights was a major moment of enfranchisement for blacks and a major setback for Democrats. In truth, Democrats are against voter I.D. because requiring verification reduces the opportunities to pass fraudulent ballots and makes it possible to perform an audit.
Finally, the left has championed the illegal immigrant in the United States for half a century. Programs like Motor-Voter ensure that any illegal immigrant can not only endanger people on the road, but endanger America’s future at the ballot box. Why do you think they want illegals registered to vote? Are you buying the left’s lines about human dignity and representation? Does that track with their history of human abuse? Grow up. They want illegal immigrants to vote because the Democrats completely control an entirely manufactured system for identifying them. Is this Alonso Gutierrez? Yes. Well what about that guy? Oh that’s also Alonso Gutierrez. Who can audit 11-to-30 million illegal voters in a timely manner? Nobody.
That the left is obsessed with identity in the pragmatic sense of cheating elections probably surprises no one — but that’s only the most direct reason and actually the least sinister.
You’ve heard this phrase too much lately: “As a (insert gender identity) of color,” or sometimes “As a (insert gender identity) of (insert racial origin)” usually preceding some opinion that absolutely didn’t require those qualifications. We’re getting lines like this from indignant strangers, politicians, activists, people who are losing arguments and need to activate some aura points, etc. We’ve never been so obsessed with ridiculous group identities as we are now. All of it promoted in recent years (particularly since the Obama administration) by the left.
Nobody seems to follow the maxim anymore, “I think, therefor I am.”
What the leftwing philosophy says is that these various intersectional group identities help to ground and center a person by taking into account cultural issues associated with those group identities. In other words, a black person will always understand a black person better than a white person, etc. In reality, these group identities serve to obscure anyone’s sense of their own unique personal identity. What if you don’t agree with some leftist maxim? Well then, as Biden said: “You ain’t black.” Victims of that worldview know their race — or what they’ve been told to believe about their race — better than they know themselves. Consequently, people hoodwinked into leftwing identity politics are forced to confront and doubt their sense of who they are on a daily basis and that leaves them constantly adrift, open to manipulation.
On the other hand, group identity is infinitely fluid. Even something seemingly concrete like an ethnic background can be handily maneuvered to your own advantage or to an opponent’s disadvantage. Kamala Harris is a great example. When she was merely a California bureaucrat, there was nothing special about her at all being a black woman in any of the offices she held — been there, done that. But being a woman of Indian descent was new and useful at the time, so she was Indian. Then she shed her Indian heritage at the national stage, where being the first Black Female Vice-President was a lot more impressive than the first Indian Female Vice-President. Michelle Obama obviously hadn’t gotten the memo when she congratulated Harris after voting day in 2020 for being the first Black-Indian, Woman Vice President. I’m sure that if Harris, or virtually anyone, takes a DNA test you’ll find a whole pantry full of useful ethnic identities to lean on in times of need when your own moral character isn’t particularly great.
That’s the whole problem though. The left’s conception of identity only allows for two kinds of people: the morally bereft chameleons who can be whatever they need to be to get power, and the confused masses in constant doubt of who they should be to get along. Neither group is a good foundation for a moral society because neither group has a solid stake in doing what is just, fair, responsible, brave, compassionate or being any other definition of a good person.
It gets even worse with gender identity. For all the same reasons that inventing racial intersectionality creates a fractured sense of self-identity, inventing fictitious genders wreaks havoc on young people today. Particularly for those who go on to suffer mutilation in the name of “non-conformist” gender identity. Those cases are truly tragic, and that topic in and of itself is so repugnant that I find it hard to write or think about. But thankfully, I’m not even talking about that effect of the gender identity movement on the left.
What I’m talking about is the impact that the left’s gender identity farce has on people looking to find a partner. Finding a partner is a sure way of finding yourself. There are many reasons to be unsure of who you want to be that are more legitimate than your race or gender, but a person who is at least not hung up on that garbage can hope to find someone who compliments them. In doing so, people usually get a stronger sense of self either because their partner acts as a mirror or barometer they can depend on, or because their partner directly supports them in those areas where they feel unsure. And vice-versa.
A person who can’t settle on whether they are pan-sexual, demi-sexual, thinks they are a woman even though they’ve got a penis, and who breaks out into Deconstructionist tirades whenever X and Y chromosomes are mentioned is not finding a supportive partner. They can’t even know who they are looking for, as they haven’t got even a marginally-fixed sense of self. But they can be told what to do and how to identify during times of political need — aren’t you ever surprised people who are so mentally, emotionally, and morally destabilized that they can’t pick a gender (out of two options) can still show up in matching outfits at the right time and place for a political protest?
Well now you know why. And the scary thing is how complacent everyone is becoming about the integrity of their personal identity. Not just leftwing believers, but even regular people tend to be more concerned about insults to racial or gender identities than insults to personal identities. The entirety of the Social Security Administration’s database was recently compromised. It made the news for a day or so and virtually nobody is talking about that. In contrast, if you insult Black Lives Matter, and you’re likely to get 90 days of riots for it.
All of this is to say that through any variety of means, and probably more to come, the left’s attack on personal identity has been an attack on the American Identity. Individualism is baked into the ethos of the American experiment. In America you are supposed to be able, willing, and wanting to stand for yourself. But the founders knew that there still needed to be certain common traits that supported the flourishing of a society filled with good people. Superfluous connections like race and gender were not the kind of bonds that provided individuals with a strong moral compass. God, and love of country do provide that compass.
The founders believed that every man has a God-given sphere of liberty around him and that it served a few beneficial purposes. It gives everyone a sphere within which to define themselves individually — it is the anathema to group identity. There is always an extent to which only you can know yourself. Also, you cannot and should not try to violate another’s sphere. That social contract and minimum separation of individuals makes it possible (actually, necessary) to understand one another person-to-person and form symbiotic bonds far more significant than some post-modern professor’s version of group identity. Incidentally, it also means that people are hard to control, because their identity is discrete, concrete, and self-imposed.
So this ultimately is why identity must be destroyed as a concept. The left cannot abide a world of self-determined individuals, nor a world where the receipts of one’s actions can be traced back to them. They need a world where no individual really knows where they end and the group begins. To that end, their fight against identity is a lot more than about elections. It’s about the death of individual identity itself as a means of killing the American Identity for good. And just imagine how hard it will be to unravel those effects in a nation of 400 million people when your typical college can’t even sort out five people with matching names.