Here is an extraordinary — and I mean that emphatically — essay by an Australian named Edie Wyatt, writing in Quillette: “My White Privilege Didn’t Save Me. But God Did.”  Wyatt wrote this to object to something the Quillette editor, Claire Lehmann, wrote. It was good of Lehmann to publish the Wyatt essay, which starts like this:

Following the furore over Netflix’s Cuties movie in the fall, Quillette editor-in-chief Claire Lehmann tweeted that the creepy conservative obsession with paedophilia is as bizarre as the feminist obsession with rape. I took umbrage, and noted my annoyance—though I knew what she meant. Sexual violence, particularly toward children, is becoming more of a marginal topic. Rape, while a serious problem in every society, has been in historic decline in the west.

I am not naturally conservative, and I do not exhibit the required antagonism toward men to qualify me as a decent feminist. But in the area of sex, rape, and paedophilia, I am unable to separate my politics from what is fashionably called my “lived experience.” As a young girl, I was raped, as were other members of my family (not all of them female). It was only in my reaction to this tweet that I started to think of how those experiences, and the circumstances that surrounded them, shaped my politics.

My experience is not uncommon among those who share my socioeconomic background. I will spare readers most of the unpalatable details. But suffice to say I had a childhood marked by constant fear—of sleepless nights spent keeping watch.

The abuse started when I was about six. When I was about 10 (by my recollection), the abuser moved away, and no longer had access to my home. I then had a few years of peace. I might have used that interregnum to ask my parents for help, had they been more approachable.

The life she had as a child was horrific, as she details. No one protected her or her cousins. Unsurprisingly, as a teenager, Wyatt acted out in very destructive ways. Somehow, she got into university. More:

You won’t find it surprising to learn that I related easily to Marxist ideology. I liked the idea that my oppression was systemic, that I was marked for suffering before I was born, and that I was a victim of it. If this was all true, then the path to justice was corporate and institutional, rather than the terrifying path of facing my own issues as a powerless individual.

By the time I was 20, my mental health was deteriorating, and what was left of my family was falling apart. Following the suicide of her brother, Nicky showed signs of serious emotional instability. Neither of us knew she was also experiencing early signs of Huntington’s disease. I will always remember the sorrow and frustration in her face when she turned to me one day and said, “no matter how hard I try, I just can’t seem to get myself together.” We’d always dreamed of escaping our torturous childhoods amid the freedom and possibilities of adulthood. The reality was different.

Under the belief (delusional, as it turned out) that the problem was rooted in my drug and alcohol use, I gave up both. Unfortunately, without that self-medication, I found myself face to face with the underlying pain and paralysing fear. One night, I collapsed on the floor, crying and in such physical pain that I could barely move. I picked up a Bible and read a passage from 2 Corinthians 5—Awaiting the New Body—that left me completely undone.

Not long after, I walked into a suburban Baptist church, full of strange, unfashionably dressed, conservative Christians. I was a Marxist, a feminist, foul-mouthed, a chain-smoker, and desperate. The love I received in that place is the reason that I will defend the rights of fundamentalist Christians to my dying breath. They were the kindest people I’d ever known. They loved me, on principle, and in doing so saved my life.

People who advocate for a world without religion have no idea what it is like to find the relief that I found at that time. My purpose here is not to describe my “Amazing Grace” moment, but to explain why I have no patience for militant atheists. In the face of my evangelical Christianity, progressives (mostly men) have called me every unholy thing imaginable—including, of all things, a paedophile apologist.

I went back to university, now into my second year, as a newly minted Christian. As I was no longer a Marxist, I lived in a world of cognitive dissonance. While pumping out essays about the patriarchy, the evils of capitalism, and the sinister influence of religion, I diligently studied my new faith.

Wyatt laments that the Left — the academic Left, anyway — has abandoned economics for culture war. More:

The postmodern re-engineering of left-wing political theory has included the redefinition of “privilege” in a way that is separate from economics, a definition of “sex” that is separate from biology, and a definition of “violence” that does not involve actual violence. It’s a language and a narrative that completely abandons the working class, while erroneously taking for granted our loyalty. Until recently, I have thought my objections with the new Left were the result of its ideological incoherence. But when I deal honestly with my reactions to issues of sexual violence, I can see that my politics has always come from a more personal place.

Australian Greens Senator Lidia Thorpe, who is Aboriginal, recently walked into parliament wielding the “black power” fist gesture, and carrying a stick with a notch for every aboriginal death in government custody. Ms. Thorpe declared she would be a voice for Australian Indigenous people. In Indigenous communities, sexual assault, domestic violence, and incest are epidemic. Yet thanks to the fashion for prison and police “abolition,” it now isn’t unusual to see left-wing activists effectively shield the men who rape and abuse women and children, instead of urging the protection of these victims.

My “white privilege” didn’t save me from childhood sexual abuse. Sexual violence almost killed me. It ruined my childhood, made me homeless, and left me with enduring scars. I can debate and theorize about politics as much as the next person. But ultimately, the politics of the modern Left is dominated by its fixation on power. And children have no power.

Read it all.

There’s so much more to this amazing essay. Wyatt blasts the “defund the police” progressives, saying that bad men who want to exploit the weak are always happy to see fewer police around. She goes on to say that her No. 1 concern is to protect women and children, and that “because of my experiences, and the newly fashionable denial of reality being promoted by progressives, I find myself sitting with the politically homeless.” I found this earlier essay by Edie Wyatt about feminism and tyranny; it’s straight fire. Excerpts:

Neo-Marxists, God bless them, have finally found some traction with intersectionality. Now those who remember the horrors of communism are largely gone, they have the opportunity to re-invent themselves to a naive generation. They do this by basing victimhood in concrete traits of races, gender and sexuality (instead of the proletariat which kept getting prosperous and leaving them). Intersectionality has the same narrative as classical Marxism, just redefined groups. Instead of victim-hood being ground in work, struggle and poverty, we see it ground in implicit bias, racism and misogyny.  Instead of problems of poverty and violence, we have people with hurt feelings, being undervalued, overlooked and discriminated against. Critically, instead of capitalism, they get to overthrow patriarchy, white supremacy and heteronormality. These seems like impotent aims with little chance of social change. I have been sitting back rolling my eyes, but now they are taking over governments, and they have my attention. Because they have realised that infiltrating the state, is far easier than overthrowing it.

Let me first look at the liberal understanding of rights. Liberalism, broadly, sees rights and obligations between individual and the state in terms of the “social contract”.  The balancing of individual rights of citizen to those it gives over to the state, to organise the society.  An example is the the right to bear arms. In the US, this is embedded in the constitution.  And it is a real thing.  Humans are violent creatures, and it is not an unreasonable argument to suggest they have an inalienable right to hold resources to defend themselves. In Australia we yield this right to the state. we do this collectively so the state can perform the responsibilities of protection on our behalf.  This means that those who want to bear arms, have a measure of deprivation of liberty. And I support this, because I believe yielding that right to the state does more good than harm. And the state is essentially good government in Australia.  Classic liberals believe that rights come at a cost of responsibility.  When we yield the right to the state we also yield the responsibility with that measure of liberty.  In this complicated equation, the more the state does for the individual, the less liberty the individual bears. There has been a tussle over the rights/responsibility and individual/state balance in the west for hundreds of years. One could argue we are pretty close to getting the balance right. Central here, are the doctrines of free will, individual autonomy and liberty.

The left often ignore the complexities of rights and responsibilities because they like to ignore our fundamental difference in ideology.  Marx himself did not believe in individual “rights” because he did not believe in the agency of the individual. Under Marxist ideology, the individual is motivated by social agency. For Marx, this was social class, and for the intersectionalists this is race, sexuality and gender.

More:

Women in the west have have become very free, largely because they have exercised agency and insisted on the broadening of citizenship rights to include them. Women have gained rights through free and open debate and no one was censored in this debate.  Women survived the hurt feelings.  Reject the narrative. ‘White’ and ‘male’ are not poisons to eradicate in western power, this is shit Marxist ideology.  White men largely build western greatness (they had help), and removing them is not a sane objective. Teaching our children this lie is very bad, and racist and sexist. I’d rather live under the patriarchy in a western liberal democracy, than come under the oppressive matriarchy of the pussy hat Stalinist.

Marx looked to a day when the proletariat ruled the world, he didn’t think that once they ruled, they would no longer be the proletariat.  That on the march to power, power itself would became the objective.  That the proletariat would hand their individual rights and power over to the collective in order to be handed starvation, tyranny and despair. Women if you use your collective power to submit to a Marxist doctrine aimed at the conquering of the western world, rather than the advocacy of women and girls, you may just find the cost to get there will destroy not only what it is to be a woman, but the greatness of our society as well. That if you hand your collective ‘rights’ over to have them enforced by the state, individual liberty itself is the only possible cost. Central to liberalism is being responsible for the rights we have, and holding them with a measure of dignity and respect. Ignore this, and you ignore the very foundation on which your liberty is based. I, for one will not be complicit in this nonsense.

Read it all. I look forward to hearing much more from Edie Wyatt. Oh, look, here’s one more, from her blog, about the political usage of whiteness in the mouths of the Left. Here’s an excerpt that will delight our faithful commenter Siarlys Jenkins:

I am an Australian white woman and I am descended from bastards, sluts, lunatics, thieves, criminals, working women and diseased women.  I know the life they lived was on land that had been solely occupied by Australian Indigenous people for ever. But what they were doing here in this city was not colonising, it wasn’t even complicity in colonisation, it was certainly not white supremacy, it was common or garden survival, and they didn’t even really do that very well.  Alongside them were Indigenous women also living brutal lives, with less opportunities, this I don’t wish to deny, my mother certainly didn’t deny it.  I owe these white women, my ancestors, my late sister and my late cousin everything, but I owe what are now being called women of colour (WOC) nothing, certainly not an apology, nor an explanation, mainly because they don’t exist.

WOC and “brown women” are political inventions in the same way that “white women” are. My mother considered herself a White Anglo Saxon Protestant (WASP).  She may have stolen this identity from the free settlers who’s ancestry she had adopted, but in her work ethic, her morality and her perspective she was correct.  WASP’s can in some way be considered a people because they have a belief system, a common ethnicity, a traceable history and a more or less common understanding of themselves as a group. I can talk about the crimes and gains of WASP women, but not today.  Today I want to say that “white women” can be a physical description, but the idea that they are a people group is ridiculous.  Polish women, French women and Russian woman are all white, but when they come to Australia they do not act with one agency. “Brown women” is even more ridiculous.  This is supposed to be fair Indians, Middle Eastern women, and mixed-race women, among others. The Middle East alone has several different races with different cultures, religions and languages. Are they to act with one agency when they come to Australia? Are they defined solely in their separateness from white people?  So, what are my children, who have a Lebanese father?  Are they white? Do they lose their Lebanese heritage?  Or do they abandon their Anglo Saxon heritage?  These are stupid questions that I refuse to address.

This is all bullshit.  It is all invented to pit us up against each other, to assign historical blame, privilege and victimhood in accordance with the subtle hue of skin.  It is part of the new left trend to deflect blame from the elite and situate it in the general working populations to divide them politically. I will not play, and I refuse to pretend that it is not deeply offensive to the people who have birthed me.  They can run this line that brown scars are causing my white lady tears as much as they like, but they do it to call me a white supremacist, and that’s pretty bad.

Read it all. I am thrilled to be discovering Edie Wyatt, thanks to Quillette. We need to hear voices like hers more often. A lot more often.

One thing I would like to see is liberals and conservatives — including feminists and Christians (Wyatt is both) — teaming up to dismantle porn corporations like Pornhub. If you missed Nick Kristof’s stunning NYT piece on Pornhub and what it does to children, read it here — but steady yourself, because he writes about stone cold evil.