The Exodus: Past, Present, and Future

The Passover Seder tells the story of Passover through three different time frames. We see the Exodus from the perspective of those who left Egypt, but also from the perspective of the Patriarchs and the Rabbis. This is essential for understanding the Seder as the Seder is designed to transcend time. It is not simply about commemorating an event that happened in late Bronze Age Egypt but connecting us to it.

As to be expected, the Seder talks a fair amount about the Exodus from Egypt using verses from the Book of Exodus. The logical way to organize the Haggadah would be to have the child ask the Ma Nishtana questions, followed by Avadim Hayinu. We could then proceed to tell the story of Passover in a straightforward linear fashion, focusing on Moses telling Pharoah to let the Israelites go, Pharoah saying no, and Egypt getting smitten with the Ten Plagues. Instead, we take a confusing side detour to the Rabbis of the Tanaitic period. We soon find ourselves jumping back in time before the Exodus to learn that Abraham’s family were a bunch of idolaters and also that Laben tried to kill Jacob. Later, we find ourselves jumping forward in time again to the Rabbis making acronyms for the plagues, calculating how many plagues there actually were in Egypt and then during the crossing of the Red Sea, and telling us that we need to talk about the Passover lamb, matzoh, and maror. After completing the other biblical commandments of the night, eating matzoh and maror, we then go back to the Rabbis to Hillel’s sandwich.

The Seder is not simply the story of the Exodus. In a “post-modern” twist, it is the story about the telling over of the story of the Exodus. The Patriarchs are not simply the background as to how we ended up in Egypt, but the promise of the Exodus. The Patriarchs had to accept, on faith, that God would eventually, after hundreds of years give their descendants the Land of Israel. Along the way, they had to endure tremendous difficulties. For example, Abraham left Haran even though he was prosperous to travel to Canaan and then was hit with a famine that forced him to go to Egypt. Centuries before the Exodus, it was already something that people needed to relate to.  

In the Midrash, Abraham is depicted as celebrating Passover when visited by the angels. The cakes he served them were matzah. Why would Abraham celebrate something that had not happened yet? The Exodus is not simply something that happened at a specific time but the event that connects Jews across time. Abraham had just circumcised himself, joining himself to a promised Isaac who had yet to be born but who would be the first person circumcised at the proper age of eight days old. Abraham was also joining himself to all the Jewish people throughout history who were also yet to be born. As such, he joined them in celebrating Passover.  

Already, at the time of the Exodus, Moses commanded the Israelites as to how they should respond to their Wicked, Simple, and Unable to Ask Sons. (The Wise Son does not appear until Deuteronomy.) This was an act of faith. The Tenth Plague had not yet happened and Pharoah was still refusing to let them out. The Children of Israel needed to believe that they would get out and have children for whom this was all history. That first Passover in Egypt was still a celebration of God’s promise that had yet to be fulfilled.

The Rabbis exist on the other side of time to the Exodus. Living after the time of the Bible, they represent us. Passover was something that they commemorated as something happening in the past. But they also connected back to the Patriarchs. They were the ones who lost the Temple. Remember, Hillel's sandwich was supposed to contain the Passover lamb. Despite all this, the Rabbis had the courage to allow Judaism to continue even if that meant lambless matza sandwiches. They made the decision to be satisfied with God’s promise of a messianic redemption. In honor of that, we put the cup out for Elijah, celebrating a redemption that has not yet happened. It does not matter that it is not yet “next year in Jerusalem.”  

As Jews, we exist across time. At the Seder, we are joining Abraham and the angels in the fields of Mamri, Moses and the Israelites in Egypt, the Rabbis in Bnai Brak, and our future descendants who will share a fifth cup of wine with Elijah. All occur in God's ever-present now. No matter where and in what century you celebrate Passover in, you get to join the one and only Seder.      

Community Building and Sexual Morality

Years ago, I wrote about sexual morality from a Kantian perspective, arguing that sex outside of a relationship such as marriage violated the categorical imperative to see others as ends and not as means. I have also written about community building in the contexts of the Ender series and the Twilight series. More recently, I have written about the musical Rent and its depiction of community being built out of individuals whose very morality renders them incapable of being part of a community in a meaningful sense. In my most recent post, I wrote about Calvin existing in his own head without the moral sense that he is obligated to parents and future generations. In this post, I would like to explore sexual morality from a community perspective.

For a community to meaningfully exist it cannot simply be a collection of individuals cooperating together at a given moment but must also operate within time. A community that does not produce a next generation will not survive. As such, how this next generation comes into being is a central concern to the community to such an extent that each individual’s attitude toward this question serves as a useful means to measure their commitment to the community as a whole. Since sexual intercourse is the primary means by which human beings come into this world, there can be no community that can survive in the long run that does not take some interest as to who people are sleeping with. To be clear, a healthy community is likely to recognize that, considering the fact that reality is messy, there is often a need to play ignorant and not go kicking down the doors of people violating the sexual norms of the community.

There are many plausible strategies for trying to ensure a future generation for the community. If you are the Shakers, you forgo physically reproducing children and rely completely on outreach. This has proven to not be an effective strategy for the Shakers and they have just about all died out. To their credit, the Shakers were a victim of their success at getting their adherents to actually follow the tenets of the faith. If only the Shakers were a little more “accepting of human weakness,” they might have survived.

If you are the Catholic priesthood, your celibacy is one of the main things that tie you to the wider Catholic community and stops you from breaking away from those “sinful” lay Catholics and creating a “purified” Catholic Church. You are relying on all the non-celibate Catholics to be fruitful and multiply so there can be a next generation of priests.

On the other extreme, cults will often allow for a surface sexual liberation. This is something that makes them attractive to potential believers. The irony of such sexual liberation is it comes to serve as one of the primary means of cutting people off from any sort of traditional morality that lies outside of the cult. This opens the door for the cult leader to become a tyrant as there is no outside standard by which to judge him. Furthermore, even the supposed free love turns out to be illusory. Instead, what you get is a hierarchy where those at the top are liberated to prey on others and those at the bottom will find sexual norms enforced upon them. It is precisely this ability to brazenly abuse others and get away with it that becomes the mark of their place in the hierarchy. As such, they are incentivized to become sexual predators and everyone else must “humbly” accept this.

Traditionally most societies have operated on a system of polygamy and slavery founded upon male covetousness. One has the male lord with his property such as cattle. This creates a political system where people submit themselves to the lord of the household as his bondsmen in order to eat the food he provides. This logic of lordship extends to women and the lord is able to have relations with those women under his domain. This allows the lord to produce lots of sons to continue his line, with the favored son becoming the next lord and his brothers serving under him. Daughters can be sent to neighboring households to cement alliances with other lords.

This order is further reproduced through the servants. They do not have access to the lord’s harem so they do not have women of their own. This is solved through warfare. The lord leads his servants against neighboring households. Upon victory, the servants take male members of the defeated household to be their slaves and help themselves to the women as well. Thus, the servants become minor lords themselves under their lord. The most successful practitioner of this sort of politics was Genghis Khan and a significant percentage of the world’s population are his descendants.   

We can see this sort of thinking in the Bible with Abraham even as Abraham was, perhaps, a less evil practitioner of these norms. He owned herds of animals and with that came servants. When he was unable to produce a son with Sarai, she agreed to allow him to take up with Hagar. This produced Ishmael. When Isaac was finally born, this created a problem as it was not obvious which son was going to inherit the leadership role from Abraham. Abraham made war upon the four kings after they took Lot and the people of Sodom into captivity. Clearly, it would have been Abraham’s right to take all of these people as his slaves, but he returned them to the king of Sodom without accepting any gifts in return. (Note that taking a gift from the king of Sodom would have indicated that Abraham was submitting to the king of Sodom as his lord.)

Later in the Bible, we are introduced to the concept of the Captive Woman (Yifat Toar). The Bible places limits on what can be done to her, but one cannot ignore the brutal reality that this law underscores. One of the purposes of going to war in the ancient world was to gain captives, including female captives. Similarly, in Judges, we have the Song of Deborah where she imagines Sisrah’s mother wondering why he has not come home and assuming that he has been delayed because he is dividing up the female captives. When one hears of the horrors of what was done to women on October 7^th, it is important to recognize that, historically, such behavior has been the norm in war.

I would argue that the destruction of the First Temple and the Babylonian exile radically changed Judaism. Among other things, it may have given rise to the beginning of what we might think of as the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic. In a world in which Jews did not have power, being the lord of a household and spreading one’s seed through slavery and warfare stopped being practical. As members of a minority religion faced with the twin threats of extermination and assimilation, Jewish survival depended on a father’s willingness to not only have lots of offspring but to invest in raising them as Jews. This meant that Jewish men were going to need to be made to settle down and marry Jewish women. Note that it is precisely when we get to Ezra that we see Jewish men being denounced for taking non-Jewish wives not as a matter of this leading to idolatry but because intermarriage itself suddenly became a problem.  

Women leaving Judaism were not nearly as serious a threat. A man might want to leave Judaism in order to move up in society and become someone with power. This did not apply to women as we are still dealing with patriarchal societies. A woman who left Judaism would simply be exchanging the relatively mild Jewish patriarchy for a gentile patriarchy enforced through explicit violence. 

Since it was primarily men who needed to be kept in line, the key feature of the Judeo-Christian sexual ethic became the regulation of male sexuality. In Judaism, this has manifested itself in taboos against looking at women dressed in a manner deemed immodest or listening to women singing. This has the practical purpose of setting up no-go spaces for men. This serves as a useful proxy for avoiding places and the sort of people who are not practicing a similar sexual ethic.  

Furthermore, the rabbis cleverly made use of the ban on sexual relations with a menstruating woman to render all sex outside of marriage to be sinful. Unmarried women are kept from using the mikvah. As such, all unmarried girls above the age of puberty are legally in the state of niddah and men cannot touch them let alone sleep with them. As strange as this sounds, it has been worth it for Judaism to allow its members to fall into grievous sin by engaging in pre-marital sex without immersing in the mikvah rather than allow unmarried girls to use the mikvah. If unmarried girls were allowed to use the mikvah, rabbis would no longer have a coherent argument as to why pre-marital sex should be regarded as a sin.

To be clear, the main problem with sex outside of marriage is not that it harms individuals but that it harms the community. As such, the community needs to greatly limit such behavior and inculcate in its members a deep loathing for such behavior. The problem is that people are not likely to think in terms of the needs of the community and sacrifice for it. As such, the solution is to simply label pre-marital sex as sinful by the legalist workaround of making unmarried girls ritually impure.

Admittedly, the main tool for regulating male sexuality has been regulating female sexuality. If women face a stigma for sex outside of marriage they will insist on marriage. As more women take themselves out of play men will conclude that their only hope is to get married.  As long as men are not supposed to be looking at women dressed in a certain fashion, it becomes the implicit obligation of women to dress in a manner that will allow men to look at them. To be clear, this still requires the Jewish community to come after men who sleep with gentile women. 

At first glance, the lord of the household and the Judeo-Christian sexual ethics will appear similar. Somewhat counterintuitively, the former will usually enforce stricter modesty codes on women. The reason for this is that the consequences of female infidelity are greater. A woman who is unfaithful calls into question the paternity of her children and their future claim to rule, thus undermining the entire system. From this perspective, honor killings of women on the mere suspicion of infidelity become a reasonable response. This demonstrates that the men are in charge and can guarantee the parentage of their children. By contrast, Jewish survival is far more threatened by male indiscretions than female ones as this would create a situation where men stopped being committed to raising their kids as Jews.   

The practical distinction between the two models is what they mean for male sexuality. In the lord of the household model, restrictions on female dress or their ability to leave the house do not mean restrictions on men. On the contrary, restrictions on women are meant to demonstrate that they are the property of a man. This divides women into those within the community. They are the property of a husband lord and are not to be touched by bondsmen. Then there are outside women who are fair game. By simultaneously being willing to kill women within the community for walking in the street dressed immodestly and assaulting women who are not part of the community simply for walking in the street, one demonstrates that the community is powerful and that everyone should submit themselves to it. (On the implications of this sort of thinking for Muslim men in Europe, see Ayaan Hirsi Ali’s Prey.)

By contrast, the primary purpose of the Judeo-Christian ethic is to restrict men. Men are the ones who are easily tempted and need to be kept in line. As Jews lacked power, they did not need to demonstrate that they had power over their women. On the contrary, Jewish survival has relied on keeping men within the community and not assimilating into the wider society despite Jewish lack of power.  

 

Calvin the Philosophical Child

A common criticism of the comic strip Calvin and Hobbes is that Calvin is not a plausible six-year-old. There are too many aspects of his character, such as his language and reasoning, that clearly are meant to represent adults. For me, this is not a problem as I do not see Calvin and Hobbes as being about accurately representing childhood (even when it does that better than almost anyone else). I see Calvin as an adult who is depicted as a child in order to explore the childlike nature of adults. Now most explorations of people’s inner childs tend to focus on the positive aspects of childlike thinking such as innocence, or a sense of wonder. Bill Watterson focuses on the dark side of childlike thinking by making Calvin a philosophical child whose worldview is completely ego-centric and founded upon ignorance. This lack of a developed moral sense is made worse by Calvin’s highly developed even adultlike ability to reason. 

In examining Calvin’s thinking, it is useful to consider three different realms of knowledge, facts, morality, and reasoning. Facts are the realm in which Calvin is most obviously a child. He knows little about how the world actually functions and the few facts that he has are riddled with errors. While the particulars of what Calvin knows may mark him as a child, this is not, in itself, a flaw or what marks him as truly a child. All of us are profoundly ignorant about the world and, considering how ignorant we know we are when it comes to things of this world that have credible answers, we must assume that our ignorance only gets worse when it comes to metaphysics. From a divine perspective, the most knowledgeable person on the planet must appear no different than a child like Calvin. Even though Calvin’s ignorance is not, in itself a flaw, it does introduce a legitimate moral flaw in that Calvin’s ignorance is greatly exacerbated by his laziness. 

In terms of morality, Calvin is very much a child in the sense that he is the center of his own universe. He lacks the sense that he is not the most important being in the world. He does not see that he has obligations to those who were here before he was born and to those who will be here long after he is dead. In this sense, he is less obviously a child. Most adults have more information about the world even as they remain moral children. That being said, part of the fun of the character is how unapologetically self-centered he is. He lacks the adult ability to effectively flatter others or to pretend that he cares about them.

Calvin’s self-centeredness can be seen as the foundation for his ignorance. To study means to recognize that one is ignorant. As Calvin is the center of his own universe, he can never acknowledge this. At a practical level, this manifests in his laziness. Paying attention in class or doing homework are literal torture for him as these are tasks that require him to confront his limitations. Better to not do work and continue to bask in one's supremacy. When, inevitably, Calvin gets himself into trouble, he can never acknowledge that the problems in his life might actually be his own fault. Instead, the fault must lie in other people such as his parents, Susie Derkins, or Miss Wormwood, his teacher.

The least childlike aspect of Calvin’s thinking is his ability to reason. Calvin reasons with the full array of tools that we associate with adults. What makes Calvin so interesting, though, is precisely that his sophisticated reasoning does nothing to fix either his ignorance or his self-centered morality. Calvin’s reason only serves his passion to be lazy and not work to lessen his ignorance as well as to flatter himself into believing in his own importance.  

A useful example of the interaction of all three aspects of Calvin’s thinking can be seen in the piece where Calvin asks his father to burn leaves to appease the snow demons.

One might say that Calvin is ignorant to believe that the weather is the product of supernatural beings as opposed to the scientific laws of meteorology. That being said, he is still able to use his reason to construct a narrative of how the world functions on the edifice of his ignorance. He assumes that there are powers out there that affect the weather and he theorizes as to how to best interact with them.

The real problem, as Calvin’s father indicates, is Calvin’s theology. Since Calvin lives in a moral universe that is all about him, his reaction to the existence of higher powers is to construct a magical religion as opposed to an ethical one. The question that Calvin implicitly asks is how does one get a supernatural power like a snow demon to do his bidding. Calvin is not interested in the question of how he can mold his personality to be more in line with that of a supremely perfect being. For Calvin, the supremely perfect being is himself.

Because Calvin has not given himself an education in history or literature which might have given him a wider picture of the world, and lacks the moral imagination to even suspect that such a larger world might exist, he is a slave to momentary pleasures as symbolized by his television set, which he turns into an idol.   

For all of Calvin’s great ability to reason, his rationality, limited by its service to an ignorant self-centered child, ultimately leads him simply to worshipping pleasure and sacrificing his intellect to it.

Calvin’s hope for redemption lies in his stuffed tiger Hobbes. In a sense, Hobbes can be seen as another idol constructed by Calvin. Someone as self-centered as Calvin is incapable of friendship so his solution is to construct a friend for himself according to his own design that he can control. What is interesting about Hobbes is the extent to which Calvin loses control of this relationship. (Perhaps, this is because Hobbes is not simply a figment of Calvin’s imagination.) One thinks of Hobbes tackling him when he opens the front door or his refusal to hate Susie.

Hobbes may be everything that Calvin desires to be, a powerful tiger who is not answerable to parents, teachers, or social conventions. Yet, it is this very wish fulfillment that turns Hobbes against him and stops him from being merely Calvin’s plaything. Furthermore, Hobbes' self-sufficiency makes him rational in a Stoic sense; he does not desire things that he cannot have. Because of that, Hobbes is consistently happy in a way that eludes Calvin. 

This opens Calvin to the possibility that there can be something out there, besides himself, that he should want to imitate. Most importantly, the fact that Calvin can love Hobbes, even though Hobbes acts against him, means that we can truly consider Hobbes to be his friend. With Hobbes, Calvin is given a door through which he might eventually think his way outside of himself.

In keeping with a character named after John Calvin, Calvin is a distinctly Augustinian sort of child. He is trapped by a Satanic love of self that corrupts his reason into digging ever deeper into himself. Calvin is an anti-hero. He is not a good person, but we still like him perhaps because we recognize that his sins are our sins. We are never given a chance to see Calvin grow up. Perhaps, he becomes more like Hobbes, which might lead him to stop being a slave to desiring what he cannot have and instead to love Susie and to try to become the sort of person that she might love in return. But that would be of little interest as a comic strip.  

 

In Search of the People (Part III)

(Part I, II)

While leftist revolutionaries around the world came to embrace third-world peasants, Arab nationalists, and even Islamists as manifestations of the People, Western revolutionaries had a problem as they lacked these groups at home. The United States never had a peasant class. In Europe, capitalism and the Industrial Revolution had eliminated the peasant class in a mostly bloodless fashion and, until the end of the twentieth century, Arab and Muslim migration were not significant issues. The solution was to turn to racial and later sexual minorities.

Mid-twentieth-century American radicals “discovered” blacks, a group that was honestly being oppressed. At a time when white workers were embracing the New Deal and its protections for unions and even going so far as to vote for Eisenhower, blacks stood out as a group whose problems could not easily be solved by lobbying for some changes to current laws. Blacks were up against the well-organized conspiracy of segregation that was passively facilitated by a wider white society that, even subconsciously, looked down on blacks and did not see their plight as a priority.

In the end, though, the mainline Civil Rights Movement proved a failure for leftist revolutionaries. The Civil Rights Movement succeeded in defeating formal segregation by pursuing a moderate path that was fundamentally unrevolutionary. It avoided violence and framed itself as being within the American tradition. For Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., blacks were Americans who, as Americans, were now coming to collect on the American promise. He succeeded precisely because he managed to convince white America that he was not a revolutionary but an American asking for perfectly reasonable American things. 

While the Civil Rights Movement itself proved distinctively unrevolutionary and, even more subversively demonstrated that a reformist movement really could bring about real change within a liberal democracy, it still ended up proving useful to the left. The Civil Rights Act of 1964, while well-intentioned and perhaps necessary under the circumstances, effectively eliminated the constitutional balance between the federal and state governments. Now the federal government can force any law upon a state simply by claiming that it is a matter of civil rights, leaving us with a dangerously overpowered federal government just waiting for leftists to take control and turn it to their own ends.

At the end of the day, the Civil Rights Movement did not solve the economic problems facing the black community. This caused many civil rights leaders, including Dr. King in the last years of his life, to drift toward a more revolutionary mindset. This did nothing to help actual black people. This should only be expected as the purpose of a leftist revolution is not to improve the lives of actual individuals. A group is only useful, and therefore only counts as part of the People, when their problems are not being solved. Thus, leftist revolutionaries have needed to keep blacks poor and blame American racism for it. One can see this most easily in urban policy and education, areas dominated by the left, that have utterly failed the black community economically but have kept alive a sense of grievance.   

The less plausible the charge of racism, in the conventional sense, has become, as Americans have become less racist, the more racism has needed to be redefined in ever more abstract frameworks. This has benefited leftists as it makes the case for revolution. If you are black and your goal is for white people to not hate you and conspire to keep you out of middle-class jobs or even murder you, there is no need for a revolution. If your goal is to not be an outsider in a culture created by white people for the benefit of white people, then the only solution is for there to be a revolution. This will tear down white American culture and place blacks as the People at the center of the new culture. White people will be stripped of any positive identity and left only with the option of being allies of blacks if they wish to not be oppressors. 

The most important leftist success of the 1960s was the sexual revolution. This was indirectly connected to the Civil Rights Movement. As Shelby Steele has argued, white American parents who were complicit in tolerating segregation and felt guilty about it were not in a position to challenge their children over whom they slept with and their kids knew it. Sexuality has long been a tool of revolutionaries as communities require rigid sexual rules to establish clear lines of kinship that place children within the group. Allow children to be born outside of clear families and their community becomes the non-community of the revolution. The Sexual Revolution has been particularly effective at maintaining blacks as a revolutionary class. It has inhibited economic growth within the black community. At the same time, anyone who points this out can be charged as a racist. Thus, blacks are more likely to assume that the source of their problems is racism, as manifested in bourgeois values like the nuclear family, and the only solution is revolution.  

The Sexual Revolution also created a new oppressed group that could serve as manifestations of the People for leftist revolutionaries, sexual minorities. It was leftist revolutionaries who decided that gay people were actually a group as opposed to simply individuals who pursued an action that should or should not be tolerated to various degrees. Furthermore, the fact that the sexual revolution made sexual repression a form of oppression rendered gays an oppressed group. Gays are an even better class of revolutionaries than blacks as accommodating them within a traditional society is even more difficult, hence gays are more likely to assume that their only solution is the revolution and will not be bought off by minor reforms such as the removal of anti-sodomy laws.

Furthermore, the fact that even considering gays as a group is an invention of leftist revolutionaries has meant that the gay community is intrinsically tied to the leftist revolutionary cause and cannot easily exist without it. It makes perfect sense for a black conservative to still want there to be a black community such as their presumably black families. It is hardly obvious why an Andrew Sullivan style conservative gay community would want to operate as a gay community as opposed to being a tolerated minority within their presumably heterosexual families and the wider community. Keep in mind that gays, unlike blacks, are usually not raised with their identity. This is something they consciously embrace as teenagers or later in life.  

Much as with blacks, the gay rights movement involves an act of motte and bailey duplicity. Now that the sexual revolution has happened, it makes sense to not stigmatize people for sexual acts between consenting adults. We might even take the next step and say that government should recognize same-sex marriage. None of this, in itself, would be particularly revolutionary. On the contrary, accommodating homosexuals in such a fashion lessens their ability to serve as revolutionaries and risks their status as a manifestation of the People.

The revolutionary doctrine would be to say that the sexual acts of homosexuals give them authenticity as a manifestation of the People that heterosexuals lack, particularly if they submit themselves to traditional morality. Heterosexuality does make one part of the People but their oppressor. As such, heterosexuals need homosexuals to redeem and make them part of the People. This is done by allowing heterosexuals to become allies and share in the task of tearing down society and rebuilding it around homosexuals.

Homosexuality requires someone to do, or at least desire to do, something that most people would find repulsive. This limits the number of people who can be gay. The solution is for sex education that will encourage more people to overcome any predispositions against engaging in gay sex so there can be more gay people. Alternatively, there are the bi-sexual and queer identities that anyone can embrace. Thus, the LBTQ+ identity has the ability to become a larger group than African Americans and thus a better claim to being the American People. And since LGBTQ+ identity really means nothing more than rejecting traditional sexual norms, this manifestation of the People can be relied upon to truly embrace the revolution as their very identity is meaningless otherwise.  

More recently, as homosexuality has gained mainstream acceptance and lost its revolutionary edge, we have seen the rise of a transgender identity, which furthers the revolutionary logic of homosexuality. Unlike homosexuality, which requires no great metaphysical leap to accept that a person really is attracted to people of the same sex, accepting that someone is trans requires buying into a larger metaphysical system that the person really is a different “gender” from how they were identified at birth. The reason for accepting this new metaphysics is that leftist revolutionaries have placed transgender people as an authentic manifestation of the People and to reject this claim makes you an oppressor and not part of the People. This means that transgender people are dependent on leftist revolutionaries not only to have a transgender community but even to be trans in the first place.

Transgenderism, building off queer identity, is something so nebulous that anyone can claim to be trans and, thus become a manifestation of the People. That being said, “authentic” transgenderhood requires hormone injections and surgery. Going through this means that not only are you the male or female that you claim to be but you are more authentically that gender than those “assigned” their identities by their doctor at birth, thus you are an authentic manifestation of the People. Cisgender people can only become part of the People by being allies of transgenders and acknowledging their greater authenticity.

In the present discourse, it has become common to see rhetoric like “Gaza to Ferguson” or “Queers for Palestine.” If one thinks in terms of helping members of particular groups improve their physical lots in life and overcome oppression, this sounds strange. We are talking about different groups in different parts of the planet, with different needs that might even clash. For example, Hamas believes in murdering gay people. 

These claims begin to make sense once you realize that we are not talking about actual blacks, homosexuals, or Palestinians. Instead, these are simply names for manifestations of the People, united in being rhetorically useful for leftist revolutionaries. The point is not to improve the lot of members of any of these groups. On the contrary, doing so would lessen their usefulness to the revolution and render them no longer manifestations of the People.  Thus, we are not interested in helping gay Palestinians. Such a Palestinian undermines Palestinian peoplehood and, thus, it is a revolutionary act of the People to kill them. By contrast, a gay person in the United States does represent the People so not wishing them mazal tov on their wedding is a counter-revolutionary act that makes you an oppressor. 

The real purpose is for there to be the revolution. This will place the truest manifestation of the People, leftist revolutionaries, in power. In the end, not only will whites, Christians, and Jews not be part of the People but even the "oppressed" groups, which were supposed to be favored to make up for their lack of privilege will eventually also lose their place as they stop being needed and can be replaced with a more plausibly revolutionary manifestation of the People.