As I wrote recently for Real Good Oil, after being briefly beguiled by the New Atheists, it quickly became apparent that they were not at all what they cracked themselves up to be. Far from the rational, enlightened thinkers they professed to be, glaring flaws in their arguments were too obvious to ignore. Sam Harris in particular derailed his pretensions to rationality by succumbing to a degree of Trump Derangement Syndrome that would make Rachel Maddow blink.
More and more, the acid test of a prominent ‘thinkers’ commitment to hard-headed logic is how easily deranged they are by wokeism. Of all the people to fall victim to that particularly insidious mind virus, though, the last one I’d have bet on was Penn Jillette.
Penn Jillette, the tall half of the hugely successful magician duo Penn & Teller, is one of the entertainment industry’s most outspoken atheists. For decades, Jillette has smugly condemned all manner of religious, psychic, and pseudoscientific irrationality. He also has a fan base on the right, because as a self-described libertarian, Jillette’s often mused about how “taxation is theft” and government compulsion is bad.
Penn Jillette: a man with no gods, including government. A man who falls for no (to use the title of his Showtime series) “bullshit.”
Sorry to say, though: another titan bites the woke dust.
Jillette – Mr “no pseudoscience,” Mr “no cults or flimflam” – has become the spokesperson for the biggest pseudoscientific cultlike flimflam of the 21st century. The guy who’s spent a career deconstructing magic (“no, the bouquet of flowers didn’t actually become a rabbit; it was sleight of hand”) is now a true believer that a girl can actually become a boy overnight, by the sheer power of mentalism!
The cult got at even Penn by the most insidious and demonstrably most powerful means they have. The weakest link in any man’s mental armour: his children.
Then his teenage daughter decided that she’s a man. And the world witnessed how quickly the “smug” vanishes from the rationalist when the bullshit hits too close to home.
About a year or so ago, Jillette’s daughter, Moxie Crimefighter (yes, that’s her name), decided that she’d been “assigned the wrong sex at birth.” And she demanded that her parents no longer use female pronouns for her, like, ever.
I’d feel sorry for him, except that, like any other vacuous celebrity parading their trophy ‘trans’ child, he’s determined to let us all know how woke he’s become. Not just over his no-doubt beloved daughter’s mental confusion, but over everything he’d ever stood for.
As part of Jillette’s conversion to spiritualist, he’s publicly renounced his libertarianism (on CNN, no less!), he’s embraced burdensome government, and he’s thrown his support full-throttle behind Joe Biden and Gavin Newsom as they promote policies that strong-arm us to “see” Jillette’s spooks and spirits (Newsom in particular is arguably the most “compulsory” politico in the country when it comes to forcing people to accept tranny theology). Jillette supports politicians who want to force girls to shower, change, and go to the bathroom alongside biological boys.
These are not inconsequential delusions. Were it merely confined to the Jillette home, well, that’d be their own sorry business. But the sort of policies Jillette is throwing his weight behind now affect everyone.
To be clear, women will die from the elimination of targeted cervical cancer outreach, and girls will be, and have been, raped by boys playing tranny to infiltrate the girls’ bathroom. Jillette used to be a campaigner against “psychic surgeon” frauds who endanger people by pretending to cure their disease, thus prompting them to neglect legitimate treatment. Yet now he supports politicians who put women at risk because of a belief system no less irrational than psychic healing.
Let’s be honest: this is cult behaviour 101, from the very person who spent most of his life, and made most of his living, by mocking everyone else’s ‘cults’. The man who, just a decade ago, upbraided Yusuf Islam for not using his ‘real’ name since converting to Islam. “I do not respect this decision in any way,” Jillette sneered. Which is odd, because Steven Georgiou hasn’t used his real name since 1965.
Yet, now Jillette berates himself for using his own daughter’s real name.
There’s a disturbing lesson in this for all of us. How easy it is to fall prey to the tranny cult.
The tranny cult got to Jillette through his child, through his obvious love for her, and through the continuity break that occurred when the girl he raised declared she’s not a girl. That’s how they hooked an otherwise intelligent 66-year-old man […] Many on the right tend to think that the tranny cult targets kids in order to estrange them from their families. And in many cases, that’s true. But as the Jillette example starkly illustrates, hooking the kids can be an effective way to hook the parents […]
And that’s how you pull off the magic trick of turning a cynical libertarian into a woke social justice true believer who supports politicians who use all manner of force and coercion in the name of enforcing tranny dogma.
Let that be a warning to us all, I guess.
