Review: The New Puritans: How the Religion of Social Justice Captured the Western World

Andrew Doyle’s The New Puritans: How The Religion of Social Justice Captured The Western World begins and ends with America’s Salem Witch Trials. In between, he has twelve chapters, each of whose titles has a religious connotation and all of which, when taken collectively, fillet not only Critical Race Theory (CRT) but all of its neo-Marxist derivatives. If you are looking for a book to assail all such nonsense, this is the tome for you.

As an Oxbridge PhD, who earns his crust by stand up comedy and authoring satirical books under the Tatania McGrath nom de plume, Doyle, who writes like an angel, is well-equipped to hasten this madcap ideology’s one way journey into the intellectual and policy making abattoir, where it belongs. 

This book belongs not only on the secondary reading lists of all relevant university courses in sociology, literature, law or Queer Theory (sic) but it also belongs in the Christmas stocking of anyone who likes well-written books on matters of topical interest.

Though such quibbles as I may have with it are insignificant those, I take pride in boasting, are products of my upbringing, my education and my experience. Doyle’s targets could not say the same on this or on any other well-researched and well-written book that exposes these creatures of the twilight to the light of day.

That is because, as Doyle explains, they are clergy for a godless age, presiding over the dreariest landscapes of their own sterile imaginations, rewriting our language, history and traditions as they go along to bend us, like bonsai trees, to their own one-dimensional designs. These pampered prats do this, Doyle asserts, because they think that only those, who are imbued with their infantile word games and rhetorical sleights of hand, know what is best for the rest of us, who don’t buy into their nonsense and name-calling about supposedly ‘far sight’ TERFS and other direct incitements to physical violence.

The intersectionality of race, gender and sexuality is the beating heart of this caricature of the Beast of the Apocalypse, whose mark, Revelations 13:17 tells us, is necessary to engage in commerce. These charlatans go much further than that fabled Beast and the no less fearsome Anti-Christ he serves. Under these whack jobs, even children’s stories are haram. Even though I have used up almost all of my allocated three score and ten years, I previously had to defend the fantastic Russian children’s stories of Masha and Mishka                    against these imbeciles, I now have to bat for JK Rowling, whose persecution at the hands of these pseudo-intellectual savages beggars belief.

Though I have no time for Rowling’s take on either Syria or Russia, I am quite happy both for the joy her works have brought to tens of millions of children and, just as importantly, for her courage in standing up for female autonomy against these creeps. There is an important point in this and one Doyle repeatedly makes not only in Rowling’s case but in many others as well. We, who steadfastly refuse to sup their bile, can differentiate between the works of Rowling and the immortal Dostoyevsky and all of their views which, in Dostoyevsky’s case, was less than charitable to members of Pope Francis’ Society of Jesus.

Whatever literary or other criticisms can be levelled at Rowling, threats of rape and death are not legitimate forms of criticism. They are criminal and those who make them should be prosecuted and, if found guilty, severely punished.

But then, as Doyle points out, Scientific American, whose authors once included Einstein, Pauling and Oppenheimer, now have clowns telling us that the Star Wars franchise is “prone to (white) saviorism and toxically masculine approaches to conflict resolution” with their “phallic lightsabers” and “gaslighting by means of Jedi mind tricks”. Little wonder that the book burners of Kiev are so popular in Joe Biden’s U.S. of A.

In contrast to that tripe, the works of Dostoyevsky, like those of Homer and Shakespeare (a favourite target of CRT’s high priests) are immortal for a number of reasons, not the least of which is they deal with our eternal dreams, wishes and dilemmas, all without the meaningless jargon Foucault and his tens of thousands of clones in our universities use as fig leaves for their own intellectual charlatanism.

Whilst Doyle gives the academic bluffers a good dusting, plenty of others get red noses too. He scoffs at billionaire Oprah Winfrey telling Dixieland’s trailer trash they wallow in white privilege and the spoofers of the Scottish National Party, who would make possession of the Bible illegal as homosexuals are criticized in it, a good going-over. He uses such charlatans to make the point that much of Critical Race and related theories (sic), such as those of Whiteness Studies, Fat Studies and Disability Studies exists to appease the super-rich like Oprah Winfrey and the clothing brands who sell their goods to the obese, many of whom likewise wallow in this threadbare nonsense. 

Doyle posits that CJT’s success is in neglecting class as it is basically a middle-class movement of the pampered, who play word games when they are not watching Oprah or vaunting their narcissism wherever they can.

Although Doyle instances a lot of criminal and other cases that support his thesis, he does not dwell on them which is a good thing as many of them are revolting. One such case concerns the militant left’s use of violence against women and children protesting against a known sexual predator posing as a woman who exposes himself to some other women and children at the Wi Spa in Los Angeles.

Though Doyle wonders why leftist heavies, can stoop so low, he supplies the answer on page 170 when he states that their inability and that of the SNP, the British Labour Party and many other foot soldiers and officers of this cult to define what is a woman is either delusional or dishonest. Doyle makes the point that he is not here asking for treatises on how blood is deoxygenated or even a detailed overview of the molecular mechanisms by which protein function is regulated in cells but just a simple definition of what a six year girl (and, therefore, future woman) might furnish at a moment’s notice.

Though Doyle demolishes the straw men of the Frankfurt School and other neo-Marxist schools, which set out to seize and, ultimately, destroy the means of cultural production, he is cognizant of how left’s word plays have wormed their way into the policy-making decisions of police forces, Parliaments, kindergartens, libraries and publishing houses, which hire sensitivity readers to ensure all works conform to progressivism’s frigid orthodoxies. Though the case of America’s Miriam-Webster dictionary using punch a TERF as an example as to how to use that slur in a sentence should be a matter for criminal investigation, such genuine micro-aggressions against the sane from those who may be criminally insane are so commonplace in real life that, Rowling apart, he does not dwell on them.

Rather, Doyle follows St Augustine’s precaution to hate the sin but to love the sinner. Although very few of the CJT lot would be familiar with any of this great Algerian’s works, saintly forgiveness is to surrender the field to these entitled iconoclasts, their infantile tantrums, and their viral videos of their pink-haired loons screaming at their detractors. That is, in fact, where the book ends, when Susanna Martin, one of those hanged at Salem, points out the sheer stupidity of her accusers and of those who aided and abetted them.

Although Martin was one of the last of Salem’s martyrs, today’s left Puritans will claim many more victims. Doyle reports that the state-funded BBC outfit which, along with the Guardian newspaper, is in the van of this unholy movement, is squandering a further of £100 million of taxpayers’ money to make their programming more acceptable to these cancel culture maestros and their online echo chambers. Forget Dostoyevsky or Masha and Mishka. Even JK Rowling is more intellectually challenging than this pottage.

To coin Othello, whose blackness the neo-left of course castigate as an instance of Shakespeare’s white privilege, while Doyle has done our modern state of affairs some service with this great work, there is much to do to cast these left demons far away from even the shadows and for the cowed majority to reclaim and rebuild civilization anew. Although Doyle has given many pointers in the arts world, others, Hungary’s Victor Órban and China’s STEM Research facilities being prominent amongst them, point to what else must be done to reclaim our future from these one-dimensional cretins, their enforcers and their collaborators.