Image Credit: GIORGIO VIERA / Contributor / Getty Images 
The so-called “struggle session”—douzheng hui in Mandarin—emerged during China’s bloody Cultural Revolution, between 1966 and 1976. Millions, maybe tens of millions, took part in public denunciations where various “enemies of the revolution” were humiliated, abused, forced to confess their “crimes” and subjected to physical punishment. Victims had their hair pulled, were spat on and beaten, paraded through the streets bearing signs that listed, for all to see, the terrible things they’d done. Hundreds of thousands are thought to have died from their injuries or by suicide, unable to bear the shame.
The aim of the struggle session was not just to punish the enemies of the Maoist regime, real or otherwise, to break and bend their will as needed, but also, crucially, to build solidarity and class-consciousness among the mob carrying it out.
If you want to create a strong feeling of us, there’s no better way than to provide an equally strong feeling of them.
Readers of an historical bent will know that similar rituals of confession and shaming have taken place in other revolutionary states at various different times, for the same reasons. In Soviet Russia (the Show Trials). During the Jacobin Terror in France. We might even see elements as far back as the early Christians, who confessed their sins in public, to their fellow congregants, and received punishment and forgiveness in return. The Puritans revived this practice in England in the sixteenth century, and there are still records of Oliver Cromwell addressing his parish in church, years before he saved England and became Lord Protector.
The struggle session is with us now. In fact, it’s been normalised, made less spectacular and bloody, and integrated into our lives today in hundreds and thousands of little ways. Every day, we’re expected to make countless public statements demonstrating our commitment to the values of the Current Year and the new Cultural Revolution.
Or else.
One of the most insidious aspects of the latter-day struggle session is its dual nature, at once voluntary and coercive. You’re invited to make a “voluntary” statement or display while a Sword of Damocles hangs over you as surely as if you were in Mao’s China, standing in a square surrounded by peasants with pitchforks.
You can see the sword, everyone else can see it, but no-one is allowed to say. You all just have to smile and pretend.
When you’re asked to add “your pronouns” to your Zoom profile or your company email bio, everyone knows the fate that will befall the idiot who doesn’t do it properly or forgets—or worse yet, the courageous dissenter who refuses out of principle.
The struggle session may be most associated with the left and our current woke tyranny or whatever you want to call it, but the right has its struggle sessions too, and they’re just as unedifying. Events of the last week or so tell us that loud and clear.
First, we had the lovely Sydney Sweeney deftly rejecting an interviewer’s attempts to make her “disavow white supremacy”—to make her cringe and squirm and apologise for her role in a perfectly harmless advert in which she showed off her admirable curvature and joked about having good jeans/genes.
I’ve watched that advert many times. Many times. It’s an advert for jeans, with an innuendo in it. Nothing more.
So what did Sydney do? She just said no.
“I think that when I have an issue that I want to speak about, people will hear,” she said.
And that was it. The interviewer’s grotesque condescension, a vile mixture of feigned sympathy and barely concealed threat—nothing. No effect. I’m not doing that. Fuck off, she smiles.
Compare this with the sorry state of things over at the Heritage Foundation, which has been tearing itself apart since its president, Kevin Roberts, posted a video in which he defended Tucker Carlson.
Tucker did a two-hour sit-down interview with Nick Fuentes a little over a week ago and all hell has broken loose since, with Con Inc. figures like Ben Shapiro and Mark Levin and politicians like Mitch McConnell and Ted Cruz calling for Tucker to be cast out from polite society forever along with the Groypers and “race realists” and the Buchananites and, of course, the anti-semites—who are all one and the same, or so we’re told.
There’s a battle for the soul of conservatism taking place right now, they say, between the heirs of William F. Buckley and the heirs of Pat Buchanan. Buckley must triumph again; the right must resume its position standing athwart history yelling “STOP!” or it will destroy itself as surely as its enemies will.
Of course, we might ask why this great reckoning has to happen right now, when President Trump has a generational mandate for the most far-reaching changes to American domestic and foreign policy since World War Two at least. I know what I think… Anyway.
Because of Kevin Roberts’ personal friendship with Tucker, and the Heritage Foundation’s sponsorship of his show, Roberts came under pressure immediately to distance the Foundation from Tucker and even denounce him as a bigot, anti-semite or Nazi. Instead, Roberts put out a measured video explaining that Tucker should be allowed to interview whomever he pleases, and that the Heritage Foundation could still have a relationship with him even if it, and its president, disagreed with his choice of guest, which they did.
That was a week ago, October 30th. On Wednesday, a town-hall meeting meeting was convened after initial attempts to reinforce that line failed. Chief of Staff Ryan Neuhaus called for dissenters to resign, then was forced out of the Foundation himself. The Heritage Foundation’s Anti-Semitism Task Force sent Roberts a series of demands by letter, six in all, that he would have to grant to make amends. These were: deleting his original video response; apologizing to Jews and Christian Zionists; condemning Tucker Carlson; hiring a fellow to “reclaim” youths taken in by the Groypers; hosting a conference about the current divisions among conservatives; and permitting members of the Task Force to host “optional” shabbat dinners for junior members of the Foundation to encourage them to learn about Judaism and the “Judaeo-Christian tradition.”
These demands were discussed at the town-hall meeting. When a junior member objected, on personal religious grounds, to being made to attend shabbat dinners, and said he worried they might serve as an “informal litmus test,” he was greeted with a furious response from the Vice President of the Task Force, Victoria Coates.
“That is a gross mischaracterization,” she said.
“It was made in generosity of spirit… Evan, I’m deeply sorry you could not see that as a generous offer but rather a personal attack on you.”
Worse was yet to come. Audio of the man’s objections was leaked to the public, his identity and other personal details were released and, of course, he was branded an anti-semite for “treating Jewish hospitality like waterboarding.” His inbox filled with threats, abuse and ridicule.
Turns out, the “optional” shabbat dinners weren’t really optional at all. Who would have thought?
My friend Bronze Age Pervert raised a very important, very basic point on Twitter yesterday. Plenty of people have been attempting to defend Evan Myers—that’s the guy—on religious grounds. They say: “It’s right for Evan Myers to be able to raise a religious objection to attending a shabbat dinner. He’s a pious Christian, and Christian piety should be respected. If he wants to fast on a Friday instead of attend a shabbat dinner, he should be able to.” But nobody, or very few, have said, “People have every right to object to moral blackmail and purity tests, regardless of their religious beliefs. Nobody should be forced to attend a religious dinner out of fear of being labelled a bigot or an anti-semite if they don’t.”
When I was at Cambridge, I had a lovely Jewish girlfriend who bore a striking resemblance to Sydney Sweeney in two big ways. After we’d been going out for a few months, I was invited to attend a passover meal in North London. I could have objected on religious grounds, of course, being that I’m an Anglican Protestant and not Jewish, but why would I do that? It was a chance for me to be present at an event that was important to her, and to meet her family and friends. It was a generous invitation, heartfelt, and besides, I’d never been to a Passover meal and so of course I wanted to see what one was like. (The dinner was, in fact, quite strange. Because there were vegetarians present, the paschal lamb was replaced with a large swede, which was roasted and treated with the same solemnity. All hail the Paschal root vegetable!)
Anyway, one thing I do know, as sure as eggs is eggs, is that if I’d been told, “You have to attend this Passover dinner otherwise we’re going to call you an anti-semite,” I would have felt very differently about the invitation. I wouldn’t have gone.
No self-respecting person would.
An organization like the Heritage Foundation that was founded to protect and promote American values, including freedom of speech, freedom of worship, and freedom of association, should have no truck with such blackmail and manipulation. Its response should be, quite simply, “Fuck off.” Take your struggle session somewhere else.
The Heritage Foundation could learn a lot from Sydney Sweeney. Do you want to know my suggestion? Rename it the Big Jugs Foundation, put Sydney in charge and you’d have a far better vehicle for promoting conservatism and real American values in 2025.
(By the way, if anybody with money is reading this, I would be most happy to help you establish a Big Jugs Foundation. Please contact me on Twitter. My DMs are open. The same goes for you, Ms. Sweeney. I await your response.)
