Thanks To You, A Cultural Renaissance Is Sprouting Out Of Decline
The Black Sheep Future You’re Helping Us Build
Before I learned to tell the truth and accept its painful consequences as the noble price for sticking to my principles, what kept me quiet was often the silence of others.
When people started pushing the idea that your race could entitle you to less or more of an opinion, that public shaming and career loss were fair consequences for just about anything, and that encouraging people to damage and loot local businesses was “retributive justice,” I could feel something was wrong but couldn’t see anyone saying so. It’s harder to question the herd when you’re afraid of what your life without it might look like.
Many of us have been looking behind the wizard’s curtain for so long we can’t imagine considering anything without a dose of skepticism, but there’s a first time for everyone, and the first time you realize things aren’t always what they seem is the hardest.
Enter: The Black Sheep. Since we launched a year ago, we’ve been a home for people who feel loyalty to something bigger than peer approval or convenient narratives. We’ve published numerous stories from black sheep who have recognized that life after dissent isn’t just tolerable, but desirable.
The Black Sheep’s readers are a rare group who genuinely want to engage with controversial ideas on their merits and believe doing anything less ultimately hinders us all. Those of you who have chipped in with a paid subscription or donation are literally laying the foundation for a better future with your support. This Thanksgiving, I wanted to send out a giant thank you for making this publication possible. We can’t do this without you, and we hope those of you who’ve appreciated our work will join in contributing to help our community grow.
I want you to see the alternative culture we’re cultivating with your support. So let’s take a trip down memory lane—here are some of my favorite essays from the black sheep we’ve published over the last year.
One of our first guest essays after launching was the story of a writer and literary magazine editor who had a cancellation mob kill her publication for the crime of… publishing fiction with an unlikable white male protagonist. While some people are fooled by the notion that a better world is created by punishing everyone who doesn’t conform to their beliefs, something ugly lives beneath this behavior. This essay highlights a vital lesson our culture needs to learn: the best place to hide bad intentions is behind the facade of good intentions. Stories like Michele Seminara’s are needed to help liberals recognize the countless authoritarian wolves wearing liberals’ clothing.
Griftivism: How Activists Profit Off Your Empathy
My cancellation helped me uncover how activism is often a nefarious disguise.
There are many different routes to becoming a black sheep. Women who reject the disempowering narratives promoted as feminism, artists who commit wrong-think by having any political opinions to the right of the far-Left, and sexual minorities who question the fringe ideas pushed on them as “liberation.” Pear Joseph’s essay is a classic tale of learning that a real community offers its members the freedom to be authentic and respects their right to question ideas gaining dominance. It also warns against the mistaken belief that sharing the same identity is synonymous with sharing the same values.
Pear’s essay reminds me of my own experience recognizing that the “community” I found myself in as a leftist was based on my performing all the same opinions as the group. The person who would later develop a career built upon expressing my individual perspective was once entirely consumed with being who a group of ideologues wanted me to be.
Being LGBT Without The “Community”
Despite proudly proclaiming how inclusive and accepting they are, the LGBT “community” doesn’t tolerate individualism.
As a millennial, I remember a culture that was closer than ever to transcending race as a meaningful category, with MLK Jr.’s principle of treating people as individuals so widely recognized that people espoused it with the same common sense tone you’d use to state the sky’s color. Yet Adam B. Coleman’s essay reveals that group identities like race are still traps that tell us who we’re supposed to be, at the expense of becoming who we are.
Adam is a success story, but his essay still makes me sad; it’s a reminder of how group identities can limit great individuals when they crowd out individuality.
"Blackness” Is a Collectivist Control Tactic—Even A Child Could See It
With every lame comment about how “white” I dressed or talked, it weakened my resolve for pursuing other people’s acceptance.
The biggest obstacle to a healthier society isn’t so much the unhinged activists who turn every situation into a vehicle for indoctrination, but the everyday people who are blind to their schemes and thus enable them. William Reusch’s story is what I would show the latter person. There’s something innately sinister about mediocre ideologues using the guise of moral superiority to gang up on an inquisitive person for questioning the ideology they’re pushing.
Will’s essay is an example of how authoritarians can sneak into trusted professions like education, and the first line of defense is black sheep like Will who are willing to push back.
It’s hard to believe that Gillian Florence Sanger’s commonsense essay received more backlash than the others on this list; perhaps that’s because it debunks a key collectivist tactic.
The year was 2020 and Instagram was awash in black squares; some called them symbols of solidarity, but I called them symptoms of groupthink. People were being pressured into performing a vapid gesture of loyalty to an ideology they barely understood. And now, as new world events lead to a routine updating of foreign flags for display in one’s social media bio, Gillian’s essay gives people the words they need to combat the shaming, pressuring, and blatant threats collectivists use to create the illusion of agreement with their destructive ideology.
Silence Isn’t Violence—It’s An Act Of Maturity We Need More Of
A culture obsessed with appearances has forgotten the power of silence.
There’s an alternative path for women, one where we gain enough maturity and wisdom to use our relatively new-found influence in all of society to help it move forward, not drag it back into the past by clinging to an outdated ideology. During my feminist days, I looked down on men, made pejorative jokes about them that I wouldn’t tolerate if made about women, and actively looked for anything I could use as evidence I was oppressed. It brought me nothing except a false sense of superiority that allowed me to ignore the many personal issues I needed to outgrow.
Lilah Fisher Wise’s story beautifully shows how feminist groupthink has encouraged women like us to hurt ourselves and those around us. But this isn’t a discussion most women in the freest societies in history are ready to have.
Luckily, Lilah’s is the most popular essay we’ve published to date.
Feminist Ideology Wrecked My Marriage. And It’s Wrecking Women’s Politics.
Women are more often victims of our own beliefs about men than actual men.
All of these essays elevate the values we most need today: individualism over collectivism, rationality over irrationality, courage over cowardice. Your support is helping us show more people that dissent against destructive groups is uncomfortable, but letting destructive people control you and your society is unacceptable.
Please consider a paid subscription or one-time donation to The Black Sheep. We can’t keep telling stories like these without your support. But with your help, The Black Sheep will encourage more people to walk away from today’s mainstream culture of division and collectivism.
“Peaking behind the curtain” …… you nailed it!! As a kid in the 60’s, I can clearly remember watching (between my fingers) as Dorthey bravely confronts the wizard, and then the ahhh haaa moment arrives. Will never forget it. And then, in a blink of an eye, it is 60 years later, and I am reading my trusted MSM media, Covid has us in lockdowns, and I am having the same feeling that I need to look behind the curtain. My spider senses were telling me I am being lied to……. a lot. First, I found Independent Media then The Black Sheep. Ahhh Haaa…… it all makes sense now. And looks like Totto is going to make it back to Kansas.