Emotional healing is the latest form of fascism. Getting over your trauma, or coping with your problems, makes you a literal Nazi, according to Rev. Jinzu Minna Jain, pronouns they/them.
“Even in left-wing spaces we can accidentally reproduce health fascism through the language of healing”, Reverend Jain told the Socialism 2026 “Liberatory Spirit, the Spirit of Liberation” panel this weekend.
“Organizers need to be careful about what ‘healing’ means, because sometimes people are not looking to ‘get better’ or ‘move past’ trauma at all”, Jain opined. “What people may need instead is collective support while sitting with the cracks, sitting with the bones, and sitting in the horror together.”
We must stay stuck in our feels, otherwise the fascists win. Here is a clip of Jain, an “artist, writer, and racial & systemic equity educator” who identifies as “BIPOC, disabled, queer and trans/nonbinary”, displaying the arrested development of an unhappy young adult.
An intense, often distressing preoccupation with personal moral, spiritual, ethical, or ideological ‘purity’ is commonly called scrupulosity. It is also known as ‘religious OCD’ or ‘moral OCD’. Author Ben Appel, who was raised in the Lamb of God cult, developed a bad case of scrupulosity as a child. He tells the story in his memoir, Cis White Gay: The Making of a Gender Heretic.
Conditioned to think of himself as a hell-bound sinner by the spiritual abuse of the cult, which he likens to sexual abuse, Appel struggled with involuntary urges to pray. He would pray silently in class, and then try to sneak the word “amen” out loud as a cough, or else rush to the restroom, fall on his knees in a stall, and call on God to help him stop feeling tortured.
Scrupulosity is mental self-bullying. Sufferers experience intrusive doubts and fears that they have sinned, violated their values, become spiritually contaminated, or failed to live up to an impossibly high standard of goodness. Constantly aware of their own imperfections, the scrupulous constantly seek reassurance that they are still “clean” or morally acceptable. They are seeking permission to love themselves.
“I was mistaken to believe that the prayer, if I could just say it correctly or repeat it enough times, would eventually ease my shame”, Appel laments. “Praying only made it more potent.” His constant urge to pray became so debilitating that the only cure was to stop praying altogether.
Many years later, Appel discovered he had joined yet another cult after he was accepted into Columbia. In this campus cult of woke, being homosexual was not radical enough. Appel was white, and ‘cis’, not “properly queer”, and at Columbia, that made him the oppressor. His struggle meant nothing to the cult of social justice. His story of healing and personal growth was unwelcome.
Appel had wanted to join the queer tribe, but “the group I had longed to unite with, dedicated to social justice and equality” was “more conformist and intolerant than the fundamentalist religious leaders of my childhood … and even crueler than my middle school bullies.”
One commonality with Appel’s previous cult experience that stood out to him was the struggle. Within the history of communism we find class struggle, Lenin’s post-revolutionary struggle to purify the state, Stalin’s two-line struggle between ‘correct’ and ‘incorrect’ views, his purges, and the ritual humiliation sessions of Mao. When everything is a struggle, helplessness sets in.
The ‘liberationist’ teachings Ben Appel received from certified Marxists at Columbia were “a remarkably familiar reprise of the close-minded, intolerant orthodoxy of the Christian cult from which I had escaped at age twelve.” Students “literally wore pajamas” because they were so fragile and infantilized. The lectures they attended did not help.
This was perhaps an historical inevitability. Ludwig Feuerbach, the German socialist philosopher, was explicit about replacing God with humanity. Drawing on Feuerbach, Marx replaced humanity with the socialist state. Lenin replaced the state with the Party. The woke era has seen the Party replaced with identity in the dialectical formulation.
Leftist ideology is simply ersatz Christianity stripped of grace and forgiveness. Once you see it, you can never unsee it. The Socialism 2026 panel put it on grand display.
