Rod Dreher's Blog, page 10

Monkeypox & Gay Sex Freaks

From The Telegraph:

Monkeypox cases in Spain have been linked to a superspreader event at an adult sauna in Madrid.

“Adult sauna” means gay bathhouse. More:

Enrique Ruiz Escudero, the region’s cabinet minister for health of the community, said on Friday that health officials had traced many of Spain’s 30 monkeypox cases to a single sauna in the capital.

Britain’s monkeypox tally now stands at 20 after 11 fresh cases were announced on Friday, and contact tracing and quarantine of close contacts is under way.

A “notable proportion” of the UK and European cases are in gay and bisexual men, health officials have said.

Three cases in Belgium have also been linked to a large-scale fetish festival in Antwerp, according to organisers. The Darklands Festival [warning: link takes you to festival promotional video, which is NSFW] warned people who attended four days of parties, starting on May 5, that authorities had linked the event to the country’s three confirmed cases.

“There’s reason to assume that the virus has been brought in by visitors from abroad to the festival after recent cases in other countries,” the festival said on its website.

Darklands is a ticketed event that describes itself as a place where “various tribes in the gay fetish community (leather, rubber, army, skinhead, puppies…) come together to create a unique spectacle of fetish brotherhood”.

Sources have told The Telegraph that an internationally advertised gay party in Spain is also being investigated as the root cause of the global monkeypox cases.

In the UK, a link was first drawn between gay men and monkeypox earlier in the week, with the UK Health Security Agency (UKHSA) urging men who have sex with men to be alert to any new rashes or lesions on their body, including their genitalia.

A unique spectacle of fetish brotherhood. Now nobody will be allowed to draw freaking obvious conclusions from this epidemiological event — that these wicked people are bringing serious disease into our societies, and ought to be stigmatized and suppressed — because it involves the deranged sexual behavior of a Sacred Minority.

From Darklands Festival 2020

“Therefore God gave them over in the sinful desires of their hearts to sexual impurity for the degrading of their bodies with one another.” (Romans 1:24). It’s not just the fetish brotherhood and the bathhouse whores. It’s this entire society we live in that valorizes people like that, and their behavior.

In 2013, Emily Witt wrote for n+1 a shocking (but celebratory) story about sexual culture in San Francisco. Be aware: it’s not for the squeamish. Excerpts:

In San Francisco, people thought differently. They sought to unlink the family from a sexual foundation of two people. They believed in intentional communities that could successfully disrupt the monogamous heterosexual norm. They gave their choices names and they conceived of their actions as social movements. I had come to San Francisco to observe this sexual vanguard, but I did not think their lessons applied to me. “But what is your personal journey?” they would ask, and I would joke about this later with my friends.

I can’t post any further details here without putting into your minds images that you may not want to. I can tell you that Witt attends the filming of a public pornography video in which a female porn actress willingly declares that “I am a worthless c*nt,” and undergoes various public sexual tortures, for her own pleasure and the pleasure of the mob. It is heterosexual, and it is evil. Interestingly, I talked the other day to a Christian friend who told me about a recent convert, a young woman who had a tattoo on her body that conveyed the same message. He asked her about it, and she said, “I used to think that’s what I was.”

OK, this part from the Emily Witt story I can post without feeling that I’ve assaulted you:

In San Francisco, the right to be a lawfully wedded couple was not taken for granted, but this question was still pursued with a cheerful, pragmatic determination. It came accompanied by Google spreadsheets, jargon, discussion groups, community centers, dietary changes, and hallucinogens. San Francisco’s sexual vanguard might overuse words like “consciousness” and “mindfulness,” but the success of their politicization of sex had repercussions that reached across the country. The mind-set could sometimes seem grim, or at least all that talking kind of dampened the feeling of spontaneity. But they meant it: “Polyamory is a decolonizing force,” one person explained to me. “If you want to transform society, it includes our intimate relations.”

I met with everyone I could. I met a group of Google employees in their early twenties, beneficiaries of the country’s most elite educational institutions, now applying their sharp minds to the investigation of multiple concurrent relationships. They all did yoga, were extremely attractive, and accompanied their sexual experimentation with controlled consumption of psilocybin mushrooms and MDMA. They spoke of primary and secondary relationships, and described a world in which jealousy and possessiveness were the sins to overcome. I attended the cult-like meetings of a group of people who have devoted themselves to the female orgasm. After a “game” at one meeting, where I stood directly in front of a male stranger who looked in my eyes and repeatedly demanded answers to the question “WHAT DO YOU DESIRE?” for several minutes, I went home, drank almost a full bottle of wine, and wept.

I took the train across the Bay to Oakland for a quiet dinner with several anarchists, to talk about anarchist ideas of sexuality. They all wore black and spoke of their decisions with a seriousness that my friends in New York might have had derided. The anarchists cooked kale and dressed their pasta with cashew pesto from a jar. Oakland’s soft summer warmth came as a welcome relief from San Francisco’s miserable microclimates. We dined with the windows open and the evening sun flooding into an apartment lined with books.

In another part of Oakland I met with a radical queer activist who had a platonic partner, a sexual partner, and a rotating cast of people with whom she “played.” (The really tough part, she admitted, was the scheduling.) I asked if her platonic partner was not just her roommate, or a friend, but she explained that it involved a deeper commitment: going to holidays at each other’s family homes, caring for each other when sick—everything expected of a husband or wife except for the sex. It wasn’t any easier than marriage, either: they were in couples’ therapy.

In the past twenty years, in San Francisco especially, the celebration of choice over systems has coincided with the advent of new technology and an influx of money and entrepreneurs. One result has been the healthy, humane workplaces presented by Google, Facebook, Twitter, and the other Bay Area companies and their acceptance of individual expression in the corporate workplace and of families in all their forms. These changes made for a better working experience, but they also made it easier to complacently watch the flourishing of unfamiliar digital monopolies, to partake in the consumer delights produced by unprecedented inequality with a mistaken sense of political agency, and to pay to watch a woman get gangbanged on the internet with a clean conscience, because the producers used the rhetoric of the fair and just. The ghosts of the formerly ostracized, including the untimely dead, haunted the city. The general consensus was that we honored the dead and the formerly oppressed by enacting the present utopia.

The wealth and the corporate culture that produced it defied the old models of good and bad. Google’s motto, “Don’t be evil,” had been adopted across a range of industries. Evil, unfortunately, remained loosely defined: we would know it when we saw it. But all we saw on our computers were our photographs, our friends, our broken hearts, our writing, our search terms, our sexual fetishes.

The friendly blandness of Google’s interface bestowed blessing on the words that passed through its sieve. On Google, all words were created equal, as all ways of choosing to live one’s life were equal. Google blurred the distinction between normal and abnormal. The answers its algorithms harvested assured each person of the presence of the like-minded: no one need be alone with her aberrant desires, and no desires were aberrant.

This is the dark side of this culture of “freedom” we have created. Monkeypox, anarchy, and the destruction of the human. If you don’t think the legitimization of the sexual exploitation of children isn’t coming next, you are living a fairy tale.

By the way, here is what the Diversity-Celebrators of the Spanish sauna and the fetish festival have introduced into our society. From a Deutsche Welle report about the monkeypox outbreak, this image of a sufferer:

 

According to Wikipedia, this is what happens when you contract it:

Symptoms begin with fever, headache, muscle pains and feeling tired. Unlike the more severe smallpox, there are also swollen glands. Within a few days or longer of the high temperature, lesions appear typically on the face first before spreading to other parts of the body. They begin as small flat spots, before becoming small bumps which then fill with at first clear fluid and then pus, which subsequently burst and scab over. It looks identical to the rash of smallpox. An affected person may remain unwell for two to four weeks.

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‘Not Everything’s About You’

Bill Maher’s monologue about LGBT is fantastic. The guy is liberal, and pro-LGBT, but he says we have taken this way too far. Above, he’s pointing out that at the statistical rate that the population is declaring itself L, G, B, or T, we will all be LGBT by mid-century. He’s joking, obviously, but it’s a real thing that the percentage of people in US society claiming LGBT status has doubled every generation. This has never before happened in human history. But one is not permitted by the woke gatekeepers to notice this, except to cheer for it. In the monologue, Maher lambasts the ACLU for surrendering its historical dedication to free speech in order to support suppressing trans-critical speech.

There are some funny lines (e.g., “Maybe childhood makes you sad sometimes, and there are other solutions besides, ‘Hand me the dick saw.'”), but there are some strong, substantive points here — and made in a way that today, given where he lives and the professional world in which he lives, constitutes bravery. For example:

I’m happy for LGBT folks that we now live in an age where they can lead their authentic lives openly. And we should always be mindful of respecting and protecting. But someone needs to say it: Not everything’s about you. And it’s okay to ask questions about something that’s very new and involves children.

Watch the whole thing. It’s only nine minutes long, but something like this, from a Los Angeles liberal like Bill Maher, is worth an infinite number of op-eds and blog posts from cultural conservatives like me:

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Cordileone Shows How To Bishop

A letter that Salvatore Cordileone, the Catholic Archbishop of San Francisco, sent to Nancy Pelosi:

To the Speaker of the House of Representatives of the United States Congress Nancy Pelosi

The Second Vatican Council, in its Decree on the Church in the Modem World, Gaudium et spes, reiterated the Church’s ancient and consistent teaching that “from the first moment of conception life must be guarded with the greatest care while abortion and infanticide are unspeakable crimes” (n. 51). Christians have, indeed, always upheld the dignity of human life in every stage, especially the most vulnerable, beginning with life in the womb. His Holiness, Pope Francis, in keeping with his predecessors, has likewise been quite clear and emphatic in teaching on the dignity of human life in the womb.

This fundamental moral truth has consequences for Catholics in how they live their lives, especially those entrusted with promoting and protecting the public good of society. Pope St. John Paul II was also quite consistent in upholding this constant teaching of the Church, and frequently reminded us that “those who are directly involved in lawmaking bodies have a ‘grave and clear obligation to oppose’ any law that attacks human life. For them, as for every Catholic, it is impossible to promote such laws or to vote for them” (cf. Doctrinal Note on some questions regarding the participation of Catholics in political life [November 24, 2002], n. 4, §1). A Catholic legislator who supports procured abortion, after knowing the teaching of the Church, commits a manifestly grave sin which is a cause of most serious scandal to others. Therefore, universal Church law provides that such persons “are not to be admitted to Holy Communion” (Code of Canon Law, can. 915).

With regard to the application of these principles to Catholics in political life, then-Cardinal Joseph Ratzinger, as Prefect of the Congregation for the Doctrine of the Faith, wrote to the U.S. bishops in 2004 explaining the approach to be taken:

“… when a person’s formal cooperation becomes manifest (understood, in the case of a Catholic politician, as his consistently campaigning and voting for permissive abortion and euthanasia laws), his Pastor should meet with him, instructing him about the Church’s teaching, informing him that he is not to present himself for Holy Communion until he brings to an end the objective situation of sin, and warning him that he will otherwise be denied the Eucharist. When ‘these precautionary measures have not had their effect … ,’ and the person in question, with obstinate persistence, still presents himself to receive the Holy Eucharist, ‘the minister of Holy Communion must refuse to distribute it.’”

In striving to follow this direction, I am grateful to you for the time you have given me in the past to speak about these matters. Unfortunately, I have not received such an accommodation to my many requests to speak with you again since you vowed to codify the Supreme Court’s Roe v. Wade decision in federal law following upon passage of Texas Senate Bill 8 last September. That is why I communicated my concerns to you via letter on April 7, 2022, and informed you there that, should you not publicly repudiate your advocacy for abortion “rights” or else refrain from referring to your Catholic faith in public and receiving Holy Communion, I would have no choice but to make a declaration, in keeping with canon 915, that you are not to be admitted to Holy Communion.

As you have not publicly repudiated your position on abortion, and continue to refer to your Catholic faith in justifying your position and to receive Holy Communion, that time has now come. Therefore, in light of my responsibility as the Archbishop of San Francisco to be “concerned for all the Christian faithful entrusted to [my] care” (Code of Canon Law, can. 383, §1), by means of this communication I am hereby notifying you that you are not to present yourself for Holy Communion and, should you do so, you are not to be admitted to Holy Communion, until such time as you publicly repudiate your advocacy for the legitimacy of abortion and confess and receive absolution of this grave sin in the sacrament of Penance.

Please know that I stand ready to continue our conversation at any time, and will continue to offer up prayer and fasting for you.

I also ask all of the faithful of the Archdiocese of San Francisco to pray for all of our legislators, especially Catholic legislators who promote procured abortion, that with the help and under the guidance of the Holy Spirit, they may undergo a conversion of heart in this most grave matter and human life may be protected and fostered in every stage and condition of life.

Given at San Francisco, on the nineteenth day of May, in the Year of our Lord 2022.

[Signed]

Salvatore J. Cordileone

Archbishop of San Francisco

It is sad that this was necessary. But necessary it certainly was — not least for the salvation of Nancy Pelosi’s soul. I wish we had more bishops like him, in all the churches, including my own.

 

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Fear, And ‘Fear’

I just finished a long phone conversation with an old Christian friend whose family is in crisis. Obviously I won’t give details here, but it has to do with a sibling who has struggled for years with mental health, and who is now identifying as transgender. The friend called me after watching or listening to the startling interview my podcast partner Kale Zelden and I did with Helena Kerschner, the 23-year-old detransitioner, who described at length how she was sucked into the trans world. (If you don’t have time to listen to the interview, then read and what the experience has taught her about why so many people of her generation are falsely embracing trans identity.)

“That interview rocked me hard,” he told me, and then revealed to me the struggles within his family to make sense of this. He doesn’t believe for one second that his sibling (who is married but estranged from her husband, who has his own issues) is actually transgender. Rather, she surrounded herself with friends who told her that the solution to all her anxieties was to embrace her “true” identity as a man.

We talked through this for over an hour. I had no answers for him, not really. Has any civilization ever faced this kind of thing? It’s hard to believe. But we can be sure that it is going to get much worse before it gets better. We talked about the spiritual aspects of all this, and how the churches are badly equipped to deal with it.

I bring this up in light of this comment by Skye Jethani, a standard-bearer of the “What, Me Worry?” Evangelicals:

What’s really fueling all of the criticism of winsome Christian voices like @timkellernyc & @DavidAFrench? Here’s my take on the ‘war on winsomeness’ from this week’s @HolyPostPodcast. https://t.co/ljybKdWVeG pic.twitter.com/zERYOYoHfi

— Skye Jethani (@SkyeJethani) May 20, 2022

This comes from Jethani’s Holy Post podcast. He thinks Christians like me are “terrified,” and traffick in fear, and that this is why we criticize the “winsome” approach of people like Tim Keller and David French. What we really need to realize, he said, is that Jesus is in charge — as if faith somehow magically makes threats disappear.

I am reminded of the old joke about the man who sits on the roof of his house in a flood, praying for God to save him. Rescuers show up in a boat and urge him to get in, but he says no, I’m fine, God is going to save me. The water keeps rising higher, and he intensifies his prayers. Another rescue boat shows up, but he turns them away too, saying that God is in charge, and is going to save him. Finally the waters overtake the man’s house, and he drowns. When he gets to heaven, he asks God, “I had faith in you! Why didn’t you save me?” And God answers: “Fool, I sent two sets of people to rescue you, but you wouldn’t listen to them.”

And I think about the Slovak Catholic bishops of the 1940s, who told Father Tomislav Kolakovic that he should stop his mission of preparing Slovak Catholics for Communist persecution, because that kind of thing won’t happen here, not to us. Thank God the priest did not listen to the bishops, and continued building his network. When the Iron Curtain fell over his country, the Slovaks who took Father Kolakovic seriously were ready. They couldn’t stop the persecution, but they were prepared to live with it, and remain faithful under great duress.

Not all fear is of the same kind. There is a fear that is irrational, and often found with a fear that paralyzes. But there is also a fear that is reasonable, and that should encourage people to act to the best of their abilities to reduce the threat that provokes the fear reaction. The first kind of fear is a curse, but the second kind of fear is a gift, if received rightly.

What I’m trying to get my readers to do, in both The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies, is to embrace the second kind of fear. The Jethanis of the world want people to believe that all fear is of the first kind. I believe they are not selling courage, but a form of anesthesia. And they are going to get a lot of Christians in trouble.

Before we go further, let me say that I am only speaking for myself, and that I’m not talking about Tim Keller or David French. I know very little about Keller, except by his sterling reputation; I am in no position to criticize him. David French is a friend, and though we disagree on a lot, I think he’s correct when he focuses on certain actors on the Right, religious and political, who stoke people’s fears — rational and irrational — for worldly advantage. I do have a much darker view of the present situation, and the situation developing, than David does. But in neither case do I believe either Keller or French says what they do out of bad motive. I think they are being faithful to what they believe to be the truth. I simply think that the “winsome” approach associated with Keller and French is in general no longer a rational response to the times in which Christians find themselves.

The Protestant cultural critic Aaron Renn really does speak prophetically about this stuff. If you’re not following him, you really should be. In his latest Substack essay, he defends his “Three Worlds of Evangelicalism” thesis, which obviously has relevance to all theologically conservative Christians, not just Evangelicals. Excerpts:

To refresh, my framework posits that during the period of secularization post-1965, America has passed through three distinct phases or worlds in terms of how secular culture views Christianity.

Positive World (Pre-1994). Christianity was viewed positively by society and Christian morality was still normative. To be seen as a religious person and one who exemplifies traditional Christian norms was a social positive. Christianity was a status enhancer. In some cases, failure to embrace Christian norms hurt you.Neutral World (1994-2014). Christianity is seen as a socially neutral attribute. It no longer had dominant status in society, but to be seen as a religious person was not a knock either. It was more like a personal affectation or hobby. Christian moral norms retained residual force.Negative World (2014-). In this world, being a Christian is now a social negative, especially in high status positions. Christianity in many ways is seen as undermining the social good. Christian morality is expressly repudiated.

Like all frameworks of this type – such as the division of history into ancient, medieval, and modern – my three worlds model is a simplification of very complex phenomena, and designed primarily for utilitarian purposes. Unlike with theological or scientific models, which are claims to objective truth, frameworks like these are tools to help us make sense of and navigate the world. There may be many frameworks to explain the same phenomenon, each of which is useful to some people but not others, or each of which illuminates different dimensions of the situation. I always encourage people to try out different frameworks or lenses on a problem to look at it from multiple angles. Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option is a related but different lens, for example.

Renn obliterates David French’s claim that there was never a time in the contemporary US when it was acceptable to hold morally conservative beliefs. Renn provides data — many of which you can also find in Live Not By Lies — showing that there really has been a sea change in American moral views, in a very short period of time. Do you remember that as recently as 2008, California voters — California! — voted down same-sex marriage in a referendum. You can believe that the changes have been good, or mostly good, but what you cannot deny is that there have been huge changes in American life on a number of moral issues — and all of this has made it much more difficult for those who believe in traditional Christianity. Renn:

The average person in America can sense that something has changed profoundly in the era since Obama won his second term. They might not be sure what it is, how to describe it, or what to do about it, but they know it’s there. Acting like it’s the same old negative world it ever was – or even, as French does, pointing out ways things have improved – is just not going to connect with people. It’s like continuing to describe our world in terms of concepts like relativism. It doesn’t speak to the mood of the culture or what the man on the street is sensing and or experiencing in his daily life.

I spoke this week to a friend who is involved in Christian education, and he has a pretty negative view of the future of it. Why? Because, he said, he sees so many Christian schools that declare themselves to be conservative preoccupying themselves with maintaining status in Negative World (he didn’t use this term, but that’s what he was talking about). He gave me specific examples. I believe him. Back in 2015, I was present at a meeting of conservative Evangelicals at which a speaker, an academic, predicted that things would get much worse for those who believe in the gender binary, and what Scripture teaches about sex and sexuality.

A woman present who held a high-status job in a major American city was clearly frustrated by all this. She said something like, “When can we get over all this concern about homosexuality and transgenderism, and get back to preaching the Gospel?”

I don’t know this woman, and can’t discern what was in her heart. But she is the sort of person Skye Jethani speaks to, and for. She apparently held the wholly untenable belief that to be a Christian is what you affirm in your heart, and has nothing to do with what you do with her body. Maybe she would have denied that she believed that, but that’s exactly the implication of her remark. The truth is that given the world she was in — secular media — and the position she held, she was made extremely uncomfortable by the claim that to be faithful to Christ, you could not affirm homosexuality or transgenderism.

Aaron Renn does not claim, nor do I, that there was ever any sort of Golden Age of Christianity in America. Try being a believer who preached the Gospel truth about race in the 1950s South, and see how much the Positive World did for you. Nevertheless, it is generally true that Christianity back then was seen as something positive for society. This is why the black pastors of the Civil Rights Movement were so effective in calling out the hypocrisy of white Christians who professed one thing, but live another way. If Christianity weren’t seen as a positive thing, that line of critique and protest would not have been effective. Today, Scripturally normative Christianity very much is not seen as positive — not even when that Christianity is held by people of color. In the European Parliament this week, members voted down a discussion about Deborah Yabuku, a Nigerian Christian murdered by Muslims on charges that she blasphemed against the Prophet Muhammad on a WhatsApp chat:

This is the moment when MEPs voted NOT to even debate the issue of Christian persecution and the tragic murder of Deborah, killed for “blaspheming” on a WhatsApp chat. “Shame!” Shout some MEPs in response: pic.twitter.com/WWgQLlkE6g

— ADF International (@ADFIntl) May 20, 2022

When you talk to people who do work with the persecuted church around the world, you’ll hear them all say that Western politicians and civil society leaders don’t want to know about this stuff, or to act on it. They regard Christians as somehow deserving what they get. Inside every martyred Nigerian Christian is a little Jerry Falwell Jr., they seem to believe.

As Renn says, there must have been a period of Neutral World in the transition. He dates it to 1994, but I can say that I lived it in my high school between 1983-85. There were gay people there who were either out, or made little effort to hide their homosexuality. Everybody knew who they were — and nobody cared. There were also engaged Christians, who were a small minority. Their status was definitely not enhanced by being identified as believers, but it didn’t suffer either. They were respected. Most of us would have said we were Christian if asked, but didn’t go to church and were pretty, well, neutral about the whole thing. I didn’t really consider myself a Christian back then, and actually was quite liberal overall. But I didn’t think badly either of Christians or gay folks. I had friends in both camps. Back then, there was nothing like the polarization of today.

Almost every day I hear from someone who tells me that they used to think I was an alarmist about this stuff, until the shadow of what Renn calls Negative World fell over their lives. I think Christians and other religious and moral traditionalists, and dissenters of all kinds from the postliberal successor ideology of Wokeness, ought to fear this stuff, in the same way they ought to fear crime, and take sensible precautions against it. Believing in Jesus Christ is not going to keep bad things from happening to you. Your faith may help you endure those bad things with calm courage, because you know that in the end, “the Lion of the Tribe of Judah, the Root of David has triumphed” (Rev. 5:5). When you read the testimonies of Christians jailed by Communist regimes, you don’t see any of this middle-class American “don’t worry, be happy” copium. You see people who knew exactly how evil their opponents were, and who were suffering because of it. But they were not afraid to die for Christ, because they knew that the God-man in whom they placed their faith had already defeated death. Even if they were asked to give their lives in testimony for Him, they were prepared to do it.

Dr. Silvester Krcmery, one of Father Kolakovic’s disciples, and a pillar of the underground Catholic Church in Communist Slovakia, wrote that his spiritual father had taught them all to expect persecution one day, but to meet it without fair, trusting that everything they suffered for Christ’s sake had meaning, and would be rewarded ultimately. Father Kolakovic’s command to refuse fear was certainly not telling them to relax, because nothing bad would happen to them. Not at all! He was telling his followers that persecution is coming, and you should prepare for it now — and when it arrives, meet it with courage and confidence. This is why, in his 1954 trial, the young physician Krcmery told the Communist court:

God gave me everything I have and now that I face persecution because of Him, and am called on to profess my faith in Him, should I now pretend I don’t believe? Should I hide my faith? Should I deny Him?

That is true courage! Only a fearless man could have spoken that way. Dr. Krcmery spent a decade in prison, under torture, for his faith. In his 1996 memoir, this is what the former prisoner of conscience had to say to the world:

We are so often naive in our thinking. We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible. We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented. This, at first, is quite inconspicuous. However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.

We are, I believe, living through the first days of that now. If you are the kind of person who recognizes it, but is paralyzed by fear of the future, then you desperately need to conquer that fear, and rather allow it to drive you to take prudent measures now to prepare, spiritually and otherwise, for what is to come. But by no means should you achieve peace of mind by denying the reality of what’s happening around you! That’s what the Catholic bishops of 1940s Slovakia did, and they failed to prepare their people for the trials to come. Their fear was the wrong kind, and it cost them and those under their authority greatly.

As Dr. Krcmery and Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn both warned, what happened in their countries could happen any place on earth. We have to hope and pray that it won’t happen here, but we cannot sit on our roof and pray for God to save us, while refusing to step in the rescue boat, so to speak. If you listen to Skye Jethani and his faction of Copium Christians, you will be buying inner peace at too high a price. My friend — the guy who called me today, whose younger sister is on the verge of mutilating her body in her quest to become male — comes from a normal middle-class suburban conservative Evangelical family. There is nowhere to hide.

You’d have to be crazy to look around our country today and not be afraid of what’s happening, and what it stands to do to you and your loved ones. Father Kolakovic was a preacher of healthy fear — but also of hope. Hope does not make bad things go away, but it gives us the wherewithal to confront them with courage. Denying that threats exist, and calling those who point to them bad people, is not faith, but rather a kind of cowardice.

 

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We Are All Katz & Sabatini

You have read my defenses here of Princeton professor Joshua Katz, who is being persecuted by the university for publicly dissenting from a totalitarian document proposed by black academics and their allies during the Summer Of Floyd. Today, The New York Times reports on it. It’s a pretty thorough basic account, it seems to me. Katz, one of the most distinguished Classics scholars in the world, was fine at Princeton, until he publicly dissented from the neoracist totalitarianism sweeping his institutions in 2020 (here’s what he wrote in dissent). I know the facts in the case, but re-reading them in today’s Times piece, it could not be more clear that Princeton went trolling for any excuse it could find to fire Joshua Katz for being a heretic against wokeness. Excerpt from today’s Times story:

But with attention focused on Dr. Katz, the student newspaper, The Daily Princetonian, began an investigation of sexual harassment accusations against him. It culminated in a lengthy report in February 2021 about his sexual relationship with the undergraduate.

Princeton already knew about her. The university had started an investigation after it learned of the relationship in late 2017, about ten years after it happened, and Dr. Katz confessed to a consensual affair. He was quietly suspended without pay for a year.

The Princetonian also reported that Dr. Katz had made at least two other women uncomfortable by taking them out to expensive dinners — and in one case by commenting on the woman’s appearance and giving her gifts. All three women were identified by pseudonyms and could not be reached for comment.

Dr. Katz’s lawyer said there was no pattern of sexual misconduct. He asked numerous students, male and female, to dinner over the years, she said — “so many that he has no idea who that even is.”

The woman in the sexual relationship did not cooperate with the original Princeton investigation. But after the Princetonian report, she filed a formal complaint that led the administration to open a new investigation, which it said was looking at new issues rather than revisiting old violations, according to the university report.

Princeton asserted that Dr. Katz had discouraged the woman from seeking mental health treatment while they were together, for fear of disclosing their relationship; that he had pressured her not to cooperate with the investigation in 2018; and that he had hindered that investigation by not being totally honest and forthcoming, according to the report.

Dr. Katz’s wife, Solveig Gold, said he had lost many friends over the controversy. “Nobody wants to be seen in his presence, in his company, in his friendship,” she said.

I am completely confident that when Princeton fires him, as they surely will, that Joshua Katz will have a lawsuit against the university, and that he will prevail, or at least he will walk away with a handsome settlement from the deep-pocketed institution. But none of this is victory. Prof. Katz’s wife said:

Ms. Gold said her husband had several job offers. “The canceled have a way of looking out for each other,” she said. “But none of them is the job that he has loved doing his whole life.”

Not only that, but Prof. Katz will have to live the rest of his life under a cloud. Will he ever be able to do Classics scholarship again? Doubtful. Academia is so poisonous and so totalitarian that most people would refuse to touch him. This is what Solveig Gold is talking about — not only personally, but professionally.

You think Live Not By Lies is alarmist? Talk to Joshua Katz about totalitarianism in American life.

Or talk to David Sabatini, one of the greatest cancer researchers of his generation, whose career is now in ashes because of what sounds all the world like a vengeful ex-lover. His story appears on Bari Weiss’s Substack, for which let us thank God every day that she had the guts to quit her job at the NYT and go it alone; that website of hers is irreplaceably important. Anyway, here are excerpts from the story, by Suzy Weiss:

Today, Sabatini is unemployed and unemployable. No one wants to be associated with him. Those who do risk losing their jobs, publishing opportunities, friends, visas, and huge federal grants. “What wormhole did my life take, to billionaires and protests and being called a sexual predator? What quirk in the universe allowed this to happen?” Sabatini asked me.

The entrance to the wormhole can be found in Rockville, Maryland, at a hotel that Sabatini was staying at while attending a conference about lysosomes and cancer sponsored by the National Institutes of Health. There, on the night of April 18, 2018, after an evening of whiskey tasting—Sabatini is a whiskey aficionado—he and Kristin Knouse had sex. Knouse was an incoming cancer researcher at the Whitehead, where she would also head her own lab; hers focused on liver regeneration. He was 50. She was 29. He had split with his wife, and was in the process of getting a divorce.

The next month they met up at Knouse’s condo near Boston Common where they discussed a few ground rules for their tryst. They agreed they could see other people. Knouse, Sabatini remembers, had ongoing flings with men who she referred to with nicknames like “anesthesiologist fuck buddy,” “finance bro,” and “physics professor,” and she wanted to keep it that way. Also, they wouldn’t tell anyone. Why complicate things at work? It was all supposed to be fun.

But then, in August 2018, the Whitehead adopted a new Consensual Sexual and Romantic Relationships Policy, which stated that lab heads couldn’t have a “consensual or sexual relationship” with any coworkers. “Not going to H.R. right then was my critical mistake,” Sabatini told me.

At the time, Sabatini didn’t think it mattered much. Things were fizzling. He still cared for Knouse, and they were still close—he had a cancer scare in late 2018, and when he found out he wasn’t dying, she was one of the few people he texted. But he was getting involved with another woman, a microbiologist in Germany.

Knouse didn’t want to let go. In January 2020 she texted, in part: “I get anxious when I don’t hear back from you and then I see you post stuff on Twitter and it provides an admittedly small and silly but still another bit of evidence to this growing feeling that you don’t care about me in the way that I care about you.” He wrote back: “I am sorry but you are being crazy.” In another text, Knouse admitted feeling “stung.” She added: “I think it’s worth thinking about whether you want someone who matches your passion, intellect, and ambition.” He wrote back: “I have to explore this.” (Knouse declined to talk with me. This account is based on interviews with Sabatini, more than a dozen colleagues of both Sabatini and Knouse, legal filings, text messages, emails, and documents obtained exclusively by Common Sense.)

For a few months, Knouse broke off communication with him. Then Covid hit. In April 2020, she reached out via text. She made a dorky joke about the pandemic and enemas. They griped about Covid safety protocols. She invited him and his son to her family’s beach house on Cape Cod for some “low density private beach and pool action.” She bought a new red Audi and sent him a picture of it. Her grandmother died, and he told her he was sorry for her loss, and they went back and forth about her traveling to Pennsylvania for the funeral. “A big hug,” he texted her, “and a safe travels!”

Then, in late summer or early fall—when the whole country was gripped by protests and riots, and everyone was apologizing and reckoning—something changed.

In October 2020, Knouse texted her friends that she was “unpack[ing] a ton of suppressed abuse and trauma from an obvious local source”—an apparent reference to Sabatini. Knouse’s fellowship at the Whitehead was ending, and she didn’t apply for any faculty jobs there. When the new director, Ruth Lehmann, called Knouse to ask why, Knouse complained for the first time of being “harassed.”

In November, Knouse warned her friend—an incoming Whitehead fellow—to “squeeze out as much advice as possible before your mentor is Weinstein’ed out of science.”

In December, at Lehmann’s behest, the consulting firm Jones Diversity sent the Whitehead employees a survey “based in part on Dr. Knouse’s false complaint about Dr. Sabatini,” according to a complaint later brought by Sabatini. All participants were anonymous. Five or so of the nearly 40 employees in Sabatini’s lab took part.

The next month, two former Sabatini lab members lodged complaints to H.R.—the first complaints against him in his 24-year tenure—about “bro culture” in the lab.

This prompted the Whitehead to hire the law firm Hinckley, Allen & Snyder to conduct an investigation on “gender bias and/or inequities and a retaliatory leadership in the Sabatini lab.” The Whitehead never told Sabatini what he was accused of. Former lab members told me their co-workers were sobbing when they came out of meetings with the lawyers, saying that the lawyers had put words in their mouths. “They had a very strong agenda,” one of them told me.

In retrospect, it was already over for this once-in-a-generation scientist.

More, after the law firm’s report came out:

So what exactly had those 248 pages said? What had David Sabatini been found guilty of that merited this kind of punishment? Chiefly, failing to disclose his consensual relationship with Knouse. On top of that, the report found that Sabatini, in his day-to-day administration of the lab, violated the Whitehead’s Anti-Harassment Policy, since his “behavior created a sexualized undercurrent in the lab.” Sabatini’s relationship with Knouse exacerbated things, given his “indirect influence” over her, which violated the Anti-Harassment Policy and ran afoul of the “spirit” if not the letter of another of the institute’s policies.

True, he didn’t supervise Knouse. He didn’t work directly with her. He never threatened her or proposed a quid pro quo. And he certainly didn’t have the power to fire her. But, according to the report, he had “experience, stature, and age” over her. Knouse’s apparent desire to continue their relationship only served to confirm his influence: “That she felt the need to act ‘fun’ to impress Sabatini underscores how Sabatini’s words and actions profoundly impacted her,” the lawyers wrote.

Nor did the lawyers care for the happy hours and whiskey tastings that Sabatini sometimes hosted in his office, which betrayed his “apparent ‘friendliness’ and general propensity to have ‘fun.’” (Knouse, in her counterclaim, says the events were “drunken,” and “conversations quite frequently veered to the sexual.”)

“While we have not found any evidence that Sabatini discriminates against or fails to support females in his lab, we find that Sabatini’s propensity to praise or gravitate toward those in the lab that mirror his desired personality traits, scientific success, or view of ‘science above all else,’ creates additional obstacles for female lab members,” the report concluded.

This was baffling to everyone I spoke to: Nine of Sabatini’s current and former lab employees, a current faculty member at the Whitehead, and half a dozen top doctors and scientists in Sabatini’s field. Most of them would not speak on the record for fear of being associated with Sabatini and derailing their own careers. “It’s impossible to be honest about this and preserve your own skin,” says a scientist who recently worked under Sabatini.

That trainee called the report’s depiction of the lab an “alternate reality,” and the characterization of Sabatini as lascivious and retaliatory “deeply insane.”

“They have the wrong guy,” a female scientist who knows Sabatini and Knouse told me. A female former trainee told me that the climate in Sabatini’s lab was “one of excellence.” She said that Sabatini could be demanding, but he was never demeaning or unfair. “I try to emulate him in my own lab,” another female former trainee said. A third female trainee said the lab could be informal, but it was hardly a locker room. “It just wasn’t in the air.“

I asked a former technician about the notorious whiskey tastings. “These weren’t keggers,” he said. “‘Bench scientists’ and ‘party’ don’t generally overlap.”

The allegations over the relationship and the ones about the lab’s culture served to reinforce each other; if Sabatini was so ill-advised as to hook up with a younger colleague, surely his bad judgment spilt over into his (extremely well-funded) lab. Making such a claim also appeared to be advantageous to the Whitehead.

For one, it would allow Lehmann to be seen as a no-nonsense leader with zero tolerance for the sexism in science that she saw as a challenge. It would also pacify Knouse, who wanted to see Sabatini fired publicly. “Part of me just wants to organize a protest outside of Whitehead and this would be over in a matter of hours not weeks,” wrote Knouse to a friend during the investigation.

Then, there’s the money.

Weiss is talking about how huge government grants keep university labs alive. In the #MeToo era, the state tied those grants to universities taking extremely sensitive positions on anything to do with sexual harassment.

One more excerpt:

In the 24 hours after the report came out, Sabatini’s life fell apart. MIT put him on administrative leave. The Howard Hughes Medical Institute, another prestigious non-profit that funds biomedical research and was paying Sabatini’s salary, fired him. He resigned from the Whitehead, and eventually MIT, at the advice of his lawyers who thought it would help him secure his next job. (“I one hundred percent regret that,” Sabatini told me).

Soon, the biotech startups he’d helped found— Navitor Pharmaceuticals, KSQ and Raze Therapeutics—started severing their relationships with him. Sabatini was axed from professorships, fellowships, and professional societies. Awards and grants were pulled. His income disappeared.

On August 20, Lehmann officially cut ties with Sabatini in an email sent to the whole institute. That was leaked to the Boston Globe within minutes; the news was circulating on Twitter within hours.

“I lost everything. My whole life imploded,” Sabatini said. “I became a shell of what I was.”

Read it all. You have to, to understand all the details. What exists — what people have created — is a system that allows certain favored people to position themselves as victims, and destroy those they have come to hate. Aside from the human tragedy here, think of the scientific discoveries that are now denied to us, because of this vengeful woman, and this vengeful, unjust system we have created — a system that is a Machine incapable of dealing with humanity, in all its complexity.

I have been hearing in private correspondence, and in this blog’s comments section, some people saying that they don’t recognize what America has become, and that they are exploring ways to leave. Others — I’m thinking of a friend who is a very well known academic — says that no matter what, he is staying to fight to the bitter end. The incredible thing is that we are having these conversations at all. I can do the work I do just fine here, for now, but if I were and up-and-coming Joshua Katz or David Sabatini, I would start looking to start my career in Europe or elsewhere abroad, where they aren’t as insane as Woke America has become.

And listen: the thing you see so clearly if you live any time abroad, as I have done in Hungary over the past year, is that America remains a cultural powerhouse, exporting our own insanity to the world. One of the reasons I strongly support Hungarian PM Viktor Orban is that he is not intimidated by any of it, and he understands the need to use what power he has as the country’s political leader to defy this insanity, and to prevent it from taking root in his country.

What I hope to see in our country is a Republican Party come to power on a platform of actively rolling back wokeness, institutionally and otherwise. Not just opposing it rhetorically, but using the power of the state to push it back, hard. No more Joshua Katzes. No more David Sabatinis. No more martyrs to this totalitarian ideology that is destroying our ability to live together as broken human beings.

Readers, what we are seeing happen now is precisely what the refugees from Communism who sought safety in the United States have seen coming. This is why I wrote Live Not By Lies: as both warning and a manual for dissidents. This is something that we have to fight using politics, but in the end, politics will not be sufficient to destroy this evil. This is a cultural war, and this, ultimately, is a war of religion, in the sense that wokeness is more of a political religion than a normal political program.

The important thing to understand is that though Joshua Katz and David Sabatini were high-profile academics, what happened to them could, one day, happen to you, if this is not stopped. You may not see this in your own life and workplace now, but it’s coming, and it’s coming fast. The political scientist Eric Kaufmann warns that it’s going to get much, much worse.From a podcast:

Brian Anderson: About a quarter of Americans have had direct exposure to what we could call critical social justice ideology at work. Younger employees are most likely to have gone through various training programs in this area and support as you just suggested, what I would call illiberalism, progressive illiberalism and what you’re calling cultural socialism.

Your data show that diversity training is linked both to being in favor of cancel culture and also having a greater fear of being subjected to cancel culture. So what explains that particular tension and what does this kind of youthful endorsement of what we’re calling cancel culture these days mean for the future of free speech in America?

Eric Kaufmann: I think it’s a very negative finding in a way for the future of free speech. It suggests there is a sort of package of beliefs, which fit under the label cultural socialism, which a large number of millennials have bought in into millennials and Gen Z. And that sort of deal if you like, that social contract is one that says, I am scared of being canceled, so I’m fearful of losing my job or reputation for something I’ve said online.

This is one of the questions that I put in this, and this question has been asked, a different version of it has been asked by the Cato Institute and similar kinds of findings, levels have been reported. Roughly 35, 36% of Americans are afraid of losing their job or reputation for things they’ve said or posted online in the past or in the present. It goes up to close to 50% amongst those under age 40, so it’s higher.

But what’s interesting is those younger people are much more likely to say, “Well,” in fact, a majority of those under age 25 would say, “Well, this is an acceptable price. My fear of being canceled is more or less an acceptable price to pay to protect minority groups.” So they’re buying into an ideology, which is a pretty sort of, it’s a pretty tough ideology that they’re willing to accept the risk of being canceled in order to uphold what they see as social justice.

So they’re buying the loss of freedom. They’re willing to sacrifice their own freedom to uphold their vision of cultural socialism. And that’s quite interesting to me, it kind of shows. Because a lot of the questions in the past have simply shown that yeah, people are scared of being canceled and yes, that they support free speech and they’re against hate speech, but none of these questions really force people to choose and make trade offs between these values. And when you do that, what you really see is that the older generations tend to prioritize free speech over cultural socialism. The younger generations, if anything, put cultural socialism slightly above free speech.

So I think as that generation enters organizations, they enter that become the median voter. They’re going to change the culture of organizations and probably even law to make it essentially to restrict free speech in the name of social justice.

The coming generation has been propagandized into submission. This is not something that is going to go away by simply voting for anti-woke Republicans this fall (though I hope you will!). This is a struggle that is going to take one or more generations to endure. You’re tired of me saying it, I’m sure, but small-o orthodox Christians and others who are on the dissident side of the culture war must — must! — use this time we have been given to prepare for the long struggle ahead. This is what Live Not By Lies is about. This is serious. The gift of the warning that the immigrants from the Communist world are giving us is not one we should take lightly.

The post We Are All Katz & Sabatini appeared first on The American Conservative.

Vienna Calling

Hallo, hallo, I interrupt this non-stop gloomery to report that soon my son Matt and I will be departing for a summer in Vienna. We have planned for months to spend the summer in the Austrian capital. I rented a flat from a friend who gave me a fantastic deal, and will use Vienna as a base to travel and do research for my next book. Matt is going to cycle a lot, travel with me some, and look around for grad school programs in Europe.

We visited Vienna last summer for a long weekend, and really liked it. I have some friends there — ADF folks, Mario and Ellen Fantini, and a few others — so we won’t arrive as strangers. I have never really been drawn to German culture, but there is something soft and appealing about the Austrians. I even like to hear their lilting version of spoken German, though German speakers seem to look down on it the way Back Bay Brahmins would snoot at an Alabama drawl.

Let me put the question to you Vienna lovers, and generally to you fans of Austria: what should we do this summer there? Mind you, I’ll not be staying put in one place, and we’ll be living there, not being tourists, so I’m more interested in the kinds of things that should become part of our summer-in-Vienna life. What are some good walks? Good cafes to make our second home? Places to drink wine? Our apartment will be not too far from the opera house, near the center of the city.

And what about Austrian culture? What should we know about it? What are things we should do? Shouldn’t do? What about trips within the country? I was just out here in Baton Rouge, where the temperature is 91 degrees Fahrenheit, with 42 percent humidity, and I’m thinking that I need to be on top of an Alp, drinking a cold crisp lager.

What should we read to prepare? Actually, this is a question for my son. I’ll be reading books of research for the book I’m writing. I insist that he read Joseph Roth’s novel The Radetzky March, Stefan Zweig’s memoir The World of Yesterday, and Paul Hofmann’s nonfiction portrait The Viennese. What else? If I had the whole summer to read what I wanted, I would probably try Robert Musil, but my reading program is set.

There’s a movie theater on the Ring that plays The Third Man, one of the greatest movies ever, regularly. I will find a Third Man tour of Vienna for us. And I might even bring myself to compete for 50,000 krankheits by climbing the Shmatterhorn!

If you have nothing to say about Vienna, why don’t you still add to this thread by talking about your vacation plans for the summer. I’m curious to know where people are going, if you’re going anywhere during this inflationary season.

The post Vienna Calling appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Day In The Culture War

Man, there was some hardcore Democratic craziness on Capitol Hill today. Here is Aimee Arrambide, a Democratic witness before a House committee today, at a hearing on abortion rights:

Truly incredible clip
pic.twitter.com/hjTgdoxX6G

— Greg Price (@greg_price11) May 18, 2022

There’s more from the hearing:

A Democrat witness testifying before the House Judiciary Committee on abortion rights Thursday declared that men can get pregnant and have abortions.

Aimee Arrambide, the executive director of the abortion rights nonprofit Avow Texas, was asked by Rep. Dan Bishop, R-N.C., to define what “a woman is,” to which she responded, “I believe that everyone can identify for themselves.”

“Do you believe that men can become pregnant and have abortions?” Bishop asked.

“Yes,” Arrambide replied.

The remarks from Arrambide followed a tense exchange between Bishop and Dr. Yashica Robinson, another Democrat witness, after he similarly asked her to define “woman.”

Here’s the exchange:

Q: “Do you believe that men can become pregnant and have abortions?” –@RepDanBishop

A: “Yes.” -Democrat witness pic.twitter.com/TfxboajSJU

— House Judiciary GOP (@JudiciaryGOP) May 18, 2022

This is what the Democratic Party believes. These are witnesses called by the Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee. Dr. Yashica Robinson, a pro-abortion OB/GYN, refused to answer a straightforward question about whether or not she would support the right to abort a child that was halfway out of the birth canal. Dr. Robinson said that such a thing has never happened. But it most certainly has (warning: very graphic video here).

We cannot have this. This has to be stopped. These insane people cannot be allowed to set public policy.

Meanwhile, Woke Disney continues to shape the minds of the young. Witness its new Pride collection of clothing and accessories,which includes kids’ clothing like this queer Star Wars jersey:

 

Marx believed that capitalism was a revolutionary force. Woke Capitalism is unquestionably the most culturally revolutionary force — and that’s the only revolution that matters today. You saw this ad, I guess, from Calvin Klein:

 

I do not want to share a society with any of these people. Not the people in this image, not the people who made these image, not the people who profit from images like this. They are destroying us.

 

 

The post A Day In The Culture War appeared first on The American Conservative.

Tucker Carlson Not Surrendering

I’m thrilled that Tucker Carlson isn’t doing the usual right-wing thing and crumpling in the face of bad-faith attacks from the media and Democrats. Watch this 15-minute monologue from him last night, throwing the “Great Replacement” smears back in their faces. 

Early in the monologue, Carlson points out that last year, a Syrian immigrant shooter went into a Boulder, Colo., supermarket and allegedly (he has not yet been tried and found guilty) murdered ten people — same number of dead as in Buffalo. Unlike this week in Buffalo, Joe Biden didn’t fly to that crime scene, Tucker said. Why not? Because that mass shooting didn’t fit the Narrative. He was a Person of Color, not a white supremacist. about how worried Colorado Muslims were of “backlash” because the shooter was Muslim. The Washington Post ran an analysis that pointed out that the Syrian shooter was, in fact, legally white, and an example of “whiteness”. So the Narrative Managers were able to call this an example of white male violence after all!

I also didn’t realize until watching this segment how mentally ill Payton Gendron, the Buffalo shooter, was. Did you know that he was hospitalized for 20 hours as a high school student because he had threatened mass shooting? Did you know that he wore a hazmat suit to school for an entire week? Did you know that his mother once helped him bury a cat that he had tortured and killed? Animal torture is a MASSIVE warning sign! This kid has been priming himself for homicide. But sure, let’s blame Tucker Carlson for this heinous act.

Below is the especially valuable part of the Carlson segment — the one in which he video-quotes passages of Democratic politicians and pundits saying explicitly that non-white immigration is diluting white voting power, and that’s a good thing. Watch:

Carlson smirks appropriately at the end, “So you play clips of them saying it, and you’re the deranged conspiracy nut.”

About the op-eds and media claims about how whites are declining in political strength, and what a great thing that is, Carlson says:

“If you don’t want people to be paranoid and angry, maybe you don’t write pieces like that, and rub it in their face, and give them the finger day after day.”

His point — and it’s a good one — is that the Left is totally gaslighting us on the “Great Replacement” thing. If you believe that whites are being displaced politically by immigration and the growth of non-white communities, and that it’s a good thing, you’re fine to say so. But if you believe that and you think it’s bad — well, you are a white supremacist who encourages loonies to commit mass murder.

Carlson brought up this 2013 story from Politico, which is as mainstream Washington political reporting as it gets. Here is a screenshot of the headline:

From the piece:

The immigration proposal pending in Congress would transform the nation’s political landscape for a generation or more — pumping as many as 11 million new Hispanic voters into the electorate a decade from now in ways that, if current trends hold, would produce an electoral bonanza for Democrats and cripple Republican prospects in many states they now win easily.

Beneath the philosophical debates about amnesty and border security, there are brass-tacks partisan calculations driving the thinking of lawmakers in both parties over comprehensive immigration reform, which in its current form offers a pathway to citizenship — and full voting rights — for a group of undocumented residents that roughly equals the population of Ohio, the nation’s seventh-largest state.

If these people had been on the voting rolls in 2012 and voted along the same lines as other Hispanic voters did last fall, President Barack Obama’s relatively narrow victory last fall would have been considerably wider, a POLITICO analysis showed.

Again, if you notice this from a progressive or neutral point of view, it’s fine. But if you notice this as a conservative, and you say you don’t like it, you are a RACIST.

Check out the headline on this Michelle Goldberg column in The New York Times:

It more or less concedes the white nationalists’ point, and says too bad for them. Excerpts:

Right now America is tearing itself apart as an embittered white conservative minority clings to power, terrified at being swamped by a new multiracial polyglot majority. The divide feels especially stark in Georgia, where the midterm election is a battle between Trumpist reaction and the multicultural America whose emergence the right is trying, at all costs, to forestall.

“Any time there is progress made there will always be moments of retrenchment,” Abrams said to me later on Saturday. But, she added, “what I am more excited about is the counterforce that we’re seeing in the number of people running for office who represent a much more forward-looking, progressive vision.”

Abrams’s goal is to put together a coalition of African-American and other minority voters and white liberals. The potential is there; Georgia is less than 53 percent non-Hispanic white. “Georgia is a blue state if everybody votes,” DuBose Porter, chairman of the Democratic Party of Georgia, told me.

More:

On Saturday morning, Abrams closed by reminding the crowd of Kemp’s views on democracy. “He said he is concerned that if everyone eligible to vote in Georgia does so, he will lose this election,” she said. “Let’s prove him right.” In a week, American voters can do to white nationalists what they fear most. Show them they’re being replaced.

You can’t have it both ways, liberal media. I mean, you can, because you usually do, but finally at least some conservatives are not intimidated by your hypocrisy. Take a listen (or a look at the transcript) of how NPR yesterday tried to blame these murders on Tucker Carlson and Fox News. Excerpts:

[HOST MARY LOUISE] KELLY: David, you start. And let’s start there with Tucker Carlson, who – just to be clear, he is not mentioned in this 180-page screed that authorities say the alleged gunman posted online. Right?

[MEDIA CORRESPONDENT DAVID] FOLKENFLIK: Yeah. He’s not anywhere in there, not at all. Instead, he cites the influences of 4chan and invokes what’s called the so-called “great replacement theory,” this idea that these amorphous forces are trying to replace whites – started a century ago in France, moved around, different targets in different places.

KELLY: So in this century, why is why is Tucker Carlson part of this conversation? What’s his role here?

FOLKENFLIK: Because he’s made it acceptable to talk about it. If you look at what leading white supremacists have said, a number of them really hail him for popularizing their views, and particularly on this. I think there are two ways to think about Carlson being part of this. One is through the sheer volume of his coverage. And the other is the influence he has in the Trump wing of the Republican Party on and off the air. He’s one of Fox’s most popular shows. And if you think about him as a political force, people have even – talking about him as a potential Republican presidential candidate in 2024 should Trump not run.

Yeah, so Tucker Carlson isn’t anywhere in the 180-page manifesto the alleged killer left explaining why he did what he did … but it’s Tucker’s fault anyway, according to David Folkenflik. More:

KELLY: Well, let me turn us to the politics of this, which brings me to you, Domenico. How influential is this? How does this filter into the politics of the right in America?

[NPR POLITICAL ANALYST DOMENICO] MONTANARO: I mean, David’s documented pretty well how conservative media, particularly Tucker Carlson, has played a pretty big role in all of this. We have seen his influence with the base of Republican voters, certainly in that Trump base. We’ve seen in polling, for example, that people who watch conservative media far more likely to believe in the tenets of replacement that – and that it’s, in fact, happening in this country. Almost half of Republicans believe replacement is happening, according to a recent AP-NORC poll.

So it’s taken some degree of hold. But the seeds of this go pretty far back. You know, the fights over affirmative action in the 1980s when manufacturing jobs were being outsourced in huge numbers. Blue-collar jobs were becoming increasingly scarce. And that led some politicians to try and exploit that for political gain. I think back to 1990, for example, in this ad run by the late North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms called “White Hands.” Take a listen to part of that.

(SOUNDBITE OF POLITICAL AD, “WHITE HANDS”)

JESSE HELMS: You needed that job, and you were the best qualified. But they had to give it to a minority because of a racial quota. Is that really fair?

MONTANARO: And you see in that a white man in a flannel shirt crumple up a piece of paper. And fast-forward to the fights over immigration in this century, and that narrative really took hold on the right. Here was Donald Trump as a candidate for president three months before the 2016 presidential election, backstage at the Values Voter Summit to the Christian Broadcasting Network.

(SOUNDBITE OF ARCHIVED RECORDING)

DONALD TRUMP: I think this will be the last election that the Republicans have a chance of winning because you’re going to have people flowing across the borders. You’re going to have illegal immigrants coming in, and they’re going to be legalized, and they’re going to be able to vote. And once that all happens, you can forget it.

KELLY: So he’s not actually using the word replacement – not using it explicitly – but clearly talking about it, and then taking that and moving into the White House.

MONTANARO: Right. And when he was in the White House and when he campaigned again, he’s been – he did it in very intentional ways and continues to do it. I mean, earlier this year, Trump was at a rally, and he exaggerated what was happening with a COVID program in New York. He claimed that whites were being made to go, quote, “to the back of the line” for therapeutics. So I called up Casey Kelly a professor at the University of Nebraska Lincoln, who has studied Trump’s language. He says what Trump has tried to do to exploit white grievance is to reframe experiences of alienation that many in rural America feel that pop culture doesn’t reflect who they are anymore and show it as something purposeful that’s being done to them.

I remember when that Helms ad was controversial, and I understand why it was controversial. But here’s the thing: that’s what affirmative action and quota hiring do! This is the most amazing thing about the liberal/progressive mind: they celebrate things that actively stigmatize and discriminate against people on the basis of race, sex, and sexual orientation … but if you are one of those stigmatized and discriminated against, and you don’t agree that you deserve it, then you are a bigot for saying so!

Notice that what Donald Trump said in the quoted piece above is pretty much what Politico said in 2013, and what a panoply of liberal politicians, academics, and pundits have been saying for years. But when Trump says it, well, shut the front door, that’s RACIST!

About the Covid comments from Trump, here’s an MSN report from when he first said it, and the context in which he said it:

Speaking during a rally in Florence, Arizona, Trump alleged that coronavirus vaccines and treatments are being unfairly “rationed” and withheld from white Americans in some states.

“The left is now rationing life-saving therapeutics based on race, discriminating against and denigrating, just denigrating white people to determine who lives and who dies,” Trump said during his speech. “You get it based on race. In fact, in New York state, if you’re white, you have to go to the back of the line to get medical help. If you’re white, you go right to the back of the line.”

The former president’s comments came in reference to a recent New York state policy that allows health-care providers to consider race as a risk factor when administering limited supplies of antiviral treatments to those most in need.

That policy states that “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity should be considered a risk” due to “longstanding systemic health and social inequities” that increase the risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19. The guidelines come after the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) found that Hispanic or Latino people are 2.1 time more likely to die from COVID-19 than white people, while Black people are 1.9 times more likely to succumb to the virus.

Did Trump “exaggerate”? Maybe. But note this Jan. 7 Wall Street Journal op-ed from left-wing academics John Judis and Ruy Teixeira, criticizing the very New York state policy that Trump criticized. Excerpts:

New York state recently published guidelines for dispensing potentially life-saving monoclonal antibodies and oral antivirals like Paxlovid to people suffering from mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19. These treatments are in short supply, and they must be allocated to those most in need.

According to these guidelines, sick people who have tested positive for Covid should be eligible to receive these drugs if they have “a medical condition or other factors that increase their risk for severe illness.” These include standard criteria like age and comorbidities like cancer, diabetes and heart disease—but, startlingly, they also include simply being of “non-white race or Hispanic/Latino ethnicity,” which “should be considered a risk factor, as longstanding systemic health and social inequities have contributed to an increased risk of severe illness and death from COVID-19.”

Consider the following cases: A middle-aged investment banker born in Colombia shows up at a physician’s office in Manhattan; a laid-off middle-aged worker of Italian ancestry shows up at a doctor’s office in Rochester, N.Y. Neither has medical risk factors, but both have mild to moderate symptoms of Covid-19. The wealthy Colombian-American could be given Paxlovid; the laid-off auto worker would be turned away. You can construct thousands of these comparative cases using well-off Hispanics, Asians or blacks and working-class whites.

This is unfair and possibly illegal. With these kinds of regulations, the Democrats who control New York reinforce the racial and ethnic divisions that grew during Donald Trump’s presidency. These state officials have been abetted by social scientists who collect survey data in a manner that, intentionally or not, confirms their presuppositions.

Judis and Teixeira cite data pointing out that disparities are more due to class than race. More:

All this suggests that the racial lens on Covid disparities is inadequate. A broader lens that included class factors would be unlikely to suggest to public health officials that the Indian-American CEOs of Alphabet and Microsoft ought to get priority over white Walmart clerks and hospital orderlies. Who should receive scarce Covid treatments should be based on genuine medical risk factors such as age and comorbidity, but class disparities can be relevant to deciding where to spend money to increase access to public-health benefits including vaccination and testing.

Liberal political scientists and many Democratic officials seem determined to ignore class divisions and instead divide the country up by race and ethnicity. This practice, which is unpopular outside elite media, universities and nonprofits, contributed to the rise of Mr. Trump. If it continues, Democrats could pay a lasting political price, which could threaten the welfare of groups Democrats want to help.

So Trump might have exaggerated, but his basic claim was true — and here you have two prominent left-wing commentators warning the Left not to go down this route, because it helps Trump.

Back to the NPR story. Here is Folkenflik griping that Fox won’t fire Tucker Carlson:

KELLY: And what about media on the right? Let me bring it back to you to close us out, David Folkenflik. Is there any pushback? Is there any – say, at Fox News, which employs Tucker Carlson, is there any sign that they’re addressing this rhetoric?

FOLKENFLIK: None whatsoever. Fox News almost invariably – and again, in this case today – doesn’t comment, just points you to what Carlson has had to say on his show about this subject. In his case last night, Tucker Carlson called the shooting horrific, said the accused shooter was racist and also mentally ill. But he’s turning the tables, essentially using this to lay into President Biden and Democrats for playing what he says are racial politics. The parent company, Fox Corporation under Lachlan Murdoch, says this is just all part of an open, lively debate and discussion, won’t really engage on it now. But in reality, Fox News has stripped away restraint. And you aren’t seeing repercussions for Carlson. And what that means is you’re seeing other opinion hosts dip into these waters. And some news anchors essentially allow guests to propagate the same racial replacement racist theories without any pushback or contradiction. And in doing that, they’re simply following Carlson, who is clearly the leader of the pack at Fox.

This is how they roll, the Left. They want to fire people who say things they don’t like. They want Tucker Carlson cancelled because he notices the same things they all notice, but he thinks it’s bad, not good — and says so.

This leftist crybullying increasingly doesn’t work anymore. At last!

I urge the usual left-wing commentators to watch the 15-minute Carlson monologue before phoning in your usual complaints.

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Princeton’s Disgrace

The Anglosphere’s most elite universities continue to beclown themselves: Cambridge University undergraduates are to be taught to regard Mozart’s music as imperialistic. 

I know I keep saying that the totalitarian impulse ruining liberal democratic society today is like unto the Soviet Union, but they didn’t go that far even in Soviet Russia. In fact, the pianist who famously rebuked Stalin and lived to tell the tale (this story is recalled in the black comedy The Death of Stalin) was playing Mozart on the radio when the dictator heard her and loved her performance so much he demanded a recording of it. So, wrap your mind around the idea that Josef Stalin was more tolerant of Mozart than Cambridge University instructors.

Meanwhile, in the US, Princeton University advances towards woke madrassah status:

Princeton University is planning to fire one of the most distinguished classics professors in the country, Joshua Katz, after his criticism of the school’s racial politics made him the target of student protests and the subject of two separate university investigations.

University president Christopher Eisgruber—who in 2020 alleged that Katz had failed to exercise his free speech “responsibly”—passed his recommendation that Katz be stripped of tenure and fired to the university’s board of trustees last week, according to three sources with firsthand knowledge of the situation.

It is rare for a university to fire a tenured professor, and even rarer for a university to fire a professor with Katz’s record: By the university’s own admission, he did not commit fraud or sexual misconduct, two of the most common grounds for revoking tenure. Rather, the university is citing as grounds for dismissal a consensual relationship Katz engaged in with a student more than a decade ago, and for which he was already disciplined by the school in 2018.

The board is all but guaranteed to accept Eisgruber’s recommendation when it meets on Wednesday, the sources said. Board members include Yale Law School dean Heather Gerken, who has presided over several high-profile free speech-related scandals on her campus, including the intimidation of a second-year law student by university administrators.

Princeton University did not respond to a request for comment.

Read it all. 

Why are they going after Katz? It began back in 2020 with an astonishingly illiberal, even semi-totalitarian, proposal by black faculty members and allies that Princeton fully embrace race radicalism, to atone for its alleged racism. Part of the proposal called for:

… a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

Like I said, totalitarian.

Katz responded with a public letter in Quillette criticizing the proposal. Though he is one of the nation’s most accomplished classicists, Princeton has endeavored to make his life hell ever since. One of his lead antagonists is Dan-el Padilla Peralta, once mentored by Katz, and who now, as a Princeton Classics professor himself, is trying to overturn the field of Greco-Roman studies to “save it from whiteness.”

If Princeton fires Katz today, I hope he takes them to court and walks away with a fat fortune. I cannot imagine, though, that most Princeton alumni and donors would be happy with what Eisgruber and the board will have done. This is precisely the reason that many revolutions succeed: liberals charged with gatekeeping collapse morally and functionally in the face of radical challenge.

If Katz is sent down, Princeton is probably lost. No professor will feel free to resist the woke totalitarians. If they can get a tenured professor of Katz’s academic status fired for crossing the ideological line, who is safe?

I should say that since all this began in the Summer of Floyd, I’ve gotten to know Joshua Katz somewhat. He is a very fine and generous man, and a friend — which makes his persecution at the hands of Princeton’s privileged and powerful personally galling to me. What the Princeton board does not understand is that if they make a free speech and academic freedom martyr of Joshua Katz, they will, in the end, have done themselves and the Ivy League more damage than they realize. You don’t persecute and abominate a man like that without serious consequences. Bring them on.

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Kintsugi Alison

I drove down to New Orleans last night to have dinner and spend the night with some old friends. It’s the first time we’ve seen each other since my divorce news, and they wanted to offer me some bourbon and sympathy. What I’m about to tell you I do so with the permission of the wife, “Alison” (not her real name).

Alison — middle to upper-middle class white person — is a survivor of childhood sexual abuse, which, of course, knows no class boundaries. She struggled for years to deal with it before finally getting the help she needed. Part of her recovery has been to involve herself in charity work helping families in severe crisis. This has become her passion. She’s an Uptown New Orleans lady who looks like everybody else walking around this part of the city, but this woman, I swear, is a saint. I mean it seriously. Working out of her own radical brokenness, Alison, a committed Evangelical Christian, has thrown herself into helping children who are even more vulnerable than she was.

When I said goodbye to her this morning, after hearing the story of one family she’s helping, I said to her, “My God, if you weren’t in their life, where would they be?”

She replied, “That’s exactly what made me do it. When I first heard about them, I said, ‘Lord, do I really want to wade into that mess?’ And I realized that if I just stood by and let it happen, those kids would have nobody advocating for them.”

This family is a black family. Four kids, I think, all by different fathers, but there is a man in the house, their mother’s longterm boyfriend, who seems like a good guy. They were homeless when Alison was put in contact with them through a charity she works for. They were living in a hotel on Chef Menteur Highway, which, said Alison, “is the human trafficking district of New Orleans.”

She explained that human trafficking — that is to say, trafficking in sex slaves — is “one of our big tourist draws in New Orleans” (she was being sarcastic). She said, “We have way more pedophiles in this society than people think.” She told me about a friend of hers who works in state government, on a task force fighting human trafficking, who goes into crowds when there are big sporting events in the city, and passes out leaflets warning people that the “girlfriend” they hire might be a sex slave.

“A lot of these people come to town and want prostitutes,” said Alison. “And a lot of them want ten year old girls.”

She then told me about a world that I only barely knew existed. And it was this world from which she was trying to save the children in that family.

But to do that, she had to help save the family from itself. She told the back story of how they used to live with the mother’s mother (that is, the grandmother of the kids). That woman was abusive, and stole the paychecks of her daughter, the children’s mother, and gambled them away. Finally they got out of that situation. The mom, though, “has no idea how to be a mother,” said Alison. She was never taught. Alison has to teach this poor woman basic things about how to live life — the kind of things that most of us take for granted. Plus, the mom is — well, not mentally retarded (if you can still say that word), but intellectually limited in a serious way. There’s just not a lot that she’s capable of.

When Alison first encountered them, she set up an escape plan for them to get out of that trafficking motel and into safe housing for six months, during which time they were supposed to figure out a plan for their lives. The six months came and went and … no plan. Alison says that they simply could not imagine the future, or imagine that they have any agency.

I forget the timeline as I write, but at some point the kids lived in the care of a distant relative who ran an unlicensed day care center. She abused these children — little children! — so badly that one of them ended up in the ICU. When the child protective services got involved, they found that the other children had bite marks on their torsos. This distant relative who ran a freaking day care, was abusing them in ways that other people couldn’t detect.

Eventually, Alison opened doors and got the children and their reunited parents moved to a suburb of New Orleans that’s safe. They didn’t want to go at first, saying, “they don’t like black people there.” Alison had to explain that a lot of black people lived there, and that the schools for the children would be almost entirely black. This suburb is right here in Greater New Orleans, but the mom and her boyfriend had no idea that a lot of black people lived there. And they didn’t want their kids going to school at first. Alison had to explain that it was really important that these kids get in school right away.

The mother and the father simply didn’t understand why.

This is just one family. Just one family. But, says Alison, this city, and this country, is full of people like them. Alison plans to spend the rest of her life pouring herself out to do what nobody did for her, growing up in a solid middle-class conservative Christian family: do her best to make sure the kids are safe.

Listening to Alison’s stories — and she works with other cases too — made me realize how completely unrealistic our discussion in this country is about race, class, and poverty. This is one reason why J.D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy struck such a chord in me: because he talked about white people who lived in many ways with the same internal social chaos as these black people Alison helps. One great strength of J.D.’s book — something that angered his liberal critics — is that he criticized his own people for their failures to thrive. For their drinking and drugging, and not showing up for work, and for creating a culture of failure.

Alison’s husband was telling me about this family his wife helps, and how so much of the brokenness and exploitation came from a “truth” of the family that the wicked grandmother told: that her daughter’s paycheck didn’t belong to her daughter, but to “the family,” which meant that Granny got to control it … and she gambled it away while they all lived in poverty. Granny exploited the idea that “family” means more than anything else. This went on for years before the young mother realized what was going on, and told Granny that you won’t be getting my paycheck anymore and taking it to the casino. Granny called child protective services and told them that her daughter was abusing the kids. They seized the children — this, because Granny wanted to punish her daughter for standing up for herself.

I told Alison’s husband about two extended families I know of back home — one black, and one white — that operate this way. How children raised in those family systems can ever break out of it is a mystery. One of these families I wrote about in Little Way. My late sister helped a student of hers do so. That student, who came from one of the poorest families in the parish, went on to get a graduate degree, and has built a successful life as a wife, mother, and professional out in California. I asked her after I interviewed her for the book if she ever thought about coming back to Louisiana. Never, she said: if she did, her family would eat her and her husband and their kids alive. This woman had been delivered from a culture of drink, drugs, and abuse — and could not afford to look back.

Family. The details she gave me about how the members of her clan treat each other made me realize that there is not enough private charity or government programs in the world to fix that kind of brokenness. Same with the white family clan I’m thinking of. At some point, something essential was lost. Me being me, I thought about the collapse of the western Roman Empire, and how total it was. As the Oxford archaeologist and historian Bryan Ward-Perkins has shown, when the Roman state fell apart in the West, the amount of basic human knowledge that was lost was massive.

I wonder if we are living in a failed society, in the sense that the systems that passed along basic social knowledge have been lost to large numbers of people, and are being lost. I’ve written here about how bizarre it was to go to a conservative Evangelical college about a decade ago — a predominantly white school in a fairly conservative part of the country — and to have a conversation with a professor who told me the thing that worried him most about his students was that they would not be able to form functional families. This mystified me. Why not? I asked.

“Because most of these kids have never seen one,” he replied. All the other professors around the table nodded.

(I am aware, of course, that I am making this point as a man whose wife is divorcing him, and whose children are now … well, you know. And yet, as regular readers know, I have said that even though I did not choose this path, I believe my wife chose the less bad option, given how long we had both been suffering in a marriage that long ago broke down irretrievably. We have the freedom today to end bad marriages — and even marriages between two people who are faithful Christians who believe in the sanctity of marriage can go bad. So much of the stability that we long for in the past depended on people having to absorb a hell of a lot of suffering, with no hope of relief. I believe that our inability to tolerate suffering is a big part of what’s wrong with our society and culture — but that said, that doesn’t mean that one must accept deep suffering in every instance as simply a fact of life.)

Anyway, what has happened to the poor is now moving up the social ladder, though in different ways. The very poor are homeless and living in fleabag motels on the Chef Menteur Highway, trying to keep their children from being trafficked. The middle class and the rich are trying to figure out how to keep their children from deciding that they are the opposite sex and want to cut their breasts or their balls off. As a people, we are forgetting the basic skills of how to be human. Don’t you think? I interviewed Prof. Ward-Perkins years ago, and he told me that it’s difficult for modern people to conceive of how total the loss of technical knowledge was when Rome fell. For instance, he said it took Europeans a thousand years to learn how to build roofs as well as the Romans.

That’s not likely to happen to us, thanks to technology. There will always be books that can teach us how to build roofs. But what about knowledge of how to raise a family? How to create stability? How to build a resilient society?

I’m not talking about utopia, please understand. We will always have evil with us. It’s in our nature. The kind of evils that adults visit on children, and that Alison was telling me about — the evils to the poor black family, and the evil that was done to her as a child by members of her extended family — are not a function of bad social systems, or poverty, or anything other than the evil that lurks inside every human heart. I firmly believe that the best we can do is build societies in which the instances of evil are limited, but it cannot be eliminated. An attempt to do so would create other evils. You could build a theocratic police state where vice is heavily policed, but think of all the other evils that trying to stamp out particular evils would create. Any proposed solution that ignores the urgent need for repentance, and the reformation of each individual’s heart, is a false one.

Solzhenitsyn famously said that one of the most important lessons he learned in the gulag is that the line between good and evil doesn’t run between social classes, but down the middle of every single human being’s heart. We are always looking for scapegoats. I was thinking on the drive back to Baton Rouge today of a person I know whose mother looked the other way while he was being abused by others in the family. He told me that to this day, she refuses to admit any responsibility for what was done to him. “It’s not that it’s her fault, exactly,” he once said. “But she had a part in it. She can’t say that she’s sorry. This is how she’s been all her life, blaming everybody else for all her failures.”

He no longer talks to his mom. My sense is that all he asks from her is that she say, “I’m sorry I failed you.” But she won’t. This is as old as Adam blaming Eve for making him taste of the forbidden fruit. Scapegoating is in our nature. Alison told me this morning that she and her mom are rebuilding their relationship, but it took a while, because her mom did not want to face her own role in the abuse that happened to her daughter (it was the same kind of deal: the mom should have recognized what was happening, but did not want to see the obvious signs, because that would have forced her to take responsibility to protect her child by offending other family members).

How much respect I have for Alison! She can never undo what was done to her, but she’s healing now — and she has used her own experience of deep suffering to reach out to others, especially children, to try to save them from some version of what happened to her. Alison has political views, and I’m quite sure she has ideas about what the state, and private society, can and should be doing that it’s not. But Alison is also a faithful Christian, and there is a certain realism about her Christianity. She doesn’t harbor illusions that all this brokenness can be fixed if we just adjust the technocratic formulas, or crusade sufficiently in the media against this or that social evil, or demonize this or that race, religion, or class of people. She believes that sin is real, and Jesus Christ, the God who entered into the human condition, and suffered as unjustly and as painfully as anyone suffered, is the only real hope for any of us. She is trying to be Christ to that poor family. She told me that on Mother’s Day, the mom of that family texted her to say, “You have taught me more about how to be a mother than my own mother ever did.” Alison, who has no children of her own, but whose heart was broken, and out of it pours love for the other broken people.

She got me to thinking on the drive home: how will I allow the broken heart I have over my divorce change me? How can I allow this suffering not to embitter me, or make me cynical, but rather more loving? If you read the thing I posted here about the small miracle I had in Jerusalem on Holy Thursday (see “A Resurrection in Jerusalem”), you’ll know that I spent Holy Week at the chapel built over Golgotha, where Jesus was crucified, praying for my wife, my kids, and myself. On that Thursday, I was at a different chapel, this one at the base of the stone hill that was Golgotha, and I felt the presence of Jesus at my right side. I wrote:

The morning after I found out that my wife was divorcing me, I came to Jerusalem. I have spent a lot of time atop Golgotha, praying for her, praying for me, praying for our kids. I have been grieving. God has given me an ability to see my wife as someone who has been suffering greatly too. I have not been able to muster anger at her. We are just so unbelievably exhausted from all this. Nine years of it. 

So: as I sat in that silent crypt this morning, I thought about the sword in the stone, then I remembered that today is Holy Thursday, the day that Jesus Christ was taken in the Garden of Gethsemane to his trial. On this night, Peter drew his sword to protect the Lord from his enemies, but Jesus told him to put it away, and surrendered to his fate. Jesus knew that what was about to happen had to happen for all righteousness to be fulfilled.

I heard the inner voice say to me that now was the time to put away my sword — that is, to stop fighting for a restoration of the past. In fact, said the voice, I had done that at the monastery. I had made the long nine-year journey across the empty bath with the flame alight; now I needed to place it on the stone and be free. Then it hit me: that stone where I had just been praying was the stone that marks the spot (traditionally, if not necessarily literally) where the Romans discarded the Cross. The inner voice was telling me that the fight was over, that what was about to happen — meaning the dissolution of the marriage — had to happen.

But why? I asked. Why not just restore the marriage?

I didn’t wait for an answer, but banished the questions. I may never know, and that’s beside the point. Why did Jesus have to suffer and die? We are dealing with the deepest mysteries here.

Why doesn’t God smite the child traffickers and child molesters? Why doesn’t he punish the evil grandmothers who exploit their children? Why doesn’t he stop the white supremacist mass shooters before they can pull the trigger? You get nowhere going down this path. I think of my friend Michael, who is now dead. He was raped by the monsignor who was principal of his Catholic school when he was around eleven years old. This would have been in the 1960s. He told his working-class Irish Catholic mother what happened. She slapped him hard and told him never to speak ill of a priest. That was it. He became the sex slave of a priest who went on to become a bishop. Michael became a chronic alcoholic who compulsively sought out sex with men, often priests. Eventually, as an older man, he found sobriety.

He told me about how back in 2002, I think it was, a priest from somewhere in the Balkans came through New York to say some masses. This priest was purported to have some sort of mystical gifts of healing. The priest said mass at a big parish in Queens. Michael went to the mass, though the priest spoke no English. He was hoping for a miracle. Michael said he waited in line to get the priest’s blessing, and made sure that he was one of the last ones. He didn’t want to be greedy.

He knelt to receive the blessing, then began making his way toward the exit. Before he got to the door, an English-speaking assistant of the Balkan priest ran to him, took him by the arm, and said, “Father wants me to tell you that the Holy Virgin saw your suffering there, at the hands of that priest. She was there with you, and suffered too.”

When Michael told me that, he was crying. Those words had been so healing to him. My unspoken thought was, But why didn’t she strike down the evil monsignor? Michael, he was just grateful that he had been seen, and that the Mother of God shared his suffering. That was enough for him.

It is enough for me, in my own suffering, to know Jesus was there with me, and in some way, this was part of His plan. My suffering is very, very small compared to what Alison endured, and to what the family she’s helping endures. Alison can’t fix all that is wrong with that poor family. But she can try to fix what she can, and she can continue to walk with them, and share their suffering. What else is there?

We will never be able to straighten every crooked line, and right every wrong, though that is certainly no excuse for not acting when we have the capability to do so.  We are going to need a lot more Alisons in the days to come.  And by the way, in the subhed of this piece, I said, “What a once-broken and abused woman is doing to redeem her suffering.” Alison would be the first one to correct me. She would have me say, “What a once-broken and abused woman is allowing Christ to do through her to redeem her suffering.” She has in her kitchen a kintsugi vase — it’s a Japanese style of pottery that’s about the art of embracing damage. It’s a sign of her new wholeness.

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