Rod Dreher's Blog, page 102

The De-Catholicization Of Poland

Just now I received an anguished e-mail from Łukasz Kozuchowski, a young Catholic friend I made in Warsaw last fall. He served as my interpreter for the Live Not By Lies interviews in the Polish capital. At the moment, he is doing graduate work in Belgium. Łukasz was one of a number of Catholics in their twenties who told me that the idea of Poland as a fortress of the Catholic faith is badly outdated. He was not the Pole who told me that within a decade, maybe two, Poland was going to go the same way as Ireland — that is, to the collapse of Christianity and the passionate embrace of secularism — but he was one of many who sadly agreed that that was Poland’s future.

Today Łukasz writes about the situation back home:

The Law and Justice party has been ruling in Poland single-handedly since 2015. Since the party claims to represent the Catholic point of view, numerous pro-life NGOs have been lobbying for making Polish abortion laws stricter.

Poland already had one of the most antiabortion law systems in Europe: enabling abortion in only three cases (health or life of mother in danger, pregnancy caused by rape and — the most widely used — defects of the child in the womb, not only lethal, but also non-fatal, e.g. Down syndrome). This law is known in Poland as “the Abortion Compromise”, developed after long talks in 1993 and regarded by most of society, both religious and not, as untouchable.

In 2016, the first attempt was made to outlaw the last of the abortion cases mentioned. However, significant protests appeared. There were big manifestations in Poland’s big cities. As a result, the proabortion movement “Czarny Protest” (“The Black Protest”) was founded, demanding not only not restricting the law, but even making abortion more available. The protests attracted many people, not only the hard-line abortionists, but also people who “merely” opted for the Compromise. Among the latter were also numerous of my young Catholic friends (which shows that “Catholicity” of Poland is merely theoretical in many cases).

Another attempt was made in spring this year, with similar results. But last week, the Law and Justice party used the Constitutional Court of Poland, regarded by many as a puppet institution of the current government, to declare that the case of child’s defect cannot be legally regarded as an excuse to perform abortion. The backlash has been much bigger than in the previous instance.

First of all, the “Black Protests” erupted with force not seen in Poland before. Not only in big (“liberal”) cities, but also in smaller towns, hundreds of thousands of people protest. Every single day streets are full with people day and night. They shout: “wyperdalać” (fuck off!) and “to jest wojna!” (this is war!).

Almost all of my friends (even Catholic) are taking part in these protests. Not only the left-wing, but even those who seemed to be moderately conservative, vocally oppose the Constitutional Court’s decision. Many of them are very vehement. Numerous institutions and brands, including almost all the universities in Poland, published statements openly supporting the protests and encouraging students to take part in them (even though we are dealing with Covid!). Since the Church hierarchy openly lobbied for the change in law, many of the protesters vandalised churches and expressed vulgar, aggressive remarks about the Church. Masses were interrupted, curses and proabortion slogans painted on churches’ walls. Today, a tabernacle with the Body of Christ has gone missing (probably stolen) from one of the churches in Łódź, the city known for its reluctance towards religion.

The reaction of the bishops actually helped the rioters. The bishops expressed their gratitude for changes in law. It is nothing extraordinary, but was done in a way a bit reminiscent of the Byzantine system, where the state de facto paternalises the Church. Responding to this, Jarosław Kaczyński, the leader of Law and Justice, made a speech on TV declaring very paternalistically that the state will protect the Church.

The atmosphere is extremely tense. The lay people are organizing spontaneously to protect their places of worship, because there are so many protesters that the police cannot manage the situation. Right in the middle of Warsaw, on the Three Crosses Square, brutal fights took place, including people being stabbed. Both sides are losing their temper and many people — both pro- and anti- protests — are resorting to violence.

I do not know in which direction this all will go. Some people are simply afraid, and stay at home.

As a Catholic, I am of course pro-life. This has led to many of my friends turning their backs on me. Some of the people I previously knew as kind and intelligent wrote to me very vulgar and offensive messages. The polarisation of the society is becoming extreme, with the pro-life side on the margin. To be honest, I feel lost and helpless. I do not know what to do (especially that I am far away from my home country now) and whether the change in law, since causing such disruptions, was the right thing to do here and now.

If the government looses power after next elections, without a doubt a severe legal pro-abortion backlash will follow, causing thousands of children to die — the protesters say that there is no way back to the Compromise. For me, it is not certain that the lives of innocent children will indeed be saved by the Constitutional Court’s ruling. And strong anti-Catholic tendencies in the society are growing rapidly and profoundly.

I pray that the situation will de-escalate — this is the most important thing now, as the state does not seem to control the situation fully.

Today the President of Poland proposed a kind of “a new compromise”: aborting a child with lethal defects will remain legal, but children with non-lethal diseases, such as Down Syndrome, will be illegal. We are also seeing divisions among the protesters appear — the most hardcore ones, who are organizing the protests and who run the “Black Protests” movement, are now starting to condemn the “not-pro-abortion-enough” protesters, including moderate politicians, causing visible confusion among many. Will it calm down society? We will see…

Łukasz gave me permission to post this, and requests that I ask you readers to pray for Poland. He sends this image of the crowd in the heart of Warsaw right now:

 

The post The De-Catholicization Of Poland appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Kolakovic Moment

Here is a chilling letter from an academic — a white man married to a black woman, by the way. He gave me permission to publish if I kept his name and college out of it:

 

In spite of all of the COVID restrictions and distractions that have come with our academic school year, Wokeness is taking over. We were asked to take an anonymous online survey on “faculty morale” that came from our “diversity” office, using a link they sent to us via email. Because I have been relatively satisfied with my employment in the many years I have been here, I was glad to click on the link and begin. After all, they assured us, it was anonymous and that they would respect our privacy.”


The early part of the survey was boilerplate, but as it moved along, the questions more and more began to fall into the “wokeness” category, both in race and sexuality. For example, the survey asked about our “preferred pronouns (some faculty members already list them, while most of us abstain), as well as a number of questions regarding the racial climate on campus.


Being that close to a third of our student body is Black, it obviously is imperative that we have a positive racial atmosphere for them. In one of my courses last spring, I dealt at length with aspects of our nation’s racial history during the Progressive Era, tying many progressive policies to racism, including many of the so-called economic and social reforms that earn high praise in academe and the media but had a very dark racial component as well. From what I could tell, the students appreciated what I did (at least judging from the very high evaluation marks I received from them after the course was over).


The survey then asked our sexual preferences, age and also our religious affiliations, as well as asking how long we had worked at our university. Both my wife (who is African American) and I became concerned about where these questions were leading, as there were enough categories listed that would help specifically identify the faculty member. At that point — my wife concurring — I ended my participation. Once again, I had almost fallen for the classic bait-and-switch tactics that are now common in higher education.


What do I mean? As you know, Wokeness often is disguised as an “improvement” of liberalism. Under the standard liberal views, racial divides were to be broken down through color blindness as well as programs aimed at improving the well-being of Black Americans, and while we can argue about the effects (especially the unintended effects) of many of these policies, nonetheless the intention always has been to elevate people in our society who had been held down wrongfully by racist policies of earlier years.

Under liberalism, there was a general understanding that our existing institutions were capable of reform and that the values that undergird those institutions were such that we could employ them to make the necessary and moral social changes to end racial discrimination. There also was general respect for free speech, freedom of thought, and freedom of religion.

So much for liberalism. Critical Theory is the antithesis of liberalism, as it glorifies the use of raw power, groupthink, shaming, threats, and outright murder. We saw its fruit from the various communist revolutions around the world, beginning with the Russian Revolution of 1917. But 30 years removed from the end of the USSR and communism in Eastern Europe, the once-fringe voices in academe that supported these regimes now are becoming mainstream. In its 100-year commemoration of the Bolshevik Revolution, the New York Times published a series of editorial-page articles that portrayed communism as Paradise Lost. Furthermore, woke capitalism now seeks to impose the kind of domestic spying on employees and Americans in general reminiscent of the tactics of the East German Stasi in order to impose a social credit system that truly is totalitarian.


For now, our campus hardly is the picture of woke totalitarianism. Over the years, a libertarian-conservative like me has been able to chair three important university-wide committees and receive university awards. Political and social disagreements did not matter the way they are about to matter now. The new Gospel of Wokeness overshadows everything else and I realize that before long, all the goodwill I built up over the years is likely to disappear because I am not Woke, nor ever will be Woke.


Thank goodness for me I am near retirement, but in the future, people who think like I do are not going to have a place in higher education or many of the other professions and will be relegated to the margins. This is how it was in the communist world, where fealty to the Party outranked everything else, and today, fealty to Wokedom is paramount to professional survival.



People who do survive the Woke onslaught are people who have their own strong belief systems, such as Christianity and who also have friends and family that will not be directly subject to personal attacks the way that fellow faculty and staff at the college or university where they work might be. This is important. That is why it is imperative in this Benedict era that we seek friendships and support in places outside our workplaces, including family and churches. In these times, such institutions become lifelines, the true “safe spaces” where people can go when the mobs turn on them.


Unfortunately, so many people on campus already have rejected religion or are likely to attend a Woke church whose members either are also from the faculty/staff of the college, so the shunning would continue even at the church. Their personal and social circles are likely to be tied to the college where they are under attack, so anyone who is a target and does not have outside support is going to be bombarded with invective 24/7.


One does not reason with these mobs, as they seek victory using means as brutal as is necessary to achieve their ends. They are destructive, but one does not have to give in to them or take part in the destruction. It is a matter of will, and it is a matter of choice.

The danger here is not that universities will become “liberal.” They’ve always been that. The danger is that they are becoming something that is the antithesis of liberal values, and the antithesis of what a university is supposed to be. I mean, look at these fools at Brown University:

A Brown University student group, Decolonization at Brown, wants the school to remove two Roman statues displayed on campus, claiming the statues represent white supremacy and colonialism.

The student group at the Ivy League university in Rhode Island has lobbied the school’s Undergraduate Council of Students to support its initiative to remove of statues of Roman Emperors Caesar Augustus and Marcus Aurelius.

Removing the statues “is one step in a broader project of decolonization by confronting Brown’s institutional and ideological legacies of colonialism and white supremacy,” members of the group wrote in The Blognonian, a student publication at the university.

The Undergraduate Council is scheduled to vote on endorsing the initiative on Thursday after it bumped the vote, originally scheduled for October 22.

 

Please understand that these fanatics are essentially the same as the Taliban zealots who blew up the Bamiyan Buddhas, on the ground that their very existence was an aggression against the One True Religion (in that case, Islam). There is no way that a real university can co-exist with Wokeness. Universities are signing their death warrants. What will remain are institutions that control the entrance into professional and socially elite spheres, but that’s about it.

This is a tremendous opportunity for those who still believe in the old model of education. You will have to be as Benedictine monks in the early medieval period. It can be done!

Can we get wealthy conservative donors to start giving to efforts to build and defend these civilization-saving institutions? The Republican Party is not going to save what remains of the West, especially its Christian heritage. Real colleges might.

Going back to the professor’s e-mail, it is absolutely vital now that dissidents and resisters find each other, and set up networks of mutual support. You all know by now the story of Father Tomislav Kolakovic, who in 1943 saw Communism coming to Czechoslovakia, and who immediately began organizing resistance cells among Catholic students. Some of the Slovak bishops chastised him for being alarmist, but that did not deter him. When the Iron Curtain fell in 1948, the “Family,” as Father Kolakovic called his network, became the backbone of the underground church, and the only meaningful resistance force for the next forty years. I dedicated Live Not By Lies to him because we desperately need men and women like him today, right here, right now. The brave priest organized primarily among idealistic Christian university students.

Fr Tomislav Kolakovic

As the professor who wrote me says, for some, not even their church will be a safe place. You will find that people you thought were allies are not who you thought they were. But you will also find people you never imagined would be on side are your comrades. After the election next week, things will be clearer. It is perfectly clear now, though, that we have no time to waste.

The post The Kolakovic Moment appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Northwestern Ninety

There are very few profiles in courage today, when it comes to the leadership class of our institutions. I want to highlight a prominent example of one: Morton Schapiro, the president of Northwestern University. The literary scholar and historian Gary Saul Morson, who teaches at Northwestern, tells readers of Mosaic magazine what’s happening there. He talks about how Schapiro has led the university over the years to be pro-active in reaching out to the Evanston, Ill., community, where the university is, and especially to the disadvantaged black residents of the town and neighboring Chicago. A reader at Northwestern who first alerted me to this piece described Schapiro as “woke.”

Prof. Morson writes:

Following the shocking and violent death of George Floyd this past May, a Northwestern organization named “NU Community Not Cops (NUCNC)” demanded the abolition of the university police force. Northwestern administrators, who have themselves long made “racial justice” a priority, made clear that they sympathized with this demand. At many universities, high-minded statements are part of career advancement (or maintenance), but Schapiro is deeply committed to improving the opportunities for the most disadvantaged in a personal way, and sees this pursuit of justice as an expression of his Jewish observance. Top Northwestern officials reiterated the University’s commitment to Black and minority concerns, met with student groups over the summer, and issued, on September 10th, a document outlining specific reforms to advance “commitments to advancing racial and social justice.” These included appointing three high-ranking administrators with “expertise in diversity and equity,” establishing “anti-racism and unconscious-bias training” for 50 university leaders, providing $1.5 million to advance social justice in Evanston and Chicago, and, most important, hiring outside consultants to review the operations, practices, and budget of the university police. Before the fall 2020 quarter began, President Schapiro had already moved significant university resources into combatting racial bias.

Community Not Cops, dissatisfied that the NUPD was to be reformed and improved rather than abolished, vowed to continue protests until it was. Over the weekend of October 17-18, protests in downtown Evanston, not just on campus, included vandalism, lighting fires, and spray-painting calls for violence against police. The Daily Northwestern, our college newspaper, which is sympathetic to the protestors, quoted one student: “There is no level of property destruction that we can do that is more violent than the cops existing.” Another told the paper: “When I say that Evanston is the most racist place I’ve ever lived, I am not exaggerating.” In 2019 the city of Evanston passed a bill to pay reparations to its Black residents.

President Schapiro refused to dismantle the university police department. So the mob turned on him. Morson:

During that same weekend, in the early hours of the morning, NUCNC came to the president’s house to protest and shout obscenities, including a cry of “piggy Morty.” Schapiro, who makes no secret of being an observant Jew, and whose Jewishness is a target for some, recognized that the comparison of Jews to pigs is an anti-Semitic slur that was used by genocidal Nazis as well as by some in today’s Middle East. Schapiro responded with a letter to the university community that is very different from the self abasement that has become typical of the genre. After repeating his commitment to racial justice, Schapiro asserted a principle that numerous leaders on other campuses have ignored or rejected in recent years, namely, the firm support for “vigorous debate and free expression of ideas.” He drew the line at violence, intimidation, and lawbreaking. These days, any administrator who takes such a stance risks his career.

The president asked students to consider the pain of others: what would their parents or siblings feel if awakened with obscenities and personal attacks? To be sure, Schapiro allowed, students may not have known that “pigs” was a slur against Jews as well as police, but it was nevertheless hurtful and “unacceptable.” Although he was careful not to call the students anti-Semitic, replies have presumed he did. “They didn’t read all that carefully,” Schapiro later said.

You’ll never believe what happened next: Schapiro was publicly denounced by 90 Jewish faculty, students, alumni and others for, get this, anti-blackness. Here was the Jewish president of the university, suffering blatant anti-Semitism by a black mob and its allies — and 90 Jews found fault with him. Here’s a link to the letter they wrote to the campus newspaper, in which they proclaimed that “White Jews are still largely protected by our Whiteness.”

Read the whole Mosaic piece. You can read it for free if you’ll sign up. It’s worth it. That’s a great magazine.

What to make of this? The self-hatred of progressive white people is boundless. It truly is. If they could, they would set themselves on fire to rid themselves of their guilt and shame over being white. It is really important, though, to understand where this death wish comes from. These passages from Live Not By Lies will help:

It’s possible to miss the onslaught of totalitarianism, precisely because we have a misunderstanding of how its power works. In 1951, poet and literary critic Czesław Miłosz, exiled to the West from his native Poland as an anti- communist people misunderstand the nature of communism because they think of it only in terms of “might and coercion.”

“That is wrong,” he wrote. “There is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.”

In The Captive Mind, Miłosz said that communist ideology filled a void that had opened in the lives of early twentieth-century intellectuals, most of whom had ceased to believe in religion.

Today’s left-wing totalitarianism once again appeals to an internal hunger, specifically the hunger for a just society, one that vindicates and liberates the historical victims of oppression. It masquerades as kindness, demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of “victims” to bring about “social justice.”

The contemporary cult of social justice identifies members of certain social groups as victimizers, as scapegoats, and calls for their suppression as a matter of righteousness. In this way, the so-called social justice warriors, (aka SJWs), who started out as liberals animated by an urgent compassion, end by abandoning authentic liberalism and embracing an aggressive and punitive politics that resembles Bolshevism, as the Soviet style of communism was first called.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the cultural critic René Girard prophetically warned: “The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.”

This is what the survivors of communism are saying to us: liberalism’s admirable care for the weak and marginalized is fast turning into a monstrous ideology that, if it is not stopped, will transform liberal democracy into a softer, therapeutic form of totalitarianism.

More:

Why are people so willing to believe demonstrable lies? The desperation alienated people have for a story that helps them make sense of their lives and tells them what to do explains it. For a man desperate to believe, totalitarian ideology is more precious than life itself.

“He may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and frame his own death sentence if only his status as a member of the movement is not touched,” Arendt wrote. Indeed, the files of the 1930s Stalinist show trials are full of false confessions by devout communists who were prepared to die rather than admit that communism was a lie.

Totalitarianism’s most dedicated servants are often idealists, at least at first. [Holocaust survivor Helen] Margolius Kovály testifies that she and her husband embraced communism at first precisely because it was so idealistic. It gave those who had walked out of hell a vision of paradise in which they could believe.

Ever read Darkness At Noon? The Arthur Koestler novel about Stalinism. I wrote about it last year here.  This is a quote from Ivanov, one of the Stalinist torturers.

There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community — which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb.

The Ninety Self-Hating Jews Of Northwestern have forsaken the ethical heritage of the Hebrew Bible and gone over to the other side. They’re trying to bring down Morton Schapiro, but he’s standing firm. We all need to applaud those — especially liberals like Schapiro — who will not surrender to this moral blackmail. This might well be the thing that red-pills him on wokeness.

—

Say, readers, I have started a Substack newsletter on the side, so I can have a place for a different kind of writing than what you see here on my blog. I explain it in more detail on my first post there. I’m not going to post any less here, but the Daily Dreher newsletter will feature a more diary-like take on the days events, and will have more personal religious reflections, which, as I have explained before in this space, I don’t feel quite right sharing on this blog. I invite you to read the first post and sign up — it’s free, and you’ll get an e-mail once a day from me with material you haven’t seen on this blog. If you don’t like it, just drop it. But I think a lot of you will.

UPDATE: Changed the title to remove the phrase “self-hating Jews.” I find it loathsome that these 90 Jews are attacking Morton Schapiro, in part on grounds of his Jewishness. But I understand that the phrase is problematic for a Gentile to use, so I will withdraw it.

The post The Northwestern Ninety appeared first on The American Conservative.

Northwestern’s Ninety Self-Hating Jews

There are very few profiles in courage today, when it comes to the leadership class of our institutions. I want to highlight a prominent example of one: Morton Schapiro, the president of Northwestern University. The literary scholar and historian Gary Saul Morson, who teaches at Northwestern, tells readers of Mosaic magazine what’s happening there. He talks about how Schapiro has led the university over the years to be pro-active in reaching out to the Evanston, Ill., community, where the university is, and especially to the disadvantaged black residents of the town and neighboring Chicago. A reader at Northwestern who first alerted me to this piece described Schapiro as “woke.”

Prof. Morson writes:

Following the shocking and violent death of George Floyd this past May, a Northwestern organization named “NU Community Not Cops (NUCNC)” demanded the abolition of the university police force. Northwestern administrators, who have themselves long made “racial justice” a priority, made clear that they sympathized with this demand. At many universities, high-minded statements are part of career advancement (or maintenance), but Schapiro is deeply committed to improving the opportunities for the most disadvantaged in a personal way, and sees this pursuit of justice as an expression of his Jewish observance. Top Northwestern officials reiterated the University’s commitment to Black and minority concerns, met with student groups over the summer, and issued, on September 10th, a document outlining specific reforms to advance “commitments to advancing racial and social justice.” These included appointing three high-ranking administrators with “expertise in diversity and equity,” establishing “anti-racism and unconscious-bias training” for 50 university leaders, providing $1.5 million to advance social justice in Evanston and Chicago, and, most important, hiring outside consultants to review the operations, practices, and budget of the university police. Before the fall 2020 quarter began, President Schapiro had already moved significant university resources into combatting racial bias.

Community Not Cops, dissatisfied that the NUPD was to be reformed and improved rather than abolished, vowed to continue protests until it was. Over the weekend of October 17-18, protests in downtown Evanston, not just on campus, included vandalism, lighting fires, and spray-painting calls for violence against police. The Daily Northwestern, our college newspaper, which is sympathetic to the protestors, quoted one student: “There is no level of property destruction that we can do that is more violent than the cops existing.” Another told the paper: “When I say that Evanston is the most racist place I’ve ever lived, I am not exaggerating.” In 2019 the city of Evanston passed a bill to pay reparations to its Black residents.

President Schapiro refused to dismantle the university police department. So the mob turned on him. Morson:

During that same weekend, in the early hours of the morning, NUCNC came to the president’s house to protest and shout obscenities, including a cry of “piggy Morty.” Schapiro, who makes no secret of being an observant Jew, and whose Jewishness is a target for some, recognized that the comparison of Jews to pigs is an anti-Semitic slur that was used by genocidal Nazis as well as by some in today’s Middle East. Schapiro responded with a letter to the university community that is very different from the self abasement that has become typical of the genre. After repeating his commitment to racial justice, Schapiro asserted a principle that numerous leaders on other campuses have ignored or rejected in recent years, namely, the firm support for “vigorous debate and free expression of ideas.” He drew the line at violence, intimidation, and lawbreaking. These days, any administrator who takes such a stance risks his career.

The president asked students to consider the pain of others: what would their parents or siblings feel if awakened with obscenities and personal attacks? To be sure, Schapiro allowed, students may not have known that “pigs” was a slur against Jews as well as police, but it was nevertheless hurtful and “unacceptable.” Although he was careful not to call the students anti-Semitic, replies have presumed he did. “They didn’t read all that carefully,” Schapiro later said.

You’ll never believe what happened next: Schapiro was publicly denounced by 90 Jewish faculty, students, alumni and others for, get this, anti-blackness. Here was the Jewish president of the university, suffering blatant anti-Semitism by a black mob and its allies — and 90 Jews found fault with him. Here’s a link to the letter they wrote to the campus newspaper, in which they proclaimed that “White Jews are still largely protected by our Whiteness.”

Read the whole Mosaic piece. You can read it for free if you’ll sign up. It’s worth it. That’s a great magazine.

What to make of this? The self-hatred of progressive white people is boundless. It truly is. If they could, they would set themselves on fire to rid themselves of their guilt and shame over being white. It is really important, though, to understand where this death wish comes from. These passages from Live Not By Lies will help:

It’s possible to miss the onslaught of totalitarianism, precisely because we have a misunderstanding of how its power works. In 1951, poet and literary critic Czesław Miłosz, exiled to the West from his native Poland as an anti- communist people misunderstand the nature of communism because they think of it only in terms of “might and coercion.”

“That is wrong,” he wrote. “There is an internal longing for harmony and happiness that lies deeper than ordinary fear or the desire to escape misery or physical destruction.”

In The Captive Mind, Miłosz said that communist ideology filled a void that had opened in the lives of early twentieth-century intellectuals, most of whom had ceased to believe in religion.

Today’s left-wing totalitarianism once again appeals to an internal hunger, specifically the hunger for a just society, one that vindicates and liberates the historical victims of oppression. It masquerades as kindness, demonizing dissenters and disfavored demographic groups to protect the feelings of “victims” to bring about “social justice.”

The contemporary cult of social justice identifies members of certain social groups as victimizers, as scapegoats, and calls for their suppression as a matter of righteousness. In this way, the so-called social justice warriors, (aka SJWs), who started out as liberals animated by an urgent compassion, end by abandoning authentic liberalism and embracing an aggressive and punitive politics that resembles Bolshevism, as the Soviet style of communism was first called.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the cultural critic René Girard prophetically warned: “The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.”

This is what the survivors of communism are saying to us: liberalism’s admirable care for the weak and marginalized is fast turning into a monstrous ideology that, if it is not stopped, will transform liberal democracy into a softer, therapeutic form of totalitarianism.

More:

Why are people so willing to believe demonstrable lies? The desperation alienated people have for a story that helps them make sense of their lives and tells them what to do explains it. For a man desperate to believe, totalitarian ideology is more precious than life itself.

“He may even be willing to help in his own prosecution and frame his own death sentence if only his status as a member of the movement is not touched,” Arendt wrote. Indeed, the files of the 1930s Stalinist show trials are full of false confessions by devout communists who were prepared to die rather than admit that communism was a lie.

Totalitarianism’s most dedicated servants are often idealists, at least at first. [Holocaust survivor Helen] Margolius Kovály testifies that she and her husband embraced communism at first precisely because it was so idealistic. It gave those who had walked out of hell a vision of paradise in which they could believe.

Ever read Darkness At Noon? The Arthur Koestler novel about Stalinism. I wrote about it last year here.  This is a quote from Ivanov, one of the Stalinist torturers.

There are only two conceptions of human ethics, and they are at opposite poles. One of them is Christian and humane, declares the individual to be sacrosanct, and asserts that the rules of arithmetic are not to be applied to human units. The other starts from the basic principle that a collective aim justifies all means, and not only allows, but demands, that the individual should in every way be subordinated and sacrificed to the community — which may dispose of it as an experimentation rabbit or a sacrificial lamb.

The Ninety Self-Hating Jews Of Northwestern have forsaken the ethical heritage of the Hebrew Bible and gone over to the other side. They’re trying to bring down Morton Schapiro, but he’s standing firm. We all need to applaud those — especially liberals like Schapiro — who will not surrender to this moral blackmail. This might well be the thing that red-pills him on wokeness.

—

Say, readers, I have started a Substack newsletter on the side, so I can have a place for a different kind of writing than what you see here on my blog. I explain it in more detail on my first post there. I’m not going to post any less here, but the Daily Dreher newsletter will feature a more diary-like take on the days events, and will have more personal religious reflections, which, as I have explained before in this space, I don’t feel quite right sharing on this blog. I invite you to read the first post and sign up — it’s free, and you’ll get an e-mail once a day from me with material you haven’t seen on this blog. If you don’t like it, just drop it. But I think a lot of you will.

The post Northwestern’s Ninety Self-Hating Jews appeared first on The American Conservative.

Jodi Shaw, Havel’s College Staffer

Spend ten minutes watching this video from Jodi Shaw, a mild-mannered liberal woman who works as a staffer at Smith College, the ultra-liberal women’s liberal arts college in Massachusetts. She identifies herself as “a lifelong liberal,” and she’s sick and tired of enduring what she describes as “harassment, discrimination, and hostility” in the workplace at Smith, because she is white.

This is a brave woman. Watch:

What stands out is how calm she is, and how weary. As Shaw says, she just wants to stop being made to feel that there is something wrong with her for being white — as if her race is the most important thing about her.

You watch: the campus is going to go berserk, with undergraduates and faculty denouncing her for making the campus “unsafe” for BIPOCs. This gentle liberal woman will be demonized by the campus Left. What you hear, though, when you listen to her is a woman who wants to do her job and get along with everybody, and to stop being made to feel by the college itself like she’s bad because she’s white. There are no doubt others at Smith who feel the same way, but who have been too afraid to speak out. Shaw says that she couldn’t stay quiet any longer.

She is the Smith College equivalent of Havel’s greengrocer. She is sick of living by the bigoted lies that Smith College allegedly forces on its employees.

Over at Real Clear Investigations, John Murawski writes about how “white penitence” is shaking up workplaces. Excerpts:

A white physician working in Raleigh, N.C., says he has participated in multiple diversity training exercises – including two in the last two years – without a fuss. But he was taken aback when his employer, Duke University Health System, said this summer it will roll out a comprehensive strategy to purge the last vestiges of racism from the workplace.

The way it looks to him, Duke basically wants him to admit he’s a racist and repent.

Vincent Price, Duke University president: “I cannot as a white person begin to fully understand the daily fear and pain and oppression that is endemic to the Black experience.”

Like a growing number of organizations around the country responding to the death of George Floyd and the Black Lives Matter movement, Duke is adopting anti-racist advocacy as an organizational mission. That mission doesn’t mention time-honored workplace goals like color-blindness, meritocracy, or equal opportunity; instead, its target is the so-called complicity of America and its citizens in “structural racism,” “oppression,” and denialism.

“I feel like my employer is calling me ‘racist’ and I then saying I must agree,” the doctor, who requested anonymity, told RealClearInvestigations. He said he is troubled that Duke’s leadership is imposing its political ideology on staff, implicating employees in a sweeping moral narrative, and dedicating itself to the task of “uncovering this hidden racism the employer is sure lurks within.”

More:

Workplace wokeness can take the form of employees confessing to their unearned white privilege in diversity training sessions, workers wearing social justice slogans on the job, and employees participating in company-sponsored 8-minute 46-second moments of silence for George Floyd. It’s too early to tell if these cultural changes will become a permanent feature of the workplace, but some employees find them inappropriate, intrusive or even coercive, even as others feel they are long overdue.

To supporters, they are not impingements on personal conscience but compassionate and enlightened responses to deeply ingrained structures of oppression, ones that produce unequal outcomes for people of color in life expectancy, household income, education level, incarceration rates and other measures. With the belief that doing nothing is supporting the status quo, the Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health declared in June that employees who do not get involved are part of the problem: “We each must choose to be allies, as standing by idly or silently is to be complicit in perpetuating racist systems and structures.”

Read it all. This is insane. This is part of what I mean by soft totalitarianism: the idea that no aspect of life can be free from ideology — in this case, an ideology that compels people to think of racial difference constantly, and to think the worst about white people within the organization, simply because of the color of their skin.

When is a job just, you know, a job? Why does the workplace have to feel like some kind of political fundamentalist church, where people have to be afraid that somebody, somewhere might accuse them of being a heretic?

It’s going to take an army of Jodi Shaws to turn this around.

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Joe Biden: Bad For Religious Liberty

Joe Biden said today that if he’s elected (and assuming he has a Democratic Senate behind him), he will sign the Equality Act within the first hundred days. I believe him, too. This is an issue that the Democratic Party is united on. The only reason it’s not the law now is because the Republican Senate would not pass it.

The Equality Act would raise sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) to the level of race in federal civil rights law. That means that there would be no difference This would be bad news for the religious liberty of dissenting Christians, Muslims, and Jews. Why? Ryan T. Anderson explained last year that the Equality Act, if signed into law, would do the following things:

1. The Equality Act would force employers to cover abortion, and medical professionals to perform or assist in performing abortions.

When the Obama administration tried to force this same policy in its very last months in office, a federal judge declared it unlawful. When the Trump administration came into office, the Trump Justice Department agreed with that judge and did not appeal his ruling, which placed a 50-state injunction on that regulation.

Should the Equality Act become law, this abortion policy would become the law of the land, undermining President Donald Trump’s significant pro-life record.

2. The Equality Act would force employers to pay for sex “reassignment” procedures in their health insurance plans, and require medical professionals to perform them.

Think Hobby Lobby and Little Sisters of the Poor, but only worse. If a health care plan covers mastectomies in the case of cancer, but not in the case of “reassignment,” the Equality Act would deem this illegal “discrimination.” So, too, if a doctor chooses to perform mastectomies in the case of cancer but not for sex “reassignment” purposes. That doctor would be guilty of illegal “discrimination.”

Thankfully, when the Obama administration attempted to impose this mandate, a federal judge struck it down, and the Trump administration agreed with the judge and did not appeal the ruling. Should the Equality Act become law, it would undo Trump’s policy of protecting the freedom of medical doctors to not perform “reassignment” procedures if they deem them bad medicine.

3. The Equality Act would force all schools and businesses to open their women’s bathrooms, locker rooms, showers, and sports teams to boys who “identify as” girls and to men who “identify as” women.

The Obama administration imposed this transgender mandate on schools in all 50 states, and thankfully the Trump administration reversed the misguided policy during its first weeks of office. But, should the Equality Act become law, it would override the Trump policy and would threaten the privacy, safety, and equality of women and girls across the country.

4. The Equality Act could be used to force the military to pay for “reassignment” procedures and force the military to accept recruits suffering from gender dysphoria who are not combat-ready.

The Trump administration has implemented a careful, nuanced policy that allows people who identify as transgender to serve in the military — provided they no longer suffer from gender dysphoria and serve in accordance with their biological sex. But should the Equality Act become law, this Trump policy could be deemed “discrimination.”

5. The Equality Act would force faith-based adoption agencies to either violate their conviction that every child deserves both a mother and a father or to stop serving children in need altogether.

Thankfully, the Trump administration has taken initial steps to protect adoption agencies from these misguided policies. Additional steps are needed. But if the Equality Act became law, it would force all adoption agencies in all 50 states to either violate their convictions or close their doors.

6. The Equality Act would force a variety of small business owners to violate their beliefs about marriage, sexuality, and gender.

At the state level, this has happened to bakers, florists, photographers, and even funeral home owners.

Thankfully the Trump administration has supported these small business owners as their cases proceeded through the court system. But should the Equality Act become law, it would bring the full force of the federal government against these small business owners, treating them as violators of federal civil rights law.

7. The Equality Act, in general, threatens the freedom of speech, freedom of association, and free exercise of religion rights of countless people.

Anyone who believes we are created male and female, and that male and female are created for each other, will be at risk. This means Orthodox Jews, Roman Catholics, Evangelical Christians, Latter-day Saints, Muslims, and people of no particular faith tradition but who take science seriously will be on the wrong side of federal civil rights law.

This is what will happen if Joe Biden is elected president and the Democrats, who are expected to hold the House, take the Senate. Biden said so today.

My friend Tish Harrison Warren, an Anglican priest, says that you shouldn’t vote for Donald Trump to protect religious liberty. Her argument, in part:

I, for one, think it could be quite bad [if Biden wins]. I am not naïve about the threat to traditional religious communities from certain forms of progressivism. In 2012, I led a ministry that was kicked off the campus of Vanderbilt University for seeking to preserve our creedal commitments—all while Vanderbilt assured us with a fixed smile that they were actually very tolerant of religious people. In 2015, on the day Obergefell v. Hodges was decided, I called one of my best friends who is gay, listened as he enumerated all the ways this decision improved his life, and congratulated him, but I also asked that if my church loses its tax-exempt status or my kids’ Christian school is shut down, that he’d write on my behalf (for the record, he said that he would). Though I cannot predict the future, I understand what is at stake.

These fears that religious conservatives feel are real and ought not be brushed off lightly. Losing our shaping and beloved institutions is a grievous loss. But I do not think our fears can ultimately be answered politically. Instead, we as a religious community must address them theologically. The gospel alone—not Republican politics nor empty assurances that it won’t be so bad—is the proper response to genuine fears.  Laws and policies that protect religious liberty are important, but we, as a Christian community, cannot seek those laws at any cost. If we do, we will lose our own souls in the process of preserving our freedoms.

She details the ways she believes that the Trump administration’s policies, and the president’s character, has hurt the things Christians believe. And then:

My deep concern is that we are burning down our own house in the attempt to save it. Curtailing religious liberty in the United States would devastate religious communities and non-profits, weaken our society as a whole, and lead to less freedom and less diversity. But it isn’t the worst fate I can imagine. Far worse would be if in our attempt to protect robust religious freedom, the church would so fearfully compromise the message and ethics of Jesus, that we have nothing left worth preserving.

Read it all. She makes a good point. I’m not ultimately convinced, but note that unlike many on the Left, she doesn’t say either that it won’t happen (a transparent falsehood), or that we “bigots” deserve what we have coming. Warren simply judges that Christians have more to lose by voting for Trump (and a second Trump term) than by suffering the different-but-real losses of a Biden presidency. Again, I disagree — but her argument is worth listening to, because she’s right about the damage that Trump is doing to conservative Christianity. Despite that, reading Ryan Anderson’s list of what the Equality Act will do makes me think that a second Trump administration would be the lesser evil, for voters like me who believe that religious liberty is the most important issue facing us.

It is worth noting that LGBT Americans already enjoy substantial liberties, both in law and in culture. LGBT rights are popular now, and it is hard to find a business or institution that discriminated against them. Those that do face public opprobrium. The culture has changed. Those relatively few businesses and institutions that would practice currently legal discrimination against LGBT Americans will be crushed by this. So will women’s athletics. Which is the point. The Left is no longer liberal.

If Joe Biden wins this thing, especially if the Democrats take the Senate, traditional Christians, Muslims, and Jews, and other social conservatives, will wake up in a new world. In The Benedict Option (2017), I said this was coming, and that Christians had better prepare ourselves for it. Many Christians said I was a head-for-the-hills alarmist, and didn’t pay attention. In Live Not By Lies, published one month ago today, I said it was at the door — and here we are, days before the election, in which the last legislative and executive protections for religious liberty on the SOGI front seem poised to fall. All the winsomeness in the world is not going to protect your business or religious school when the Biden Justice Department comes after them.

But all the votes haven’t yet been cast or counted. Don’t forget that.

UPDATE: I texted a lawyer friend who is heavily involved in religious liberty issues, asking for his response. He texted back just now:

I think the best very brief summary I’ve seen comes from Doug Laycock. Doug is a SSM supporter, but also one of the top 1st Amendment scholars in the country — anyone left or right would agree with that. Here is what he said, “It goes very far to stamp out religious exemptions,” “It regulates religious non-profits. And then it says that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] does not apply to any claim under the Equality Act. This would be the first time Congress has limited the reach of RFRA. This is not a good-faith attempt to reconcile competing interests. It is an attempt by one side to grab all the disputed territory and to crush the other side.”

Those are very strong, but fair words, coming from a guy like Laycock. Strong, but fair.

The EQA wholly exempts itself from the operations of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA) and offers no specific religious protections to religious institutions.  The EQA would probably revoke federal security, disaster relief, and school lunch money from thousands of religious schools; would probably revoke the Pell Grant and federal loan eligibility for tens of thousands of students that attend hundreds of religious colleges, and; would probably end federal partnerships with thousands of faith-based programs that serve the poor and others in need (foster care services, homeless shelter, domestic abuse programs…). In many cases those programs simply wouldn’t survive.

It also has implications for ability of Churches and other ministries with respect to hiring practices. And also expands the definition of “public accommodation” without providing any clarity on how this would be applied to religious organizations. It certainly impacts wedding vendors, and other business owners. And it ups the ante on the kinds of privacy and free speech issues that we already see being litigated under title IX and k-12 schools, colleges and universities.

It also threatens the conscience rights of health care professionals.

I’m actually not at my desk right now or I could provide a tighter response, I’m likely forgetting something in the litany above.

There would be lots of litigation over many of the points above, but in many cases that kind of litigation is not survivable even if you win, and with all RFRA protections removed the chances of winning are diminished.

Summary, It’s a seriously problematic bill with potential deep and long lasting negative impact on individuals and institutions who hold to traditional beliefs on marriage, family, sexuality, identity… It’s a VERY big deal that I wish were getting more attention.

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Move Along, Mailchimp, Nothing To See

Mailchimp is a massively successful e-mail marketing platform. Better hope that your business doesn’t depend on it, unless you’re completely woke. A reader points out Mailchimp’s rules:

Good luck, traditional Christian churches and institutions. Good luck social conservatives.

We are going to see more of this. A lot more of this. Big Tech will cut off access to the online market to “bigots.” You have been warned.

Meanwhile, I have good news and bad news for you: the good news is that NPR has finally paid attention to Christian persecution (its record on this is all but non-existent). The bad news is that it was on the show On The Media (“God Bless,” October 2) and it’s a segment about how Christians either exaggerate or make it all up. So now the power elites in this country have been told by NPR, interviewing a liberal British academic, that Christians are whiners, that nobody is discriminating against them.

The academic is Candida Moss, who published a 2013 book called The Myth of Christian Martyrdom. Isn’t it remarkable that NPR would seek out as its sole source for a discussion of Christian martyrdom a professor who doesn’t really believe in it. The Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner ripped the book hard. Excerpts:

The tedium of repeated déjà vu in this sad little volume did at least send me back to Gibbon’s Decline and Fall. It is as if a publisher came to Candida Moss, a professor of New Testament and Early Christianity at Notre Dame, with a proposal for a quick buck, relying on the political twitter of the times: “You’re an expert: Reframe Gibbon’s notorious chapter on the Romans and the Christians with some contemporary scholarship and cultural fillips, and we can put out a nifty pamphlet that’ll sell.”

And Moss has read her Gibbon. It’s all here, borrowed from the eighteenth-century master of an English prose far more wicked in its irony than Moss’s: the fraudulent numbers of the persecuted and killed, the “artful pen” of later Christian tricksters who embellished both the past and the inner vices of the early Church’s faithful, the self-serving formation of a culture of righteous resentment and hostility by pusillanimous Christians, and, of course, the proposal that the fictions and attitudes they engendered turned the Church into the world’s worst persecutor.

So here’s the pitch: Conservatives in America think that traditional Christians are “persecuted” for their positions against abortion and homosexual marriage, but this is only a latter-day expression of an early Christian “myth” that relies on fraud to demonize opponents and stoke the fires of intolerance.

That is the book in a nutshell. Those who know some Christian history will learn little here except, perhaps, something about the continuing intellectual dead ends of historical criticism.

More:

Christian martyrdom’s power, which is a historical phenomenon and stands as an important piece of evidence in its own right, is bound to its religious meaning. The two cannot be separated, and together they shed light on the early Church’s witness. Minimalist readings of that early record are certainly possible. But Moss draws radically negative speculative conclusions from it: It is all a sham.

This isn’t history but an ideologically charged refusal to deal with the moral consistency of Christian martyrdom, both in the first centuries and as it is still in fact suffered. This refusal marks an indifference in the face of Christian martyrdom’s deep political challenges. The indifference itself hints at the irrelevance of her main project.

Gosh, it’s almost as if NPR’s On The Media went out looking for someone to confirm their thesis.

So, look, when Big Tech companies like Mailchimp start cutting off non-woke Christians, they will be able to depend on Big Media like NPR to reassure them that they are doing nothing wrong, that Christian protest is much ado about nothing.

This is how it’s going to work. Live Not By Lies has more.

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French Islam & Civic Life

A head-chopper for the Prophet has made more Christian martyrs in France, this time in Nice:

At least three people have been killed in the French coastal city of Nice during a knife attack the local mayor described as a “terrorist” incident.

The attack took place in a church, the Notre Dame Basilica, on Thursday. The victims include one woman who was “decapitated” inside the church, Mayor Christian Estrosi said.

Estrosi said the attacker was shot by police, but is still alive and has been taken into custody.

“I am on the scene with the police who arrested the attacker. Everything points to a terrorist attack,” Estrosi said on Twitter Thursday morning.

“At this moment, we have, without any doubt, two dead inside the church, in a horrible way,” Estrosi said shortly afterwards during a press conference.

This is a week or so after a Chechen Muslim decapitated a French schoolteacher for showing an offensive drawing of the Prophet to his class. According to Le Figaro, the French daily:

Selon une source policière au Figaro, une première femme, âgée et venue prier de bon matin, a été retrouvée égorgée et «quasiment décapitée» près du bénitier dans l’édifice religieux. Un homme, le sacristain, a également été retrouvé égorgé dans l’église. Une seconde femme, qui avait réussi à se réfugier dans un café voisin, y a perdu la vie, le corps lardé de plusieurs coups de couteaux. L’attaque a également fait plusieurs blessés.

Translation:

According to a police source in Le Figaro, the first woman, elderly, who came to pray early in the morning, was found with her throat cut and “almost decapitated” near the holy water font in the religious building. A man, the sacristan, was also found with his throat cut in the church. A second woman, who had managed to take refuge in a nearby café, lost her life there, her body suffering several stab wounds. The attack also left several wounded.

Note well that the French Muslim Council today condemned the attacks and called on the nation’s Muslims to avoid a traditional celebration today out of solidarity with the Nice victims. Follow the latest news on the web in English on the France 24 webcast.

There is a reason why I dedicated the French translation of The Benedict Option to Father Jacques Hamel, 85, martyred in 2016 by a Muslim fanatic while saying mass. Today is a good day to remind ourselves of what Ross Douthat had to say back then about Father Jacques’s murder. Excerpt:

But our today is not actually quite what 1960s-era Catholicism imagined. The come-of-age church is, in the West, literally a dying church: As the French philosopher Pierre Manent noted, the scene of Father Hamel’s murder — “an almost empty church, two parishioners, three nuns, a very old priest” — vividly illustrates the condition of the faith in Western Europe.

The broader liberal order is also showing signs of strain. The European Union, a great dream when Father Hamel was ordained a priest in 1958, is now a creaking and unpopular bureaucracy, threatened by nationalism from within and struggling to assimilate immigrants from cultures that never made the liberal leap.

The Islam of many of these immigrants is likely to be Europe’s most potent religious force across the next generation, bringing with it an “Islamic exceptionalism” (to borrow the title of Shadi Hamid’s fine new book) that may not fit the existing secular-liberal experiment at all.

Meanwhile the French Catholic future seems like it may belong to a combination of African immigrants and Latin-Mass traditionalists — or else to a religious revival that would likely be nationalist, not liberal, with Joan of Arc as its model, not a modern Jesuit.

This future, God willing, will preserve the late-modern peace. But it promises something more complicated and more dangerous than the liberal imagination, secular and Catholic, envisioned 50 years ago.

Some of the nervousness about calling Father Hamel a holy martyr reflects the limits of that imagination. After all, it would have seemed all but impossible, in the bright optimism of the 1960s, that a young priest of the church of Vatican II should, in his old age, die a martyr’s death in the very heart of Europe.

But it wasn’t, and he did.

Meanwhile, last night in the city of Vienne, just south of Lyon:

On the streets of France, a mob hunts for Armenians. It’s like a scene from 1915. But it’s in France, right now. Appalling. https://t.co/txJ9gx7BAs

— Mark Movsesian (@MarkMovsesian) October 29, 2020

Decapitating worshipers at mass. Leading a pogrom for Christian Armenians through the streets.  The French state should come against these evil men with maximum force. I thought that what that schoolteacher did, by showing the offensive image of Muhammad in class, was an unkind provocation, but not in a thousand million years did it deserve anything more than a letter of protest or a meeting with the school principal. People who feel at liberty to murder teachers in the street, and old women and sacristans at morning prayers, and chase down Christians in the street, have no right to expect anything but hard justice from any state and social order capable of self-preservation. France must be united in this, and severe with these malefactors and those who support them.

UPDATE: The former Prime Minister of Malaysia (a self-proclaimed proud anti-Semite, by the way), has tweeted this morning, in response to the murders in Nice:

Man.

UPDATE.2: Note well that the New York Post is still locked out of its Twitter account because of its Hunter Biden story, but Twitter allows the former PM of Malaysia to use its platform to call for mass murder of French people.

UPDATE.3: This from a Muslim friend:

Today, in #NiceAttack, all humanity was killed.

The three victims were purely innocent worshippers at Church – and that who kills one innocent soul is guilty "as if he had killed all mankind."

As a Muslim I offer my condolences to France & all Catholics.https://t.co/TWJHbPHYS0

— Mustafa Akyol (@AkyolinEnglish) October 29, 2020

I would dispute that, in a slight, friendly way: we should not minimize the particularity of these deaths. Those people died because they were Christians. Still, I understand what Mustafa is saying here, and I’m grateful for his statement of solidarity. No one must think that all Muslims approve of those murders.

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Never Buy Girl Scout Cookies Again

This is what the Girl Scouts of America tweeted out:

 

But then the libs went berserk, weeping and wailing and gnashing their teeth. Then the Girl Scouts tweeted:

That’s the Left for you: politicizing every damn thing. And that’s the quality of our institutional leadership today: surrendering every time leftists caterwaul.

Deleting that ACB tweet was a political act, Girl Scouts. You can’t have it both ways. You caved to your progressive critics, who in effect exercise a veto over which women can and cannot be celebrated for their accomplishments.

I hope you have enough liberal customers to make up for the conservative ones you will lose for the cookies you peddle. I do not want to support an organization that teaches girls that the only women worth celebrating are those who grow up to be progressives, and that the thing for women to do when they are criticized by Mean Girls is to retreat and apologize.

Never buy Girl Scout cookies. Never, ever again. If the Girl Scouts of America are ashamed of accomplished conservative women, and too afraid to stand up for them, then you don’t deserve the support of conservatives, male and female both.

 

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Trump, Trans, And Therapeutic Totalitarianism

We read all the time about how barbaric Donald Trump is, how he has trampled down norms, how “the cruelty is the point,” and all that. And some of that is true, not gonna lie. But what our media do not see is how radically the Democratic Party has changed its stance on transgender issues, to support some things that many of us genuinely find to be barbaric. However unkind or crude Trump is at times, he does not support the brutality that kind, housebroken, clubbable Joe Biden and his party do when it comes to mutilating children’s bodies and compelling everyone in this society to accept the lies that undergird gender ideology.

This afternoon I received the following e-mail from the founder of the website transbrainfx.com. We have a mutual friend. The author said I could publish this e-mail, but that I could not use her name. This stuff is important, and you never, ever read about or hear it in the mainstream media, which are totally sold out to gender ideology. Read on:

I’d like to share a story that illustrates how a combination of soft and hard totalitarianism, driven by money and ideology, can endanger young people with gender difficulties. Your readers might be especially interested in this now that Joe Biden says he will “change the law” to support youngsters who identify as transgender.

I’m a technical writer with a Ph.D. in a behavioral field. I began to research female-to-male transition treatments during the Obama-Biden administration. That was the “most trans-friendly presidential administration in history.” Left-wing LGBTQ activists and people who made money from gender transition were permitted to set the boundaries for “acceptable” speech, research, and medical practices. That made it dangerous for medical experts to speak up about problems with transition treatments. This affects the treatments that young people with gender difficulties get today.

Studies showed that female-to-male treatments could be harmful and unnecessary for many patients. High testosterone conditions had been correlated with female autism and psychiatric disorders. Placebo-controlled experiments and transition treatment studies showed that the treatments might trigger or worsen autism or psychiatric disorders by altering brain tissue and brain activity.

I knew that doctors were not warning families about this. I asked medical experts to help me expose the dangers of transition treatments. However, I could not get medical experts to acknowledge publicly that transition treatments might be unsafe and unnecessary even when their own studies already showed this.

I contacted medical experts in the U.S. and elsewhere. Some told me privately that they thought transition treatments were bad, but they did not want to say this publicly. Others refused to talk to me. One scolded me for being “heteronormative” because I questioned the safety and necessity of testosterone drug treatments for young females. That person had already published a study indicating that excess testosterone could trigger a brain disorder in females.

I shared my research with doctors who specialized in treating patients with autism and gender dysphoria. The doctors claimed that they weren’t familiar with the studies I found—although the studies were done by prominent researchers and published in high-profile journals—or they did not “believe” the studies. And they still planned to provide transition treatments to young females with conditions such as autism.

One expert refused to help me because, he said, the benefits of transition outweighed the risks. That might be true for some patients, but it’s not a legitimate justification for concealing or downplaying the risks. It is paternalistic, injurious to patient autonomy, and incompatible with principles of informed consent for a doctor to withhold risk information only because the doctor personally values the supposed benefits of gender transition. The American Medical Association says that “withholding information without the patient’s knowledge or consent is ethically unacceptable,” except in some medical emergencies.

Doctors knew they could get away with this. They could make money from transition drug and surgical treatments, and never be held accountable for the damage done to young patients, because societal elites supported gender transition.

Proponents of gender transition won over 150 policy victories in K-12 education, healthcare, and other areas during the Obama-Biden administration. Private sector actors worked independently and in partnership with the Obama-Biden administration and others to promote transition. These public and private sector allies created a de facto system of rewards and punishments: soft and hard totalitarianism. I believe this is why so many medical experts declined to acknowledge problems with transition treatments.

Doctors who supported transition—including doctors with ties to transition drug companies—got research funding, donations, and payments from patients and health insurers. Academics got a bonanza of publishing opportunities if they framed their studies as ways to combat “transphobia” and “hetero-cis–normativity.”

People who questioned or opposed gender transition faced severe consequences: professional sanctions and job loss, criminal investigations, public shaming, physical violence, censorship, and the risk of having one’s academic research attacked or un-published.

Democrats won donations (“pink money”), favorable media attention, and votes by supporting LGBTQ causes. Barack Obama, Hillary Clinton, and other Democrats supported the gender transition movement. Joe Biden voiced support for it in 2012, 2017, and 2020. This was especially important when the Democratic Party was going bankrupt and Hillary Clinton and Joe Biden were contemplating presidential campaigns.

Public and private actors created a tidal wave of favorable attention for gender transition in the U.S. and other countries. Many young people, especially females, developed rapid onset gender dysphoria (ROGD) in that milieu.

Female-to-male transition surged in the Obama-Biden years. Girls were left bald, bearded, without breasts, without ovaries, with permanently deepened voices and distorted genitalia, at risk for myriad physical and mental health problems, with their female identities erased.

Around 2% of all U.S. girls may now identify as transgender or non-binary. Some 40% or more may have autism diagnoses or undiagnosed autism. Some have psychiatric disorders. But gender transition is so popular now, and the risks are so well-concealed, that many young people without severe psychiatric disorders or autism may be lured into it.

How many girls would be safer today if the Obama-Biden administration had not promoted gender transition? How many young people around the world might have avoided drugs and surgeries if the Obama-Biden administration and its left-wing allies had not promoted gender transition?

Doctors have used transition treatments on patients with autism, schizophrenia, PTSD from rape, cognitive disabilities, dissociation, attention deficit disorder, and other conditions. Doctors have prescribed cross-sex drugs for 12-year-olds and hormone blockers for children. They’ve performed mastectomies on 13-year-old girls, genital surgeries on minor boys, and hysterectomies on very young women with mental health difficulties.

The public has been told that such patients need drugs and surgeries because they are “transgender.” But “transgender” means only that a person claims to be or wants to be a different gender, which could be a result of autism or a psychiatric disorder. “Transgender” is not an “intersex” condition or physical disorder of sex development. Most people would understand this already, I believe, if the Obama-Biden administration had not promoted gender transition.

The Obama-Biden administration should have suspected problems with the gender transition movement from the very beginning. Transition treatments are radical treatments used disproportionately on patients with conditions such as autism, who are vulnerable to medical mistreatment. Doctors have subjected such patients to LSD drugs, electrical shock punishments, lobotomies, germ warfare experiments, euthanasia, and other harms.

Even a cursory investigation would have revealed that there were problems.

Transition treatments use testosterone drugs and estrogen-suppressing drugs in biological females. The drugs were not, and are not, FDA-approved for gender transition purposes.

Health experts warned about a lack of safety data for testosterone therapy for females in 2007 and 2014. An FDA panel said in 2015 that doctors should “prescribe testosterone therapy only for men.” In 2019, experts said: “There are no clearly established indications for testosterone therapy for women.”

The FDA launched a safety review of testosterone drugs in 2014 after federal studies linked the drugs to serious health problems. In 2016, the FDA warned that testosterone drugs were being abused by adolescents and adults. It said that “abuse of testosterone…is associated with serious safety risks affecting the heart, brain, liver, mental health, and endocrine system.  Reported serious adverse outcomes include…depression, hostility, [and] aggression.”

Researchers correlated female autism with high testosterone conditions in 2007, 2010, 2016, 2018, and other years. This was reported in high-profile journals such as Nature.

Researchers also correlated high testosterone conditions with female schizophrenia, bipolar disorder, borderline personality disorder, suicidal behavior, criminality, cognitive problems, mood problems, body dissatisfaction, risky decisions, and aggression. These correlations were reported from the 1990s onward.

Interestingly, in males, low testosterone or non-testosterone factors have been linked to autism, bipolar disorder, and other psychiatric and neurological disorders. Sex differences matter.

Experiments from 2010 onward showed that testosterone drugs changed females’ brain activity and behavior. Testosterone drugs impaired females’ social cognition and decision making. They altered females’ moral judgment and decreased interpersonal trust. They might lead to social aggression. Researchers said their findings revealed “a neural mechanism by which testosterone…may link to the symptomatology of” autism.

By 2006, researchers knew that transition treatments changed brain tissue. A 2011 study showed that female-to-male treatments suppressed social brain activity, which might lead to autism-like difficulties. The treatments also affect brain areas responsible for “self-referential and own body perception,” sexuality, language, aggression and motivation, empathy, and other things.

Studies in the 1990s suggested that female-to-male treatments increased anger and aggression proneness and impaired verbal abilities. A 2011 study showed that female-to-male patients had elevated rates of criminal convictions and suicide after being treated.

The FDA has received many reports of health problems in patients who got hormone-blocking drugs, which are used for “puberty suppression.” Researchers in the 1990s linked estrogen blockers to depression in women. Low estrogen conditions were correlated with cognitive deficits in young women. Blockers were linked to lower IQs in girls and altered brain development in female animals.

The head of the U.S. National Institutes of Health told researchers in 2014 to pay more attention to biological sex differences to avoid problems such as adverse drug effects in females. U.S. health officials had known since the early 1990s that females might be harmed by drug treatments that seemed safe for males.

None of this stopped the Obama-Biden administration from promoting gender transition.

So here we are. Joe Biden, who may be our next President, just said that he would enact policies to support “an eight year-old child” who decides, “you know…I want to be transgender….[It would] make my life a lot easier.”

Rod, I think it would be very useful for you, Tucker Carlson, and other conservatives to remind people of what it was like during the Obama-Biden years.

I just did. Neither Trump nor the Republicans in Congress have done much to derail the trans train, but they have not aligned the federal government with its goals. If Biden wins next week, the entire executive branch will be in the hands of the controllers who believe a dangerous lie about sex and biology, and who are willing, even eager, to experiment on the bodies of children and minors. Think about that.

In the future, historians will look back on this era and marvel at the things we did to our bodies, and to the bodies of children, in the name of the Sexual Revolution and its therapeutic totalitarianism. This will not have been done by redneck Deplorables and Orange Man Bad; this will have been done by sophisticated, cosmopolitan elites and the avuncular politicians who see no limits at all to their utopian projects.

 

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