Rod Dreher's Blog, page 104

View From Your Table

The reader writes:

Thought I’d share the view from my table this morning – deep in the English countryside in Devon, with a pot of hot tea, with Vaclav Benda’s collected writings. I’ve been so inspired by him having read Live Not By Lies that I invested in him for my holiday reading.

What a man. And, in the face of great evil, still so funny in a way that only those with confidence and hope can be. This cracked me up, from “A Small Lesson in Democracy” — a story from when he was losing his university job after signing Charter 77:

“[The director of the institute] regretted my inadequate sense if responsibility with regard to my five small children, and contrasted this with the sleepless nights he spent on their behalf. He went on to say he suspected that my good mood issued from a hidden income from abroad. Thinking about the undesirable state of my family finances, I wanted to make a sharp protest, then however the hidden treasures laid up in heaven occurred to me… Since I had some doubts as to whether the director would consider heaven to be a domestic or foreign institution, I confined myself to a restrained reply“

May we keep the same good mood in the days ahead.

The Benda family is always good company!

I should start doing VFYTs again. Don’t know why I got out of the habit of doing them, but I think we could use them again. The rules are this: take an image of what it looks like to be seated at your table. Don’t take a photo of what’s on your table alone, but rather show it in broader context. We want to get a sense of place, even if that place is only the interior of your own home. Also, no faces (I’ll make an exception for people in the distance, in a crowd).

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Paul Kingsnorth’s Alexandria

Regular readers know that I am a fan of the writing of Paul Kingsnorth, an Englishman who lives with his wife and two children in rural County Galway, Ireland. You will recall a short piece of Kingsnorth’s fiction, “The Basilisk,” that I linked to here over the summer. I discovered his essays a few years ago — in particular, “In The Black Chamber,” on the meaning of sacredness and wonder sparked by a visit to prehistoric cave paintings in France. At the time, Kingsnorth was an atheist, but was on a quest for the eternal.

Kingsnorth spent most of his adult life in the environmental movement, but had come to believe that the fight to save the earth from climate destruction had been lost. He helped launch the Dark Mountain Project, a way of responding to the collapse through writing and art, by reckoning with what it means to live with hope in the ruins. In 2014, The New York Times Magazine profiled Kingsnorth, explaining in detail why he believes what he believes. Excerpt:

Instead of trying to “save the earth,” Kingsnorth says, people should start talking about what is actually possible. Kingsnorth has admitted to an ex-activist’s cynicism about politics as well as to a worrying ambivalence about whether he even wants civilization, as it now operates, to prevail. But he insists that he isn’t opposed to political action, mass or otherwise, and that his indignations about environmental decline and industrial capitalism are, if anything, stronger than ever. Still, much of his recent writing has been devoted to fulminating against how environmentalism, in its crisis phase, draws adherents. Movements like Bill McKibben’s 350.org, for instance, might engage people, Kingsnorth told me, but they have no chance of stopping climate change. “I just wish there was a way to be more honest about that,” he went on, “because actually what McKibben’s doing, and what all these movements are doing, is selling people a false premise. They’re saying, ‘If we take these actions, we will be able to achieve this goal.’ And if you can’t, and you know that, then you’re lying to people. And those people . . . they’re going to feel despair.”

Whatever the merits of this diagnosis (“Look, I’m no Pollyanna,” McKibben says. “I wrote the original book about the climate for a general audience, and it carried the cheerful title ‘The End of Nature’ ”), it has proved influential. The author and activist Naomi Klein, who has known Kingsnorth for many years, says Dark Mountain has given people a forum in which to be honest about their sense of dread and loss. “Faced with ecological collapse, which is not a foregone result, but obviously a possible one, there has to be a space in which we can grieve,” Klein told me. “And then we can actually change.”

Kingsnorth would agree with the need for grief but not with the idea that it must lead to change — at least not the kind of change that mainstream environmental groups pursue. “What do you do,” he asked, “when you accept that all of these changes are coming, things that you value are going to be lost, things that make you unhappy are going to happen, things that you wanted to achieve you can’t achieve, but you still have to live with it, and there’s still beauty, and there’s still meaning, and there are still things you can do to make the world less bad? And that’s not a series of questions that have any answers other than people’s personal answers to them. Selfishly it’s just a process I’m going through.” He laughed. “It’s extremely narcissistic of me. Rather than just having a personal crisis, I’ve said: ‘Hey! Come share my crisis with me!’ ”

You might think of Kingsnorth as a Gen X English Wendell Berry. In fact, he selected and wrote the introduction for a 2019 collection of Berry essays, The World-Ending Fire: The Essential Wendell Berry. You can read Kingsnorth’s selected short fiction and essays on his website here.

This week, Kingsnorth published his latest novel, Alexandria (Gray Wolf Press), a dystopian tale of a remnant community living in eastern England about a thousand years into the future, after the seas have risen 60 meters, and all human civilization has been destroyed. Like most futuristic science fiction, it’s really a novel about ourselves and our time. The questions Kingsnorth explores in the novel have to do with the meaning of the human person, and the struggle between the Body and the Machine. I don’t typically read fiction like this, but I found the book hard to put down, because it intersects with so many of my own concerns. I recommended Alexandria to Zack Stentz, the screenwriter of a couple of Marvel films, and sci-fi projects. He tweeted this week:

The other day, I sent Paul some questions via e-mail, and received his answers back this morning. Here’s our conversation:

Alexandria is set in a dystopian future, almost a millennium after the collapse of civilization under the pressures of global climate catastrophe. I first discovered your writing years ago, with your Dark Mountain project. Why are you so interested in apocalypse?

I think to answer that question you would have to look deep into my twisted soul! In some ways, I just have a natural tendency to see a glass half empty. But I also think it is increasingly hard to be anything but apocalyptic when we look to the future if we are being honest. I worked as an environmentalist for years, and it’s impossible to look at the current state of the Earth without foreboding. Culturally, too, it’s hard to argue that the West, or indeed much of the rest of the globe, is in a healthy place at the moment. Maybe it never has been. Still, I’m pretty convinced by the claim that we are in a cultural decadence. The divisions and the tensions are rising across the board, and we have no unified sense of what we are or where we are going or what we believe or stand for.

I tend to think that civilisations have a natural life cycle — a rise and fall — as do empires, and that the West is at the end of one of those cycles now. My country, Britain, once owned half the world, and sucked much of its wealth out for its own gain. After World War Two, we sunk into post-imperial decline, and we’ve been in that decline all my life. Your country took over the imperial mantle, and now it’s your turn to experience the collapse. This is what happens to empires, so there is some justice in the world.

This can all seem pretty apocalyptic. Something that is interesting to me, though, is the original meaning of the word apocalypse, which of course is ‘revelation’ or ‘unveiling.’ In apocalyptic times, a lot is revealed that was previously hidden. The covid virus alone is unmasking so much of the unworkable and unreal nature of modern life: it is fundamentally unsustainable in so many ways. We were living in an illusion, and now the illusion is shattering.

You believe that there is no stopping climate collapse at this point. I have said the same thing about the cultural collapse of Christianity in the West, with my Benedict Option project. We both agree, I think, that humankind needs to shed its optimism, and instead look for the kind of hope that can give resilience. This approach infuriates people. Why the rage, do you think?

Let’s look at the modern mind, and especially the modern Western mind. What defines it? I think it might be a desire for control. We are desperate to believe that humanity can build paradise on Earth. Millions upon millions of people died in the last century alone in pursuit of that goal. We believe that we are, in the words of technotopian thinker Stewart Brand, ‘as gods, and we have to get good at it.’ But we are not good at it, and we never will be, because we are not gods. We are a species which has caused a mass extinction event, changed the climate of the whole planet and turned half of the world’s ancient forests into tables and toilet paper: all in pursuit of ‘progress.’ We can create marvels, but we are not in control of where they take us. We are now at a point where we cannot stop the runaway train.

But we hate hearing this! If the modern West has a religion, it is the religion of Progress — the faith that things will continue to improve for us all as a result of our cleverness: that the arc of history bends not only towards justice but towards endless material improvement. I genuinely do believe that we have an almost spiritual commitment to this notion. Questioning it, in that context, is virtually blasphemous. It infuriates people, and they call you all sorts of names. Without progress, what do we have left?

Let’s talk about Alexandria, which is the third of a trilogy. How does it relate to your two previous novels, The Wake and Beast?  

A decade ago I started writing a novel about the Norman Conquest of England in 1066. I wanted to tell the story of the largely unknown underground resistance movement which fought against the Normans. As I wrote, a problem emerged. My narrator was an eleventh century man but he was speaking 21st century English. In reality he would have spoken what we now call ‘Old English’, a Germanic language which is virtually unrecognisable to us today. I couldn’t make his voice work. What I ended up doing was creating my own version of Old English — a shadow tongue, as I called it — which was intended to convey the feel of the speech patterns of early medieval England. It was a challenge, but it was fun.

By the time I’d finished I developed the mad idea that this would be the first book in a loose trilogy which would span two millennia of time, and would trace the path of one line of people in the same place across history. My second book, Beast, was set in the present day — that was published in 2017. Alexandria is the last book in the series. It’s set a thousand years from now, in the same place as The Wake. There are a lot of echoes, but it’s also a book that stands alone. It can be read without even knowing the other two exist; but if you have read them, there will be an added layer of richness to it. The common theme of all the books is the relationship between people and the land — and the notion that the land is a lot more sentient and aware than we might give it credit for.

The first thing that leapt out to me about Alexandria is how this remnant community is organized around religion. It’s a pagan earth religion that appears to have been cobbled together from the ruins of memory — for example, the myth of the Fall of Man is a combination of the Judeo-Christian myth and the pre-Christian Odin myth. It turns out that religion is absolutely central to this novel, though Christianity has clearly not survived the collapse. Why is this novel so centered around religious practice and consciousness? 

Partly because this is what I am interested in at present. All novels, even novels set a millennium in the future, are really just reflections of the writer’s inner landscape. But more broadly because of a realisation that has been creeping up on me for some years now, and which has really entirely changed my worldview: that religious practice and consciousness is central to human life, and always has been.

I grew up in a post-religious country, and as a young man I largely viewed religion as an antiquated irrelevance, if not an actively hostile force. That has changed over time, for many reasons. Studying history, and trying to work out what has gone wrong for us today, has brought me back again and again to the primary claims of any serious faith: the importance of humility, love of others, self-control and respect for creation. The fact that many religions have so often failed to practice these goals doesn’t negate their truth. My own understanding of history and other cultures, has brought me around now to almost the opposite view to the one I used to hold. Now I think that religion is perhaps the best, maybe even the only, way to direct humans towards humility rather than pride. And humility is what we need in the face of the ecological crisis we have created.

I’ve learned a great deal here from my wife, who comes from a Punjabi family. Watching some of my close family practice the Sikh religion, which at its best is a beautiful expression of charity and community, has shown me what faith can and should do; and how much better that way of life is than the kind of deracinated consumer individualism that has replaced it in the world.

Alexandria, in some ways, was designed to have this argument out at length, perhaps at least partly so that I could make up my own mind about it. Is faith a necessary component of a worthy human life, or a superstitious hangup from another age? There are characters in the novel who push both perspectives, and others.

I don’t want to give too much of the plot away, but we can say that the survival of humanity depends on how the remaining people regard the body. Why is the body so central? 

The central question that runs through the novel — the question that has riven humanity and created an entirely new world — is to what degree humans should live within the bounds that nature has set for them, and to what degree they should attempt to break them and remake the world in their own image. Really, that the question has been at the centre of the human project since we planted the first crop or fashioned the first axe. Today, in the dawning age of transhumanism, it takes on a new urgency.

We now have the technologies available, or on the horizon, to resurrect extinct species, genetically modify plants and animals to create versions we find more useful and — most ominously — entirely remake the human body so that it resembles a new species; one created by us rather than by God or nature. I have met people who are thrilled by this prospect and are working to make it happen. I think it’s pretty clear that the fundamental redefinition of the building blocks of life itself is the next phase of ‘progress’. Some people find that thrilling – the final conquest of nature, if not its abolition. I find it terrifying — arrogant, hubristic, the final frontier in our war against life and against limits.

In The Abolition Of Man, C. S. Lewis wrote: ‘human nature will be the last part of nature to surrender to man. The battle will then be won …  but who, precisely will have won it?’ That’s the question my book is asking.

In my own recent book, Live Not By Lies, I have written about how soft totalitarianism is coming upon us in large part because we want to use technology to be free of natural limits, and to avoid suffering in our bodies. I was startled to see these themes playing out in Alexandria too. The temptations the techno-totalitarian’s emissary offers to the remnant make a lot of sense, if suffering in the body is a curse from which one wants to be free. Religion and mythology are the only meaningful sources of resistance to this anti-human techno-totalitarianism. Is that true in our own world?

The big issue — the resounding global question, the one we are so desperate to ignore — is the reality of limits. The importance of acknowledging limits is at the heart of the green movement — or at least, it used to be. The greens today are very much a part of the global techno-machine which seeks to use technology to overcome the problems that technology has created. Back in the day though, the environmental argument was all about limits and how we could live within them. Limits to growth, limits to pollution, limits to human population size, limits to consumption, limits to behaviour: the questions were around what they should be, whether they were flexible, whether they were right or wrong and whether and how they could be enforced.

This is really, I suppose, the classic divide between the small-c conservative and the progressive minds. The conservative wants to conserve, to protect, to nurture; at least in theory. The progressive wants to move ‘forward’ to something better, to improve the world by remaking it according to our lights. Classical environmentalism was conservative in that sense. Roger Scruton wrote a thick book about this conservative vision of environmentalism; not that many conservatives were listening. They were too busy shilling for big business to bother about conserving anything. This old, rooted version of the green worldview is maybe best exemplified in your country by the great Wendell Berry, who is still down in Kentucky enunciating it. But there’s no doubt that the old greens have lost, as has anyone who wants to meaningfully conserve anything in the age of liberal techno-capitalism. Limits are now for fools and romantics and reactionaries. All problems are to be solved in one way: more, bigger, faster. In the age we live in, growth and progress are the only games in town. That’s been the case for a long time now.

I only realised relatively recently that this was actually a religious question — or at least a spiritual one — and that’s one of the great themes of Alexandria, which I was working out as I wrote it. Religions impose limits: on our desires, our passions, our will. They require us to live within boundaries, to obey God, and the best of them require us too to respect nature — Creation — and our bodies, and the shape and form they impose upon us. Religions require self-control, limits on our appetites, respect for those shapes and forms rather than a desire to break them open. Take away the notion that God wants us to live within given limits, and to exhibit self-control for the greater good, and you get the kind of free-for-all we have now in which every limit we see in any area of life is a form of oppression to be attacked and destroyed.

So the short answer is that, yes, traditional religion can be a real source of resistance to the techno-machine, though in the real world it has often completely failed to be, and has just as often helped it advance. For any path I’m aware of it though, it would seem like a requirement to stand against it. Take Christianity: it’s long bemused me that anyone who follows a man who said things like ‘woe unto ye who are rich’, and made his views on wealth, greed and cupidity crystal clear, could possibly support the existing order and its values. And if God created the world and ‘saw that it was good’ — six times! — then how can we justify mining and poisoning it for our own short-term gain?

I think we could make a convincing case that society in the West today is based on the seven deadly sins – not on avoiding them, but on pursuing them, as active goals. We have to each work out where that leaves us as individuals.

I recently participated in an online seminar about an excellent new book about bioethics, written by Carter Snead, a Catholic scholar who argues that we need to return to an older, richer view of what it means to be human. He says that the anthropology of “expressive individualism,” one that seems the human person as essentially will unencumbered by anything unchosen, is not only unrealistic, but is taking us to some dark places. I agree with him, of course, but during the seminar, I brought up Alexandria as an example of how important it is to fight these lies not just with nonfiction arguments, but with good storytelling. In fact, I think it’s more important, because the storytelling of expressive individualism is the controlling myth of our civilization — and it makes it harder for ordinary people to accept the plausibility of solid arguments like Snead’s. What kind of stories, and storytellers, do we need today, in our crisis? How can they be formed, and how can they be heard? 

This was the question at the heart of the Dark Mountain Project, which I co-founded a decade ago. Dark Mountain was — still is — a cultural movement which is looking for new stories, and new ways of telling them, that will rise to this challenge. When I conceived that project I was wondering where all the fiction writing was that was really engaging with the world as it is – engaging with the crisis – rather than as we would like it to be. I wondered how much contemporary fction would look simply irrelevant to future generations: as if we were writing silly fancies while the world burned. I thought that a lot of writers, possibly including me, were in denial to some degree; still writing as if everything would be fine. Our manifesto declared that everything would not be fine and that we should tell stories as if that were true. I don’t know if we succeeded, but the work is ongoing.

Do you have religious belief and practice? What kind of religious belief and practice will we in the West need to embrace if we are going to resist the Machine?

Well, let’s first acknowledge that the West is ground zero for the techno-utopian tragedy that is unfolding around us. It’s what the Native American activist Russell Means called the ‘European mind’ that created the rational, spiritless, utilitarian world that ultimately leads us to Lewis’s abolition of man. That manifests today most obviously in the the Silicon Valley technotopians who want us to upload our minds to the cloud so that we can live forever after death in silicon transcendence – a twisted echo of the Christian story. These people are the ones who control how we communicate, and who frame our ways of seeing.

That’s another way of saying that we — modern, Western people — made this mess, but we don’t seem to know how to clean it up. Maybe we don’t want to. But we should also remember that Means’s ‘European mind’ is really the modern mind — the one which embraced rampant individualism, ‘progress’, love of money and the pursuit of the passions, all of which have eaten us from within. The cultural manifestation of that is the kind of decadent uber-liberalism you write about so penetratingly. The economic manifestation is consumer capitalism, which has destroyed cultures and landscapes worldwide like nothing before it. The ‘left’ tends to push the former while the ‘right’ shills for the latter, but they are two sides of a coin, and they both eat away at our souls.

But there was another West before modernity, just as there was another East or South before we exported modernity to the ‘developing’ world. There are still other Wests that exist alongside the main stream of progress, growth and endless upheaval and uprooting. Our challenge now, I think, is not so much to go back, which is never possible, but to go through. To go through the disintegration that modernity is unleashing and to find some better, more rooted, kinder values again on the other side of the decadence and ecological meltdown. To rediscover the deeper, better aspects of our heritage. Those would be the values of community, self-sacrifice, love of place and nature, rootedness in a sense of the sacred — and actually the baseline Christian virtues: love God and your neighbour, and really try to mean it. I’ve not come across a better ethic to live by. Again, we’re back to limits.

You ask me about my practice. I have been on an increasingly intense spiritual search for a decade, which has taken me through a long immersion in Zen Buddhism, and more recently through various forays into neo-paganism, mythology, gnosticism — you name it. Actually I think my search for some kind of objective truth goes back perhaps even to childhood. My love of nature and my desire to protect it was in many ways driven by what I think now was a religious sensibility — as I wrote in this essay a few years back.

But something was missing from all of this. It turns out that something was God. And 2020, in that respect, has been a revelation to me — literally. I found myself being dragged kicking and screaming earlier this year towards the one place I never thought to look: which is to say, to my own ancestral faith, Christianity. This is a journey that has come upon me entirely by surprise, and it’s only just beginning, so I’m not going to try and lock it down with words, or even pretend that I really understand what’s happening. But something big is going on, and it’s not my doing. I’ll just say that the world has taken on a completely new shape, and I’m still gaping at it. One day I might try and write it down.

I’m not renowned as an optimist, but actually I think that the global machine we have built will not last, because the way we are living is spiritually, as well as ecologically, unsustainable. I don’t believe now that a human culture can last for any length of time unless it has a spiritual core: unless it is built around some path to God. The paths may differ through history and across cultures, but I can’t think of a single example of a culture that has existed without one. That’s one of the themes of Alexandria: if you don’t worship what is greater than you, you’ll end up worshipping yourself. The result of our self-worship — of our rebellion — is climate change and the death of the seas. We’ll have to find a truer path, because this way of living is driving us mad and destroying the ground it stands on. But there’s a fire to be walked through first. I think we’ll emerge unrecognisable, but I think we must.

—

The book is Alexandria, published this week by Gray Wolf Press. Find links to booksellers here. Visit Kingsnorth’s own personal page for the book here.  If you enjoyed this interview, take a look at this 2019 Dutch documentary about Kingsnorth, his ideas, and his life in rural Galway.

 

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Courage And College Republicans

This week I drove down to Thibodaux, Louisiana, to give a Live Not By Lies talk at Nicholls State University. Thibodaux is Cajun country. It is not the Bay Area. It is not the Upper West Side. It is not New England. It is a conservative place. But earlier in the week, the Social Justice Warriors made their malign presence known on campus in a big way.

Last weekend, the campus College Republicans chalked pro-Trump messages on the sidewalk. Such as:

 

“Geaux Trump” is the most Louisiana MAGA thing ever.

Anti-Trump students had a meltdown. Over chalk. On a sidewalk. Here is a parade of fragile students speaking out at an extended student government meeting, all of them outraged that other students expressed a political opinion — support for the re-election of the President of the United States — that caused them anxiety. I’ve cued the video to the first speaker. There’s a long line of them:

This is just embarrassing. I started out my college years at LSU (1985-89) on the political left, and active on campus. It would never have occurred to any of us to have appealed to university authorities to silence the College Republicans. It would never have occurred to any of us that anybody on campus with any political opinions should be compelled to be silent. We actually liked to argue! Crazy us, we thought learning how to argue with our opponents was a good thing.

After the student government meeting, Nicholls State president Jay Clune responded thus:

That’s it? The president sat through a long meeting in which student after student said, in various ways, that the expression of support for Donald Trump was illegitimate, and ought not to have been heard on campus, because it upsets people. If the College Republicans broke state law by putting chalk on a sidewalk, surely that is an extremely minor offense, but okay, slap them on the wrist. If I were a college president, though, I would be seriously alarmed that so many of the students under my authority did not seem to grasp the fundamental liberal values of free speech and free thought. This was a teaching moment, but Dr. Clune whiffed.

It got worse. On Wednesday night, after my talk — which went well — I had dinner with a couple of professors, their wives, and a young student couple who are at the center of the controversy: Mark Wiltz, president of the College Republicans, and his girlfriend Jade Hawkins, the CR secretary. That day, Jade had gone to her classes accompanied by a campus police officer because of numerous death threats she had received from fellow students. Not at Oberlin, not at Evergreen State — at Nicholls State, in Thibodaux, Louisiana!

Here are some of the things she and Mark received. I spent some time later perusing Nicholls student social media to find more of it:

“That boy” is Mark Wiltz:

One student worker at a university office decided that she was going to go on a strike in protest of the fact that Republican students who had received death threats were accompanied to class by police officers for their protection:

 

Lo and behold, she got fired! Good! But now she cannot believe that she was actually held accountable for her actions. Dr. Perry did the right thing.

Anyway, it was a genuine shock to me to hear all this, and to imagine that it was happening on a small public university campus here in a ruby-red state — and that the college president was not taking a clear and unambiguous stand against those students who would threaten violence against these conservative students, who would use racist invective (“Coonkaylen”), and who would demand that political speech that makes them feel uncomfortable be silenced. Nicholls State is a university, not a day care or a seminary.

After I returned home, I asked Jade Hawkins if she would be willing to be interviewed via e-mail. She said yes. Here’s our conversation:

RD: When you and I met for dinner, you had spent the day being escorted to class by a campus police officer. Why was that necessary? What happened at Nicholls?

JH: After the negative response to the Republican chalking some students and others took to social media with threatening messages. Saying that we need to “watch our neck” or deserved to be snatched up, one even went as far as asking to borrow an ak [AK-47 — RD]. I was worried about my safety on campus. The officer was there to help me get from class to class because I didn’t want to risk being harmed but I also didn’t want to miss classes and fall behind.

I’m shocked that this is happening not at Yale, or Oberlin, or one of the “usual suspects” schools, but at a small public college in a very conservative state. What does this say about the left in your generation?

I wouldn’t go as far as saying this is the whole left, I have close friends with different political views than me. But what is sad in this instance these students never really wanted to have a conversation or hear us out. They went straight to attacking us in large groups on social media. Being able to speak freely and have disagreements is one of the great things about our nation, and I will not let this group scare me into silence for issues I believe is right.

I gave a talk about Live Not By Lies at Nicholls, and was well received. I could tell that there were some people in the audience who didn’t like my message, but they were respectful. To what extent are these Social Justice Warriors representative of the student body?

I do not think that this group is the student majority, I just think they’re the loudest. I have received multiple messages and phone calls of support from students who are admittedly scared of speaking up for me in public. They’re afraid of getting the same kind of backlash that I am experiencing. That’s why I was so pleasantly surprised about how well your talk was received, as I feel as if students really heard you and respected what you had to say.

In your opinion, how has the university’s administration behaved? It is shocking to me that the Nicholls leadership hasn’t taken a firm, unequivocal stand against this kind of harassment from the left.

In my opinion this has been handled very poorly and that is so upsetting me. Our university President sent an email stating that our chalking was against state law and university policy yet he never sent one condemning the threats, harassment and bullying of students by students. These messages and examples were sent to them on Monday and there has yet to be any statement from the university despite their “No Tolerance” policy.

You are dating the head of the Nicholls College Republicans, who is black. I see on social media that he has been viciously criticized, in racist terms, by other black students. What has this been like for him?

He makes me so proud in the way that he never lets others’ words get the best of him. He knows he’s a good man and that’s all that matters. If anything this has just given him motivation to stand true and firm in what he believes in, and has given him more of a reason to proudly vote Trump 2020.

As we discussed a bit at dinner, when I was in college here in Louisiana in the 1980s, we had liberals and conservatives on campus, but we found it possible to argue without turning to hysterics and threats of violence against each other. So much has changed. What kind of country will we have when these students who believe the way to get what they want is to scream, emote, and threaten people with violence, graduate and go out into the world?

To me, the thought of that is worrisome. I want to be able to have a conversation and come to compromises or at least agree to disagree. Yet if there is no open dialogue, how is anyone going to be able to share ideas?

There are people on the right and the left who see what is happening to you all at Nicholls, and who want to help you stand strong. What can we do for you?

The best thing anyone can do to help is to stand firm in your beliefs. Don’t let anyone silence you, but don’t shut down conversation either. If we all start working towards having respectful conversations that would help us all.

The kind of courage that Jade Hawkins, Mark Wiltz, and the Nicholls College Republicans are showing is an example to us all. President Clune, please take notice. Louisiana state legislators, you do too. No student in this state, black or white, liberal or conservative, should have to go through what these young Republicans are enduring. Maybe the CRs should not have chalked without permission, but that is of far less importance than the atmosphere of illiberal bullying that has arisen out of the campus left in response.

UPDATE: Sorry, I misread the “AK” above — it’s AK-47, not axe — I’ve corrected it.

This e-mail went out to the parents of the Little Colonels Academy, a campus day care:

Parents,

The year 2020 has been a very challenging year in many ways for family, friends, and colleagues. Some of these include COVID-19, political unrest, and peaceful protests occurring on campuses nationwide.

As we continue to navigate these challenges, it seems that new challenges arise that test our strength, determination, and perseverance.These situations can be frightening for young children who are not yet able to comprehend adult matters. In an abundance of caution, we will be making the following changes at LCA effective immediately and will continue until further notice:

● Nature walks

○ All nature walks have been suspended until further notice.

○ Children will be provided with additional outdoor play time on our AMAZING new playground as much as possible.

● Heavier campus police presence

○ You may see a heavier campus police presence in the vicinity of the center. This has been requested to provide an extra layer of security for your little learners.

● Drop-Off (7:00am – 9:00am)

○ Only essential personnel will be allowed access to the center.

○ Parents will bring children to the entrance of LCA where Mrs. Katie, Mrs. Sarah, or Mrs. Jen will be available to retrieve children. ○ Children will then be escorted to their classrooms by an available teaching assistant.

● Pick-Up (3:00pm – 5:00pm)

○ Only essential personnel will be allowed access to the center.

○ Children will be escorted to Mrs. Katie, Mrs. Sarah, Mrs. Jen, or Mrs. Jaycie. One of these ladies will then escort your child/children to meet you outside the entrance of the center.

○ We ask that – when possible – parents call ahead [deleted] so we can prepare children for pick-up. Please leave a message if needed as we may be unable to immediately answer the phone.

Again, we are tremendously grateful for your understanding and patience as we strive to continue to provide a safe and developmentally appropriate environment for your little learners. LCA has been extremely blessed with the continued support provided by LCA families, members within the Nicholls community, and Nicholls administration. Please feel free to reach out with any questions or additional concerns.

How about that. The radical campus left at Nicholls State has forced a campus day care to suspend normal operations because they cannot guarantee the safety of little children.

Tell me again how the Left is all about social justice. This mob needs to be brought under control. President Clune, expel those who threaten violence. Defend those little children. Defend the college students under your authority. Defend your university.

The post Courage And College Republicans appeared first on The American Conservative.

The President America Needs

Modern Age editor Daniel McCarthy kindly asked Self to participate in a fun pre-election symposium. Dan asked us which character from creative literature would make an ideal president. Here are the answers various writers gave.  I bet I was the first one to turn in his bit, because they answer for me is so obvious that I can’t believe anybody had to ask:

Ignatius J. Reilly, A Confederacy of Dunces

Verily, things look bad for America now, but as an unjustly neglected prophet has averred, “Even when Fortuna spins us downward, the wheel sometimes halts for a moment, and we find ourselves in a good, small cycle within the larger bad cycle.” This annus horribilis of 2020 has delivered us a glimmer of hope amid Fortune’s failings: America may now finally be ready to heed that prophet’s political message. I speak, of course, of Ignatius J. Reilly of Constantinople Street in New Orleans.

Ignatius, the crusading hero of John Kennedy Toole’s comic novel A Confederacy of Dunces, is an arch-medievalist who considers himself in a permanent state of war with the modern world. “I suspect that we are teetering on the edge of the abyss,” he mused about America. What was Ignatius’s solution? “What I want is a good strong monarchy with a tasteful and decent king who has some knowledge of theology and geometry, and to cultivate a Rich Inner Life.”

Well, yes, why not? No short-fingered Manhattan vulgarians or mush-brained Delaware levelers. There are Habsburgs extant, you know.

I step off the train in my first-ever trip to Vienna, and who do I see in the station but my friend ⁦@EduardHabsburg⁩ — I was in Vienna for all of two minutes, and saw a Habsburg. Awesome! pic.twitter.com/uV4QU8wiqy

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) September 3, 2019

More seriously, Ignatius’s quest to restore the degraded social order has a serious philosophical point. A society built outside of the Divine—and the transcendent order rooted in it (and made immanently manifest in mathematics and architecture)—cannot help but be tasteless, indecent, and chaotic. It inevitably leads to devaluing contemplation, creating a world of sensual chaos—like, say, the French Quarter, into which our stout and gassy Don Quixote waddles to defend chivalric virtues against the forces of capitalism, sensualism, and ideology.

We cannot expect a man of genius like Ignatius to arise to lead us in this woebegone age, but as an amateur gastronome whose last two books concern the decline and fall of our political and social order, I regard I.J. Reilly as my muse. “I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century,” the great man confided. “When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.” Scorn not the cheese dip, you villeins! It’s all part of building a Rich Inner Life, which this fall may be the only consolation left to us Kirkean reactionaries.

Read the entire symposium here.

The post The President America Needs appeared first on The American Conservative.

Facebook Bans Bret Weinstein

A reader writes, and gives me permission to share this if I obscure his identity:

I’m a Political Science professor at a major university in [a ruby-red state] and have been since 2003. I’ve noticed in recent years what you are talking about in this essay, but wasn’t fully convinced until last night.

Last night I graded undergraduate essays in my American Government class that support Dreher’s fears. Dozens and dozens of them.

The essay prompt was simple enough. Basically, should religious organizations, like churches or synagogues or religious schools, be allowed to discriminate on the basis of religion, sexual orientation, or gender?

Some students didn’t understand what was being asked or didn’t take a position. But a sizable majority of the students who took a position (14 of the last 19 I’ve graded) have said, “No.” Moreover, they’ve said no with either complete ignorance of or disregard for the First Amendment. Most don’t even address it at all. It’s as if it doesn’t exist or is totally irrelevant to the question.

Here’s a sample of answers (paraphrased):

Religious organizations that discriminate against people of the LGBTQ community should be penalized in the same way as any other organization; churches should be treated like businesses and other organizations if the discriminate; If they discriminate in any way, they should be punished by the government; a Christian church should not be allowed to not hire someone from another religion, like Islam; how should we deal with religious organizations if they discriminate against others? Many agree with me. I think that a church like that should be shut down for a while and fined by the city. And finally: America is about equality, and sometimes someone’s ‘freedom’ must be sacrificed for it.

That’s a fair sample of the essay answers. Not sure what concerns me most: the haste and ease with which young people seek to legislate morality, or the complete ignorance of or disregard for the constitution. They simply say, X is wrong, so X should be illegal. and are unaware that there should or could be restraints or objections to that impulse in a liberal constitutional democracy. Constitutional liberalism just doesn’t cut it for them anymore (are they even taught the constitution these days?). They are more revolutionary than constitutional processes and restraints currently allow (but for how long?).

This is a clear trend I’m noticing more and more among students in the past few years, even here in [ruby-red state]. That’s right, [ruby-red state]. They seem to be manipulated militantly from something (social media?) in recent years. Scary, as a believer but also simply as an American.

Meanwhile, this happened today:

Bret Weinstein, as you should know, is not even on the political right. He is an evolutionary biologist and atheist who describes himself as a social progressive and left-libertarian. He was essentially driven out of Evergreen State University for refusing to bend the knee to the SJW mob. Look who is supporting him in this latest row:

This is crazy! Even for someone like me who is well aware of baseless cancellations by our social media overlords, to evict my friend @BretWeinstein is a new kind of insanity. I would go so far as to call it evil. You could not find a more measured and reasonable man than Bret. https://t.co/tGTm42FlTx

— Sean Ono Lennon (@seanonolennon) October 22, 2020

Sohrab Ahmari of the New York Post has been talking to a Facebook whistle blower. The source says:

There are at least half a dozen “Chinese nationals who are working on censorship,” a former Facebook insider told me last week. “So at some point, they [Facebook bosses] thought, ‘Hey, we’re going to get them H-1B visas so they can do this work.’ ”

The insider shared an internal directory of the team that does much of this work. It’s called Hate-Speech Engineering (George Orwell, call your office), and most of its members are based at Facebook’s offices in Seattle. Many have Ph.D.s, and their work is extremely complex, involving machine learning — teaching “computers how to learn and act without being explicitly programmed,” as the techy Web site DeepAI.org puts it.

When it comes to censorship on social media, that means “teaching” the Facebook code so certain content ends up at the top of your newsfeed, a feat that earns the firm’s software wizards discretionary bonuses, per the ex-insider. It also means making sure other content “shows up dead-last.”

Like, say, a New York Post report on the Biden dynasty’s dealings with Chinese companies.

In an earlier column, Ahmari wrote about his conversation with the source:

“Facebook is almost an arm of the Democratic Party — an arm of the far-left wing of the Democratic Party.” So said the former Facebook insider as we sat down for an interview at a Midtown restaurant Friday afternoon.

A gloomy rain had left the joint deserted, yet the man across the table from me spoke in hushed tones and looked over his shoulder in between remarks for fear of retaliation. Yet he felt he had to speak out, because staffers are “intentionally trying to swing people further to the left,” as he had put it in an e-mail requesting the meeting.

I already knew that, of course. It was a Facebook communications manager, Andy Stone, who on Thursday announced the firm was reducing circulation of The Post’s still-undisputed reporting on the Hunter Files — an employee who happened to work for Democratic lawmakers before joining the tech giant. What the Facebook insider wanted to impress upon me, however, was how Facebook’s partisan tilt is common knowledge inside the firm.

He had the secret chats to prove it.

More:

So what do Facebook workers think about the company’s handling of our story? The comments speak for themselves:

“[Facebook] employees want Trump to lose,” wrote one user. “If that means rigging [the platform] against him, they don’t care.” The post garnered 29 “likes” from other employees.

“I was shocked that Facebook did this,” said another. “We kinda called [brought] this on ourselves. So much for ‘we are not the arbiters of truth.’ ” That comment garnered 15 “likes.”

Still other comments: “Facebook bets that Biden wins the election. So an effort to jump on the bandwagon.” “Yeah this one is unconscionable. I’m ashamed.” “Imagine if we censored some leaked Trump stuff. It would be the #1 upvoted question tomorrow for Mark [Zuckerberg company-wide]’s Q&A.”

And:

So could these voices of reason prevail inside the company? The Facebook insider, who shared the Blind comments with me, was pessimistic. “The whole thing,” he said, “is run by super-woke millennials and gen-Xers. This overwhelming majority of people make sure there’s no chance of breaking through the ideological barrier.”

As a Facebook employee, the insider told me, “if you’re left-wing, you can say what you want. But if you’re conservative — or even just apolitical — you have to go on this anonymous app” to speak your mind.

Read it all.

If Bret Weinstein, of all people, is banned from Facebook, no non-woke person is safe. You need to make sure you get all your photos off of the platform, and either get out yourself, or prepare for being banned. The fact that Facebook and other social media companies are so integral to our lives leaves us quite vulnerable to them. From Live Not By Lies:

Why should corporations and institutions not use the information they harvest to manufacture consent to some beliefs and ideologies and to manipulate the public into rejecting others?

In recent years, the most obvious interventions have come from social media companies deplatforming users for violating terms of service. Twitter and Facebook routinely boot users who violate its standards, such as promoting violence, sharing pornography, and the like. YouTube, which has two billion active users, has demonetized users who made money from their channels but who crossed the line with content YouTube deemed offensive. To be fair to these platform managers, there really are vile people who want to use these networks to advocate for evil things.

But who decides what crosses the line? Facebook bans what it calls “expression that . . . has the potential to intimidate, exclude or silence others.” To call that a capacious definition is an understatement. Twitter boots users who “misgender” or “deadname” transgendered people. Calling Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce,” or using masculine pronouns when referring to the transgendered celebrity, is grounds for removal.

To be sure, being kicked off of social media isn’t like being sent to Siberia. But companies like PayPal have used the guidance of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center to make it impossible for certain right-of-center individuals and organizations—including the mainstream religious-liberty law advocates Alliance Defending Freedom—to use its services. Though the bank issued a general denial when asked, JPMorgan Chase has been credibly accused of closing the accounts of an activist it associates with the alt-right. In 2018, Citigroup and Bank of America announced plans to stop doing some business with gun manufacturers.

It is not at all difficult to imagine that banks, retailers, and service providers that have access to the kind of consumer data extracted by surveillance capitalists would decide to punish individuals affiliated with political, religious, or cultural groups those firms deem to be antisocial. Silicon Valley is well known to be far to the left on social and cultural issues, a veritable mecca of the cult of social justice. Social justice warriors are known for the spiteful disdain they hold for classically liberal values like free speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty. These are the kinds of people who will be making decisions about access to digital life and to commerce.

The rising generation of corporate leaders take pride in their progressive awareness and activism. Twenty-first century capitalism is not only all in for surveillance, it is also very woke.

We are ceding massive power to control the narrative and the country to companies whose internal culture not only despises the non-woke, but which is populated with a generation that increasingly sees no merit to classical liberal values like free speech and fair play.

If you didn’t see last weekend’s Dark Horse podcast with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, in which they discuss Live Not By Lies at length, please watch it now. These are reasonable liberals who believe in free speech. Spend ten minutes listening to them talk, and you’ll understand at once why it’s so outrageous that Facebook banned Weinstein.

UPDATE: Sorry, a reader points out that I embedded above the Q&A part of Dark Horse #50, not the discussion part. I’ve fixed it now. Thanks, reader, for alerting me.

And, Bret posted this a short time ago:

The post Facebook Bans Bret Weinstein appeared first on The American Conservative.

No Families, No Children, No Future

Here’s a fascinating article from New York magazine on the massive gender gap between Trump and Biden supporters. It contains this eye-popping claim, buried deep down:

Neither the societal shift away from traditional gender roles nor the downstream cultural consequences of that shift are anywhere near complete. As Rebecca Traister has incisively argued, the growing prevalence of singledom among America’s rising generation of women is one of the most potent forces in contemporary politics. In 2009, for the first time in history, there were more unmarried women in the United States than married ones. And today, young women in the U.S. aren’t just unprecedentedly single; they also appear to be unprecedentedly uninterested in heterosexuality: According to private polling shared with Intelligencer by Democratic data scientist David Shor, roughly 30 percent of American women under 25 identify as LGBT; for women over 60, that figure is less than 5 percent.

David Shor is one of the best data people the Democratic Party people has. Take this seriously.

Has anything like this ever happened to any society, ever? Three out of ten women under the age of 25 consider themselves to be gay or transgender. Five percent, sure. Maybe even eight percent. But thirty? Will they always think that? Maybe not, but these are their prime childbearing years.  The US fertility rate is at a 35-year low, and there’s no reason to think it will rise. Some critics blame structural difficulties in the US economy that make it harder for women to choose to have children, but European nations make it vastly easier for mothers, and still cannot get their fertility rates above replacement.

What’s behind this is primarily cultural. We have become an anti-natalist society. And further, we have become a society that no longer values the natural family. We see everywhere disintegration. Yesterday, on the Al Mohler podcast, I talked about going to a conservative Evangelical college a few years back, and hearing from professors there that they feared most of their students would never be able to form stable families, because so many of them had never seen what that’s like.

And now we have 30 percent of Gen Z women claiming to be sexually uninterested in men. There is nothing remotely normal about that number. It is a sign of a deeply decadent culture — that is, a culture that lacks the wherewithal to survive. The most important thing that a generation can do is produce the next generation. No families, no children, no future.

In 1947, Carle C. Zimmerman, then the head of Harvard’s sociology department, wrote a book called Family And Civilization. He was not a religious man; he was only interested in the cultural values that allowed civilizations to thrive, and those that caused civilizations to collapse. His general thesis is that family systems determine the strength and resilience of a civilization. Zimmerman wrote:

There is little left now within the family or the moral code to hold this family together. Mankind has consumed not only the crop, but the seed for the next planting as well. Whatever may be our Pollyanna inclination, this fact cannot be avoided. Under any assumptions, the implications will be far reaching for the future not only of the family but of our civilization as well. The question is no longer a moral one; it is social. It is no longer familistic; it is cultural. The very continuation of our culture seems to be inextricably associated with this nihilism in family behavior.

And:

The only thing that seems certain is that we are again in one of those periods of family decay in which civilization is suffering internally from the lack of a basic belief in the forces which make it work. The problem has existed before. The basic nature of this illness has been diagnosed before. After some centuries, the necessary remedy has been applied. What will be done now is a matter of conjecture. We may do a better job than was done before; we may do a worse one.

He wrote this in 1947. Zimmerman missed the Baby Boom coming, but otherwise, he was right on target.

Earlier this year, David Brooks wrote a big piece for The Atlantic in which he observed that we are living through the most rapid change in the structure of the family in human history. In the piece, Brooks writes:

Eli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the “self-expressive marriage.” “Americans,” he has written, “now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth.” Marriage, according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, “is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment.”

Sex is also primarily about individual fulfillment — and maybe solely about individual fulfillment. Young people today see no connection between sex, family, and a greater purpose. I wrote about this more or less in a 2013 essay, “Sex After Christianity,” that remains one of the most read pieces I’ve ever published here at TAC. In his book, the sociologist Zimmerman, in listing the signs of a dying civilization, mentions a decline in family formation and a rise in homosexuality. Again, he was not a religious man, but his social science convictions led him to conclude that from studying the historical records of ancient Greece and Rome.

It’s far too simplistic to say “homosexuality brought down Rome.” Homosexuality didn’t mean the same thing in those societies that it means in ours. More importantly, the idea is that the greater tolerance for and acceptance of homosexuality was an indicator of the collapse of the shared belief that forming families to produce the next generation was the most important purpose of the civilization, and that a culture’s structures and norms should be constructed to support that mission.

We are going to have to endure a civilizational collapse before we begin the Great Relearning. I am beginning to see now why a sociologist I heard speak a few years ago said that losing awareness of the gender binary is going to mean the end of us. He meant that we will lose cultural memory of the basic fact needed to ensure the future of our civilization. We are living through the fall right now. This is why I wrote The Benedict Option. The newer book, Live Not By Lies, is about enduring acute marginalization and persecution; the older book is about constructing a strongly countercultural community capable of surviving in the ruins of our civilization.

Thirty percent of women aged 25 and under have no interest in sex with men. If that does not alarm you as a religious traditionalist or conservative, then you might actually be dead. We absolutely must form right now — not tomorrow, right now — communities that socialize our children into the goodness of marriage and family. The broader culture knows what it believes, and it preaches this confidently. The churches are barely pushing back. And it shows.

UPDATE: A number of readers have pointed out that the “B” in “LGBT” — bisexual — is probably doing a hell of a lot of work in that 30 percent number. This is probably true, but it doesn’t really change much. I’m not sure how many men would want to partner with a woman whose sexual desires are so unstable. I would never have wanted to date a woman who identified as bisexual. How many women would want to date men who identified as bisexual? So, I will withdraw my “not interested in sex with men” claim, because “bisexual” could cover “open to sex with both sexes,” but I maintain my point about this being a decadent and deeply destabilizing finding.

UPDATE.2: A Gen Z female reader writes:

First off, I agree with some of your viewers who say the statistic you shared in your recent article (title above) is probably in part skewed by the increasing number of young women who identify as Bisexual. But I feel that they fail to grasp the entirety of the situation by dismissing that statistic. It is, as you said, alarming, for a variety of reasons. I spend a lot of time on social media interacting with other young women my own age, and many of them, even in the Catholic circles I follow (I am also Catholic) increasingly identify as either bisexual of some degree or at least “a little bit queer” (their words- not mine). Wiser heads around me have proposed that this is in part due to female sensibilities naturally being more capable of at least considering romantic attraction to the same sex (as opposed to a straight male) but even that is only, in my opinion, part of the reality.

In truth, there is a kind of increasing self-aggrandizement that surrounds this idea of identifying as any type of LGBTQ. It’s a social marker that puts you in the ‘in’ crowd. It makes you cool, it makes you one of the crowd. It also makes you ‘safe’. Let’s dive more into that last one.

First off, I see this happening more and more the farther back we step from the #MeToo movement. I want to reiterate, I am female- so my thoughts here are not coming from any kind of male perspective or male-influenced perspective. But I have seen an increasing number of women swear off dating, swear off marriage, swear off kids, and especially, swear off men, in the last several years. (I’ve also seen the other side, where many women are decrying the lack of decent men to date, or decent men to marry, but that’s a whole other discussion) The Anti-Men crowd, in my honest opinion, is a new wave of Neo-Feminism that not only wants to ‘crush the patriarchy’ but also wants to be able to move in a circle where men are not just optional, they’re completely unnecessary. These New Feminists are also increasingly gender-fluid, and welcome (with open arms) male-to-female Trans Rights Activists into their ranks.

Being Female doesn’t mean the same thing to them as it does to you or I- it means living a life of glitter and thunder, where all the worst female stereotypes marry an anti-child, anti-family worldview and deliver to the world a crowd of superficial, sexless persons who carry the banner of “Woman” without knowing what it might mean. They’re Pro-Abortion, Pro-Sex (but the kind that ‘counts’) and Pro-Trans Rights (because “Woman” is a tag-line, not a biological reality). In this reality any Man who isn’t an ‘Ally’ is the enemy, and men in general are very optional, can be easily replaced, and should support them and their increasingly hard-to-pin-down perspectives/interests in every way possible. A man looking for a wife (or children) isn’t going to find any prospects in the Neo-Feminist crowd, because these women don’t care about those things, they care about progressing an agenda that they’ve created. Ever wonder why so many people thought Hillary Clinton was the be-end-all of women’s rights in the U.S.? I know you probably know, but that sentiment wasn’t coming from conservative women.

Those are the extremists. They control the narrative. For conservative girls (even Catholic ones) trying to make it in a world being controlled by these groups is a dangerous prospect. You either have to be rigidly anti-culture and know when to keep your mouth shut (I adhere to this sentiment) or you have to have some cards to play that will let you weave through the lines. The “Bisexuality” card is one of those cards, in my opinion. The second you prescribe to any LGBTQ identity you become “safe” in the Neo-Feminist lens. Even if you are religious or conservative and won’t ever act on same-sex attraction, ‘being Bi’ is enough to allow you to participate in the show without getting dragged for being an ‘old-fashioned female’ or ‘being controlled by the patriarchy’ (I sometimes wonder, as an aside, what some of these people think patriarchy means). It’s a convenient truth, and as others around me have mentioned, almost any woman with an imagination can be a ‘little bit Bi’ without too much effort.

Those that do this are mostly unaware that they are tacitly living lies. Most are entirely convinced of their LGBTQ status, but it is telling that they are dabbling at best in same-sex relationships, and that many cast off that status as they get older. But in the moment, it is such a marker of “Pride” that they celebrate it and act like it’s everything to them. I have a Catholic friend who recently ‘came out as Bi’ and her social media announcement about it was all about ’embracing’ this incredibly important part of her identity. I can’t help but wonder how much of that is just a filler for something deeply broken inside, with some of these women. They’ve been hurt too many times, by secular men, by the culture, and by increasing pressure from a narrative they never asked for, and so they cling to these ‘identities’ as a way of replacing something that is broken. But as all who live by lies know, eventually those rotten cores will crumble, and there will be an emptiness left that almost nothing can fill. I have another friend who is going ‘Non-Binary’ after years of only identifying as female. She has hopped full on the Trans-Rights Train, and likely won’t be getting off anytime soon. But she’s not a stereotypical female, and somehow, deeply, it feels to her as though she can’t be ‘fully woman’ if she doesn’t fit those check-boxes. Again, the Neo-Feminist narrative says that being a woman is all about High Heels and Bloodlust against the ‘patriarchy’ (i.e., conservative society, marriage, and traditional family structures), and if you can’t be both of those things, then you’re just not a woman anymore.

I saw a line in a TV show last night that made me think about how this narrative is really shifting. (I was a little hesitant to say what show it was from, for fear of revealing my ‘nerd’ card- but then I remembered that this another of one those areas where I don’t need to fear for my own identity. I’m very proud to be both anti-cultural and anti-female stereotypes.) The line came from Naruto Shippuden, Episode 337-

“You gain nothing when you attach your self-value to something external that’s admirable and praiseworthy to you.”

(Itachi Uchiha, the character who says this line, was speaking quite literally to a series villain who had, through experimentation, literally attached other beings abilities and powers to his own self (and self-value)- Japanese anime is incredibly surreal sometimes) But what a line for our times. This is literally what is happening in so many circles of our society. Otherwise normal and rational people are attaching their self-value to externals- and they gain: absolutely nothing.

The post No Families, No Children, No Future appeared first on The American Conservative.

Preparing People For Persecution

I’ve been away from the keys doing interviews for Live Not By Lies (still going strong, three weeks in). I wanted to point out to the book’s fans two really good online videos about the book. The first is the Dark Horse podcast #50, with Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying, in which they spend nearly the entire 100 minutes of the podcast talking about the book. You may not know that Bret and Heather are evolutionary biologists, liberals, and atheists — yet they both find a lot to like in the book:

It’s a very rich discussion, all the way through. I will be very surprised if you watch this without subsequently subscribing to their podcast.

The second is a long podcast interview I did with my friend Yoram Hazony, the Israeli scholar, who is a very thoughtful interviewer:

I’ve been away from the keys, more or less, for the past day, because I’ve been doing a lot of press for the book (e.g., I spent a good hour yesterday online with Dr. Albert Mohler, for his podcast), and because I had to drive down to Bayou Lafourche to give a book talk at Nicholls State University (more on which in a separate post). I didn’t get home till midnight last night; after posting this, I’ll turn to approving the seventy-billion comments from yesterday.

On the long drive down through the cane fields, I called a Catholic priest I know, but from whom I had not heard in over a year. He had moved to a new parish, and I was eager to see how it was going. He told me that he had been pleased and surprised by how the people were rallying to his leadership. Their previous pastor had been an older ultra-liberal, and while this younger priest is not political, he actually believes in the Catholic Church’s teaching about abortion and the natural family, and isn’t afraid to teach them. He had wondered if the congregation would reject him, because he is so substantively different from the previous pastor, but in fact, it seems, they were dying for real Catholic leadership. He said they really do seem to appreciate bold, straightforward preaching.

We talked about the problems in the Catholic Church, and he said basically that he has emotionally disconnected from the bishops and the Pope. He obeys them, of course, but he no longer expects leadership from them, only confusion and weakness. He says his mission is to do the best he can to build up his own parish community as a bastion of spiritual strength and resilience for the days to come. I told him that I write about this in my new book, specifically in the story of Father Tomislav Kolakovic, who did not let the discouragement and lack of leadership from the Slovak bishops in the 1940s prevent him from preparing his people for the coming of communist dictatorship.

I suggested to my priest friend that he get my new book, because in it he will find vindication for what he is trying to do in his parish, and also inspiration, and practical advice, for how to go about it. I told him too that if he decides to start a Live Not By Lies reading group in the parish, that he could download the study guide I wrote, for free.

This morning I see on my Twitter feed this essay by the conservative Evangelical pastor John Piper. He seems pretty down about voting for president. He spends the essay confronting fellow Christians who believe that Trump’s sins — he names them — are less destructive to the nation than Biden’s sins. It’s well worth reading, though I don’t share his conviction that Trump’s sins are equally destructive as Biden’s. Trump does not support the right to murder the unborn. Trump doesn’t consider it important to protect the right of children to be jacked up with cross-sex hormones. The beliefs that lead Biden to endorse unrestricted abortion and transgenderism in children are terribly destructive to the nation.

That said, I appreciate Piper’s warning that we Christian conservatives would be fools to downplay or dismiss the seriousness of Trump’s personal corruption. He writes:

Therefore, Christians communicate a falsehood to unbelievers (who are also baffled!) when we act as if policies and laws that protect life and freedom are more precious than being a certain kind of person. The church is paying dearly, and will continue to pay, for our communicating this falsehood year after year.

The justifications for ranking the destructive effects of persons below the destructive effects of policies ring hollow.

I don’t really agree with this. I think Joe Biden is probably a far more personally decent man than Donald Trump. But look at the policies he supports. 

Here’s a real-life example of why you can’t take the full measure of a man by his personal behavior. Thomas Howard, the celebrated convert to Catholicism, died recently. He was a wonderful man. I met him once, in March of 2002, in New York. This was about two months into the church abuse scandal, which had exploded out of Boston, where Tom lived. We were both Catholics, and both very upset about what we were learning. Tom had recently retired from teaching literature at St. John seminary, where the Archdiocese of Boston trained its priests. Tom told me that homosexuality was rampant at the seminary when he was there, and how shocked he was to discover that his best student had a reputation for giving the most expert fellatio in the entire seminary.

If you knew how personally dignified Tom Howard was, you could appreciate how painful it was for him to speak those words.

“Tom,” I said, “did Cardinal Law know about all this?”

“Yes,” he answered. “I told him myself.”

“And he did nothing?”

Tom just looked at me like a deer caught in headlights. I knew that he was very close to Cardinal Law, and held him in high esteem as a man and as a friend. But here, Tom was faced with the fact that the man he knew and loved had been faced with gross moral corruption in the seminary for which he, the cardinal, was responsible — and had refused to do anything about it. Tom was caught in the trap of cognitive dissonance. All the good personal qualities that endeared Cardinal Law to Tom said nothing about how Law actually governed — or failed to govern — his archdiocese. And that led to collapse.

We didn’t talk about it further; I could see it was too painful for Tom. But I’ve never forgotten that, and I learned over and over, in writing about the scandal, that it was easy to be fooled by the personal kindness of bishops and priests. That could be a cover for deep immorality. Don’t forget that everybody loved Cardinal McCarrick.

That said, I don’t at all think that we can dismiss what Piper is saying here about the corrupting aspect of Trump’s public behavior, even if one believes that voting for him is the lesser of two evils. Piper does not say who he’s voting for, if he’s voting for either, but he makes it clear that he finds both unacceptable. He makes it clear that he sees that America has become decadent, not just on the left. He gives this charge to pastors:

May I suggest to pastors that in the quietness of your study you do this? Imagine that America collapses. First anarchy, then tyranny — from the right or the left. Imagine that religious freedom is gone. What remains for Christians is fines, prison, exile, and martyrdom. Then ask yourself this: Has my preaching been developing real, radical Christians? Christians who can sing on the scaffold,

Let goods and kindred go,

This mortal life also;

The body they may kill:

God’s truth abideth still;

His kingdom is forever.

Christians who will act like the believers in Hebrews 10:34: “You joyfully accepted the plundering of your property, since you knew that you yourselves had a better possession and an abiding one.” Christians who will face hate and reviling and exclusion for Christ’s sake and yet “rejoice in that day, and leap for joy, for behold, [their] reward is great in heaven” (Luke 6:22–23).

Have you been cultivating real Christians who see the beauty and the worth of the Son of God? Have you faithfully unfolded and heralded “the unsearchable riches of Christ” (Ephesians 3:8)? Are you raising up generations of those who say with Paul, “I count everything as loss because of the surpassing worth of knowing Christ Jesus my Lord” (Philippians 3:8)?

Have you shown them that they are “sojourners and exiles” (1 Peter 2:11), and that their “citizenship is in heaven,” from which they “await a Savior, the Lord Jesus Christ” (Philippians 3:20)? Do they feel in their bones that “to live is Christ, and to die is gain” (Philippians 1:21)?

Or have you neglected these greatest of all realities and repeatedly diverted their attention onto the strategies of politics? Have you inadvertently created the mindset that the greatest issue in life is saving America and its earthly benefits? Or have you shown your people that the greatest issue is exalting Christ with or without America? Have you shown them that the people who do the most good for the greatest number for the longest time (including America!) are people who have the aroma of another world with another King?

I one hundred percent endorse that. I’ve noticed that when I’ve been on radio call-in shows promoting Live Not By Lies, there is usually a Christian caller, sometimes two, who will come in with the idea that the only thing standing between Christians and persecution is Donald J. Trump. I am telling you that even if you vote for Trump, you would be wise not to put false hope in him. Even if he were super-competent and without moral fault, even he could not turn back this tide. This is not primarily a political problem.

Last night at Nicholls State, I learned about a controversy that had burst out on campus this week. Some College Republicans chalked “TRUMP 2020! MAGA!” on a sidewalk there. You would have thought that the Hitler Youth had marched through campus by the reaction of campus lefties. At my dinner table last night was a young female College Republican who had had to go to class that day escorted by a campus police officer, because of all the death threats she received from fellow students. She shared some of the vitriol with me on her smartphone; I’ll be writing about it later.

This is not Oberlin. This is not Yale. This is not Evergreen State in Washington. This is a public university in a small city in a deeply red state. A conservative student had to be protected by a campus police officer just to go to class, because she is a Trump supporter. Her boyfriend is head of College Republicans, and he is black. The racist abuse he has received from other black students over this is beyond vile.

What can Donald Trump do about that? What could any president? There is something profoundly disordered and evil in our culture today. Vote, yes — it’s important. But don’t think for a second that voting is the most important thing you can do to prepare yourself, your family, and your community for the terrible trials to come.

If Father Kolakovic were here, what would he tell us to do? Think about it, and do likewise.

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Left Is Coming For Christian Schools

Oh my God, Amy Coney Barrett is a believing Catholic! The Associated Press brings the shocking news:

Supreme Court nominee Amy Coney Barrett served for nearly three years on the board of private Christian schools that effectively barred admission to children of same-sex parents and made it plain that openly gay and lesbian teachers weren’t welcome in the classroom.

The policies that discriminated against LGBTQ people and their children were in place for years at Trinity Schools Inc., both before Barrett joined the board in 2015 and during the time she served.

The three schools, in Indiana, Minnesota and Virginia, are affiliated with People of Praise, an insular community rooted in its own interpretation of the Bible, of which Barrett and her husband have been longtime members. At least three of the couple’s seven children have attended the Trinity School at Greenlawn, in South Bend, Indiana.

The AP spoke with more than two dozen people who attended or worked at Trinity Schools, or former members of People of Praise. They said the community’s teachings have been consistent for decades: Homosexuality is an abomination against God, sex should occur only within marriage and marriage should only be between a man and a woman.

Interviewees told the AP that Trinity’s leadership communicated anti-LGBTQ policies and positions in meetings, one-on-one conversations, enrollment agreements, employment agreements, handbooks and written policies — including those in place when Barrett was an active member of the board.

Read it all. 

Let me explain something to the Associated Press: there is this thing called the Roman Catholic Church, and it teaches that marriage is only between one man and one woman. It also teaches that sex outside of a lawful marriage is sinful. It teaches that homosexual acts are sinful. It has done this for almost 2,000 years.

This is not what liberals believe today — and not just liberals. Many people who identify as conservative have shed the historic Christian teaching about homosexuality. Today comes news that Pope Francis has endorsed civil unions for LGBT people. Even so, he has not declared that Catholic teaching about homosexuality and marriage has changed. Still, yes, we have to acknowledged that society at large has changed decisively on this issue. Ours is a post-Christian society, in that most people in it do not understand the Bible as the story by which they live their lives.

But some of us still do. Amy Coney Barrett is one of them. If she is anything like me, she bears no ill will towards gays and lesbians, and counts some as friends. She doesn’t think gays are icky, or anything like that. Her personal and professional life would be easier if she simply accepted what the world now believes. But she tries to be intellectually honest, and she knows that one cannot simply throw aside an authoritative Biblical teaching because it doesn’t suit contemporary cultural beliefs. A believer — certainly a faithful Catholic or Orthodox — is bound to submit to these teachings whether or not she understands them or wishes they weren’t there. Truth is objective, though it must be subjectively appropriated and lived out. A number of Catholics are really members of the Church of What’s Happening Now, and they’ve enjoyed lucrative careers because of it; Amy Coney Barrett is not one of them. If she is confirmed as a Supreme Court justice, it will be despite the fact that people like these AP reporters tried to tear her down for her fidelity to her Church’s teaching.

Look at the way this AP story reads:

Nearly all the people interviewed for this story are gay or said they have gay family members. They used words such as “terrified,” “petrified” and “frightening” to describe the prospect of Barrett on the high court. Some of them know Barrett, have mutual friends with her or even have been in her home dozens of times. They describe her as “nice” or “a kind person,” but told the AP they feared others would suffer if Barrett tries to implement People of Praise’s views on homosexuality on the Supreme Court.

Terrified! Petrified! Frightening! Even though Judge Barrett is a nice and kind person, she’s really a smiley-faced monster, you see.

More:

Turpin-King said she has briefly met Barrett, and they share mutual friends. Some of her husband’s family members are still members of the People of Praise community, and she loves and respects them. Many of Trinity’s teachers were wonderful to her. But the thought of Barrett sitting on the Supreme Court scares her.

“I am deeply concerned about my queer friends. I’m concerned about my own children,” Turpin-King said. “From what I experienced in People of Praise, as a student of one of their schools, everyone needs to be petrified, frankly.”

Everyone! There is not the slightest attempt in this long story to explain why the Catholic Church believes what it does, just to give the other side, and to give readers context for why People of Praise has the policies it does. The reporters know what they’re doing here. They called a well-known left-wing Catholic historian at Villanova, who helped paint a picture of People of Praise as cranky weirdos outside the Church’s mainstream.

Look, there’s nothing wrong with pointing out what ACB believes as a Catholic, even controversial stuff. But this AP story is propaganda. It’s not going to keep her from being confirmed and sworn in, but it is important for the rest of us to understand it as a glimpse into the mindset of liberal elites, as the Catholic journalist Tim Carney tweeted this morning:

Of course they will. Do not ever believe them when they say they won’t. There are good Democrats who say it won’t happen, and they really believe it — I’m thinking of my friend Michael Wear — but the logic of what the Democrats believe, and the force of its activist wing, is going to go that way. The Left sees no goal as more important than non-discrimination, at least not against its preferred victim groups (racial minorities, LGBTs, and others). If they have to smash religious liberty to achieve it, they will, as soon as they are able. Even though they have won the culture war in every significant aspect, they will not be satisfied until they have rubbed the noses of the vanquished in the dirt.

Last year, in my travels (remember when we could do that?), I found myself in conversation with an experienced religious liberty litigator, a fellow Christian. We were talking about how frustrating President Trump was on this or that. I said to the lawyer, “I feel, though, that as this country moves further away from Christianity, the federal judiciary is going to be the last line of defense Christian schools and churches have — and that’s why it’s important to make sure we get good judges who respect religious liberty on the courts, while we can.” The lawyer strongly affirmed this.

I have pretty much decided to vote third party for president (American Solidarity Party). Trump has my state locked up anyway, so I’m thinking that I would like to cast a vote in favor of a party whose platform I really believe in, as opposed to voting for the lesser of two evils, and choosing between the evil of two lessers. Reading this AP story this morning, though, has reminded me again of the contempt the left has for people like me, and our institutions, which they will demonize as a precursor to destroying them. The story has re-centered me on the critical importance of the federal judiciary as likely the last thing standing between Christian schools and institutions, and the progressive mob. I’m going to be thinking about this all the way through to election day, and I hope you Christian readers — especially those in swing states — will too. Though my vote really doesn’t matter in my state, this issue might move it to Trump anyway, given the quality of his judicial appointments. If I were in a swing state, this AP story, and what it symbolizes, would seal the deal for me.

This is who the Democrats are. If the party’s leaders and activists didn’t despise traditional religion so much, I would be open to voting for them (as I’ve voted twice for Democratic Gov. John Bel Edwards of Louisiana). But we can’t afford to look at the world through rose-colored glasses. If the Democrats take power and hold it, it will only be a matter of time before they come after traditional Christian (and Orthodox Jewish, and Islamic) schools on anti-discrimination grounds. When they say today that they would never do such a thing, don’t believe them. They’re relying on the Law of Merited Impossibility: It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it. 

UPDATE: If they destroy Christian schools, where will parents be able to educate their children away from this kind of propaganda, which is presented to fifth graders in California public schools:

UPDATE.2: I know y’all are all waiting for me to say something about Pope Francis and civil unions. Patience, my preciouses; I have been very busy all day doing book stuff, and I am about to head down to the bayou to give a speech. I haven’t even had time to approve comments yet. I’ll get to it, promise — though I won’t be home till later tonight.

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Egalitarianism Yes, Excellence No

Bad news out of San Francisco:

San Francisco’s academically selective Lowell High School will admit students using a random lottery for next year’s freshman class, a decision made unanimously by the school board Tuesday after a divisive community debate.

Lowell has for decades admitted students based on a score that takes into account grade-point average and test results while setting aside a limited number of spots for qualified students from underrepresented schools, making it one of the best public high schools in the country.

More:

Board member Stevon Cook urged the public to remember that the great thing about the district and the city is that there are opportunities everywhere.

“This was in response to the pandemic and it’s become a discussion about race and diversity as well as the culture at Lowell and the negative experiences that black students have experienced,” he said, adding those are issues to be dealt with. But for Tuesday’s vote, he said: “We are here today because of the pandemic.”

Notice these competing quotes in the passage below:

Resident Howard Hsu strongly disagreed with the decision.

“Real life doesn’t give out awards for just showing up,” he said. “Not everyone gets into UC Berkeley or Harvard.”

Others applauded the decision.

“It’s way past time that we have only one high-performing high school,” said Diane Gray, a Lowell graduate. “All of our high schools demonstrate high academic and artistic standards.”

Read the whole story.

Last week there was a chaotic school board meeting about the proposal. Parents who spoke out in defense of the selective system were denounced as — surprise! — You Know Whats:

Board members chastised some public speakers for the rude behavior as well as comments that appeared to imply that some students don’t belong at Lowell or aren’t good enough to attend the school.

Currently, Lowell lacks diversity, with less than 2% African American students among the 2,800 students. More than half the students are Asian American.

“This was not a good day for San Francisco,” said board member Rachel Norton after public comment. “What I’ve heard tonight from people who claim to support our system and claim to support our students is disgusting. I’m really overcome by the ugliness.”

Board member Alison Collins, at one point, was heard on a hot mike, speaking apparently to someone outside the meeting saying, “I’m listening to a bunch of racists.”

The new lottery policy is only supposed to be in effect for one year, because of Covid, but it will almost certainly be retained for racial reasons. In the end the left is going to destroy the best public high school in the city, and one of the best in America, for the sake of egalitarianism. Smart kids whose parents can’t afford to send them to high-quality college prep schools had a chance to get a first-rate education at Lowell. Now the school board is taking that away from them, because excellence is intolerable, even racist.

Here’s one lie that people there have to live by: “All of our high schools demonstrate high academic and artistic standards.” This is not true, but it’s what they have to tell themselves to avoid the painful realities of hierarchy — namely, that some students are more academically or artistically gifted than others.

Another lie: that the reason there are so few black kids at Lowell is racism. Do I know for a fact that that’s a lie? No, of course I don’t. But I strongly reject the Ibram Kendi “antiracist” gospel that says all racial disparities are the fault of white supremacy. (And boy, white supremacy sure is doing a bang-up job at Lowell, where more than half the students are Asian.) This is a lie that the left tells itself, and demands that we all agree to, to support its destructive levelling policies.

In Live Not By Lies, I quote Hannah Arendt on the pre-totalitarian societies of Germany and Russia:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

I don’t think the school board members are seeing this as “fun,” exactly, but they certainly don’t care that they are destroying an important part of civilization in the name of inclusion and egalitarianism.

This passage from Live Not By Lies is also applicable to the Lowell situation:

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 dissident, wrote that Western 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.”

I guarantee you that’s what’s happening at Lowell now. And when this lottery system causes the quality of instruction nosedives to accommodate students who simply are not able to do the work, the answer will be: more diversity, more egalitarianism, more rage against the idea of excellence.

More calling Asian people like Howard Hsu racist for simply telling the truth. More lies all around — whatever it takes to satisfy that internal longing for harmony and happiness, which in this case can apparently only be realized by taking a valuable civic good away from certain people so nobody else feels bad about themselves.

What a shame for that school. It has been educating the city’s best and brightest for decades. Look at the list of alumni. And now the institution’s guardians — the San Francisco school board — has thrown it away so they can live by progressive lies.

Don’t think for a second that the same militant egalitarians aren’t going to target your school one day.

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Facebook Stings Babylon Bee

During the Amy Coney Barrett hearings, The Babylon Bee, an Onion-like humor site for conservatives, published a story that starts like this:

WASHINGTON, D.C.—After two days of Amy Coney Barrett gracefully and stoically answering questions with perfect recall and no notes, suspicions grew on Capitol Hill that she might be a practitioner of the dark arts.

“Oh, she’s a witch alright, just look at her!” said Senator Hirono. “Just look at the way she’s dressed and how she’s so much prettier and smarter than us! She’s in league with Beelzebub himself, I just know it! We must burn her!”

Senator Hirono then pulled a live duck out of a massive burlap sack next to her and announced: “In addition to being a Senator, I am also quite wise in the ways of science. Everyone knows witches burn because they are made of wood. I think I read that somewhere. Wood floats, and so do ducks– so logically, if Amy Coney Barrett weighs as much as this duck I found in the reflection pool outside, she is a witch and must be burned.”

OK, it’s not that funny — but it is unmistakably a joke. It was not that funny because all of us have seen Monty Python and the Holy Grail eleventy-million times. Here’s the scene that the joke is lifted from:

OK, but now this actually happened:

There is a zero percent chance that Facebook’s censors don’t understand that this is a joke, and a zero percent chance that they really believe that repeating a gag from a universally beloved comedy film that’s nearly fifty years old incites violence.

What is it, then? It’s Facebook flexing its muscle to punish a comedy website that made fun of Democratic politicians.

They have demonetized The Babylon Bee for a groundless reason, making it harder for the people who write for the Bee to make a living. I wrote yesterday about Amazon deciding not to allow Shelby and Eli Steele’s terrific documentary What Killed Michael Brown? 

Amazon told the filmmakers that it was for unspecified “content” reasons. I watched the film, which is formally excellent, but contains content that challenges the left-wing narrative about race in America — this, from the point of view of a highly regarded black conservative academic, Shelby Steele. The only conceivable reason Amazon is doing this is to manage the Narrative.

That’s a serious issue. What Facebook is doing to the Bee might seem more trivial, but it’s not. The idea that you cannot even make a 45-year-old joke about a Democratic politician without losing your ability to make an income on Facebook ought to tick you off. Who’s next? Big Tech has way too much power, and they’re using it to silence conservatives on matters both serious and silly.

Who do they hire at Facebook to make these decisions? Facebook — and Twitter, and Amazon, and Google — deserve what’s eventually coming to them. Did you hear about the Justice Department’s big antitrust lawsuit filed today against Google? That’s going to take years to resolve, but I hope that both Republicans and Democrats understand that the power of Big Tech over the lives and livelihoods of ordinary Americans is a bad thing.

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