Rod Dreher's Blog, page 105

Hating Poland, Hating Hungary

I’m old enough to remember when it was a huge political deal when President Gerald Ford, in a debate with challenger Jimmy Carter, said that he didn’t believe there was any such thing as the Soviet domination of Eastern Europe. Seriously, he said it:

He screwed up a line from his briefing book, is what happened. Still, it was a moment. (And even though I was nine years old at the time, I remember it because I was a total nerd kid who obsessed over this stuff.)

So, the other night, it was shocking to hear Joe Biden describe US allies Poland and Hungary as “totalitarian.” Look:

These are democracies and NATO members! What an incredible insult to these nations, which have democratically elected nationalist governments. That derisive remark revealed more about Joe Biden than it did about either Poland or Hungary. Gladden Pappin cuts loose:

Protestations from Poles and the Hungarian foreign minister aside, however, no firestorm broke out in English-speaking media—and for one very simple reason. To the media class, the categorization of Poland and Hungary as “totalitarian regimes” was not a gaffe at all. It did not lead to fact-checking or hasty denials. (Notably, no EU diplomats defended their member states, either.) Rather, it points to new levels of laziness in American foreign policy thinking, where vague impressions of “totalitarian” (read: nationalist, culturally traditional) rule are enough to cast aside countries that have been allied with the United States for generations. For these viceroys of global liberalism, the new hostility is fully intentional.

More:

The real problem with Poland and Hungary, though, is not that Andrzej Duda and Viktor Orbán have charted supposedly authoritarian political courses. Indeed, faced with the loss of political control over the Supreme Court, the Democratic Party is more than willing to consider tactics that would be pilloried as “authoritarian” in any other context. Rather, Poland and Hungary are successful countries that insist on maintaining their national identities and traditional values—and doing so with the use of democratically earned political power. Liberals abandoned “democratic” concerns long ago, when the European Union was justified in pursuit of substantively democratic outcomes—even while popular opinion was opposed.

And:

The real reason that Poland and Hungary have been demonized in the United States is that they represent a successful alternative to the failed American combination of industrial and family collapse. In recent years, Poland has pursued a policy of modest domestic re-industrialization, while also supporting Polish families with direct government support. Hungary has done the same, including appointing a minister of state for family affairs (Katalin Novák) tasked with helping Hungarian families thrive.

Read it all.

It really is eye-opening to actually go to Hungary and Poland, to talk to ordinary people there, and to try to see the world through their eyes. You must understand that for Americans who don’t speak Polish or Hungarian, all we ever hear about those countries comes to us through English-language media. It is impossible to overstate how culturally conditioned US journalists are by liberal internationalism — that is to say, towards seeing those nationalist governments, which were chosen by their people in free and fair elections, as illegitimate. Even, as Joe Biden put it, as “totalitarian.”

What opened my eyes, and my mind, to the other side of this story was going to Hungary for the first time a few years back, and talking to ordinary Hungarians about how fearful they were of losing control of their own country’s identity, and its fate, to Western capitalist entities and liberal institutions. The people in the Western media, and among Western elites, who look down on the Deplorables in this country hold the same views about the kind of Poles and Hungarians who vote for Duda’s Law & Justice Party, and Orban’s Fidesz. I’m not saying that those governments are above criticism, but Pappin is right: what people like Joe Biden find most repulsive about them is that they have the audacity to question whether policies made in Washington and Brussels are in the best interests of their peoples — and whether the progressive ideals championed by secular Western elites are actually nothing more than a form of cultural imperialism.

UPDATE: This:

As a person who is not a registered foreign agent, it strikes me that much of the criticism of Hungry and Poland by American elites is directly due to the challenge those countries governing parties make to the idea that only left liberal solutions are possible in a ‘democracy.’

— Dan Pollak (@PollakDan) October 20, 2020

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Havel’s Greengrocer Economist

I often hear from academics who are scared to death to publicly dissent from the woke totalitarian apparatus at their universities. Daniel B. Klein, an economics professor at George Mason University, is a great example of a professor who is unwilling to live by the lies that the professoriat accepts, and is courageous enough to say so in public. Here is a letter he wrote to the president of his university (forgive the unevenness in the alignment; I captured it in a series of screenshots). This, folks, is how you do it:

 

Hooray for Professor Klein! Principled and courageous! I know there are many more like him out there, both on the left and the right. Let him be an example to you. Stand up! Live not by lies!

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Liberalism’s Fear Of Shelby Steele

We saw last week how Big Tech — Twitter and Facebook — tried to control the political Narrative by making it impossible, or at least difficult, to spread the New York Post‘s scoop about Hunter Biden’s hard drive. Notice that the Biden campaign has not denied that what’s reportedly on that hard drive is true. The media have been running interference for Team Biden by focusing on how the Post obtained that information.

Here’s another jaw-dropping move by the media controllers to restrict the Narrative. You might have heard that Amazon has refused to add a new documentary, What Killed Michael Brown?, to its streaming service. The documentary was written by and stars the conservative black scholar Shelby Steele, and was directed by his son Eli Steele. In it, the elder Steele examines the shooting death of Michael Brown in Ferguson a few years back, and its place in the larger story of race in America.

Here’s what Amazon told Eli Steele in rejecting the film for inclusion on its streaming service:

Your title doesn’t meet Prime Video’s content quality expectations. Why not? What could possibly be so offensive about this movie that Amazon Prime, which streams some real junk, won’t let it onto the platform? I e-mailed the film’s producers and asked for a press screener (which I encourage all media to do by clicking here).

After 15 minutes, it was perfectly obvious why Amazon wouldn’t let this movie show: they do not want any criticism of the progressive narrative about Michael Brown, and about race in America in general. There is only one acceptable narrative — and black men like Shelby and Eli Steele who challenge it must be silenced.

It’s hard to overstate the power of What Killed Michael Brown? It’s not a bombastic polemic, in the style of Michael Moore. Eli Steele is a cool, careful filmmaker. Its power is in its understatedness, its reasonableness — and, of course, in the truth bombs that Shelby Steele drops throughout the whole thing. This film is so dangerous that Amazon doesn’t want people to see it. Why is Amazon so afraid of a gentle 74-year-old black professor?

Here’s why.

Notice the title — not who killed Michael Brown, but what.  We know who killed him: Ferguson police officer Darren Wilson, who was not indicted for the shooting. Shelby Steele wants to know what forces brought Michael Brown to that fateful encounter with the white officer. In exploring this question, Steele shines a piercing light on the way our media, politicians, and institutions construct the narrative about race in America.

He observes in the film’s opening minutes that in 2014, the year Michael Brown died in Ferguson, over 700 black men were shot and killed in Chicago, by other black men. Nobody in Black Lives Matter cared much about those black lives, nor did the national media. It’s only when a black life is taken by a white police officer that they care. Late in the movie, Steele observes that more and more black children are dying from drive-by shootings in their neighborhoods. Activists barely noticed. Observes Steele,  “There was no power for blacks, or innocence for whites, to be had from these innocent deaths.”

What explains this? “We human beings never use race except as a means to power,” Steele says. His thesis is that “racism” did not kill Michael Brown, but rather that Michael Brown became the sort of thuggish young man who threw his life away because of cultural forces of disintegration emerging from 1960s liberalism — and that is something we cannot bring ourselves to face.

Steele reflects on his 1960s past as a self-described “black militant” working in LBJ’s War on Poverty. He worked for three years with the black poor in East St. Louis. Young Steele was optimistic then about what the government could do for the black poor who had been held back for so long by racism. What he learned was that the antipoverty programs were not really about advancing black people in the name of social justice. Rather, he says, “Taking advantage of white guilt was the focus of justice.”

Steele explains the concept of “poetic truth.” It’s not the objective facts about a person or an event, but what others believe those facts to mean. Poetic truth is a synonym for “myth” — a story that may or may not have basis in fact, but which we use to explain what the world means, who we are, and how we are supposed to react. With poetic truth, says Steele, “you don’t think so much as step into that meaning.”

Poetic truth always distorts objective truth, and can be used to gain power. That, says Steele, is exactly how black activists and their allies have used and abused the Michael Brown narrative. He explains what is well established truth (according to the US Department of Justice’s investigation): that Michael Brown died after attacking Officer Wilson and trying to take his gun. Michael Brown was in no way an innocent victim of police brutality. But, says Steele, “poetic truth set the stage for a power grab.”

I had forgotten the role that Obama Attorney General Eric Holder played in this drama. Steele is quite harsh on him. The DOJ under Holder proved that the Michael Brown victim narrative was entirely false — but as Steele shows, Holder inserted himself into the Ferguson situation in a racialized, politicized way, and turned the town in which a bully was shot trying to assault a cop into a symbol of America’s 400 years of racist oppression. Says Steele, “Holder made Ferguson pay the price for a racist murder that was neither racist nor a murder.”

If Michael Brown is a victim, then he is the victim not of a racist cop, but of the toxic culture of 1960s liberalism, which, in Steele’s words, “focused far more on assuaging white guilt than on black development.” Steele talks about how federal social engineers destroyed working-class black homes, and the equity that was in them, to build massive housing projects that dispossessed and ghettoized black people in lawless hives. Moreover, this kind of liberalism conveyed to blacks that they didn’t have to take responsibility for their own lives and fate, but rather had to depend on how much they could extract from guilty white people. “The poetic truth of black victimization became their identity,” he says. Liberalism consigned blacks to “invisibilization,” to “permanent victimhood.”

“The faithlessness in black authority is what gave us the world that Michael Brown grew up in,” Steele says.

And further: “Modern liberalism does not like human complexity in its victims. It wants the lines of responsibility to be clear and simple, and always to point to the white world.” Liberalism wants blacks to give up before even trying, by convincing them that no matter how hard they work, they can never get ahead. Though Steele condemns the police killing of George Floyd as a “murder,” he casts a gimlet eye on the violent protests that followed, saying that Floyd’s murder was “less a tragedy and more an opportunity” for cynics seeking to advance their grip on power.

Steele profiles contemporary black neighborhood activists, including a pastor on Chicago’s poor and violent South Side, who are trying to return a sense of agency and responsibility to communities decimated by the moral collapse of institutions of black authority: the family, the school, and the community. Here are two of them you meet in the movie:

Varney Voker, a reformed Chicago drug dealer, teaching young black men in his neighborhood learn what Shelby Steele calls ‘the transformative power of work’
Miss Queen, seated, an East St. Louis activist helping poor families survive

In these people, Steele sees a contemporary version of his late father, a black man raised in deep poverty and segregation, with only a third grade education, but who raised himself and his family up by virtue of his self-discipline and hard work. He calls the Black Lives Matter movement a “bad faith movement” that wants to dismantle America, by contrast to the Civil Rights Movement, which wanted blacks to be part of America.

Why is that message so threatening to Amazon? Maybe Shelby Steele has it wrong. Maybe he’s blind to things that others see. Fine — release the movie and let people make up their own minds. Stop this liberal paternalism that doesn’t trust people to think for themselves. The fact is, a lot of people, including black people, will watch What Killed Michael Brown? and hear an authentic American voice, the voice of common sense and bedrock American values. It won’t be good for the Victim Industrial Complex. Hence Amazon’s desire to control the narrative.

In 1989, the black critic Stanley Crouch — who died last month — published a searing essay in The Village Voice about Spike Lee and his new film Do The Right Thing. He denounced the film as “Afro-fascist chic.” Excerpt:

One must always face the razor’s edge of the fact that race as it applies to American identity has a complex relationship to the grace, grime, and gore of democracy, and that an essential aspect of democracy, of a free society’s exchange of ideas, is that we will inevitably be inspired, dismayed, and disgusted by the good, mediocre, and insipid ideas that freedom allows. The burden of democracy is that you will not only get a Thurgood Marshall but an Alton Maddox, a Martin Luther King and an Al Sharpton — the brilliant, the hysteric, the hustling. And in terms of film opening up to more and more black people, there is no doubt that most will follow trends and appeal to the spiritual peanut galleries of society as long as there is money to be made, while a few will say something of importance, not only to Amer­ican society but to the contemporary world. Few in this country have ever wanted to be artists, have wished to challenge or equal the best on a national and interna­tional basis. Most want no more than a good job and — ­in our time of the rock-and-roll elevation of the brutish, the superficial, and the adolescent — pop stardom. Those who believe that such American tendencies will fall before the revelations of the sword of the Negro soul are naïve.

That naïveté, like an intellectual jack-in-the-box bumpkin, periodically popped up through the Black Filmmaker Foundation’s ceremonies. There was much talk of “controlling our images,” a term suggestive of the worst political aspects of black nationalism, one far more dangerous if taken in certain directions than, say, expanding our images. Such “control” without attendant intelligence and moral courage of the sort we saw so little of during the Brawley farce or rarely hear when Louis Farrakhan is discussed, will make little difference, since the problems Afro-Americans presently face ex­tend far beyond the unarguable persistence of a declin­ing racism. Intellectual cowardice, opportunism, and the itch for riches by almost any means necessary define the demons within the black community. The demons are presently symbolized by those black college teachers so intimidated by career threats that they don’t protest students bringing Louis Farrakhan on campus, by men like Vernon Mason who sold out a good reputation in a cynical bid for political power by pimping real victims of racism in order to smoke-screen Tawana Brawley’s lies, by the crack dealers who have wrought unprecedented horrors, and by Afro-fascist race-baiters like Public Ene­my who perform on the soundtrack to Do the Right Thing.

In more than a few ways, Do the Right Thing fits the description Susan Sontag gave fascism in her discussion of Leni Riefenstahl, “Fascinating Fascism.” Sontag says fascist aesthetics “endorse two seemingly opposite states, egomania and servitude. The relations of domi­nation and enslavement take the form of a characteristic pageantry: the massing of groups of people; the turning of people into things; the multiplication or replication of things; and the grouping of people/things around an all-­powerful, hypnotic leader-figure or force.”

In Do the Right Thing, the egomania and the servi­tude, the massing of people into things, and the irresist­ible force are all part of blackness. That blackness has the same purpose Sontag recognized in the work of Riefenstahl: it exists to overcome “the dissolution of alienation in ecstatic feelings of community.” Lee’s vi­sion of blackness connects to what Sontag realized was “a romantic ideal… expressed in such diverse modes of cultural dissidence and propaganda for new forms of community as the youth/rock culture, primal therapy, anti-psychiatry, Third World camp following, and belief in the occult.”

Read it all. 

Notice the difference Crouch draws between controlling the images, and expanding them. That’s precisely what’s going on here with Amazon’s actions towards the Steeles’ film. And, the poetic truth that Shelby Steele so powerfully illuminates and dismantles in What Killed Michael Brown? is a baldfaced lie about race and America that promises to deliver its believers from alienation — both its black believers and its white believers (who are so desperate for absolution from racial guilt that they will accept anything). As I write in Live Not By Lies:

A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[I]t has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

When Shelby Steele, in this extraordinarily important, even urgent film, exposes the lies of Michael Brown’s death, and of the left-wing race narrative, and concludes that “liberalism wants your very soul” — this is exactly what he is talking about. No wonder Amazon, as one of this culture’s controllers, will not permit any challenge to its monopoly on reality. Shelby and Eli Steele are two of the bravest men in America, and I mean that.

UPDATE: A reader points out that you can buy a DVD or Blu-ray version of What Killed Michael Brown? here. I hope you will. Not only will you support these filmmakers and their worthy project, but you will own a movie that you can show to your kids and to your friends, and talk about these issues. Shelby and Eli Steele put a lot on the line to tell this story; we should stand with them by buying their work and telling others about it. This really is a first-rate documentary.

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Cultural Revolution In King County

Christopher Rufo is still on fire fighting left-wing institutional racism and bigotry. Look at what he found in leaked documents from the King County, WA (Seattle), district attorney’s office. They are forcing employees to endure this racist claptrap. Imagine being compelled to confess your guilt as a condition of employment! Look at these examples:

More:

There’s more, from two other agencies. Read Rufo’s column in the New York Post explaining more. Excerpts:

State-sanctioned racial segregation ended with the Civil Rights Act of 1964 but has recently returned in an unlikely place: government agencies in Seattle. According to new whistleblower documents I’ve reviewed, at least three public agencies in the region have implemented race-segregated diversity trainings.

At the King County Library System, a private consulting firm called Racial Equity Consultants recently held racially segregated “listening sessions” to root out “institutional privileges and systemic inequities.” Apparently, there is widespread “institutional racism” in the libraries, and employees who reject that premise are accused of “internalized racism.” When reached by e-mail, the firm said it wasn’t authorized to comment.

At the federal Veterans Administration Puget Sound facility, the local leadership has launched a series of racially segregated “caucuses” for “individuals who identify as white” and those who identify as “African-American or black” or as “people of color.” According to whistleblower e-mails, the organizer, Dr. Jesse Markman, convened the racially segregated sessions, calling them “an environment for sharing and discussion, which is not afforded by mixed groups.” Dr. Markman referred me to the VA’s public-affairs office, which didn’t provide comment.

More:

Finally, at the King County Prosecutor’s Office, the chief prosecutor, Dan Satterberg, and senior staff have recently required employees to sign an “equity and social justice” pledge and assigned “continued training for white employees,” who must “do the work” to “learn the true history of racism in our country.”

White employees are encouraged to participate in racially segregated “anti-racist action groups,” as well as agency-wide “cultural-competency” training that teaches them to how to adopt “a new non-oppressive and non-exploitive attitude.”

According to a leaked memo I’ve reviewed, Satterberg recently wrote a letter to staff suggesting that the “privileged, white, male cohort” in his office should “shut up and listen.” The prosecutor’s office confirmed the authenticity of the equity pledge and staff-wide memo but didn’t offer further comment.

Oh, the irony: Seattle’s white elites are instituting a policy of racial segregation in the name of social justice. In all three of these institutions, white executives have explicitly implemented these policies, arguing, in one case, that holding segregated training sessions mitigates “any potential harming of staff of color that might arise from a cross-racial conversation.”

Read it all.

This is how soft totalitarianism is coming to us. Along those lines, today I received an e-mail from a reader whose Chinese-born wife who grew up during the Cultural Revolution saw me on “Morning Joe” on Friday, arguing with the black Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, who denied that there is any such thing as the illiberal left, and said people like me who say there is are really racist. The reader wrote:

She pointed out immediately that [Princeton professor] Dr. [Eddie] Glaude was doing EXACTLY the same thing that Chairman Mao and the Red Guard, initially a far left left-wing group of college-aged students,  did during the early phases of the Cultural Revolution.  The technique is hauntingly familiar to her.

First it was done in debates and speeches on campus and the local and university newspapers.  Then it progressed to “struggle sessions” in public forums.  Eventually, at the end, it led to repeated public executions.

The tools in the initial phases of the Cultural Revolution are exactly the same we are seeing now, and were demonstrated perfectly by Dr. Glaude the other day.  Indeed, in early Cultural Revolution China, prominent university faculty were always the voices of choice.  Facts are pesky details to be brushed aside.  Minimize any legitimate issues with the official narrative as “tawdry little trifles.”  If your debate opponent continues down the road of facts, make sure you begin tarnishing him with one ad hominem attack after the other. In Cultural Revolution China, it would be that you didn’t pay taxes, your mother was a Nationalist whore, your family members were proven enemies of the People etc. Today, in America,  of course, you are a racist.  Everything you say comes from your privileged status.  Or better yet: you are being supported by Putin and his Russian hackers.

She also had some words of warning for folks like Mika Brzezinski who sit and lap this all up, act offended on cue, and see every issue through the lens of “the official narrative.”  You may think you are righteous in what you are doing.  But please note: when the time came in the worst of the Cultural Revolution, after years of percolation, it was the non-radical liberals like Mika who were taken out and shot first. 

She wants to urge anyone with eyes to read to go and look at the history of the early Cultural Revolution.  The issues and narrative are completely different to ours in America now, but the techniques and the groups involved are disturbingly familiar.  And she and thousands  upon thousands of Chinese immigrants to this country are struggling with the same question: WILL THE RESULT BE THE SAME?

She wanted me to let you know that this is EXACTLY how the Chinese Red Guard did business — and despite years of trying, the other side never could figure out a way to combat it. She lamented that this will soon spread into families here in America, and family members will begin turning on each other. Everything will be about politics — including the most sacred holidays and the most private family issues.  There will be no place or no relationship that will be truly safe.

Have you read Live Not By Lies yet? You should. This is here in some places (like King County), and you had better believe that it is spreading everywhere fast. We have to be ready.

 

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Queering Calvin University

A sign of changing times from Claire Murashima, writing in the student newspaper of Calvin University (formerly Calvin College) in Grand Rapids, Michigan:

In the 102 years that Student Senate has existed, we’ve never had an openly gay student body president. It’s beyond time that the LGBTQ community is represented in the highest student leadership position at Calvin.  I’m proud to be the first.

A few years ago, I never thought that I would be coming out to the world through my school newspaper at my Christian university. I wanted to be known as the girl who started Dance Marathon and led students to raise $50,000 for our local children’s hospital, the girl who co-hosted a podcast for the Chimes, or the girl who tried out for every single hip hop dance guild and was rejected from every single one. But my legacy will invariably be different, because I am Calvin University’s first openly LGBTQ student body president. I’m bisexual. I’ve also questioned if I was a lesbian in the past. Usually, I use the term “queer” because it encompasses all of these identities.

One thing’s for sure: I am not straight. I’m sharing my story with the community because I take the weight of representation seriously, I have a desire to lead Calvin and the CRC [the Christian Reformed Church in North America] into the future and want other queer students to see themselves in my story. I’d feel as if I’d made a mistake as student body president if I did not use my platform to do so.

Read it all. 

The CRC are the Dutch Reformed in America. The friend who sent me that link also sent along this 2018 essay by the Rev. Christopher Gordon, a pastor in one of the NAPARC (conservative Presbyterian) churches. Excerpts:

It was a painful decision for my father to leave the Christian Reformed Church of North America (CRC). He was pulled apart over it. He expressed all of his concerns to the new minister. “The direction you’re taking,” my father said, “is undermining the Great Commission of Jesus.” Immediately, the pastor yelled back, “this is what’s wrong with you Reformed people.” My father retorted, “But aren’t you Reformed?” That is a great question.

By being raised in the CRC I learned a lot about what can happen to a church. I have been a pastor in a confessional Reformed church for almost 15 years now. As I watch the shifts and listen to the discussions, this all seems like déjà vu. What took the CRC thirty to forty years to accomplish, in jettisoning her Reformed heritage, seems to be taking some NAPARC churches about a decade. I am particularly concerned for the PCA, but they are not the only one. There are other Reformed denominations following suit, but the PCA, at the moment, appears to be leading the pack.

The most disturbing part is that many seem completely oblivious to the shifts. Among a new generation of Reformed pastors and churchgoers, there seems to be little awareness that the project they are pursuing, and the shifts they are pushing, have already been tried and have ended with catastrophic consequences in the life of a major Reformed denomination.

More:

The pressures being laid upon Reformed churches are many. As a pastor, I have felt the pressure to conform to the American way of church. Among the evangelicals in our community, our Reformed church is pegged as the strict church in town doing things that nobody else does. Downgrading those Reformed practices that are the most off putting is assumed to be the best path forward to reach a broader base of potential churchgoer. This is the very audience the CRC took to evangelicalism. The CRC’s commitment to downgrade became a commitment to the intolerance of its own theological identity, and the toleration of everything else.

The question to be answered is whether other NAPARC churches, like the CRC, have already been sowing these seeds of their own overhaul. In my humble opinion, when I look at the practices of many NAPARC churches, especially when it comes to corporate worship, I see little different from the evangelical church down the street. This is not the case across the board, but neither was it in the CRC. The general trend was clear. Once the CRC hierarchy opened the door to accommodation becoming a more broadly evangelical church, that door remained open for everything else. I fear that history is repeating itself.

The CRC, after remaking itself into another evangelical church, soon found itself absorbed by social justice issues. Synodical meetings were filled with social causes. The irony was, most evangelical churches didn’t fall into social justice as deeply as the CRC did once that door was opened. The thirst for relevance could not be quenched. They were like a man out of prison, running as fast as he can without looking back. Social activism and causes became a dominant focus of church life.

Read it all. 

In the coffee hour (outside, socially distanced) at my Orthodox parish today, I was talking with a younger convert about how hard it is for so many Christians, across the different churches, to see clearly what is happening within their churches, much less figure out how to resist it. He told me about some family members who are in a conservative Pentecostal church, and how the teachings of the denomination itself are being fast undermined by the new hymns that the denomination is taking up. My interlocutor said that standing outside that denomination, from an Orthodox point of view, he can see what’s happening, and that it’s happening very quickly. But those within the denomination might sense that something is wrong, but nobody dares to say anything. This young man and I talked about how a determined and focused elite really can move entire masses of passive people.

Anyway, maybe you think it’s a good thing that the churches are moving this way. But you have to admit that it is a thing.

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Douthat On The Pink Police State

In his new column, Ross Douthat talks about why conservatives fear soft totalitarianism from the Left. Excerpts:

“This is what totalitarianism looks like in our century,” the Post’s Op-Ed editor, Sohrab Ahmari, wrote in response: “Not men in darkened cells driving screws under the fingernails of dissidents, but Silicon Valley dweebs removing from vast swaths of the internet a damaging exposé on their preferred presidential candidate.”

Ahmari’s diagnosis is common among my friends on the right. In his new book “Live Not By Lies,” for instance, Rod Dreher warns against the rise of a “soft totalitarianism,” distinguished not by formal police-state tactics but by pressure from the heights of big media, big tech and the education system, which are forging “powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse.”

Dreher is a religious conservative, but many right-of-center writers who are more culturally liberal (at least under pre-2016 definitions of the term) share a version of his fears. Indeed, what we call the American “right” increasingly just consists of anyone, whether traditionalist or secularist or somewhere in between, who feels alarmed by growing ideological conformity within the media and educational and corporate establishments.

Let me try to elaborate on what this right is seeing.

Ross has to function as a conservative whisperer to the liberals who read the Times. You should read his whole column to get his explanation, but in brief: he says that the consolidation of cultural power in the hands of fewer elite institutions, and the radicalization of the people who run those institutions, combined with the mendaciousness of the Trump presidency, has turned those institutions and the power-holding class into would-be totalitarians.

Ross goes on to offer several reasons why he thinks people like me tend to overestimate the power of the soft totalitarians:

The second is a somewhat exaggerated sense of the possibilities for permanent cultural control available to a tech-enabled progressivism. The Californian writer James Poulos, who coined the term “the pink police state” to describe the phenomenon that Dreher and others call soft totalitarianism, also emphasized the way that dissent and transgression under this system still “recedes from the reach of officialdom,” often outstripping and eluding the would-be censors. The new progressivism is a powerful orthodoxy in certain ways, but brittle and beset by internal contradictions in others, and the full expanse of American discourse is unlikely to ever fall permanently under its control.

I think this is true, but insufficient. The immediate danger is not that no one will ever be able to speak or write a dissenting word (though that would certainly be a danger if the US were to institute its own version of China’s social credit system). The more imminent danger is that the gatekeepers of middle-class professions refuse to allow dissenters from their ideology into the professions, and into the social circles of the “successful.” In a bourgeois conformist nation like ours, that may be enough to crush a lot of discourse.

Along those lines, here’s a must-read Quillette piece about wokeness within corporate America. Notice this part:

The crux of the social-justice belief system is the claim that society’s elite structures are shot through with powerful forces that invisibly prop up privileged cliques. This is why managers at every large organization now spend much of their time on programs aimed at detecting, analyzing, and suppressing increasingly esoteric forms of implicit bias—often with the active encouragement of the youngest and lowest paid workers and their union representatives (if any). Yet the result of this process has been to simply shift the locus of privilege from professional rank and socioeconomic status to markers of doctrinal purity developed in a small cluster of high-status schools and companies—schools and companies that (surprise, surprise) are stuffed with the sons and daughters of privileged cliques.

After all, who else but society’s most pampered specimens can seriously entertain the delusion that the biggest threat to a worker’s psychological health is a book by JK Rowling or a podcast host who expresses belief in the idea of biological sex? The problem we face isn’t that young workers don’t respect the values of their older bosses. It’s that the most culturally influential and prominent sectors of the economy now operate in an ideological universe that their own customers increasingly find unrecognizable.

The woke truly despise the Deplorables — and more and more of us are “deplorable.” I’m not going to quote here again the passages from Live Not By Lies in which I point out that a highly motivated activist elite can ram a revolution down the throats of the passive, disengaged masses, but it really is true, and we shouldn’t forget that.

I wonder to what extent that passivity is entwined with fragility. I’m always talking to academics because, as that Quillette piece says, the online magazine “often focuses on disputes within rarified professional subcultures because these milieus serve as canaries in our cultural coal mines.” I hear more and more that the psychological and emotional fragility of students today can’t be overestimated. I assumed that it was just something at elite colleges, but I’m hearing no, that it’s more general. This week I had a conversation with a friend who teaches at a state school, and who told me that it really is something to see how coddled this entire generation has been by their parents, and by the authority figures in our culture. We have left them unable to handle adversity. I brought up to my state university professor friend this story from Live Not By Lies:

I am riding on a Budapest tram with a Hungarian friend in her early thirties. We are on our way to interview an older woman who endured real persecution in the communist era. As we bump along the city’s streets, my friend talks about how hard it is to be honest with friends her age about the struggles she faces as a wife and mother of young children.

Her difficulties are completely ordinary for a young woman learning how to be a mom and a wife—yet the prevailing attitude among her generation is that life’s difficulties are a threat to one’s well-being, and should be refused. Do she and her husband argue at times? Then she should leave him. Are her children annoying her? Then she should send them to daycare. She worries that her friends don’t grasp that suffering is a normal part of life— even of part of a good life, in that suffering teaches us how to be patient, kind, and loving. She doesn’t want them to give her advice about how to escape her problems; she just wants them to help her live through them.

I tell my friend that this is the argument that John the Savage has with the World Controller near the end of Huxley’s Brave New World. The Savage, I explain to my friend, is an outcast in a world that sees suffering, even mere unhappiness, as intolerable oppression. He is fighting for his right to be unhappy—“and so,” I tell my friend, “are you.”

As we step off the tram and walk to our meeting, we talk about the irony of the social about-face that has overtaken postcommunist Hungary. The woman I am about to meet, like all the Christians I had been interviewing, allowed the suffering inflicted by the communist regime to deepen her love for God and for her fellow persecuted believers. Now, in liberty and relative prosperity, the children of the last communist generation have fallen to a more subtle, sophisticated tyranny: one that tells them that anything they find difficult is a form of oppression. For these millennials, unhappiness is slavery and freedom is liberation from the burden of unchosen obligations.

Though these decadent sentiments may be shocking because they have emerged in a postcommunist country, they are by no means limited to young Hungarians. A 2019 NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll found a distinct minority of young American adults believed that religion, patriotism, and having children are an important part of life, while nearly four out of five said “self-fulfillment” is key to the good life.1 Similarly, the sociologist of religion Christian Smith found in his study of that generation that most of them believe society is nothing more than “a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”

These are the people who would welcome the Pink Police State. This is the generation that would embrace soft totalitarianism. These are the young churchgoers who have little capacity to resist, because they have been taught that the good life is a life free from suffering. If they have been taught the faith at all, it has been a Christianity without tears.

How confident should we be that as the Boomers pass into history, and the Millennials, Generation Z, and the one that comes after them become politically dominant, that they will still respect the right to dissent without being driven to the margins of economic and social life? I am not confident at all.

Let’s go back for a second to the Douthat column. It is impossible, I find, to get liberals and progressives to understand why so many of us on the Right fear the Left more than we loathe Donald Trump. Just today I was talking to a friend of mine, a successful lawyer and mother who is a Republican. She cannot stand Trump, but expects to vote for him because in her professional milieu, the viciousness and intolerance she sees from the Left — discussing their reactions to her support for Amy Coney Barrett’s nomination is what brought this conversation up — frightens her for herself and her children. Douthat writes:

But having offered these doubts about the diagnosis, let me stress that the mix of elite consolidation and radicalization that conservatives fear is entirely real — and its reality is one reason among many to recognize that no, even in a second term a hapless bully like Trump will not become a dictator and the Republican Party will not establish permanent one-party rule.

Power lies in many places in America, but it lies deeply, maybe ineradicably for the time being, in culture-shaping and opinion-forming institutions that conservatives have little hope of bringing under their control.

I would trade the presidency in a heartbeat for the power that the Left has within culture-shaping and opinion-forming institutions. Ask conservative college professors and teachers, conservative physicians and nurses, conservative lawyers, conservative journalists, and conservative business executives if they believe that the Trump presidency is making it easier for them to be openly conservative in their environments.

Look at what just happened in Ithaca, NY: the Democratic Socialists of America held a violent counterprotest against a small group of Trump supporters in the liberal town. Excerpt:

Throughout Friday afternoon, protesters chanted “you’re not welcome here,” and “go inside” at the Trump supporters. Pushing and shoving among the crowd caused the ralliers to retreat inside the Republican storefront. Towards the end of the rally, several protesters tore down the “Vote Republican” banner in front of the storefront, leading to another tug-of-war over the property.

But after over two hours, the counterprotesters declared “victory” and marched to the Commons through the streets, blocking traffic and garnering cheers and waves.

There, they celebrated and discussed future plans, including the rally for Black lives on Sunday, the 21st one since this summer.

“Today was a tremendous victory for the forces of anti-racism,” Rickford said. “It was a spontaneous and almost joyful display of, not only disgust with racism and fascism, but also a positive affirmation of an alternative politics, celebrating human dignity.”

This is the kind of America the progressives are bringing into being. If this had been a MAGA mob going after a small group of socialists, you can bet it would have been national news. Yet we are supposed to believe that the real threat is from Trump and his supporters. Yeah, right.

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Amy Coney Barrett, A Woman In Full

A reader shares with me this Peggy Noonan column on the Amy Coney Barrett hearings, and how ACB stood head and shoulders above her Democratic antagonists, and her Republican would-be defenders, with their unctuous chivalry. It’s important to note that Noonan begins the column with some commentary about how everybody in Washington seems to have gone crazy these days. Excerpt:

She will be confirmed. Having spent a long time reading of her and her decisions, what strikes me is a story she told last spring, at Notre Dame. It is personal but sheds light on her thinking. She and her husband had suddenly received a call saying a baby had come up for adoption. But she had just found out she was pregnant with her fifth child. She threw on a jacket, took a walk, and wound up on a bench in a cemetery. She thought, “If life is really hard, at least it’s short.” They adopted the baby.

There have been many men on the court who seemed deep and were celebrated for their scholarly musings but were essentially, as individuals and in their conception of life, immature. But this is not a child, a sentimentalist, an ideological warrior. This is a thinker who thinks about reality.

She’s not what you expect when you open your handy box of categories. People who understand conservatism in a particular, maybe limited way—they don’t know what they just got.

Modern, a particular kind of Catholic, a woman, with a lived emphasis on people in community—this is not a “standard conservative.” In her independence from partisan politics, in her lived faith in higher persons, spirits and principles, this is rather a dangerous woman.

And she’s sane.

Read it all (if you can get around the paywall).

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Soft Totalitarianism? Glaude Have Mercy!

I was on Morning Joe this morning, talking about Live Not By Lies, and trying to minister to poor Joe Scarborough, who needs to overcome his background as a University of Alabama graduate (seriously, though, Joe and I have been teasing each other, in a friendly way, on phone calls and texts about the LSU-Alabama SEC rivalry). On the show, I got into a heated exchange with Princeton professor Eddie Glaude, about whether or not there is a such thing as illiberal leftism/soft totalitarianism. It’s not up on YouTube, but a reader sent me this link to the whole show; the segment with Glaude and me (and David French and Josh Barro) comes on about about 15:55.

Prof. Glaude basically demonstrated my thesis. He denied that wokeness is a thing — which, for a Princeton faculty member, is like a Politburo member going on TV to deny that the press is controlled in the Soviet Union. I brought up what faculty like him did this summer to Prof. Joshua Katz, a liberal professor who publicly stood up to Team Glaude’s attempt to suppress free speech and academic freedom at the university, in the name of “antiracism.” I wrote about it here.

If you watch the Morning Joe clip, you’ll see that Glaude fell back on the claim that basically people like me are white supremacists who can’t stand the fact that we are not allowed to say racist things anymore. It’s bullsh*t, of course, but this is precisely the way that these woke totalitarians exercise their power within the institutions they control: by demonizing dissent, even when it comes from old-fashioned liberals like Joshua Katz, as bigotry.

Glaude also tried to pass this off as a tempest in a teapot — as academic wrangling with no broader meaning for society. Wrong, wrong, wrong. Glaude admitted that universities produce wokesters, but then seemed to deny, at least implicitly, that this is significant. Oh, please! These little Jacobins have marched through the institutions of civil society — universities, newsrooms, corporations, and so forth — and have imposed the same illiberal, woke militancy. There is no escaping it. As I write in Live Not By Lies:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter.Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”

This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy— functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.

The social justice cultists of our day are pale imitations of Lenin and his fiery disciples. Aside from the ruthless antifa faction, they restrict their violence to words and bullying within bourgeois institutional contexts. They prefer to push around college administrators, professors, and white-collar professionals. Unlike the Bolsheviks, who were hardened revolutionaries, SJWs get their way not by shedding blood but by shedding tears.

Yet there are clear parallels—parallels that those who once lived under communism identify.

Watch the Morning Joe segment, and observe the woke soft totalitarian method at work. First, deny that they are doing what they are clearly doing with regard to free speech and free thought. Second, demonize dissidents as white supremacists or some other kind of bigot.

My friend David French was on the segment too, and he said that we need more conservatives to stand up to this kind of illiberal militancy within institutions. I agree with him on that, even as I recognize that people like Prof. Glaude, whose allies control faculties, university administrations, newsrooms, corporations, and so forth, have the power to destroy the careers of dissidents — and will not hesitate to use it.

Yet this is what Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said we have to do: to refuse to live by the lies they demand that we affirm. There is no way out of it except through suffering, and solidarity with those shattered by woke totalitarians like Prof. Glaude and his allies in power through elite networks.

UPDATE: Oh vom:



Rich Inner Life, that one.

UPDATE.2: Reader Irish99 writes:

Three years ago, my friend tried to stop a known thief in the store where she worked. Another woman filmed the interaction, accusing her of discrimination and my friend lost her temper. No Black people were involved, yet my friend was accused of anti-Black racism and the incident went viral. She lost a job that paid less than minimum wage. Ultimately she lost her apartment in public housing. Upon moving into her car, she lost custody of her children.

The woman wielding the camera phone, a self-appointed SJW heard what she believed to be a dog-whistle that meant racism and successfully provoked a response. The SJW sought something from my friend’s employer but was not satisfied with a written apology and my friend resigning. She sought a psychic boost from labeling someone else racist and seeing that person be publicly shamed. At best, the woman who filmed the incident is working class. Both my friend and the thief live at or below the poverty line.

I share this story to highlight that the phenomenon has spread beyond the campus for a while now. SJWs do not want a more just or merciful society, they want to cast stones. They come from all walks of life and they’ll target anyone who is slightly beneath them in the pecking order.

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The Un-Americans

I usually can’t stand the claim that people who take a political position I dislike are “un-American” or “hate America.” That’s almost always a demagogic smear. Read on:

Dozens of San Francisco schools could soon be renamed, according to a San Francisco Unified School District advisory committee.

The committee has been reviewing names for months, and they’ve identified 44 schools that meet re-naming criteria, based on “relevance and appropriateness.”

The standards shared by the advisory committee consider the following criteria:

Anyone directly involved in the colonization of people
Slave owners or participants in enslavement
Perpetrators of genocide or slavery
Those who exploit workers/people
Those who directly oppressed or abused women, children, queer or transgender people
Those connected to any human rights or environmental abuses
Those who are known racists and/or white supremacists and/or espoused racist beliefs
Many of the schools are named after historic figures, including George Washington and Dianne Feinstein.

The names of presidents and other political and historic figures could soon be purged from SFUSD schools. This includes George Washington, Diane Feinstein, even Abraham Lincoln.

This is crazy, of course, but par for the course with our Woke Totalitarian Left, which never met any inconvenient historical fact that it didn’t want to erase. These people really do hate America — the actually existing America, with all its faults and virtues. They want to erase it all.

In Live Not By Lies, I write about how totalitarian regimes always try to control a culture’s collective memory. They want to erase the past so that they can build something new on it, without resistance. Excerpt:

Forgetting the atrocities of communism is bad enough. What is even more dangerous is the habit of forgetting one’s past. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera drily observes that nobody today will defend gulags, but the world remains full of suckers for the false utopian promises that bring gulags into existence.

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people.

In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality.

“Children, never look back!,” [cries Kundera’s character Husak], and what he meant was that we must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future. It’s not that forgetting the evils of communism means we are in danger of re-creating precisely that form of totalitarianism. It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general.

If the schoolchildren of San Francisco are compelled to forget any figures from the past tainted by what this current generation of left-wing zealots believe to be sin so grave that their memory should be consigned to oblivion, the young will be conditioned to accept without protest the construct of ideological lies that the radicals wish to impose. This is the point!

When I was researching the book, a Budapest teacher named Tamás Sályi told me that in his youth, the Hungarian communist regime plied them constantly with propaganda denouncing everything in the pre-communist past as ugly, cruel, bigoted, and outmoded. All were taught to hate everything about the past — this, as part of justifying the new order. Sályi told me that ironically, free-market capitalism in Hungary has done a more effective job of erasing his nation’s cultural memory than even communism did. More from the book:

The idea that the past and its traditions, including religion, is an intolerable burden on individual liberty has been poison for Hungarians, he believes. About progressives today, Sályi says, “I think they really believe that if they erase all memory of the past, and turn everyone into newborn babies, then they can write whatever they want on that blank slate. If you think about it, it’s not so easy to manipulate people who know who they are, rooted in tradition.”

Along these lines, this morning I was on Morning Joe to talk about Live Not By Lies. I got into it hot with Eddie Glaude, a Princeton professor who denied that there is any such thing as woke totalitarianism, and who said the only people who believe that are white supremacists like me who are angry that they can’t say whatever they like about people like him (Prof. Glaude is black). He was supremely unaware that he confirmed part of my thesis: that intolerant lefties like him demonize all critics as racist, or otherwise bigoted.

I’m going to post that segment with Prof. Glaude, me, and the other guests as soon as it’s available on YouTube, so you can judge for yourself. I don’t know if Prof. Glaude would support what this San Francisco school board committee is doing, but as a general matter, both he and his San Francisco woke comrades are united in their rigid ideological assault on classically liberal norms and American history.

UPDATE:

Clip hasn’t been posted to YouTube, but here’s a screengrab:

News from our Ivy League betters, in this case, Cornell:

During the English department’s first faculty meeting of the fall semester, faculty members of color introduced a proposal — to change the department’s name.

The new proposed name — “the department of literatures in English” — would mark a distinct change in the department’s branding, helping to eliminate what Director of Undergraduate Studies Prof. Kate McCullough, English, said was the “conflation of English as a language and English as a nationality.”

Earlier this month, a significant majority of the department approved the change, and is now awaiting approval from college administration.

The decision to demand such a change was spurred by this summer’s resurgence of the Black Lives Matter movement following George Floyd’s death, according to Prof. Carole Boyce-Davies, English, one of the original proposal writers. As a result, the faculty felt a sense of obligation to react in their own department.

“Faculty around the country — not just faculty of color, but faculty in general — began to look at the institution to see how we can help advance a discourse that challenges structural forms of racism which get reproduced in students and in teaching over and over again,” Boyce-Davies said.

 

 

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Johnny, No Longer Rotten

With the Sex Pistols, you had to be there. I remember as a child watching a 1976 TV news report on Britain’s new musical sensations, and thinking that the world must be coming to an end. Their best-known song, “Anarchy in the UK,” starts like this:

I am an Antichrist

I am an Anarchist

A decade later, in college, I was bouncing around in my dorm room listening to their one and only album, Never Mind the Bollocks…Here’s the Sex Pistols with fierce glee. They couldn’t play their instruments, true, but there was something intoxicating about the sheer propulsiveness of their sound. Even in 1986, it felt transgressive, volcanic, and full of testosterone, like the best rock and roll.

The Mick and Keith of the Sex Pistols were Johnny Rotten and Sid Vicious. Sid overdosed on heroin with his girlfriend Nancy Spungeon [UPDATE: A reader points out that Nancy was stabbed to death, perhaps by Sid, who died of an overdose before it could be sorted out]. Johnny, who went back to his given surname, Lydon, started a band named Public Image Ltd, and carried on. What I didn’t know until reading this profile in The Observer is that he has been a happily married man since 1979, to a German woman named Nora, about a decade his senior. Today, they’re living in Los Angeles, and he is caring for her constantly through the ravages of her Alzheimer’s disease.

Lydon was in the news recently when he was photographed leaning out a window to smoke a cigarette while wearing a MAGA shirt — about the punkest thing a rock legend can do in 2020, if you ask me. Here are some excerpts from the Guardian piece:

It all sounds so daunting. I tell Lydon that I admire his honesty. “It takes courage, I suppose, to bring it out into the open. Thinking you can keep it to yourself, and it will somehow manage itself, it’s not the case. You’ve got to talk about it.” Lydon is militantly against “moaners”, a legacy of his tough working-class London upbringing, which he describes as “Charlie Dickens with motor vehicles”. His mother was often sick, and Lydon cared for his younger brothers while his father worked. “The main lesson I learned from my mum and dad is no self-pity. Self-pity was unacceptable.” Still, Nora’s suffering affects him deeply. “It’s very hard not to go into a tear-jerk about it. You don’t realise this about me, I suppose, but I’m quite emotional. I’m a passionate fella.”

He still has strong views. He voted Obama, then Trump. He plans to vote for Trump again. He’s still down on organized religion and its “disgusting negativity.” He supports Brexit:

In his view, the working classes have spoken: “They’re not going to be dictated to by unknown continentals.” While Lydon seems genuine, he’s not above liberal-baiting this Observer journalist. When I ask if he’s definitely voting for Trump, he cries: “I am!”, produces a MAGA cap, and gleefully dangles it in front of the screen.

Lydon co-wrote the punk standard God Save the Queen. Now he says: “My feeling about the royal family is one of sorrow. I’ve always felt they’re poor little birdies trapped in cages, gold cages, but they’re still entombed.” What about Meghan Markle? “Dreadful person. Very bad actress. But she’s in a masterclass now.” Lydon doesn’t agree that Markle suffered racism. “Stop being self-righteous and smug, that’s what she needs to do. She’s hopping on a cause. There are valid cases out there, genuine people who need help.”

He’s 100 percent correct about Meghan Markle. One more clip:

Whereas once he couldn’t stand “bohemian nonsense”, he now seems to view all political correctness as irritating, self-righteous uber-leftie dogma. “My God!” he retorts. “Shouldn’t any sane person?”

OK, I’ll bite: political correctness may not be perfect, but isn’t its aim to empower and protect? “It’s taken too far, though. Death by committee, trying to slam your dictates into another person’s face. That’s not healthy.”

He thinks everything and everyone should be questioned, including himself. “If I’m wrong, I’m highly capable of correcting that. I’ve done that many times and I’ve had to. That’s why I love debate and conversation, because you learn from it. Don’t become entrenched in one opinion and get stuck there for ever.”

Read it all. Funny, but it seems that decadent America could stand to be a little more Rotten, don’t you think?

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