Rod Dreher's Blog, page 110

Stephanie Winston Wolkoff, Monster

CNN today featured former Melania Trump aide Stephanie Winston Wolkoff airing a secret recording of the First Lady making a profane remark about Christmas decorations, and complaining about the way the media were treating her about migrant children at the border. I’m not going to link to the clip, because it is repulsive. I’m not talking about what Melania Trump said — though that is certainly obnoxious — but about the fact that this Wolkoff cretin has betrayed a friend so horribly. That, and the fact that CNN is party to this betrayal.

What is the point of this? What national security issue was at stake, such that violating someone’s privacy and expectation of confidentiality is rewarded? If you’re mad at Melania Trump for what she said, okay, but you ought to be furious that someone betrays the confidence of a friend and employer (and for such a trivial reason!), and that a major news network went along with it.

You don’t like Melania Trump? Okay. But humiliating her with this kind of betrayal makes the world a more vicious, and dare I say totalitarian, place. I spent a year talking with people in the Soviet bloc, reporting Live Not By Lies, about what their lives were like. Imagine a world in which you could not trust anybody. In which even your best friend might betray you to the secret police out of fear, or for the purpose of personal gain. This happened all the time. After communism fell in East Germany, and people’s Stasi files were made public, many former East Germans were staggered by the discovery that people they trusted the most — even their spouses — informed on them.

There is a reason why, in his Divine Comedy, Dante put traitors in the deepest pit of hell: because the radical loss of trust made society impossible. In late medieval Tuscany, with cities at war with each other, everyone inside a city’s walls had to hope that they could trust the guardians of the city’s gates. If they couldn’t, then a traitor might open the gates to the enemy at night, and that would be the end. As Dante saw it, the worst sins were those that made human community impossible by severing social bonds.

It was a horrible way to live, to have to be anxious all the time that those around you might betray you. Last year in Budapest, a Hungarian told me that the nation’s biggest problem is a holdover from the communist era: the lack of civic trust. The communists created a society in which nobody could afford to trust anybody, because to trust was to make yourself vulnerable to losing your freedom, even your life. Once that trust goes, it is extremely hard to replace. This, said the Hungarian, is one reason why the country is still struggling with communism’s legacy.

What Melania Trump said about Christmas decorating was rude and shallow — and boy, I’m really shocked that a former supermodel is rude and shallow — and what she said about the migrants was not really about the migrant kids at all, but about media hypocrisy in covering the story. But sure, if you want to spite Melania Trump for that, go ahead.

But what Stephanie Winston Wolkoff has done is truly monstrous. If you know her, or are her friend, you are now on alert as to the kind of person she is. Once more, that CNN rewards a wretched betrayal like this is a sign of degraded standards — and sign that they are helping to bring about a world in which selling out a friend by exposing intimate private conversations, for the sake of advancing a political cause, is our new norm. Seriously, folks: think about the kind of social order that we are bringing into being with stunts like this. 

It won’t stop with the betrayal of Melania Trump’s confidence. Mark my words. This puts everybody on notice that even close friends will instrumentalize your friendship and sell you out to the highest bidder, for the sake of political advantage and personal advancement.

 

 

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‘The Right Book At The Right Time’

Thanks to Daniel Flynn at The American Spectator for his generous review of Live Not By Lies. Excerpts:

Live Not by Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents reads as a peculiar book in that its most important line occurs in the acknowledgments. “I am not at liberty to thank some of those who helped me research this book, because it would put them at risk of retaliation in the workplace,” author Rod Dreher writes. “None of these anonymous helpers live in the former Soviet bloc; all are Americans.”

This illustrates the theme of the book in two lines. Many Americans cannot live out loud, as the culture urges so many pursuing unusual lifestyles to do, because revealing oneself comes at great expense. If the firing of JavaScript creator Brendan Eich from Mozilla, the humiliation of hockey broadcasting legend Don Cherry, and the pulling of A&E’s top-rated Live PD from the air could occur despite their enormous contributions and popularity, then certainly anonymous Christians not generating millions of dollars for powerful people could also find themselves canceled for impolitic beliefs. This pressure — call it cancel culture or political correctness or social totalitarianism — results in a disconnect between private thoughts and public utterances. Live Not by Lies seeks for its readers to, well, live not by lies. It offers guidance on how to navigate the modern minefield while maintaining integrity.

That lede is magnificent. I hadn’t thought of that line in the acknowledgements (who reads acknowledgements?) as so significant, but Flynn is right. And note well that this totalitarian condition has accelerated under Donald Trump. I don’t at all say that it’s Trump’s fault, but only to point out that having a president who is no fan of wokeness has made very little difference, aside from possibly slowing down the inevitable.

More from Flynn’s review:

Rod Dreher writes the right book at the right time. And its appearance in non-samizdat form suggests that time remains to change the European past from becoming the American future. Live Not by Lies is an easy read about hard issues.

Chick-fil-A rather suddenly becoming the most popular fast food restaurant in America not named McDonald’s, Fox News beating traditional broadcast networks to strangely reign atop the Nielsen ratings in 2020, the mere fact of Donald Trump’s presidency, and the wild popularity among viewers (but not critics) of Dave Chappelle mocking wokery in his “Sticks and Stones” comedy special all serve to show that that the emperor, though wielding hairshirts, has no clothes. The success of Live Not by Lies, which occupied the top-seller spot on Amazon.com during the composition of this review, demonstrates this, too.

Read the whole thing. 

Flynn is right: all is not lost (yet, anyway). We still have the freedom to push back — and we should use it. But as I have been stressing in interviews about the book, we had also better use our freedom to form groups and networks that will be able to survive when soft totalitarianism turns harder. This is the message I take from the story of Father Tomislav Kolakovic, to whom I dedicated this book. As regular readers of this blog know, in 1943, Father Kolakovic escaped the Gestapo in his native Croatia, headed for Slovakia, his mother’s homeland. From Live Not By Lies:

By the time Father Kolaković reached Bratislava, it was clear that Czechoslovakia would eventually be liberated by the Red Army. In fact, in 1944, the Czech government in exile made a formal agreement with Stalin, guaranteeing that after driving the Nazis out, the Soviets would give the nation its freedom.

Because he knows how the Soviets thought, Father Kolaković knew this was a lie. He warned Slovak

Catholics that when the war ended, Czechoslovakia would fall to the rule of a Soviet puppet government. He dedicated himself to preparing them for persecution.

Some Slovak bishops criticized the refugee priest for being too alarmist. He ignored them. More:

Father Kolaković knew that the clericalism and passivity of traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing, he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the church by subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.

“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.

Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. The total destruction of the First World War opened the eyes of younger Catholics to the need for a new evangelization. A Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn, whose father had been killed in a mining accident, started a lay movement to do this among the working class. These were the Young Christian Workers, called “Jocists” after the initials of their name in French. Inspired by the Jocist example, Father Kolaković adapted it to the needs of the Catholic Church in German-occupied Slovakia. He established cells of faithful young Catholics who came together for prayer, study, and fellowship.

The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility, he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists became the motto for what Father Kolaković called his “Family”: “See. Judge. Act.” See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.

Václav Vaško, a Kolaković follower, recalled late in his life that Father Kolaković’s ministry excited so many young Catholics because it energized the laity and gave them a sense of leadership responsibility.

“It is remarkable how Kolaković almost instantly succeeded in creating a community of trust and mutual friendship from a diverse grouping of people (priests, religious and lay people of different ages, education, or spiritual maturity),” Vaško wrote.

The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.

The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. “By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate.”

In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolaković had predicted. Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolaković’s top two lieutenants— physician Silvester Krčméry and priest Vladimír Jukl — quietly set up Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.

The underground church, led by the visionary cleric’s spiritual children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty. The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.

See, this is why Live Not By Lies is not just doom-and-gloom stuff, but is full of information — stories from and about people like Father Kolakovic and his followers — about practical things that Christians can and must do to endure what is coming. Young Christians, like those in Father K’s Family, are going to have to lead the charge.

Crisis editor Michael Warren Davis’s new essay about St. Francis and manliness is good on this point. Excerpt:

I have written here before that the West is on its way to another Dark Age. Ours is no longer a Christian society, but a pagan one. Our liberal democracies are now succumbing to the same twin errors—decadence and gnosticism—that destroyed the Roman Empire. Within a few centuries, nothing of the old order will remain. We Christians will have to rebuild civilization from its ruins. It’s only natural, then, that we should look to the Middle Ages for guidance.

Rod Dreher has been thinking along these lines for years. His book The Benedict Option urged us to look to the example of another great Medieval saint, Benedict of Norcia, for inspiration on how to build strong “intentional communities”: bastions of Christendom, safe-havens for the faithful, which can withstand the terror that will inevitably follow when our own Empire collapses. I agree with him wholeheartedly.

Yet it won’t be enough to build intentional Christian communities. We must also build intentional Christian men. Those men must be capable of building those communities and, when the time comes, defending them against the barbarian hordes—winning new souls for God all the while. To this end, I propose that we also follow the example of Saint Francis of Assisi. Call it the Francis Option.

The fact of the matter is that we Christians, as much as our neo-pagan countrymen, are decadent. We’re dangerously unprepared for the coming Dark Age. Mr. Dreher touched on this point during his recent appearance on Tucker Carlson Tonight. He said that, in writing his new book Live Not By Lies, which recounts the persecution of Christians by the Soviet Empire, he learned a powerful lesson:

It taught me about how much we Americans need to learn how to suffer better…. We have got to be a lot more patient with our suffering so we can endure what is to come. Because this is what the soft totalitarians are going to do: they’re going to use our addiction to comfort to control us.

Mr. Dreher is right: we don’t know how to suffer. We train a small number of men to fight in our armed forces, and only a small number of men work in hands-on industries like construction or mining. Technology and outsourcing have rendered most blue-collar work obsolete; others, like corporate farmers, are only there to direct the machines until Silicon Valley can produce a microchip to automatically steer tractors and drive trucks.

Similarly, I end Live Not By Lies like this, by quoting Solzhenitsyn’s eponymous essay:

The Marxist Mordor was real, but the faith of those who resisted outlasted it, because hard totalitarianism met something harder: the truth. In our time, the emerging totalitarianism is softer, smarter, and more sophisticated—but is no less totalitarian for it. Lubomir Gleiman, who listened to Father Kolaković’s Bratislava lectures in 1943, wrote in his 2006 memoir that Kolaković believed communism “was more ruthless than the Western secularized ‘soft’ totalitarianism,” and therefore the greater threat to Christianity at the time. But as Timo Križka, a son of the first generation of post-Soviet freedom, discovered, the totalitarianism that Father Kolaković identified as soft really exists. Like its more brutal older brother, it is built on the oldest lie of all, the one the serpent whispered in the Garden, the father of every other lie: “Ye shall be as gods.”

Our cause appears lost . . . but we are still here! Now our mission is to build the underground resistance to the occupation to keep alive the memory of who we were and who we are, and to stoke the fires of desire for the true God. Where there is memory and desire, there is hope. Let all saboteurs for the Kingdom of God heed the stirring conclusion of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 essay, “Live Not by Lies!,” which gives this book its title. It was his valedictory to the Soviet people:

And so: We need not be the first to set out on this path, Ours is but to join! The more of us set out together, the thicker our ranks, the easier and shorter will this path be for us all! If we become thousands—they will not cope, they will be unable to touch us. If we will grow to tens of thousands— we will not recognize our country!

But if we shrink away, then let us cease complaining that someone does not let us draw breath—

we do it to ourselves! Let us then cower and hunker down, while our comrades the biologists bring

closer the day when our thoughts can be read and our genes altered.

And if from this also we shrink away, then we are worthless, hopeless, and it is of us that Pushkin

asks with scorn:



‘Why should cattle have the gifts of freedom?

Their heritage from generation to generation is the belled yoke and the lash.

The right book at the right time. Yes, I believe it is. I would also point you to what my TAC colleague Helen Andrews says in her important essay about the parallels between the Russian Revolution and contemporary America. Excerpts:

But are we really so safe? In June, the great Russian literature professor Gary Saul Morson told The Wall Street Journal that America was starting to feel eerily familiar. “It’s astonishingly like late 19th-, early 20th-century Russia, when basically the entire educated class felt you simply had to be against the regime or some sort of revolutionary,” he said. Even the moderate Kadet Party could not bring itself to condemn terrorism against the czar, any more than a modern Democrat could condemn Black Lives Matter: “A famous line from one of the liberal leaders put it this way: ‘Condemn terrorism? That would be the moral death of the party.’”

Today, the Resistance is already signaling that they won’t accept a Trump victory in November any more than they accepted one in 2016. After the last election, they attempted a soft coup by means of the Russiagate scandal and impeachment. What kind of coup will come next? By looking at the Russian precedent, we can evaluate the risk that this country might enact our own distinctively American version of 1917—and how close we have come to it already.

More:

That all changed around the time of Nicholas II’s coronation in 1896. Suddenly the terrorists had the moral high ground, and it seemed as if nothing they could do would forfeit it, even cold-blooded murder of women and children. “It was common talk in the best families, in the homes of generals et al., that the Empress should be killed and gotten out of the way,” one St. Petersburg professor wrote to an American friend. Wealthy merchants and industrialists like Savva Morozov and Mikhail Gotz—men you might expect to be grateful to the existing order for making their prosperity possible—gave fringe groups like the Bolsheviks the money to publish their newspapers and support their leaders in exile. Every time Nicholas lost a minister to assassination, his security bureau would show him private letters between prominent people applauding the assassins.

Read it all. 

A very important point I bring out in Live Not By Lies: what the elites believe and do is critically important. In the US, Trump may be the president, but the people who support the cultural revolution control the universities, the media, Hollywood, major corporations, and are the gatekeepers in the professions (e.g., medicine and law). Whether Trump wins or loses, they are going to accelerate the revolution. Kolakovic knew how the communists thought, and knew what they were after. After this past decade — and especially these past six months — we know what our opponents are like, and what they are going to do.

To my fellow social and religious conservatives: can you afford not to buy Live Not By Lies, and start facing these hard truths about where our country is headed? You may not be a Christian, or even much of a right-winger, but if you oppose wokeness in power, you need to read this and take what you can from it. If you buy the book, please download this free study guide.

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Trump’s Covid Agony

President Trump and the the First Lady have Covid. From the NYT:

Even if Mr. Trump does not become seriously ill, the positive test could prove devastating to his political fortunes given his months of playing down the enormity of the pandemic even as the virus was still ravaging the country and killing about 1,000 Americans every day. He has repeatedly predicted the virus was “going to disappear,” asserted that it was under control and insisted that the country was “rounding the corner” to the end of the crisis. He has scorned the advice of scientists, saying they were mistaken about the severity of the situation.

For months, Mr. Trump has refused to wear a mask in public on all but a few occasions and has repeatedly questioned their effectiveness. And as recently as Tuesday, at their opening debate, he mocked Mr. Biden for wearing one. “I don’t wear masks like him,” the president said, his voice dripping with derision. “Every time you see him, he’s got a mask.”

More:

In his eighth decade of life, Mr. Trump belongs to the age category deemed most vulnerable to the coronavirus. Eight out of every 10 deaths attributed to it in the United States have been among those 65 and older. In private discussions, Mr. Trump has been fatalistic with associates when talking about whether he or others would get sick from the virus, describing it as essentially a roll of the dice.

Watch this short clip from the debate the other night:

You might think that this is another episode in a reality show. It feels theatrical. But that seems insufficient. This feels like we’re nearing the climax of a Greek tragedy. Plague. Hubris calling down nemesis. Character being destiny.

Let us pray for the recovery of the President and the First Lady. Even if you have no love for them, you do love your country, I expect, and your country doesn’t need this crisis. But here we are. One month before the election, here we are.

The campaign is essentially over now. Assuming that the president is going to recover, it’s impossible to see how, so far behind in the polls, he turns his fortunes around.

UPDATE: I’m with Jesse:

We sincerely pray the President& the First Lady do not have the worst of this disease.We must all pray for the full recovery of the President& his wife.For whatever religious or political persuasion you may be, we must all pray as millions of people are affected by this disease.

— Rev Jesse Jackson Sr (@RevJJackson) October 2, 2020

UPDATE.2: Good on you, Biden:

Jill and I send our thoughts to President Trump and First Lady Melania Trump for a swift recovery. We will continue to pray for the health and safety of the president and his family.

— Joe Biden (@JoeBiden) October 2, 2020

UPDATE.3: Folks, I’m not saying that Trump shouldn’t campaign (though he’ll obviously have to do so on social media and maybe by video). I’m saying that the normal campaign is over. With one month to go, it is unlikely that we will have any more debates. No more presidential rallies — which Trump needed to rally his base, given how far behind he is. Biden could afford to campaign from his basement, because he has such a formidable lead.

Biden has also been raising massive amounts of money, while the Trump campaign has been hurting. If you were a Republican donor, would you give money today to the campaign of a president who has just been diagnosed with Covid, and is showing symptoms?

I hope he recovers, but his acquiring the virus under these conditions, especially days after ridiculing Biden for being overcautious, invites scrutiny and judgment of his leadership. It is a matter of political psychology.

Reagan’s communications director Michael Deaver had a theory. Every time he was able to control the environment in which Reagan faced the press, he made sure that the president was in front of American flags, or some other patriotic backdrop. Deaver explained that it didn’t really matter much what the president said; what people saw on the evening news, or on the front page of the morning paper, was an image of the president in front of flags. Deaver was practicing political psychology in the visual age.

Similarly, I have heard from Trump-supporting friends this morning saying that Trump was actually correct to chastise Biden for his over-reliance on masks, because [insert facts and logic here]. Even if their facts and logic are correct, that completely misses the point of political psychology. What the nation has seen is a president who, all year long, has been downplaying the seriousness of Covid. On Tuesday night, in front of a national audience, he made fun of his opponent for being a scaredy-cat for wearing his Covid mask too often. By week’s end, Trump had been tested positive for the virus, and was reportedly showing symptoms.

We don’t know yet how this is going to affect the nation’s political perceptions, but I think that the power of the narrative that we have seen with our own eyes is going carry more psychological and emotional weight than any kind of logical analysis. Why should the fact that Reagan appeared in front of American flags carry more weight than his actual words in response to media questions? Well, it did, because we are not brains on a stick. Why did the fact that candidate George H.W. Bush held a rally at a flag factory matter? The media made fun of it as a pathetic sop to patriotism — but the pictures conveyed that Bush was a solid patriot, while his opponent Dukakis, hey, who could be sure about that guy?

The clip of Trump making fun of Biden for masks at the debate is going to be played a thousand million times between now and Election Day. This is going to matter, whether any of us like it or not.

UPDATE.4: And I say that as someone who is more likely than not to vote for him, because of the radicalism that the Democratic Party represents on cultural issues. But I do not intend to deceive myself about the kind of man for whom I will be voting, if indeed I vote for Trump.

UPDATE.5: Jim Geraghty at National Review:

I don’t think anyone knows how this will affect the presidential election. This could spur a wave of sympathy for the president — as well as the First Lady and Hicks and the White House staff. No doubt some will see this as comeuppance for a White House that disdained masks, quarreled with Dr. Fauci, and apparently did not practice precautionary measures consistently enough.

More:

However, this is a giant flashing neon sign that we must see this problem with clear eyes and not flinch in the face of scary truths. We’re not done with this pandemic, and this pandemic isn’t done for us. That vaccine is getting closer, but we can’t get lax or reckless yet. I’m thinking of all of those people who assured us for months that “herd immunity was just around the corner” or “the outbreak is gone in most places or on the way out” . . . and I wonder what they’re thinking at this moment. As I wrote on September 15, “the primary problem in this coronavirus has been that many, many Americans, both in government and outside of government, insisted it wouldn’t be that bad and thus underestimated the risk to themselves and others.”

A couple of months ago, I spoke to someone on staff at a nursing home in Baton Rouge. She told me that there are two kinds of people in this country city: those who have had Covid (or know someone who has), and who therefore take it really seriously, including wearing masks — and those who have not, and who are cavalier about the virus.

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Christianity: White Supremacists At Prayer?

A reader whose parents escaped Communist Hungary sends this link to an upcoming lecture at Cal State Fullerton. I’m old enough to remember when Orange County was conservative. Heck, I’m old enough to remember when California was liberal, not militantly woke. Anyway, if you’re on campus on the evening of November 3, this is what you can go hear at the College of Humanities & Social Sciences’ “Interdisciplinary Conversations on Anti-Blackness”:

Justin Huft, Sociology and Psychology, Religiosity and Critical Whiteness: How Christianity Serves White Supremacy

Though race, socioeconomic status, education levels, and geographic location are often cited as possible reasons for investing in white surpremacist [sic] philosophies, an often overlooked component of white supremacy culture is how Christianity contributes to these beliefs. A wide range of interdisciplinary research has identified how Christianity buttresses patriarchal power structures and beliefs. We will discuss how Christianity reaffirms white supremacy views; including how a “color-blind” approach maintains the optics of being “non-racist,” while upholding racist systems of power.

Here’s a link to Prof. Huft’s faculty page. 

There is nothing wrong with investigating the intersection between religion and racial structures in societies. But in this climate of racial hysteria, we have here a professor at a California state university giving a lecture on how Christianity “contributes” to what the contemporary American left has identified as the greatest social evil of our time. Note that even if Christianity teaches people not to judge others by the color of their skin, it is still white supremacist. 

How far do you think a Cal State professor would get giving a lecture on how Judaism fosters social evil, or Islam? You know the answer: because anti-Christian bigotry is a sign of enlightenment among these elites. Nobody at Cal State Fullerton is going to have to answer for this.

Why did the daughter of Hungarian refugees send this item to me? The answer is in this passage from the introduction of Live Not By Lies:

What makes the emerging situation in the West similar to what they fled? After all, every society has rules and taboos and mechanisms to enforce them. What unnerves those who lived under Soviet communism is this similarity: Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups. A utopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice.

Further, these utopian progressives are constantly changing the standards of thought, speech, and behavior. You can never be sure when those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before. And the consequences for violating the new taboos are extreme, including losing your livelihood and having your reputation ruined forever.

People are becoming instant pariahs for having expressed a politically incorrect opinion, or in some other way provoking a progressive mob, which amplifies its scapegoating through social and conventional media. Under the guise of “diversity,” “inclusivity,” “equity,” and other egalitarian jargon, the Left creates powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse and marginalizes dissenters as evil.

It is very hard for Americans who have never lived through this kind of ideological fog to recognize what is happening. To be sure, whatever this is, it is not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet Bloc nations, with their secret police, their gulags, their strict censorship, and their material deprivation. That is precisely the problem, these people warn. The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty. That, and the way those who take away freedom couch it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.

“I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and I’m frankly stunned by how similar some of these developments are to the way Soviet propaganda operated,” says one professor, now living in the Midwest.

Another émigré professor, this one from Czechoslovakia, was equally blunt. He told me that he began noticing a shift a decade or so ago: friends would lower their voices and look over their shoulders when expressing conservative views. When he expressed his conservative beliefs in a normal tone of voice, the Americans would start to fidget and constantly scan the room to see who might be listening.

“I grew up like this,” he tells me, “but it was not supposed to be happening here.”

What is happening here? A progressive—and profoundly anti-Christian militancy—is steadily overtaking society; one described by Pope Benedict XVI as a “worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies” that pushes dissenters to society’s margins. Benedict called this a manifestation of “the spiritual power of the Antichrist.” This spiritual power takes material form in government and private institutions, in corporations, in academia and media, and in the changing practices of everyday American life. It is empowered by unprecedented technological capabilities to surveil private life. There is virtually nowhere left to hide.

If you are a Christian in Orange County, go out there to protest peacefully that night, with prayer and song. If you are a Christian student on that campus, stand up and be heard. White Christians, Latino Christians, Black Christians, Asian Christians — everybody, fight the hate! Don’t let them teach you to despise your own faith. Jewish students and Islamic students would not stand for this if it were happening to them.

UPDATE: A reader sends evidence that Prof. Huft is a bona fide totalitarian. Here he is in 2017 writing to the student newspaper to protest a fellow professor’s op-ed in which he (the other prof) said students should treat a planned Milo Yiannopoulos lecture on campus as a chance to learn, to engage with someone who doesn’t share their views. Huft wet himself with anger. Excerpt:

Oppressors (accidental or purposeful) in a system often place expectations like this on the oppressed in order to effectively silence their discomfort. If we reposition your argument into other contexts, I think it’s easy to see how absurd and offensive it is (perhaps, we can also turn domestic violence into learning opportunities for women, Doug?).

At the same time, you are seemingly trying to hold up and empower students, you are using different oppressive tactics to reinforce a narrative that dismisses and systematically silences any dissent.

It is very easy for a person with your intersection of identities to be blind to what some students are experiencing, but the language being used to contrast this narrative is far from productive.

When you talked about “getting our collective panties in a bunch,” I also understand that you are likely not trying to be as misogynistic as you are. Again, it is easy to be a white male and be blind to how you (and I) contribute to ongoing systems of oppression.

This surfside Stalinist is not just the enemy of Christians and conservatives; he is the enemy of actual liberals, too.

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Trans Totalitarianism & Your Children

The Kelsey Coalition is a volunteer organization of parents and others who are trying to sound the alarm about the great harm being done to young people by the transgender movement. They do not oppose adult transgenders, and they are neither political nor religious. A friend who got active in the group after her teenage daughter was sucked into the trans movement, and is now (as a legal adult) jacking herself up with male hormones, told me that there are Christians in the group, as well as Jews, pagans, and atheists. There are conservatives and liberals. What they share is profound anxiety over what has been done to their children, and — this is key — the fact that nobody wants to listen to them. The media don’t want to tell their stories, at all.

A reader of this blog founded the Kelsey Coalition, and writes under the pseudonym “Katharine Cave”. She e-mailed this to me today, and cc’d a friend of mine who is active with Kelsey, and who vouches for Katharine’s credibility. Katharine writes:

Good morning, Rod. Looking forward to reading Live Not By Lies soon. Thank you for sounding the alarms!

Unlike many of your readers who accuse you of hyperbole, I believe we have already entered into a state of hard totalitarianism in the realm of transgender ideology: People are not only losing their jobs for speaking out, they are losing their children. I don’t think there are many people who grasp the depth and the tragedy of this issue.

As you know, transgender ideology is the notion that a child has an innate and immutable “gender identity” that is dangerous to question and whose young growing body should be medicalized with hormones and surgeries. Our educational systems, the mental health profession, the medical profession, lawmakers, policymakers, and the courts have all adopted this ideology as fact.

What you may not know: there is a movement in progressive legal circles to expand the doctrine of parental neglect to include refusal to consent to hormones and surgeries. Journal articles such as this provide physicians with explicit guidance on how to perform these interventions on minor children when their parents refuse to give permission. Published legal memoranda argue that “gender-affirming” interventions, including vaginoplasties and mastectomies for children under 18 years old, are medical necessities. Therefore, any parent who does not consent to these interventions may be found guilty of child neglect. Read this report for details.

This is a serious issue. This is a medical and legal scandal that is being sanctioned and promoted by the state. This is not a mere matter of which bathroom to use, but about the countless young people in anguish about what was done to their bodies when they were too young to consent. Their stories are absolutely heartbreaking.

One of our Members describes how she was powerless to stop surgeons from removing the breasts, ovaries, and uterus of her 17-year-old daughter. As she explains in this written testimony, surgeries were performed without any extensive mental health assessment or after-care. They were funded 100% by Medicaid.

Our future physicians are currently being trained in these ideologically-based practices, as this medical student reports, and there is a movement pushing for surgeries for children at younger and younger ages. Girls as young as 13 have had mastectomies; those as young as 16 have had their uterus and ovaries removed. Penectomies, orchidectomies, and vaginoplasties are performed on boys as young as 15. In this article (“Age Is Just A Number”), surgeons describe why they conduct invasive and irreversible procedures on mere boys rather than wait until they are older. It is hard to believe that this is actually happening in the US…and yet no one in a position of power is doing anything to stop it.

Instead of working to protect our children from these body-altering practices, our lawmakers are increasing their likelihood by passing “conversion therapy” bans, which prevent therapists from questioning children’s gender identities. This report explains the details. Therapists who dissent risk violating their state’s conversion therapy ban or being reported to their licensing board. The Biden campaign promises that this will become the law of the land under the Therapeutic Fraud Prevention Act. (H.R. 3570 and S.2008).

This is not a fringe issue; trans identities in children are no longer rare. Read this account of what happened last year in an 8th grade classroom: 14% of 13-year olds identified as transgender and three are already on life-altering hormones. Read our testimonials from across the US. Teachers are afraid to speak out about this issue because they know they will lose their job if they do. Read this report about how schools require teachers to keep parents in the dark.

Many physicians, teachers, and therapists have written to us anonymously. They are scared about what is happening to children, and angry about what their profession is requiring them to do to them. Read their stories: here, here, here, and here.

The pediatric transition movement started under the Obama administration and accelerated under Trump as the number of pediatric gender clinics rose from zero to 65 in just twelve years. While the Democrats are certainly guilty of actively promoting these laws and policies, the Republicans are guilty of silent complicity. Our attempts to seek passage of protective state laws were undermined by corporate interests. Our petitions and face-to-face pleas with federal representatives and administrative officials of both parties have been ignored.

This is not about left vs. right, but fact vs. fiction and right vs. wrong.

Parents write to us desperate for help. Some have already been reported to the authorities. One was reported by her own pediatrician. One family was forced to move out of Oregon so they would not lose custody of their daughter. Where will our families move when federal law becomes as progressive as those in states like Oregon and California? And given the US Supreme Court’s faulty reasoning in Bostock v. Clayton County, it appears that even a conservative-leaning Court may not save our children from gender identity laws.

Our biggest weapon is that we have the truth on our side. We are using that truth to share our testimonials and reports with the general public in small face-to-face meetings throughout the country. But we are up against incredible opposition, and time is of the essence.

She’s telling the truth. In Live Not By Lies, I mention a physician at a major US hospital who told me that hospital management ordered all doctors there to provide cross-sex hormones and any other services requested for transition by patients — even if, in the professional opinion of the attending physician, the patient’s medical issues would not be solved by hormones and the rest. To refuse to do this means termination.

This morning I was on a call-in radio show talking about my book, and a lesbian caller said that she’s not trans, but she doesn’t want to be against “my transgender sisters and brothers.” I bet that woman has no idea at all what’s being done to children in the name of transgender rights. Why should she? Most Americans don’t. Our media don’t want to write about it. As Cave says, Republicans don’t even want to touch the issue. It is impossible to resist even from within the medical community without risking your career. Ask Dr. Allen Josephson. Or ask a world expert on transgenderism, Dr. Kenneth Zucker, who was driven out of his own lab for not being sufficiently trans-affirming for the insane activists.

Unlike in the UK, where there is starting to be some mainstream media pushback against the trans zealots, there is nothing in the US. Joe Rogan’s great interview with Abigail Shrier, a journalist who is trans-affirming for adults, but who wrote a book about how this movement is harming girls, has Spotify employees threatening to strike if the company doesn’t remove it. I asked Katharine Cave if there’s a difference between UK media and US media. She responded:

Absolutely! The media coverage in the UK is quite extensive. Janice Turner at The Times really started leading the way on the trans pediatric medical scandal a few years ago. https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/trans-teenagers-have-become-an-experiment-87vn5m8fw?shareToken=28d2d82c60a653bed4e6a5b46df0a905

James Kirkup has also been great on this issue: https://www.spectator.co.uk/article/the-document-that-reveals-the-remarkable-tactics-of-trans-lobbyists

Some other examples can be found throughout print media:

The Telegraph: https://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/2019/12/12/childrens-transgender-clinic-hit-35-resignations-three-years
The Guardian: https://www.theguardian.com/society/2019/feb/23/child-transgender-service-governor-quits-chaos
The Daily Mail: https://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-6897269/Workers-transgender-clinic-quit-concerns-unregulated-live-experiments-children.html


Same thing with television. Just one of many examples: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4bX1xMo-jWE

One major difference in the UK is that many on the political left are gender critical, unlike in the US. And for that reason, our counterparts in the UK don’t seem to understand the need for us in the US need to work across aisle to get anything done. You are absolutely right when you talk about the need to work with strange bedfellows. This is all hands on deck.

Another important difference: the UK — with socialized medicine — has data and a bit of control when it comes to medicalizing children. In the US, it is the Wild West of medicine with zero data collection or accountability. We are in desperate need of a thorough investigation into this scandal and no one wants to do it. I tried very hard to get US journalists interested.

Are you aware that schools have protocols in place that actively deceive parents of trans students who declare that their parents wouldn’t support their transition? That’s right: your kid’s school could be collaborating with your minor child to keep you in the dark about the fact that your daughter presents as a male, and is planning to seek out hormones and other aids to transitioning. In Oregon, the medical age of consent is 15. If your 15-year-old daughter wanted to have her breasts surgically removed (or your 15 year old son wanted to have his testicles cut off), and could find a doctor willing to perform the surgery, then you would be powerless to stop them — and their school might have been complicit for years in hiding the dysphoria crisis from you, to prevent you from taking actions to head it off.

There’s so much more. Go to the Kelsey Coalition website. 

Did your favorite newspaper or news site tell you any of this information? Did your pastor? Did anybody? Educate yourself — and prepare to resist. The other day an Orthodox Christian reader of this blog wrote to say that a priest taught their class that transgenderism is nothing more than a different way to be a person. I advised the reader to get the heck out of that parish, because the priest is telling dangerous lies.

In the UK, gender-critical feminists — including many lesbians — have risked a lot to speak out against this exploitation and mutilation of girls. J.K. Rowling is a trans-affirming feminist — for adults. She has brought howls of condemnation down on her head for standing up for girls. We have to find the same courage. And we need to start preparing underground railroads for families who are trying to save their children from these ghouls.

Let’s be very clear: this is a third rail in American life. If you criticize the gender-transition movement at all — even if you limit your criticism to children — you are calling down catastrophe on yourself. Be prepared for it. That’s what it means to live not by lies: to be willing to suffer for the truth. Vaclav Havel was not a religious believer, but he said that only when you are willing to suffer for the truth does the truth mean anything (this was the meaning of his famous Parable of the Greengrocer). Come on, let’s go!

UPDATE: Let me remind you:

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Totalitarianism-Proofing Your Family

Hey, some of my latest Live Not By Lies interviews are here:

Here’s a link to me talking with Matt K. Lewis of the Daily Beast: audio here, and YouTube here.

Here’s a link to me talking with the ever-dapper Eric Metaxas.

Here’s a link to me talking to the Lutheran radio show Issues, Etc.

Here’s a link to me talking to Pastor Chris Alford of the Epiclesis podcast.

I’ll add more as I collect them. Tonight I’ll be on EWTN’s The World Over With Raymond Arroyo at 8 Eastern/7 Central — if you don’t watch on satellite or cable, you can watch over the internet here. 

There’s still time to sign up for a live webinar I will be doing on Friday with Freddy Gray of The Spectator. Here’s the link to register. He’s English, so I will be especially interested to hear the kinds of questions he asks based on what he sees in the advanced cancel culture of Woke Britannia.

For those who have purchased the book (or who are considering buying it to read in small groups at church or elsewhere), here is a free downloadable Study Guide I have prepared. It’s great for groups, but even if you’re just reading it by yourself, the questions will stimulate thought.

Here is a link to what is pretty much a Live Not By Lies FAQ. If you’re new to this blog, and are thinking about buying the book, that link will give a fuller account of its argument.

I’ve been talking on this site about certain aspects of soft totalitarianism for a long time, and sharing previews of the book with you readers. I’ve quoted particular parts often, because they are highly relevant to specific stories in the news. But there’s a lot in this book that does not have a tight news hook, but that is still important to the kinds of lives we dissident Christians are going to have to build.

For example, there’s a chapter on Family as a locus of forming dissenters. I profile the Benda family of Prague, who raised a large Catholic family and fought communism as part of the Charter 77 movement. Their patriarch, Vaclav (who died in 1999), spent four years jailed as a political prisoner. Excerpts from that chapter:

[Vaclav] Benda said that the family house must be a real home, “that is, a place which is livable and set apart, sheltered from the outer world; a place which is a starting-out point for adventures and experiences with the assurance of a safe return”—in other words, a haven in a heartless world. The loving, secure Christian home is a place that forms children who are capable of loving and serving others within the family, the church, the neighborhood, and indeed the nation. The family does not exist for itself alone, but first for God, and then for the sake of the broader community—a family of families.

When that nation and its people are held captive by a totalitarian order, then Christians and their families must push as hard against the totalitarian world as it pushes against them. That’s what the Benda patriarch taught, and that’s how he and his family lived.

More, on how parents model heroism:

“Our parents were heroes for us,” says Patrik [Benda]. “My father was the sheriff from the High Noon movie.”

Václav often taught his children how to read the world around them, and how to understand people and events in terms of right and wrong. He did not allow them to drift into ignorance or indifference. The battle into which all of them had been thrown by history was too important.

For example, Václav explained to his kids that there are some things more dangerous than the loss of political liberties.

“Our father told us that there is a difference between a dictatorship and totalitarianism,” says Marek [Benda]. “Dictatorship can make life hard for you, but they don’t want to devour your soul. Totalitarian regimes are seeking your souls. We have to know that so we can protect what is most important as Christians.”

Watching how his brothers behaved in their adolescent years revealed to Patrik how much moral authority his father had within the family. Rebellion against authority is normal for kids that age, but the children of dissidents didn’t have that luxury.

“All the arguments within the family had to be put aside so we could stand against the outside threat from communism,” Patrik says. “When my father told my brother Martin that he couldn’t drink alcohol publicly until he turned eighteen, he explained that this rule is a way of protecting the whole family against the regime. ‘You can’t do that,’ he said to Martin, ‘because it could endanger all of us.’”

Rather than regarding this as a heavy yoke, the Benda kids saw this as an opportunity to serve something greater than themselves.

“Watching High Noon really formed our way of fighting against evil,” Marek Benda says. “Everyone is asking the sheriff to leave so that the town will have no problems from the bad guys. But the sheriff comes back nevertheless, because his virtue and honor can’t allow him to leave. He is looking for assistance, but no one wants to do that. But his wife helps him in the end. In some way, this was our family’s story. This is what our father and mother did.”

You shouldn’t think that their father was a natural hero, cautions Martin Benda. One evening, when Kamila was late coming home, Václav kept a nervous vigil by the window, staring at the street below, afraid that his wife had been arrested by the secret police.

“That was the moment when I started to admire my father even more,” says Martin. “That’s when I saw that he was human. He was scared, but he did not want his fear to master him.”

Kamila said that it wasn’t enough to teach their children what evil was. They also had to fill their children’s moral imaginations with the Good, the True, and the Beautiful:

Screening High Noon and movies like it for their children wasn’t the only way Václav and Kamila Benda prepared them for Christian resistance. Despite the demands of her job teaching at the university, Kamila made time to read aloud to her children for two to three hours daily.

“Every day?” I ask, stunned.

“Every day,” she affirms.

She read them fairy tales, myths, adventure stories, and even some horror classics. More than any other novel, though, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was a cornerstone of her family’s collective imagination.

Why Tolkien? I ask.

“Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story”—that of the hobbits and others resisting the evil Sauron—“was our story too. Tolkien’s dragons are more realistic than a lot of things we have in this world.”

“Mom read The Lord of the Rings to us maybe six times,” recalls Philip Benda. “It’s about the East versus the West. The elves on one side and the goblins on the other. And when you know the book, you see that you first need to fight the evil empire, but that’s not the end of the war. Afterward, you have to solve the problems at home, within the Shire.”

This is how Tolkien prepared the Benda children to resist communism, and also to resist the idea that the fall of communism was the end of their quest for the Good and the True. After communism’s collapse, they found ways to contribute to the moral reconstruction of their nation.

Patrik says the key is to expose children to stories that help them know the difference between truth and falsehood, and teach them how to discern this in real life.

“What my mom always encouraged in us and supported was our imagination, through the reading of books or playing with figures,” he says. “She also taught us that the imagination was something that was wholly ours, that could not be stolen from us. Which was also something that differentiated us from others.”

Buy the book, read it all. These good and faithful people hold wisdom that we in the West desperately need.

A couple of years ago I posted a blog entry called “The Quiet Heroism of Kamila Bendova” (in Slavic countries, wives take a feminine form of their husband’s name: Benda = Bendova). The patriarch was the one protesting on the streets, and suffering in prison, but the matriarch kept the family going, and strengthened them through that difficult trial. You cannot underestimate the value of the work done by women like her, behind the scenes.

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They Came For The Tweeting Cyclist

In the first part of Live Not By Lies, I write about Hannah Arendt’s great book The Origins Of Totalitarianism, and discerned a list of aspects of pre-totalitarian societies. Elsewhere in TAC, we publish a lengthy adaptation of the Arendt material from the book, focusing on her symptoms of pre-totalitarian societies. In this excerpt, here are two:

A Mania for Ideology

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

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

Similarly, under the guise of antiracism training, U.S. corporations, institutions, and even churches are frog-marching their employees through courses in which whites and other ideologically disfavored people are compelled to confess their “privilege.” Some do, eagerly.

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left today pushes its ideology ever deeper into the private realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

A Society That Values Loyalty More Than Expertise

“Totalitarianism in power invariably replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intellect and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty,” wrote Arendt.

All politicians prize loyalty, but few would regard it as the most important quality in government, and even fewer would admit it. But President Donald Trump is a rule-breaker in many ways. He once said, “I value loyalty above everything else—more than brains, more than drive, and more than energy.”

Trump’s exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting. But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity politics. This is at the root of “cancel culture,” in which transgressors, however minor their infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness.

Read it all.

Last night I wrote about the late artist Philip Guston, a victim of cancel culture as carried out from the marmalade-spined leaders of four top museums. This morning, I have found the newest victim of cancel culture: 19-year-old cyclist Quinn Simmons who committed a crime against wokeness: with one word and a single emoji, he expressed support for Donald Trump. Here’s what happened:

American neo-pro Quinn Simmons, a 19-year-old who signed to Trek-Segafredo after his junior world championship in Yorkshire in 2019, has been pulled from racing by his team following an incendiary tweet.

“Regrettably, team rider Quinn Simons made statements online that we feel are divisive, incendiary, and detrimental to the team, professional cycling, its fans, and the positive future we hope to help create for the sport,” the team said.

“In response, he will not be racing for Trek-Segafredo until further notice.”

It was the Trump support, and the fact that Quinn Simmons, who is basically worthy of a Nuremberg trial, used a brown emoji! Oh, the humanity.

That’s what it takes to get you kicked off a cycling team here in Wokistan. It is not a weird one-off In our Sentinel-sponsored Zoom event yesterday, J.D. Vance says he has lots of friends, both liberal and conservative, who walk around on eggshells constantly, terrified that something they say will get them fired. Yesterday there was this extraordinary tweet by Dick Costolo, a Silicon Valley big who served as CEO of Twitter from 2010 to 2015.

It’s like I said above:

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness.

The former CEO of Twitter saying that those who believe politics should be kept out of the workplace should be the first people massacred in the revolution — gee, you think there might be a totalitarian mentality among Silicon Valley elites?

Say, folks, I’m going to be on Raymond Arroyo’s EWTN show The World Over tonight at 8pm Eastern, 7 Central, talking about Live Not By Lies, of course. If you don’t have satellite or cable, you can watch the show broadcast live online by clicking here. 

UPDATE: A reader who is also a cyclist writes to say that I’m not seeing the business angle here. He says that Trek is a bike manufacturer who sells a lot of their product to police departments. They’ve been catching hell among the woke for being cop suppliers. Cutting Quinn Simmons loose is a way of restoring their woke bona fides.

Ah, woke capitalism…

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Soft Totalitarianism At The Art Gallery

In doing Live Not By Lies interviews this week, I’ve been asked to describe the difference between hard totalitarianism and soft totalitarianism. One way to look at it would be to consider the difference between George Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. The late, great media critic Neil Postman, in the foreword to his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves To Death, wrote:

We were keeping our eye on 1984. When the year came and the prophecy didn’t, thoughtful Americans sang softly in praise of themselves. The roots of liberal democracy had held. Wherever else the terror had happened, we, at least, had not been visited by Orwellian nightmares.

But we had forgotten that alongside Orwell’s dark vision, there was another – slightly older, slightly less well known, equally chilling: Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. Contrary to common belief even among the educated, Huxley and Orwell did not prophesy the same thing. Orwell warns that we will be overcome by an externally imposed oppression. But in Huxley’s vision, no Big Brother is required to deprive people of their autonomy, maturity and history. As he saw it, people will come to love their oppression, to adore the technologies that undo their capacities to think.

What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book, for there would be no one who wanted to read one.

There’s a slightly different way to view soft totalitarianism. In a hard totalitarian society, the state would close down an art exhibition, or not allow it to be mounted in the first place, because it offended against the ruling ideology. The state would throw the museum director into prison.

In a soft totalitarian society, the museum director would cancel the exhibition without the slightest pressure from the state, because he feared offending against the ruling ideology, which he would have internalized.

This has now happened, at the highest levels. Washington Post art critic Sebastian Smee brings the news, and rightly condemns these cowardly museums. Excerpts:

The catalogue was published. The loans secured. Everything was in place. But four illustrious museums — the National Gallery of Art, the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts Houston and the Tate Modern in London — have together decided to postpone, to 2024, a major exhibition devoted to the work of one of America’s most critically acclaimed and influential artists.

Why? Because they want to protect the public from having to interpret Philip Guston’s art (which includes cartoon-inspired depictions of figures wearing Ku Klux Klan hoods) for themselves.

Never mind that Guston, who was Jewish and died in 1980, had a powerful record, going back to his youth, of anti-racist actions and imagery. Never mind that two of today’s leading African American artists, Glenn Ligon and Trenton Doyle Hancock, have contributed essays to the catalogue (Ligon even praising Guston in his essay as “woke”). And never mind that it’s absurd to require artists to pass such litmus tests in the first place.

Call me naive, but I didn’t anticipate this. Yes, I can see all the forces in the culture leading to it. But the decision is simply wrong — and a legitimate cause for outrage.

More:

In the art world, the culture war is playing out as a question of how big a role art can and should play in bringing about certain kinds of social change. Many on the left want our idea of art to become so instrumentalist — so subservient to political imperatives — that they are willing to jettison large parts of what art means to people who love it and truly need it. I am referring to its ambiguities, its contradictions, its connection to the richness and freedom of our inner lives, to beauty and pain, and its ability to speak to confusions within and without. I’m talking about all the things you find in Toni Morrison, in Frank Ocean, in Anton Chekhov or Alice Munro, in Shostakovich or Duke Ellington, in Romare Bearden or Philip Guston.

This Guston decision feels big — like the first significant marker in an accelerating attempt not so much to respond to the “public discourse about art” as to alter our whole conception of art.

But it’s not actually a first, is it? We’ve seen it before, in Nazi Germany, in Stalinist Russia and in many other places where those in power, or those fearful of power, thought they could control the human heart and bend society their way by restricting what we see and how we express ourselves.

Such people are always wrong. History continuously proves them so.

What is at stake is not just the arts, or even the human heart. What’s at stake is also political, in the immediate sense. I’m talking about the upcoming election. Because nothing invites a backlash from reasonable people on the left, in the center and on the right — people whose votes Democrats will need if they want to beat President Trump — more than the left’s efforts to control and foreclose upon free thought.

Not to see this is the worst kind of political naivete.

Read it all. 

This is what the Left is turning our universities and leading cultural institutions into! The government is not making these museum directors, university presidents, and so on, do this — they’re doing it of their own initiative, because they are gutless, servile ninnies who are not worthy of the institutions that they lead. In Live Not By Lies, I explain why this kind of thing is a four-alarm fire. Excerpt:

This totalitarianism won’t look like the USSR’s. It’s not establishing itself through “hard” means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft forms. This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.

To grasp the threat of totalitarianism, it’s important to understand the difference between it and simple authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is what you have when the state monopolizes political control. That is mere dictatorship—bad, certainly, but totalitarianism is much worse. According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. 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.”

As part of its quest to define reality, a totalitarian state seeks not just to control your actions but also your thoughts and emotions. The ideal subject of a totalitarian state is someone who has learned to love Big Brother. Back in the Soviet era, totalitarianism demanded love for the Party, and compliance with the Party’s demands was enforced by the state. Today’s totalitarianism demands allegiance to a set of progressive beliefs, many of which are incompatible with logic—and certainly with Christianity. Compliance is forced less by the state than by elites who form public opinion, and by private corporations that, thanks to technology, control our lives far more than we would like to admit.

As Sebastian Smee, to his credit, understands, these woke museums are destroying the essence of art, and of the public’s relationship to art. And for what? To avoid hurting people’s feelings? To avoid the possibility that someone might see these paintings, and think a forbidden thought?

I repeat: this is not a downtown Manhattan gallery shutting down an exhibition out of woke piety. This is the National Gallery of Art. This is the Tate Modern. This is the Museum of Fine Arts Boston, and the Museum of Fine Arts Houston. If those institutions lack the courage to show paintings of a left-wing artist whose works were completely unproblematic the day before yesterday, what kind of signal does that send to smaller institutions? What does it say to the rest of society about what art is for?

If Guston is cancelled, who’s next?

Notice that the Bad Orange Man did not order the cancellation of a major art exhibition. These museum boards did it to themselves — and to the publics they are supposed to serve. But look, readers, this is another sign of the times — and another reminder that if you think totalitarianism is only something that the state can impose, you’re wrong. In Live Not By Lies, in the section about China as the model for our Western future, I write:

“China is about to become something new: an AI-powered techno-totalitarian state,” writes journalist John Lanchester. “The project aims to form not only a new kind of state but a new kind of human being, one who has fully internalized the demands of the state and the completeness of its surveillance and control. That internalization is the goal: agencies of the state will never need to intervene to correct the citizen’s behavior, because the citizen has done it for them in advance.”

In this case, the museum directors have not internalized the state’s demands, but have indeed internalized a slavish left-wing ideology that teaches them to intervene against themselves. We don’t need a soft totalitarian government to get involved when the leaders of cultural institutions are eager to live like slaves.

I’m not sure about the Tate Modern, but I know that those three US museums have many corporate patrons. What do they think about this? Do they support it? I hope Sebastian Smee and other arts journalists will force them to go on the record. If they are not protesting this utterly irresponsible decision, it will tell us something important about woke capitalism, and the kinds of society the wealthy corporate patrons want.

UPDATE: I think it’s important to point out that the President of the United States doesn’t have anything to do with this kind of thing. We do not live, and should not want to live, in a society in which the president can tell art galleries what they can and can’t exhibit. This lunatic norm stands to be freely adopted by museums — as is, and as should be, their right. But it’s still weird and destructive and yes, sort of totalitarian.

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Why Trump Is Not Out Yet

Here’s why Donald Trump is not out of the game yet. It’s a ruling from two months ago, by the federal 11th Circuit, brought to my attention just now by a reader:

A Florida school board’s refusal to allow a transgender boy to use the bathroom matching his gender identity was unconstitutional, the 11th Circuit ruled Friday.

In a 2-1 decision, the Atlanta-based appeals court found that the St. Johns County school board violated Nease High School graduate Drew Adams’ civil rights by instructing Adams to use a gender neutral or girls’ restroom and warning him that he would be subject to disciplinary action if he used the boys’ bathroom.

“A public school may not punish its students for gender nonconformity. Neither may a public school harm transgender students by establishing arbitrary, separate rules for their restroom use. The evidence at trial confirms that Mr. Adams suffered both these indignities,” U.S. Circuit Judge Beverly Martin, a Barack Obama appointee, wrote on behalf of the majority Friday.

In a 28-page dissent in which he refers to Adams as “a female who identifies as a male,” U.S. Circuit Judge William Pryor, a George W. Bush appointee, said the majority opinion “distorts the [school board’s] policy, misunderstands the legal claims asserted, and rewrites well-established precedent.”

Pryor warned that the opinion will have “radical consequences for sex-separated bathrooms.”

The two judges who voted for the kid were Obama appointees. More:

In his dissenting opinion, Pryor objected to the majority’s interpretation of Title IX, writing that sex “unambiguously is a classification on the basis of reproductive function” and claiming that sex “has never meant gender identity.”

Pryor went on to argue that Congress could not have intended the term “sex” to include gender identity when the law was enacted in 1972 because the medical community at that time “was firmly opposed to sex reassignment surgery.”

“It is untenable to construe transgender status, which even the medical community saw as a departure from the norm, as altering the norm itself among the general public,” Pryor wrote.

Read it all. 

You will recall that the federal Fourth Circuit also ruled the same way in August for trans student Gavin Grimm.

The Supreme Court will have to decide this issue. Even if Gorsuch is on the trans side — as he probably will be, given his opinion in Bostock — having Justice Barrett on the Court presumably gives conservatives the power to reverse the lower courts.

In last night’s terrible debate, Trump made much of the fact that he has appointed lots of conservative judges. Thank God for it! It’s the one thing for which I am grateful in his presidency. Judges matter. And this issue matters. We know where Joe Biden stands:

No room for compromise.

Please understand what is at stake here. It’s an issue fundamental to human identity. Prior to the past few years, the overwhelming number of people who have ever lived believe that male and female are immutable characteristics, and that they are undeniably rooted in biology. Many millions of people still believe that, in part because it happens to be scientifically true. What the Democrats and the LGBT activists who own their party are doing is coercing everyone to accept this radical gender ideology (which is not the same thing as homosexuality). Ryan T. Anderson points out the details of what gender identity laws mean here. 

Many of us do not want biological males competing against biological females, because that is intrinsically unjust. Many of us do not want to have to share women’s bathrooms and locker rooms with biological males. Most important of all, we do not want schools indoctrinating our children into gender ideology, and we do not want them to conspire against us to compel us to allow our minor children to transition against our consent.

This is actually happening! It’s not some right-wing fantasy. In this book, Abigail Shrier talks about how this trans craze takes advantage of the distress of adolescent and teenage girls, and how the institutions of our society try to silence dissent. Shrier has no complaints at all about trans adults, but she says it’s terrible to inflict this on children. Joe Rogan had her on recently to talk about it on his podcast, and now Rogan’s employer, Spotify, is facing an internal rebellion from Spotify employees who say it’s “transphobia” to have a different opinion. I strongly urge you to watch that Rogan episode while you still can, so you can have a better understanding of how totalitarian this movement is.

These are the stakes in this election: whether or not a radical vision of human sexuality and human identity will be forced on the American people against their will. Joe Biden and the Democratic Party believe it must be — “no room for compromise.” Trump-appointed federal judges are sanity’s last line of defense.

Like I said earlier, Trump was a crazy man in last night’s debate, and was a disgrace. It says something terrible about our country that this is how our president behaves. But we should also keep in mind that the kindly, respectable Joe Biden represents something truly barbaric — in fact, believes that there can be no compromise on the issue.

This is about what it means to be a male, a female, a human being. And Joe Biden is on the wrong side of the issue. 

I don’t for a second think that Donald Trump understands the issue, or cares much one way or the other. What I know is that he will probably appoint judges who do understand it, and will vote the right way — and will vote to defend the rights of religious believers to run their own institutions in defiance of this bizarre new reality. We know for a fact what the judges Joe Biden appoints will do.

From Live Not By Lies:

It is difficult for people raised in the free world to grasp the breadth and the depth of lying required simply to exist under communism. All the lies, and lies about lies, that formed the communist order were built on the basis of this foundational lie: the communist state is the sole source of truth. Orwell expressed this truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Under the dictatorship of Big Brother, the Party understands that by changing language—Newspeak is the Party’s word for the jargon it imposes on society—it controls the categories in which people think. “Freedom” is slavery, “truth” is falsehood, and so forth. Doublethink—“holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”—is how people learn to submit their minds to the Party’s ideology.

If the Party says 2 + 2 = 5, then 2 + 2 = 5. The goal is to convince the person that all truth exists within the mind, and the rightly ordered mind believes whatever the Party says is true.

Orwell writes:

It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

In our time, we do not have an all-powerful state forcing this on us. Under soft totalitarianism, the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in doublethink every day. Men have periods. The woman standing in front of you is to be called “he.”

Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result. To update an Orwell line to our own situation: “The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

I urge you to get a copy of my book and read it — it is essential to learning how to navigate through this new world. Here is a link to the free downloadable study guide. 

Again: this is not about whether or not a teenager needs to have a penis to go to the boy’s restroom in high school. This is ultimately about what it is to be human, and whether or not a free people can be compelled to say, under penalty of law, that 2 + 2 = 5.

Last night’s debate showed why I consider even at this late date withholding my vote from Donald Trump. The reality of how the destructive ideology of transgenderism is moving through the courts, and how it has conquered elites, is why I will not rule out voting for him, despite knowing how bad he is.

It really has come down to this in Weimar America. No room for compromise. Trump didn’t say that — Biden did.

UPDATE: A reader posted this on another thread, but it makes sense here:

Rod, I appreciate the historical frame you put around President Trump’s performance last night. However, it is a stretch expecting him to make a moral and keen argument against transgenderism and its ideological enforcement, the capstone of the Sexual Revolution, when no religious leader of stature in our country, or elsewhere has been able to do this. Not the Pope, not the Orthodox Ecumenical Patriarch, not Tim Keller, not any religious leader of stature, Bishop, or even local priest or pastor. Political leaders need moral guidance and language from somewhere and it cannot be found for any of us. I have been in Protestant and Orthodox communities now for almost 60 years and have begged for moral guidance for us and our children on sexual matters, but I get a suspicious look and am told that we have better ways that don’t require “harsh” moral guidance.

Unfortunately, this is true. I mean, I wouldn’t expect Trump or any politician to give that argument, but the point about the lack of effective religious witness to the truth of marriage and sexuality is inarguable. More to the point, where has the witness been against the gnostic ideas that bodies don’t matter, and that we can be anything we want to be? Trans is becoming so accepted so fast by the young not just because they are being relentlessly propagandized about it, but also because it conforms to what they are taught to believe about human personhood (e.g., that who you are is entirely what you choose to think about yourself).

They have instead wasted all their religious authority and capital talking about being “loving” and “compassionate” — defining that as (in effect) living by therapeutic lies.

I’ve been asked a couple of times in interviews for the book this week if I thought that pastors were prepared for soft totalitarianism. The answer is no, not most of them, no more than the rest of us are.

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The Debate Disaster

I am busy today doing interviews for my book, but I want to make a quick post about last night’s debate. I think it was a landmark in American history — in all the wrong ways.

It was a disgrace, and Donald Trump is almost entirely at fault.

Old Joe Biden is a feeble man, no doubt about it. Trump hit him hard a couple of times in the debate, and showed how weak he is. He is going to be a transitional figure towards a harder, more ideological left, which will dominate him if he is elected president. I expect no good things to come to us from a Biden administration. He refused to say he wouldn’t engage in court-packing. I expect that wokeness will advance throughout the government, paralleling its march through society’s institutions, and that life for conservatives, small-o orthodox Christians, and other dissenters will get much tougher.

Having said that … my God, I never imagined I would see an American president refuse to say he would accept the results of the election if he loses. That’s our democracy, right there. That’s it. A constitutional democratic order depends on the peaceful transfer of power. Trump’s refusal simply to follow the ordinary rules of debate last night — his constant talking over Biden — symbolized his inner refusal to live by the rules that govern our constitutional order. It was repulsive and frightening. He is unfit for office.

He pointedly refused to condemn white supremacists. He disgustingly rubbed Joe Biden’s face in the fact of Hunter Biden’s drug abuse — something that I don’t believe will play well at all with most people. All of us have in our families or circles of friends someone who has struggled with drugs or alcohol. One of the things I admire about Joe Biden is that he has not disowned his failson. I think Hunter Biden’s capitalizing on his father’s power for personal gain is fair game, but for pity’s sake, don’t trash a man’s son for his brokenness with substance abuse. If they weren’t politicians, but two ordinary guys in a bar, I would have loved to have seen Joe Biden walk over and cold-cock Trump for trashing his boy.

I can’t believe I wrote that line about a presidential debate. This is what Trump, the chaos agent, brings to our politics.

What a disaster for Trump! The thing is, Trump really could make some powerful critiques of Biden and the Democrats. When Trump talked about rooting out anti-white racism in the federal government, that should have been a clear winner for Trump. It’s not “racial sensitivity,” as Chris Wallace deceptively framed it, but straight-up racism. Trump is right on that issue. But he didn’t explain that clearly, and his later refusal to condemn white supremacists played right into the hands of the left.

Biden wasn’t great at all, but he won that debate by seeming normal. This is deceptive: Biden described the racist indoctrinations that so many of us are now subjected to in the workplace as mere sensitivity training, teaching people how to be more decent. It’s not true! But he got away with it because Trump seems to irrational. Biden earlier this year described transgender rights as “the civil rights issue of our time.” That is incredibly radical, but nobody sees that because it doesn’t get called out, and because Trump’s maniacal blustering makes Biden, who, like the contemporary Democratic Party, really does advocate radical things, seem like the sane center.

I watched the debate with my family. The kids are older, and understand what’s going on. It was a civic exercise. By the end of it, we all felt sick and angry and anxious — and it was all Trump’s fault. By the end we were shouting at the TV, “Shut up and let him talk!” There was nothing remotely edifying about that display — and again, it was Trump’s fault. What the hell are my kids supposed to think of their country when a bully like that is president, and believes that that’s how a president behaves? Trump turned it into Meet The Press by way of The Jerry Springer Show.

This is so damned depressing. I have just published a book about how the left, driven by social justice warriors, is going to institute soft totalitarianism. Last night showed me how it’s going to happen. Trump is likely to lose this election because a majority of voters are just tired of all the chaos and craziness. Trump defeated himself last night.

Anyway, Trump is likely to lose, and cause a constitutional crisis by contesting the election past any reasonable lines. Removing him is going to be a deeply destabilizing event. He’s not going to go away, either: he’s going to carry on trying to undermine Biden, and urging his supporters toward civil unrest. It seems clear from last night that that is his plan.

This is going to provide an excuse for the Democrats and all their ideological allies throughout American corporate life and institutional life to tighten the vise on anyone who dissents. They are going to do whatever they can to try to prevent another Trump from rising.

This is what Trump’s crackpot bullying is going to cost us. I received this letter this morning from a reader, who gives me permission to publish it without his name:

I am a lawyer in Missouri (not exactly a bastion of progressivism). Missouri has adopted a continuing legal education requirement of 1 hour per year for “implicit bias” training. I was sitting in the webinar yesterday and noted a few things.

The instructor opened up with the following statement: “I don’t want to take time to convince you that implicit bias exists – we all understand that it does.” This is quite a presumption, given that the implicit bias studies have had, generously, mixed results. But I think it’s revelatory that the woke religion is pretty much the default, assumed faith nearly everywhere.

Another interesting thing that was said up front was that our instructor did not want to guilt us.He contrasted his presentation with one he’d attended entitled “We are all criminals” (I’m not kidding). He went on to say that we probably are, but that such an approach would not be “effective.” So, in sum, white lawyers are “criminals” but we’re not going to say it out loud because we want to convince them to get on board. It reminded me of every time the left does or says something reprehensible, there are always the liberal columns that “condemn” the action not on substance, but on the fact that it was a tactical misstep. A prime example would be the torrent of articles to condemn Beto O’Rourke’s promise to strip tax exemption status from religious organizations who didn’t get on board with the new orthodoxy not because it’s wrong, but because it gave conservatives a talking point.

In a profession that is a mere 17% conservative leaning, this will probably go unchallenged. I would be surprised if, in a generation, the legal profession will even tolerate dissenting views within its ranks.

He’s right about that. This is part of the soft totalitarian order that the left is advancing through the institutions right now! We conservatives ought to be on our best game to fight it. Instead, we got the revolting spectacle of Donald Trump last night. Again: he has in principle a powerful case to make against the left. But he’s too lazy and undisciplined to make it. He just trash-talks and bullies. Even if somehow he happens to be re-elected, look for leaders in the many institutions of American society (e.g., law schools) to radicalize even further in opposition to him.

Former TAC editor Dan McCarthy has been one of the most articulate supporters of Trump. But he thought Trump lost last night because of the ridiculous way he behaved:

Trump chose to fight not only Biden but also the debate process and conventional politics itself. The cost of this, besides turning off wavering voters, is that it blotted out most of the substantial arguments that could be made for the president’s agenda.

Exactly! Trump came across as an authoritarian goon. And should Biden win, and the left continues to bring about soft totalitarianism throughout American society, all of us on the right should remember last night’s debate. (Note well that authoritarianism means a consolidation of political power in one person or party; totalitarianism is an extreme form of authoritarianism, which is the consolidation of political power in a society in which everything has been politicized.) Given the power of our enemies, our side needed a skilled fighter; we got a saloon drunk who demeans his office and our democracy. The Greeks were right: character really is destiny.

OK, time to do another interview about Live Not By Lies, which is becoming ever more relevant by the day. It is hard to have watched that spectacle last night and have much hope in our democracy. It was a terrible night for America. It feels like the republic really is dying.

UPDATE: A friend does not share my view:

I spent several weekends camping with Trump supporters this summer. They literally see him as the only thing standing between them and socialism and totalitarianism.

You cannot underestimate the fear of what the Left has become.

This isn’t about personalities. This is about competing views of what our country should be.

Both conservatives and liberals I talk believe the country will split in their lifetime, that union cannot, and perhaps should not, hold.

UPDATE.2: Reader Radur comments:

Thanks for writing this, Rod. I can see some of the parallels that you are seeing with the Romanovs—unforced errors that amplify the discontent of the masses and kindle the fires of revolution.

That’s a good point. Looking back on the history of the Russian Revolution, it does not make the Bolsheviks one bit less evil to point out that the Tsar and the establishment bore some responsibility for bringing this on themselves. From Live Not By Lies:

At dinner in a Russian Orthodox family’s apartment in the Moscow suburbs, I was shaken by our table talk of Soviet oppression through which the father and mother of the household had lived. “I don’t understand how anybody could have believed what the Bolsheviks promised,” I said glibly.

“You don’t understand it?” said the father at the head of the table. “Let me explain it to you.” He then launched into a three hundred-year historical review that ended with the 1917 Revolution. It was a pitiless tale of rich and powerful elites, including church bureaucrats, treating peasants little better than animals.

“The Bolsheviks were evil,” the father said. “But you can see where they came from.”

I believe that what the progressives in the Democratic Party in this country are going to bring on it is going to be disastrous, and yes, evil. But when the history of this revolution is told, what happened last night on that debate stage is going to be a landmark moment in its coming. We conservatives are heavily outmatched, and need a smart, capable, disciplined fighter. What we got was an arrogant man who invites contempt, even of people skeptical of the woke Democrats. He is his own worst enemy, or at least was last night.

Reader Kyle W.:

It’s starting to feel like our present situation differs from the Spanish Civil War mainly in that the Right gets to have in its standard-bearer all the authoritarianism and moral compromise of Franco, without any of the gravitas or managerial competence of Franco. The Left, meanwhile, just needs to openly burn down a few more churches in between all the storefronts, and they’ll fit the bill exactly. God have mercy on us all.

Yes. Once again, I urge you all to watch at least this first episode of a 1980s British TV documentary about the Spanish Civil War. That episode is about the prelude to the war — how both left and right ratcheted the stakes higher and higher, until war was inevitable.

After last night, it is clear to me that one of two things will happen:

Trump will win re-election, and the left will be so rebellious throughout institutions that they will accelerate wokeness as a form of resistance, overwhelming his ability to cope with it; or
Biden will win, and the fallout from Trump’s refusal to accept the results will compel the left — which was already going to accelerate wokeness throughout the government — to undertake that project with even more ardor, claiming that they have to do so to protect the Republic from Trumpism

Either way, America is in trouble. Big trouble. Prepare, while there is time.

UPDATE.3: This comports 100 percent with my experience watching the debate with my family:

in Frank Luntz's focus group, Ruthie from PA (upper right corner) said she was undecided coming into tonight….. but now likes Biden b/c Trump was behaving like a "crackhead" and made the debate impossible to watch pic.twitter.com/NjgvWvnTM9

— Tim Alberta (@TimAlberta) September 30, 2020

I would have walked away from the screen after the first 45 minutes or so if I didn’t feel compelled to watch it for my job. Everything about the way Trump behaved made me despise him — and I say that as someone who might yet vote for him. The constant talking over Biden, and Chris Wallace having to beg the President of the United States to be civil — it was truly a miserable experience.

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