Rod Dreher's Blog, page 111

How (And Why) To Suffer Well

An Orthodox Christian reader saw me on Tucker Carlson Tonight last night, and says she was moved when Tucker asked me how living with the stories from these anti-communist dissidents had changed my thinking — and I answered by telling him that it made me realize more deeply the value of suffering. The reader writes:

You didn’t know when you started Live Not By Lies that it would publish in a year of suffering. You didn’t know about the pandemic. You didn’t know how churches and other religious groups would be singled out during the pandemic. You didn’t write this knowing that John MacArthur would be battling the state of California and city of Los Angeles. You didn’t know that people would be separated from ill and dying loved ones, or unable to attend the funerals of friends. You didn’t know the fear and panic that would fuel our already highly charged election year. You didn’t know about the resurgence of BLM and the riots. You didn’t know that there would be outrage of how and if communion would be distributed in Orthodox churches, or even if those churches would be open at all. You didn’t know about the mass unemployment. You didn’t know this was going to be published after months of our culture suffering.

So I say this seriously, not as trite flattery, that I think this book is to some degree the Holy Spirit at work.

Man, that is some stuff. It made me think about how I have reacted to the Covid stress in my church with a lot less anxiety than I would have normally had. When I would start to feel sorry for myself, not being able to go to church, I would think about the stories I had heard from these people living under communism, who could not go to church at all, or who, if they did manage to go, would have to suffer real persecution from the state for it. Yet they kept the faith. If they had gone to pieces, they would have been ruined. Hearing these stories made me realize that we Christians have to be prepared for the long run. We need to develop patience and forbearance. If we don’t, we’re not going to make it.

And when I have been tempted to pity myself for the fact that Covid has stopped so much of my life, and the lives of my friends, I always go back to the stories of Silvester Krcmery, the young Slovak physician who was a pillar of the underground church in his country. An English translation of his incredible prison memoir exists; I don’t know if it’s still in print, but if it is, get it — it’s one of the most incredible books I’ve ever read. The original Slovak title — This Saved Us — is much better than the anodyne one (Break Point) the English publisher gave it. I quote him in Live Not By Lies:

In totalitarian Czechoslovakia, Kolaković follower Silvester Krčméry emerged as one of the priest’s most important disciples and organizers. Years of Bible study, worship, and personal spiritual practice under the guidance of Father Kolaković prepared the young physician for a long prison term, which began with his arrest in 1951.

The basis for his resistance was the firm conviction that “there could not be anything more beautiful than to lay down my life for God.” When that thought came to Krčméry in the police sedan minutes after his arrest, he burst into laughter. His captors were not amused. But refusing self-pity, and teaching himself to receive whatever the interrogators did to him as an aid to his own salvation, saved Krčméry’s spiritual life.

Behind bars, and subject to all manner of torture and humiliation, Krčméry (pronounced “kirch-MERRY”) kept himself sane and hopeful through cultivating and practicing his faith in a disciplined way and by evangelizing others.

In his memoir, This Saved Us, Krčméry recalls that after repeated beatings, torture, and interrogations, he realized that the only way he would make it through the ordeal ahead was to rely entirely on faith, not reason. He says he decided to be “like Peter, to close my eyes and throw myself into the sea.”

“In my case, it truly was to plunge into physical and spiritual uncertainty, an abyss, where only faith in God could guarantee safety,” he writes. “Material things which mankind regarded as certainties were fleeting and illusory, while faith, which the world considered to be ephemeral, was the most reliable and the most powerful of foundations. The more I depended on faith, the stronger I became.

That’s what saved the prisoner Silvester Krcmery and his fellow prisoners. It’s what’s going to get us through or vastly less severe trials too, if we take this teaching seriously.

Here is another story from Live Not By Lies, about how suffering can draw us closer to God. I took this story from a book of interviews, sermons, and letters by the late Father George Calciu:

Accompanying other persecuted people in their suffering can lead us to deep repentance and spiritual strength. One of Wurmbrand’s fellow Piteşti prisoners was George Calciu, an Orthodox Christian medical student who was eventually ordained a priest. In 1985, he was sent into exile in the United States, where he served at a northern Virginia parish until his death in 2006.

In a lengthy 1996 interview, Father George told about his encounter with a fellow prisoner named Constantine Oprisan. They met when Calciu was transferred from Piteşti to Jilava, a prison that was built entirely underground. The communists put four prisoners in each cell. In his cell was a man named Constantine Oprisan, who was deathly ill with tuberculosis. From their first day in captivity there, Oprisan coughed up fluid in his lungs.

The man was suffocating. Perhaps a whole liter of phlegm and blood came up, and my stomach became upset. I was ready to vomit. Constantine Oprisan noticed this and said to me, “Forgive me.” I was so ashamed! Since I was a student in medicine, I decided then to take care of him . . . and told the others that I would take care of Constantine Oprisan. He was not able to move, and I did everything for him. I put him on the bucket to urinate. I washed his body. I fed him. We had a bowl for food. I took this bowl and put it in front of his mouth.

Constantine Oprisan—“he was like a saint,” Father George said—was so weak that he could barely talk. But every word he said to his cellmates was about Christ. Hearing him say his daily prayers had a profound effect on the other three men, as did simply looking at the “flood of love in his face.”

Constantine Oprisan

Constantine Oprisan was a physical wreck because he had been so badly tortured in Piteşti for three years, reported Father George. Yet he would not curse his torturers and spent his days in prayer.

All the while, we did not realize how important Constantine Oprisan was for us. He was the justification of our life in this cell. Over the course of a year, he became weaker and weaker. We felt that he had finished his time here and would die.

After he died every one of us felt that something in us had died. We understood that, sick as he was and in our care like a child, he had been the pillar of our life in the cell.

After the cellmates washed his body and prepared it for burial, they alerted the guards that Constantine Oprisan was dead. The guards led the men out of the windowless cell for the first time in a year. Then the guard ordered Calciu and another man to take the body outside and bury it. Constantine Oprisan was nothing but skin and bones; his muscle tissue had wasted away. For some reason, the skin pulled tight over his emaciated skeleton had turned yellow.

My friend took a flower and put it on his chest—a blue flower. The guard started to cry out to us and forced us to go back into the cell. Before we went into the cell, we turned around and looked at Constantine Oprisan—his yellow body and this blue flower. This is the image that I have kept in my memory—the body of Constantine Oprisan completely emaciated and the blue flower on his chest.

Looking back on that drama nearly a half century later, Father George said that nursing the helpless Constantine Oprisan in the final year of his life revealed to him “the light of God.”

When I took care of Constantine Oprisan in the cell, I was very happy. I was very happy because I felt his spirituality penetrating my soul. I learned from him to be good, to forgive, not to curse your torturer, not to consider anything of this world to be a treasure for you. In fact, he was living on another level. Only his body was with us—and his love. Can you imagine? We were in a cell without windows, without air, humid, filthy—yet we had moments of happiness that we never reached in freedom. I cannot explain it.

In terms of sacramental theology, a mystery is a truth that cannot be explained, only accepted. The long death of Constantine Oprisan, which gave spiritual life to those who helped him bear his suffering, is just such a mystery.

The stricken prisoner was dying, but because he had already died to himself for Christ’s sake, he was able to be an icon to the others—a window into eternity through which the divine light passed to illuminate the other men in that dark, filthy cell.

I’m telling you: these people, these heroes of the anti-communist resistance, know things we don’t. They have what we need.

When I was in Eastern Europe interviewing these people last year, I heard often how grateful they were to America for providing support and hope for them during the Cold War. Kamila Bendova told me that when the government arrested someone in the dissident movement, Radio Free Europe was talking about it in a flash. They knew they weren’t forgotten. History is a funny thing. We helped them once upon a time, and now they are in a position to help us.

Read more in Live Not By Lies. The stories of these hidden saints must not be forgotten. Here is a link to a free downloadable Study Guide to help you and your church or student group read through the book and talk about how to apply its lessons to your life.

Don’t forget to sign up for Wednesday’s online discussion with J.D. Vance and me about the book! It’s free, but you gotta register:

The post How (And Why) To Suffer Well appeared first on The American Conservative.

Professor Recants Love Of College Football

Early in the Live Not By Lies project, I gathered information from Eastern bloc émigrés to the US, trying to see what they meant when they said that America today was starting to remind them of life under communism. One of the things I heard over and over from academics had to do with the compulsion to confess one’s supposed sins against woke ideology, and to abase oneself for having violated ideological purity. Czechs talked about the show trials of the early 1950s, in particular.

Today, Inside Higher Ed publishes a spectacular example of this in American academia. A sad and broken man named Matthew J. Mayhew, a professor at Ohio State, denounces himself for — well, read it for yourself. Excerpts:

I recently led a piece in Inside Higher Ed titled “Why America Needs College Football.” I am sorry for the hurt, sadness, frustration, fatigue, exhaustion and pain this article has caused anyone, but specifically Black students in the higher education community and beyond.

I am struggling to find the words to communicate the deep ache for the damage I have done. I don’t want to write anything that further deepens the pain experienced by my ignorance related to Black male athletes and the Black community at any time, but especially in light of the national racial unrest. I also don’t want to write anything that suggests that antiracist learning is quick or easy. This is the beginning of a very long process, one that started with learning about the empirical work related to Black college football athletes.

Rather than make excuses, I should talk about which facets of the article that I have recently learned are harmful — through my students, wider social media community and distinguished academics like Donna Ford, Joy Gaston Gayles and Gilman Whiting.

I learned that I could have titled the piece “Why America Needs Black Athletes.” I learned that Black men putting their bodies on the line for my enjoyment is inspired and maintained by my uninformed and disconnected whiteness and, as written in my previous article, positions student athletes as white property. I have learned that I placed the onus of responsibility for democratic healing on Black communities whose very lives are in danger every single day and that this notion of “democratic healing” is especially problematic since the Black community can’t benefit from ideals they can’t access. I have learned that words like “distraction” and “cheer” erase the present painful moments within the nation and especially the Black community.

More:

I am just beginning to understand how I have harmed communities of color with my words. I am learning that my words — my uninformed, careless words — often express an ideology wrought in whiteness and privilege. I am learning that my commitment to diversity has been performative, ignoring the pain the Black community and other communities of color have endured in this country. I am learning that I am not as knowledgeable as I thought I was, not as antiracist that thought I was, not as careful as I thought I was. For all of these, I sincerely apologize.

Read it all. I can’t decide whether it’s hilarious, or a sign of terrible psychosis.

Here is an excerpt from Live Not By Lies:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

Matthew Mayhew does not think college football is racist. He has been psychologically brutalized by bullies into thinking that something innocent that he loved is somehow counterrevolutionary poison. Here’s a link to the piece he wrote last week talking about how great college football is, and how it can bring us together through this Covid crisis. Excerpt:

This election season has demonstrated how stifled, polarized and dangerous our political differences have become, and college football can remind us of respect — even in the wake of deep disagreement. We can root for different teams, scream at the players, argue with the refs and question the coaches, but win or lose, at the end of the day, we leave the stadium, watch party or tailgate with a sense of respect for the game and the athletes that train so hard, leaving it all out on the field every time. Indeed, if a player is injured, the entire stadium usually applauds, not just fans from one team.

Deep difference doesn’t have to lead to disrespect.

In addition, football players become beloved community figures beyond the boundaries of the stadium or campus. Football gives players a platform to make statements about issues they care about. We have seen student athletes taking part in protests and making demands for racial equity. We have seen student athletes kneel to protest police brutality. Colleges and universities should take many more steps to empower athletes to engage with the community. Depriving them the opportunity to play doesn’t accomplish that goal.

Finally, let’s not forget how low the morale of this country has been over the last six months or so. People are fed up with the new conditions and limitations that the coronavirus forced onto their lives, and they need an outlet. They need those lost football Saturdays gathered around the TV. The need the socially responsible tailgate as a means of experiencing some modicum of normalcy. This all may not make sense for the people who did not grow up in places where college football was part of the identity of the state. Here in Ohio, everyone is a Buckeye.

It took only five days for this professor — a man who is quite accomplished — to be reduced to begging forgiveness for the ideological crime of liking college football.

In this excerpt from Live Not By Lies, the Polish poet and dissident Czeslaw Milosz talks about why people like Matthew Mayhew succumb to totalitarianism — and why the collapse of a college professor is a bigger deal than we might think:

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

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

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

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

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

What you learn when you dive into the histories and the literature of the Soviet era is that it was not uncommon for true-believing Communists to denounce themselves, even if they knew that it was a lie, and that they had done no wrong. It was more important for them to preserve the Dream that gave their lives meaning than to even save their own lives. If they had to be destroyed to protect the Lie, so be it.

What a horror show academia has become as the Woke Revolution has proceeded. I can’t say it enough, though: do not think for a minute that this is going to stay on campus, and only affect academics. This way of thinking is spreading like a virus through lots of American institutions. One more passage from Live Not By Lies speaks to the dangers from these ideas being taken up by networks of intellectual elites:

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

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

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

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

Did you ever think college football would be stained by cultural politics? As the Bolsheviks taught, there is no such thing as, for example, “football for football’s sake.” Everything is political. That is what it means to live in a totalitarian society.

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‘Live Not By Lies’: America’s No. 1 Book

I couldn’t believe it when I saw it this morning, but it’s true:

Though some might conclude the lesson here is, “If Uncle Chuckie be for me, who can be against me?”, in fact I think it has a lot to do with the power of Tucker Carlson, who had me on his show last night. I’ve cued the broadcast to the point where my fathead self appears:

If you’re new to this blog, click here for a basic rundown of the ideas in Live Not By Lies.

This morning, with tears in my eyes, I am thinking of all those good men and women of the Eastern bloc, and of Russia, who told me their stories — who told me what they suffered under communism, and how they came through. I am thinking in particular of Frantisek Miklosko in Bratislava, recalling standing next to Bishop Korec, the underground Catholic prelate of his country, as two secret police agents tried to arrest him off the street, but the bishop fought them back. Frantisek saw it happen. I’m thinking about Maria Wittner, now an old lady who lives outside of Budapest, taking up a gun to fight the invading Soviets in 1956, and, on death row, telling me the story of saying goodbye to her cellmate as the young woman was taken to her execution (Wittner survived). I think of Kamila Bendova looking up at me in her Prague apartment, explaining to me why, in the depths of communist persecution, she read Tolkien to her children (“Because we knew that Mordor was real.”) I’m thinking of Alexander Ogorodnikov, tears running down his face, partially paralyzed from prison beatings, as we spoke in a Moscow hotel, and he told me about the miracles he experienced as a prisoner of conscience in some of the roughest Soviet prisons.

There are so many more. They trusted me with their stories, and now I tell them to you in Live Not By Lies. It’s not just a book of interesting stories. All these accounts are there to awaken us Americans to what is happening around us today, and how we should prepare ourselves for it, spiritually and otherwise. This is an aspect of our world’s recent history that has largely been erased. I hope and pray that this book will do something good to make people pay attention again.

And I hope this book will lead people to read Solzhenitsyn, Miłosz, Havel, and all the writers and artists who endured communism, and told the truth. Here is a link to Solzhenitsyn’s 1974 “Live Not By Lies” essay, from which my book gets its title.

If you would like to order my own Live Not By Lies, this link will take you to a page from which you can choose your retailer. As always, Eighth Day Books, an independent bookstore in Wichita, is exclusively handling mail orders of signed copies; order here.

 

UPDATE: For those who have bought the book, download a free Study Guide here, with questions for group consideration.

Also, I have a couple of book-related live web events this week. Tomorrow (Wednesday), J.D. Vance and I talk about the book. It’s free, but you have to register here. 

 

On Friday, you can listen to the author of America’s No. 1 book talk to Britain’s No. 1 Briton, Freddy Gray, by signing up here.

The post ‘Live Not By Lies’: America’s No. 1 Book appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Live Not By Lies’ Is Here

Hello Tucker Carlson Tonight viewers. You might be wondering what Live Not By Lies is about. First, let me say you can order the book from a variety of sources, all linked here. And I hope you will, because the stories these brave resisters from Russia and the Soviet bloc have to tell us are vital to our American future.

Here’s an informational interview I did with myself to introduce people to the book’s concept:

You say that totalitarianism is a real threat to the US. Secret police, commissars, and gulags – can you be serious?

I am serious – in fact, the outlandishness of the claim is a big reason for our vulnerability. I didn’t take it seriously either when people who grew up under Soviet-style totalitarianism started explaining to me what they were seeing emerge here. I came to realize that they were our canaries in the coal mine. But no, I don’t foresee gulags and the usual apparatus of Stalinism coming for us. It will be softer and more subtle than that.

What’s the difference between soft and hard totalitarianism?

Let’s start with some basic definitions. Authoritarianism is when a non-democratic government has a monopoly on politics. Totalitarianism is when an authoritarian government expands its claim to power to cover every aspect of life – including the inner life of its citizens. Stalinism, or hard totalitarianism, achieved that through terror and pain. This kind of system is what every American high school student read about in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. I wouldn’t say it could never come here, but I don’t really think it will.

Instead, we are building a kinder, gentler version. What awakened the Soviet-bloc emigres is the way political correctness has jumped over the walls of the universities and is both intensifying and spreading through society’s institutions. The forms it takes, the language that it uses to justify itself, and the way that it tolerates absolutely no dissent – all of this is truly totalitarian.

What makes it soft? A couple of things. First, it is emerging within a democratic system, within the institutions of liberal democracy, without a state monopoly on power. Second, and more importantly, the emerging totalitarian system will not coerce compliance through pain and terror, but more from manipulating our comforts, including status. It will be more like the dystopia in Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World. That’s more pleasant to live through than Nineteen Eighty-Four, but it’s still totalitarian, and it will still have major long-term effects.

Communism is the complete antithesis of capitalism, but you say there’s a role for capitalism in the coming soft totalitarianism. Explain.

This is the most fascinating aspect of the emerging system – and the one conservatives are least likely to understand, because they operate from an outdated model of “Big Business good, Big Government bad.” In the book, I write about “woke capitalism,” which is what you have when major corporations sign on to culturally progressive causes. In a capitalist society like ours, corporations have been much more important than the state in mainstreaming progressive values.

Plus, given the role that “data mining” – the harvesting of individual personal data from the Internet and smartphone apps – plays in the now-dominant economic model, the role woke companies will play in manufacturing consent for progressive values and policies will be paramount.

What are the signs of a pre-totalitarian society?

In 1951, the great political theorist Hannah Arendt published The Origins of Totalitarianism, the results of her investigation into how Nazism and Communism arose. Though the two ideologies were very different in most respects, they appealed to the same longings in the masses, who saw in them a solution to their grave problems. Reading Arendt in our time was shocking to me, because I realized that most of the signs of a pre-totalitarian society are flashing strongly in ours.

For example, Arendt said that loneliness was the greatest source of totalitarianism – that desperately lonely people were looking for meaning, purpose, and solidarity with others. They found it in totalitarian political ideology. Sociologists have been warning for years now that we have reached dangerously unhealthy levels of loneliness and atomization in our “Bowling Alone” society.

Also, the loss of respect for hierarchy, traditional authority, and the decline of the institutions of civil society, opened the door for totalitarianism. The desire to transgress – that is, to destroy things for the sake of destroying them – were key factors. Another: the willingness of the masses to believe things they knew were untrue, or probably untrue, but that made them feel good.

There are others. None of this means that totalitarianism is inevitable, but it means we are especially susceptible to it. Arendt said that liberal societies will always have to contend with an inner voice that says it can’t happen here, when the 20th century proves that yes, it actually can.

You are a conservative, but you don’t say “vote for Trump” or “vote for Republicans” to stop this soft totalitarianism. Why not?

Because I don’t think politics can do much to stop it at this point. In fact, believing that stopping it is simply a matter of voting Republican is one reason we conservatives have failed to see it coming. Don’t get me wrong – it does help to vote Republican, because we know with the Democrats, wokeness is going to be accelerated and imposed throughout the government. But we should not have false hope. As I explain in the book, the factors leading to soft totalitarianism are complex and vast. What’s coming cannot be stopped through politics alone. As I explain in the book, our culture has declined to the point where many people — especially those under 40 — actually want what soft totalitarians are offering, because it seems just to them.

Let’s talk about some of the things you suggest people can do to resist. What do you mean by “live not by lies”?

That was the title of the final essay the great Soviet dissident Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn distributed to the Russian people before he was sent into exile in 1974. In it, Solzhenitsyn acknowledged that ordinary people were powerless to change the situation under totalitarianism, but one thing they could all do is refuse to pretend like they didn’t see what was going on, or that they agreed with it. The whole system was a lie, and to the extent that they could, men and women of integrity should refuse to consent or cooperate.

For us, this means refusing whenever we can to bend our knees to what the so-called “social justice warriors” demand. Refuse to say that we believe something when we don’t. This is going to require us to be prepared to suffer for the truth – but what else can we do?

There are many other things people can do to resist, right?

Yes, and I talk about them at length in the book. All of these strategies came to me from the people who actually had to live under Communism. They tell me that we should start right now forming small groups of trusted people we can count on. We should begin educating ourselves about real history, real art, real literature – this, as opposed to the politically correct propaganda versions. Parents need to make sure their families are strong, and that they are teaching their children the importance of living in truth, not conforming to have an easy life.

Most of all, we need to learn how to suffer. Over and over again, in the testimonies of those who endured persecution, I learned that the ability to suffer for one’s faith, and for the truth, was the key factor in what got them through the terrible trial of totalitarianism. We middle-class American Christians have been raised in a shallow, feelgood form of the faith – and it will not be enough to sustain us when the persecution starts. I hope my Christian readers take this message very seriously.

The subtitle of your book is “A Manual For Dissident Christians.” Is there nothing here for people who aren’t Christians?

To the contrary, though I wrote Live Not By Lies as a Christian for my fellow Christians, there is a lot non-believers can learn from it. Christians were not the only dissidents from Soviet tyranny. Vaclav Havel, the imprisoned playwright and future president of post-communist Czechoslovakia, was an agnostic liberal, and is one of the heroes of my tale. Christians have particular strengths through their religious convictions that will help them build resistance, but the lessons in this book about solidarity, about preserving cultural memory, and about developing the capacity to suffer for the truth – these are universally valid.

In our own American situation, I look to non-Christians like James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, Bret Weinstein, Ben Shapiro, Heather Heying, and others as vital allies.

You dedicate Live Not By Lies to the memory of Father Tomislav Kolakovic. Who was he, and why does he matter to your story?

He was a Catholic priest who arrived in Slovakia in 1943, fleeing the Gestapo. He told students at the Catholic university that their country was going to fall to Communism after the war, and that as Christians, they needed to prepare themselves. The Communists were going to severely persecute the Church. Some bishops thought he was alarmist, but Father Kolakovic got busy organizing young people into cells for prayer and study – including studying the art of building a resistance.

In 1948, the Iron Curtain fell over their country. Everything Father Kolakovic predicted came true. But the network of faithful Christians he had built around Slovakia became the backbone of the underground church. I dedicate Live Not By Lies to him because I think it’s 1943 in America today, and we all need to look to his example for guidance and inspiration.

In fact, it’s strange how history moves. When I was in the Soviet bloc interviewing people who survived Communism, some of them talked about how grateful they were to Americans for standing with them during the Cold War, and offering them hope. Now, as a very different kind of totalitarianism threatens us in the West, they are in a position to return the gift of solidarity and hope. The stories these people trusted me with, and that I tell in the book, are going to be seen one day as a lifeline to truth, to sanity, and to hope.

The book is Live Not By Lies. Because of Covid, there won’t be a book tour, I’m sorry to say. If you’d like a signed copy, order it exclusively through this link at Eighth Day Books in Wichita.

UPDATE: This is the kind of thing I’m talking about. The person who tweeted with Shadi Hamid is Joe Biden’s deputy data director for Pennsylvania. She is young, well-educated (Mount Holyoke ’17), and … well, look:

 

The Biden staffer has protected her Twitter account now, as well she might. I don’t believe you can ascribe the views of a Biden campaign staffer to Joe Biden, any more than you could do the same for a Trump staffer at that level. That said, what this Biden worker wants to see happen — that orthodox Christian, Jewish, and Islamic belief about sexuality will become disqualifying for public positions — is exactly what progressives are working for. Note well: it’s not just that people like this 25-year-old Biden staffer opposes religious orthodoxy — that’s perfectly understandable — but that she considers that simply professing to believe these things ought to make you unfit for public service.

They are going to do their best to write this discrimination into law, as soon as they can. It may take time, but they have the elites already, especially the younger ones. How will you fight this? How will you and your family endure should these people come fully to power? That’s what Live Not By Lies is about.

 

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Trump Might Be Broke — But Not Woke

You saw the big Times story about Trump’s taxes, right? It’s not good. If it’s true, then Trump is more or less broke, and he hasn’t paid taxes for years. He has $400 million in loan payments coming due in the next few years. No wonder he didn’t want people to see his tax documents. Though I will say that Trump is doing what all the rich do: using his fortune to buy the expertise that allows him to avoid — legally — paying a hell of a lot of taxes.

Take Apple, for example:

Apple quietly sidestepped a crackdown on its much-maligned Ireland tax avoidance practice by moving its overseas operation to the tax haven of the Channel Island of Jersey, documents leaked from an offshore law firm revealed.

The move, beginning in 2015, allowed Apple to continue to avoid paying billions of dollars in taxes.

Apple, the most valuable and most profitable company in the world, had been paying a corporate income tax of 5 percent or less thanks to a loophole in US and Ireland tax law, according to reports.

That is much less than the 12.5 percent Irish corporate tax rate and the 35 percent top US corporate tax rate.

The loophole, known as the “double Irish,” is perfectly legal.

Apple made $92 billion in the first quarter of FY 2020, according to the company — and 61 percent of that revenue was in overseas sales. That’s about $50 billion. You know what the corporate tax rate on Jersey is? Zero.

I’m not saying this to defend Trump, especially because the massive loan payments coming due really does raise conflict of interest issues with his presidency. But I am saying that the problem of skinflint ultrawealthy tax dodgers is not limited to short-fingered Orange Men from Manhattan.

I guess this is kind of an October Surprise from the Times‘s point of view. I’m trying to bring myself to care more about it, but I gotta be honest, here’s what I’m thinking about this afternoon.

I received a letter from a teacher. I won’t say where, to protect the teacher’s identity. The teacher writes:

I am a high school teacher in [state] and one of my students recently chose to change his gender. We are now asked to call him by his chosen feminine name and use all female pronouns. I am at a loss as to how to respond. I want to stand for what is true, beautiful, and good, but I also want to show compassion and love. I would also be disingenuous if I did not mention my fear of being terminated or publicly vilified. This sentiment may display cowardice, but it is real.

This is what is happening all over. This teacher is going to have to violate their conscience, and cooperate with a lie — or lose their job, and be treated as a pariah.

I also received this letter from a reader. I have edited it to protect his identity. He writes:

As I regular reader of your articles and blog (I also pre-ordered you book) I know you get many emails from people coming under attack for not towing the Woke line.

Today they came for me.

I am a CFO at [company name and location]. I live in [city] and my wife and I proudly fly a Blue Lives Matter flag in front of our home.

Today, the CEO of my company and three other executives received anonymous letters. The letters included a picture of my home and identified me by name, title and home address. It stated next to the picture:

“Proudly flying a white supremacist flag in his front yard. Do you encourage your employees to demonstrate their racist views?”

I have attached a copy of the letter.

I assume there will be pressure on my company to fire me now or risk public shaming.

This is just insane. I am concerned for my family now and am having an alarm system with cameras installed. I cannot understand what our country has become. I do not recognize it.

We’ll keep the flag flying. We won’t back down.

The reader gave me permission to post the anonymous letter the harasser sent to his employer, as long as I blacked out his name, address, and the address of his company:

 

What is happening to that teacher and to that business executive could happen to any of us — and The New York Times would support it. In fact, the Times is leading the way in creating a cultural climate of persecution for people like the teacher and the executive.

Are you more worried about Donald Trump’s taxes or the woke persecutors who would happily come for your job, or force you to violate your conscience to hold on to your livelihood? I wish Donald Trump were a more honest man in all of his dealings. But Donald Trump does not threaten the jobs of ordinary schoolteachers and businessmen who support the police. The woke do.

Donald Trump is not leading a crusade to destroy the gender binary, which is one of the things civilization depends on to survive; The New York Times is. Donald Trump does not vilify the police; the progressive left does. The New York Times promotes shoving hateful racial identity politics down everybody’s throat; thanks to the efforts of Chris Rufo, the Trump administration is trying to stop it, at least in the federal government.

I didn’t vote in the 2016 presidential election, and I have been critical of Trump in this space. But I tell you, if he were the real threat to our way of life, I wouldn’t have had a book to write. I had to write Live Not By Lies because the Left holds all the institutional high ground — including in corporate suites — and will do its best to impose soft totalitarianism on the country. American immigrants who grew up under communism are seeing their adopted country looking more and more like what they left behind. My book is both a wake-up call, based on their testimonies, and a manual for how to resist what the Left is throwing at us.

Rich guys have always avoided taxes in this country. Ordinary people have never before lost their jobs for refusing to pretend that boys are really girls. Ordinary people have never faced anonymous campaigns to be fired as racist for supporting the police.

Hey, I’m going to be on Tucker Carlson’s show tonight talking about this, and my new book. Tune in if you can.

UPDATE: Let me balance this comment by something I talked about on Tucker tonight. Here’s a quote from Live Not By Lies — a story I told on TV tonight:

All the young are candidates for the solutions of communism or fascism when there are no alternatives to despair or dissipation.

—Nadine Gordimer

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.”

The Russian man was right. I was chastened. The cruelty, the injustice, the implacability, and at times the sheer stupidity of the imperial Russian government and social order in no way justifies all that followed—but it does explain why the revolutionary Russian generation was so eager to place its hope in communism. It promised a road out of the muck and misery that had been the lot of the victimized Russian peasant since time out of mind.

The history of Russia on the verge of left-wing revolution is more relevant to contemporary America than most of us realize.

I am far more concerned with the woke coming after people like my teacher reader and my business executive reader. But if the rich — including Donald Trump — continue to exploit their status, especially when, as Nadine Gordimer said in the quote I use to introduce this chapter, “there are no alternatives to despair and dissipation” then they will bring a calamity onto this country.

UPDATE.2: Getting dragged in the comments by people who actually know how taxes and finance work, and who say I’ve gotten some things wrong. I confess, it’s no doubt true. I’m terrible at things involving cipherin’.

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Wokeness Comes For Dawkins

Did you see that the Woke at Trinity College Dublin have no-platformed Richard Dawkins, of all people? They are afraid that his criticism of religion will offend, get this, Muslims. Had he come to trash Catholics, they would have been all for it, but we mustn’t cause any distress to Muslims. The Woke are also afraid that Dawkins’s past commentary on sexual harassment could trigger women.

MBD makes an excellent point:

More evidence of @matthewschmitz Trad-None vs Woke dynamic of the time. Trads were anxious and happy to debate Richard Dawkins. Wokes won’t have it. https://t.co/IMlIdQZ7x3

— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) September 28, 2020

People desperately need to understand that the fight with the Woke is ultimately a war of religion. In my new book Live Not By Lies, I talk about how the contemporary Woke, like the Bolshevik revolutionaries of over a century ago, are driven by an essentially religious fanaticism. They don’t believe in God, but they hold their beliefs with the same kind of zealotry, and they consider those beliefs to be unfalsifiable. Somebody like Dawkins must not even be given a platform to spread his error, you see.

In my book, I credit the work of James Lindsay. He’s not a religious believer, but secularists like him, his colleague Helen Pluckrose, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, and others, are indispensable allies to we on the religious and cultural right who are trying to resist this cancerous ideological pseudo-religion.

With that in mind, here’s something really interesting. Sarah Haider, an ex-Muslim who is an activist for secularism, has started a letter exchange with Ayaan Hirsi Ali, another ex-Muslim.  She begins by saying that they aren’t going to be complaining about intolerant Muslims, but about the Woke. Haider says that she cannot even get her own people — liberals — to take her criticism of religion seriously because they don’t want to hear anything critical of Muslims. It’s not because they feel sympathetic to Islam; it’s because it is considered unwoke to criticize Muslims.

Haider writes:

Over the previous few decades, a new ideology had taken hold throughout liberal and progressive circles: writer and cultural critic Wesley Yang called it “the successor ideology,” but now it’s more usually called wokeism. At its core, this ideology is a delegitimization project—and it targets the very foundations of humanist, Enlightenment values. Wokeism is not the only movement to exploit the same programming that makes us vulnerable to religion. But it has achieved astounding success because it has also managed to neutralize liberals, who might otherwise stand against religious impulses, by hijacking our caring instinct, and by ruthlessly exploiting social dynamics to crush dissent.

Before we dive in too deeply, I would like to elaborate on a point I made in a private conversation prior to this exchange, which seemed to surprise you. I will repeat it here for the benefit of our audience: I believe that what we are witnessing is not the dawn of open war, but its conclusion. The woke have won, and decisively. But all is never truly lost, and this is not a prelude to submission. My approach is one of pragmatic optimism: In order to fight this—and we must fight it—we need to understand what lies ahead of us.

She goes on:

Wokeism has won because it has captured our cultural and sense-making institutions.

Nearly all our educational, media, and non-profit institutions (including major grant-making organizations) are advancing in one direction. Meanwhile, the hearts and minds of the global elite are almost uniformly supportive of this new secular faith.

Read it all. 

It’s really insightful, and important. In Live Not By Lies, I talk about how important it is for dissident Christians to ally themselves with non-believers who nevertheless recognize wokeness for the danger that it is to values we hold in common. Haider echoes a fundamental point of my book: that this fight is almost over before most people realize it has begun.

This is not a defeatist attitude, but a realistic one. If Haider didn’t think the fight was worth having, she wouldn’t be writing about it. What she’s trying to do is to convince her readers to understand the battlefield realities. Wokeness really has captured all the institutional high ground — and this is going to make fighting it much, much harder than most people think. From Live Not By Lies:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter.

Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed

networks and powerful institutions.”

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

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

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

transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.

This, I think, is what Sarah Haider is pointing to: that these fanatics have gained control of institutions, and are creating a brave new world for us all.

I was on Ben Shapiro’s show today, and unfortunately the interview ended before I got around to talking about where our hope should come from. Live Not By Lies is full of stories and advice from men and women of the former Soviet bloc who tell us how to prepare for this reality. All resistance has to begin with recognizing the true nature of the enemy. Sarah Haider and I no doubt disagree about a lot of things, and I don’t want to downplay those differences too much. But we are on the same page when it comes to the Woke, and their threat to fundamental liberties like the right to free speech, freedom of association, and freedom of religion (or, in some cases, freedom from religion). Wokeism is about delegitimizing not only the Enlightenment, but all that came before it too in the West: Christianity. It is about delegitimizing everything that is not itself. And as Haider says, it has control of many institutions and corporations.

This matters. Prepare to fight. Christopher Rufo is doing fantastic work exposing Critical Race Theory in the federal government, and convincing the president and his team to root it out. But this struggle is going to be very long and difficult, and winning it is going to require measures of faith, fellowship, and endurance that many of us have never faced.

UPDATE: This. A thousand million times this:

Again, I urge you to remember that we've merely achieved a line just in from the beachhead with the federal EO against Critical Race Theory. Almost all of the relevant territory is completely occupied and rapidly installing more machinery of war. pic.twitter.com/zG6I9glslD

— James Lindsay, big swords very up (@ConceptualJames) September 28, 2020

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People Of Praise: A Benedict Option

Back when I was researching The Benedict Option, someone I met at a conference told me that I should look into People Of Praise, an ecumenical (but mostly Catholic) charismatic community to which he belonged. I heard about it too late in the writing process to do as he said, but I’ve kept them in mind over the years. Now that a member of that community, Amy Coney Barrett, has been nominated to the US Supreme Court, we are all finding out a lot more about People Of Praise.

I can certainly see why the young man advised me to look into People Of Praise as a Benedict Option community — because it is! Excerpts from National Catholic Register:

In the heady days that marked the birth of the Charismatic Renewal movement in the 1960s and 1970s, many Catholics and other Christians sought to deepen their faith by forming and joining covenant communities — including the People of Praise community that is reportedly associated with Judge Amy Coney Barrett.

Modeling their lives on those of the early Christians in the New Testament Book of Acts, some sold their houses, relocated and pooled resources to become part of communities that they hoped would offer them a greater degree of fellowship and support than might be found at a typical prayer meeting or Sunday Mass.

More:

Founded in South Bend in 1971, the ecumenical People of Praise has 1,700 members in 22 cities in the U.S., Canada and the Caribbean. Members are Catholic, Anglican, Lutheran, Methodist, Pentecostal and nondenominational Christians, with each attending his or her own church in addition to community worship gatherings.

Although members do not take vows, after several years of prayer and discernment they can make a covenant, or permanent commitment, to the group indicating their support of the community. Each member also has a spiritual director or guide known as a head who provides practical and spiritual advice based on the Spiritual Exercises of St. Ignatius.

Aaaaaaaaaah, I wish I had discovered these people earlier! Here’s some material from a Politico story that sees People Of Faith in a somewhat sinister light: 

What’s difficult to understand outside South Bend, however, is just how deeply integrated this group is into the local community. Though the group has only a few thousand local members, and keeps a low profile as an organization, its influence and footprint in the city are significant. That influence, and its resistance to liberal changes in the wider culture, are likely to arise as issues in her Supreme Court nomination hearings, expected to begin Oct. 12.

People of Praise includes several prominent local families, including realtors and local financial advisers, who act as a sort of professional network for families in the group and provide considerable social capital to its members. In South Bend mayoral elections, campaigns have been known to strategize about winning over People of Praise as a constituency, given the fact that they live close together in several neighborhoods. The group runs Trinity School at Greenlawn, a private intermediate and high school that is considered by some to be the best—and most conservative—school in South Bend.

No “head for the hills” there, you see! But what’s wrong with them, from Politico‘s point of view? This, about Trinity School:

The school publishes a “cultural statement” laying out its views on social issues. It articulates a clear, conservative Christian set of values, including discouraging sex before marriage and cautioning students who experience same-sex attraction from “prematurely interpret[ing] any particular emotional experience as identity-defining.” It also appears to have been at odds with American law while Barrett served on the board: A version of the statement from the 2018-19 school year, provided to POLITICO by the parent of an alum, says: “the only proper place for human sexual activity is marriage, where marriage is a legal and committed relationship between one man and one woman.” “Homosexual acts” are said to be “at odds with Scripture.” A spokesman for the school said the language changed around the 2018-2019 school year, meaning it would have been in place during Barrett’s tenure as a board member from 2015 to 2017—and well after the Supreme Court decision Obergefell v. Hodges, which in 2015 legalized same-sex marriage nationwide.

The current version still disapproves of same-sex marriage:“We understand marriage to be a legal and committed relationship between a man and a woman and believe that the only proper place for sexual activity is within these bounds of conjugal love.” The spokesman also added that there is a new passage rejecting “any form of harassment, bullying, verbal abuse or intimidation by any member of the Trinity School community towards any other member for any reason,” including a “student’s sex, race, ethnicity, religion, sexuality or perceived sexuality.”

“At odds with American law”?! Perhaps the piece’s author needs to be reminded that while same-sex marriage is constitutionally mandated, according to the Supreme Court, religious organizations retain the right to run themselves according to their beliefs. There was and is nothing at all illegal about the sexual code of conduct at Trinity School. It is unpopular with journalists and now outside the mainstream, but it is completely consonant with what the Catholic Church teaches, and with what traditional Christians of all confessions believe.

And liberals wonder why so many of us religious traditionalists worry about the decline in respect for First Amendment guarantees of religious liberty. By the way, one more bit from that Politico story:

A White House spokeswoman said Barrett had no involvement in crafting the statement, but it aligns with her public views on the subject:sheco-signed a letter to Catholic bishops, dated 3 months after the Obergefell decision, affirming that marriage is the “indissoluble commitment of a man and a woman.” In a 1998 article “Catholic Judges in Capital Cases,” she referred to abortion as “always immoral.”Barrett has also said these views would not impact her jurisprudence. “It’s never appropriate for a judge to impose that judge’s personal convictions—whether they derive from faith or anywhere else—on the law,” she said during her 2017 confirmation.

Since I began this blog entry, I see that the piece’s author, Adam Wren, has indicated on Twitter that he is not saying that what People Of Praise do with the school is illegal. A more charitable reading would be that it is at odds with changing standards, including legal standards. If so, I hope he will rewrite that line to be clearer. Conservative Christians are jumpy about this stuff for a reason. We know that the existence of our institutions depends on the willingness of a post-Christian majority (or at least a majority that includes non-believers and Christians who have assimilated the Sexual Revolution) to tolerate our fidelity to Biblical and Church teachings.

Anyway, though as I have said before, the charismatic style of Christianity is not my jam, I am very pleased to learn about People Of Praise. Looks like we are about to get our first Benedict Option Supreme Court justice! When the rights of schools like Trinity and religious groups like People Of Praise to exist come before the High Court, I will be so very, very glad if Amy Coney Barrett is there to hear the cases and argue about it among her colleagues.

By the way, my friend Warren Farha, the Eighth Day Books owner who is exclusively handling signed pre-ordered copies of Live Not By Lies (pre-order here), tells me that he is also selling more copies of The Benedict Option these days, as people’s interest in Live Not By Lies is making them curious about what came before. Good — it should. They are companion books. You don’t have to have read The Benedict Option to understand anything about Live Not By Lies, but if you liked TBO, then LNBL is a variation on and intensification of the theme of Christian cultural resistance.

UPDATE: Oh brother:

For the uninitiated, the “Boromir Option” refers to the character from Lord Of The Rings who wants to seize the Ring and use its power for Good. The idea here is that ACB represents the opposite of the Ben Op — that she stands for advancing Christianity through controlling institutions.

This is really dumb. For one thing, ACB received her formation as a Catholic in large part through a thick Christian community. This is very quickly becoming necessary for all Christians in this post-Christian society. More importantly, though, faith comes neither through legislation nor judicial rulings. The best Christians can hope for is that judges and lawmakers will make it possible for us to live our lives fully as Christians, even in the public square. If we expect politicians or magistrates to Christianize our families and communities, we are fools.

It will be great to have ACB on the High Court in part because she can presumably be counted on as a vote to defend religious liberty. The justices will not catechize your children, nor lead your family or church in lives of spiritual discipline. That’s not their role. I’m thrilled by her nomination, and I think that conservative federal judges are going to be the last line of defense that traditional religious believers have in the decades to come. It really matters who runs our institutions. But come on, people, don’t sit there and feel smug and secure that one of us is nominated to the Supreme Court, while your kids are having their faith taken from them by this post-Christian culture. We could have nine Amy Coney Barretts on the Supreme Court, and it would not move the needle on conversion or retention of the Christian faith. What we must hope and pray for is that SCOTUS makes it possible for groups like People Of Praise, Trinity School, and other religious institutions to be true to themselves, even in a hostile social and political climate.

UPDATE.2: A couple of readers say that I’ve misread the meme, that it was meant to show the tension between the Boromir Option and the Benedict Option, as manifest in ACB’s life — not the superiority of one to the other. That makes sense, and if I have erred, as I seem to have done, then I apologize to the meme maker.

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Evil Progressive Adoption Politics

You have seen, maybe, Ibram Kendi raise questions about Jesse and Amy Coney Barrett’s adoption of black children from Haiti. I did not realize how serious, and how inhuman, the movement within adoption circles is to destroy families composed of white parents and adopted kids of non-white backgrounds. A friend sent this in from an adoption e-mail list he’s part of:

The past several days have seen exactly the attacks I predicted on Judge Amy Coney Barrett’s family. Upon learning that she and her husband adopted two children from Haiti, I knew those attacks were inevitable. They have nevertheless come as a surprise to people outside the adoption sphere, so it is worth taking a moment to explain the progressive critique of adoptive families. It’s real, and it’s growing. In the attacks on the Barrett family, Americans who don’t move in adoption circles are getting to see what those of us who do have been seeing for several years now.

I’ll start by putting my cards on the table vis a vis our own family, identity, and adoption.

My wife and I are the very proud parents of two adopted boys. I am Mexican-American, and she is what we call in Texas plain Anglo. We are both racially classified, as far as the United States Census is concerned, as white. Both of our sons are Chinese. Our oldest son looks (inasmuch as human phenotypes mean anything) like a stereotypical southern Han, which is to say someone from Guangdong or Taiwan, although he was found abandoned somewhat to the north, in Ningbo. Our youngest son was found abandoned in Shanghai, and despite that southerly origin he looks very much like a stereotypical northern Han — or even Manchurian, or Mongolian, or Korean. Someday we’ll do the DNA test and learn more. Both came to us with special needs: the eldest with severe vision issues that will afflict him for a lifetime, and the youngest with potentially serious conditions that — thank God — are mostly resolved. The youngest was also subjected to a harsh orphanage environment that included, as far as we know, severe food deprivation and probably worse.

All this is background. The boys are doing well now. They seem happy to be with us — and for us, they are the joy of our lives. All told, since we started our first adoption process, we have been engaged in adoption-related conversations online and off for just over half a decade.

In these five years or so, we have come to learn that there is a loud and persistent cohort among progressives who very much disapprove of our family’s existence. The disapproval is rooted in the simple fact of whites parenting nonwhites. It is worth exploring in some detail.

Here are a few assumptions I brought with me into adoption:

All things being equal, for a child, any family is preferable to any institution or orphanage.
The most important thing, and the one essential thing, that a parent can bring to a child is love.
A child’s culture of origin is important, but considerably less important than the imperative of having a family of any culture.

The quality and efficacy of parenting is wholly independent of a parent’s race or ethnicity.
The quality and efficacy of parenting is wholly independent of a child’s race or ethnicity.
A “trans-racial” adoption holds the potential for just as close a parent-child relationship as any other.

None of these items are the product of any unique insight on my part. They’re common-sense understandings of the human condition, backed by longstanding research and experience in human development, and rooted in the universal truths that we are created in the image of a God who is definitionally love. They reflect what most normal people think about families and children in general.

Modern progressive ideology rejects every single one of these propositions — and affirms the opposite. I wish to be clear as to what I mean by “modern progressive ideology” here. I do not mean the old-school left of an elderly Catholic ladies’ circles worried about Reagan’s policy in El Salvador. I do not mean the working-class left that thinks private-sector unions are a good idea. I do not even mean the overwhelming majority of the American left prior to, say, 2008, who believed that there are only two genders and marriage consists of their union.

I mean the modern progressives for whom race, and racial essentialism, are the foundational constructs of their own power-based analysis of all human society, all human interaction, and all human relationships.

For that sort of individual — and there are quite a few of them these days — you can see immediately how a two white people parenting two Chinese boys, or two white people parenting two Haitian children, or white parents with any nonwhite children whatsoever, is fundamentally problematic. More than problematic: it is an intrinsically wrong scenario that, in their eyes, should have never been allowed to happen.

Take that list of assumptions above. Here are the modern-progressive ripostes to each of them:

For a child, an institution or orphanage is sometimes preferable to a parent of a different racial identity.

The most important thing, and the one essential thing, that a parent can bring to a child is racial affirmation.

A child’s culture of origin is surpassingly important, often more important than the imperative of having a family of any culture.

The quality and efficacy of parenting is dependent upon a parent’s race or ethnicity.

The quality and efficacy of parenting is dependent upon a child’s race or ethnicity.

A “trans-racial” adoption holds a uniquely fraught potential for parent-child division and discord.

Several of these propositions fly in the face of everything science and empiricism tell us about human development. No child ever preferred to be in a loveless environment with racial counterparts, over a loving family with racially different parents. What happened to Harlow’s infamous rhesus monkeys happens to children too: deprived of touch, attention, and care, they physiologically and psychologically wither. To have no parents is a profoundly existential threat: it is almost literally a slow death. (Here I would encourage readers to look up the heartbreaking “Can An Unloved Child Learn to Love?” on survivors of Romania’s horrific orphanage system, in the July 2020 issue of The Atlantic.)

We saw it in our own children. Our youngest child came from an admittedly abusive environment, but our eldest — having had the good fortune to land in a privately supported (though not private) institution — came from a place where he was generally well cared for, and even had some meaningful attention and attachment. Yet even he, in Ningbo, did not fully thrive. When we adopted him, his skin was sallow, and at two and a half years old, he could hardly chew food. We are still working on minor issues with him that are a consequence of that early neglect: grip strength, for example, necessary to do something as simple as write with a pencil. To emphasize, he was lucky. There are children in worse straits, who are never held, and simply die. (Here you may look up the 1995 documentary “The Dying Rooms,” which is still available on YouTube, on Chinese children deliberately consigned to death-through-neglect in PRC state institutions of that era.)

Why would modern progressives object to saving children from environments — and fates — like this? The answer lies in the fanatical ideological commitment to the twin pillars of racial essentialism and power dynamics.

The former, on racial essentialism, is usually (though not always!) accompanied by a racist disdain for whites that mirrors the assumed racist disdain whites feel, in their imaginations, for nonwhites. (Here you might look up Michael Harriot of The Root: “Jessica is a white woman. You cannot wish worse upon her than that.”) Even absent that sentiment, there remains a belief that a white person, possessing some Platonic form of white-ness, cannot fundamentally raise or relate to a nonwhite person, who possesses in turn some Platonic form of nonwhite-ness (or blackness, or Asian-ness, and so on). This is the adoption-community counterpart to identitarian extremism elsewhere: for example, in denying that a white author can write a nonwhite character in her novel, or in denying that a white professor can teach history involving nonwhites, or in asserting that a white person is disqualified from engaging in rational discourse or argument with a nonwhite person. It is an outright denial of the ability of humans to form bonds on the basis of a common humanity — of companionship, of friendship, of love.

(As an aside, when confronted with this sort of thing from progressives in the adoption sphere, I was always able to play the Mexican card — and it always worked. It didn’t work because it actually means anything significant. My Mexican identity is quite obviously attenuated at best, though no white progressive who realized it, fearful of identity crimethink, ever had the courage to say so. It worked because a caste-based worldview grinds to halt when confronted by an amalgamation of a favored and disfavored caste. Typically when that admixture exists, the subject chooses the favored caste. In my case, were I a progressive, that would mean going full Mexican. To choose both has basically the same effect as Captain Kirk telling the evil planetary computer to “REFUSE THIS ORDER”: the machine starts to smoke and rattle, and the robot slave wardens drop dead.)

The latter pillar, the reduction of all human relations to plain power dynamics — literally the Leninist “ Кто? Кого?” concept — conceives of a parent-child relationship exactly as it does a boss-worker relationship, or a ruler-ruled relationship. What normal people perceive as welcoming a child into their homes in the course of an adoption, these ideologues understand as an acquisition or a conquest. (Here see Dr Ibram X Kendi’s now-infamous tweet, endorsed by fellow racial essentialist Richard Spencer, characterizing the “colonizer” quality of the Barrett family’s adoptions.) We should acknowledge here that there are obviously adoptions that present the appearance of self-serving acquisition — the recent James and Myka Stauffer adoption-and-abandonment of a special-needs child from China being one example, and the guilty-pleasure 1981 “Mommie Dearest” depicting another. Nevertheless these are a vanishingly small minority of the whole. Something like 135,000 adoptions take place in the United States each year, the overwhelming majority involving much work, much expense, and little fanfare. The progressive ideologue looks for the power-acquisition motivation in each of them, and when he sees that parent and child are of different races, he has his answer. It must be the timeless, ceaseless, insatiable drive of the white to dominate the nonwhite.

It does not occur to them that ordinary people find something intrinsically good about a family, about children, about love, about the sacrifice required for all of it.

This is the why. Who are the progressives who dive in against multiracial families?

In days and weeks to come, it will be a lot of individuals who are otherwise uninvolved in adoption, simply because the Barrett nomination will mobilize them to do so. Normally, though, the movement is led to a surprising degree by a small cohort of adult adoptees. (Here look up Democratic activist John Lee Brougher, who tweeted critique of the Barrett family, citing his own adoptee status.) In the Chinese-adoption sphere, these are almost entirely young women in their twenties, who profess progressive politics, and will often acknowledge that they came to their critique — of their own parents and families — in the course of ideological indoctrination at college. Sustained engagement with this cohort reveals fairly quickly that the overwhelming majority of them appropriate the jargon and concepts of progressive race- and power-obsession to engage in re-litigation of entirely ordinary personal passages. Questions of self, meaning, parents, and nascent adulthood that rightly occupy the attention of anyone from ages 15 to 25 are subordinated to the rigid ideological strictures — and pre-ordained answers — of progressive cant. Of course, not one of these young people enters indoctrination and emerges thinking, “Wow, based on this, my parents were good people and my family was a good place.” The explicit intent is to inculcate the opposite conclusion. The saddening outcome is the reversal of the happiness that began when they were very small: from the making of a family to its deliberate unmaking.

There are few greater crimes in my book, and few greater achievements in theirs.

Phrases like “ideological indoctrination” are used here with deliberation. For those willing to go down the rabbit hole, search for a Facebook group called Transracial Adoption Perspectives. It isn’t the only progressive transracial-adoption group out there, but it is the one most popular with the Chinese-adoption community. (The other big one, simply called Transracial Adoption, has a Group Rules list jam-packed with identitarian jargon, “lived experience” and all, that must be seen to be believed.) Then search for a Facebook group called TAP 101: this is the introductory / indoctrination group where one must spend several weeks before permission is granted to join Transracial Adoption Perspectives. Only after demonstrating willingness to acquiesce to progressive concepts and rhetoric in full — and, for adoptive parents, to submit to what is effectively ritualistic humiliation and formal reprogramming — does the inner sanctum open up.

I was in it for a little while, and left after one of the founders, a Korean-American fellow, berated some hapless adoptive parent for voting for Ted Cruz. You see, voting for Ted Cruz is a white mother’s expression of sublimated hatred for her nonwhite child.

All this is overview. It is long enough as it is, but rest assured it is only the tip of the iceberg where the progressive attack on adoptive families is concerned. We haven’t even gotten to the efforts to promulgate the concept of “Adoptive Parent Fragility,” lifted from Robin DiAngelo’s “White Fragility” tome. We haven’t gotten to the efforts to (quite literally) silence adoptive parents, in favor of nonwhite adoptees, in public fora. Most significantly, we haven’t gotten to the influence of the progressive critics of adoption in our own Department of State, where they have succeeded in slowly strangling international adoption across the past decade. On the last, the sad reality is our Chinese children are likely to be among the last adopted by Americans: I expect it to end almost entirely in the 2020s.

There are real consequences to this. The attacks on families like ours are awful, and I am glad our sons are too young to notice them, much less comprehend them. But the price isn’t paid by us. It is paid by the children who desperately need parents — to thrive, to know love, to live — and won’t ever have them, because the unholy alliance of Ibram X Kendi, Richard Spencer, Dana Houle, John Lee Brougher, and so many other race-fixated fanatics find it ideologically expedient to denounce and deride those who would take them in. Every day for the rest of our lives, we will know that somewhere a child is growing up — if she grows up — alone, desperate, and unloved thanks to this awful apparatus.

Politics? No: evil.

Yes, evil. This is where racial identitarianism gets you. The fact that Richard Spencer, the white supremacist who advocates for a white ethnostate, agrees with Ibram Kendi tells you something important about the malign roots of Kendi’s “antiracist” philosophy. These guys are two sides of the same coin — except one is a pariah, and the other runs an endowed center at Boston University and has become the most influential public intellectual in American life today.

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Life As A Social-Credit Untouchable

We’re getting close to the Tuesday launch of Live Not By Lies. After church this morning, I was talking to one of my fellow parishioners about the social credit system, and how last week, a reader in the tech industry had sent me a report from a trade publication that focuses on coming trends; the report was aimed at showing the industry how to prepare itself to profit from the coming social credit system in America. I blogged about it here, and also included some text from my book about how the Chinese totalitarian state controls its population through a pioneering social credit system.

In Live Not By Lies, I predict that the soft totalitarianism coming to the US will use an Americanized version of this method to compel conformity with its “social justice” ideology. As I explained to my churchgoing friend this morning, the state won’t have to send secret police after you; if you tell most Americans that you and/or your children won’t be able to gain access to the best schools, or you won’t be able to travel as freely, or go to some sporting events, etc., because you have a low social credit score, they will do as they are told. Over the weekend, I recorded an episode of a video podcast in which one of the hosts, a pastor whose church includes university faculty, said that the academics in his flock have been telling him that they can see the rudiments of this kind of thing already taking shape in their workplace. They are being asked questions that they’ve never before been asked by superiors, and they know that their answers are being noticed.

All of that is a preface to an extraordinary e-mail I received from a reader of this blog. I know his real name, but he has asked me not to use it. He reminded me that he had written me before to encourage me about the importance of the Live Not By Lies project, and now he has something else to add. Read this:

I hope some of this will be of insight or use to your readers and maybe offer some advice on how to reduce the impact of the coming Social Credit system on their lives. To start, I am a software developer who has worked with machine learning and “AI” professionally. While it’s not my primary focus of my daily work, I tend to keep up with developments in the field and am skilled enough to use it to solve problems in production systems — in other words, things that are consumed by end users and actually need to work right. Problems I have used it for are recommending content to users, predicting essentially how long a user will remain engaged on a site, and so on. Properly used, it is an extremely powerful tool that can improve peoples’ lives by serving them content they would be more interested in, and not wasting time with stuff they’re not.

Maliciously used, well…at a minimum, it can be used to manipulate people into staying on a site longer by serving content that is designed to stimulate the brain’s pleasure centers. Facebook does this to keep people reading items which are tailored to what experience they tend to prefer and things they’ve liked. If these things can be used to increase a site’s user engagement even by only a few percentage points, it can pay off big in terms of increasing ad revenues. Other practical applications include quality control, homicidal Teslas, security systems, and so on.

Unless you work within the field, most people don’t understand what artificial intelligence can and cannot do. To start with, the definition is misleading. Computers have not yet attained true “intelligence” in the human sense. We are probably a ways off from any system attaining consciousness in the classical sense, though I suppose it’s worth pointing out that systems can be designed to act rationally within a given set of information that is presented to it. DeepMind, Google’s AI “moonshot” company that intends to create a true artificial intelligence, has designed a system that can play old Atari games without any instructions. While I haven’t read more into the details, I would imagine that this happens by the system trying an action and see if it results in a more positive state (losing fewer lives, achieving a higher score, etc).

On the other hand, computer games with artificial intelligence generally don’t use true AI techniques to simulate a player, as it’s too computationally expensive and often gives less than desired results. A good example of this was a strategy game where the AI simply had its units run away to an isolated corner of the map because this was the most “rational” decision it could make within the framework of the game. In many senses, though, a true thinking machine is on the same timeline as a flying car or fusion power.

That said, a social credit system does not actually need true artificial intelligence to function, and this can actually be done with some very simple techniques. You take a set of data points and then run them against an algorithm to determine the likelihood of there being a match of a person against that data set. For example, if you’re trying to determine if someone is an active member of a “bigot” denomination of Christianity, or holds their views, you would find some people who fit the profile, then extract data points that distinguish them from someone who is not, and then check unclassified people against those points.

So, if you know a “bigot” Christian shops at a religious bookstore, gives more than five percent of their income, frequents certain forums, etc, then you can develop a data profile of what this type of person looks like. In turn, if someone only meets one of those three criteria, such as visiting forums but not engaging in the other two activities, the possibility of them being a “bigot” Christian is much lower. Maybe they’re just an atheist trolling on the forums. Likewise, if they visit a religious bookstore, they might just be browsing or buying a gift, and this would require adjusting the algorithm inputs to filter out casual shoppers.

The big challenges involved in doing this really are not actually running the algorithms, but classifying and processing the data that the algorithms operate on. This is where data science and big data come in.

What happens is that there are statistical analysis programs which can be run against a data set to begin filtering out irrelevant things and looking for specific patterns. Continuing with the above example, let’s say that a both a “bigot” Christian and hardcore woke social justice warrior buy bottled water and celery at the store. This data point doesn’t distinguish the two, so that it gets tossed out. By refining the data through statistical techniques, it quickly becomes clear what points should be looked out to distinguish membership in a given data set. The SJW doesn’t attend church, or attends only a “woke” one, so they can be filtered on that point. This is why seemingly innocuous things like loyalty cards, social media posts, phone GPS and so on are actually dangerous. They essentially can tie your life together and build out a profile that can be used to classify and analyze you in ways with connections you never thought would be made. All it takes is building “training sets” and then throwing live data at these sets to have a usable outcome.

Ultimately, the power of all this is to be able to do on an automated basis what would have been a ton of legwork by a secret or thought police. Even if, say, there is still a secret police or social media police force involved it making ultimate decisions about how to handle a particular report, machine learning can help sort out private grievances from real dissenters by looking at what distinguishes a legitimate report from a fake one. No longer does expertise have to be produced and retained via training and personal experience, but can now simply be saved to a database and pulled out, refined, and applied as needed. These routines can be packed up and distributed and run at will, or run by accessing cloud servers. Huge numbers of profiles can be run at any given time, too. While building the profiles is computationally expensive, running them is very quick.

The other thing that people in your comment section don’t grasp is that this is not a political issue in any sense of the word. Tech and the consolidation of power doesn’t really have a right or left to it; it is about technocracy.

The reality of why this will be applied to people opposed to critical race theory is simply that opposing CRT means that you are a skeptic, that you still think 2 + 2 = 4, and oppose what the elite are teaching you. People who think this is overblown or won’t apply to them, whatever their politics, are naive. Anything which militates against accepting a common vision is what is the marker here, and it could be anything else down the road as trends change and what is acceptable shifts.

Driving a gasoline-powered car, having your recycling bin half full, or buying bottled water, might all be things that impact your social credit score if it begins to be applied to environmental issues. Drink three beers instead of two at a restaurant? You’re going to be flagged as an alcoholic and watch your health care premiums shoot up, or perhaps lose it altogether if we have a single-payer system. The true evil with this is how it dehumanizes people, categorizes them, and removes their individuality by reducing them to a statistic. “I’m not a number, I’m a name” no longer applies. Mental illness is overrepresented in the tech world, and you run into all sorts of people that are narcissistic, sociopathic, and so on. How well and fast and elegantly something runs is the true yardstick, not if it is ethical and moral.

Also, the notion that there will be laws against this sort of thing, that there will be a legal deus ex machina that will stop this soft totalitarianism, is just laughable. Things like GDPR [General Data Protection Regulation, an EU law — RD] are a step in the right direction, but data and web services are so interconnected today that trying to erase all your digital tracks is going to be very difficult. Besides, if you’ve been offline for several years, you’re trying to hide something, right? Tech used to be full of people with a very libertarian and free-thinking mindset. This was also when it was at its most innovative. These days, identity politics is pushing out libertarian politics, and the idea of curtailing speech and access for people who are “racist,” etc, is not just accepted but promoted. Even if law doesn’t come into it, technology has been biased against personal freedom and privacy for a long time.

If nothing else, underfitting a data curve — that is, too broadly applying — might result in people being unfairly barred from banking, jobs, public transit, and so on. Think of the poor guy in Fahrenheit 451 that the mechanical hound killed in the place of Montag after he escaped. You likely won’t be able to appeal, as this would reveal too much about the algorithms that are being used by the system. Maybe you’ll get scored differently again after a period of time, but there is no guarantee of that, either. The system will always err on the side of underfitting, too. In the new Sodom, there are not fifty righteous men. Everyone is guilty of something.

Dealing with this is trickier than it might seem, but can also be spoofed somewhat. As you point out, China’s system relies on cameras being present everywhere, and also associating with people who meet certain criteria to have a lower score. The first and most important thing to remember is that you are going to have to be cautious and be fully “underground.” Public pronouncements that run contrary to the acceptable narrative are going to be an automatic black mark on your score. Keep your mouth shut, don’t post memes on Facebook. Otherwise, you’re going to suddenly find that your bank account is locked for “supporting extremism,” and you’ll have a pink slip waiting for you at work the next day.

Now, getting down to practical matters, if you and someone with a low social credit score ride the same bus to work, probably not an issue, but if you ride the same bus and then have lunch together, big red flag. Will sitting next to each other matter? Maybe, but you might also get on at the same stop, so this would be less of a red flag, particular if you don’t talk to each other beforehand. Change where you sit on the bus, sit together some days, and not together the next, and change your seating position relative to each other. At some point, it becomes increasingly difficult to develop rules from a pattern and your behavior might be thrown out as an outlier. This is going to be harder to maintain if you need long-term interaction with someone, like at a prayer group, but can still be used for some one on one time, important communication between groups, spreading information manually, etc.

Speaking of prayer groups, the obvious answer is to congregate in places where there is not likely to be any cameras. As they become smaller, less visible, hooked into networks, and with better low light performance and resolution, it’s going to be increasingly difficult to know when you’re being watched and when you’re not. I’d expect parks to be monitored, and if not inside the park by drones or cameras, then at least the entrances and exits. Same group of ten or so people going to the same place every week for the same amount of time, especially if one or two are known to be problematic? Big red flag. On the other hand, people meeting in random locations, in varying sizes, in varying times, this might slide by the system and be lost in the “noise.”

Phones will be tracking people, of course, and phones being in the same location at the same time, big red flag. If you leave your phone at home, hope that you don’t have an internet of things device connected, or a camera on your building, or you’ll be known as a person who leaves their phone behind. Big red flag. If you leave your phone in your dwelling, but are seen to go exercise without it, maybe less of a red flag. Just don’t be gone for three hours on a “quick run.”

There is also the idea of too little data being available, a “black hole” if you will. If you don’t carry a phone, usual social media, obviously associate with anyone, and so on, you’re likely going to be flagged because you’re seen as trying to hide your life and activity. It’s worth noting that phones are basically ubiquitous in Chinese society, and people were trying to estimate the actual impact of Covid-19 in China based on how many fewer people were buying and using cell phones after December of last year. Why are phones ubiquitous? Because people need their positive behavior to be recorded.

Ultimately, the idea is to either engage in the bounds of normal behavior or engage in behavior that doesn’t meet an expected pattern and will likely be trimmed as an outlier (assuming outliers aren’t investigated as well). If you need to meet, do so in a way that would be socially acceptable and plausible, like an art class or a pickup sports game in the park. Taking a break on a random park bench with random people at random times might work as well. Use written communication or learn sign language to avoid bugs (conversations can be analyzed for keywords as well). The thing is, the more effective a social credit system becomes, the less human intervention and legwork there is likely going to be. No one’s going to bother with looking at what you wrote on a notebook, because it would take too much effort to track someone down and actually examine. They care more about where you go, when you go there, who’s there, and so on. The faith in technology is such that there is a strong bias against manual intervention.

No, none of this is going to help us stop the soft totalitarianism, and I have been repeating it over and over that orthodox Christians and other soon-to-be-unpersoned groups need to really start understanding and preparing for a life as “untouchables.” If you post the wrong thing, say the wrong thing, hang out with the wrong people, your card is going to be cancelled, no other banks will pick you up, you’re likely not going to be able to get a job due to a low score, and so on. You might not even be able to pick up menial work. Under the table work will be gone once everything needs a card for a transaction. All cards are issued by banks and most of them are woke. Think there will be a “rogue” bank that will do so? Good luck with that. If you think, okay, you can start your own small business growing and selling food, other goods, etc…you need to be able to buy and sell supplies. Cashless economy requires having a card and an account. You won’t be able to open an account due to “extremism.”

As you’ve been hammering home over and over again, now is the time to form communities. These can quite literally provide support and safe harbor for internal exiles, if they are careful. This isn’t just about maintaining the faith, but about maintaining those who will have nowhere else to go. Barter, self-sufficiency, low tech, these things are going to be massively important.

A good follow-up to Live Not By Lies would be a detailed how-to guide for living underground in the coming tech-based tyranny. It should be published while we can still do that sort of thing. Anyway, Live Not By Lies has really more to do with how and why to prepare yourself spiritually to resist. It’s a book aimed specifically at subversive Christians, but any person of faith, or person who rejects the SJW ideology now taking over institutions, will benefit from it. A liberal friend of mine who disagrees with my thesis tells me that what I call  “soft totalitarianism” is not that, but simply the frightening (to people like me) novelty living in a society that doesn’t operate from Christian assumptions. Pointing to the social credit system is the first thing I would say to him in response. There won’t be any way for any dissenter to opt out of this, or to build a stable, prosperous life on society’s margins.

And by the way, I’m slated to be on Tucker Carlson Tonight on Monday evening to talk about the book, and why this matters. Tune in.

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The Amy Coney Barrett Apocalypse

So, the Amy Coney Barrett nomination is official. Gotta say that for me, this is the high point of the Trump presidency, and I’m very, very grateful to the president for what he has done. Here is her speech today at the White House, accepting the nomination:

 

You can believe that she shouldn’t be on the High Court, but I don’t know how you can watch that without believing that Amy Coney Barrett is an admirable person. One thing that the ACB nomination will do is expose the worst of the left-wing haters for what they are.  In this sense, it will be an apocalypse — an unveiling. Yet another one in this apocalyptic year!

Take a look at the wicked, race-obsessed man who has become America’s No. 1 public intellectual. Here he is answering a claim (removed from Twitter by its author) that ACB can’t be racist because she has adopted black children:

 

Chloé Valdary, a black woman (whom you should follow on Twitter), shot back:

Go get him, Chloé. (By the way, Valdary has developed her own antiracism program, Theory of Enchantment, that sounds interesting. I haven’t looked into it closely, but judging by the way she treats people on social media, and the way she addresses racism, I want to know more.)

Kendi’s remarks are evil, but perfectly in line with his racialist philosophy. I agree with Mollie Hemingway:

Of this reprehensible and evil tweet from Big Media and the elite left’s newest highly funded racist, a friend writes: “We are just at the beginning of this hideous line of attack: not just upon Amy Coney Barrett, but upon ourselves, our families, and our children.” https://t.co/56sPofBcGn

— Mollie (@MZHemingway) September 26, 2020

Here is a Stanford Law professor trashing the Harvard Law professor Noah Feldman for saying nice things about Amy Coney Barrett, alongside whom he clerked at the Supreme Court (her for Scalia, him for Souter):

 

Professional atheist Bill Maher called her a “fu–ing nut” on his HBO show last night.

Now, let’s be fair: you can’t pick the worst examples of liberal freak-outery and say, “They’re all like that!” The liberal legal commentator Benjamin Wittes, for example, has said that though he opposes the nomination, he will criticize it for professional reasons, and will leave her religion and personal life out of it. (He’s also leaving her jurisprudence out of it, because he thinks the entire nomination is illegitimate.) That’s totally fair. Obviously I don’t agree with him, but I don’t expect liberals to roll over for this nomination. Yet going after her on the basis of her religious faith and her family, for heaven’s sake — that’s absolute gutterball.

I cite these two examples because they reveal the staggering spite many left-wing elites have towards those not like themselves. The Kendi tweet is especially important, given how he has become the guru on all things racial to institutional elites. This is where Ibram Kendi Thought leads. People have got to wake up and see this, and what  the elites who fund this charlatan (e.g., Jack Dorsey of Twitter gave $10 million to his Boston University Center for Antiracism Research) are paying for. For example, Kendi believes that the US should pass a constitutional amendment to ban racism, and establish a cabinet-level agency to monitor the population for racism, and punish them. You want to talk about soft totalitarianism? There you have it. That’s the mind of Ibram X. Kendi, the darling of all the progressive elites, including woke capitalists like Jack Dorsey.

The Barretts adopted Vivian, their Haitian daughter, when she was a baby. Excerpt from this 2019 interview:

Vivian is amazing. She was 14-months-old when she came home, and she couldn’t make any sounds at that point, nor could she pull herself up to a standing position, and she was wearing size 0-3 month clothing because she was just so malnourished. At the time they told us they just weren’t sure whether she would speak. She had been so sick she hadn’t had a lot of practice making sounds and hadn’t been spoken to a lot. She was just weak and she had rickets [disease] so her legs were kind of bowed out.

Because the Barrett family opened their hearts and their home to this child, she is thriving now. It is a beautiful story. But to someone like Kendi, Amy and Jesse Barrett might be racist colonizers. Hey, he’s just asking questions!

Watch and listen to what people like Ibram Kendi say in this next month about her. If they go after her for her judicial philosophy, or because they think the nomination is illegitimate because of the political circumstances, that is fair game. But when they go after her for her religion, her family values, and her race, they are revealing what they think about millions of their fellow Americans — and what they are going to do with their power and privilege as it increases.

I would like to point you to Ross Douthat’s column today about ACB, especially the part where he talks about what the Right has to learn from her. He calls her an icon of “conservative feminism”:

A conservative feminism today, on the other hand — again, if we can say that it exists — is adaptive rather than oppositional. It takes for granted that much of what Ginsburg fought for was necessary and just; that the old order suppressed female talent and ambition; that sexism and misogyny are more potent forces than many anti-feminists allowed. It agrees that the accomplishments of Barrett’s career — in academia and now on the federal bench — could have been denied to her in 1950, and it hails that change as good.

But then it also argues that feminism’s victories were somewhat unbalanced, that they were kinder to professional ambition than to other human aspirations, and that the society they forged has lost its equilibrium not just in work-life balance but also in other areas — sex and romance and marriage and child rearing, with the sexes increasingly alienated from one another and too many children desired but never born.

And:

Hence the reasonable test for any conservatism that takes Barrett for its avatar: What is it doing in its policymaking to make her kind of life, professionally impressive and personally full, feel more available and affordable and imaginable for women who aren’t nominated to the Supreme Court?

That’s a good and important point.

Today, though, it’s enough to take satisfaction in the fact that the Supreme Court nominee looks like people like me. I’m not a woman, a Catholic, or the father of seven, but I am a pro-life Christian who, like ACB, did not go to an Ivy League university, and who looks at her family and thinks that they are the kind of people I aspire to be, and that I hope my own children look up to as a model. That somebody who sees the world through her eyes may be sitting on the highest court in the land gives me hope for America in a time when that is hard to come by.

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