Rod Dreher's Blog, page 114

Not So Fast, Nikole Hannah-Jones

The Atlantic‘s Conor Friedersdorf takes to Twitter to call out Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning founder of The 1619 Project. Here is his masterful thread:

This claim is staggering. Because I wrote an essay arguing that The 1619 Project was great in parts, but was wrong to argue that 1619 was our “true founding,” I take exception to it. My essay is here: https://t.co/fh6JjqnGon Was I duped by “the right” or duping others? A thread: https://t.co/DhsON1NJ77

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) September 18, 2020

Nikole Hannah Jones repeats this claim on CNN, where the interviewer credulously accepts her framing that the right is misrepresenting the project https://t.co/drU0CTZELS

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) September 18, 2020

What triggered this response from Conor Friedersdorf? This tweet from NHJ:

One thing in which the right has been tremendously successful is getting media to frame stories in their language and through their lens. The #1619Project does not argue that 1619 is our true founding. We know this nation marks its founding at 1776. https://t.co/Af8sqr9YO7

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) September 18, 2020

She’s mad that Trump called her project — which won her the Pulitzer Prize, a big movie deal with Oprah, and universal plaudits among the media elite — phony. From the Washington Post story to which NHJ links:

President Trump pressed his case Thursday that U.S. schools are indoctrinating children with a left-wing agenda hostile to the nation’s Founding Fathers, describing efforts to educate students about racism and slavery as an insult to the country’s lofty founding principles.

Trump, speaking before original copies of the Constitution and Declaration of Independence at the National Archives, characterized demonstrations against racial injustice as “left-wing rioting and mayhem” that “are the direct result of decades of left-wing indoctrination in our schools. It’s gone on far too long.”

The federal government has no power over the curriculum taught in local schools. Nonetheless, Trump said he would create a national commission to promote a “pro-American curriculum that celebrates the truth about our nation’s great history,” which he said would encourage educators to teach students about the “miracle of American history.”

Trump is calling the panel the “1776 Commission,” in what appeared to be a barb at the New York Times’s 1619 Project. The project, whose creator won a Pulitzer Prize for its lead essay, is a collection of articles and essays that argue that the nation’s true founding year is 1619, the year enslaved Africans were brought to the shores of what would become the United States. Trump said Thursday the 1619 Project wrongly teaches that the United States was founded on principles of “oppression, not freedom.”

That is exactly what Nikole Hannah-Jones and The New York Times claim in The 1619 Project! But now that the president is pushing back hard by describing the project fairly and accurately, by its own words, she is now trying to change history (again).

It seems to me that this is the second win this week from the Trump administration, by taking the left’s racial rhetoric at its own word, and proceeding as if these leftists mean what they say. Princeton president Eisgruber says this university is shot through with racism? Oh dear, then the Education Department better investigate, because it is illegal for federal funding to go to a racist institution. And now that Trump has announced an initiative that stands to reveal the ideologically-driven falsehoods of The 1619 Project, and fight back against them being mainstreamed into US classrooms, Nikole Hannah-Jones is caught lying about what her own project actually says — and smearing people who engaged her in good faith.

It’s all such a grift. The Pulitzer Prize committee and The New York Times deserve this shame. In my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies, I cite the 1619 Project as an example of how totalitarians rewrite history to erase cultural memory, to make people easier to control. Excerpt:

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.

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

Here’s an important example of this happening in our time and place. In 2019, The New York Times, the world’s most influential newspaper, launched the “1619 Project,” a massive attempt to “reframe” (the Times’s word) American history by displacing the 1776 Declaration of Independence as the traditional founding of the United States, replacing it with the year the first African slaves arrived in North America.

No serious person denies the importance of slavery in US history. But that’s not the point of the 1619 Project. Its goal is to revise America’s national identity by making race hatred central to the nation’s foundational myth. Despite the project’s core claim (that the patriots fought the American Revolution to preserve slavery) having been thoroughly debunked, journalism’s elite saw fit to award the project’s director a Pulitzer Prize for her contribution.

Equipped with this matchless imprimatur of establishment respectability, the 1619 Project, which has already been taught in forty-five hundred classrooms, will find its way into many more.

This is why The 1619 Project is so dangerous. It is also why I view a “1776 Commission” with real skepticism, if its point is to give an imprimatur to an official hagiographic view of American history. I don’t think we know what in particular Trump has in mind, and in any case the federal government doesn’t have the power to order schools to change their history curricula. Still, it’s revealing that Hannah-Jones has changed her story, claiming now that she only wants more attention paid to slavery. No, that is not at all what the 1619 Project is about. It is about establishing maintaining slavery as the raison d’être of the United States — a flat-out lie, one that, if true, would delegitimize everything about the American founding.

Trump forced her hand. Good. I wouldn’t claim Donald Trump as an Orange Thucydides, but he’s correct about the importance of history to identity: who we are and who we will become depends on who we think we were. Once again, from Live Not By Lies:

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

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality.

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

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

Put another way, we not only have to remember totalitarianism to build a resistance to it; we have to remember how to remember, period.

Everything about modern society is designed to make memory—historical, social, and cultural—hard to cultivate.

Christians must understand this not only to resist soft totalitarianism but also to transmit the faith to the coming generations.

In his 1989 book, How Societies Remember, the late British social anthropologist Paul Connerton explains that there are different kinds of memory. Historical memory is an objective recollection of past events. Social memory is what a people choose to remember—that is, deciding collectively which facts about past events it believes to be important. Cultural memory constitutes the stories, events, people, and other phenomena that a society chooses to remember as the building blocks of its collective identity. A nation’s gods, its heroes, its villains, its landmarks, its art, its music, its holidays—all these things are part of its cultural memory.

Connerton says that “participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.”Memory of the past conditions how they experience the present—that is, how they grasp its meaning, how they are to understandit, and what they are supposed to do in it.

No culture, and no person, can remember everything. A culture’s memory is the result of its collective sifting of facts to produce a story—a story that society tells itself to remember who it is. Without collective memory, you have no culture, and without a culture, you have no identity.

The more totalitarian a regime’s nature, the more it will try to force people to forget their cultural memories. In Nineteen Eighty-Four, the role of Winston Smith within the Ministry of Information is to erase all newspaper records of past events to reflect the current political priorities of the Party. This, said the ex-communist Polish intellectual Leszek Kołakowski, reflects “the great ambition of totalitarianism—the total possession and control of human memory.”

“Let us consider what happens when the ideal has been effectively achieved,” says Kołakowski. “People remember only what they are taught to remember today and the content of their memory changes overnight, if needed.”

People remember only what they are taught to remember today… . What Nikole Hannah-Jones, The New York Times, the Pulitzer Prize committee, and all their allies are doing is striking at the foundation of the American constitutional order. Now that the president has called it out, NHJ is lying to obscure her real intentions, and the truly revolutionary nature of The 1619 Project. Don’t let her get away with it.

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Evangelicals: Middle-Class Optimists

A reader who asks for anonymity gives me permission to post this letter below. Given its length, I’m publishing it as a separate post instead of as an update to the previous Trevin Wax/Live Not By Lies post:

I found your response to Trevin Wax’s critique of your book interesting, because as a long-time reader of your blog and fan of the Benedict Option, as well as a raised-devoutly-Catholic-turned-Evangelical, it brought to mind a lot of similar things I’ve experienced when discussing your work with Evangelical Christian friends of mine. I haven’t discussed much ‘Live Not By Lies’ (for simple reason that I don’t yet have a copy—very much looking forward to that), but I think the overarching themes are similar enough to Benedict Option that what I have to say applies in both cases.

I have recommended BenOp to scores of people and purchased many copies for others to ensure they read it, always looking forward to their thoughts and fruitful discussion. Almost universally amongst my Evangelical kin, they recognize the cultural challenges BenOp surfaces, and sympathize with your view of these developments, but they do so in a kind of dismissive, “Yeah, it’s frustrating, isn’t it?” manner, and tend to figuratively roll their eyes at the need to create intentionally Christian communities with the physical space and outward trappings of such a community in order to protect and preserve it. The first person I ever had read the book summed it up to me thusly: “So, we should go start a cult in Montana?” Most other responses have been within striking range of that sentiment. They see the cultural morass of the moment as a passing thunderstorm: it looks and sounds scary, but with a few exceptional lightning strikes, it’ll pass and everything will be just fine when the sun comes out again. They are happy to acknowledge alongside you that a storm exists—but where you see Category 5 hurricanes and F6 tornadoes, they see weather-as-usual.

I’m going to generalize here, because of course there are always exceptions, but it has struck me that my Catholic family is much more receptive to the full message of the BenOp. I’ve been frustrated by these differences in reception; I confess that like you, I think that this time it may be different: this might be the Cat 5 storm and not just a passing thundercloud. I want those I care about to take it seriously, but I get the “What are you worried about, just trust in God” response. All of this has led me to consider why the American response to these times, especially amongst Evangelicals, is what it is. I fully concede I can’t predict the future any better than Trevin Wax, and he might be right and you (we) might be wrong. But of what value is it to speculate that perhaps some unforeseen threat will come from the far-right? Perhaps a miracle cure for coronavirus will be discovered, too, or perhaps another virus with truly apocalypse-level impact will come on its heels. None of what is unknown justifies us ignoring what is known, which is what I think you are trying to do with BenOp and LNBL.

I think there are (at least) 3 big reasons Evangelical response to both of your books has been somewhat tepid, at least relative to the more traditional strands of the Christian faith, and these reasons are all inextricably intertwined with one another.

First is the history of Protestantism in the west, and in America in particular, and the hold of Calvinism on the American Evangelical Church (I cannot speak to other places for lack of personal knowledge) that specifically gave rise to the notion of the Protestant Work Ethic. The PWE binds hard work at one’s trade as a sign of devotion to God, and thus as an external sign of one’s salvation. I’m a big fan of working hard, but you can see how easily this can be corrupted from “Work hard as a tribute to God’s glory” to “The fruits of hard work are a tribute to God’s glory” (the prosperity gospel follows in short order).

In the American Industrial Revolution this gave rise to ideas along the lines of “work harder, make more money, and then you can give back more”, as exemplified by Titans of Industry/Evangelical Christians like John D. Rockefeller, and PWE can be fairly considered the genesis of the “American Dream”. Max Weber even goes so far as to say it is the PWE that gave rise to capitalism, though this is disputed. But what is not in dispute is that the idea of working hard, and of the fruits of that work being a sign that you are “doing it right”, certainly has lent itself to American capitalist values, and I believe has made it hard today for many Evangelical Christians to disentangle their faith from their economic system.

When in your writing you suggest that capitalism may be in some ways at fault for the precipice we find ourselves on, this (along with other status quo issues you challenge) is almost unthinkable and leads to an instinctive rejection of the rest of your message. Consumerism, buying the bigger house, traveling and taking photos for Instagram…these fruits of our labor cannot possibly be part of the problem, and you can’t possibly be suggesting we give these up! To do so is to be over the top, an alarmist. “It’s just a photo on social media. It’s just a car. It’s just a movie.” Taken in isolation, all is harmless. Taken together…we shall see.

One place where I see this most evident is in the adoption of capitalism’s “growth as its own end” mentality, applied to churches, which I believe is the second reason Evangelicals struggle with your work. I have helped Evangelical churches in a consulting capacity in the past, and without fail the pastors and elders say they want to be run “more like a business”. There are numerous books and resources on how to run church like a business (coffee shop in the front!), but I have not seen any that target the Catholic Church or mainline protestant churches, which is interesting. It has been my experience ever since converting to Evangelical Christianity that churches around the country all prioritize growth—butts in seats, if you will—in much the same way a social network prioritizes number of users (as opposed to, say, quality of interaction). Outreach events, marketing, messaging—it’s all coordinated to that one end. Many of these churches are—and wish to be—run like successful American corporations. I wager most pastors will admit that discipleship of existing Christians is a significant weakness amongst their congregation, because 80% of their energies are spent on attracting new members.

So why does this matter as regards BenOp and LNBL? When you tell people wholly oriented toward Evangelicalism and bringing more people through the doors of the church each week (never mind retaining them) that now is a season where the church needs to look internally and figure out how to strengthen what it has, because it might not be able to put on ‘Trunk or Treat’ in the church parking lot or the neighborhood showing of ‘Frozen’ in a culture that despises it, that’s not something growth-oriented people want to hear. In fact, it is anathema. (I must add both of those are real things churches I’ve attended have done for the sake of ‘outreach’.) They’ve been told all their lives that they need to put flyers on their neighbors’ doors inviting them to Christmas and Easter service (which are hands-down the most Christian-Lite sermons of the year, which strikes me as kind of ironic), or invite their friends to the concert at the church where we guarantee they won’t hear anything that might challenge them on a moral level, and now you are telling them they need to be weirdos who stand out from and even outright reject the culture and perhaps alienate the same people they’ve been trained to look and speak like (for the sake of outreach and relating to the culture)? They will readily quote the words of St. Paul: “All things to all”, or St. Ambrose (via Augustine): “when in Rome”. Perhaps while being in the world, we have become a little too of it.

Your message of “preservation” of the church is almost diametrically opposed to “get butts in seats even if you are virtually tricking people and obscuring the harder truths of the Gospel to do it” that we Evangelicals are used to hearing. No, I get it, it doesn’t have to be that way, but most of us can scarcely hold two near-identical ideas in mind at the same time, much less two ideas that may contextually conflict with each other.

This ties into my next and final point, which is that as a fundamentally middle-class endeavor in America, Evangelical Christianity has adopted the look and feel of what the typical middle-class American experiences. Branding, marketing, messaging, even the way the pastor dresses and the music played in services looks nearly identical to (or is a poor simulacrum of) what we experience every time we turn on the football game and see the Pepsi commercial. Church is one more version of TV programming for the Evangelical—now, more than ever since many of our services are online (and especially during this coronavirus thing). It is another middle-class therapeutic comfort.

When any creature is comfortable and expending minimal energy, the last thing it wants to do is move from that state. So why would the average comfortable middle-class American Evangelical Christian, for whom the “culture wars” are viewed through the jeremiad blog posts of Rod Dreher or the breathless hyperbole of CNN, want to move a muscle unless absolutely forced to do so? I’m convinced that’s why most Evangelicals I talk to don’t think this election will matter all that much. It certainly won’t be as bad as Rod says…right? I mean, totalitarianism? Here? That’s what the right wing nut jobs said about Obama and Clinton.

This will be just like that; perhaps the church will emerge slightly worse for wear, but it will always endure. And they’ll always be right, until they aren’t. The church will endure, but I haven’t found the “in America” part of that passage in my Bible just yet.

The problem here is the problem all people have in uncomfortable situations: hope. This isn’t hope in Christ or eternal salvation that I’m talking about. It’s just baseless hope as one’s only strategy. Hopefully this is going to be just like all the other moral panics, and it won’t be as bad as everyone says. Hopefully the forest fires have nothing to do with climate change and this is another doomsayer false alarm. Hopefully Biden won’t actually implement the Green New Deal and mandatory Wokeness and will just return to center.

Have you ever wondered why people who knew they were going to be killed by other people, perhaps because of a plane hijacking or even watching the person in line next to them get executed, just stood there and let it happen instead of fighting back with everything they had? Jihadis have coerced false confessions out of people moments before sawing their heads off on camera; the person would be just as dead had they spat in the jihadi’s face, refused to play along, and cursed Muhammad instead, but they didn’t. They said the confession. Hope. Hope that at the last minute some divine intervention would pluck them out of the situation, even when any rational person could see there is no hope. And I think that is where American Evangelical Christianity largely stands on the issues you write about today. The comfortable middle class is hoping they will be left alone, that it won’t be that bad. Some even ‘say the words’ in the hopes that their captor will release them and welcome them into the fold.

I’ve focused on Evangelicalism here, but it does make me wonder, why (again, generalizing greatly) do other strands of Christianity seem to take the warnings of LNBL and BenOp a little more seriously? Or at least don’t reject them out of hand quite as instinctively? My other experience is with the Catholic Church, so I speak largely from that perspective, but perhaps it is because the CC’s worldview is not so modern and new as American Evangelicalism. The Catholic Church wasn’t born and raised in American middle-class capitalism, and it’s been around for a long time and in a lot of places that have seen literal authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and everything in between. Perhaps there is some kind of institutional memory or wisdom from this long-tenured, global experience that makes American soft totalitarianism not seem like such a long shot.

And while the typical Evangelical Protestant church (in my experience) is still fueled by the rewards of the Protestant Work Ethic and (increasingly) non-controversial, uplifting, therapeutic messages, the Catholic Church has always been more focused on guilt, sin and blood in its day-to-day language. I recently listened to a Catholic sermon and blood (of Christ) was mentioned so many times and so graphically that I found myself thinking, “This would be very off-putting to someone not accustomed to the language of Catholics.” Uplifting, positive messages around self-help tools for day-to-day living…or constant reminding of the debased creature you once were pre-salvation, salvaged only by the bloody, violent, brutal execution of a blameless victim. Which group do you think will have an easier time swallowing the idea that the world can turn really evil, really fast?

Anyway, forgive my long-winded exposition. I appreciate your blog posts, especially the ones that I have a hard time agreeing with or that are challenging for me, and I appreciate that you jot my thinking in terms of crystallizing things on this issue that I haven’t had a chance to verbalize. Maybe none of the above will ring true to you or anyone else, but having spent enough time to see both modes of thinking (Evangelical vs. Catholic) I do think maybe there is a shred of truth in it.

What a letter! Thank you, reader. I really look forward to the comments from other readers.

I don’t know that most American Christians of non-Evangelical churches are a whole lot more receptive to the message. Maybe they are — I just don’t know. I think all the time of Prof. Christian Smith’s sociological work on Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, and his finding that it is the de facto religion of the great majority of American Christians. Catholicism and Orthodoxy should both be more theologically and historically imbued with a tragic sense, and with an awareness of the connection of suffering to sanctity. But MTD might well have destroyed that. We will see.

Say, readers, if you are moved to pre-order a copy of Live Not By Lies, would you please consider doing it via Eighth Day Books, the independent Christian bookseller in Wichita? Here is the link to do so. 

Its owner, Warren Farha, is a friend of mine, and I have said many times that Eighth Day Books is one of the happiest places on earth. You can order a signed (via book plate) copy of Live Not By Lies  exclusively through Eighth Day. I just checked, and Warren has 107 left, for shipping on 9/29, the publication date.

The post Evangelicals: Middle-Class Optimists appeared first on The American Conservative.

Evangelical Dislikes ‘Live Not By Lies’

The first negative review of Live Not By Lies (that I’ve seen) comes from Trevin Wax of The Gospel Coalition, a website for conservative (ish) Evangelical types. Here’s a link to it. It’s an odd review, in that it concedes a number of the book’s points, yet still finds it alarmist, and “not just pessimistic, but overly so.” Wax said in this book, and on this blog, “fear seems too often to drive [Dreher’s] analysis.” I’m going to try to answer these criticisms. I should say that I know Trevin a little bit, and he’s a serious Christian and a genuinely nice guy. This disagreement between us on the content of my book is not personal, but professional. I think he’s quite wrong, but please dismiss any thought that in rebutting his review, that I am criticizing his character. That assumption used to be a given, but these days, alas, it needs saying.

He’s right that fear drives much of my cultural analysis — but he says it like that’s a bad thing. If you are living in Oregon, and you see wildfire cresting the hill behind your town, then fear is an appropriate reaction. It should incite you to make plans to deal with the crisis to save your life and the lives of those in your care. A fear that paralyzes is certainly to be shunned — but a fear that catalyzes is the rational response, one that can save our life.

I am trying to instill the rational kind of fear into my readers. I believe one of the greatest enemies of the church in this time and place is the middle-class complacency that everything is going to be okay if we just sit still and wait this out. This was more or less the viewpoint of some of the Slovak Catholic bishops in the 1940s, when Father Tomislav Kolakovic was organizing students to prepare for Christian resistance to the communism he foresaw overtaking their country after World War II. They thought he was an alarmist. Well, he was alarmed, that’s for sure — and thank God for it, because as I write in Live Not By Lies, that priest really did see what was coming, and the network of believers that he set up became the underground church after the communist government clamped down on all the priests and bishops.

My argument in this book is that we are facing a similar situation in the US at the present time, and that we should listen to the immigrants who grew up under communism when they express their alarm at what they’re seeing happen right here in America. From the book:

Reflecting on the speed with which utopian dreams turned into a grisly nightmare, Solzhenitsyn observed:

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

It wasn’t just the tsarists who didn’t see it coming but also the country’s leading liberal minds. It was simply beyond their ability to conceive.

I can see why passages like that would be upsetting to American Christians, but we need to be shaken out of our unjustified confidence. Things can go very bad, very quickly, once a social order comes unmoored, and fanatics take control.

To be fair to Wax, he says it’s not my pessimism that puts him off:

It’s not the pessimism I have a problem with. In fact, some of the writers I’ve read in depth (MacIntyre, Rieff, Lasch) can be categorized as pessimistic in their overall outlook. It’s the sense of hopelessness that suffuses Dreher’s pessimistic take, something that at times feels at odds with the fine principles and wise practices he recommends.

Well, this could be an aesthetic error that turns into a moral error. I fully concede that when writing in the prophetic mode, I can be so strong that it eludes readers who don’t know me that I am actually, in person, a fairly easygoing guy. In fact, I’ve thought that for my next book, I need to figure out how to convey the hope that keeps me going, and happy, in the face of dire challenges. Nevertheless, I wouldn’t have written Live Not By Lies if I didn’t think that there was reason to hope — not to be optimistic, but to hope. This comes into focus in the final chapter, when I write about the young Slovak photographer Timo Krizka, whose grandfather, a Greek Catholic priest (Greek Catholic clergy can marry), had been forced out of the priesthood because he refused to obey the government’s orders:

Several years ago, Križka set out to honor his ancestor’s sacrifice by interviewing and photographing the still-living Slovak survivors of communist persecution, including original members of Father Kolaković’s fellowship, the Family. As he made his rounds around his country, Križka was shaken up not by the stories of suffering he heard—these he expected—but by the intense inner peace radiating from these elderly believers.

These men and women had been around Križka’s age when they had everything taken from them but their faith in God. And yet, over and over, they told their young visitor that in prison they found inner liberation through suffering. One Christian, separated from his wife and five children and cast into solitary confinement, testified that he had moments then that were “like paradise.”

“It seemed that the less they were able to change the world around them, the stronger they had become,” Križka tells me. “These people completely changed my understanding of freedom. My project changed from looking for victims to finding heroes. I stopped building a monument to the unjust past. I began to look for a message for us, the free people.”

I don’t want to spoil the book’s ending, but it has to do with the paradox that the poorer and more restrained these Christians were by circumstances, the greater their joy had been. Krizka finally realized that all his freedom, and all his worldly success as an artist who grew up in the postcommunist era, had enabled his anxieties and desires to establish a tyranny over his imagination. I know, this is not a romp-through-the-bluebonnets epiphany, but it’s real, and it’s going to have to be the thing that gets faithful Christians through the hardships to come.

And that’s because the totalitarianism coming at us is going to be not Orwellian, but Huxleyan. It’s not going to be about inflicting terror and pain, but rather about managing status and pleasure. This is what makes the emerging totalitarianism here different from what the captive peoples of Russia and Eastern Europe endured. As I write:

Križka discovered a subtle but immensely important truth: We ourselves are the ultimate rulers of our consciences. Hard totalitarianism depends on terrorizing us into surrendering our free consciences; soft totalitarianism uses fear as well, but mostly it bewitches us with therapeutic promises of entertainment, pleasure, and comfort—including, in the phrase of Mustapha Mond, Huxley’s great dictator, “Christianity without tears.”

But truth cannot be separated from tears. To live in truth requires accepting suffering. In Brave New World, Mond appeals to John the Savage to leave his wild life in the woods and return to the comforts of civilization. The prophetic savage refuses the temptation.

“But I don’t want comfort. I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”

“In fact,” said Mustapha Mond, “you’re claiming the right to be unhappy.”

“All right then,” said the Savage defiantly, “I’m claiming the right to be unhappy.”

This is the cost of liberty. This is what it means to live in truth. There is no other way. There is no escape from the struggle. The price of liberty is eternal vigilance—first of all, over our own hearts.

We have to claim the right to be unhappy — otherwise, there is no joy. Maybe Wax didn’t understand that point, or maybe I didn’t articulate it well. But there it is.

Wax seems to believe that he has caught me out on a contradiction: I cite the Soviet experience as a warning for what’s coming here, yet I keep saying that we’re not going to have Stalinism 2.0. That’s actually not a contradiction, though: as I make clear, Orwell and Huxley wrote about very different totalitarianisms. Orwell’s was realized in the USSR; I believe that what we are building in the West will more closely resemble Huxley’s. Wax writes:

So, on the one hand, Dreher worries we’re moving quickly toward totalitarianism like that of the Soviets, but on the other hand, it must be a soft totalitarianism, because the signs are all different, and the trajectory doesn’t follow. Are we ripe for revolution or not? “The parallels between a declining United States and prerevolutionary Russia are not exact, but they are unnervingly close,” he writes. Close in a few key ways, but radically different in others, as he himself must admit.

Um, yeah. That’s one of the main themes of the book. We really are undergoing a revolutionary moment, but this is hidden from many of us because we’re not faced with Bolshevik mobs rampaging through the streets. This is a very bourgeois revolution. Wax appears to believe he has found a contradiction in my narrative, but he has in fact discovered one of its fundamental points.

Strangely for someone who believes the book is alarmist, Wax credits its analysis of threats from the left. But it bothers him that I don’t “on the other hand” it with threats from the right:

My point isn’t that Dreher is wrong to warn against cultural currents that may sweep us into soft totalitarianism. I only wish he had explored how this tendency toward soft totalitarianism could wind up being as much a feature of a nationalist surge from the far right as it could the elitist “top down” from the far left. I understand why Dreher prioritizes the threat from the far left more than the far right—the left is embedded in various institutions that have traditionally wielded enormous power. But as Yuval Levin and other cultural observers have pointed out, these institutions have lost much of their power and credibility, which may leave us vulnerable to surges of revolutionary fervor from surprisingly unexpected directions.

Well, hang on. First, this is far, far too dismissive of the power of institutions in American life. It is certainly the case that the power of institutions is diminished. But it is also true that they are the gateways to power in American life. As I write in the book, the sociologist James Davison Hunter has warned that cultural change always begins through networks of elites. News and entertainment media, academia, and major corporations are already pumping out the pseudo-religious ideology of “social justice” into the minds of the American people — and if you dissent from it, you will increasingly find yourself shut off from participating in the mainstream of economic and cultural life. So much of Live Not By Lies is dedicated to explaining how this works that I find it weird that Wax, in his review, glosses over this.

More to the point, Wax is simply wrong to say that there is a parallel totalitarian threat from the right. There is an important difference between totalitarianism and authoritarianism. The nationalist-populist right, at its worst, promises authoritarianism. The left, by contrast, is totalitarian in its aims. From Live Not By Lies:

Today’s survivors of Soviet communism are, in their way, our own Kolakovićes, warning us of a coming totalitarianism—a form of government that combines political authoritarianism with an ideology that seeks to control all aspects of life. This totalitarianism won’t look like the USSR’s. It’s not establishing itself through “hard” means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft forms. This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.

To grasp the threat of totalitarianism, it’s important to understand the difference between it and simple authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is what you have when the state monopolizes political control. That is mere dictatorship—bad, certainly, but totalitarianism is much worse. According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[I]t has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

As part of its quest to define reality, a totalitarian state seeks not just to control your actions but also your thoughts and emotions. The ideal subject of a totalitarian state is someone who has learned to love Big Brother.

Whatever criticism you might make of, say, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban, or the Law & Justice government in Poland, they do not have the slightest interest in making anybody “love Big Brother” (our equivalent would be “fly the Pride flag,” “affirm Critical Race Theory,” etc.). The left does. Authoritarianism only demands control over the political space, but totalitarianism wants to “destroy the essence of man.” If you don’t think that this kind of thing, which is common in LGBT training in schools and among professionals (a reader sent this from a legal seminar he took), is destroying the essence of man, then you are not understanding the revolutionary moment upon us:

Authoritarian governments may have their problems, but they’re not trying to destroy the essence of man.

Finally, Wax concludes:

I’m not as sure as Dreher that these days are just around the corner for us; neither am I as confident that they’ll necessarily come from the socialist left rather than the populist right, since history is full of surprises, and future trends can be upended in cataclysmic events that almost no one foresees. I also believe that such resistance can be only marshaled and sustained if accompanied by a deep and abiding sense of joy. Most of my family members and friends who persevered as dissidents under communism were marked by a profound joyfulness. The joy of the Lord (even if not evident in this book) must mark any successful resistance.

OK, he’s not as sure as I am. Why not? I have laid out a meticulous case for why I believe we are in real trouble, including devoting a lot of space to Hannah Arendt’s analysis of a pre-totalitarian culture, to a deep discussion of the way theories of “social justice” now going mainstream (even now tearing apart churches) work like acid on Christian assumptions, and a long discussion of how the expanding of data-gathering technology into every aspect of our lives sets us up for manipulation and control, along the lines of China’s surveillance-based social credit system. Wax ignores all of this. I would have loved to have known why he thought my arguments were wrong. But he doesn’t really engage them. The reviewer just seems to have found it all too depressing to think about.

Well, yeah, it is depressing to think about. But that doesn’t make it untrue.

Nor does the fact that right-wingers have created totalitarianisms in the past (e.g., Mussolini’s Italy, Hitler’s Germany) mean that they are on the verge of doing the same today. Sure, we have to be vigilant against that, but again, I have made an actual argument for why the big threat here and now comes from the left. I have never been a fan of Donald Trump, did not vote for him in 2016, and think he’s been a lousy president for the most part. But Donald Trump is not pumping this revolutionary poison through the American body politic. It’s not going to be the Trump Administration that comes after the traditional Christian institutions that won’t accept the new ideology. It’s not schools and universities of the right who are training white children like mine and Wax’s to despise themselves because of the color of their skin, and to question whether or not they are male or female. It’s not right-wing capitalists like tech giants and major banks who are busily deplatforming dissenters, and who are working to make it harder for dissenters to participate in the economy. There are no right-wing mobs at universities driving left-wing professors and speakers off campus. Alt-right Millennials and Zoomers embedded inside major media institutions, like The New York Times and the Washington Post, are not driving the content of the coverage, and driving out senior editors who refuse to toe the ideological line. It’s not right-wingers within professional associations that are working now to make it impossible to be credentialed if you don’t affirm certain woke claims. And so forth.

All of these things are happening on the left, right now. But hey, maybe they will start happening on the right too. Ya never know. I think this is whatabouttery serving as a strategy to avoid making hard choices, but then, as an alarmist, I would say that, wouldn’t I?

UPDATE: A reader points out that Wax’s review reminds him of the “Neutral World” classification that Aaron Renn articulated three years ago in this piece about American Evangelicalism. In Renn’s view, “Neutral World” presupposes that Christianity exists in a broader culture that is neither positively nor negatively disposed towards it. Neutral World Christians believe in “cultural engagement,” and take their cues from secular elites, says Renn. Here is the key excerpt from Renn’s essay, which he published in 2017 (and in which he criticized my Benedict Option a bit, but credited it with at least dealing with reality):

My initial thought is that as soon as being known as a Christian would incur a material social penalty, which I anticipated happening soon, there would be a mass abandonment of the faith by the megachurch crowd, etc.

I was wrong about that. What happened instead is that the neutral world Evangelicals largely decided to follow the response of the traditional mainline denominations before them in embracing the world and focusing on the social gospel. In other words, they decided to sign on with the winning team.

The average neutral world Christian leader – and that’s a lot of the high profile ones other than the remaining religious righters, ones who have a more dominant role than ever thanks to the internet – talks obsessively about two topics today: refugees (immigrants) and racism. They combine that with angry, militant anti-Trump politics. These are not just expounded as internal to the church (e.g., helping the actual refugee family on your block), but explicitly in a social reform register (changing legacy culture and government policy).

I’m not going to argue that they are wrong are those points. But it’s notable how selective these folks were in picking topics to talk about. They seem to have landed on causes where they are 100% in agreement with the elite secular consensus.

It’s amazing how loud and publicly chest thumping they are on these topics while never saying anything that would get them uninvited from a Manhattan cocktail hour. They are very party line. (Since I mentioned Keller earlier I’ll point out he’s been somewhat different. He pointedly refused to take a position on the election, for example, saying that as a pastor he had to stick to the Bible and not give political opinions. And angry screeds aren’t his style).

I won’t speculate on their motives, but it’s very clear that neutral world leaders have a lot to lose. Unlike Jerry Falwell, who never had secular cachet and lived in the sticks, these guys enjoy artisanal cheese, microbrews, and pour over coffees in Brooklyn. They’ve had bylines in the New York Times and Washington Post. They get prime speaking gigs at the Q conference and elsewhere. A number of them have big donors to worry about. And if all of a sudden they lost the ability to engage with the culture they explicitly affirmed as valuable, it would a painful blow. For example, to accept Dreher’s Benedict Option argument they’d have to admit that the entire foundation of their current way of doing business no longer works. Not many people are interested in hearing that.

The neutral world Christians – and again that seems to be much of Evangelical leadership today – are in a tough spot when it comes to adjusting to the negative world. The move from positive to neutral world brought an increase in mainstream social status (think Tim Keller vs. Pat Robertson), but the move to a negative world will involve a loss of status. Let’s be honest, that’s not palatable to most. Hence we see a shift hard to the left and into very public synchronization with secular pieties. That’s not everybody in Evangelical leadership, but it’s a lot of them. Many of those who haven’t are older and long time political conservatives without a next generation of followers who think like them. (Political conservatism is also dying, incidentally).

Believe me, I get it. Always remember the Law of Projection. What you see in others is what’s present in yourself. I live in NYC. I love going to the opera. I’m into all that stuff. My urban work is a version of neutral world strategy I called “policy not politics.” I focus almost exclusively on local policies, which are far way from the world of national politics. I studiously avoid giving my opinion on things like Obamacare, not just because I’m not an expert on it, but also because it will just alienate people (regardless of my position) gratuitously. I try to be completely evenhanded in criticisms of Republicans and Democrats. I’m in the mainstream media. My personality is also not really oriented towards high-conflict environments. I prefer being generally liked. I’ve got a lot to lose. Changing that approach would be really hard.

But the reality is even in my secular urban work the ground is eroding under my feet. Everything is becoming hyperpolitical, whether I want it to be or not or whether it should be or not. I’m going to end up in a higher conflict mode whether I want to or not. Just like what happened to Tim Keller at Princeton. Buckle up.

People are going to be forced to make choices, across a wide spectrum of domains. I’m afraid current trends indicate that Christian leaders are going to make the wrong ones. We already know from the past that social gospel style Christianity is a gateway to apostasy. That’s where the trend is heading here.

I was speaking with one pastor who is a national council member of the Gospel Coalition. He’s a classic neutral worlder who strongly disapproves of Trump. But he notes that the Millennials in his congregation are in effect Biblically illiterate and have a definition of God’s justice that is taken from secular leftist politics. They did not, for example, see anything at all problematic about Hillary Clinton and her views. A generation or so from now when these people are the leaders, they won’t be people keeping unpopular positions to themselves. They won’t have any unpopular positions to hide. They will be completely assimilated to the world. Only their ethics will no longer be Hillary’s, but the new fashion du jour.

Rather than a mass blowout then, Evangelicalism would thus die from a slow bleed, much as the mainlines and the Church of England did before them. Indeed, today’s Evangelicals are retracing the steps of the mainlines. The parallels with the late 19th/early 20th centuries are there and should be studied. Back then, for example, virtually all of the sophisticated intellectual and cultural types – the cultural engagers of their day – sided with the world and became today’s liberal mainlines. Many of the ones who remained orthodox, like Gresham Machen, paid a huge price for doing so – largely inflicted by their erstwhile brethren who assimilated. As it turns out, intellectuals are very easy to co-opt with a few trinkets.

It looks like it’s happening again. Almost every Evangelical institution I know is explicitly reformulating itself around secular social gospel principles, even if they wouldn’t use those words to describe it. There will be residual beliefs in place, but over time they could dissipate to nothing. (Remember, the liberal mainlines didn’t go from A to B overnight. It was a long process. For example, earlier this year I read a book by famed early 20th century liberal preacher Henry Emerson Fosdick that contained things so reactionary that even many “conservative” pastors today would be unwilling to write them).

Read it all. That was a good catch by the reader. Whether he means to be or not, Trevin Wax is working from a Neutral World paradigm, but he’s living — we all are in the US — in Negative World. I expect that Live Not By Lies will be poorly received by Christians who insist that we live in Neutral World. As Renn wrote back in 2017, if we live in Negative World, then Christians like him (and like me!) who enjoy living in the world are going to be in for hard times. We are going to be forced to make hard choices, because the world itself will no longer give us the opportunity for neutrality. That has become as sharp and as clear as a shard of glass smashed out of a storefront window. To believe that you can avoid the difficult parts of a pessimistic argument because of its supposed joylessness, and throw some anti-Trump whatabouttery at the problem, like a handful of salt tossed over one’s shoulder for good luck, is a textbook Neutral World response.

I would have probably responded better to Wax’s review if he had flat-out rejected the book. The weird thing about it is that he seems to believe that I’m onto something real (he acknowledges that people from Romania in his circles also see the sunny skies of America darkening in a familiar way), but the fact that I don’t say it with winsomeness, and don’t say “But Trump too!”, seems to have put him off.

Eventually, though, middle-class believers like Trevin Wax — and like the author of Live Not By Lies — are going to have to make hard choices. The temptation to rationalize is going to be very, very seductive.

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Constructing Left-Wing Conformity

Here we have a woman who believes that black shoplifters should be allowed to get away with it because reporting them to the police would be putting them at risk of death. Seriously, this is the argument she uses to abuse this CVS store manager:

The divide in America right now is basically between the reasonable man in this video and the insane woman berating him. If you find yourself on the side of the insane woman, you are the bad guy.

pic.twitter.com/NQX9OCRRnT

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) September 17, 2020

Is she right? If you report black male shoplifters to the police, are you therefore at risk of being killed? Sure seems like these protesters think so:

Reminder

>How many unarmed black men were killed by police last year?

[The correct answer was 9]

Some of our finest, most well educated young people’s answers:

– Hundreds

– A thousand+

– Dozens of thousands

– Thousands per month o_O

pic.twitter.com/ZGYLYQJMs2

— One Walleee (@onewalleee) September 14, 2020

According to USA Today, using the Washington Post database, the number for 2019 was actually thirteen. Read the piece, though, and appreciate the weird, shrill way the USA Today writer doesn’t trust readers to draw their own conclusions from the data. She wants them to be very sure that they know that the true numbers are probably a lot worse than thirteen! Probably hundreds, or even thousands, I reckon.

The left, including the left-wing media, does this kind of thing with numbers all the time. I’ve written before about how activists and their media allies completely distort the meaning of murder statistics involving transgenders, for the sake of creating a narrative. Here’s what I said in December 2019. Excerpts:

At last night’s Democratic debate, Elizabeth Warren solemnly declared that if she is elected, she will make a point of coming out onto the White House lawn once a year and reciting aloud the names of all the transgendered Americans who have been killed in the past year.

Dying While Trans is a big thing on the Left, and in the mainstream media. We keep having stories — Google them, you’ll see — on the “epidemic” of murders of transgendered Americans. The American Medical Association has also labeled it an “epidemic.” According to the Human Rights Campaign (HRC), the leading LGBT lobby, 22 trans persons have been murdered so far in 2019. One is too many, but to put this in perspective, in 2018, there were over 16,200 murders in the US. In my medium-sized city alone in 2019, there have already been 75 homicides — over three times the “epidemic” of trans murders. Nobody is talking about an “epidemic” of murder in Baton Rouge. Nor should they, as awful as the killings are, because to label it an epidemic would be meaningless.

The word “epidemic” when applied to the killing of transgendered people is 100 percent a political term, one that has no real-world meaning whatsoever, except insofar as it can advance the pro-trans narrative. It is pure propaganda. 

In the piece, I looked into the circumstances surrounding the deaths of each of the 22 transgendered people murdered that year, according to the LGBT activist organization Human Rights Campaign — all of them, according to HRC, victims of “anti-trans hate.”

It was a lie. A flat-out lie. Read the details. Only one of the cases might have been legitimately framed as anti-trans hate. Most of the murder victims were prostitutes. That doesn’t justify their murder, heaven knows, but walking the streets selling sex is extremely dangerous. There is no evidence to justify belief that these people were murdered in hate crimes. It’s total propaganda.

Look at this news from Gallup in 2019:

U.S. adults estimate that nearly one in four Americans (23.6%) are gay or lesbian. Gallup has previously found that Americans have greatly overestimated the U.S. gay population, recording similar average estimates of 24.6% in 2011 and 23.2% in 2015. In each of the three polls in which Gallup has asked this question, a majority of Americans estimated this population to be 20% or greater.

Americans’ estimate of the proportion of gay people in the U.S. is more than five times Gallup’s more encompassing 2017 estimate that 4.5% of Americans are LGBT, based on respondents’ self-identification as being lesbian, gay, bisexual or transgender.

You can easily imagine why Americans think this, given how obsessive our news and entertainment media are about LGBT issues. They’re that way about identity politics, period. They create these false and destructive narratives that drive us to fear and loathe each other.

In Quillette, Matthew Blackwell writes about how the data on police shootings don’t support the activists’ narrative — but facts don’t matter. Excerpts:

Before proceeding further, it’s important to emphasize caution on over-interpreting the anti-white findings of recent scholarship. The evidence on racial differences in police killings is not unambiguously settled; scholars continue to argue over the minutia of data collection and statistical techniques, and Fryer himself has warned against drawing strong conclusions at this stage: “Are there racial differences in the most extreme forms of police violence? The Southern boy in me says yes; the economist says we don’t know.” But uncertainty is sufficient to set off alarm bells about the Black Lives Matter movement among those who adopt a sceptical approach when evaluating knowledge claims. “There’s so much we don’t know,” says author Sam Harris in a recent podcast, “And yet, most people are behaving as though every important question was answered a long time ago.” Harris, known for his staunch atheism and critique of faith-based religion, asks some troubling questions about the Black Lives Matter movement by pointing out that it disguises empirically fragile claims with absolute conviction and then stonewalls any attempt to examine the evidence: “Like most religious awakenings, the movement does not show itself eager to make honest contact with reality.”

While doubt prevails among those familiar with the data on policing killings, faith-based inerrancy seems to invigorate activists to the point where discussion becomes futile. When video journalist Ami Horowitz tried to engage with Black Lives Matter activists he found they had virtually no familiarity with the data on police killings and no desire to know about it. “I can’t, I’m getting angry, I don’t want to talk anymore,” said one activist in response to Horowitz’s attempt to discuss the evidence. Another said, “Your data can go and suck the same dick you’re gonna suck.” Another rebuffed Horowitz by demanding to see his sources but then refused to look when he attempted to produce them on his phone. Yet another resorted to conspiracy theorizing, suggesting that any study conflicting with the sentiment of Black Lives Matter must be some kind of academic plot.

This aligns with what a (white) friend of mine told me recently about some young (white) relatives of his who are Black Lives Matters zealots: that when he asked them to explain how they came to believe the things that they do, they got upset and accused him of aggression. Merely asking how do you know that? is to prove your racism in the eyes of these people.

More Blackwell:

And, as likeminded people surround each other, the more resistant they are to discrediting information. Leon Festinger describes this process in When Prophecy Fails, but the most eloquent description comes from Adolf Hitler’s architect and Minister of Armaments Albert Speer, who spent decades in prison after the war attempting to understand how he had allowed himself to become swept up by the delusions of the regime he supported:

… in normal circumstances people who turn their backs on reality are soon set straight by the mockery and criticism of those around them, which makes them aware they have lost credibility. In the Third Reich, there were no such correctives, especially for those who belonged to the upper stratum. On the contrary, every self-deception was multiplied in a hall of distorting mirrors, becoming a repeatedly confirmed picture of a fantastical dream world, which no longer bore any relationship to the grim outside world. In those mirrors I could see nothing but my own face reproduced many times over.

Just as sticks propped against one another are kept upright by mutual inter-dependence, false beliefs may acquire spurious validity in the public square from the confidence engendered by their popularity. When one is brought up in a society where everybody practises a religion, there is scarcely any reason to question that religion, even though it may have no contact with reality at all. Over the past few months, I’ve asked friends and acquaintances if they believe in an epidemic of killings by police, and if so how they came to believe this. I tended to receive answers such as “everyone knows,” or “literally nobody disagrees.” These are the words of believers who have relied on cues from their peers to form the belief.

Blackwell discusses how this eagerness to believe an activist narrative, heedless of the facts, plays out once the media pick it up, and it becomes too dangerous for politicians and public figures to dissent from the approved narrative. One result of this is bad public policy, says Blackwell.  You could say that it allows petty criminals like shoplifters to get away with crime, for fear of being doxxed and harassed by activists. Or you could say, as Blackwell does:

Investigations into alleged police misconduct are obviously important, but not when conducted in response to the histrionic demands of uninformed activists. A recent 50-page study examined the effects of investigations into police forces on crime. It found that most investigations are followed by a reduction in levels of crime, but with one important exception. If an investigation into the police force occurs after a viral media storm due to the shooting of a black suspect, the effect is a significant decrease in policing and a catastrophic increase in crime. The paper warns, “If the price of policing increases, officers are rational to retreat. And, retreating disproportionately costs black lives.”

Read it all.

Now, ask yourself how likely it is that a high school teacher or college professor is likely to raise even the slightest criticism of Black Lives Matter and its narrative, even in simply trying to get students to understand the situation. You’d have to be professionally crazy to take that risk. And so you allow your students to remain ignorant but serene, and you protect your job. Same with the “epidemic” of trans murders.

Speaking of the Third Reich, did you see the report that transpeople and their allies are burning J.K. Rowling’s books and tiktokking the pyres? Y’all keep rolling your eyes when I talk about soft totalitarianism, and don’t notice bookshops declaring that they will no longer stock the books of “transphobes” like Rowling, because they don’t want their trans customers to feel “unsafe”. Because of a book on the shelf. Of a bookstore. In a free country.

 

 

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Betsy DeVos Calls Princeton’s Bluff

I love this so much:

The Department of Education has informed Princeton University that it is under investigation following the school president’s declaration that racism was “embedded” in the institution.

President Christopher L. Eisgruber published an open letter earlier this month claiming that “[r]acism and the damage it does to people of color persist at Princeton” and that “racist assumptions” are “embedded in structures of the University itself.”

According to a letter the Department of Education sent to Princeton that was obtained by the Washington Examiner, such an admission from Eisgruber raises concerns that Princeton has been receiving tens of millions of dollars of federal funds in violation of Title VI of the Civil Rights Act of 1964, which declares that “no person in the United States shall, on the ground of race, color, or national origin, be excluded from participation in, be denied the benefits of, or be subjected to discrimination under any program or activity receiving Federal financial assistance.”

Eisgruber’s letter branding the 274 year-old university racist came after a summer of unrest rife with race riots and an open letter from hundreds of Princeton faculty members who wrote, “Anti-Black racism has a visible bearing upon Princeton’s campus makeup.” The admission was followed by dozens of “anti-racist” policy change demands. Among them were calls for select faculty race quotas and to “reconsider” the use of standardized testing for admissions.

Now, the Education Department has sent a formal records request as they pursue their investigation. Their main point of contention is whether Princeton has lied to the public with their marketing and to the Department in their promise to not uphold racist standards in accordance with receiving federal funds.

Read it all. 

If Trump is re-elected, I hope he uses the executive branch to go to war on wokeness in all these institutions. Call their bluffs. If mandarins like Chris Eisgruber really believed their cant about systemic racism, they would resign tomorrow to renounce their privilege. But these powerful white people never do. These fortunate sons and daughters just want to make less powerful white people, and their children, pay the cost of bearing their own liberal guilt.

Good for Betsy DeVos. A superb example of trolling.

 

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A Hard Look At Catholicism’s Crisis

Back in the early 2000s, when the Catholic sex abuse crisis broke open, the fact that the Internet existed made all the difference. The establishment Catholic media was largely useless in writing about the crisis, and the mainstream media, though vastly better, still had blind spots. At the time, though, blogging was a new thing, and individual Catholic bloggers aggregated stories and provided analysis that establishment media — both in the church and in the secular mainstream — could not or would not provide.

But there was a problem — an understandable one, given human nature, but still a problem. People within factions tended to only want to read reporting and commentary that reinforced their preferred narratives. Generally speaking, you could not find reporting and commentary on the Catholic left that breathed a word about the role that gay networks played within clerical circles, re: the scandal. It was hard on the Catholic right to find writers willing to confront problems with conservatives’ favorite narratives. For example, you were treading on dangerous territory if, as a Catholic conservative, you raised questions about the role that clerical celibacy may have played in creating a culture of sexual corruption.

Understand my point here: I’m saying that you couldn’t even raise the questions, because the discourse police on your own side would set on you. This played out in other ways. After I lost my ability to believe as a Catholic, as the result of staring too long into the abyss of Church corruption, some of the same people who used to cheer me on when I wrote about church corruption as a Catholic were now quick to denounce me and to deny that anything further I had to write about it had any merit whatsoever. Again, I get that: it’s human nature.

Even at this late date, that kind of thing continues. Many Catholics can’t stand the radically orthodox Catholic website Church Militant, because they consider it to be too quick to credit rumors and conspiracies, and perhaps too vulgar in their reporting and commentary. Maybe these critics are right, at least to some extent. I honestly couldn’t say, because I no longer follow Catholic stories as much as I once did. But I do know this: sites like Church Militant arise because there are still big problems in the Catholic Church, ones that the mainstream media prefer not to cover, for whatever reason, and that the institutional leaders (e.g., bishops, heads of religious orders) will not address.

This morning on Church Militant, Christine Niles reports on how the Bishop of Fresno has quietly reinstated a priest who had been found with gay porn years ago, and who as recently as 2018 had been found with evidence that he was a sexually active gay man. Where else are you going to read stories like this, which bear witness to the corruption within the institutional church, and warn faithful Catholics about what’s really going on?

There are some rad trad Catholic sites whose writers, fourteen years after I left the Catholic Church, still rant about me and discount the things I say because I’m an ex-Catholic. They don’t get that I’m not their enemy. In fact, two years ago, even Benedict XVI’s private secretary praised The Benedict Option as a good guide for Catholics through the dark wood of the present moment. I see my public role now as one who tries to build bridges among Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox, to make it feasible for us to defend each other against the threat of ascendant anti-Christianity. In my new book Live Not By Lies, I interview and quote from Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox about their experiences of communist persecution. As people like the Catholic Silvester Krcmery, the Orthodox priest George Calciu, and the Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand all testified, they found real brotherhood among Christians of all confessions who had been, like them, thrown into prison for their faith.

The persecutors will not distinguish between Catholics, Protestants, and Orthodox; they will come after us because we profess Christ. This does not make the real and serious theological differences among our confessions go away, but it does put them into context.

I have been an infrequent reader of the traditionalist Catholic writer Steve Skojec for a while. One thing that draws me to Steve is that he really does seem like a man who is urgently trying to get at the truth. He sees that the line between truth and lies does not run between trads and liberals within the Catholic Church, but down the middle of every Catholic heart. (This is true for all of us, of course.) In his most recent piece, he sends up a cri de coeur against people on his own side whose ideological priors keep them from diagnosing the deepest crises in the Catholic Church, and working out a prescription. He begins by quoting his wife, who some time ago asked him why he kept fighting Church battles when it made him so miserable. Skojec writes:

The truth was, I didn’t have an answer for her at first. In fact, it took me a few days before I thought I knew. I came back to her, and I did my best to explain it:

“I think,” I said, “It’s because my Catholicism is my entire identity. It’s all I’ve ever known, or been known for. I’ve been actively involved in the Church and defending the faith since I was a kid. And if the people in charge of the Church right now are right, if their side wins, it means it was all for nothing. It means the Church is a lie. And if that’s the case, I don’t even know who I am anymore.”

“Really,” I concluded, “I’m not just fighting for the Church. I’m fighting for my own survival.”

This is a question that has haunted and plagued me ever since: what if they are right? What if I’ve spent my whole life defending something that isn’t even real? Something totally changeable, and not timeless in its truth?

There are times when it really gets to me. There are others when old habits take over, and swatting down heterodoxy and promoting the true faith are as effortless and familiar as riding a bike.

But more and more lately, I’m feeling very restless. The question comes back to bother me more than I’d like to admit. I don’t like feeling guilty about asking questions I’m being forced to consider, as though that makes me the bad Catholic, and not the people doing this stuff. The surreality of the events of 2020 have only seemed to warp the fabric of what is known even more. There’s a profound sense, as my friend Kale Zelden wrote recently, that things are very broken, and that we desperately need to figure out how to make sense of the world again.

Skojec writes about how he started watching Jordan Peterson videos, and he was dazzled by how Peterson grappled with big ideas without a sense of tentativeness. Peterson, he said, was unafraid — and that was liberating:

And then the mirror flipped, and I realized that I have never felt so free. That even though I started 1P5 so that I could say the things that needed to be said that were considered taboo, I am nevertheless still trapped within that adamantine framework of the Church. Consequently, whenever I write about a difficult topic, or fire off a tweet, or speak into a microphone for a podcast, I can count on an army of amateur theology-checkers and censors to ferret out my mistakes (of which there are no doubt many) like some Monty Python-esque version of the online inquisition, looking to correct or prove me wrong, or perhaps even to humiliate me in articles and posts without ever addressing me at all — me, the person, the fellow brother in Christ — all because I colored outside the lines.

I cannot overstate how inhibiting that awareness is to authentic curiosity, or problem solving. I can’t tell you how much it feels like a cage, when all you want to do is hash things out, deconstruct the concepts, get your hands dirty, and figure out what makes it all tick.

The freedom to make mistakes, to sincerely get things wrong, and to keep digging is what we need right now. More than ever. We don’t need our intellectual hands and feet to be tied, or to get zapped with a cattle prod every time we step out of bounds. Because what we’re dealing with is way too important to simply gloss over. In a way, we need to do what Pope Francis says, and make a bit of a mess.

What do we do when time and again, we are confronted with the unthinkable? What happens when the pope himself — THE POPE HIMSELF — says contraception is OK, or approves Holy Communion for people living in adultery, or changes the Catechism in a way that reverses the Church’s infallible bi-millenial teaching on the moral liceity of the death penalty (in a way that opens the door to reversing everything else), or signs an interfaith document that undermines the exclusivity of salvation through the Church? What do we think when we hear again and again through one of the pope’s most trusted confidants that he thinks hell doesn’t actually exist, and that the souls of the unrighteous are merely annihilated? What about when he says the miracle of the feeding of the 5,000 wasn’t really a miracle – wasn’t “magic” – but just some act of sharing? What about when he says of the Blessed Mother that she wanted to accuse God of lying to her? Or that Jesus actually “became sin“? What of a hundred or a thousand other troubling things?

Skojec emphasizes that he is not a sedevacantist, nor does he advocate leaving the Catholic Church. But he said that the faithful cannot strengthen themselves with “platitudes,” or by refusing to see the Church for what it is today. He says a priest even told him once to stop thinking about all this. That, says Skojec, is the coward’s way out. More:

Those of my generation have never seen a Church not at war with herself. Never known a Church where there were not two competing sets of doctrines, two fundamentally incompatible liturgies in her central rite, two entirely different sets of sacraments, two completely disparate versions of a thing we’re told is characterized by unity, of all things, as one its four distinguishing marks.

No amount of preference for one way of doing things or another is going to make the dichotomy go away. No amount of fence-straddling the pre and post-conciliar worlds will make either one feel like it’s really part of the same religion. No amount of wishcasting will make the hermeneutic of continuity believable. I have spent approximately half of my life on each side of the fence, and although I can tell you which one I think is better for the life of the soul, neither is without significant limitations and drawbacks.

But they are certainly not equal, and the Church throws all her weight behind the inferior things. It’s as if she wants us to lose our faith.

So now, as the Church faces inevitable post-covid demographic collapse, those of us who are left on either side of this artificial and carefully-designed divide need to find a way to work together. We will be, before long, all that is left.

And we need to find a way to answer, or at least live with, the questions that my litany of observations above prompt in our minds with utmost urgency.

We are obligated, I think, to ask hard questions. Questions, even, that we’ve been told that we are not allowed to ask.

Read it all.

There’s so very much more in this piece — and it’s not just for Catholics. I stay out of the Very Online Orthodox world, because I remember all too well how getting caught up in that world as a Catholic broke me. Not long into my life as an Orthodox Christian, I involved myself in the Orthodox version of same, and met a bad end. For the sake of my own faith, I resolved to stay out of the online Orthosphere, not because I don’t think the questions Very Online Orthodox talk about are unimportant — sometimes they are, but often they’re serious questions — but because I know my own faults all too well, and don’t want to get mixed up in that again. I recognize clearly the kind of online Christians that Skojec is talking about, and how their instinct to police discussion like penny-ante inquisitors makes it impossible for men and women of good will to have the urgent conversations that they need to have for the sake of the survival of the faith. To get drawn into fruitless, rancorous debates with them is to risk being disheartened about the possibility of Christian resistance.

We Christians are in the beginning stages of a Long Emergency, to borrow a James Howard Kunstler term. When I was in Moscow last fall, interviewing an older Russian Baptist pastor about resistance to communism, I didn’t stop to think about where he stood vis-à-vis the Russian Orthodox Church. I just thought, “Here is a believer with whom I deeply disagree on some things, but who comes from a community that suffered intense persecution. What can I learn from this brother in Christ?” Here is some of what he told me:

Two days later, I sat in a café in the heart of Moscow listening to Yuri Sipko, a retired Baptist pastor. In his village classroom in the 1950s in Siberia, Sipko and his classmates were given a badge with a portrait of Lenin. At age eleven, the children were given the red scarf of the Young Pioneers, a kind of Boy Scouts and Girl Scouts for communist youth. Teachers drilled the children in the slogan of the Pioneers: “Be ready. Always be ready.”

“I didn’t wear the pin with Lenin’s face, nor did I wear the red scarf. I was a Baptist. I wasn’t going to do that,” recalls Sipko. “I was the only one in my class. They went after my teachers. They wanted to know what they were doing wrong that they had a boy in their class who wasn’t a Pioneer. They pressured the director of the school too. They were forced to pressure me to save themselves.”

To be a Baptist in Soviet Russia was to know that you were a permanent outsider. They endured it because they knew that truth was embodied in Jesus Christ, and that to live apart from him would mean living a lie. For the Baptists, to compromise with lies for the sake of a peaceful life is to bend at the knee to death.

“When I think about the past, and how our brothers were sent to prison and never returned, I’m sure that this is the kind of certainty they had,” says the old pastor. “They lost any kind of status. They were mocked and ridiculed in society. Sometimes they even lost their children. Just because they were Baptists, the state was willing to take away their kids and send them to orphanages. These believers were unable to find jobs. Their children were not able to enter universities. And still, they believed.”

The hour is too late for us to argue over the orthodoxy of Russian Baptists. Am I indifferent to the theological differences between us? No. I think Pastor Sipko is wrong about some important things — and I pray that one day, we will be in a civilizational situation in which Baptists and Orthodox have the luxury of disputing each other at length. Now is not that time, though. As Skojec says about Catholics, I say of all small-o orthodox Christians: We will be, before long, all that is left. We need to find a way to work together.

This is the kind of realist ecumenism I advocate in The Benedict Option, and one that I urgently advocate in Live Not By Lies. One of these days, we or our descendants are going to get to know each other, and to depend on each other, in prison, so we had better start building those bridges of faith and solidarity now. Trust me, people: you are better served by building relationships with Christians of other confessions who see clearly what’s happening now, and are not afraid to say so, than you are by being intimidated by those within your own church who are too scared to ask the hard questions, and who try to defend their own fear by shutting down those who do ask.

I have never met Steve Skojec, but that man, a true-believing Catholic trad, is my ally — and I am his. We cannot afford not to stand side by side against an enemy like this. Skojec titles his essay “No More Platitudes: It’s Time To Take A Hard Look At The Crisis Of Catholicism.” Change the word “Catholicism” in that title to “Christianity,” and that headline is a sentiment I agree with one hundred percent.

 

The post A Hard Look At Catholicism’s Crisis appeared first on The American Conservative.

Soft Totalitarianism & Anti-Biden Ad

The next issue of National Review has a very strong review of Live Not By Lies in it. I won’t quote much, because it’s not online yet, but I do want to put this passage out there:

The underlying and unwelcome message of Live Not by Lies is that fast approaching the doctrinally flabby, enervated Western church is a time of great trouble of a kind not seen in American history and that orthodox Christians should recognize the fact, prepare responsibly, and live out their faith boldly (if shrewdly): They should live their lives worthily of the calling they have received. “You may not have the strength to stand up in public and say what you really believe,” Dreher writes, “but you can at least refuse to affirm what you do not believe. You may not be able to overthrow totalitarianism, but you can find within yourself and your community the means to live in the dignity of truth. If we must live under the dictatorship of lies, . . . then our response must be: ‘Let their rule hold not through me!’”

Did he say “totalitarianism”? Indeed so. InLive Not by Lies, Dreher asserts that the Christian Church in the West, along with Western culture in general, is increasingly under the dominion of “soft totalitarianism.” This is not to imply the introduction of prison camps, executions, or the midnight knock on the door. Instead it is the now-familiar movement in which progressive-minded men and women— rootless, self-righteous, violently intolerant of viewpoints other than their own, tediously foul-mouthed, and wondrously ignorant—endeavor to use the levers of corporate and political power to control the way people think, speak, and act at the most granular level.

We have a good example of this just now in what Facebook has done to an ad criticizing Joe Biden for his support for the so-called Equality Act, which would (among other things) allowed male-to-female transgenders to participate fully in women’s sports. The ad targets Michigan voters. Here it is:

You can disagree with the ad, but it’s a perfectly normal criticism of the Equality Act. It says that by permitting biological males to compete with girls, it will “destroy girls’ sports.” In fact, here is the transcript:

All female athletes want is a fair shot at competition. At a scholarship. At a title. At victory. But what if that shot was taken away by a competitor who claims to be a girl but was born a boy? Senator Gary Peters and Joe Biden support legislation that would destroy girls’ sports. They call it Equality. Really? That’s not fair. Not fair at all. Vote against Gary Peters and Joe Biden. They’re too extreme for Michigan.

So why won’t Facebook let people post this ad?  Jon Schweppe, head of American Principles Project, the organization that made the ad, explains what happened. He says that gay-rights and left-wing media groups began screaming bloody murder about the ad, calling it “hate speech.” But the independent fact-checking outfit PolitiFact rendered a verdict saying this is not a matter of fact-checking; they can’t fact-check a prediction. That should have been the end of it, right? Nope:

On Tuesday morning, Facebook slapped a warning label on our ad, urging our target audience that the ad wasn’t providing enough context. By Tuesday night, Facebook had removed the ad entirely.

The justification? Previously, Facebook had indicated they would take down ads that failed to pass a fact check from one of their “independent” fact checkers. Obviously APP’s ad passed the fact check, which PolitiFact admits. So Facebook added a brand new category to justify taking down demonstrably truthful political ads like ours: “Missing Context.” This newly invented rating seems to suggest we didn’t do enough to explain our opponent’s point of view. Objectively, of course, that could be said of every single campaign advertisement in the history of American politics. It certainly could be applied to every campaign advertisement being run by Joe Biden this cycle.

Will Facebook take down this ad, where the Biden campaign slams Donald Trump for concerns over mail-in voting but fails to provide the important context that some states, like New Jersey, are planning to send mail-in ballots to every voter on their voter rolls, whether or not they have applied for absentee ballots? Or what about this ad, where Biden accuses Donald Trump of “purposely downplaying” COVID-19 early on in the pandemic, without providing obvious context—that the president was trying to avoid creating a panic, and that he was far from the only one to undersell the virus’s potential to cause havoc?

Schweppe knows, though, that this is not about facts at all: it’s about privileging left-wing gender ideology, and suppressing criticism of it. More:

We’ll produce a new ad, and Facebook will reject that one, too. Maybe Politifact can write it for us. But then, of course, the goalposts will move again. Big Tech has appointed itself the sole arbiter of our elections, and American Principles Project PAC is not allowed to participate. Social conservatives are not allowed to participate. Anodyne Republicans will soon not be allowed to participate.

Read the whole thing. 

This is a garden-variety example of soft totalitarianism. Nobody is going to throw Jon Schweppe into a gulag. He’s just not going to be able to say anything against the Equality Act. It’s Facebook today, but you know it’s not going to stop there. Woke Capitalism — including tech and media giants — will increasingly stop at nothing to control the narrative and suppress truth, or at least dissent. Expect this to get worse — especially if Donald Trump wins re-election.

Which is one reason to consider voting for him: to spite the controllers. I’ve thought since this summer that Trump would certainly lose. All the usual factors are lined up against him, and he’s been doing badly in the polls. Besides which, he’s running a poor campaign, and is often his own worst enemy. In Alabama yesterday, I talked to a conservative resident of the state who is ticked off at Trump for costing Jeff Sessions the GOP Senate nomination out of spite. The voter said returning Sessions to the Senate would have put one of the best conservative lawmakers back in action, but now conservatives will have to vote for Tommy Tuberville, the former football coach, who is (said the man) a total mediocrity.

But you know, I’m really not sure that Trump is going to lose at all. If I were not a pundit, and I were going to vote for Trump, there’s no way I would tell a pollster; I wouldn’t trust them with that information. This is entirely anecdotal, but a few weeks back, I decided to ask people who tell me they intend to vote for Trump if they would say so to a pollster. They all react like it’s a crazy question: of course they wouldn’t tell a pollster — because they don’t trust a stranger with that information.

Moreover, I don’t know that I have ever observed such a disconnect between the political and cultural landscape as presented by the mainstream media, and the political and cultural landscape as it is. Maybe I’m living too much inside my own bubble, but if you read the major papers, listen to NPR, and look at the broadcast and cable networks (their websites, at least), you would think that the country has turned deep blue. My social media feed, and my scanning of right-of-center websites, reveals a very different story. Let me be clear: I know that I self-curate my reading, and that I could be every bit as stovepiped as the liberal media, maybe even moreso. But with each passing day, I have my doubts.

As I mentioned earlier, I was in Alabama this week at a TAC event. I took advantage of being in the area with a car to visit friends I haven’t seen in a while — people who read my blog, and who know the kinds of things I’ve been focusing on. It continues to astonish me how many conservatives have been intimidated into total silence about racial conflict. I don’t say that as critics of them in the least. I’m hearing people who have been hit really hard by this fast-emerging situation, and who don’t know what to say at all. People who are now questioning longstanding friendships, even family relationships — all because others who had been close to them are accusing them of being racist, simply for not agreeing with their woke take.

Again, it’s all anecdotal, so take it with a grain of salt, but I’m getting a growing sense of deep anger over all this — over the feeling among these people that they are being harassed and threatened into silence, even by people they know well, or thought they knew well. When you have people in your family, and people in authority, telling you that “silence is violence,” and trying to force you to say things you don’t believe in, what do you do? On the long drive back home to Louisiana today, I thought: well, yeah, they’re going to vote Trump, because their secret vote might the only thing they know that they can do to protest this without risking their jobs and reputations. 

My sense — and that’s all it is — based on e-mails and conversations, is not that people think Trump can or will stop this stuff. It’s that they don’t know what else to do. They believe — and I think that they’re absolutely right here — that a vote for Biden will be a vote to give the executive branch over to these woke militants. Interestingly, a lot of conservative professors I know, people who don’t like Trump at all, are now strongly on his side since late summer. Having to see how their own university administrations are going militantly ideological, and trampling down an ethos of free speech and an free inquiry, has made something click inside them about what to expect when people like that run the executive branch.

Either way, we’ve got big trouble ahead. If Trump wins, look for Facebook, Google, Twitter, and woke capitalists everywhere, to convulse, and nakedly seek to suppress the free exchange of ideas. If Trump loses, I expect them all to consolidate and extend their efforts to control thought and expression. I see no way out of this, except straight through it, fighting. I wish I did. If you see a clear and struggle-free path forward, let’s hear from you. We have to prepare, spiritually and otherwise, while there is time.

(By the way — and sorry, but I don’t know how else to do this — when I was able to check my TAC e-mail today after 36 hours offline, I saw that I have several interview requests around Live Not By Lies. If you’d like to talk about scheduling an interview, please reach out to publicist Gwen Nappi at gwen — at — mnspublicity — dot — com.)

UPDATE: As soon as I posted this, I saw this line on Axios:

If President Trump defies today’s swing-state polls and pulls off another upset, what will we have missed that could have been a clue?

Here’s an answer: the silence the left forced onto dissenters. You can’t see an absence, maybe, without looking hard. But the media isn’t interested in looking hard outside its Safe Spaces. Besides, I’m hearing from conservatives that they will not work with the media if asked. They don’t trust them to treat them fairly. I wouldn’t have said it in an earlier election cycle, but I’ll say it now: smart move. Most of them just want to find a way to shoehorn you in to an anti-Trump story. The point here is that Trump voters are so distrustful of pollsters and media that they kept their true views to themselves. The thing you media will have missed is the environment that you helped created in this country where people are afraid to say what they think, on account of what the left will do to them.

Anyway, look: If Trump pulls off another upset, what will the media have missed that could be have been a club?

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America’s Return To Racism

I have been struggling to articulate my rising anger and despair over the way we think and talk about race in this country. This moving piece by Naomi Schaefer Riley over her fears of how the Great Awokening might screw up the heads of her biracial kids speaks to it surprisingly well. Excerpts:

A little more than a week after school ended in June, I ran into a friend who wanted urgently to know whether my children were okay. Her concern was not whether my middle-school son and daughter had caught the virus (she knew they hadn’t), or whether they had suffered from the isolation of a months-long lockdown, or even whether they had managed the stresses of online learning. No, she had just read on a local news website that my children’s school, Rye Country Day, was a hotbed of racial animus, and she was worried that my children, whose father is black, had suffered as a result. I laughed politely and assured her that they were fine. But the more I have thought about their experience over the past year at this elite prep school in Westchester, the more I wonder whether the racialized madness that has overtaken our country will leave any of us “fine”—and the more I have come to believe that these schools are, in fact, beset by racism. It’s just not the kind of racism they think.

I am not naive. When we decided to leave the world of our Jewish day school, I knew things would be different. I knew that at least some of the time spent on Judaic studies would be filled up with social-justice pursuits. I knew that our children would go from being seen as Jews who looked a little different from other Jews (and may have appeared in school brochures more frequently than other children) to children whose racial identity mattered considerably and whose religious identity was a secondary, if not a trivial, concern. But we had also been told that, of the public and private schools in our area, RCDS was among the most academically rigorous. Students not only got into top colleges, which was true at many other Westchester schools, but they took a lot of AP classes, had the option of studying classics, and were assigned a significant amount of homework.

Within the first week of school, though, it became clear that the school had other priorities—namely, “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” The kids were immediately offered the chance to join a variety of clubs, including a diversity club, a students-of-color club, and a girls-of-color club in which older girls of color mentored younger ones. Parents received numerous emails about these clubs, and our kids were invited on a number of occasions to join, including by their teachers. They did not.

I’m not going to quote from the vast middle of the piece — you really do need to read it for yourself. This elite private school has gone totally neurotic about the possibility of racism tainting its student body. It sounds like a miserable experience — nonstop ideological monitoring and messaging. She continues:

When I asked my children whether they experienced racism at RCDS, they laugh. Their classmates were never anything less than kind to them. Maybe any aggressions were too “micro” to be noticed. But the parents, too, seemed considerate and warm. And this, perhaps, is what worries me most. In the 13 years since I gave birth to my first child, I have sighed occasionally at the silly things people say to me—“What a nice tan your children have,” “What does their father look like?”—but the experience of being the mother of mixed-race kids has only confirmed to me that we are fortunate to live in the most tolerant, open-minded country in the world. There are parents at our synagogue, our schools, and in our neighborhood who have welcomed my children into their homes, who have fed them and cared for them, and who have treated them like family.

I fear that the message currently emanating from teachers and administrators and politicians and pundits will harm those relationships. The new anti-racism, with its endless cycles of victimization and demands for reparations—as opposed to the model of teaching people to aspire to colorblindness and providing everyone with equal opportunity—requires all of us (and children in particular) to see race all the time. This new model will turn what would otherwise be ordinary, healthy relationships—friendships, even—into dramas with racially defined roles for all the characters.

The good people of my community and others around the country are told that no matter how welcoming they are, how well they treat others, there is nothing they can do to make up for systemic racism. Will they begin to fret over every interaction, fearing that they could say or do the wrong thing? When the parents I know see a New York City education-council member screaming at a white man because he is bouncing the black child of a friend on his lap—as one activist, Rachel Broshi, did in a video of an online meeting that went viral—what will they think?

Read the whole thing. I strongly urge you to.

Why do I relate to this?

As most of my readers know, I was born in 1967, in the rural Deep South, in a parish (county) that was half black. I wouldn’t learn this till far into my adulthood, but the Klan still existed there when I was born, though it was fast winding down under FBI pressure. My generation was the first to go through integrated public schools there.

If you want to talk about “systemic racism,” well, I regret to say that the society in which I grew up was that, to some extent. I honestly don’t recall my parents ever teaching anything explicitly racist to me, and I imagine that most of my white peers would say the same thing about their childhood homes. But our parents didn’t have to. We all experience blacks (and they experienced us) as the Other. We went to school together, we shopped in the same stores, but that was about it. I remember in fourth grade (probably 1977), on one of the last days of school in the spring, the teacher passed out application forms for boys to join the Dixie Youth private summer baseball league. None of the black boys in our class got a form. I remember feeling embarrassed over that, but that quickly passed, because of course black kids weren’t going to play baseball with us.

We belonged to a private pool in town. It wasn’t fancy at all — all of us kids were middle and lower middle class people — but it was exclusively white. I can remember splashing around in the summertime there, and seeing black kids from time to time walk by and look at us through the fence. I remember feeling shame over that, but again, I put it out of my mind so I could enjoy the swim. That was just the way it was.

This is the way systemic racism worked to shape us kids, black and white, in the 1970s. There were other ways too, ways that continued after I left. I wrote about it this spring, when there was a protest movement in town — a protest movement for racial justice that my niece started, and that I publicly supported.

Now that I’m older, though, I can see that despite all our defects in the 1970s on race, the people of my town — white and black — were making real progress. The integration of the schools and the end of the apartheid Jim Crow system was a massive leap forward, something that would have been unthinkable only ten years before I was born. Nobody could have expected utopia instantly. The black kids had to give up their own schools to make integration work. The unified school system did what it could to get through the tumultuous change keeping everybody together. If I explain to people who didn’t grow up there that in my elementary school, there were five classes, three of them all-black, with all black teachers, and two of them mostly white, with a few black kids, their faces blanch. I can easily imagine, though, that this was necessary for the transition. Black parents didn’t want to give up their schools, but they had to — but at least they could keep their black teachers. White parents who had been raised in segregated schools no doubt felt anxiety about their kids going to school with black kids. Somehow the school administration — which included black people in positions of authority — had to make it work.

And they did. They built what has become one of the most successful public school systems in the state.

Anyway, I’ve thought a lot over the years about how very different the message that my generation got about race was from what our parents had. My mom and dad were in school in the 1940s and 1950s. Segregated schools. They grew up in what you might call an “information environment” in which white supremacy was the only reality. They never, ever heard it challenged — not on radio broadcasts, not in the newspapers, not in church, nowhere. Their children, though, were raised on television. We never (to my recollection) got any kind of proclamations of white supremacy; the adults just didn’t talk about any of it. But we did get, and got often, the message through television, and to some extent in the classroom, that the color of your skin doesn’t matter — it’s all about the content of your character.

This was a radical message for us! Can you imagine that the local culture, since the area was first settled in the 1700s, had been built around the idea of racial difference, and the superiority of whites to blacks — first with slavery, then through Jim Crow. Then suddenly, with my generation, all of that changed. It changed because Martin Luther King, Jr., and his disciples preached the gospel — and demanded that not only America live up to the promises of its Constitution, but that white Christians live up to the commands of Our Lord.

Dr. King didn’t just set the black people of America free; he set us all free. What liberty to be told that you shouldn’t judge a person by the color of their skin — that we are all brothers and sisters underneath. The men and women of my mom and dads generation didn’t have that liberty. My generation did. It did not bring us to Paradise — a paradise that is impossible on this earth — but it did finally start us on the road to greater equality.

What a blessing to have children, raised in the South, who find it completely bizarre that once upon a time, in their grandparents’ generation, there was legal discrimination against black people. Once a child of mine asked if blacks and whites could marry back then. No, I told him, they couldn’t. But you kids, the only thing your mom and dad care about is that you marry within our faith. My late sister’s daughter is engaged to be married to a man from Colombia — a good man whom she met at church. He is Latino, but has skin darker than some black people in our town. And we love him, in our family, without reservation. Two generations ago, that kind of marriage would have been impossible there. This is progress! The burden of judging people by the color of their skin is being shaken off — imperfectly, God knows, but there it is.

And now look. It’s coming back with a vengeance — from the left. All the things that the Civil Rights Movement worked for — the change of consciousness — is being thrown in the ditch by progressives on the Long March to Paradise. They are condemning new generations to think constantly about race and racial difference, to believe that it is impossible to judge people in any other way. I will be damned before I allow my children to believe that they are better than anybody because they are white, or that they are worse than anybody. The good people in my mom and dad’s generation had to fight the racists of the Right in power for the sake of colorblindness. Now good people have to fight the racists of the Left for the same reason.

How infuriating, and how tragic, it is to hear coming out of the lives of left-wing people ideals that essentially confirm what white segregationists once thought, and taught. Will it have just been a moment in our country’s history, when we tried, really tried, to see not color, but character as the measure of a man’s worth?

I was e-mailing with a reader of this blog, a white Christian man in his 60s who is married to a black woman. We’re both Southerners. I want to quote this passage from his e-mail:

Our generation was the bridge between Jim Crow — which existed in all its ugliness when we were children — and the racially-integrated world. I have no doubt that the approach at Martin Luther King, Jr., took was successful, for it forced whites to look into the mirror and see all sorts of violence and ugliness. We didn’t do it perfectly or even well, but nonetheless the racial attitudes that had endured for generations were broken, and I credit the non-violent movements for allowing people to break through the barriers.

Wokeness, and especially Wokeness in the Church is not a continuation of what happened 50 years ago. The appeals to ending racism in the Church were made through Scripture, through St. Paul imploring believers to remember that in Christ, there was no Greek nor Gentile nor Jew, no male nor female, but all were one. The message was an appeal to grace, not to prejudice. However, look at Wokeness with its ultra-fundamentalist approach; it condemns and offers no grace except the “grace” that comes when one “loves Big Brother.” There is no redemption, only submission, and it is much more like Islam than Christianity. In so many ways, it reminds me of the graceless and angry fundamentalism of my childhood when places like Bob Jones University preached a gospel utterly incompatible with Scripture. All “heretics” are shunned and thrown into the Outer Darkness (where there will be found weeping and gnashing of teeth). …

The movement Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. began appealed to grace; Wokeness does not, as it is the polar opposite of grace. When Christian churches accept this way of thinking, they abandon the one thing that makes the Gospel stand out from everything else and replace it with a system of shaming, anger, hatred, and no hope of redemption.

I can’t tell you what a blessing it is to have lived in a society where you don’t have to think about racial difference constantly. We are regressing. And as I keep telling the left, the demons of white supremacy were bound not that long ago. The Klan rode in the South within living memory. Everything the woke left does to compel us to focus incessantly on race, and to judge people on race, only paves the way for those demons to return. It infuriates me that they can’t see it. Well, I’m not going back to that, neither from the right nor from the left.

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They Will Be Harmonized

It is weirdly shocking but also not surprising how quickly the mainstream media have shut down any conversation on race that doesn’t conform to a narrow left-wing narrative. Matthew Franck of Princeton’s Witherspoon Institute wrote an essay for Newsweek in which he said racism exists, but that the case for “systemic racism” is much harder to stand up. Excerpts:

Americans are talking constantly these days about racism—and if anyone needed reminding of its dominant historical form, specifically “anti-black racism.” It’s still a very real thing, and we all have a stake in its eradication. But is “systemic racism” a real thing in the United States? To judge from the weakness of the case made for it, I would say no. In fact, the thesis for the existence of “systemic racism” looks just like a conspiracy theory, with one salient difference from other conspiracy theories. Let me explain.

OK, let’s hear the case. More:

[T]wo related features mark all conspiracy theories. First, the lack of evidence for their central claims does not count against them. Indeed, evidence to the contrary does no damage to belief in them, but is regarded as either proffered by the credulous or deliberately faked by the conspirators themselves. Second, the very denial of a conspiracy theory’s truth is taken as confirmation of it. The denier will typically be declared to be in on the conspiracy himself. “Of course he would say that. He’s one of them!”

Franck argues that the charge of “systemic racism” is unfalsifiable — and if you question it, that just proves (in the minds of its proponents) that you are guilty of it. He goes on:

We can sensibly talk about individual, or legal, or even institutional racism. All these can be blamed on someone. Perhaps someone in the past set certain racist policies in place; even so, if the policies are still in effect, someone today is perpetuating them and could change them. But while an apparently disparate racial impact of a policy may raise initial suspicions that the policy itself is racist, it is no proof of the matter, for disparate outcomes can have multiple causes, some blameless, others blameworthy.

No proof of systemic racism need be offered, says Franck; it is enough to assert it. More:

Are there racist policies at work elsewhere in American criminal justice, or in education, or housing, or professions and trades? Maybe, but the systemic-racism theorist is relieved of any burden of showing concretely what they are, or who needs to do what about them.

Read it all. Maybe he’s wrong — but it’s an interesting issue to argue.

You’ll notice if you click through that it didn’t appear at Newsweek, but rather at Public Discourse. Actually, it appeared at Newsweek for a couple of hours on Monday morning, but then was taken down. Franck explains why in the preface to the column at PD. Excerpt:

Author’s note: The essay below was accepted on September 11 for publication by the opinion editor of Newsweek, and after some changes by the editors not reproduced here, was published on the morning of September 14, by 7:00 a.m. or a little after. Two hours later it was taken down by the editor-in-chief, Nancy Cooper, with no explanation on the publication’s website.

I was told that Newsweek would like to publish it again—for keeps this time!—a week later, but only when a piece commissioned from the opposing viewpoint could appear alongside it, in a feature called “The Debate.” Would the author of that piece be able to have a look at mine? There was no reason to think not, since my essay was saved on the “Wayback Machine.” But would I see the counterpoint essay before publication and be able to respond with slight revisions of my own? I was given no assurance of that.

Franck refused the magazine’s conditions. Read his entire account.

I would hope that Nancy Cooper would explain herself, but I don’t expect that she will. In the world of professional journalism, she would have faced more harsh questioning (about why she published it at all) from her peers, and maybe the Millennials and Zoomers on her staff, than she would from any readers. From the available evidence, it appears that once again we have a case of the leadership of an important liberal institution losing all courage in the institution’s mission when challenged from the left. You may well disagree with Matt Franck’s column, but it’s an interesting and important argument, and it deserves a hearing — especially after the magazine published the thing! My guess is that Nancy Cooper surely saw it before it was published, and approved it — only to get cold feet when complaints started coming in from the woke.  I hope I’m wrong, but I doubt that I am.

This is the new reality, I’m afraid: the media gatekeepers are going to make it impossible to have any kind of critical, questioning conversation about race, just as they have done about LGBT issues. This doesn’t mean that people aren’t going to be having these conversations. It just means that they’re going to be having them in private. This is very good news for publications like this one, because we become forums for the conversations that the mainstream is too afraid to have. I feel bad for the op-ed editor at Newsweek, who just had his legs chopped out from under him by his boss Nancy Cooper today. What non-leftist is now going to want to contribute to Newsweek‘s commentary, knowing that his or her column could get yanked?

The liberal establishment’s mania to control the narrative really is getting out of control. Look at this that showed up earlier today on social media; it’s a statement from the English Department at the University of Chicago:

 

Can you believe that? This is an English Department at a major university. What if you are a black student interested in Milton? Too bad. This is dereliction of scholarly duty. These academics are destroying their universities. In one sense, this is no big deal, because there are almost no jobs for English PhDs anyway. But as a symbolic move, this is pure ideological madness, and a sign of intellectual decadence. One way to look at this is that the English faculty of the University of Chicago believes there are no conversations about literature worth having with graduate students, except for conversations about black literature.

Some news media elites are trying to ignore aspects of stories and urgent public controversies that contradict the preferred left-wing narrative. And some elite universities are deliberately cutting the young off from vast areas of scholarship, for nakedly ideological reasons. It sounds familiar. This is a passage from Live Not By Lies:

The Chinese state is also utilizing totalitarian methods for ensuring the coming generations don’t have the imaginative capacity to fight back.

In his 2019 book, We Have Been Harmonized —China’s term for neutralizing citizens as a threat to the social and political order — veteran journalist Kai Strittmatter, who spent years in Beijing reporting for a German daily, reveals the techno-dystopia that modern China has become. He interviews a Chinese teacher who gives his name as “David,” and who despairs of his country’s future.

“People born in the 1980s and afterwards are hopelessly lost,” David says. He continues:

The brainwashing starts in nursery school. It was different for us. They called us a lost generation because schools and colleges were closed back then, and many of us were denied an education. But in reality, we were probably the lucky ones. We fell through the cracks. The brainwashing didn’t get us. Mao was dead, and everyone was desperate for China to open up, for reform, freedom.

The state’s information-control apparatus has demolished the ability of young Chinese to learn facts about their nation’s history in ways that contradict the Communist Party’s narrative. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, for example, has been memory-holed. This is something that we will almost certainly not have to endure in the West.

But the condition of the youth in consumerist China is more Huxley than Orwell. As the American media critic Neil Postman once said, Orwell feared a world in which people would be forbidden to read books. Huxley, by contrast, feared a world in which no one would have to ban books, because no one would want to read them in the first place. This, says David, is China today. Even though a great deal of information remains available to students, they don’t care about it.

“My students say they haven’t got time. They’re distracted by a thousand other things,” David tells

Strittmatter. “And although I’m only ten years older than them, they don’t understand me. They live in a completely different world. They’ve been perfectly manipulated by their education and the Party’s propaganda: my students devote their lives to consumerism and ignore everything else. They ignore reality; it’s been made easy for them.”

And so, a population that has been wholly propagandized by a totalitarian state, and demoralized by hedonistic consumerism, will hardly be in a position even to imagine opposition to its command-and-control strategies. And even if some dissidents did emerge, the government’s total information system would quickly identify and “harmonize” them before they had the opportunity to act — or even before they had the conscious thought of dissenting.

The people who depend on the mainstream media to tell them about the world, and those being educated at our great universities to be custodians of our intellectual and cultural heritage — they will be harmonized even before they have the conscious thought of dissenting.

UPDATE: I was just reading the new Masculinist newsletter (No. 44) from Aaron Renn (subscribe here), who quotes Harvard’s Stephen Pinker:

A way in which I do agree with my fellow panelist that political correctness has done an enormous amount of harm in the sliver of the population whose affiliation might be up for grabs comes from the often highly literate, highly intelligent people that gravitate to the alt-right – internet savvy, media savvy – who often are radicalized in that way – who “swallow the red pill” as the saying goes from the Matrix – when they are exposed for the first time to true statements that have never been voiced in college campuses or in the New York Times or in respectable media. It’s almost like a bacillus to which they have no immunity, and they are immediately infected with both an outrage that these truths are unsayable, and no defense against taking them to what we might consider rather repellent conclusions.

Renn quotes Pinker in making his own (Renn’s) points about sex and gender. Renn says that the “manosphere” blogs drew a lot of young men in because they told truths that respectable authorities had withheld from them all their lives. But in being red-pilled, these young men also accepted a lot of bad stuff.

I think the media, academia, and even the church’s refusal to say things, or permit things to be said that violate rigid left-wing norms about race are going to end up driving a lot of people to the alt-right. Newsweek wouldn’t even let a mainstream conservative academic figure who works on an Ivy League campus question the definition of systemic racism. Does Newsweek‘s editor in chief really think that that’s going to keep people from being curious about it? It probably will cause a fair number of people to blindly and blandly accept the party line. But those who don’t — I fear more than a few of them will go to some dark places, and be susceptible to exploitation by some truly bad actors.

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The Woke Capitalism Grift

I gotta hand it to Nikole Hannah-Jones, the Pulitzer Prize-winning matriarch of The 1619 Project. She’s doing very, very well thanks to Woke Capitalism. If Shell Oil pays her to lead “emancipation conversations” about race in America, it buys lots of goodwill from nice liberals who might otherwise look askance to Shell’s global business practices.

Here’s where that image above came from:

The World Socialist Web Site has been hell on Hannah-Jones’s 1619 Project because it regards the project as a massive distraction from the problems of class and economic exploitation. In their essay about NHJ’s collaboration with Shell, Trévon Austin and Bill Van Auken write:

Hannah-Jones’ appearance in Texas was sponsored by the Houston-based Shell Oil Company. This is the US subsidiary of the oil and gas corporate giant Royal Dutch Shell, which is confronting international public outrage over its involvement in massive human rights abuses in the African country of Nigeria. The focus of protests has been Shell’s collaboration with the Nigerian government in the suppression of the Ogoni ethnic group. The company currently faces multiple court cases over its complicity in the murder of thousands, including the Nigerian dictatorship’s hanging in 1995 of the well-known Ogoni writer and environmental activist Ken Saro-Wiwa.

Hannah-Jones is unsparing in her condemnation of the moral failings of the democratic revolutionaries of the 18th and 19th centuries. She can barely contain her contempt for those who failed to leap out of the historical epoch in which they lived and embrace the rhetoric of 21st century middle-class identity politics. But the unforgiving code of ethics she imposes upon the historic figures of the past does not seem to apply to herself. Her own personal moral compass does not seem to be in working order.

More:

The crimes committed by Shell in Ogoniland did not occur in the 18th, 19th or even the early decades of the 20th centuries. This is a contemporary event and an ongoing crime. Shell is now on trial at a court in The Hague, charged with complicity in murder, rape and burning down villages by the Nigerian regime. The plaintiffs are the widows of four of the nine Ogoni leaders who were hung after being falsely convicted by the dictatorship’s sham tribunal. Shell fought an earlier attempt to try the company in the US all the way to Supreme Court, where the case was thrown out on jurisdictional grounds.

A report by The Guardian published on February 12, 2019 quoted Mark Dummett, a researcher at Amnesty International, who stated that the widows of the executed Ogoni leaders “believe that their husbands would still be alive today were it not for the brazen self-interest of Shell.” The trial, Dummett continued, “is an historic moment which has huge significance for people everywhere who have been harmed by the greed and recklessness of global corporations.”

The oil giant is facing a second criminal prosecution in the Netherlands on charges of bribery and corruption for its part in handing out $1.1 billion that went into the pockets of Nigerian politicians and middlemen to secure lucrative offshore drilling rights.

Read it all. 

I’m certainly not a socialist, but that crew of socialists understands clearly how culture war is often a front for class war. Say something nice about The 1619 Project, and your corporation can blackwash its reputation for cruelty and exploitation in Africa. I’m sure NHJ was well paid for her speech, as she should have been; there’s nothing wrong with being paid for your words, as anyone who makes a living through writing and speaking will attest. And there’s nothing necessarily wrong with giving a speech before an audience at the behest of people whose politics you may not share, as long as you speak what you know to be true.

But the World Socialist Web Site is not wrong about how Shell Oil is using NHJ and the 1619 Project. This is what Woke Capitalists do. They colonize progressive causes by donating to them and publicizing them, with the hoped-for effect of silencing criticism from the left. Jesse Jackson was a master at exploiting this grift back in his heyday. Almost twenty years ago, I wrote about his Wall Street Project and its left-coast offspring, the Silicon Valley Project, which was ostensibly about getting more blacks into the finance and tech industries, but which had the miraculous effect of raising money and status for the Rev. Jackson. As I wrote in the NYPost back then:

It’s long past time for corporate heads to smoke out the real Jackson, a shakedown artist who squeezes millions from businesses by, in effect, offering them protection against bad, race-based publicity. His Wall Street Project is supposed to encourage financial firms to be more open to minority employment and opportunities.

Its Web site brags that it “helps determine corporate targets who should be trading partners” – that is, supporters.

“Targets”? “Should be”? They’ll make you an offer you can’t refuse. Jackson has the same scam going out west – the Silicon Valley Project.

From sea to shining sea, only T.J. Rodgers, CEO of Cypress Semiconductor, has had the courage to stand up to Jackson.

When Jackson came calling, hat in hand, Rodgers rebuffed him, saying Silicon Valley had nothing to be ashamed of regarding its diverse work force.

The response? A Jackson ally told the press, “We can now officially describe Cypress Semiconductor as a white-supremacist hate group.”

Got it? Cross Jesse Jackson, and find your company likened to the Ku Klux Klan. No wonder so many CEOs are scared.

“I don’t care if he screwed somebody. I care about whether or not he’s running a scam for his own benefit,” Rodgers told me.

To be fair, I have no reason to believe that Nikole Hannah-Jones is doing the Jesse Jackson thing now. I think that she and other progressives ought to be aware, though, of how their activism is being co-opted by corporations. If the only thing she cares about, or if the thing she cares the most about, is the state of black people in the US, then maybe it’s worth it, in an un-cynical way, to get major corporations to buy into her project. But as the WSWS observes, it’s not particularly in the interest of black people in the parts of Africa where Shell Oil does business.

And once again, it is way past time for conservatives to understand that Big Business is no friend of ours. One of the points I bring out in my forthcoming (9/29) book Live Not By Lies is that woke capitalists are agents of left-wing social transformation, and will eventually ally with the government to administer the pink police state. As I write:

The embrace of aggressive social progressivism by big business is one of the most underappreciated stories of the last two decades. Critics call it “woke capitalism,” a snarky theft of the left-wing slang term indicating progressive enlightenment. Woke capitalism is now the most transformative agent within the religion of social justice, because it unites progressive ideology with the most potent force in American life: consumerism and making money.

In his 2018 letter to investors, Larry Fink, CEO of the global investment company BlackRock, said that corporate social responsibility is now part of the cost of doing business.

“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose,” Fink wrote. “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

Poll results about consumer expectations back Fink up. Millennials and Generation Z customers are

especially prone to seeing their consumer expenditures as part of creating a socially conscious personal brand identity. For many companies, then, signaling progressive virtues to consumers is a smart business move in the same way that signaling all-American patriotism would have been to corporations in the 1950s.

But what counts as a “positive contribution to society”? Corporations like to brand themselves as being in favor of a predictable constellation of causes, all of them guiding stars of the progressive cosmos. Woke capitalist branding harnesses the unmatched propaganda resources of the advertising industry to send the message, both explicitly and implicitly: the beliefs of social conservatives and religious traditionalists are obstacles to the social good.

The awakening of conservatives to the fact that Big Business mans the biggest guns in the culture war — and that they are pointed right at us — is something that needs to happen, and happen fast. May Live Not By Lies hasten the red-pilling of the Right.

(Readers, I am going to be on the road for most of Monday, traveling for business. Please be patient with my approving comments. And as ever, please realize that the Disqus mechanism routinely marks as spam comments that I have approved. Don’t assume that I have spiked your comment. Just do note as much in a subsequent comment, and I will go into the spam folder looking for it when I have the time.)

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