Rod Dreher's Blog, page 116

Orthodox Women’s Monastery In Ireland

My writer friend Paul Kingsnorth tips me off to a marvelous project in rural Ireland: the establishment of an Orthodox women’s monastery by some Romanian nuns. The Orthodox Monastery of the Life-Giving Spring 

The Monastery of the Life-Giving Spring is a women’s monastery established in 2019 with the blessing of His Eminence Joseph, Metropolitan of the Romanian Orthodox Metropolis of Southern and Western Europe.

It is dedicated to the Mother of God, its main feast being “The Life-Giving Spring” (celebrated on the Friday after Easter), it is also dedicated to St. Ciaran of Clonmacnoise ( Feast day – the 9th of September), to all Celtic Saints of Ireland (celebrated on the second Sunday after Pentecost) and to St Prophet Daniel and the Three Youths (celebrated on the 17th of December).

The Monastery is located in the very heart of Ireland, in Shannonbridge, just a few kilometers away from the 6th century monastic site of St. Ciaran in Clonmacnoise. Ireland was famously abundant in monasteries, and the Irish landscape was sanctified by the ascetic labours and constant prayer of countless monastics for hundreds of years in the first millennium.

Although founded by the Romanian Orthodox Church, the monastery is open to anyone, of any nationality, language, race, or age and the language used during the services will be, depending on the congregation, Romanian and English, with some Greek, Russian, and even Irish.

At the moment the monastery is home to two nuns and welcomes pilgrims throughout the year, subject to availability of places.

Here is a clip of the nuns chanting a hymn, in English, with images of the monastery:

And here they are chanting a hymn about St. Ciaran of Clonmacnoise, a local 6th century saint, whose feast day was yesterday, September 9:

 

 

The property was a retreat center run by Catholic Ursuline nuns, who apparently could no longer keep it going. So the Romanian Orthodox bought it, and it is now a convent. This delights me, and not only because I am an Orthodox Christian. When I made my first and only trip to Ireland over a year ago, I heard many dreadful things from Irish Catholics about the state of the Catholic Church there. The abuse scandal in Ireland has devastated the church, along with mass secularization that began in the 1990s. I heard stories about people who were broken by the scandal, and could no longer bring themselves to go to mass.

I would like to invite them to visit this Orthodox monastery, to pray, and to offer God their sorrows. A priest comes to say the Divine Liturgy, to which anyone can come. Though only Orthodox are allowed to commune, Catholics can at least be in the Real Presence of Christ in the Eucharist (Catholic teaching holds that Orthodox sacraments are valid). This little monastery can be an oasis of light and healing.

I understand that the nuns have a big payment to make on the property by year’s end. If you are Orthodox, or an Irish Catholic who nevertheless cares that ancient prayers continue to be heard and said on this holy ground, where once Catholic nuns lived, and that the Eucharist be offered there, please consider donating something to these nuns. Here’s a link for those who want to help.Please be generous. Ireland is de-Christianizing; these nuns from a foreign land are doing their part to stand against the tide of atheism.

UPDATE: Maybe it’s easier for you to donate to the nuns through their Go Fund Me.

The post Orthodox Women’s Monastery In Ireland appeared first on The American Conservative.

Benedict Option Online Seminar

Did you read The Benedict Option and like it, but have been stumped by how to get started living it? Cameron Thompson is a trained psychologist and American Catholic thinker who has spent a lot of time pondering the challenges of the Ben Op. On Saturday September 12, Dr. Thompson will offer a three-hour online seminar titled, “Benedict’s Rule & Modern Society: A Guide for Living The Benedict Option.”

The seminar will take place from 9 am till noon. Cost of admission: $25. This week, I had an e-mail exchange with Dr. Thompson about the course, and why he’s offering it:

RD: Tell us the basics of this online course you’re offering.

CT: The online course/seminar, entitled “Benedict’s Rule and Modern Society: A Guide for Living the Benedict Option,” essentially presents a deep dive into the Rule of St. Benedict, looking at how we as Christians in modern society might apply Benedict’s own wisdom to the needs of our time, especially in the light of the present crises we are facing. The course is structured around three central themes:



1. Bringing God’s Divine Order into our relationship with creation (Benedictine Economics)

2. Bringing Divine Order into our relationships with one another (Benedictine Organizational Principles and Governance), and

3. Bringing Divine Order into our relationship with God (Benedictine Spirituality).

Participants will learn about the practical principles that can be derived from Benedict’s Rule (which is, as you mentioned in The Benedict Option, essentially a political constitution for Christian community life) and what we can learn from them to guide our own BenOp communities and initiatives. Emphasis will be given to practical application, and include open discussion time throughout the three-hour course to address specific questions and challenges that participants have encountered or are facing in their own experience of (or aspirations for) BenOp living.

The basic idea is this: If we want to follow the way of St. Benedict as an Option for surviving as Christians, what are some of the key things we need to learn from Benedict himself about how to successfully put this into practice? Thanks be to God, we don’t have to reinvent the wheel here – Benedict himself can guide us with the wisdom of his “constitution” that has been around for over 1,400 years, and outlasted countless dark ages, crises, and civilizational collapses.

Who is it for?

The people who would benefit the most from this course would be folks who are familiar with the Benedict Option — at least the idea, if not the book — and are trying to live seriously as (“little o”) orthodox Christians in the midst of an increasingly anti-Christian societal context. I know a bunch of people who are trying to carve out a path forward toward BenOp living, but face very real and practical challenges in day-to-day experience and are seeking for concrete solutions to address those challenges. This course is specifically designed for them.

I’ve also seen a lot of people who encounter the same challenges we all do, but maybe have some misconceptions about what the BenOp is all about, and could put their uncertainties to rest by participating in this course and seeing what Benedict himself has to say about it.

Why is this important for Christians right now?

This is important for Christians right now because we are living in times where it is hard to be a faithful Christian, and increasingly it is difficult (frankly, I’d say in many cases impossible) to authentically live the Gospel while completely embedded in structures and systems at best unhelpful and often inimical to Christian life.

But it’s obvious that we can’t do this alone as individuals; it’s essential to form Christian communities within which we can create the parallel structures necessary to be free to live the Gospel — communities where, frankly, it’s easier to orient our life on Christ. And of course, with this comes a whole host of questions and challenges: How do we actually build such a community? What are the key roles people need to take on? What are the guiding principles for finding the right balance between community life and personal freedom? How do we rediscover the basics of forming a Christian community of prayer?

There are a host of practical questions that need to be addressed in order to do this successfully, and not merely be blown like chaff in the wind when difficulties come our way. Thankfully, Benedict himself offers some important insights into how to solve these challenges.

I understand that you and your family are looking to make a fairly radical move into a Benedict Option community. Tell us about that, and how you all discerned this path.

We have found it increasingly difficult (like Christ said in the sermon on the mount) to serve both God and Mammon (spoiler alert: it’s impossible). By Mammon, of course, we don’t mean pursuing wealth and success, but rather the reality that modern consumerist society shapes us to live in a certain way and become a certain kind of thing, whether or not we recognize it. We’ve discovered that it’s not merely enough to make interiorly the resolve to live the Gospel somehow while still embedded within all this, but that it’s vital to form and participate in communities wherein we can be more free to love and serve God.

St. Benedict says “if you would have life and desire to see good days, you must keep your tongue from evil and your lips from deceit, turn away from evil and do good, and seek after peace and pursue it.” As we’ve gone forward on the path toward trying to authentically live the Gospel, we’ve found that at least for our own selves, being honest about our needs and human weaknesses, that in order to “seek after peace” we need to live in a context where it’s frankly more possible to live a life centered around worship of God, at peace with God, ourselves, and the created order, than what we’ve been able to do in modern urban USA. One of the key things that drives us is the need to return to a more human scale of social organization and a more human pace of life. For us, at any rate, to keep our tongues from evil and lips from deceit (i.e. “to live not by lies”) means to move to a place where we believe God to be leading us, which possibility really opened up a little over a year ago.

I read your blog post last year about Giovanni Zennaro and the Cascina San Benedetto, and our interview with him where he rightly identified a core aspect of the problem we face in modern society being the spiritual/mental bourgeoisification of society (cf. “The Bourgeois Mind” by Nicolai Berdyaev). This articulation of the problem has been a key theme for my family, as we’ve identified it. Anyway, this resonated so strongly with me that I immediately reached out to him and said we’ve in fact been trying to move to Italy and live on a more human scale and pace of life, why don’t we get to know one another and see what comes of it? I ended up in Europe on business last fall and stayed with the lovely Zennaro family, and met many of the people involved in their project, and we’ve kept in touch since.

We tried at some point to pursue here in rural USA what they are doing in Italy, but found that at least in our circumstances this would not be possible, and not God’s will for our family. We’ve discovered that for us the path is pointing toward returning to our ancestral home of Europe, and seeking God there. Currently the Cascina San Benedetto project is moving forward toward living in a hamlet outside of Norcia, which won’t be an immediate possibility for us, but we do hope to be moving to Italy from the USA very soon, and from there we can continue to discern a path together.

What are some of the things that prevent American Christians from grasping the need for a Benedict Option way of life? In other words, what blinds us?

Now that would be telling, wouldn’t it? I honestly think there are a number of things that contribute to that, but I think the key thing that prevents American Christians from grasping the need for a BenOp way of life is the fact that Americans — or at least those living in the USA, which is a very different religious-cultural reality than Latin America — have been formed under such a hyper-individualistic sense of what it means to be a human being, let alone a Christian.

The cultural reality of the USA is one that idealizes the rugged individual actor, to the detriment of the ecclesial (that is community) aspect of Christian life. This stems from among other things, the pre-eminence of what we can call the “bourgeois spirit” or “bourgeois mind” in the USA. Without getting too much into it (you can read a great essay on this by Christopher Dawson), the USA uniquely in many ways among the nations is founded from the beginning very much with this kind of social-religious sensibility of the bourgeois mindset, that really blinds us both to the need for Christian community as the essential and primary context for human living (rather than the market or the liberal nation-state, for example). It also to blinds us to the urgency of our situation — namely, that American society has already gone so far down a certain path that Christians here have not even noticed until recently the increasing incompatibility of living the gospel within the ordinary structures of modern life.

In the book, Father Cassian Folsom, then the prior of the Norcia community, said that any Christian that doesn’t do the Benedict Option is not going to have what it takes to survive what’s coming. What does that remark mean to you?

Honestly, I think he’s right. I think it means that the only thing resilient, or robust, enough to withstand massively tectonic civilizational/social change are smaller, human-scale, tight-knit communities. History itself speaks to this. And I sincerely believe, and current events are only confirming this, that we are living through a period now of massive change transitioning in many ways from one era to another. It’s not the first time in history, and it won’t be the last, but once we recognize that it’s “another one of those” moments in history, then we can know what we need to do to not only survive, but come out the other side actually heading toward a true renaissance.

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For more information about the life and work of Cameron Thompson, check out his website. Here is a link to the Eventbrite page for Dr. Thompson’s “Benedict’s Rule & Modern Society: A Guide To Living The Benedict Option.” The details for the online seminar are:

If you have not read The Benedict Option, but are curious about it, why not check out the seminar to see if it’s something that fires your imagination?

The post Benedict Option Online Seminar appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Demons Of Racism Return

This letter came in from a reader:

Rod, I’m sure you’ve seen the articles about the Rochester principal that was caught screaming “f— the police” and various other obscenities at the protest. After first saying they would “deal with it as a personnel matter” the district has summarily suspended him.

https://www.foxnews.com/us/rochester-protests-new-york-assistant-high-school-principal-facebook-life-police-leave

You’ve talked frequently about how identity politics will end up driving whites & conservatives to illiberalism out of desperation. It’s already happening. I teach civics in [deleted] and consider myself a student of political philosophy, yet it has begin to affect me as well.

Six months ago, my reaction to this principal being suspended would have been anger that a school district would hold a tenured principal’s job hostage based purely on his personal political beliefs. When I read the FoxNews article today, my first reaction was, “good, maybe they’ll actually get rid of this idiot.” I am appalled my such an illiberal response, but no longer surprised by it.

Until this year, I would have put myself in that principal’s shoes. A John Stuart Mill response: “I wouldn’t want my job to be conditioned on my private political opinions, therefore, I must accept that no one’s job should be conditioned on their private political opinions.” But it is clear the Left no longer believes this. They can — indeed, they do — condition continued employment on holding the correct political opinions. Express dissent from progressive orthodoxy, and they will bury you. They’ve abandoned Mill for Khrushchev. Even though I despise the new rules they’ve created, I find myself being dragged into to playing by them whether I want to or not — a political expression of mutually assured destruction. Hence my illiberal response: “Sack that principal; he’s in the Other Tribe.”

This isn’t the first time either. I’ve never experienced any form of racial solidarity. Like you, I grew up in MLK’s “content of their character” America; collective racial identity was unthinkable. But this summer I found myself quietly rooting for a charity to sponsor the white businesses that were destroyed in Minneapolis. Admittedly, this was in response to the charities formed to rebuild only minority-owned businesses, but the feeling of solidarity with whites — simply because they were white — was very foreign to me. And again, I found it disturbing.

Liberals have been attacking white, married, Christian, conservatives for years. It never affected my underlying commitment to John Stuart Mill liberalism. Until this year. I know these are small, symbolic things. But my core political philosophy is changing. I don’t like where it’s going, but I don’t know how to stop it. And I’m starting to wonder whether maybe I shouldn’t try. Maybe Ahmari and Legutko are right.

Thank you for what you do, Rod. I’m looking forward to Live Not By Lies. I’ve even ordered a copy for my dentist, who is a [ex-communist country] emigrant, since I’m curious his take on it. I didn’t fully believe you after Benedict Option; I can’t deny the obvious now. The darkness is coming. I mean this very seriously: please pray that I don’t end up becoming part of it.

As always, if you post any of this, just leave my name off. My wife is a public school teacher and I’m certain her district would fire her in a heartbeat.

For years, I’ve said in this space that the left, by insisting on valorizing racial identity, is calling up demons it will not be able to control. Well, here is a white race liberal who is losing his race liberalism because of the left’s insanity. You cannot insist on racial identity for non-white people, and expect white people not to claim it for themselves. You might wish that they would own their “whiteness” by turning on themselves self-critically, and ashamedly. That only works with middle-class white people who are desperate to conform.

I don’t know how this lands with Millennials and Gen Z readers. For me, as a Gen Xer raised in the Deep South, it is very, very depressing (though I completely understand it). My generation was the first one raised on Martin Luther King-style race liberalism. Prior to my generation, white kids and black kids in my parish went to different schools. You don’t erase the effects of centuries of white supremacy overnight, yet the idea that people should not be judged by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character, was the only reasonable way out of that morass. My children, all 21st century kids, cannot fathom in their imaginations the world into which their father was born, and how much progress has been made in improving racial understanding. The world is far from perfect, but under the liberal principles of the King era, America made immense progress.

Four years before I was born, a black pastor was the first black man to attempt to register to vote in over six decades in my parish. It caused a near-riot among white racists on the courthouse lawn. I went to school with that pastor’s grandkids. One of his granddaughters was in my class all the way from elementary school. That old man could not have fathomed that his grandchildren would live to see the election of the first black president of the United States of America. What a triumph for our democracy! It did not lead to utopia — there is no such place — but progress away from a world in which racial identity was codified in law and immovable in culture is something to be grateful for, and celebrated.

It is literally breathtaking to me that all of this is coming back now, not via what remains of the white supremacist right, but through the mainstream progressive left and the institutions it now runs. It took so much blood and pain to exorcise those demons (“exorcise” meant figuratively; unfortunately, no society can ever be completely free of racial prejudice), and now the most progressive among us are begging them to come back.

This country is going to convulse in the years to come, no matter who is in the White House. Jesus said:

“When an unclean spirit goes out of a man, he goes through dry places, seeking rest, and finds none. Then he says, ‘I will return to my house from which I came.’ And when he comes, he finds it empty, swept, and put in order.

Then he goes and takes with him seven other spirits more wicked than himself, and they enter and dwell there; and the last state of that man is worse than the first. So shall it also be with this wicked generation.” (Matthew 12: 43-45)

We have invited the unclean spirits of race hatred to re-enter the body politic. The one thing that might have given us the power to resist — Christian faith — is something many of us have turned from. The author of the letter above hasn’t turned from it — it’s what is causing him to resist the temptation to race hatred. But as for the country as a whole, the Christian legal writer John Ehrett prophesied something dark in his review of Live Not By Lies. He wrote:

All told, atavism—at least in its more elaborate forms—offers a disquietingly coherent alternative to both traditional Christianity and the social justice movement. Charles Péguy presciently warned in Temporal and Eternal that it would not be a simplistic materialism that posed the greatest threat to Christianity, but rather those pantheistic philosophical systems that are developed enough to stand as genuine metaphysical rivals to Christian theology. Such a system is here, now, and it is the mortal rival of the modern progressive. In the face of the social justice activist’s claim we are infinitely valuable, the atavist offers a cold rejoinder—we’re nothing special at all.

I’ve spent so long laying out the principles of atavism because I think it’s necessary in order to properly frame the current conflict. Despite the seemingly political valence of Dreher’s writing, the struggle recounted in Live Not By Lies is not, I think, properly conceived as a struggle between “right” and “left”—it is between a post-Christian right and a post-Christian left. Dreher routinely writes of the “demons” being called up by those on the left who absolutize “whiteness” as an immutable reality—well, those demons are already at hand, and the battle to come will likely be fought between these two forms of post-Christian religiosity.

The historic Christian faith sits uneasily between these two alien poles. It cannot affirm either post-Christian system as such, though it can ascertain certain glimmers of truth in both. With proponents of the modern social justice movement, orthodox Christians can affirm the absolute dignity of human souls and the reality of transhistorical, transcultural moral obligations. So too, Christians can acknowledge (as Dreher certainly does) an essentially linear view of history: the Son of God entered contingent human history at a distinct moment in time, and He will come again in glory at the end of days to restore the world. Christians can also acknowledge, as do at least some of those whose inclinations trend atavist, that there is a link between the created order and our moral obligations—that is, that there is a genuine natural law—as well as that community practices and traditions are integral to human flourishing. But a faithful Christian can never hold that the absolute end of human beings is emancipation from all unchosen constraints, or, alternatively, that human beings are of fundamentally unequal value before God. So too, both left and right post-Christian systems reduce any concept of the divine to the level of the immanent—the orthodox idea of a transcendent, personal Creator is alien to both.

Could it be that the future of America does not lie with men like the author of the letter — Christians who are living through the passions of our time, and struggling to hold on to the old Biblical moral vision — but rather with those who have already sided with either the post-Christian left (even though it takes some Christian forms, through CRT), or with the post-Christian right?

Ivan Krastev, a sympathetic critic of Anne Applebaum’s new book, suggests that she is a prisoner of 1989, the year that the things she believes in triumphed. The world has changed, and she has failed to change with it. In the same way, I wonder if white people like me are prisoners of 1964, the year the Civil Rights Act was passed. I’m reading Days Of Rage, Bryan Burrough’s history of violent radicals in America, circa 1968 to 1972. It’s pretty incredible to read the same arguments we hear today from the left, coming out of the mouths of gun-toting white and black revolutionaries from that era. Today these views, slightly less radical (but only slightly), are more likely to come from people of all colors within the Establishment.

By the end of this decade, I fear that there will be no liberals or conservatives. There will only be radicals and reactionaries. This is what the left is bringing down on us all.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Since you like collecting stories of how people are reacting to the chaos of our times, here’s another one for your file.

I’m a white male, older Millennial (born early 80s), middle class, with a Ph.D in the sciences. In response to your question, “I don’t know how this lands with Millennial and Gen Z readers” from your post “The Demons of Racism Return”: I can relate to your letter-writer, sort of. Not so much with regard to feelings of racial solidarity with whites or animus towards minorities. I grew up taking the “content of your character” position for granted, and this year’s riots haven’t made me deviate from that. After all, when I watch videos of the destruction, it seems like it’s mostly being perpetrated by insane, leftist, WHITE psychopaths with a smattering of minorities thrown in. It might help that, during my university studies, I made many friends with international students, and dated a Chinese girl for a while during grad school — and that, although it didn’t work out with her, that’s been by far my best experience with relationships by comparison with the American girls I’ve dated (ranging from slightly older than me to one Gen Zer, born in the mid-90s), who have been a bunch of emotionally unstable commitment-phobes. In general, a lot of the foreign people I’ve known — admittedly, almost all Asians — seem to have better American values than most of the Americans of my own age or below.

As far as blacks specifically are concerned, knowing that they vote 90%+ for Democrats, I know that the vast majority of them don’t share my values, but that knowledge has nothing to do with their skin color and everything to do with political views that just happen to be correlated with their skin color. I respect the hell out of prominent black conservative voices with the strength and courage to stand against the tide, like Candace Owens, the Hodge Twins, Brandon Tatum, etc.

In short, I’ve never given a hoot about race and I still don’t.

The part of the letter I can relate to, however, is being driven toward radicalism and illiberalism by the madness of the left. People claim “the right has its share of crazies,” but it sure isn’t a bunch of Trump supporters burning the country down, or cheering on the looters; and it’s not the right that regards me, a straight white male, as an evil to be crushed by virtue of my immutable characteristics.

All of that has provoked a sharp reaction from me. I’d rather just be apolitical, be left alone, and tend to my own life, my own tiny slice of the world, without interfering with others or suffering their interference. But the left won’t allow it. My job has started showing signs of racial anti-white craziness and I’m prepared to lose my job rather than suffer the humiliation of denouncing myself for having Y chromosomes and less melanin in my skin. I sat the last election out because I found both candidates unacceptable, but come this November, I’ll be voting for Trump, full-stop. I’ve also armed up with lots of ammunition and even body armor, and have been hitting the range to sharpen by shooting skills, in anticipation of possibly needing to defend myself using maximal force in the event that things really go south. There was a time when that would have seemed like a crazy proposition. Today, it really doesn’t.

I had ordered Patrick Deneen’s Why Liberalism Failed a couple of years ago, but put it on the shelf without finishing it. The other day, I pulled it back out and read it to the end. His arguments have a lot of force today. I can’t say for sure, but I suspect he may be right that what we’re witnessing today is the inevitable destination of the liberal project, that this chaos and destruction isn’t because of a failure of liberalism, but because of its success. I’ve lost a great deal of trust in liberalism as a philosophical framework. The frightening thing is that I don’t see a viable alternative to it. All I see is a slide into chaos, and then despotism. The alternative — that decadent liberalism does manage to stumble along in an oppressive, technocratic haze of blind hedonism in the face of a meaningless blob of existence — doesn’t seem much better.

The only sensible response I see is the Jordan Peterson approach, which represents a kind of Benedict option that’s broader in application due to not being specifically Christian: Cultivate virtue first in oneself, then in one’s immediate social circle, and from there to one’s community. The tide is too strong to turn back, but individuals, families, and maybe even communities might be able to weather it. So, prepare — morally, and martially (yes, martially, not materially) as well. The time has been upon us for a while where we’ve had to fight a difficult spiritual battle. For many, sometime in the near- to mid-future, that battle may turn physical as well. I pray that it doesn’t, that I’m just being an overreactive paranoiac — but as the time-honored wisdom goes, better to err on the side of caution. If it can happen in Kenosha, it can happen anywhere.

UPDATE.2: This from a reader. She used her real name in her letter, but asked me not to publish it. I checked her out, and she is who she says she is:

I’m a long time reader of your blog who started out on the political left and made a gradual shift rightward. I’m also a (white) teacher in the Seattle Public Schools.

I’m writing in response to your blog piece “The Demons of Racism Return.” The mention of the principal in Rochester who was fired for anti-cop invective spurred me to write to you. Ideas like his are common in Seattle schools. Where I work, saying “all lives matter” or “back the blue” is more likely to get you fired than shouting profanity at cops.

One example is a teacher at Chief Sealth High School. A quick browse of his twitter page shows all of the typical far left ideologies: anti-cop, anti-capitalism, supports BLM and antifa, etc. Here is his page in case you want to browse; he uses his real name on the account:

https://twitter.com/assatasdad

He is a particularly extreme example, but there are many teachers who think this way. I used to think this stuff was fringe; I never thought “dismantle” literally meant “dismantle…” I thought it was a metaphor for reform. It’s not. You might say I’ve just become “woke” to the real danger posed by the far left; I thought they were just crazy before.

My circle of friends and family are nearly all on the left and are posting black squares and making blanket “all white people” statements and so forth. They are a racially diverse bunch but they all think the same way and take their cues from left-leaning media. The weird thing is they all act normal in public. They will #BLM and post black squares and black power fists and talk about “Karens” etc., but when you see them in real life they are completely normal humans who never bring any of this stuff up. I deleted my social media accounts because I couldn’t stand the toxicity I was seeing, and didn’t dare comment on any of it. I also didn’t want to be called out for *not* saying anything on social media, in the “silence is violence” vein, so I thought it better to make my exit.

I don’t think any of the people in my circle realize that the threat on the left is real. They see any concern from the right about a Biden presidency ushering in the possibility of radical leftist control of government as scare tactics by right-wing fascists (I don’t think that Biden himself is a radical, but I fear he is simply a puppet). If I hadn’t seen the far left craziness from many teachers in my profession, I might be similarly dismissing these concerns.

It’s also interesting that in your piece you mentioned Mills’ social contract. A couple of weeks ago SPS required its employees to attend an all-day live webinar on “dismantling the racial contract” which basically says the social contract only benefits whites, and everyone else really operates on a racial contract that leaves them out of the bargain. The presentation was rife with SJW jargon, calls to check one’s privilege, etc.  At one point the staff was asked to read and reflect on the following:

“For many of us, the task at hand is to stay Black and live. For others, it’s time to bankrupt your privilege in acknowledgment of your thieved inheritance. Sure, do whatever you need to do in order to sleep at night, but also- consider who you want to be when the morning light finds you.” — Saeed Jones

“Bankrupt Your Privilege” Personal Reflection Questions:

After reading the quote from Saeed Jones, use the following prompts to ask yourself how the role as educator has influenced certain power dynamics in the classroom and in relationships. Consider how your positionality perpetuates the inequities inherent in this racist system.

• What are you willing to risk for racial justice as an educator?

• What would “bankrupting your privilege” look like for you in your classroom practices?

• What is getting in your way?

• What are you afraid of?

• Who do you “want to be when the morning light finds you” especially as an anti-racist educator?

• What immediate step can you take to be that person tomorrow?

The obvious implication of the reflection activity is that white people have a “thieved inheritance” that SHOULD make it difficult for us to sleep at night. That we must constantly “do the work” in order to not be incorrigible racists. I have had to sit through many, many trainings of this type and am still told I must “do the work.”

The comments during the live webinar were nuts, too. Here are some gems from the “educators” participating in this webinar:

“What if we raised the bar in our profession, improved working conditions, provided teachers secretarial support, raised teacher pay, and paid BIPOC teachers more?” (emphasis mine)

“Thank you for posting those questions. It is not only the who but also the what in what networking. Some one [sic] who may be presented to be BIPOC but may have a different network in which their mindsets are different from their skin color.”  (emphasis mine)  In other words, non-white people who “act white” or hold “white” opinions aren’t to be trusted…when your “mindset” is “different from your skin color.”

“We need to acknowledge the fact that whiteness/white supremacy isn’t solely enacted by white people. As a Black woman, I’ve experienced as much anti-Blackness from other Black people in our schools as other races. SPS rewards and promotes these types most…”  (emphasis mine)

Then…this one got everyone all riled up, ready for a witch hunt to find and fire the anonymous employee who posted it:

“Boy! You sure can tell we are in Liberal Land USA! What a ridiculous comment! USA was built of [sic] off black slaves? Oh, puleeez!”

The whole webinar imploded because of this single comment. Dozens of comments were made condemning this person and calling for their firing. One of the presenters stopped presenting to respond to this anonymous poster to the effect of “we see you” and “we WILL find out who you are.”  The superintendent subsequently sent out a handwringing email to the entire staff decrying the racism displayed in this comment. (Insensitive? Trolling? Debatable? Maybe…but flat out racist?)

This sampling of attitudes among SPS staff is indicative of the overall political climate in my district. I know “wokeness” is infiltrating K-12 schools, but my impression is that Seattle is ground zero for the woke agenda.

So, this is what we are up against. I often wonder if I am going insane; if I am the only one who thinks this stuff is bonkers.

The post The Demons Of Racism Return appeared first on The American Conservative.

Christopher Rufo Vs. The CRT Goliath

My hero last week was Christopher Rufo, the young independent investigative journalist who revealed racist anti-white employee training going on at Sandia National Labs, and who made it onto Tucker Carlson’s show to talk about it:

Result: a couple of days later, President Trump, acting through OMB Director Russell Vought, ordered the federal government to end training about “Critical Race Theory” and “white privilege.”

It was a big and unexpected win — and Rufo keeps releasing new documents from other whistleblowers, via his must-read Twitter feed, @realchrisrufo. I asked Rufo if he would talk with me about what he’s fighting, and the model of investigative journalism he is practicing. Here is a transcript of our interview, lightly edited for clarity:

What was it like to hear the news that the Trump administration had acted on your reporting, and stopped the Critical Race Theory training at Sandia, and elsewhere in the federal government?

I didn’t see it right away because I was on a train trip from Seattle to Chicago with my oldest son. I was coming up somewhere in Montana, and finally was able to get a cell signal. I saw my inbox flooded with all this news about it. I was just elated. I had publicly stated this goal on August 20 that I was going to persuade the President to abolish critical race theory in the federal government. Most of my friends and colleagues told me that this was a crazy goal, but I had this intuition that it was something that we could actually do.

I have to give credit to the President, Russ Vought, and their team, that they were able to act quickly and take on an issue that no Republican prior to 2016 would have.

It really is true that Republicans like to be thought of as opposing all this social justice warrior stuff, but in the end, they won’t act against it. Why not?

Republicans and conservatives, especially those operating in the political sphere, and within media and politics in our prestige cities, are deathly afraid of being called a racist, a white supremacist, or a bigot. The social pressures on them to stay silent are immense. Because power in the US is centralized – that is, concentrated within institutions in those cities — those prejudices carry lots of weight. People are afraid to engage on these issues.

But I think there’s a deeper reason. I think a lot of conservatives have internalized the metaphysical arguments of the left. There’s this lurking suspicion inside the conservative infrastructure that maybe we’re wrong. Maybe we’re guilty, just like they say we are. In a way, maybe we’ve accepted all these things.

Critical Race Theory, and all these documents that are egregious to almost everyone who sees them – frankly, we’ve let this stuff take over, and we’ve been scared to push back. I think for whatever reason, the president, and maybe a combination of his personal quirks and maybe even some of his personal flaws, are, bizarrely, the perfect battering ram against this stuff. He’s been trashed by the New York media for 50 years. It gives him this unique position where he can fight on these issues whereas a conventional Republican would be too timid.

You have had extraordinary success in exposing this Critical Race Theory cult within institutions. What’s the secret of your success?

I’m following basic Investigative Journalism 101. I cultivate sources, and run a database of hundreds of sources across federal government agencies. I’m constantly receiving and evaluating information from them. For me it’s been a great gift – I’m operating in a space where there’s no competition. The New York Times, the Washington Post, and the local papers — they’re all turning a blind eye, because they’re philosophically committed to the [antiracism] narrative. As a conservative journalist, it’s a wide-open field.

As conservatives, we have to realize that the institutions are deeply controlled by the activist class on the left. Conservatives have traditionally acted as the stabilizing force, as the establishment force, within institutions. This is kind of the “old family” view of the world. We have this idea that institutions are fundamentally conservative, manage the political process, and make incremental changes. I think people still kind of assume that worldview, but in reality, these institutions are dominated ideologically and practically by the left.

We are in some ways the anti-establishment, the rebellious faction, the insurgent faction. I see this as a David and Goliath battle. I’m just one person with a mission. I am going after the most powerful institutions in the country with a ragtag network of think tanks and conservative media outlets. And we have been able to generate tremendous power.

Because you have been able to find whistleblowers within these agencies who will leak you

documents?

Yes. If we want institutions that work for Americans, that are consonant with our values, we’re going to have to encourage people to come forward, and support them. What I’ve found is that a common theme for almost all of the whistleblowers I’ve worked with is that these are people who love the country, and who joined public service to accomplish a tangible good. These are people who believe that institutions really can serve the interest of the common man.

Often these are people in middle age. The agencies they’re in now are very different from the agencies they entered twenty years ago. They feel targeted. Scared. Bullied — and they feel completely alone. Even our military officers and soldiers feel fear. They feel that there has been an ideological campaign to uproot conservative values and principles. They are sounding the alarm that we are losing these institutions.

That is a point I keep trying to make to fellow conservatives: that the revolution has already marched through the institutions. If you think power is simply a matter of who holds elective office, you’re missing the main story.

Yes. What’s shocking is the uniformity of these [Critical Race Theory] training sessions, across very different kinds of institutions. In my reporting, whether we are talking about a school district in Tennessee or a federal agency, all of these training sessions are almost completely the same regarding their mechanisms for indoctrination. It’s kind of an organic totalitarianism that is arising everywhere, and that is now being implemented by political radicals within institutions and in street protests. Antifa and Black Lives Matter street protests are direct extensions of this ideology of Critical Race Theory. They’re all emerging from this unitary militant ideology.

Once it gets a foothold, it’s almost impossible to resist. If you disagree with CRT, embedded in that [disagreement] is an admission of your own guilt, or transgression, or evil. It’s designed in a way explicitly to prevent dissent, and if dissent emerges, to crush it.

It’s not surprising that people are scared. These true believers will stop at nothing to destroy their critics.

Oh, I have had threats, harassment, vandalism, people coming after my wife and kids, you name it. But doesn’t principled dissent require great risk? There are two ways you can fight this: the first is by appealing to civil discourse, moderate pluralism and debate. That strategy has failed. The ‘principled dissent’ strategy is the only one that remains. We have to stand up to institutions that could obliterate us at any moment. We have to steel ourselves with our principles and have the confidence that those principles will ultimately protect us, whatever the odds.

On a practical level, we have to realize that we don’t control the playing field. We have to be willing to take risks. Courage begets courage. One person who stands up can overturn totalitarian systems. Andrew Klavan said to me that being a conservative requires being willing to lose things. Once that clicked in for me, I felt a sense of comfort and calm about my work.

That’s a key thing that anti-communist dissidents told me about their experiences: that if you’re not prepared to suffer losses, you will never prevail. I think the chapter about the importance of suffering as a dissident is the most important one in my new book.

In the Soviet Union you risked losing your life. We don’t face that, but it’s not nothing. I feel sometime – and I especially did when I was living in Seattle — physical danger, physical threats. I had people doxing my house and where my kids go to school. People were putting threatening posters in my neighborhood with my face on it, encouraging others to attack me. Those things got no media coverage, had no politicians speaking out against them. This is tolerated by the ruling class. These activists work as foot soldiers of the dominant ideology.

I hear from people all the time who tell me, “I would love to speak out, but I can’t.” Let’s say you’re a 55-year-old civil servant, two years away from retirement, and feel like you can’t take the risk. I tell them to take the risk that you can. Be an ally of the people who step forward.

How can potential whistleblowers reach you?

Send me something at chrisrufo@protonmail.com. That’s a secure e-mail drop. I’m actively building new sources and documenting. We can make progress. We can keep hammering away at these folks. We have to realize that even in a Republican administration, we are outside of the institutions. Our framework has to be one of rebellion, of an outside resistance force against deeply corrupt institutions.

You no longer live in Seattle, but in a small town. Is this an advantage?

Having a conservative community around me has allowed me to be more courageous and outspoken. With the Internet and technology, we can do this kind of work from anywhere. I think there’s an advantage to living outside of the cities. Tucker Carlson is running the most popular cable news show on television from his houses in Maine and Florida, outside the media corridor. This is a huge, huge advantage. I think we’re just now starting to realize how useful this is to decentralizing power.

Tucker Carlson was key to your success against Sandia. You appeared on Tucker to talk about it, and the next thing you know, the president acted. What role do you think Tucker Carlson plays in this guerrilla media ecosystem?

I think Tucker is hands down the most courageous man in media, period. I think that he’s really had an evolution. I remember in high school watching him with the bow tie on CNN, and following his transformation. He’s the most powerful voice in conservative media. He’s fearless. He’s been incredibly effective in fighting the left organizations trying to attack him.

He realized two things. First, that doing the journalism, that breaking hard news on the issues, is actually important. A lot of cable hosts are all about chitter-chatter and opinion. But Tucker breaks hard news, and pushes the argument forward.

Second, he’s learned that you have to fight back. When The New York Times tried to dox his residence in Maine, he punched them back ten times harder than they came at him. And they backed down. We have to realize we’re operating on the opposition’s epistemological battle space. In that world, power must be met by power. That’s the only way you can do it. The ‘peace through strength’ mindset is essential, and I think he’s demonstrated that better than anyone.

It’s like you said to me [about Sandia]: our side never wins fights like this. But this time, we did. It shows — and I really firmly believe — that we can win. I’d love to see this effort expand. I’d love to see us come up with partnerships across these institutions, and really wage war against the ideology of Critical Race Theory and the political capture of institutions. We’re on the right side, and we can win.

—

Go to ChristopherRufo.com to learn more about this independent journalist, and to become a patron of his vital work. Here’s his latest tweet:

As I revealed on @TuckerCarlson last night: West Point military academy is now requiring cadets to read "Critical Race Theory: An Introduction" and "A Critical Introduction to Queer Theory" in one of its leadership courses.

This does nothing to protect our nation. pic.twitter.com/ZH2h26utz3

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) September 9, 2020

And:

BREAKING: I can confirm that @BetsyDeVosED and @usedgov are launching an investigation into the CAST conference and federal grants that support critical race theory and anti-Americanism.

We must lay siege to the activist class that has captured our institutions. Swords up! https://t.co/7BnN3v0gWf

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) September 9, 2020

The post Christopher Rufo Vs. The CRT Goliath appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trump Confesses He Downplayed Covid

No two ways about it, this is terrible for the President. From the Washington Post:

President Trump’s head popped up during his top-secret intelligence briefing in the Oval Office on Jan. 28 when the discussion turned to the coronavirus outbreak in China.

“This will be the biggest national security threat you face in your presidency,” national security adviser Robert C. O’Brien told Trump, according to a new book by Washington Post associate editor Bob Woodward. “This is going to be the roughest thing you face.”

Matthew Pottinger, the deputy national security adviser, agreed. He told the president that after reaching contacts in China, it was evident that the world faced a health emergency on par with the flu pandemic of 1918, which killed an estimated 50 million people worldwide.

Ten days later, Trump called Woodward and revealed that he thought the situation was far more dire than what he had been saying publicly.

“You just breathe the air and that’s how it’s passed,” Trump said in a Feb. 7 call. “And so that’s a very tricky one. That’s a very delicate one. It’s also more deadly than even your strenuous flu.”

“This is deadly stuff,” the president repeated for emphasis.

At that time, Trump was telling the nation that the virus was no worse than a seasonal flu, predicting it would soon disappear and insisting that the U.S. government had it totally under control. It would be several weeks before he would publicly acknowledge that the virus was no ordinary flu and that it could be transmitted through the air.

Trump admitted to Woodward on March 19 that he deliberately minimized the danger. “I wanted to always play it down,” the president said.

Read all about it — and hear audio of Trump telling Woodward that he tried to downplay the threat of the virus to prevent “panic.” The whole story is pretty savage, especially this part:

[Defense Secretary Jim] Mattis quietly went to Washington National Cathedral to pray about his concern for the nation’s fate under Trump’s command and, according to Woodward, told [then-Director of National Intelligence Dan] Coats, “There may come a time when we have to take collective action” since Trump is “dangerous. He’s unfit.”

In a separate conversation recounted by Woodward, Mattis told Coats, “The president has no moral compass,” to which the director of national intelligence replied: “True. To him, a lie is not a lie. It’s just what he thinks. He doesn’t know the difference between the truth and a lie.”

Bombshell stuff in this interview, and in this book. Depressing. Infuriating. A president who admits that he knew from the beginning how bad this was going to be, but did not level with the American people about the seriousness of the Covid threat. That is damned hard to forgive.

UPDATE:

Besides the early testing stumbles, Trump’s statements have been the worst part of the administration’s coronavirus response and it was all avoidable if he’d just consistently said from the beginning, “This is bad and we should prepare for the worst.”

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) September 9, 2020

That’s true. However, let me say something that a lot of you won’t agree with. I think that even if Trump had been at the top of his game on Covid, it would not have made a significant difference. Major European countries have been much more conventionally governed on their Covid responses, and they’re pretty much on par with us (except Germany, which has been quite good). Even at this late date, we are seeing bars and gatherings of people jammed together, when everybody knows better. Everybody.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

I grew tired of defending President Trump a long time ago and I certainly don’t want to come off as doing so here. However, the narrative generated by the “bombshell” (how many times have we heard that?) Woodward story is incredibly dishonest and disingenuous and I think that’s why, like most things, it’ll end up not affecting Trump much at all.

First, as with The Atlantic story, what took so damn long??? A media that’s made it it’s purpose in life to destroy Trump and everything close to it holds back such a damning story until it can be used to undermine his re-election campaign comes off as cynically and shamelessly political, especially when they’ve been quick to report even the most minor of infractions. This isn’t something that goes unnoticed, even by the president’s detractors and will certainly play a role in how the public views this story.

Second, the left and the media have no leg to stand on. They downplayed or didn’t give much coverage to the virus early on; Trump at least mentioned COVID in his State of the Union address. Only when it became possible to weaponize it politically did the left and the media suddenly change their approach. When they did, they parroted talking points from the WHO, which in turn was parroting talking points from China. If the left and the media thinks they were the protagonists in all of this, they’re deluding themselves.

Color me cynical, but I just don’t see Trump and his detractors on being on the same side of anything. If Trump had taken action earlier and implemented more drastic lockdown measures, mandated social distancing and mask-wearing, etc., he would’ve received political push-back, since, again, the left wasn’t all that concerned about COVID until they realized it could be used to hurt the president. Keep in mind, he needed the cooperation of both state and local governments and the public to implement such measures. Does anyone really think they would’ve followed Trump’s lead as his detractors all imply they would’ve?

Like you, I’m of the belief that earlier, better action wouldn’t have made a big difference. But, even if it did, at best, the media probably wouldn’t have covered this at all and they would’ve undoubtedly made a big deal out of the deaths that did occur. The fact is, nobody can convincingly argue how many lives could’ve been saved through drastic, earlier action, except to say it would’ve been less. It would’ve still been weaponized politically against the president.

None of this excuses Trump’s decision-making. The left and the media’s treachery doesn’t relieve Trump of the responsibility to do the right thing. Among his many problems is his unwillingness to do just that unless there’s some incentive for him to do so. However, all politicians, by their very nature, are hyper-incentivized creatures. I don’t think I’m defending Trump in any way when I say that having the whole world come after you at all hours of the day for anything and everything creates or reinforces a certain defensiveness and reluctance to do anything that might dignify your opponents in any fashion. Again, it doesn’t excuse Trump at all. If he really thought COVID was that big a deal, he had a responsibility to act prudently, no matter what the critics said.

Finally, the reason why I don’t think this story will affect Trump much is because the public has, at least behind closed doors, become exhausted with the lockdown and COVID paranoia. Even if a nearly 200,000 death toll is nothing to scoff at, you’re still talking a mortality rate in the low single-digits. Couple that with the fact these 200,000 deaths have occurred over a long period of time, it’s just not possible to keep people amped up on fear indefinitely. Also, outside a few states, the nightmare scenarios of overwhelmed hospitals, like we saw in places like Italy, has not manifested itself. The fact that the overwhelming majority of fatalities have occurred with people who had other health conditions shows that the risk presented by COVID is hardly universal, but relative, like everything else. I wouldn’t be surprised if most Americans aren’t separated by one degree from someone who’s had COVID or know someone who’s died from it. Again, I don’t want to downplay 200,000 deaths, but I think it’s clear it’s a manageable risk.

Another shift in public thinking might’ve occurred since the mass protests and riots started. I’ve heard people who aren’t fans of Trump and who are the furthest thing from “conservative” say, in private, of course, that “The double-standards are astounding.” These people recognize the cognitive dissonance that they’re being forced to conform to: COVID is so terrible we have to shut everything down except protests, because racism is so deadly it’s worth risking contracting such a lethal disease. The only other explanation is that COVID actually isn’t that lethal after all. Of course, nobody knows anymore and nobody knows who to believe, because everything’s become politicized now.

The lockdowns being generally over is proof that Americans would rather not stay locked down, even if there’s nothing stopping them from doing so. And I can also guarantee you everyone out and about consist of people all across the political spectrum. Someone who chose to participate in the economy and social activities and voluntarily assume the risk of contracting COVID, is the last person that should ever be criticizing the president’s handling of the crisis, because the president’s done exactly what most people would’ve preferred, no matter what the polls say.

I agree with the reader that this isn’t going to hurt Trump much. Way, way too much else going on now. As I’m trying to figure out my vote, I’ve already factored in Trump’s poor early Covid response. I think most people have, on both sides of the issue.

The post Trump Confesses He Downplayed Covid appeared first on The American Conservative.

Antiracism: The New Upper Class Religion

Christian schools that are more focused on their religious mission often asked families of applicants to discuss their family’s religious life and vision, as a way of ascertaining the seriousness of the applicant’s religious commitment. This is understandable if the school wishes to select for students who can be counted on to support the school’s reason for being.

A reader sends me this screenshot of an application for The Brearley School, an elite girls school on the Upper East Side of Manhattan.

This is the social elite’s Statement of Faith! John McWhorter called all of this five years ago, in his great Daily Beast piece on the religion of antiracism.

By the way, this, from the Brearley website, shows you how much it costs to send your daughter there:

Brearley is very woke. From the website:

 

I wonder if these privileged young ladies of the Upper East Side are ever asked to commit to “active introspection” about how their families’ ways of life impacts poor white children living in upstate New York trailer parks. Haha! Actually, I don’t wonder that at all. I know how they feel about the children of the Deplorables. Culture war is class war. 

Take that point seriously. This is not just something for us to laugh at. These children being indoctrinated into this ideology are the ruling class. In Live Not By Lies, I talk about why ordinary people have to pay serious attention to this stuff:

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

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

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

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

More:

“In the 1930s, before the rise of the communist regime, there were already strong forces in the culture that paved the way for it,” says Patrik Benda, a Prague political consultant, of his native Czechoslovakia. “All the artists and intellectuals advocated communist ideas, and if you didn’t agree, you were marked for exclusion. This was almost two decades before actual communism took power.”

The even worse catastrophe of World War II strengthened the case for communism. Having endured the agonies of Nazi occupation, many Central Europeans were desperate to believe in something that would guarantee them a bright future. One Czech survivor of the Nazi death camps later wrote that she joined the Communist Party because she mistakenly assumed that it was the polar opposite of Nazism.

When local communists seized power, backed by Soviet might, there was not much left within the exhausted populations with which to resist.

Writes historian Anne Applebaum, “And so, the vast majority of Eastern Europeans did not make a pact with the devil or sell their soul to become informers but rather succumbed to the constant, all-encompassing, everyday psychological and economic pressure.”

There’s a lot more of this in the book, which you can pre-order here for September 29 release.

The point is that these children of the ruling class, indoctrinated from their young years with the ideology of antiracism, will be determining the course of our country.

I just got off the phone with Chris Rufo, the young independent investigative journalist who recently scored a big victory by releasing documents proving that the Sandia National Laboratories were conducting hateful anti-white training. The Trump administration, acting on this information, banned Critical Race Theory training in federal agencies. I’m going to post the transcript of our interview soon, but I can tell you that Rufo said to me that people have no idea how thoroughly the ideological left has captured institutions, even of the federal government. You’re not going to see any of this reported in the mainstream media, because the media are totally on the side of the ideologues.

 

The post Antiracism: The New Upper Class Religion appeared first on The American Conservative.

Social Justice Realism

Ah, the joys of progressive racial consciousness:

You got that right: a whites-only space, established by the campus social justice commissariat, to encourage people to think of themselves in terms of racial difference. What a sick, self-destructive world these identity politics progressives are building for us. Can you think of a single historical example of a successful society that encouraged its members to think constantly about racial identity? At the risk of sounding like a broken record, the social-justice left is calling up demons that it will not be able to control.

In other idiotic social engineering news, here’s information out of Hollywood this morning about how the Academy is going to destroy film creativity by instituting a paint-by-numbers quota system for movies that wish to be considered for Best Picture. More:

In the latest step in its ongoing effort to boost diversity both within its own ranks and across the film industry, on Tuesday the film academy announced new representation standards for films to be eligible to compete for best picture.

Developed over the past few months by a special task force as part of the organization’s Academy Aperture 2025 initiative, the standards encompass both representation onscreen — in the types of stories being told and the actors involved — as well as behind the scenes in the makeup of the crew and in the inclusivity of the companies involved.

To be eligible for best picture, a film must meet at least two standards across four categories: “Onscreen Representation, Themes and Narratives,” “Creative Leadership and Project Team,” “Industry Access and Opportunities” and “Audience Development.” Within each category are a variety of criteria involving the inclusion of people in underrepresented groups, including women, people of color, LGBTQ+ people and those with cognitive or physical disabilities. (Other Oscar categories will not be held to these same standards, but the contenders for best picture typically filter down to other feature-length categories.)

More:

Among the new standards, those concerning onscreen representation are likely to garner the most scrutiny. Indeed, some recent best picture nominees that featured almost exclusively white and male casts — including the World War I film “1917″ and the gangster epic “The Irishman” — might have had difficulty meeting the new onscreen standards. Those standards require one of the following: at least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors is from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group; at least 30% of all actors in secondary and more minor roles are from certain underrepresented groups; or the main storyline, theme or narrative is centered on an underrepresented group.

Mindful of the difficulty of enforcing potentially heavy-handed mandates on the types of stories that are deemed worthy for best picture consideration, however, the academy is building in the flexibility for films to meet the inclusion requirements in other areas. For example, films can meet the “Industry Access and Opportunities” standard if the studio or production company offers paid apprenticeship and internship opportunities and training programs for underrepresented groups across a range of fields, something that is quite common across the industry.

Read the whole thing to see the details.They’re going to kill creativity. For example:

Best Picture winners which could not have been considered under these guidelines:

The Hurt Locker

The Departed

The Lord of the Rings

Gladiator

Braveheart

Godfather II

The Sting

The French Connection https://t.co/qViwyvcUDi

— Ryan James Girdusky (@RyanGirdusky) September 9, 2020

The official art form in the Soviet Union during the 1930s was “Socialist Realism,” about which:

The purpose of socialist realism was to limit popular culture to a specific, highly regulated faction of emotional expression that promoted Soviet ideals. The party was of the utmost importance and was always to be favorably featured. The key concepts that developed assured loyalty to the party, “partiinost'” (party-mindedness), “ideinost” (idea- or ideological-content), “klassovost” (class content), “pravdivost” (truthfulness).

There was a prevailing sense of optimism, as socialist realism’s function was to show the ideal Soviet society. Not only was the present gloried, but the future was also supposed to be depicted in an agreeable fashion. Because the present and the future were constantly idealized, socialist realism had a sense of forced optimism. Tragedy and negativity were not permitted, unless they were shown in a different time or place. This sentiment created what would later be dubbed “revolutionary romanticism.”

Now Hollywood will impose on its film artists an official Social Justice Realism aesthetic credo. Actual life is not permitted on film if it violates social justice ideals.

I never imagined that Hollywood would voluntarily return to a moralistic Motion Picture Code imposed on its filmmakers, but here we are. They’re Puritans, but Puritans for the left, so it’s okay, I guess.

In my post yesterday about Anne Applebaum’s new book, I noted that she correctly cites Hannah Arendt’s observation that a totalitarian society, or at least a society that is preparing itself for totalitarianism, values loyalty over competence. Applebaum says this is what is happening in central European countries ruled by nationalist-populist parties. She might be right about that — I don’t know enough about those governments to say one way or another — but she is missing the way that Social Justice commissars are imposing the same kind of loyalty tests from the left, within institutions and industries they control. From my new book Live Not By Lies:

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

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

Trump’s exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting. But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity politics. Loyalty to an ideology over expertise is no less disturbing than loyalty to a personality. This is at the root of “cancel culture,” in which transgressors, however minor their infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness.

In early 2020, an astonishing cancel-culture controversy emerged in which Jeanine Cummins, author of a much-anticipated novel about the Mexican immigrant experience, suffered savage attack in the media from some progressive Latino writers who accused the white woman of stealing the experiences of Latinos. Some prominent Latinas who had praised the book in advance of its publication—including novelist Erika L. Sanchez, and actress Salma Hayek—withdrew their backing, lest they seem disloyal to their group.

Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities within the University of California system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment to “equity, diversity, and inclusion”—and to have demonstrated it, even if it has nothing to do with their field. Similar politically correct loyalty oaths are required at leading public and private schools.

It is disgusting that Jeanine Cummins’s book was denounced, even by people who had praised it, not because of its lack of quality, but solely because of the racial identity of the artist who created it. This is where the left is taking American art and literature: towards politically correct mediocrity. As in the newspaper industry, the mandarins will sit around and congratulate themselves on their moral excellence, while the industry drifts into irrelevance.

It should not be lost on readers that the new Academy guidelines treat “diversity” as “suppressing white heterosexual males.” For example:

STANDARD A: ON-SCREEN REPRESENTATION, THEMES AND NARRATIVES

To achieve Standard A, the film must meet ONE of the following criteria:

A1. Lead or significant supporting actors

At least one of the lead actors or significant supporting actors is from an underrepresented racial or ethnic group.

• Asian

• Hispanic/Latinx

• Black/African American

• Indigenous/Native American/Alaskan Native

• Middle Eastern/North African

• Native Hawaiian or other Pacific Islander

• Other underrepresented race or ethnicity

A2. General ensemble cast

At least 30% of all actors in secondary and more minor roles are from at least two of the following underrepresented groups:

• Women

• Racial or ethnic group

• LGBTQ+

• People with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing

A3. Main storyline/subject matter

The main storyline(s), theme or narrative of the film is centered on an underrepresented group(s).

• Women

• Racial or ethnic group

• LGBTQ+

• People with cognitive or physical disabilities, or who are deaf or hard of hearing

Think of the moneymaking opportunities that will now arise from the Hollywood bureaucracy needed to assure diversity compliance. It’ll be just like having commissars from Mosfilm coming around to screen movies in advance to make sure they are faithful to the party line. Aren’t progressives great?

The post Social Justice Realism appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Twilight Of 1989

If you haven’t heard this week’s TAC Right Now podcast featuring an interview with me about my new book Live Not By Lies, well, here you go:

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In the interview, my colleague Helen Andrews notes that I approvingly quote Anne Applebaum’s work about the Soviet sphere in my book. Yet Applebaum’s new book, Twilight Of Democracy, surveys the contemporary scene, and draws the opposite conclusion: that we are not headed into a left-wing soft totalitarianism, but rather into right-wing authoritarianism. (Once again, let me point out that the two terms are not interchangeable; authoritarianism is a system in which political power is monopolized and concentrated in a figure or a party, while totalitarianism is an extreme form of authoritarianism, in which all political power is monopolized and concentrated — and all aspects of life are politicized.)

Helen wants to know how Anne Applebaum and I can come to such opposite conclusions from more or less the same data. I had a guess, but not having read Applebaum’s new book, I couldn’t say for sure. After we recorded the episode, I ordered Twilight Of Democracy, and read it. Now I know — and I’m going to explain it.

Applebaum is a prominent journalist who used to be associated with neoconservative circles. She is the wife of Radek Sikorski, a senior Polish politician. She begins her book by talking about a New Year’s Eve party at their Polish country home at the turn of the millennium. Poland had been free from communism for about a decade. Everyone was giddy. But now, half the people at the party aren’t talking to the other half. In Applebaum’s view, the anti-communist consensus split between classically liberal internationalists like her — pro-globalism, pro-liberal social values, pro-immigration — and nationalist populists, like supporters of Poland’s Law & Justice Party, Hungary’s Fidesz, and Donald Trump. In the book, she details these changes, and offers explanations for why they happened.

I won’t address the many detailed criticisms she has of particular people she knows, or knew, in the region’s politics. I am in no position to judge the accuracy or fairness of Applebaum’s claims. She may be completely right — I dunno. It’s beside the point here. What I’m interested in is the ideas in play.

Applebaum writes:

More recently, Karen Stenner, a behavioral economist who began researching personality traits two decades ago, has argued that about a third of the population in any country has what she calls an authoritarian predisposition, a word that is more useful than personality, because it is less rigid. An authoritarian predisposition, one that favors homogeneity and order, can be present without necessarily manifesting itself; its opposite, a “libertarian” predisposition, one that favors diversity and difference, can be silently present too.

Stenner’s definition of authoritarianism isn’t political, and it isn’t the same thing as conservatism. Authoritarianism appeals, simply, to people who cannot tolerate complexity: there is nothing intrinsically “left-wing” or “right-wing” about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debates. Whether those who have it ultimately derive their politics from Marxism or nationalism is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.

In his 1927 book La trahison des clercs—loosely translated as “The Treason of the Intellectuals” or sometimes “The Betrayal of the Intellectuals”—the French essayist Julien Benda observed and described the authoritarian elites of his time long before anyone else understood how important they were. Anticipating Arendt, his concern was not “authoritarian personalities” as such, but rather the particular people who supported the authoritarianism that he already saw taking both left- and right-wing forms all across Europe. He described both far-right and far-left ideologues who sought to promote either “class passion,” in the form of Soviet Marxism, or “national passion,” in the form of fascism, and accused them both of betraying the central task of the intellectual, the search for truth, in favor of particular political causes. Sarcastically, he called these fallen intellectuals clercs or “clerks,” a word whose oldest meanings link it to “clergy.” Ten years before Stalin’s Great Terror and six years before Hitler came to power, Benda already feared that the writers, journalists, and and essayists who had morphed into political entrepreneurs and propagandists would goad whole civilizations into acts of violence. And so it came to pass.

Applebaum goes on to say that this is present on both the left and the right today.  I agree with her! She and I might well draw the lines in different places, but we generally agree that this is a problem on both sides.

Where we disagree is over what constitutes illicit and indefensible acts of authoritarianism, and on which side poses the greater threat to the common good. That’s because — and this is the heart of it — we disagree on what constitutes the common good.

For example, she writes:

By contrast, the new right does not want to conserve or to preserve what exists at all. In continental Europe, the new right scorns Christian Democracy, which used its political base in the church to found and create the EU after the nightmare of the Second World War. In the United States and the United Kingdom, the new right has broken with the old-fashioned, Burkean small-c conservatism that is suspicious of rapid change in all its forms.

Although they hate the phrase, the new right is more Bolshevik than Burkean: these are men and women who want to overthrow, bypass, or undermine existing institutions, to destroy what exists.

A lot of people on my side dislike Anne Applebaum, but I see no reason to think of her as deceptive. I think she is an honest, even pure, expression of the globalist right-liberal. People on the “new right,” as she calls it, think of the institutions that exist — broadly speaking, the European Union and its various agencies and norms — as a threat to their particular traditions and sovereignty. In his great little book The Demon In Democracy, Ryszard Legutko, a Polish philosopher who is part of the party opposed by Applebaum’s husband, explains why to Poles of his political and cultural convictions, the EU is a kinder, gentler version of communism. Both are driven by the homogenizing, totalizing vision of progressivism, which wants to free humankind of traditional religion, loyalties, and particularities.

In my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies, a Budapest teacher told me how this worked in his youth under communism:

Those steeped in the teachings of Marx believed that communism was inevitable because History—a force with godlike powers of determination—required it. Kundera says that what makes a leftist (of any kind—socialists, communists, Trotskyites, left-liberals, and so on) a leftist is a shared belief that humanity is on a “Grand March” toward Progress: “The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.”

If progress is inevitable, and the Communist Party is the leader of society’s Grand March to the progressive future, then, the theory goes, to resist the Party is to stand against the future—indeed, against reality itself. Those who oppose the Party oppose progress and freedom and align themselves with greed, backwardness, bigotry, and all manner of injustice. How necessary—indeed, how noble—it is of the Party to bulldoze these stumbling blocks on the Grand March and make straight and smooth the road to tomorrow.

“There was constant propaganda about how communism was changing the village for the better,” recalls

Tamás Sályi, a Budapest teacher of English, of his Hungarian youth. “There were always films of the farmer learning to improve his life with new technology. Those who rejected it were [depicted as] endangering their families. There are so many examples about how everything old and traditional prevented life from being good and happy.”

Thus does the Myth of Progress become a justification for exercising dictatorial power to eliminate all opposition.

Now, Anne Applebaum was and is a strong critic of communism. Let us get that straight. There is nothing in her work that is sympathetic to communism in the least.

And yet, there’s this quote from the same Tamas Salyi, in Live Not By Lies:

Tamás Sályi, the Budapest teacher, says that Hungarians survived German occupation and a Soviet puppet regime, but thirty years of freedom has destroyed more cultural memory than the previous eras. “What neither Nazism or Communism could do, victorious liberal capitalism has done,” he muses.

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

You see? Salyi spent roughly the first half of his life living under communism, and the second half living under liberal capitalism. On the same day I went to interview him and his wife, a young Hungarian Catholic told me that her generation has completely abandoned the faith. It is a legacy of the dead past. Most of the Millennials and Zoomers, she said — and I heard this in other former Soviet bloc countries — want nothing more than to live as Western Europeans do: as hedonistic consumers bound by nothing but the limits of their desires.

This is where a lot of the people Applebaum denounces as right-wing enemies come from. The kind of people she dislikes are the Catholics I talked to in Poland who work for US and European-based multinationals, and who say that their companies are forcing them to violate their consciences by observing LGBT Pride celebrations in the offices. They see this — correctly — as cultural imperialism, as part of an alien ideology forced on them by Western capitalists.

Elsewhere, Applebaum writes:

Unlike an ordinary oligarchy, the one-party state allows for upward mobility: true believers can advance—a prospect especially appealing to people whom the previous regime or society had not promoted. Arendt observed the attraction of authoritarianism to people who feel resentful or unsuccessful back in the 1940s, when she wrote that the worst kind of one-party state “invariably

replaces all first-rate talents, regardless of their sympathies, with those crackpots and fools whose lack of intelligence and creativity is still the best guarantee of their loyalty.”

This form of soft dictatorship does not require mass violence to stay in power. Instead, it relies upon a cadre of elites to run the bureaucracy, the state media, the courts, and, in some places, state companies. These modern day clercs understand their role, which is to defend the leaders, however dishonest their statements, however great their corruption, and however disastrous their impact on ordinary people and institutions. In exchange, they know that they will be rewarded and advanced.

I have no doubt that that happens in some of these countries. But look, how is this so different from the left-liberal corporate, academic, and institutional regime we have in the US, where you can be sub-competent and still keep your job if you tick off the right diversity, inclusion, and equity boxes — and where, if you dissent from this ideology, you will be sacked no matter how good your are at your job? Believe me, I have seen in the journalism profession how this works. It’s invisible to many liberals, who will deny to their dying day that it’s happening. But it’s happening.

In Live Not By Lies, I write:

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

Trump’s exaltation of personal loyalty over expertise is discreditable and corrupting. But how can liberals complain? Loyalty to the group or the tribe is at the core of leftist identity politics. Loyalty to an ideology over expertise is no less disturbing than loyalty to a personality. This is at the root of “cancel culture,” in which transgressors, however minor their infractions, find themselves cast into outer darkness.

In early 2020, an astonishing cancel-culture controversy emerged in which Jeanine Cummins, author of a much-anticipated novel about the Mexican immigrant experience, suffered savage attack in the media from some progressive Latino writers who accused the white woman of stealing the experiences of Latinos. Some prominent Latinas who had praised the book in advance of its publication—including novelist Erika L. Sanchez, and actress Salma Hayek—withdrew their backing, lest they seem disloyal to their group.

Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities within the University of California system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment to “equity, diversity, and inclusion”—and to have demonstrated it, even if it has nothing to do with their field. Similar politically correct loyalty oaths are required at leading public and private schools.

De facto loyalty tests to diversity ideology are common in corporate America. As the inventor of JavaScript, Brendan Eich was one of the most important early figures of the internet. But in 2014, he was forced out of leadership of Mozilla, the company he founded, after employees objected to a small donation he made to the 2008 campaign to stop gay marriage in California.

A Soviet-born US physician told me—after I agreed not to use his name—that he never posts anything remotely controversial on social media, because he knows that the human resources department at his hospital monitors employee accounts for evidence of disloyalty to the progressive “diversity and inclusion” creed.

That same doctor disclosed that social justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to advise gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes it is not in that particular patient’s health interest.

I interviewed that physician face to face on one of my trips last year. I had to assure him multiple times that I would not use his name in my book. He said he really could lose everything he and his wife had worked for — this, simply for being identified as disloyal to transgender ideology, even from a purely medical point of view.

This is why I have a lot of trouble seeing eye to eye with Anne Applebaum. She sees all the cultural changes on the LGBT front as uncomplicated goods. She sees immigration in the same way, it appears. In her book, Applebaum harshly criticizes the Spanish populist party Vox. She makes them sound like a bunch of opportunistic haters. Nowhere in Applebaum’s book is there any recognition that Vox is fighting radical gender ideology coming at Spanish families from the Spanish left in power. I wrote about it here, and earlier here, in a piece about how the left-wing governing party in the province of Navarra is pushing through mandatory sex-and-gender education on preschool children. In a later post, I talked about Vox in a longer piece how the “establishment Right” — that would be people like Anne Applebaum — don’t understand the new right at all. Excerpt:

Meanwhile, in Spain, the populist party Vox has been voted into power in the province of Andalusia, ending forty years of Socialist rule in Spain’s most left-wing province. Why? The migration crisis, with Andalusia on the front line, has a lot to do with it.  In Spain, a man told me that his relative works for the government on those front lines, and voted for Vox because he can see with his own eyes, every single day, migrants coming ashore and melting into the greater European population — while the government does nothing. Another Spaniard told me that people in Andalusia were sick and tired of corruption in the ruling party, which they had come to see stood for nothing more than protecting itself.

Vox is hysterically denounced by the Spanish and European media as “far right.” Here, in the liberal Madrid daily El Pais, is a description of Vox’s platform. Read this and say with a straight face that Vox’s sensible, moderately conservative nationalism counts as “far right.” It’s an absurd slur, and shows just how far Europe’s liberal establishment — of which the intellectuals who are signatories to the Guardian column — have drifted from the legitimate needs of the people.

Applebaum’s book is a perfect example of why it is impossible to trust the news in the US and UK media about the right-of-center counter-establishment parties in Europe. Right-liberals like Applebaum see them all as undifferentiated authoritarian troglodytes. Why is it racist or Islamophobic for people in a European nation to prefer for their nation and its culture to be as it always has been? People who hold these views might well hate foreigners, or hate Muslims, but the Applebaums of the world can’t conceive of their political views as being driven by anything other than hatred. Maybe they love what they’ve been given, and want to keep it.

Unsurprisingly, Hungarian prime minister Viktor Orban is singled out by Applebaum for special opprobrium. Michael Brendan Dougherty, writing in National Review, says that Orban is neither the hero that some on the right want him to be, nor the villain that most on the left despise. In this passage, you can see why Orban’s strong opposition to immigration, especially Muslim immigration, is less a matter of hating outsiders than loving one’s own country, and seeing it threatened:

But Orban used the [immigration] issue, to dramatize himself as standing against the great powers in the European Union, but also to dramatize the long struggle of the Hungarian people to survive the political domination of outsiders. In his 2019 state-of-the-nation address, he connected the immigration issue to Hungary’s birth dearth, a Continental phenomenon in Europe and a regional catastrophe in Central Europe. “People in the West are responding to this with immigration,” he said. “They say that the shortfall should be made up by immigrants, and then the numbers will be in order. Hungarians see this in a different light. We do not need numbers, but Hungarian children.”

Immigration can be politically destabilizing even in much stronger, richer nations. It can lead a democratic people to vote for Donald Trump, for instance. In Hungary the calculations are even finer. In a country with a tradition of emigration, any decrease in living standards or quality of life can spur a further exodus of the most talented, who have, in their EU passports, a right to move to richer nations.

In Hungary the fertility rate is at national-suicide levels, 1.53 children per woman. Orban has learned that a small country cannot exercise effective sovereignty without economic growth, and economic growth is more difficult, almost impossible, with a contracting population. “It is not written in the great book of humanity that there must be Hungarians in the world. It is only written in our hearts,” Orban said in his 2019 speech, before announcing a variety of natalist measures, including one that would eliminate income tax for life for any woman who had four children.

Orban’s theory is that small nations must have strong and nimble states that can intervene to protect democratic peoples from the bullying of multinational corporations and larger states. And the process of centralizing political structures is not outside the European norm, even if American conservatives look at it with suspicion. The constitutional reforms removed some checks and balances in the Hungarian system, moving it away from an American-style system toward a more British style of parliamentary supremacy. Orban’s reforms could be compared to Margaret Thatcher’s in the 1980s, which pulled powers away from local government and put them into Whitehall and its archipelago of quangos. But even in “authoritarian” Hungary, the power of the prime minister would still fall short of the kind of authority enjoyed by European leaders such as French president Emmanuel Macron.

So, by now I think you get the point. Applebaum and I would agree that the old postwar Atlanticist consensus favoring free markets and liberal democracy is falling apart in the postcommunist era. She regards the right as the greatest threat to the common good, which she defines as secular, liberal, capitalist, and internationalist. I regard the greatest threat to the common good as the left, which has become increasingly illiberal. I believe in a capitalism with more limits than Applebaum probably does, and in strengthening national sovereignty, and in traditional Christianity (though not with an established church), and in privileging traditional marriage and family. More to the point, I see that the left holds all the high ground within civil society, its institutions, and its networks — media, corporations, universities, etc.. The only thing the right holds is some political power, for now.

The Tragic Romance of the Nostalgic Western Liberal

Finally, here’s an interesting critique of Applebaum’s book by Ivan Krastev, writing in Foreign Policy magazine. He clearly sympathizes with Applebaum, but sees her as someone nostalgic for the narrative of 1989, with the victory of liberal capitalist democracy over communism. More:

Her much-praised history books about the Soviet Gulag and the establishment of the communist regimes in Central Europe were her historical introduction to the inevitability of 1989. For her, the end of the Cold War was not a geopolitical story; it was a moral story, a verdict pronounced by history itself. She tends to see the post-Cold War world as an epic struggle between democracy and authoritarianism, between freedom and oppression.

In this sense, Applebaum is a classic ’89er; like many of us, she was shaped by the Cold War without ever really experiencing it. For the ’89ers, the Cold War was what the anti-fascist resistance was for the West’s student revolutionaries of the 1960s, the ’68ers—a time of inspiring heroism and moral clarity. In her worldview, the marriage between democracy and capitalism was made in heaven, and most of the conflicts in the world were not about a clash of interests but about a clash of values. It was this mindset that made many ’89ers first to detect the danger coming from Vladimir Putin’s Russia but also the last to condemn George W. Bush’s ugly war in Iraq.

This is insightful. It turns out that liberal democracy is not an end point, but a means to an end. What is that end? Freedom? Okay, but freedom for what? Progress? Fine, but where are we going? Towards a world of radical individualism, of self-actualized hedonistic shoppers? Anne Applebaum needs to read some Michel Houellebecq.

The post The Twilight Of 1989 appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Problem Of Woke College Football

On August 28, the LSU Tigers marched from practice across campus in a Black Lives Matter protest. Later, Coach Ed Orgeron said that he supported his team. That same week, Alabama coach Nick Saban led his own team in a BLM protest:

“Today I’m like a proud parent,” Saban said at the end of the march. “I’m proud of our team, I’m proud of our messengers over here and I’m very proud of the message. I’m very proud of the ’All lives can’t matter until Black lives matter’ video that we did early on that I think had a very positive impact. That was something we did together as a team.

“This is something that the team decided to do together as a team, so I’m very proud and supportive of what they are trying to say, and in a peaceful and intelligent way. I’m very pleased to be here today.”

I am not a big sports fan, but you can’t live in the South and not understand that SEC (Southeastern Conference) football is a tribal religion. My sense is that if college football teams go woke, it could cause real disruption, in ways that might have a political effect. This is just speculation, mind you; I invite you readers who are more knowledgeable about sports to weigh in.

It’s also true about professional football. Today we’re learning that the Dallas Cowboys organization has given the green light to players to kneel during the National Anthem. Me, personally, I am not offended by the kneeling. But I don’t think that’s going to go over well in Texas.

Here in Louisiana, people care about the New Orleans Saints, but they don’t care nearly as much as they do about the LSU Tigers. If the Tigers go woke, Ed Orgeron has a big problem on his hands. Orgeron is from down the bayou. He surely knows in his bones how unwelcome the racial politicization of Tiger football will be among white fans. I wouldn’t presume to guess what Coach O’s true feelings are about Black Lives Matter, but one has to appreciate the dilemma’s he’s in. Orgeron, Nick Saban, and other coaches lead teams that are predominantly black. If the black players (and their white teammates) feel strongly about this issue, then their coach failing to support them is going to make the coach’s job untenable. That’s just a fact of life.

Yet figures like Orgeron and Saban have to know that these protests are not going to be popular with the large white fan bases of their teams. It is impossible to overstate how much good will the LSU Tigers have here in Louisiana after their National Championship win last season. But they could burn through it very quickly.

There will be people who flat out hate Black Lives Matter. But there will also be people who hate that something as beloved and unifying as college football is being politicized. The fact that the LSU Tigers are marching for Black Lives Matter is not going to make more Tiger fans support BLM; it’s going to make more Tiger fans turn on the Tigers.

Again, you might say it’s racism, and you might be right for some people. But my gut tells me it’s mostly going to be about resentment at the politicization of college football, which, again, in the South really is a tribal religion. A few weeks back, I was talking to a friend who is a pastor in Baton Rouge. We were talking about how the diminishment of this fall’s football season is going to be psychologically painful for a lot of people in this city. Laugh at it if you want, but football season is the happiest part of the year for a hell of a lot of people. The fact that the Tigers are going to be playing only a limited schedule, and that there will be only half-full stadiums (by governor’s orders), and some of the players are opting out for their safety — all of this is going to hit people very hard, especially after suffering depression from six months of Covid measures.

Folks are going to be angry. The Tigers (and, I presume, other football teams) can’t afford to have the people angry at them. 

I mean that literally. All college programs are under a lot of pressure this year because of Covid. The financial losses to universities and businesses who profit from football season are going to be massive. The projected losses are going to be so great at LSU that the university is asking fans to donate to the athletic program. You think the small business owner in Lafourche Parish is going to open his wallet to the Tigers when they’ve gotten woke? This is exactly the wrong time for football teams to alienate fans. But it’s going to happen, and when it does, we can count on sports journalists to chastise fans for being a bunch of slack-jawed bigots.

I see that one of Trump’s sons has picked up on the Cowboys thing, tweeting the following to his four million followers:

Football is officially dead — so much for “America’s sport.” Goodbye NFL… I’m gone. https://t.co/FSJeyvsql3

— Eric Trump (@EricTrump) September 8, 2020

Remember, the Cowboys market themselves as “America’s team.”

Think about how popular college football teams introducing racial politics into college football in the middle of this presidential campaign is likely to play. If you’re mad at your favorite team for getting woke, and regard it as yet another example of the left politicizing everything, might that not affect your vote, and/or your political intensity?

It just seems to me that if you are a football player trying to build interest in and sympathy for Black Lives Matter, this is not the way to do it. In fact, it’s the way to energize opponents of BLM. And I have a sense that this is going to have some effect, perhaps not measurable, on the fall election — and beyond. The cumulative effect of politicizing sports to the cultural left could be to help radicalize the conservative base.

What do you think?

The post The Problem Of Woke College Football appeared first on The American Conservative.

How To Disrupt Critical Race Theory Training

This morning I received a letter from a reader who is a regular commenter on this blog, though he uses a false name. I have his permission to tell this story, though I’ve had to paraphrase it from his letter to me to protect him. I’ve run this version past him for his approval.

He explained the role he had professionally in mainstreaming Critical Race Theory in universities and institutions. Not long ago, he had a falling out with a CRT advocate over corporate culture.

My correspondent — let’s call him Henry — argued with the CRT person over power and identity within corporations. Henry has decades of experience with corporate life. His view is that men and women who have reached the top in most corporations have been thoroughly assimilated into corporate culture — and that defines who they are and what they believe. His interlocutor disagreed, and said blacks in corporations retain their black identity and just engage in lots of “code switching.” They tell white people what the white people want to hear. They tell the truth to their black friends.

Henry said that this woman’s view, when understood through communications theory, means that her actual argument is this: that black people lie to white people all the time. Conclusion: the white racists have been right all along. Black people cannot be trusted when they talk to whites. Henry goes on:

Critical race theory does a poor job of relating with various theories of communication. She had no idea what to say. I presented her with an either/our that was built on what she taught. The whole problem of intentionality was lost on her (as it is on a generation of English majors who were taught not to look for authorial intention). She and I have not talked since that day. Take away point—“code switching” is a potent weak link in implicit bias and structural racism training. Code switching filtered through communication theory means lying.

The take away point, those who teach critical race theory, structural racism, and implicit bias cannot actually engage in a reasoned discussion with an educated audience—because the structure of their argument collapses. Their argument only succeeds if two things are true: (1) you accept their normative assumptions; and (2) you do not look at the implications of their argument and test them with other theories.

Most people who take critical race training at work are not in a position to ask simple but devastating questions. That puts the burden on others to do so.

I asked Henry for a list of such “simple but devastating questions” that people forced to take CRT-based training in the workplace could ask. He responded with more than a few, separating them into subject areas. This is really useful stuff, and I hope you readers will take them into this training with you to subvert the process:

Pattern One: “Code Switching”

Line of questions about “code switching.”  Code switching is basically a communication strategy often (but not exclusively) used by black people where they use one set of language and words to talk with “white people” and a different set of language and words to talk with each other.  The assumption is that blacks tell whites what they believe works as communication in white world—or communication is shaped to the audience.  Blacks then speak a different truth to each other.

1. What is “code switching?” I have heard that black people respond to racism by “code switching”  — what is it?

2. Is code switching acceptable?

3. Words have meaning and generally if you use different words you change the meaning.  Why isn’t code switching lying?  So it is okay to speak different truths to different audiences?

4. Is it okay if white people code switch?

5. Unless you are calling white people dumb, don’t you expect that the response to your training will just be for white people to code switch (like black people do)?  How will that help?

Pattern Two: Moral Relativism

This is a line of questioning about the values underlying the training.

1. What are the values or principles behind what you are teaching us? (We don’t actually care the answer to this one so long as it is answered)  Follow up—why won’t you tell me what your principles  are?  What are you hiding?

2. Are those moral assumptions “moral absolutes” or are they just social constructions like all the stuff you are teaching us about race? (Again, we don’t care the answer to this one; we just want the speaker to make what the late Douglas Walton calls “unwelcome commitments.”)

3. So you agree there are moral absolutes? I’m still allowed to adhere to my moral absolutes, like putting my family first?  Putting God first? Putting my faith first?  I’m allowed to expect that other people will always tell me the truth (see code switching above)? I’m allowed to expect that other people will respect my property?

4. So morality is a social construction? So you are attacking my religious faith?  You say it’s a problem if it’s a moral absolute?  What exactly is wrong with my religion?  If there is nothing wrong with my religion, why do you want me to change what I do?  I’m just following my faith. I’m Christian — do you have the same problem with Judaism?  (These follow ups are why we don’t care about the beginning … the entailments are what we want — but one has to be willing to witness her or his faith).

Pattern Three —How Do You Know?

1. If I follow what you are saying, how we approach the world is shaped by cultural forces beyond us?

2. How did you escape these cultural forces?  Aren’t you in fact part of the cultural forces?  Aren’t you intellectually a prisoner to the same forces you are telling us about?

3. So you are saying you are smarter than me — that you escaped, but I didn’t?

4. Without knowing me personally, how can you teach that I am subject to these cultural forces and have not “escaped” them through my own critical thinking?

5. Why would you assume all escape from these social forces looks the same?  Aren’t there different paths that work?

6. Doesn’t Christian faith lead one to escape these cultural forces? [This depends on one’s willingness to argue doctrine]

7. Of course you have read [fill in your favorite text, and argue from it] Martin Luther’s “Freedom of the Christian.”  Do you have a problem with Luther’s teaching that one has liberty or freedom only when he lives in bondage to Christ?  Indeed, freedom has nothing to do with the secular or political world, but is purely a matter of our relationship with Christ?

Pattern 4—Teleology

In graduate school I was part of a “voluntary” critical studies reading group that existed so a young assistant professor could test out some ideas he had for a book.  This line of questions ended the reading group.

1. Let’s take a step back for a moment. You are teaching us a process of critical analysis.  You are asking us to examine how culture shapes thinking.  What is the end point of your process?  Does this process have an end point?  Why is that end point correct?  So you are saying that end point is a moral absolute?  So you believe in moral absolutes? So that end point is not a moral absolute, it’s just a different cultural construction—one among perhaps an infinite number of possible such cultural constructions? Really?

2. Why isn’t your end point merely an alternative cultural construction?  Can you show me the difference? How one is an absolute and the other a construction?

3. Why don’t you try this to explain this more clearly. Let’s invert the problem and use your end point as the point of critical departure.  What happens if we apply your methods to your end point?  Doesn’t that mean we will end up somewhere else?  Where? That place might not be good? Won’t people just apply your methods to your ends?

This last one probably goes beyond the easy.

4. Can you restate what you are telling us in terms of Popperian falsification? Can you give me a testable hypothesis that we could prove false?  Can you present us your theory in something testable that can be falsified?

On Henry’s last point, this link should clarify things. In brief, the philosopher of science Karl Popper said all scientific claims should be “falsifiable” — that is, it ought to be possible, in theory, to prove them false. If it’s not, then the claim is not scientific. What Henry advises the Critical Race Theory disrupter to do is to put the instructor in a position of having to demonstrate that CRT-based claims are scientific by coming up with examples that could, in theory, be proven false. If they can’t do that, then it shows that CRT is a political or moral ideology. This line of questioning undermines its authority in the minds of the captive audience.

UPDATE: A reader dissents:

What an insane idea, recommending that people attempt to disrupt this process will ensure nothing more than the system being reinforced even more; because the end result will be those disrupters being made into an example for the rest of the group.

I can already picture it in my mind, some foolish white man attempts to “own” the CRT hustler by asking a question like those listed above. The CRT instructor will then denounce the questioner as a racist, likely white supremacist, and a danger to people of color. This person will then be fired when a protected class member complains about them. And they will complain after they see you ask a question like this.

Of all people Rod Dreher should understand that you don’t “debate” with totalitarians, do you think the response to a friend being put in a gulag is to offer a noble debate to a commissar? We have a massive movement working towards bringing Dhimmitude status upon white people. I suppose it makes conservatives feel better thinking that they can debate their way out of that raw hatred. That’s also the reason most conservatives keep calling BLM Marxist, it allows them to avoid the real issue.

The proper response to these trainings is #1 do and say nothing, schedule a doctors visit for the training day and if you can’t do that sit silently and #2 if forced to speak say the following “I don’t have anything to add, I’m just listening to the good information everyone is discussing”. At this stage of the game your martyrdom will have the opposite impact you want as the establishment will gleefully make an example out of you. Maybe after another 10 years of ritual humiliation there will be enough angry people to push back on these concepts, but today is not the day.

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