Rod Dreher's Blog, page 118

Rittenhouse Vs. His Enemies

You know Joseph Rosenbaum, the first person Kyle Rittenhouse allegedly shot at the riot in Kenosha? You’ll recall him as the hothead taunting armed people in this clip.

Turns out he was a real-life monster: a convicted rapist of little boys. Look:

A presentence report reveals that Rosenbaum committed a range of sex crimes against several boys from the ages of nine to eleven years old, including outright rape.

I’m not going to post excerpts from the court documents describing his crimes; follow that link if you want to see them. I’m not going to say that Rosenbaum deserved to die. Rosenbaum’s criminal record has nothing to do with what happened to him; we don’t absolve people of shooting to death people who happen to have been evil at one point in their lives. [deleted line — see note below]. I hope the children he raped understand that they no longer have to be afraid that he walks the earth a free man.

Esther O’Reilly, an Evangelical writer, has had just about enough of people trashing Kyle Rittenhouse. She says, on her Patheos blog:

That honor would go to The Gospel Coalition, for this shameful attack piece run on August 29th, titled “Why I Hate August.” The author, K. Edward Copeland, goes through a compare/contrast of Kyle’s case and the case of Jacob Blake (on which more details have emerged just since the piece ran, and which is far from as simplistic as first knee-jerk reactions made it sound). He contrasts Blake’s shooting with the fact that Rittenhouse was ignored by police on the night of the incident and went home despite making an attempt to turn himself in. Supposedly, this proves systemic bias against “black and brown bodies.” In the course of drawing this contrast, without batting an eye, he outrageously lumps Kyle with other “armed mass shooters” like Dylan Roof. To be clear, we are talking about deranged killers who stormed peaceful public gatherings with the express intent of murdering as many innocent people as possible. This is the company Rittenhouse apparently keeps in the mind of K. Edward Copeland.

That any major outlet would run a bit of slander like this is sad, but at this point in the devolution of our country’s journalistic class, it’s only to be expected from most mainstream sources. But for a major Christian news outlet to run it is shocking. It is unconscionable. It violates not only the basic standards of journalistic integrity, but Christian standards for love of truth and of neighbor. At this point, I am sorry to say that it is clear The Gospel Coalition is giving free rein to its minority voices to vent in whatever manner they please, merely because they are minority voices. Running this piece was the equivalent of running a piece by a white author flirting with alt-right ideology while venting his resentment at feeling shamed for his white skin—which will never happen, nor should it. I merely note the blatant double standard.

She thinks the shootings were justified. More:

Some have cautioned against turning Rittenhouse into a conservative folk hero. I have no desire to do this. I don’t wish to canonize him or make him a mascot. But perhaps I am angry because Kyle reminds me of young guys I know. Good guys. Guys from my own hometown. Guys who, yes, support the police and plan to vote for Trump. Get over it. Perhaps I’m angry because I look at Kyle and I think that could easily have been one of them.

Kyle Rittenhouse decided not to keep walking. For that, I say good on him. And I don’t particularly care who hears it.

Read it all. 

Eric Zorn, a liberal Chicago Tribune columnist, says that Rittenhouse is going to go free. More:

According to prosecutors, video from the scene and witness accounts, the legally relevant portion of the story picked up a little before midnight: For unknown reasons, Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, of Kenosha, who had earlier been yelling angrily at the armed men who had come to the protests, was at a run, chasing Rittenhouse along Sheridan Road and into the parking lot of a used-car dealer.

When Rosenbaum, who was unarmed, finally cornered Rittenhouse, he grabbed for the teenager’s gun. Multiple shots rang out, and Rosenbaum fell, mortally wounded.

Did Rittenhouse have a reasonable belief under the circumstances that if Rosenbaum got his gun he would suffer death or great bodily harm? Jurors in Wisconsin are instructed that “reasonable” means “what a person of ordinary intelligence and prudence would have believed … under the circumstances that existed at the time.”

Tensions were high late into the protests against the police shooting of Jacob Blake two days earlier. Gunshots from other weapons were heard immediately before and after the shots that killed Rosenbaum. Whether you think Rittenhouse is a hero for helping to guard against a repeat of the vandalism the night before, or if you think he’s a reckless wannabe cop who had no business in Kenosha, you’ve got to concede that, at that moment, he was probably terrified.

This is the first I’ve seen details about the encounter between Rosenbaum and Rittenhouse. I agree with Zorn, who points out too that Anthony Huber, the skateboarder shot to death by Rittenhouse, had attacked a fallen Rittenhouse and hit him with his skateboard. It turns out, according to the law professor Zorn interviewed, that Rittenhouse’s shooting and wounding Grosskreutz, the guy approaching him with a gun in his hand, is going to be the most problematic for the kid, because Grosskreutz was not pointing his gun at Rittenhouse. But as Zorn — who says Kyle should not have been out there with a gun — acknowledges, in that circumstance, it was reasonable for Rittenhouse to fear for his life.

That’s why Rittenhouse will not be convicted, predicts this liberal columnist. Read it all. 

Unlike Esther O’Reilly, I wish Rittenhouse had not been out there that night. But like her, I hope Rittenhouse is not convicted. Like her, I believe that that TGC essay comparing him to Dylann Roof was contemptible. And like her, the more antifa and other BLM goons burn and loot and beat up cops, the more immune I become to bleeding-heart whinging about what a monster Kyle Rittenhouse is. This country would be better off with more Kyle Rittenhouses and fewer Joseph Rosenbaums.

UPDATE: I took out a line about Rosenbaum above, having thought better of it. I believe that child abusers are the scum of the earth, so I got really hot when I read the details of what he did to those kids. That said, it is important not to let the viciousness of people like him turn us vicious. I took the line out. I apologize to you for writing it.

The post Rittenhouse Vs. His Enemies appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Looting Left

I am so gobsmacked by the traction this Vicky Osterweil person has found in elite left and liberal media with her book In Defense of Looting. 

You will have heard about the long interview on National Public Radio about it. 

I couldn’t find a big enough photo of Osterweil in her Vicky incarnation; the photo above is when he was Willie. Here is Vicky:

Vicky Osterweil

It turns out that Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker spoke to her even before the controversial NPR hit. Excerpts:

Many political movements have used methods that are not always democratic at times, from Nelson Mandela on. But I read an interview with you where you said, “In the case of riots, as looting is usually done by people who live in the neighborhoods where it occurs, distinctions are often made between businesses that gentrify or oppress, and those that don’t. Liquor stores, pawn shops, pharmacies, and gentro-cafes tend to be hit much more readily than the quaint ‘small business’ the phrase is designed to evoke.” Lots of these places could be “small businesses,” and I wouldn’t want to make a claim that young men going into liquor stores are doing it because they view these things as having an oppressive or gentrifying character. I don’t know who owns the businesses of a lot of places in my neighborhood. I think a lot of people don’t. Are you over-interpreting these actions as having some political character?

I think there’s also a liberatory political character to people just getting what they want for free.

Which people?

To people in a movement getting what they want for free. Rich people get it from the exploitation of people working for them and through their generation of rents and profits, through labor and through ownership of factories and stores. I think that when people loot during a riot, they are solving a lot of the immediate problems that make their lives very, very hard, and they may also take the opportunity to make their lives more pleasurable. Liquor is also really expensive, and it’s often one of the only pleasures people who live in those neighborhoods can actually afford, but it’s still expensive on their terms. And being able to have that stuff for free allows you to have more communal pleasure, pleasures that are totally normal.

You write, “Though the buildings destroyed may be located in a predominantly Black or proletarian neighborhood, the losses go to the white, bourgeois building and business owners, rarely the people who live near them.” There have been lots of stories from Atlanta, from Minneapolis, from Seattle, about small-business owners, often non-white small-business owners, who are very unhappy with the things that have gone on, and I’m not sure that taking things from them makes any sort of point.

People know who they’re attacking in their neighborhoods. A lot of the people who are rioting or looting in a neighborhood have worked for those small businesses. They have shopped in those small businesses. They have been followed around by security in those small businesses. Personally, I’ve had a tremendous number of service jobs, and I’ve never been treated worse than I was at two family-owned businesses that I’ve worked with.

It seems like we’re slipping up on whether these businesses are perfect, which I’m sure they’re not, and whether it’s O.K. to take their property, which would seem like different things, right?

I guess what I’m saying is that small businesses also oppress the community in a similar way that large businesses do, often more directly. That form of oppression is real, and then when people riot and loot, they’re striking back against that form of oppression.

Read it all. I want to make clear that Chotiner’s interview was critical, in the way you expect a journalist to be. What slightly unnerves me, though, is the fact that these prestige liberal journalism outlets are treating the question of whether or not looting is defensible as an appropriate subject for discussion and debate. That seems to me to move the Overton window in a way that is really bad.

Here’s an interview with Osterweil at The Nation. Excerpts:

SK: One of the main goals of your book, one of many, is to show that looting is a conscious political choice, whether looters are radicals or reactionaries. Why is the looter such an important political figure to reclaim?

VO: They are conscious political actors. And I think they are important because the figure of the looter has emerged somewhat spontaneously through the last, well, we can say 50 years of struggle. I trace the looter back to the Civil War and Reconstruction, and I frame the slave revolts and the general strike of the enslaved as W.E.B. Du Bois does. There’s a Sylvia Wynter quote in the introduction, where she says, and I’m paraphrasing, “It’s necessary that we think through things with these classes of people that are rising up against and resisting the system as it exists.”

That’s what inspires this work: people moving to get free or, indeed, just moving politically in the street—they know what they’re doing. So rather than starting from a theory of what revolutions should look like, and then trying to fit movements into that, post facto, I think it’s very important that we look at the way that people are moving now and did in the past and take it seriously.

A big part of the book is my indebtedness to the rebels in Ferguson, who made this all visible and possible for me. These were thoughts that were already percolating around the UK riots in 2011, but the way in which the rebels in Ferguson combined a certain form of holding space, attacking the things that oppressed them, and of looting and then sharing the goods in order to flourish and to have fun as well, was the basis for all my understanding.

More (nota bene, Osterweil is a male-to-female transgender):

SK: You describe looting as as “femme” and “reproductive,” and throughout the book you highlight women and queer people’s participation in looting and political organization. Why was it important to you to decenter the image of the angry male mob?

VO: The main reason is that it’s true. Riots are largely carnival spaces where people find it easier to reproduce their lives and where people care for one another and are having fun and are expressing grief and rage and exhaustion and all of these feelings. Femme versus masc is hardly a great way to think about the world, but things like social reproduction and emotion are coded as feminine even though they are the way that this struggle happens—through rioting and through looting. A common slander of militant activity in general is that it’s macho, that it’s “bro-y,” that it’s patriarchal. For me, that is a really damaging myth because there’s no way queers and women, and certainly not black queer women and black trans women, are going to get free without being able to have all of these tactics available to them. So it’s both practically slanderous and incorrect, but it’s also untrue.

Read it all. Unlike the New Yorker interview, this one is a puffball one, sympathetic to Osterweil. The Nation, of course, is more to the left than the New Yorker.

The Atlantic is a center-left magazine like the New Yorker. It published this week a powerful pushback against that toxic book. The author of this essay is Graeme Wood. Excerpts:

Osterweil’s argument is simple. The “so-called” United States was founded in “cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist” violence. That violence produced our current system, particularly its property relations, and looting is a remedy for that sickness. “Looting rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property, the moral injunction to work for a living, and the ‘justice’ of law and order,” she writes. Ownership of things—not just people—is “innately, structurally white supremacist.”

The rest of the remedy is more violence, which she celebrates as an underrated engine for social justice. The destruction of businesses is an “experience of pleasure, joy, and freedom,” Osterweil writes. It is also a form of “queer birth.” “Riots are violent, extreme, and femme as fuck,” according to Osterweil. “They rip, tear, burn, and destroy to give birth to a new world.” She reserves her most pungent criticism for advocates of nonviolence, a “bankrupt concept” primarily valuable for enlisting “northern liberals.” Liberal is pejorative in this book. Martin Luther King Jr. is grudgingly acknowledged as a positive figure, but not as positive a figure as he would have been if he had kicked some white-capitalist ass and put a few pigs in the ICU. The “I Have a Dream” speech was, Osterweil writes, “the product of a series of sellouts and silencings, of nonviolent leaders dampening the militancy of the grass roots” and “sapping the movement’s energy.” More to her taste is Robert F. Williams, who practiced armed resistance, and Assata Shakur, who murdered a New Jersey police officer and remains a fugitive in Cuba. The violence needn’t be in self-defense—Shakur’s certainly was not. Osterweil quotes the “wisdom” of Stokely Carmichael: “Responsibility for the use of violence by black men, whether in self-defense or initiated by them [emphasis mine], lies with the white community.”

By now you have guessed that I am not the audience for this book. I have a job, and am therefore invested in building a system where you get paid for your work and pay others for theirs, and then everyone pays taxes to make sure that if these arrangements don’t work out, you can still have a dignified life. (Easily my favorite line in the book was written not by the author but by her publisher, right under the copyright notice: “The scanning, uploading, and distribution of this book without permission is a theft of the author’s intellectual property,” it says. “Thank you for your support of the author’s rights.”) My job sometimes entails traveling to countries recently or currently destroyed by civil unrest, and that experience has made me appreciate the fragility of peace, and has not made me eager to conduct a similar experiment in my own city.

I am also from recent-immigrant stock. Osterweil euphemizes looting as “proletarian shopping,” and no one from a place that has recently experienced this phenomenon can take seriously her assurance that it can happen justly and bloodlessly. When I think of riots and smashed storefronts, I think of Kristallnacht. I think of American businesses built by penniless immigrants who preferred to forfeit their vacations and weekends for 30 years rather than see their children suffer as they did; I think of these businesses ransacked in 30 minutes and left in ruins. Osterweil at least has the psychology right when she says that looting can be “joyous and liberatory.” I have never seen a sullen looter, but I have seen plenty of shop owners crying next to the smoking remains of their children’s future.

More:

Her conviction that her opponents deserve violence would be easier to abide if it were not obvious that nearly everyone counts as an opponent. Up against the wall are members of the media; “liberal commentators, de-escalators, nonprofiteers, right-wing trolls, vigilantes, and, of course, the police”; clergy who physically intercede between cops and protesters; and Nation of Islam members whose crime was to “broker a peace between gang leaders” and “chase looters” from neighborhood stores. You are not safe, at least not forever, even if you yourself are a victim of racism or capitalism. Perhaps you think that Dr. King’s speeches were more inspiring because he did not deliver them with a rifle in his hand, like Saddam Hussein. People like you are not part of the real civil-rights movement. “They must allow the real movement to change them,” Osterweil writes, “or they can only live to see themselves become its enemy.”

Read it all. 

Wood goes on to say that NPR’s Code Switch — its super-woke desk covering race — actually did us all a favor by querying Osterweil on the subject. Why? Wood says that Osterweil “has taken up a position that others espouse implicitly. A full exploration of that position is exactly what we need, and Code Switch found its best defender.” Wood says that if this was 1933, then NPR would need to interview Nazis to find out what they believed. In that sense, it is reasonable for them to have interviewed Osterweil, as horrible as her views are.

That’s a defensible position — and one to which I am generally sympathetic. The Chotiner interview is far better, though, because he actually challenges Osterweil. Despite my deep unease about moving the Overton window towards the morality of looting, it is probably for the best that we know that this is how some on the left are thinking. If whether or not looting is morally correct is considered a legitimate topic of discussion and debate among normie liberal journalists, well, this is very important information for conservatives, and decent liberals, to know. You might even call it an ideological broken windows moment .

The post The Looting Left appeared first on The American Conservative.

Liberal Granny’s Dark Secret

Politico writes about polling results showing the Black Lives Matter movement losing support — and blames it on Trump’s attacks. Excerpt:

“This is the direct effect of the strategy of Donald Trump and Fox News,” said veteran Democratic pollster Cornell Belcher. “The movement to a certain extent, over the last month or so, had been losing ground in controlling the narrative.”

The protests were “resoundingly successful” in creating an “inflection point” around racism, Belcher said. But the drop in favorability, he continued, comes as Trump increasingly describes the protests as “violence” and “anarchy,” rather than about police brutality and racial injustice.

Yes, this is surely the fault of Trump, and does not reflect the public’s judgment based on the evidence of their own eyes. Right? Right?

That same article reports that the polling shows that the drop of BLM’s favorability does not correspond with a rise in Trump’s poll numbers. People still trust Biden more on racial issues. But they also are negative on BLM. Maybe — roll with me here a second — people can dislike Trump, but at the same time dislike BLM.

Here’s an example. A reader writes (obviously I’m not posting his name) wrote to me last night:

I’m a longtime reader and fan. I’ve been reading your recent posts regarding BLM and the protests with some amount of disagreement. I think you are giving the police in the Jacob Blake case too much of the benefit of the doubt and I could say the same regarding Kyle Rittenhouse.

However, that’s not the topic of my letter.  I think you are tapping into a real and growing stream of discontent that is being perpetuated by these protests becoming violent and I don’t see any other journalists willing to discuss that discontent. Let me relate this anecdote to you, please do not use my name if you print this. I’ll try to avoid identifying information.

Recently and not wholly by choice I’ve been changing careers and along with that planning to relocate my wife and 2 young daughters for better access to opportunities. Recently I had a phone conversation with my mother discussing the topic of our relocation and if we had chosen a city yet.

Rod, my mother is an Episcopalian feminist who has told me many times of her belief that “All political problems are caused by extremists”. I know my mother has black friends and co-workers and I have never heard my mother utter anything remotely racist in her life, until this conversation.

She told me I needed to get my kids “somewhere away from all the black people”, these were her exact words. I was floored. I pushed back on this and she told me that I needed to put the needs of my children over any income considerations, “because it’s not safe to live anywhere near blacks”.

I was stunned by this, I have never heard my mother say ANYTHING remotely like this before. My mother lives in a small midwestern city like Kenosha and what happened there really affected her. I think these Black Lives Matter protests have actually backfired and turned my mother racist and I am simply at a loss for how to handle it.

I sense a similar hardening of attitudes in some of my other white friends. People who I thought of as mainstream GOP conservative but non-racist openly roll their eyes and quickly lose patience with the idea that any of the protests are justified in any way.

From where I’m standing, it’s hard to argue that Black Lives Matters isn’t just creating MORE racism. I’m very worried about the future of our country if this continues.

The If It Happened In Kenosha, Then It Could Happen Here Too people are going to be interesting to watch. It is incredibly depressing to contemplate that all the racial progress made in this country since the 1960s could be falling apart right in front of our eyes. Our cultural elites — like, for example, our media — need to think long and hard about what they’re doing.

This reader’s letter depresses the hell out of me, for reasons that may not immediately be clear. How can anybody of good will not be depressed by it? I was born in 1967, and raised in a culture that believed in Dr. King’s vision. However imperfectly we realized it, most of us agreed that we ought to be moving as a nation away from racial prejudice and hatred, and toward reconciliation and brotherhood. We were taught to take King’s magnificent words from his “I Have A Dream” speech as gospel:

And so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.”

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia, the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today!

I have a dream that one day, down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of “interposition” and “nullification” — one day right there in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today!

How far away that seems now. What a difference violent protest — as opposed to non-violent protest — makes.  And what a difference the abandonment by liberalism of King’s liberal vision — of a nation where people are judged not by the color of their skin but by the content of their character — makes in the attitudes of whites, who are now told by the left that their skin color convicts them of evil (“privilege,” and so forth).

The black political scientist Omar Wasow wrote earlier this year that his research on the 1960s found that non-violent civil rights protests benefited Democrats, but violent ones helped Republicans. This should be intuitively obvious: when people fear that protests could cause their businesses to be looted and their neighborhoods to burn down, naturally they are going to flip.

When Democratic data guru David Shor tweeted out a link to Wasow’s study during the George Floyd riots, he was dogpiled by progressives on Twitter as “racist” for doing so. The simple act of pointing out hey, this is probably going to hurt our side was a bigoted act, in the eyes of many of Shor’s Democratic colleagues. The left seems to have created a resilient information bubble in which it is impossible for those partisans to see how alarming the things they believe are to those outside the bubble. Only within the left-wing media bubble could NPR have aired a long interview with a radical author who has written a book defending rioting and looting.

So, the reader who sent a letter about how his Episcopalian feminist mom who has never uttered a racist word in his hearing — he’s picking up on something real, I believe. It’s not something the media want to talk about, because it violates their own taboos. It’s something that should alarm all of us who want to see a more racially harmonious, racially just America. The man who wrote me that signed his name to the letter, but I wouldn’t blame him at all for not wanting it publicized. Would you? His mother said something to him that I doubt she’s saying to anybody else — but to her, the safety of her grandchildren is at stake. She is making a racial — indeed, arguably racist — judgment, one that is clearly driven by fear. Because if it could happen in Kenosha… .

What do we do with this? Maybe it will re-elect Donald Trump, or maybe not. If Joe Biden is elected, though, don’t think for a minute that the fears raised within people like that Episcopalian feminist will go away. This is going to be a political reality for a long time. Note well: the fact that the media and professional gatekeepers have so effectively silenced any discussion having to do with race that doesn’t parrot the official line doesn’t make these conversations go away. It just drives them further underground.

I have mentioned in this space once going to a casual social event in my rural South hometown — this, about 15 years ago — in which a white plant worker spoke in a weird way about conflict with “Democrats” in his workplace. I couldn’t figure out what he was talking about. Later, after he left, someone there told me that that was his code word for black people. When that working-class man, who only knew me as a stranger from the city (at the time, Dallas), assumed I was a liberal, and immediately switched to code so I wouldn’t know what he was talking about. This startled me — and it startled me that all the other whites present understood what he meant. I was an unsafe person for them to speak about race around — and in truth, I really was, if by “unsafe” they meant “someone who will object if we say something racist.” Even though I was known to most people there as a conservative writer, after that encounter, I figured that it was probably the case that nobody there would talk about race to me in an honest way, if it ever came up — because I was the media, and they figured (again, correctly) that I hold more liberal views on race than many white Southerners.

I think about people like that when I see the polls showing that Trump is still way behind, despite the riots. Maybe he’s genuinely behind. Or maybe there are a lot of people who will not tell the truth to pollsters, in the same way that that working-class white man at the gathering (and, in my reckoning, many of the other whites there) would not be open to me, even though most of them knew me. Maybe they are people like the reader’s mother, who in normal times would never say such things, and might not even allow herself to think them, but in a condition of fear, lets go.

It is a deeply discomfiting thing to discuss. But I believe that non-black people like the frightened liberal grandmother are going to be an underestimated factor in this fall election, and beyond. In the old America, the establishment, at least, believed in old-fashioned liberal values that opened the door to reconciliation and living together in peace. That American vision — that morally beautiful, unifying vision — seems to have gone up in smoke. It’s all now about race and identity, isn’t it?

The post Liberal Granny’s Dark Secret appeared first on The American Conservative.

Hating America In The Heartland

Look at this:

Statues of Thomas Jefferson and Benjamin Franklin have been removed from the Washburn University campus after protests against racial injustice elsewhere led to statues honoring slaveholders being vandalized, pulled down or moved, the school said Thursday.

The two bronze statues that had stood outside the university’s law school in Topeka for two decades were removed in July after Washburn President Jerry Farley discussed the concerns with the family of the donor, who has since died, school spokesman Patrick Early said.

In Topeka. Topeka! Not New Haven, not Cambridge, not Ithaca or Palo Alto. Topeka. 

This is an important insight:

I’m not sure what can be done here. It’s overwhelmingly clear that a critical mass of the cultural elite, with institutional power, wants to do this. Even if most Americans do not. @SWGoldman https://t.co/XxA6NWyhuY

— Avi Woolf, Wilderness Conservative

The ‘No Friends To The Right’ Principle

I’m reading Martin Malia’s great history of socialism in the Soviet Union, and learned from it that the “no enemies to the Left” principle we commonly observe among liberals actually goes back to the 19th century. Something happened today to my friend Patrick Deneen that is awful, but worth talking about because it is exemplary of a tactic the left uses all the time, something that poisons debate. It might be thought of as an example of the “no friends to the right” principle.

The other day I posted the following excerpt from a 2018 debate about political correctness. Watch the exchange (I’ve cued it to that point) between Jordan Peterson and Michael Eric Dyson. Peterson asks Dyson, who is on the left, at what point would someone on the left have gone too far — that is, what is the line between acceptable left-wing thought and behavior, and unacceptable. All Dyson does is puff and blow and accuse Peterson of exercising white privilege just because he asked the question:

What happened with Deneen today is not that bad, but it’s a variation of it. I’m writing about it not only because Deneen is my friend, and he has been unfairly maligned, but also because this kind of thing is going to happen to a lot of right-of-center people in the days, months, and years to come. It must be called out and challenged wherever we see it.

I’m going to allow Deneen and his interlocutor Yascha Mounk — both politics professors — explain what happened:

Doing a debate with Patrick Deneen for a French magazine.

A few minutes in, he starts warning about the dangerous influence of “cosmopolitan elites.” His first example? @BillKristol.

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) September 2, 2020

To be clear, I do *not* mean to say that Deneen is an anti-Semite. I’m sure he’s not.

But I do think it’s interesting how unconcerned the main critics of liberalism are about anti-Semitic language, and how willing they are to defend actual anti-Semites like Viktor Orban.

— Yascha Mounk (@Yascha_Mounk) September 2, 2020

More:

 

And:

Fortunately, Patrick has a lot of people who know him, respect him, and who know that accusing him, even remotely, of anti-Semitism is a smear. Some of these defenders are Jews:

Yascha, if you’re going to use every tweet to smear and delegitimize conservatives, why not just say openly that you aren’t willing to participate in a two-party democratic system.

You go ahead and guess who will be left in charge once all the conservatives are gone. https://t.co/DYZu2CqSeV

— Yoram Hazony (@yhazony) September 2, 2020

Absurd “Trope Antisemitism”—hypersensitivity to microagressions that enable innocent people to be calumnied based on their politics—comes at the cost of minimizing actual threats to Jews and their lives. Jews are safe in Orban’s Hungary, but @PatrickDeneen is bad bc “trope.” https://t.co/NpbjGnc71Z

— David Reaboi (@davereaboi) September 2, 2020

Some prominent conservatives are rightly offended — and shocked because Yascha Mounk has a reputation as a thoughtful liberal:

This is really very very poor Yascha, it’s a quite deliberate smear against @PatrickDeneen I thought you were against this type of behaviour – why do it? Your acting exactly like those who you purport to oppose – very depressing https://t.co/YfPvDDuPZr

— Phillip Blond (@Phillip_Blond) September 2, 2020

Unless we have a serious reason to regard our interlocutors as actual bigots, we should refrain from making those accusations, which, in this environment, can be career-killers. I believe that there are real anti-Christian bigots in the world. I do not believe that most people who criticize Christians for this or that reason are motivated by bigotry, and do my best not to assume that they are unless I’m given a good reason to think so. Granted, accusing someone of anti-Christian bigotry will not hurt their career in our culture, but still, it’s important to give people the benefit of the doubt — especially if we are going to have a culture of open discussion and debate.

The fact is, Bill Kristol is a cosmopolitan elite. And so are all the Gentiles who are part of his class. Patrick Deneen, as a Georgetown professor, was too — in fact, moving to Notre Dame and being an outspoken conservative and believing Catholic is in some sense his being a traitor to his class. Me, I left the East Coast for the Bozart too, and though I don’t live in a cosmopolis, the cosmopolis sure does live in me — for better and for worse. My closest friends are all cosmopolitan elites of the left and the right. I don’t think it’s necessarily a slur, though Stalin certainly made it one (the Soviets infamously derided Jews as “rootless cosmopolitans”).

It must be possible for political scientists (especially theorists like Mounk and Deneen), journalists, and others to discuss the easily observable phenomenon of a global class of people — by no means limited to Jews — whose interests, convictions, and priorities are generally opposed to those of populists. The anti-Brexit people in Britain — Jew and Gentile, black and white — were mostly cosmopolitans. Some pro-Brexit intellectuals — Philip Blond, Tim Montgomerie, Boris Johnson — are also cosmopolitans, though their loyalties run more towards nationalism than to internationalism. One thing that makes figures like Deneen such good analysts of the globalist cosmopolitan mentality is because they themselves are, or have been, embedded in it, and are well aware of the privileges that its avatars exercise — privileges of which they are scarcely aware.

The fact that there are anti-Semites (alas) in this world should not make it impossible to discuss these political and sociological facts, though obviously we should do it with great care. What is galling about this Mounk smear is that he knows, or ought to know, that a professor of Deneen’s distinction is extremely unlikely to be an anti-Semite, and if he were, he would have the professional good sense to keep quiet about it.

Now, though, because a distinguished academic like Mounk leveled the charge, Deneen will have to deal with it. “Patrick Deneen — aren’t you that anti-Semitic guy?” If Deneen had even the slightest idea that Mounk would have hit him with that, I’m sure he never would have agreed to the debate. I wouldn’t have.

This is why there is a rising feeling among right-of-center intellectuals to avoid debating and discussions with the left. There is a dramatic falling off of trust on our side. We have seen it happen too many times. Just this week, Ben Smith of the Times published a profile of Andrew Sullivan that brought up Sullivan’s key role in publishing essays on The Bell Curve — as if that editorial decision 25 years ago (a defensible one, I should say!) is the shadow that darkens Sullivan’s reputation. Had Sullivan known that Smith came in with that stiletto in his backpack, he never would have opened the door, I bet.

Should we talk to journalists? Should we talk to liberal and progressive academics? Or will doing so simply open us up to being smeared as bigots?

Yascha Mounk, a political scientist at Johns Hopkins, is the founder of Persuasion, a web-based community based on defending liberal ideals of free expression. He explained it like this. Excerpt:

To safeguard the great cultural and political progress of the past half century, those of us who believe in the values of a free society need to rise to the fight of a lifetime.

At the very moment when it would be most important for those who oppose an emboldened far-right to speak with confidence and conviction, these same values are losing their luster among significant parts of the left. Companies and cultural institutions fire innocent people for imaginary offenses; prominent voices alternate between defending cancel culture and denying its existence; and an astonishing number of academics and journalists proudly proclaim that it is time to abandon values like due process and free speech.

It would be easy, and not altogether wrong, to point the finger of blame for the erosion of democracy at its sworn enemies. But the truth is that part of the reason why these values are vulnerable is that so many of their defenders have themselves fallen short.

Too often, those of us who are committed to a free society lack convincing answers to pressing political questions, including the persistent disparities of race and class. Too often, those of us who seek to defend democracy against its enemies are deeply enmeshed in an establishment that gives people good reason to rebel against it. And too often, those of us who seek to mount a case for philosophically liberal values do so in an overly apologetic or unimaginative way.

And so Mounk, because his conservative academic interlocutor, used the word “cosmopolitan” to describe a prominent neoconservative Jewish intellectual, denounces that conservative interlocutor to his 103,000 Twitter followers in these two posts (which I’ll repeat here, because they’re so damned disingenuous):

“I don’t think Deneen is an anti-Semite, but he sure does sound like one.” Good grief.

There is almost nothing controversial that any of us conservatives could talk about today that wouldn’t open us up to the same chickensh*t criticism. I don’t think ___ hates black people, but by criticizing Black Lives Matter, she sure sounds like a racist. … I don’t think ___ hates gays, but when he defends ‘religious liberty,’ it sounds like dog whistling for homophobia.  Et cetera.

I despise anti-Semitism, and police my blog’s comments to keep it out. It’s a tough call, because I don’t believe that mere criticism of Israel (I country I support) is anti-Semitic. I also don’t believe that criticizing Jewish political figures is necessarily anti-Semitic. In Hungary, for example, the fact that George Soros is Jewish should not immunize him from criticism about the way he, as an extremely rich globalist, tries to influence the country’s political culture. There are commenters here who walk right up to the line, and I usually spike their comments. Same with any kind of bigotry, though I do try to err on the side of allowing a greater range of expression.

Still, when you live in a culture — especially a professional culture, like academia — where the mere accusation of bigotry can cause tremendous harm, what reason do you have, as a conservative, to expose yourself to it by conversation with a liberal? I only do interviews with the mainstream media in writing now — and I have privately decided just not to talk to reporters with certain publications, because I don’t believe I can get a fair shake from them. This is going to be more common, and it’s going to be bad for us all, but people like Yascha Mounk are making it happen by not discerning between the enemies of decency, and people who simply disagree with them from the Right.

The post The ‘No Friends To The Right’ Principle appeared first on The American Conservative.

Wick Allison, To Whom I Owe Much

This year, 2020, keeps getting crappier. This morning we’ve learned that Wick Allison died, of cancer. From the obit by Tim Rogers, who runs Wick’s beloved D Magazine:

All of us, if we are fortunate, meet one or two angelic people in our entire lives whose serenity and calm circumspection not only inspire reverence but gently usher us toward a lifelong journey in search of our best selves. Wick Allison was not one of those people.

No, if there was a journey to be undertaken, Wick got it started with a kick in the ass and head-back cackle laugh that until recently echoed through the office of D Magazine. He was a mercurial genius. He was a bully. He was loud. He knew the answer before you did. He made things happen through a force of will that generated its own gravity and drew people to him. He could make you feel great about yourself or sick to your stomach, sometimes on the same day. He created things — publications, careers, political movements — with a fearless abandon that drove those in his orbit dizzy. Wick was something to behold.

Truer words have never been written about any man. It is hard to imagine the world without Wick in it. It is hard to imagine Dallas, or Texas, absent Wick. If you’re lucky, on the journey through life you meet two or three characters that remind you of what it means to live. Sometimes they’re saints. Sometimes they are bold sinners who really do try to be saints. Wick was the latter — that is a compliment from me — and if he is in heaven today, it might well be because the Lord looked at him and realized that it is impossible not to love the devilish Wick Allison, and that the party would be far less fun without him.

I first met Wick when I was living in New York City, writing for National Review, and had come down to Dallas with my wife to visit her family. We had lunch at Al Biernat’s, his magazine’s watering hole, and after it, I thought: so this is Texas. A bolder, brasher, more self-assured rascal I had never met. I loved him from the start. We got to be friends when I later moved to Dallas to write for The Dallas Morning News. 

I liked Wick from the beginning, but I grew to admire him for the tough stance he took in public against the Catholic diocese of Dallas, which was eaten up with scandal. Wick was a Catholic convert, and he loved the Church. But he could not stand its corruption; Dallas had become a national epicenter of coverup and abuse, and Wick would not have it. As a prominent local Catholic, Wick’s ardent and uncompromising voice for the children made a difference. The then Bishop, Charles Grahmann, tried to push him around. That was a mistake. It was always a mistake to try to push Wick around. Because he was so damn funny, it was not always easy to see how tough he was.

Wick was a Dallas rich guy, a public figure who believed in his responsibility to the public good. He worked incessantly on making Dallas a more humane place to live (he was a big fan of Jane Jacobs, who was the most un-Dallas person you can imagine). There was a private side of Wick that people didn’t see. Someone in a position to know told me once that nobody knows about the work he does with the poor in the Church. He doesn’t advertise it, because it would be un-Christian to do so. I can’t remember when I was told this, and maybe I shouldn’t bring it up, but I recall being so struck by it at the time. It seemed somehow off-brand — but, as I came to see, it really wasn’t. It surprises me not one bit that his family has asked for donations in his memory to the St. Vincent de Paul Society at Holy Trinity church, Wick’s parish.

If that had been the end of my story with Wick, I wouldn’t be writing this — and you wouldn’t be reading it, and maybe nothing else on The American Conservative site. Wick saved this magazine. I will let my colleagues who have a more intimate understanding of how he did it, but here’s how I was involved.

In the spring of 2011, I was working in Philadelphia at the Templeton Foundation, in a job that was winding down. I wanted badly to go back into journalism. Wick contacted me to share with me his plan to shore up The American Conservative, which had been in dire financial straits. Would I be interested in coming to work for it?

Absolutely! I would.

And that’s how it happened. Wick agreed to let me work remotely from Philadelphia for a while, and then when my sister in Louisiana died of cancer, he agreed to let me work remotely from the bayou, for good. It was unusual at the time, and he could have said, “We really need you in DC to do TV and other media shots to promote the magazine,” but he didn’t. He knew that my family needed me, and there wasn’t anything else to say about it. That’s how he was.

And so, I was able to build a life and career for myself at this magazine because of the generosity of this man, Wick Allison. There is an American Conservative today in large part because of the efforts of Wick Allison to shore it up. Anything I’ve been able to do in my book-writing career has been in part because Wick Allison gave me a chance at this magazine.

I write this with tears in my eyes — tears of gratitude, and tears at the thought of the neon light that has gone out in this world. God, he was one of a kind.

UPDATE: This is so, so good — excerpts of a Wick deposition in a libel case that Wick’s magazine won. This is who he was:

Q. Okay. What administration did you work in the White House in?

A. President Richard Nixon.

Q. What was your position in the Nixon administration?

A. Flunky.

Q. Flunky? Is that something like step and fetch it?

A. I prefer flunky.

Q. Okay. Who did you report to in the Nixon administration as flunky; i.e., who was the flunky supervisor?

A. Matthew Bald, who is now a retired federal judge.

Q. What years did you work in the Nixon administration?

A. 1970, ’71.

Q. Now, did the flunky job description include going through, oh, other campaigns’ files with flashlights or anything like that?

A. No.

Q. Okay. So you weren’t in any way supervised by Mr. Liddy or any of his folks, right?

A. No.

Q. Okay.

A. Is that meant as some sort of slight against the Nixon administration?

Q. No.

A. Is that a political statement in a deposition?

Q. Were you offended by it?

A. Yes. Thank you. I’m taking a break.

Read it all. It gets better, and funnier.

The post Wick Allison, To Whom I Owe Much appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Antiracism’ Destroying A Family

This is both sad and infuriating. It’s from an anonymous academic who posted it on Twitter as @publicola17:

A few things.

I think the fact that this black woman graduated from Ivy League schools has a lot to do with this. There may be a lot of class insecurity in her — guilt that as an Ivy graduate, she is one of the most fortunate people on the planet, and according to her husband, has lived “a life of untroubled privilege” — and she is displacing it by adopting this phony racialist identity.
It says something bizarre and twisted about our time and place that a person like this feels whole not through the incredible story of black endurance and achievement in America, but by adopting an identity of persecution and irredeemable suffering.
I know someone (a white person) who grew up poor, and who, as an adult, cannot accept the fact that she is accomplished and well-liked. Most people who know her have no idea about her childhood, but she is convinced that everybody secretly thinks she doesn’t belong, and are judging her. This is the furthest thing from the truth, but when I lived around her, this feeling of self-hatred and anxiety consumed her. All her stories eventually led back to her own victimization, and she perseverated on stories of other people’s victimization, because those tales told her How The World Really Is. Being in her social circle taught me that there are some people who don’t really want to be healed. Nothing anybody could do for her could change the narrative she carried with her — a narrative of rejection and persecution. The trauma-narrative was the only authentic self-narrative available to her. It was really impossible to have a serious conversation with her about any of this, because if her friends challenged the narrative in any way, she would accuse us of denying or at least downplaying her suffering. I wonder if something like that is going on here.
This is a particularly vicious — and, now, valorized — example of “inheriting the wound,” but there are other ones. It’s a very human trait: defining yourself by some grievance suffered by ancestors. It’s about knowing who you are by who your people hate. Most of the time I can’t stand the way we Americans are so ahistorical, but there are also times when it is a blessing. Imagine the American children of a Belfast-born Catholic immigrant and a Belfast-born Protestant immigrant, getting to know each other without carrying the weight of their ancestors’ past. Isn’t that in some sense the kind of society we want? One in which people are judged not by the color of their skin, or their ethnic heritage, or anything other than the content of their character?
Actually, it’s not at all what identity-politics leftists want. They want to bring the pathology that is tearing this man Publicola’s family up to all of society. This is what Marxist theory does: compel one to judge everyone else solely in terms of external identity characteristics, and how it relates to power differentials. These leftists promise nothing but constant conflict and division. There is no way ever to reach a livable state of justice; it is always relentless calling out of others for their supposed bigotries.
Can you imagine how cruel it is to fill these children of hers with fear and hatred? Does it make her feel alive? Think of all the people who came before her who suffered and fought so that she and her children could live in a world in which they would not have to carry that burden. And now she’s taking it on herself, and forcing it onto her kids. If this continues, and they believe their mother, she’s going to teach them to sabotage themselves.
And to hate their father for the color of his skin.
There’s a great French phrase — nostalgie de la boue — which means, literally, “nostalgia for the mud.” It’s a phrase to describe the desire for degradation and depravity. What this man’s wife is undergoing now is a form of this, I think. You might call it nostalgie de la plaie (nostalgia for the wound), but the boue is probably more psychologically truthful. This poor woman never knew the degradation of Jim Crow — but is now seized with the desire for it, so much so that she is wrecking her family over it.
This is what the identity-politics left is going to bring to all of society: ruin, hatred, endless suspicion. We all want, or should want, to live in peace. If there has been injustice, then it must be rectified, insofar as it can be, so that we can live in peace. But perfect justice is not possible in this life. Nevertheless, we must find a way to love each other, and bear each other’s sins and failings, or commit ourselves to forever war. “You must love your crooked neighbour/With your crooked heart,” wrote the poet W.H. Auden. Identity-politics leftism is about blaming the Other for the deformations in your own heart, and refusing to be healed because you are afraid of who you would be if you were well.
One of the strangest stories in the Gospel is when Jesus frees a demoniac by casting the evil spirits out of him, and sending them into a herd of swine (Mark 5). Mark writes: “When they came to Jesus, they saw the man who had been possessed by the legion of demons, sitting there, dressed and in his right mind; and they were afraid. Those who had seen it told the people what had happened to the demon-possessed man—and told about the pigs as well.  Then the people began to plead with Jesus to leave their region.” You see what happened? This man, Jesus, had just freed a poor soul who had been living chained up in the graveyard, tormented constantly by demons. And when the people of that village saw the miracle Jesus had worked — this suffering man, restored to himself — they were afraid, and told Jesus to get out of town! 
Why are we so afraid to live in peace with our neighbor? Why are we so fearful of being made whole? Why does hate make us feel more vital than love? Why is this man’s wife choosing to leave her family and chain herself in the graveyard, where “night and day among the tombs and in the hills she will cry out and cut herself with stones”? I mean, it is one thing if you were raised in great suffering, and cannot escape its psychic wounds, absent grace. But to choose to take that pointless suffering on — a suffering that does not lead to greater good, only suffering for its own masochistic sake? Is this not like that bizarre woman who put drain cleaner in her eyes to make herself blind, or one of those people with body dysmorphic disorder who say they will not be okay until they have a body part chopped off?

 

The post ‘Antiracism’ Destroying A Family appeared first on The American Conservative.

Suicide Of The Loony Left

The city of government of Washington DC is oh so woke:

via Spencer Brown, who comments:

Mayor Bowser & her working group recommend DC “remove, relocate, or contextualize” the Washington Monument & Jefferson Memorial in order to better reflect DC’s “values.”

Meanwhile, murders are up 15% and shootings are up 45% YOY.

What a joke, except it’s not funny anymore. pic.twitter.com/Z2kBlWnQyn

— Spencer Brown (@itsSpencerBrown) September 1, 2020

The Washington Post reports the details here.

I know that many liberals hate it when us reactionary troglodytes point this out, but this is exactly what you get when you let the loony left run things. Seriously, folks, this is a panel appointed by the Democratic black mayor of the District of Columbia recommending that the federal government move the Washington Monument and the Jefferson Memorial (among others) out of the city!

Remember three years ago, when some on the Right — including, if memory serves, Donald Trump — said that if we start taking down Confederate statues, it won’t stop there. That it would very quickly move to the Founding Fathers. Liberals said that was groundless fear-mongering. And here we are.

Of course this is not going to happen; Congress administers these things, not the DC city government. But you watch: Joe Biden will not denounce this. I am sure it appalls him, but he will not be able to muster the courage to unambiguously and forcefully denounce this garbage. The woke have too much power in his party. If Biden were looking for a Sister Souljah moment, this is it. If a man who wants to be President of the United States cannot defend — without equivocation — the Washington Monument and Jefferson Memorial from the woke iconoclasts of his own party, he doesn’t deserve to be president.

Americans know that the Democratic Party elite (which includes the media) is in the grip of extremists to whom proposals like this are within the realm of the discussable. They betray themselves all the time. Bret Stephens noted in his Times column today the wacko interview NPR ran the other day with the leftist crackpot who has written a book titled, In Defense Of Looting. Excerpt from Stephens’s piece:

The book makes the case for looting because it “attacks some of the core beliefs and structures of cisheteropatriarchal racial capitalist society”; “rejects the legitimacy of ownership rights and property”; and “reveals all these for what they are: not natural facts, but social constructs benefiting a few at the expense of the many, upheld by ideology, economy and state violence.”

To judge by the NPR interview, “In Defense of Looting” is not an interesting book. It speaks for almost nobody beyond the fringe left — and certainly not for looters who hadn’t thought about “cisheteropatriarchalism.” The fact that the publisher is an imprint of the international conglomerate Hachette (2018 revenues, approximately $2.7 billion) compounds foolishness with hypocrisy.

Nonetheless, the book is symbolically important.

It sure is. NPR is not some outfit of the fringe left. It is, well, National Public Radio. The fact that a major national media outlet felt that it was perfectly normal to give over a lot of radio time to a radical speaking in favor of looting, at a time when the ruins of businesses were smoldering in Kenosha.

Here is a couple whose 40-year-old family furniture business was burned to the ground by Kenosha rioters. Here you go, NPR. You go tell these sobbing, brokenhearted people that what was done to them was right and just, because blows against racism and cisheteropatriarchalism must be struck:

What this family, the Carpenters, need to understand as well is that the Democratic government of the nation’s capital wants those disgusting monuments to George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, and Benjamin Franklin taken out of the city limits. Maybe NPR will tell them so, or The New York Times, which, as we know, has set out to “reframe” American history — its word — by teaching that it is based on white supremacy and slavery. The news hasn’t yet reached the Carpenters, I guess, that they ought to be ashamed of their country and its founders. But it will. The media and the Democratic Party, one way or another, will see to that.

No, I don’t think Joe Biden personally feels this way, and I don’t believe that most grassroots Democrats see it that way either. But I also believe that Biden is a weak old man who does not represent the elites of his party, and does not represent the activist base that’s driving this train. People see, and people hear. Despite its many sins and failings, the Republican Party does not have to suffer its elected leaders of major cities calling for monuments to the Founding Fathers to be taken down. This is a massive symbolic issue, and I think Democrats are insane not to see its power.

I received this letter from a reader who lives in a Midwestern state. He asked me to remove his name and identifying information. I slightly rewrote a bit of it to protect his identity:

Most of the time, I imbibe your words with silent appreciation, but something you said in one of your most recent columns resonated with me such that I felt the need to share my thoughts with you.

First, a bit of context. I am a Caucasian male, and an active member of [church] here in deep-red [state]. I am a registered Republican, but I consider myself more as a classical liberal. Unlike many of your recent warnings of the threat of wokeness in corporate America, I continually count my blessings and thank God that wokeness has not yet infiltrated my company’s HR department (keyword, “yet”). Thus, I currently feel no fear in expressing my dislike for numerous aspects of Trump’s policies and antics at work; though most of my co-workers are pro-Trump, my classical liberalism provides enough coverage for me to be viewed as eccentric, but mostly harmless.

In spite all of that, I have always considered Trump to be an inept buffoon incapable of governing with competence. I voted for Johnson in 2016, and I have watched with increasing dismay the decline of the presidency under Trump. Yet, even with all the Trumpism surrounding me, to remotely consider voting for him in 2020 had been nigh impossible for me.

But, this, from your column today:

In my own little bubble, I have been surprised this past week by how many Republican friends I have who had planned either to sit the presidential election out, out of disgust with Trump, or were thinking about voting Biden — but who have said to me that they’re all in for Trump now. Kenosha was what flipped them. I’m not exactly sure why, but my sense is that there is a sense of, “If it can happen in Kenosha, it can happen here too.”

Mr. Dreher, it is as if you laid me bare before all of your readers!

Back in May, I was steeling myself to vote for Biden, rationalizing that just as the early Christians had to endure the persecutions of Rome for the sake of their witness to Christ, so I as a Christian in America may have to endure a Rome of my own. Surely, this was the price I would have to pay so as not to inflict further damage to my Christian witness?

Then, there was George Floyd and the subsequent protests and increasing tensions. My wife and I have close black relatives, so I have much sympathy for the origins of the Black Lives Matter movement. But, I could see that the original movement was morphing into a woke-fest and spiraling out of control and that Biden was not the solution. I was seriously considering not voting, not even third-party as has been my wont in the past four election cycles. Just washing my hands of it all, a modern-day Pontius Pilate.

Then, Kenosha.

“If it can happen in Kenosha, it can happen [in my town] too.”

It’s not that I have ceased to believe Christians will have to endure our own Rome in America. As you rightly say, soft totalitarianism is coming; indeed, it already has its foot in the door. It’s that I no longer see this election as defense of American Christian virtue as much as it is a defense of America herself. Our country is literally going up in flames, and I will not sacrifice my own community on the altar of wokeness to appease some ethereal sense of personal guilt in casting my vote for Trump.

Besides, legitimate martyrs are not suicidal. I will not feed myself, my family and my fellow Christians to the proverbial lions, which I increasingly believe is what those well-meaning Christians — and even orthodox Jews and Muslims — who vote for Biden will be doing. Biden himself is and will remain toothless; his woke leftist bureaucracy certainly will not be.

So, I have come to the uncomfortable conclusion that I must vote for Trump. I now believe that any other action would likely be a form of societal suicide.

Here is my parting thought to you. I am currently reading through Gregory Wolfe’s biography of Malcolm Muggeridge, originally published in 1995 (I’m reading the 3rd edition, 2003), and just last night I read this as Wolfe attempts to fit Muggeridge’s dogged anti-Communism within his (Muggeridge’s) wider critique of liberalism:

“Liberalism, [Muggeridge] began to think, was driven by a death-wish, a profound alienation from the Western tradition that led its adherents to worship those who would pull that order down. “

I have long been an admirer of Muggeridge as a luminary and prophetic voice in the 20th-century political wilderness, but I doubt seriously that Wolfe could have imagined how this succinct encapsulation would apply to our current societal upheaval 25 years after his words first appeared in print.

And, I wholeheartedly believe that Muggeridge stands tall among the giants of our collective faith who, indeed, would not live by lies, as do you.

Thank you for all you do. Don’t give up. Don’t relent. Not one bit.

It does not sound like this man needs to be convinced about how bad Trump is. He can’t stand Trump — but he fears what the Democrats are going to do to America.

A reader in Los Angeles writes:

By happenstance, this past weekend my wife and I met a couple in our apartment courtyard and ended up having an “interesting” evening with them on our patio over a glass or two of wine — socially distant, of course.

The woman was just falling all over herself to display her progressive credentials to my wife, who is black.  She was a stereotype of the ultra progressive — wealthy, white, Master’s degree, living in the hyper-wealthy beach enclave of Pacific Palisades, home of Whoopi Goldberg and other medium weight celebrities.

She explained in about the space of two minutes that it’s “ridiculous” to imagine that there are just two genders, that organized religion was the bane of human existence, “no human is illegal” or should be subject to immigration restrictions — especially Latinos whose entire reason for wanting to come here is the shambles American foreign policy had created in their lands.  She was a “radical feminist” and thought any resistance to #MeToo tactics — not just its aims — was evidence of misogyny, that wars wouldn’t happen is we had female leaders, blah, blah.

Then she went on to explain how the “peaceful protesters” only targeted the businesses of “big corporations,” and don’t worry, because they are insured and some eggs have to be broken to make a Justice omelet, and so on.  It was almost as if, meeting my wife, she felt she had to perform, to show she was one of the Good Guys.

And yes, she has been a public school teacher for the past 15 years.

Before I could open my mouth, my wife launched into an excoriation of BLM, about how it has ruined its own, once-popular mission to reform police, that it’s a bullying, authoritarian Marxist organization which has simply traded in an obsession with economic class for racial identity.  She explained how BLM’s “peaceful protest” on June 5th in LA (which we attended for the first hour, a model of peaceful, even respectful civic dissent before it went to hell) savaged our neighborhood, and destroyed a beloved cafe which had been a neighborhood anchor for more than a decade. The female owner, who had put so much blood, tears and pride into it, had just hanging on during the Covid until her place was wrecked beyond recognition.  She ended up closing down and moving back to Manila. Justice!

My wife explained that nobody wants to see police reform vis à vis black people more than she does, given that her son, an outstanding veteran, husband, father and citizen, could barely walk home in his own neighborhood as a clean-cut boy, without being sprawled on the sidewalk and frisked by Culver City police for no reason at all.  (His Junior Sheriff’s ride-along ID kept him safe.)

“BLM has set us back three decades, easily,” she stated.  My wife is not the political type, and not inclined to debate, especially idiots.  But this performatively woke, silly woman trying to impress her with her progressive bona fides was simply too much for her.  Mind you, my wife is much further to my left on politics, a lifelong New York Democrat who proudly wore a pick in her ‘fro back in the day.  She’s no right winger and has a visceral loathing of racism in this country.  But she loves it.

Our guest, who had been verbose up until then, mumbled something under her breath about Trump (she knew by then we are vociferously against him) and basically shrunk for the rest of the night.This is just an anecdote, of course.  We’ve been married 25 years, and as much as I love her, her shutting down that nitwit was among the moments I’ve been the proudest of her.

And if BLM has lost my wife, they have lost.  Period.  I just hope that Biden can make the genuine pitch that he’s not going to be pushed around by them, or it’s another four years of Trump.

This L.A. Democrat understands what’s going on. Does Joe Biden?

UPDATE: Well, done, Black Lives Matter. Nothing wins hearts and minds like vandalizing Graceland.

The wall outside @VisitGraceland in #Memphis where #Elvis fans write their names and tributes to The King was vandalized overnite. #BlackLivesMatter #DefundMPD #AbolishIce & #BreonnaTaylor were spray painted all over the wall.

Protecting The Oligarch Jeff Bezos

I hate hate hate the guillotines outside of Jeff Bezos’s home in DC. That is unambiguously evil, and must be condemned without qualification.

But that’s not to say that what Jeff Bezos stands for is unproblematic. Look at this:

Amazon is hiring ‘intelligence analysts’, who should work

on ‘sensitive topics that are highly confidential, including labor organizing threats against the company’ and spy on ‘organized labor, activist groups, hostile political leaders’.

Via @jfslowik / https://t.co/bE2Hf4BV2m pic.twitter.com/rsSop6EzoH

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) September 1, 2020

Amazon’s list of enemies, to be targeted by their corporate intelligence agency:

‘hate groups, policy initiatives, geopolitical issues, terrorism, law enforcement, and organized labor’

…plus ‘activist groups’ and ‘hostile political leaders’. pic.twitter.com/cCyfCGV6UF

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) September 1, 2020

Here’s another Amazon job listing with a similar description:https://t.co/CyguNTUIRW

In both cases, ‘preferred qualifications’ include:

‘Previous experience in Intelligence analysis and or watch officer skill set in the intelligence community, the military, law enforcement…’ pic.twitter.com/EpvcCH4ZIk

— Wolfie Christl (@WolfieChristl) September 1, 2020

So, Amazon’s internal intelligence agency will be monitoring “hate groups” and “hostile political leaders.” If I were Sen. Josh Hawley, I would be careful what I ordered on Amazon Prime. I would be careful, period.

And who, by the way, is a “hate group,” for Amazon’s purposes? Why does a retailer need to keep track of “hate groups”? Which “hate groups”?

Like you, I bet, I do a lot of business with Amazon, which makes my life better in many way. But this chilling bit of information about America’s most beloved corporate behemoth ought to be a reminder of the power of these entities. Whistleblowers like Google’s James Damore have discussed the internal culture of contempt at Google for anything not rigidly progressive. In my post yesterday about the bourgeois totalitarian Design Mom, I quoted the popular influencer saying that she wishes Trump supporters would be cut off from being able to shop in certain stores, and banned from using the Internet. That’s a hysterical wine mom tipsy on Sancerre and rage, but don’t simply dismiss her.

Why not? Consider how your life would change if you woke up tomorrow morning and found that Amazon would no longer sell you things, because its corporate intelligence office discovered your name on a list of contributors to an SPLC-designated “hate group” (like, for example, the completely mainstream and above-board Alliance Defending Freedom, a Christian law non-profit that does pro bono work defending religious liberty). As a “hater,” Amazon doesn’t want your money. It doesn’t want you to have access to its streaming video, its Kindle shop, or any of its services, because it has determined that you are part of a “hate group.” So it cuts you off.

Would that be legal? I don’t know. Remember the Virginia restaurant that refused to serve Trump’s press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders, because its owner hate Trump? That was obnoxious, but within the legal rights of the restaurant. I don’t know how that would work for a national online retailer. Are you going to file a lawsuit against the world’s biggest retailer to fight for your right to do business with it? Most people wouldn’t.

It may not be legal now, but is it really so hard to imagine that under a Biden administration, or some other future administration, there might arise an initiative to “fight hate” by allowing retailers to deny access to goods and services to those who are affiliated with officially designated “hate groups”? And they don’t have to cut you off. Back in 2014, Amazon got into a dispute with the publishing giant Hachette over e-book pricing, and used its power to twist Hachette’s arm in negotiations. 

It didn’t stop selling Hachette books, but it told customers that their order of a Hachette title would take four to six weeks to deliver. I know this because not only was it widely reported, but it also affected me: my book The Little Way of Ruthie Leming is a Hachette book. Writers like Stephen King, Salman Rushdie, and others were furious with Amazon for holding us and our careers hostage to its fight with Hachette. But Amazon didn’t care. It really is that powerful.

So, Mrs. Hatey McHaterface, you might still be able to buy from Amazon, but unfortunately your shipments may take a month to get there. Sorry! Should have thought about that before donating to the Family Research Council, or, as your online activity indicates, reading the Catholic trad website Church Militant (both of whom are officially designated SPLC hate groups).

Amazon already uses SPLC’s designation to prevent its customers from donating through its Amazon Smile program to any group that the SPLC calls a hate group. This strategy is not alien to Amazon.

One of the big messages I want to get through to readers in my upcoming book Live Not By Lies is that the soft totalitarianism I see coming is not exclusively, or even at this point primarily, coming down through the State. It’s going to come through institutions of civil society, and through big business — Woke Capitalism. The idea that totalitarianism is purely a state phenomenon is an outdated relic of the Cold War. It would be if this totalitarianism were to become hard. But the soft version will be able to engineer compliance without having to employ the crude methods of a police state. From Live Not By Lies (which will be published at the end of this month):

Why should corporations and institutions not use the information they harvest to manufacture consent to some beliefs and ideologies and to manipulate the public into rejecting others?

In recent years, the most obvious interventions have come from social media companies deplatforming users for violating terms of service. Twitter and Facebook routinely boot users who violate its standards, such as promoting violence, sharing pornography, and the like. YouTube, which has two billion active users, has demonetized users who made money from their channels but who crossed the line with content YouTube deemed offensive. To be fair to these platform managers, there really are vile people who want to use these networks to advocate for evil things.

But who decides what crosses the line? Facebook bans what it calls “expression that . . . has the potential to intimidate, exclude or silence others.” To call that a capacious definition is an understatement. Twitter boots users who “misgender” or “deadname” transgendered people. Calling Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce,” or using masculine pronouns when referring to the transgendered celebrity, is grounds for removal.

To be sure, being kicked off of social media isn’t like being sent to Siberia. But companies like PayPal have used the guidance of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center to make it impossible for certain right-of-center individuals and organizations—including the mainstream religious-liberty law advocates Alliance Defending Freedom—to use its services. Though the bank issued a general denial when asked, JPMorgan Chase has been credibly accused of closing the accounts of an activist it associates with the alt-right. In 2018, Citigroup and Bank of America announced plans to stop doing some business with gun manufacturers.

It is not at all difficult to imagine that banks, retailers, and service providers that have access to the kind of consumer data extracted by surveillance capitalists would decide to punish individuals affiliated with political, religious, or cultural groups those firms deem to be antisocial. Silicon Valley is well known to be far to the left on social and cultural issues, a veritable mecca of the cult of social justice. Social justice warriors are known for the spiteful disdain they hold for classically liberal values like free speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty. These are the kinds of people who will be making decisions about access to digital life and to commerce.

The rising generation of corporate leaders take pride in their progressive awareness and activism. Twenty-first century capitalism is not only all in for surveillance, it is also very woke.

China is already demonstrating how to do it with its social credit system. And because the overwhelming majority of commerce in China is electronic (China is pushing hard to go cashless), the state can cut any dissident off from participating in the economy with relative ease. Flip of a switch.

In Live Not By Lies, I ask the question: can it happen here?

Of course it can. The technological capability to implement such a system of discipline and control in the West already exists. The only barriers preventing it from being imposed are political resistance by unwilling majorities and constitutional resistance by the judiciary.

American culture is far more individualistic than Chinese culture, so that political resistance will almost certainly prevent Chinese-style hard totalitarianism from gaining a foothold here. But activating the broad reach of technology, especially the data-gathering technology that consumers have already accepted into their daily lives, and making it work to serve social justice goals is eminently feasible.

If democratic majorities come to believe that transferring social control to governmental and private institutional elites is necessary to guarantee virtue and safety, then it will happen.

As of this writing, the global online payments transfer system PayPal refuses to let white supremacist groups use its services. It’s hard to object to that, though First Amendment purists will feel some distress. But PayPal also stigmatizes some mainstream conservative groups. And as we have seen, some major banks now have policies that deny service to firearms manufacturers and sellers—this, even though guns are legal to make and to own under the Second Amendment. Note well that the government did not force these giant financial firms to adopt these policies. What is to stop private entities that control access to money and markets from redlining individuals, churches, and other organizations they deem to be bad social actors from denying access to commerce? China

shows that it can be done, and how to do it.

Y’all know that I’m talking about my book a lot because it will be for sale on September 29, and I hope you’ll pre-order it, but I am also genuinely alarmed by how fast things are going. I finished the final version of the manuscript in March, but already the scenarios that I write about are coming to pass, or getting close to it. Take a look at this posted the other day by a reader who has a review copy:

Yes, it’s true. We are living in Big History now. We cannot afford to be caught off guard. I’m worried that a lot of people will assume that if Trump is re-elected, that the threat from soft totalitarianism will have been averted. Not true. Not true at all. It won’t have an advocate in the executive branch, which is something to be grateful for, but I guarantee that all the woke capitalists, the media, academia, and the professions will double down on fighting “fascism” through wokeness. If you are planning to vote for Trump, don’t think that a Trump victory will solve this problem. In some ways it will slow down the drift toward soft totalitarianism, but in many other ways it will speed it up, as those in charge of corporations and institutions freak out and respond by intensifying their radicalism.

This not a reason to vote for Trump, or not to vote for Trump; it’s just saying that the phenomenon of soft totalitarianism is far, far bigger than the presidency. Again: we can’t afford to be caught unprepared.

 

The post Protecting The Oligarch Jeff Bezos appeared first on The American Conservative.

Biden Whispers The Riot Act, Sort Of

Joe Biden gave a speech addressing the riots and the fear of insecurity many Americans have. I couldn’t find a clip of his entire speech online, only highlights. Politico captured the highlights from the transcript here. 

Biden said:

“I want to be clear about this: Rioting is not protesting. Looting is not protesting. Setting fires is not protesting. None of this is protesting — it’s lawlessness — plain and simple. And those who do it should be prosecuted.”

OK, fair enough. Then:

“He may believe mouthing the words law and order makes him strong, but his failure to call on his own supporters to stop acting as an armed militia in this country shows you how weak he is.”

Wait — where is this happening? OK, it’s a big country, and I’m sure it’s happening somewhere. But are pro-Trump militias threatening the peace? Are they burning down buildings, looting stores, spraying graffiti all over? This is a false equivalence.

More:

“You know me. You know my heart, and you know my story, my family’s story. Ask yourself: Do I look to you like a radical socialist with a soft spot for rioters? Really?”

Of course not. Joe Biden himself is not much to worry about. It’s who marches into the government behind Biden that has people afraid, and understandably so.

More:

“He keeps telling you if only he was president it wouldn’t happen. He keeps telling us if he was president you would feel safe. Well — he is president. And it is happening. And you don’t. And it’s getting worse. And we know why. Because Donald Trump adds fuel to every fire.”

That’s not entirely unfair. Trump is not a peacemaker. But you’d have to be nuts to believe that Trump is the prime catalyst for this rioting. Ted Wheeler, the dopey mayor of Portland, under whose watch the city has had over three straight months of nightly antifa violence, gave a speech this week in which he blamed it all on Trump, whose help with federal forces to restore order Wheeler keeps refusing. Wheeler’s line might work on people deep inside the progressive bunker, but ordinary people can see that however bad Trump might be at stopping the violence, he didn’t start it, and he’s very far from the main reason that it’s still going.

Last night, Tucker Carlson delivered straight fire on the Biden speech. Here’s a link to part one:

PART 1: Voters have started to blame Joe Biden for the chaos. That’s clear in the polls. Suddenly Democratic leaders are worried and they are frantically trying to distance themselves from the terror they created. pic.twitter.com/azMtE1Ri8v

— Tucker Carlson (@TuckerCarlson) September 1, 2020

Tucker’s main point — and I find it indisputable — is that voters know perfectly well that the riots are not a “both sides do it” thing, and they know perfectly well that its not Trump supporters who were out pulling statues down. Et cetera.

Many people won’t take Tucker Carlson seriously. OK, then how about Bret Stephens, the Never Trump NYT columnist who is for Biden. In his column today, he warns Democrats that they aren’t taking the violence seriously enough — and that Biden’s speech is not enough. He starts by writing about that nutrageous NPR interview with the transgendered author whose book is a defense of rioting. That ridiculous piece was almost comical proof of how far down the left-wing well NPR is. Stephens dismissed the seriousness of the book as a work of analysis and advocacy, but notes that it is politically potent — in ways that would cause the NPR management fits:

Nonetheless, the book is symbolically important. I became aware of it when several friends separately forwarded to me the NPR interview. Many of these friends, I suspect, will reluctantly vote for Trump — not out of sympathy for him, but out of disgust with defenses of looting and other things they see too often on the left.

What else are they seeing? A CNN chyron from a burning Kenosha: “Fiery but mostly peaceful protests after police shooting.” A video of an outdoor diner at a Washington, D.C., restaurant being yelled at by Black Lives Matter protesters because she won’t raise a fist in solidarity. Republican Senator Rand Paul and his wife getting harassed by a swarm of protesters as they left the White House.

And more: Trump being mocked in 2017 for warning that if statues of Robert E. Lee come down, then George Washington and Thomas Jefferson statues will be next — and then radical demonstrators doing exactly that three years later. Mayor Bill de Blasio of New York scolding Orthodox Jews in April for appearing to flout social distancing rules at a Brooklyn funeral, but then making an exception for Black Lives Matter demonstrations a few months later. Seattle’s mayor, Jenny Durkan, celebrating a “summer of love” in the “Capitol Hill Autonomous Zone,” and then watching the area descend, with depressing predictability, into violent anarchy.

Yes, yes, yes. The money graf:

The list could be longer, but the question it leaves in the minds of wavering voters is exactly the question Trump most wants asked: Can the left be trusted with power?

Read it all.

Judging by the way Democratic mayors and governors have been handling the ongoing crisis, the answer is no. Besides, the idea that antifa is going to sit down and be brought by Team Biden to see reason and stand down is risible. They’re anarchists; this is what they do.

In my own little bubble, I have been surprised this past week by how many Republican friends I have who had planned either to sit the presidential election out, out of disgust with Trump, or were thinking about voting Biden — but who have said to me that they’re all in for Trump now. Kenosha was what flipped them. I’m not exactly sure why, but my sense is that there is a sense of, “If it can happen in Kenosha, it can happen here too.”

Honestly, though, I’m not sure what Joe Biden can do. The Democratic Party has so thoroughly associated itself with Black Lives Matter — which, fair or not, has become inextricable from the rioting and looting — that Biden cannot help but sound insincere.

And there’s this:

Kamala Harris says that the riots are not going to stop, ever, and to BEWARE. With a smile on her face. pic.twitter.com/xkwAUOMJcL

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