Rod Dreher's Blog, page 120

Claim: Becki Falwell Had Sex With LU Student

Politico’s Brandon Ambrosino reports today a new development in the Falwell scandal:

A former Liberty University student says Becki Falwell, the wife of the university’s then-President Jerry Falwell Jr., jumped into bed with him and performed oral sex on him while he stayed over at the Falwell home after a band practice with her eldest son in 2008.

The student was 22 at the time of the encounter, near the start of Liberty’s fall semester. He said she initiated the act, and he went along with it. But despite his rejection of further advances, he said, Falwell continued pursuing him, offering him gifts and engaging in banter through Facebook messages.

“She was the aggressor,” he said.

The messages, screenshots of which were provided by the former student to POLITICO, suggest a flirtatious relationship that went beyond what might be expected of a mother communicating with her son’s bandmate.

More:

POLITICO first contacted the former student in 2019, after hearing of his alleged sexual encounter with Falwell from former classmates. He confirmed the encounter but didn’t want to go public with it until recent weeks, when the Falwells’ behavior came under scrutiny. POLITICO granted the former student anonymity to describe what he considered inappropriate advances from a woman who was herself a university employee and wife of the university president.

He said he did not feel comfortable discussing the encounter earlier because he suffered from feelings of guilt and depression, feared exposure, and didn’t want to cause harm to the Falwell family.

Read it all. The Falwells deny the allegation. The unnamed man was a Liberty student at the time of the alleged sexual encounter. Though he was an adult (therefore able to consent), the story he tells is a “Stacy’s mom” scenario (see the Fountains of Wayne hit from ages ago) in which she groomed her son’s bandmate, and later came into his bedroom at the Falwell house, and performed a sex act on him. Again, the Falwells deny the allegation, but we already know from what they have admitted about the Pool Boy that Becki Falwell had an extramarital affair. If this latest allegation is true, then it is a sign of her sexual recklessness.

Are there more people like him?

What’s more — and this is an important distinction — at the time of the alleged incident, the young man was a student at Liberty University. Becki was the wife of the university president. That raises a big consent issue. Notice this, from Ambrosino’s story (emphasis mine):

In a statement provided to POLITICO by Liberty University senior vice president Scott Lamb, the school reiterated that it has “policies against employees having sexual relationships with students, as well as having other inappropriate relationships outside of marriage, whether consensual or not. Becki Falwell was an employee in 2008 and such policies would have fully applied to her as spouse of the then-university Chancellor and President. Liberty University has checked its Human Resources and Title IX records and finds no complaints were ever lodged against Becki Falwell for any inappropriate relationship nor were any investigations of such matters conducted. This is a fresh allegation, as far as we can tell.”

This is potentially huge. Leaving aside the abuse of power and the gross immorality of Becki’s alleged act,  opens Liberty up to legal liability. It has already been established, by the admission of Jerry Jr., that Becki had an extramarital affair. It has been reported that it was with Giancarlo Granda, and it lasted for six years, though those details have not been confirmed by the Falwells. The point is, we know that Becki has committed adultery. If this new allegation is true — Politico says it has seen screenshots of her flirtatious text banter with her son’s former friend, and its reporter talked to people who confirm that the unnamed young man told them at the time that Becki forced oral sex on him — then Liberty University could be in serious legal trouble if it can be proved that Becki had sexual relations with other students.

Let’s assume that Liberty’s spokesman is telling the truth about there being no complaints lodged against Becki Falwell. Can Liberty be certain that there were never any other potential complainants who were bought off somehow by Jerry Jr., who — to raise a hypothetical — could have set them up in business or helped in some other material way to buy their silence? Or perhaps these hypothetical victims could have been too afraid to cross the Falwells, or maybe, like this alleged victim, are Evangelicals who did not want to hurt the Falwell family? Were students or employees of Liberty who knew about these hypothetical actions free to report them, or were they too afraid to break silence?

I ask because we who covered the Catholic Church scandal know how this kind of thing worked there: victims of clerical sexual predators: victims’ shame was manipulated by powerful churchmen to shut them down or to allow the institutional Church to buy their silence with an off-the-books settlement. And those who worked for the Church who knew something bad was going on were too afraid of retaliation to speak out against it.

Let me be clear: at this point, we do not know, or have reason to believe, that any of this happened with Becki Falwell. She and her husband deny this allegation. But based on what we do know, I do not see how Liberty University can avoid hiring an independent outside investigator now, to look into whether or not the allegations in the Granda case and this case are true, and whether or not there has been a pattern of behavior involving the reckless Mrs. Falwell. The university cannot afford to be held hostage to fear that its former president’s wife, herself an employee of the university, may have engaged in legally actionable and morally compromising sexual behavior with students or other employees. The risk to Liberty University’s reputation is grave.

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Kyle Rittenhouse, Populist Hero

I’ve been sleeping most of the day, because I did not get a good night’s sleep through Hurricane Laura last night (we came through fine here in Baton Rouge). Lo, I wake up to find that Kyle Rittenhouse, the 17-year-old charged with shooting BLM rioters, has become an overnight populist hero — a Bernie Goetz for our time. A reader writes:

The memes have been intense. I have not seen this sort of fan reaction since “Based Stickman” from Berkeley Riots https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=g_uivlC_UAg

Young white dudes demonized by the media chafe and rage against the bullsh*t characterizations of riots as “peaceful protests” and how the liberal media excuses lawlessness and aggression. Any red-blooded male hates a bully and an aggressor and not only are the Leftwing mobs bullies and aggressors, the media valorizes them as heroes and victims.

So long as the media engages in this ideological propaganda to legitimize aggression, lawlessness, and crime, people are going to react be valorizing those who counter the media’s narrative: cleancut kid following rules of engagement absolutely wastes a bunch of criminal thugs trying to attack him. And he’s so nice he tries to help his victims and offers to turn himself into the police.

You remember the 80s better than me: Charles Bronson? Robocop? Toxic Avenger? People resented the violent thuggery and crime of the big cities in the 80s and the idea of some vigilante laying them to waste was virtually pornographic. I’m a broken record, but you can thank the dishonest media for this today.

Here are some of the memes the reader sent:










And my favorite:



This is no doubt because those guys Rittenhouse is charged with shooting were not Citizens of the Year:

The 3 shot (2 killed) in #Kenosha, Wisc. at the BLM riot have been identified.

Joseph Rosenbaum, 36, was the first one killed. Video allegedly shows him chasing teen shooter & throwing something at him. Rosenbaum was a registered sex offender for a sex crime involving a minor. pic.twitter.com/up1VgDyrgZ

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 27, 2020

Anthony Huber, 26, was shot & killed in Kenosha, Wisc. at the BLM riot. He was filmed chasing down the armed teen and hitting him when he was on the ground with a skateboard. He has a criminal history that includes charges of battery & repeat domestic abuse. #KenoshaRiots pic.twitter.com/1rvx7ltKKS

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 27, 2020

 

Anthony Huber, 26, was shot & killed in Kenosha, Wisc. at the BLM riot. He was filmed chasing down the armed teen and hitting him when he was on the ground with a skateboard. He has a criminal history that includes charges of battery & repeat domestic abuse. #KenoshaRiots pic.twitter.com/1rvx7ltKKS

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 27, 2020

The third who was shot (& survived) is Gaige Grosskreutz, 26. He’s a member of the People’s Revolution Movement. He was filmed chasing after the teen w/a pistol. He was shot at close-range in the upper arm. He has a criminal record that includes being intoxicated & armed w/a gun. pic.twitter.com/U9Q3R7pcPH

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) August 27, 2020

On the other hand, at least one of the dead, Anthony Huber, the skateboarder, is becoming a hero on the left wing of social media. There’s a Go Fund Me for his girlfriend, with whom he lived, and it has raised as of this afternoon nearly $100,000.

UPDATE: Here is a good Twitter thread that tracks everything Rittenhouse did, based on publicly available amateur video.

UPDATE.2: Please excuse the profanity, but you need to see this, and ponder Zaid Jilani’s question. Yoom Nguyen’s family restaurant was hit when rioters and looters sacked stores and businesses in Minneapolis last night after a false report that cops had shot and killed a black man:

 

If I were a polling firm, I would run a national poll asking people who have heard of Kyle Rittenhouse whether they think he’s a villain, a hero, or don’t know. That would tell us a lot about the mood of the country.

UPDATE.3: More information about Gaige Grosskreutz, who had his bicep shot off by Rittenhouse as he pulled a gun on him:

If Gaige Grosskreutz really did tell his buddy that he intended to kill Rittenhouse, then Rittenhouse acted in self-defense:

UPDATE.3: People, based on what we know now, I, personally, don’t believe Kyle Rittenhouse is either a villain or a hero. I am reporting that he is fast becoming a hero among a lot of people who are sick of the rioting. This may be a terrible thing, but it is really happening, and there’s a reason for it. It’s a sign, I think, of a building backlash — one that could result in a lot more violence. It doesn’t do us any good to pretend this is not happening because it frightens or offends us.

UPDATE.4: A reader e-mails:

In reply to your posting on “Kyle Rittenhouse, Populist Hero”, you are fond of pointing out the Weimar-like similarities between the U.S. today and Germany in the 1920s and early 1930s. While history doesn’t repeat, it does echo. If we are radicalizing into two or more irreconcilable factions, it stands to reason you will have martyrs to the cause. In Germany, Horst Wessel was shot and killed by the Red Front-Figures of the Communist Party. Charismatic and young, Horst’s short and violent life was turned into that of a martyr by the Nazis, particularly Joseph Goebbels. As many know the “Horst Wessel Song” became the “national battle hymn” of Nazi Germany to quote historian Richard Evans.

In American history, we have seen the making of martyrs with Matthew Shepard and the LGBT movement, and more distantly, John Brown and the abolitionist movement as two notable examples. Songs will be written and past transgressions will be forgotten or whitewashed. Woe to the intrepid soul who criticizes these new secular saints. With fanaticism on the ascent in this country there will be more martyrs and heroes minted for the cause. That’s the echo I hear in contemporary times.

Additionally, the black writer Thomas Chatterton Williams captures an absurd aspect of this event. The “Shoot me, N—” guy was Joseph Rosenbaum:

A furious white man screaming “Shoot me, N____!” at other white men in the name of black suffering, helping spark the white-on-white rampage that just might *tank* the presidential candidate who is overwhelmingly supported by actual black people might be THE metaphor for this era

— Thomas Chatterton Williams

‘Live Not By Lies’: Not Only For Christians

I received this feedback yesterday from a reader who saw an advance copy of Live Not By Lies. I loved these comments, and asked the reader for permission to post them. Here you go:

The protected file could only be downloaded on my iPhone Kindle app, so I can’t transfer my highlights/comments like I’d hoped. Here are the things I bookmarked:

John Gray on Marxism and liberal democrats/positivism/myth of progress. People hear Marxism and think economics, but it’s the positivism and myth of progress that do the real damage

Chinese state making sure people don’t have the “imaginary capacity to fight back,” and the Chinese man  interviewed who said people born in the 80s and after are lost and that they simply don’t have an interest in the information available because of the consumerist atmosphere—even 10 years’ age difference meant living in different worlds.

The point about using data to identify potential future leaders/enemies before they become aware of their potential seems very significant. One thing that worries me is that the U.S. doesn’t seem to be cultivating future leaders at all, which seems a far greater sign of social dysfunction than trying to remove future enemies, despite the ethical problems posed by the latter. The U.S. seems to have grown very averse to the concept of “proteges.”

Political correctness being more than an annoyance—it interferes with dealing with reality.

I agree. I think the problem here cannot be overstated. For this reason, I have a much higher tolerance for Trump than most people. The only way around this seems to be shamelessness—I don’t see another way to fight it, or even get a word in around it. Same goes for the mass media propaganda. The crazy shifting language corruption is the defining totalitarian feature.

The point that consenting the the system’s lies might buy your safety, but at an unbearable cost.

I think about this a lot, and as someone who is not very brave or willing to take risks, it still stuns me how many people are willing to crawl lower and lower beyond a certain point. There is a point at which the quality of life is so low and maddening and that it should be a breaking point. As you say, that doesn’t mean people aren’t going to try and protect themselves, but “If you cannot imagine any situation in which you would act like Havel’s fictional greengrocer…” something is just wrong. I understand some people may always be too afraid and resign themselves to submission, but there’s a difference between that and continuing to defend and recommend total compliance as the responsible choice to those you trust and care about.

Suffering is part of the human condition and has significant value in historical Christianity.

I’m not religious, but I have come to hold this view anyway. I think the universality of human suffering needs to be acknowledged and made the basis for healthier forms of empathy and humility.

What if the answers are in the stories of Christian dissidents?

I think this is right—or that the best way to orient ourselves is by really looking at this and similar cases of dissent in the historical record. What are the values and aspects of human nature that drive people to have seemingly alien (to modern thinking) priorities? When I said that focusing on communism isn’t the best approach, I didn’t mean that literally—I think the case study approach you took is the best way to present such an issue, and the most detailed case study available is definitely 20th century communism. I meant that in the casual discourse, for people who don’t take the time to read books like this, the label makes them look at it as an outside problem. Of course, one of the key points of your book is that we don’t recognize it because it doesn’t take the expected form, so you’re well aware of the issue.

I thought the book was excellent—it was eloquent, direct, and easy to follow, and made all the key points in a fair-minded way. I think it is relevant far beyond the target audience, and that much of the dysfunction we’re seeing is the outcome of this process having already started. That’s why I said we may be closer to the peak than the beginning. It’s crazy how much some of these things have become reality since you finished up the book. If you control people too much, they stop producing value, so you can’t get much out of them, and they require less elaborate control mechanisms. There’s also an issue where the leaders seem to become confused by their own lies over time. And, eventually, the lies don’t work on younger generations, because they don’t have the necessary context to appreciate them, which I think we’re seeing now. I think your diagnosis of the current situation is definitely accurate and very lucid, but I’m not sure what comes next. The book will definitely get people thinking in the right direction, though, which will be a big advantage for anyone who reads it.

While it is (or was, until recently) harder to see on the left, it’s not just conservatives or religious people whose value structure is being undermined. There has to be some sort of coherent structure in which everything is harmonized, and we lost that. People are trying to pick and choose components, but they don’t work outside of the system as a whole, and that is the understanding we have to regain—we’ve been trying too long to have it both ways. As Solzhenitsyn says, you have to decide never to lie—you can’t pick and choose when lying is okay. Lying about fundamentals in one area eventually corrupts the whole system. It requires more and more lies over time to correct for the initial lie, and people become habituated to it, and then lose track of what is a lie, etc. In the long run, everything falls apart.

I think the pathologies of progressivism and of neoliberalism are much more similar than most people realize. It’s not the beliefs themselves, but the way those beliefs have been tethered to a ridiculous narrative of unending progress and a rejection of the idea that there is meaning in suffering or sacrifice. I tend to lump them together under a term like technocracy. From your comments on the utopians in Silicon Valley and other insightful points, I think you are identifying the same patterns.

Believers in these systems lack prudence, as you define it—they confuse reasoning and rationalizing. They’re essentially positivist, or at least justify themselves that way, something you also highlighted: this idea of a universal convergence of values. “End of history” stuff, as “David” said. Most importantly, they are totalizing systems, which only became possible with the power concentration and tech developments of the 20th century. The post-WWI shift in the US was stunning, and I assume similar shifts played a big role in what happened in Russia and Germany. Things accelerated again Post-WWII.

Over the course of the 20th century, it was increasingly possible to impose massive systems (similar in some ways to the shift from decentralized message board culture to massive “platforms”). It was impossible for Marx to try and force a society into practicing communism, had he wanted to do so. It was possible for Lenin to do so. On the American side, the tone of the abolitionist movement is distinctly different from that of the temperance movement. The former didn’t think it could impose values or modify behavior by force. It could persuade or it could conquer militarily and enforce a ban, but it wasn’t going to indoctrinate South Carolina into being Massachusetts. The temperance movement thought it could prompt a change the whole character of people and society, just as communism did, or liberal internationalism does. You point out what globalization has enabled, and how much power big business has —these are just such major changes that our existing political system can’t survive them. Scale matters, and then mix in Woke Capitalism—it is opportunism more than ideology driving a lot of this, but we’re just unmoored from a usable value framework.

The virtues you highlight have a lot of appeal to me from a secular perspective, and historically have always had non-Christian appeal. I agree it’s time to get serious about making hard choices, and I think that, when fully appreciated, these changes are difficult but much less negative than they may seem. There’s a lot of compensation in them for the associated hardships. But for most people, this is a really hard shift, and they can’t even truly process how far we’ve drifted from traditional values, for better or worse. Americans will never decide to reject consumerism any time soon. They won’t choose to lower their expectations willingly and all at once, but I think many will have to do so piece by piece.

You may find the Benedict Option becoming attractive to secular young people. I think such a choice will be made easier by the economic issues that are probably coming, and the defeat of some of the progress narratives. I think the spiritual and the practical concerns will start to become more obviously related and less at odds—it won’t be a choice between worldly success and your soul, because the current version of worldly success isn’t going to be as plausibly achievable. I think this will require more radical cultural shifts in mindset than people in their 60s could ever conceive of, but it won’t be some revolution, just an unplanned reversal to a more historically stable equilibrium.

Much you’ve written over the last few months seems to recognize that there will be a broader shift—we’re too decadent to function. Many people might drift on, but there will be people opting out, and those at the top won’t be competent enough to force their absurdity too much on others. The compliance is borne from, as you said, the fact that so many assume that “social justice” advocates abide by traditional discourse norms, and don’t know how to defend themselves. But younger people don’t have such an assumption, and, better or for worse, will push back.

I don’t know how it will all play out, but I think it will look closer to 19th century than 20th in many ways, since we’re starting at the other end of the trend. It’s easy to fall prey to the myth of progress even while lamenting it, and think a scary trend will continue forever, but history is surprisingly cyclical.

What a great comment. I’m grateful, reader! I hope you will pre-order Live Not By Lies. It will be published on September 29. I’m posting this not only because it’s a great comment, but because it is for this writer a pleasure to finally be able to get some feedback on his book.

 

The post ‘Live Not By Lies’: Not Only For Christians appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Democrats’ Riots

Well, well, well, look what The New York Times finds in Kenosha:

Mr. Geraghty, a former Marine, said he was disturbed to see his town looking like “a war zone,” and he feared that the Democrats in charge were “letting people down big time.”

Politics for him had long been like a sport he did not follow. In his late 20s, he voted for Barack Obama, the first vote of his life. He did not vote in 2016, and he called the president’s handling of the coronavirus “laughable.”

Mr. Geraghty said he disliked how Mr. Trump talked but said the Democratic Party’s vision for governing seemed limited to attacking him and calling him a racist, a charge being leveled so constantly that it was having the effect of alienating, instead of persuading, people. And the idea that Democrats alone were morally pure on race annoyed him.

“The Democratic agenda to me right now is America is systematically racist and evil and the only people who can fix it are Democrats,” he said. “That’s the vibe I get.”

Mr. Geraghty said he understood peaceful protesting but felt frustrated with Democratic leaders who seem afraid of confronting crowds when things turn violent. He was angry at the statement by Gov. Tony Evers on Sunday, which in his view took sides against the police in a knee-jerk way that worsened the situation.

More:

Scott Haight, who was boarding up a line of businesses in a Kenosha strip mall on Tuesday, said he blamed Lt. Gov. Mandela Barnes, a Democrat, for what he said was irresponsibly stirring up emotion. (On Monday, Mr. Barnes said the shooting “wasn’t an accident.”)

“It’s like ‘What, are you trying to burn our city down?’” Mr. Haight said.

Mr. Haight, 59, said he was a “lifelong Democrat” but had decided not to vote this year.

“It’s not worth it,” he said. “One’s as bad as the other.”

Priscella Gazda, a waitress at a pizza restaurant in Kenosha, was having the opposite reaction. She said she had voted only once in her life — for Mr. Obama in 2008. Her son has Type 1 diabetes and was hoping for health insurance.

“I’m not the one who would ever vote,” she said.

But after the chaos in her town, this year is different.

“I am going to vote for Trump,” she said. “He seems to be more about the American people and what we need.”

Read it all. It’s an important developing political story. The story notes that Joe Biden on Tuesday condemned both police brutality and the rioting. Democrats don’t want to hear this, but people know that the Democrats are wobbly on this stuff.

In the Jacob Blake story, Wisconsin Department of Justice officials confirmed today that Blake had a knife in his minivan. This is almost certainly why the Kenosha cop shot Blake. According to the police scanner audio, a resident called 911 and complained that Blake was at her house, and she didn’t want him to be. Police dispatch advised the officers headed to the scene that there was a warrant out for Blake’s arrest. They knew they were going to be dealing with a troubled guy.

Many of us have seen the original video, in which an officer shot Blake in the back as Blake was reaching into his minivan. What you might not have seen is the video taken of the scene from a different angle, in the moments before the shooting, showing officers on the other side of the van struggling physically to subdue Blake.

What we can deduce from that is that Blake strenuously resisted arrest. We saw him defy police with guns drawn, to walk around his van, open the door, and presumably start fishing for something. That’s when the officer shot him. We don’t know if Blake put his hands on the knife, or if the officers knew that he had a weapon.

Police officers are trained not to take that chance. For all that cop knew, he was going for a gun. This video of cops being hot shows why you cannot let suspects who are resisting arrest reach inside a car. 

Still, the officer might have done wrong in shooting Blake. We just don’t know yet. We await the investigation’s results. The video of the cop shooting Blake is genuinely horrifying — but we cannot make a determination about the nature, legally, from the video alone.

The rioting and looting, though — that we can judge. It is not justified. Ever.

Nor, by the way, is it justified that right-wing people looking for trouble should have headed to Kenosha with their guns. I completely stand with armed citizens defending businesses and property. But people like this Kyle Rittenhouse kid, driving in from Illinois looking for adventure? No. Turns out that he’s a kid who loves the police, and took it upon himself to drive to Kenosha to police the situation. And now two people are dead, allegedly at his hand, and Rittenhouse, if convicted, will go to prison for a long time. Here’s a short clip of an interview with Rittenhouse before the shooting started:

I interviewed the alleged shooter before the violence started.

Full video coming soon: pic.twitter.com/G3dVOJozN7

— Richie

Writing Good 4 Woke Capitalists

A reader sends in the following e-mail, which I’ve edited slightly to protect his/her identity:

I’m a frequent reader of your blog. Your posts, especially about wokeness in America, have been especially helpful to me in navigating the current political climate over the past several years.  I felt affected by it, but only today do I realize just how directly affected I am, or will be, in the next several years.

I am an undergraduate student at [large public university]. I am taking a course this semester on technical editing, and have learned, along with the rest of the class, that our professor is “committed to anti-racism.”
upon opening it up, was greeted by the professor’s statement that she is ‘committed to anti-racism’ and that if we wanted to know more about how this would affect our course, we could look further in our online course description.

The reader sent me a copy of the professor’s statement. After consulting with the reader, I decided not to post it word for word, to protect the reader, who is not far from graduation, and fears retaliation by the professor (whose name and school I have). I am going to paraphrase it, though.

The professor — this is a professor of writing — says that she is committed to “anti-racist pedagogies,” and as such, refuses to accept that technical writing and editing is about correct grammar and mechanics. This reproduces racism by upholding the idea that white American English is the only correct form of writing in the workplace. Therefore, the professor has decided in her course to root out the racism in the way she was taught, and to respect language diversity in her students’ work. She will no longer teach as if there is a correct standard for grammar and writing. Students are free to choose how to write, but they must argue for why their choices were the right ones; they can’t fall back on claiming that they are writing what they were taught was correct English.

The professor warns students that she foresees “uncomfortable conversations” along the road to establishing an anti-racist classroom, but that’s just how it’s going to be, because we’re all on a “journey to antiracism.”

The reader writes:

Obviously, I don’t agree with one sentence of it. It’s posturing, plain and simple. Both my academics and the jobs I have worked in the past (I have been, for many semesters, an academic tutor of English Writing) have proven to me, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that the issue with English writing and reading has nothing to do with ‘whiteness’ and everything to do with a slow and crushing de-emphasization of humanities studies by our public school system for the last 20+ years. The notion that there is anything ‘white’ or ‘racist’ about grammar standards is particularly ludicrous, but beyond that, look to the course title. This isn’t a class in ‘Woke Creative Writing’ but a course in technical writing and editing. As in, you know, editing, for business. For professionals. For companies and corporations. Or at least, that is what it should be, what I expected it to be. But no, this professor has bravely taken it upon herself to reformat our course into a months-long lecture on anti-racism, and I can only pray I can manage to half-heartedly scrape by without drawing attention to myself. This is the world we live in now.

This university professor is actually making her students stupider, for the sake of political correctness. Back in 2013, NBC News reported:

Can you tell a pronoun from a participle; use commas correctly in long sentences; describe the difference between its and it’s?

If not, you have plenty of company in the world of job seekers. Despite stubbornly high unemployment, many employers complain that they can’t find qualified candidates.

Often, the mismatch results from applicants’ inadequate communication skills. In survey after survey, employers are complaining about job candidates’ inability to speak and to write clearly.

On Friday, the Bureau of Labor Statistics reported there were a net 204,000 new jobs created in October, though the unemployment rate rose to 7.3 percent. The numbers easily topped economist expectations of 120,000 new nonfarm payroll jobs for the month.

Experts differ on why job candidates can’t communicate effectively. Bram Lowsky, an executive vice president of Right Management, the workforce management arm of Manpower, blames technology.

“With Gen X and Gen Y, because everything is shorthand and text, the ability to communicate effectively is challenged,” he said. “You see it in the business world, whether with existing employees or job candidates looking for work.”

Others say colleges aren’t doing a good job. In a survey of 318 employers published earlier this year by the Association of American Colleges and Universities and conducted by Hart Research Associates, 80 percent said colleges should focus more on written and oral communication.

William Ellet, an adjunct professor teaching writing at Brandeis International Business School, says the problem starts earlier. He points out that when the Department of Education in 2012 published what it called “The Nation’s Report Card: Writing 2011,” just 24 percent of eighth and 12th graders were proficient in writing. From colleges on down, he said, “nobody takes responsibility for writing instruction.”

Think about those students, paying over $10,000 per year (I checked this university’s tuition) to be taught how to write good business and technical English, and instead getting this woke professor teaching them that anything goes, because antiracism. When these students apply for jobs, and it turns out that they can’t write standard English, they will not be hired — and whose fault will it be? Even the wokest businesses can’t afford to hire people who cannot write standard English. Those kids are being cheated out of the education they’re paying for.

This is happening at a big public university in a ruby-red state! If students get an A in this class, but end up unable to land or hold a job because they can’t write, they will be tempted to blame racism. They ought to blame their professor, and their university. This is infuriating. If that were me — or my kid — I would be writing to my state legislator. On the other hand — and this is where they get you — the student who wrote me is probably right that the professor would punish as a racist anyone who complained. The reader just wants to graduate and put this school in the rear view mirror. I don’t blame the student at all. But after the student gets that diploma, I hope he/she will write me back to remind me of this, and I’ll post the professor’s name, university, and the full statement. Students, prospective students, and the taxpayers of that state ought to know the fraud being perpetrated on that university’s students in the name of antiracism. Graduates of this writing program may be unemployable, but at least they’ll know how to chalk protest slogans on sidewalks.

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A Pro-Trans, Anti-Parent Conspiracy

Here is a good example of how the public schools can conspire against parents to help your adolescent child turn trans. Someone who is part of a support group for parents of kids who are going through Rapid Onset Gender Disorder sent this to me. She writes:

It is horrifying and plays into every facet of gender ideology, as you will see when you open it.  The statements basically grading parental “support levels” for gender ideology and the plan to keep information from parents is doubly horrifying.

I’m sure this stuff is being rolled out throughout on-line schooling.  It underlines the importance of Live Not By Lies.  I hope you have time to blog about it.  The left-wing atheists in my group are as upset about it as the rest of us (we have Orthodox Jewish, Eastern Orthodox, and Roman Catholic parents in my group, as well as progressive Protestant lesbian moms)!  All of us are equally horrified.

In Live Not By Lies , I write about how one of the most important lessons I learned from my interviews with people who resisted Soviet totalitarianism is the absolute importance of community in small groups. It keeps up your courage and lets you know that you are not crazy, and you are not alone. Sounds like the parents in this group are living that reality.

Anyway, here is the form from the Montgomery County (Maryland) public schools. It is breathtaking that a public school would go to this length not only to facilitate a gender transformation in a child, but also to systematically deceive parents about what’s happening:





You might remember that a couple of weeks back, I wrote about a teacher-activist in Philadelphia who tweeted about how teachers need to figure out how to use online schooling to continue to “destabilize” within students the model of the world that their parents might have given them. Parents absolutely cannot take for granted that schools are on their side. Here, from the ROGD support group, are stories by parents whose kids have been stolen by this insane ideology.I can tell you from personal conversations with moms and dads who are going through this, it usually hits you out of the blue. Your middle-schooler or high-schooler is cross-pressured intensely from online culture and peer culture to adopt a gender-transgressive identity. You almost always don’t know what’s happening until it has seized your kid’s mind in an obsessive way. What’s more, it’s common to learn that you won’t find any help anywhere, because many in the medical profession, the media, and among other parents consider you to be the enemy.

Does your county’s school system have a plan like Montgomery County’s? Does your kid’s school, public or private? You need to know this. So does your school board.

[Hey everybody, I’m posting this on Wednesday afternoon, from the darkened hallway of my house in Baton Rouge. We have been hiding here for the last hour and fifteen minutes, in which time we have had FIVE tornado warnings, from the outer bands of Hurricane Laura. It’s going to be a long night. If you don’t see me approving comments, assume that it’s because I’ve lost power.]

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Hurricane Laura Savage Storm Surge

I hope this blog’s readers in the area from Galveston over to southwestern Louisiana are not reading this, because they should be in the process of getting out of the way of Hurricane Laura. I checked on this blog’s regular commenter Leslie Fain, who lives in southwest Louisiana. She and her mom and her youngest child have evacuated north, but her husband and older sons are still there, taking care of all their animals. Please pray for them, and for all the people who will bear the brunt of the storm.

Unsurvivable storm surge with large and destructive waves will cause catastrophic damage from Sea Rim State Park, Texas, to Intracoastal City, Louisiana, including Calcasieu and Sabine Lakes. This surge could penetrate up to 30 miles inland from the immediate coastline. #Laura pic.twitter.com/bV4jzT3Chd

— National Hurricane Center (@NHC_Atlantic) August 26, 2020

I live in Baton Rouge, which means the main thing we will have to worry about is the possibility of tornadoes spun off of this thing, and spot flash flooding. If we can avoid a twister, we’ll be okay.

Laura is probably not the storm that’s going to do this, but still, it’s worth reading about the future hurricane that could turn Houston into “America’s Chernobyl.” Peter Holley writes in Texas Monthly:

The storm emerges over the eastern Atlantic in late August, first as a slow-moving tropical system that remains largely unnoticed in faraway Texas. It gains power as it drifts westward into warmer Caribbean waters, lashing island coastlines and leaving a trail of destruction in its wake. By the time the storm enters the Gulf of Mexico and churns toward the southeast corner of Texas, it has transformed into a category 4 hurricane with 130-mile-per-hour winds that fan out for 200 miles in every direction.

Unlike 2017’s Hurricane Harvey, which made landfall just north of Corpus Christi, the swirling behemoth slams into land some two hundred miles up the coastline near Galveston Island. As the hurricane moves inland, it functions like a giant wall of wind, pushing water north from Galveston Bay—one of the largest estuaries in the United States—into the smaller bays, rivers, and bayous that comprise the Houston Ship Channel, home of the largest petrochemical energy complex in the United States.

This is a hypothetical that Terence O’Rourke, an environmental attorney and hydrology expert with the Harris County Attorney’s Office, has been warning public officials about for the last decade. He says what comes next in the disaster scenario would become “America’s version of Chernobyl”—the Soviet nuclear power plant that melted down in 1986, killing 4,000 people over time and forcing the evacuation of nearly 50,000. The storm O’Rourke predicts could displace hundreds of thousands and create a sprawling contamination zone that stretches across Galveston Bay.

This is because the Houston Ship Channel produces so many toxic chemicals. More:

“There are thousands of chemical tanks and many refineries with products that are so poisonous, so volatile, and so explosive that the result of this could be the greatest environmental disaster in the history of the planet,” O’Rourke said from his home in Houston on a recent afternoon. “Downtown Houston could be flooded with deadly chemicals, entire communities could be displaced, and Galveston Bay would go from the vibrant ecological system that it is to something catastrophic—a giant toxic pond.”

One more:

There are several proposals for protecting the Houston region from the kind of superstorm that leveled Galveston in 1900, in what remains the deadliest natural disaster in U.S. history. The most well-known plan is the Ike Dike, a seventy-mile-long, $23 billion to $31 billion coastal barrier and gate system designed to keep storm surge out of Galveston Bay. O’Rourke advocates, instead, for the “Galveston Bay Park Project.” The idea is to use dredged-up sand, rock, and mud to build a string of publicly accessible islands that would buffer the western side of Galveston Bay and the Ship Channel while also providing locals with new destinations for camping, fishing, migratory bird-watching, and marina access.

At an estimated cost of $5 billion to $7 billion, the project would be far cheaper than either the Ike Dike or the cost of recovering from an epic natural disaster. Proponents believe the project could be financed at the county and state level, ideally with the help of local industry, and be completed within five years. Unfortunately, O’Rourke said, officials haven’t completed the kind of environmental impact analysis necessary to move the proposal forward in that timespan. It’s as if, O’Rourke said, the city has utterly failed to heed “the great wakeup call” that was Hurricane Harvey.

“The ocean is getting hotter and the hurricanes are getting stronger,” he said. “At this point, we really are playing Russian roulette with the largest petrochemical complex in the United States.”

Read it all.The details are, uh, harrowing.

Laura is passing far enough to the east of Houston such that the Chernobyl scenario won’t happen there. However, Lake Charles, which is going to take the brunt of the storm, is also a petrochemical center. Here is the National Hurricane Center’s prediction for storm surge — that is, the tsunami of water that’s going to roll inland with this storm:

This is why they’re calling it “unsurvivable”: everything from the coast in to Lake Charles is going to be inundated with over nine feet of water. Note too how far the surge is going to go up the river, through Lake Charles. Here’s a close-up of the Calcasieu River and tributaries in Lake Charles — all of this is connected to the Gulf of Mexico:

About 75,000 people live in Lake Charles. It is 13 feet above sea level. It’s about 40 miles inland. Those numbers give you an idea of how low and flat that part of Louisiana is.

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If It Can Happen In Kenosha…

I don’t know about you, but “Kenosha, Wisconsin” has always been for me one of those place names — like “Duluth, Minnesota,” “Peoria, Illinois” — that convey a certain Midwestern solidity and decency. Nothing happens in Kenosha, and that’s how it should be.

Well. Last night in Kenosha was — how to put this? — full of happenings.

Here’s a taste:

This video from Kenosha is INSANE. Man with a rifle falls down, appears to get attacked and fires several shots. I’ve never seen anything like this during a riot.

Why won’t the media cover this? Where are the police? How is this happening in the USA? pic.twitter.com/DT1kmdGjCZ

— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) August 26, 2020

A reader sends a link to a Twitter thread about the deadly overnight violence there among rival gangs — political militias, seems like — armed locals, and the police. The reader comments:

I never would have imagined we’d be cos-playing Syria here in America, to paraphrase someone on twitter. I’m not a big government guy, but I do believe one of THE major functions is law and order. Where is it? Why should I support any government that can’t provide it? Do we even HAVE a government now?

Notice that all this is happening under Donald Trump’s government. Mind you, policing this is a state and local affair; you can’t blame Trump for this. Finally — finally — the cops fight back in Portland like they should have been doing all along, if the city weren’t ruled by progressive civilian leadership:

Antifa gets absolutely crushed by Portland Police. pic.twitter.com/If8QJq59GQ

— Ian Miles Cheong (@stillgray) August 26, 2020

But look, does anybody think this wouldn’t be happening under President Biden? Dream on. These people who are out destroying Kenosha aren’t normie Republicans or normie Democrats. The point is that the “At least Trump will keep us safe” meme is not working for the people of Kenosha. And how do you know it’s going to work for you in your city, should things kick off there?

If the meme in which you draw solace is, “If we get Trump out, things will go back to normal,” well my sweet summer child, read that Twitter thread. What’s going on in this country now is deeper than you think, and is not particularly responsive to who’s in and who’s out in Washington. And there are foreign state actors busy on the Internet goosing this stuff.

I’m not telling you to not vote for Trump, or to not vote for Biden. I’m telling you that we are in for a long and messy struggle ahead. There will be blood and fire. If it can happen in Kenosha, it can probably happen where you live.

I’ve had this working theory, for as long as I’ve been thinking seriously about the arrival of soft totalitarianism — basically, since just before I started writing my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies — and trying to figure out how it is likely to arrive in full force here. As you will be able to see in my book (it comes out September 29; pre-order it at that link), the progressive left has been moving steadily to conquer American institutions, especially cultural institutions. This is not something that politics can really stop. But it has been happening for some time, and it has accelerated this year.

If Trump wins, I’m not sure how this will play out. If Biden wins, he will face a lot of pressure to restore calm and order. Because he will already have the buy-in of institutional elites, who are not only progressive, but who also are so grateful to him for not being Trump, Biden will move aggressively to implement the rudiments of what James Poulos calls “the Pink Police State,” and I call soft totalitarianism. Put simply, the state will begin to use technological means to manage discontent via something like China’s social credit system. Major corporations and financial institutions will cooperate with the state to marginalize and ban right-of-center groups and individuals — and the usual civil libertarian groups, having gone totally woke, will not object.

Michael Brendan Dougherty has a depressing analysis in National Review today. Excerpt:

All of the culturally formative institutions of American life — public education, academia, the entertainment industry, and, increasingly, the rest of corporate America — are controlled by progressives, and as such are a gravitational force dragging the country leftward.

Don’t believe me? Neil Gorsuch ruled earlier this year that the 1964 Civil Rights Act protects transgender rights, even though it was passed years before academics invented the concept of transgenderism. The Big Tech companies are run by progressives. The sports leagues are bending the knee too. Major international corporations, while willing to meet with Republican politicians and occasionally throw a max-dollar contribution to a GOP congressmen to keep the regulators off their backs, will turn around and give a seven-figure donation to a progressive NGO or activist group.

The last four years should have proved that Republican officeholders — and Trump in particular — cannot achieve conservative aims in this environment. They can’t keep the Little Sisters of the Poor out of federal court. They can’t stop public schools from adopting the 1619 Project as the basis of their history curriculums. They can’t stop the government from funding “social science” that is designed to portray allegiance to family, place, and faith as fascistic, dangerous, and oppressive. And they can’t stop the riots. Trump can’t end the interminable foreign wars other Republicans started, and he can’t get the intelligence community or the military to stop leaking embarrassing information to the press. He can’t even get a cabinet confirmed.

In short, there is almost nothing the modern GOP can do. There is no principle this party, particularly as led by Trump, is capable of defending. The one thing it can do, beyond passing tax cuts, is deprive progressives of unified control of government and civil society. Given how unpopular some GOP policy goals are, I suspect that this may be the only reason Republicans continue to win office.

Read it all. 

I suspect that this is why so many on the left and on the right don’t see what’s happening. For the left, it’s like, “What soft totalitarianism? Donald Trump is in the White House, and the Republicans control the Senate!” Many on the right suffer from the same delusion. The truth is, political power is not the only form of power; it’s not even the most important form of power. 

From Live Not By Lies:

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

You can say to yourself, “Who cares what The New York Times thinks?” Well, the people who administer the elite networks do. Later today I’m going to post something a reader sent in from her local public school system, about how the educational elites in her county are openly conspiring to prevent parents from knowing that their children in the system are presenting themselves as the opposite gender. The people running school systems are plugged in to the cultural ecosystem of which The New York Times — a vital pro-trans propaganda source — is a part. The people who run the large corporation you work for are part of this network too, and are influenced by it. The capture of the ruling class by the progressive left is decisive. As MBD assesses, this is why we have Republican Party government, yet the culture keeps moving steadily leftward.

More from Live Not By Lies:

Silvester Krčméry, one of Father Kolaković’s disciples, put it:

We live, contented and safe, with the idea that in a civilized country, in the mostly cultured and

democratic environment of our times, such a coercive regime is impossible. We forget that in unstable countries, a certain political structure can lead to indoctrination and terror, where individual elements and stages of brainwashing are already implemented. This, at first, is quite inconspicuous. However, often in a very short time, it can develop into a full undemocratic totalitarian system.

It only takes a catalyst like war, economic depression, plague, or some other severe and prolonged crisis that brings the legitimacy of the liberal democratic system into question. As Arendt warned more than half a century ago:

There is a great temptation to explain away the intrinsically incredible by means of liberal

rationalizations. In each one of us, there lurks such a liberal, wheedling us with the voice of common sense. The road to totalitarian domination leads through many intermediate stages for which we can find numerous analogues and precedents. . . . What common sense and “normal people” refuse to believe is that everything is possible.

We are an increasingly unstable country. The state cannot live with that forever, and won’t. Unlike the late 1960s and early 1970s, the last time we faced such unrest, the state has far more technological resources at its disposal to manage dissent, and it also has a population that is less committed to traditional norms of liberal democracy. A Trump re-election might slow the soft-totalitarian process down, but it won’t stop it. A Biden election will accelerate it, because that process will have total buy-in by the ruling class within institutions and networks, especially the media.

Prepare. Everything is possible — and in a very short time.

UPDATE: A reader sends in this. It’s a big graphic, so be warned:

GRAPHIC WARNING: Person shot in the head during riots in Kenosha, Wisconsin.

The Daily Caller’s @RichieMcGinniss rushes in, applies pressure to the wound and carries him to the hospital.

The media doesn’t want you to see this, but it’s a war zone. pic.twitter.com/uBhEkTTqFp

— David Hookstead (@dhookstead) August 26, 2020

The reader adds:

I don’t know whose side this guy was on, and it does not really matter. Violence begets violence and if the police do not impose order, more of this will come.

Democrats cannot concede the streets to Left wing mobs. That is to relinquish legitimate power and leave the power up for grabs. Nature abhors a vacuum. If the police will not control the streets, someone will take the power that the police formerly had. The Left wing mob will use that power to target people and hurt them. Someone will rise up and contest the power of the Left wing mobs. When Right wing militias contest Left wing for power over the streets, we have civil war.

This is what happened toward the end of Weimar Germany: left-wing mobs and right-wing mobs fighting in the streets. It will not go on forever.

UPDATE: Reader Arnot comments:

For those of us in cities that are not the Portlands of the world (like Kenosha and Peoria), do you really think we are saying to ourselves “Trump is in charge and yet this is happening! Why isn’t he saving us?? Surely, Biden would!!” No. When Trump even threatens to send in the National Guard, our own elected Democratic Party leaders refuse the help and support the mob. We’re not thinking “even Trump can’t stop this, maybe Biden can.” We are thinking this is what happens when you put Democrats in power. This is what they believe and who they support. I sure wish I lived in one of those few Republican-run cities right now. Lesson learned the hard way.

 

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The McCloskeys: Haute Bourgeois Bernie Goetzes

The woke mob is harassing diners, attempting to compel them to affirm that black lives matter:

Here are more protestors on the streets of DC demanding a woman raise her fist against “white supremacy.” They are actually proud of this shaming and bullying. They promote it as a job well done

Fear Of The Lord Vs. Fear Of Jerry Jr.

So at last, Jerry Falwell Jr.’s exit from Liberty University is a done deal:

In a phone call to The Wall Street Journal, Mr. Falwell said he had just sent his resignation letter to the board of the Christian school in Virginia. Mr. Falwell was placed on an

indefinite leave of absence two weeks ago, following criticism about a photo he posted on

social media showing him with his pants unbuttoned, a cup of dark liquid in one hand and

his other arm draped around a woman. The woman, who Mr. Falwell said was his wife’s

assistant, also had her pants open.

“The board put me on leave, took away my duties as prez, and that’s not permitted by my

contract,” Mr. Falwell said Monday night. “And they put me on leave because of pressure

from self-righteous people.”

What a greedhead. Here’s a guy who humiliated the university he leads with a tasteless yacht photo of his pants undone while embracing a young woman in similar humorous déshabillé, and then on Monday admitted that his wife, the so-called “First Lady of Liberty University” had been banging a pool boy with his knowledge — and, if Reuters is right, worse than that. And still he has the nerve to hold up Liberty U. for his full salary! I guess to own the self-righteous people who think the president of a Christian university shouldn’t behave like a pervy frat boy.

It’s going to take Liberty a long, long time to dig out from under this scandal. What did the Board of Trustees know, and when did it know it?

It costs around $40,000 per year to attend Liberty. The school also has a massive online student body, who also pay tuition. Now every one of those students, and all Liberty University degree holders, are going to suffer the taint from this scandal. Falwell Jr. has been a dominant presence on that campus, especially after becoming part of President Trump’s inner circle. Reputationally speaking, Jerry Falwell Jr. is Liberty University. The Falwell name is synonymous with the school.

If I had invested in a Liberty degree for myself or my child, I would want to know exactly what the Board of Trustees knew about Jerry and Becki Falwell’s scandalous behavior, and unless it was a complete surprise to them, why they did nothing about it. Liberty University is a non-profit entity. Board members of non-profit entities have particular fiduciary duties. Among them is the “duty of care”:

Duty of care means that board directors must give the same care and concern to their board responsibilities as any prudent and ordinary person would. This means board members should be actively participating in board meetings and on committees. It also means that they should be actively working with other board directors to advance the organization’s mission and goals. They can fulfill their responsibilities by overseeing and monitoring the nonprofit’s activities. Board directors should be able to read and understand financial reports and be willing to question expenditures and examine variances. They are also responsible for strategic planning and achieving the nonprofit’s short- and long-term goals.

If there is any reason whatsoever to believe that the board knew, or should have known, about Jerry Jr.’s shenanigans, then I don’t see how it avoids having to undergo an independent investigation to find out what went wrong. Brandon Ambrosino’s well-reported Politico piece last fall raised all kinds of questions about the stewardship of the university by the Falwells, and the board. Excerpt:

Senior Liberty officials might whisper about the propriety of these business deals, but they told me that Falwell’s decisions on campus are rarely ever challenged by the school’s board of trustees. “There’s no accountability,” a former high-ranking university officer said. “Jerry’s got pretty free reign to wheel and deal professionally and personally. The board will approve an annual budget, but beyond that … he doesn’t go to the board to get approval. … It simply doesn’t happen.”

That’s the financial side of things. On the ethical side, though, did the board know, or have reason to know, about Jerry and Becki Falwell’s sexual arrangement with the third party to their marriage — an arrangement that, as has been reported, had a business component? Is this the only such arrangement by the couple? Were Liberty monies involved in any way? Even if they weren’t, given the paramount role that Jerry Jr. played in the university, and in defining its brand, didn’t the board have a responsibility to stay on top of these things?

In a Biden administration, Liberty University will be a big fat target — a legitimate target — for an IRS audit. If it were to emerge that the Liberty board knew, or had a responsibility to know, of Jerry Jr.’s dodgy operations, but did nothing about it, then their poor oversight could have set the university up for a disastrous situation.

Aside from the legality of the business decisions, we have just learned that the president of the best-known conservative Evangelical university in the country was party to a six-year affair in which he appears to have consented to another man having sex with his wife (if you haven’t heard the audio of Jerry teasingly chastising Pool Boy for making his wife jealous with his other relationships, you should). And having this shocking immorality exposed to the world, Jerry Jr., who for over a decade ran a university that touted itself as “training champions for Christ,” has the nerve to demand his full salary, and to paint himself as the victim of “self-righteous people.”

The arrogance is breathtaking. I cannot understand why he feels no sense of shame before the world, before the people of Liberty University, and before his children. Then again, his lack of capacity for shame is probably what got him into this sick, twisted situation.

In the last academic year, my niece, a devout Evangelical, told my mother, her grandmother, that she ideally wanted to go to Liberty. Through my mom, I warned her to stay away, that there was too much talk of scandal involving Jerry and Becki Falwell to risk going into debt to get a Liberty degree. I said that Liberty is unlike other schools in that during these past few years, with Trump in the White House, its brand is tightly tied up to the personality of Jerry Falwell Jr. If he goes down, his fall is going to put Liberty in a terrible position, if only for the fact that a Liberty degree will be tainted in the eyes of potential employers, because of the Falwell association. Unfair? Yes. But that’s how the world works. With someone as reckless as Jerry Jr. in command, and knowing that there was bound to be more to the Pool Boy story than had been reported, I advised my niece that Liberty was not a risk worth taking.

She ended up at a state school. I cannot tell you how relieved I am, now that the other flip-flop has dropped in the Pool Boy saga.

Here’s the thing, though: if I were a Liberty student or alumnus, I would be trying to protect the value of my degree by demanding that the Board give an accounting of its oversight of Jerry and Becki Falwell. Again, if the Board knew, or had reason to know, of their sexual immorality, and turned a blind eye to it, how can that not be a gross failure of duty of care? If the president of Vassar College, for example, and his or her spouse are revealed to have been involved some sort of open marriage arrangement, it might be icky, but it’s not going to affect the reputation of Vassar College. Same thing with most other universities. Not so with a Christian college, especially a conservative Evangelical college, and most especially one whose brand is inseparable from the Falwell family.

Jerry Jr.’s resignation is the breach in the dam. The fact that he’s being so cocky, despite what has been made public about him and his wife and their kinky, adulterous sex life, is a flashing neon sign signaling corruption. If you’re a member of the Board whose job it is to hold the president of Liberty University responsible, and you failed to do so, then the corruption is on you too. How do you face the students and the alumni, and explain your actions, or lack of action, to them?

In an Associated Press report from August 14, Dwayne Carson, a former longtime Liberty staffer, said:

Carson, who now leads a Christian school in North Carolina, said the board would “need to ask some tough questions” to ensure accountability even as he expressed “love” for the Falwell family.

Harkening back to a sentiment expressed by the elder Falwell, Carson observed: “It’s not Jerry Jr.’s university. It’s God’s university.”

Oh? Who has really been Liberty’s god? That is the core question facing the Board, and the Liberty community: Whom did they fear more, the Lord, or Jerry Jr.?

 

 

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