Rod Dreher's Blog, page 121

The Lost Republicans

If you didn’t watch the speech Cuban émigré Maximo Alvarez gave to the Republican convention tonight, do yourself a favor:

I’m a total softie for this kind of thing, whether it comes from liberals or conservatives. I had tears in my eyes, and get that way when I hear old Civil Rights movement veterans speak too. It is the kind of thing that makes you proud of this country. God bless that man. This was pure Reaganism, delivered with such heartfelt emotion that it felt like 1984 all over again.

Unfortunately, a great and moving speech is no substitute for a functioning political party or movement. I read Tim Alberta’s long and troubling piece in Politico about the decadent condition of the GOP, and it struck me with the same force that Tucker Carlson’s great January 2016 Politico essay titled “Donald Trump is Shocking, Vulgar, and Right” — which was also about GOP decadence. What a strange and interesting experience to read these two essays as bookends to the Trump era.

Take this passage from the Alberta piece.The writer, who covers conservative politics, opens by saying that he was addressing a group of high school students by Zoom recently, and was stumped when one of them asked what Republicans believe, and what it means to be a Republican. Alberta was surprised that he couldn’t come up with an answer. More:

I decided to call Frank Luntz. Perhaps no person alive has spent more time polling Republican voters and counseling Republican politicians than Luntz, the 58-year-old focus group guru. His research on policy and messaging has informed a generation of GOP lawmakers. His ability to translate between D.C. and the provinces—connecting the concerns of everyday people to their representatives in power—has been unsurpassed. If anyone had an answer, it would be Luntz.

“You know, I don’t have a history of dodging questions. But I don’t know how to answer that. There is no consistent philosophy,” Luntz responded. “You can’t say it’s about making America great again at a time of Covid and economic distress and social unrest. It’s just not credible.”

Luntz thought for a moment. “I think it’s about promoting—” he stopped suddenly. “But I can’t, I don’t—” he took a pause. “That’s the best I can do.”

When I pressed, Luntz sounded as exasperated as the student whose question I was relaying. “Look, I’m the one guy who’s going to give you a straight answer. I don’t give a shit—I had a stroke in January, so there’s nothing anyone can do to me to make my life suck,” he said. “I’ve tried to give you an answer and I can’t do it. You can ask it any different way. But I don’t know the answer. For the first time in my life, I don’t know the answer.”

Here’s an answer:

“Owning the libs and pissing off the media,” shrugs Brendan Buck, a longtime senior congressional aide and imperturbable party veteran if ever there was one. “That’s what we believe in now. There’s really not much more to it.”

More:

With Election Day just a few months away, I was genuinely surprised, in the course of recent conversations with a great many Republicans, at their inability to articulate a purpose, a designation, a raison d’être for their party. Everyone understands that Trump is a big-picture sloganeer—“Build the wall!” “Make America Great Again!”—rather than a policy aficionado. Even so, it’s astonishing how conceptually lifeless the party has become on his watch. There is no blueprint to fix what is understood to be a broken immigration system. There is no grand design to modernize the nation’s infrastructure. There is no creative thinking about a conservative, market-based solution to climate change. There is no meaningful effort to address the cost of housing or childcare or college tuition. None of the erstwhile bold ideas proposed by the likes of Newt Gingrich and Paul Ryan—term limits, a balanced budget amendment, reforms to Social Security and Medicare, anti-poverty programs—have survived as serious proposals. Heck, even after a decade spent trying to repeal the Affordable Care Act, Republicans still have no plan to replace it. (Trust me: If they did, you’d hear about it.)

Understand what he’s saying here: it’s not that Trump hasn’t said what he’s for, necessarily. It’s that he has no ideas or plans for how to get there.

It’s not that the Republicans are necessarily wrong about the Democrats:

Similarly, the problem for the party isn’t that the aforementioned complaints are entirely without merit. It’s that they form no part of a broader construct on which voters can be sold. This continues to be the bane of the GOP’s existence: The party is so obsessed with fighting that it has lost sight of what it’s fighting for.

“I think I have brought tremendous strength back to the party,” the president told me last year, arguing that previous GOP leaders lacked the stomach for gruesome political combat. There is no denying Trump has transformed the party from a country club debater into a barroom brawler. But to what end?

He fights. Yeah, but for what? A drunk who slides off the barstool and flails his fists as he careens across the saloon trying to land a punch on a cowpoke also fights, but that doesn’t make him Muhammad Ali.

Read the whole thing. And like I said above, read Tucker Carlson’s 2016 piece too, which he wrote near the beginning of the GOP primary season, when Trump was still a joke with the Republican establishment. “Trump is in part a reaction to the intellectual corruption of the Republican Party,” wrote Carlson then. “That ought to be obvious to his critics, yet somehow it isn’t.”

Trump’s presidency has been a failure in most regards, but very few actual Republican voters want to return to the pre-Trump status quo — nor should they. Still, the fact that the zombie Reaganites that Trump defeated and displaced deserved it does not make Trump a successful president. Owning the libs and pissing off the media — that can be fun, but it’s not the same as governing with competence and effectiveness.

The weirdest thing is that for the GOP to become a party that actually could get some populist agenda items accomplished and enacted into law, Trump might have to lose to clear the way for serious, focused, steady politicians who know how to pass laws, not just tweet and emote and cause pointless chaos. As Alberta points out, as long as he’s here, Trump is kryptonite to Republican lawmakers. They all know how nuts he is, but they also know that the base loves him, so they don’t dare resist. To be fair to these Washington lawmakers, in a democracy, it’s awfully hard to be an elected representative who stands against the views of the people who sent you to Congress.

The post The Lost Republicans appeared first on The American Conservative.

Falwell Family Values

Yesterday Jerry Falwell Jr. released a self-serving public statement saying that his wife Becki had had an affair with an unnamed individual, and his mishandling of the affair led to his recent bad behavior. He also said that the unnamed person was extorting them. The statement portrays the Falwells — who helped finance a Pool Boy’s purchase of a gay-friendly hostel on Miami’s South Beach — more or less as victims.

Today Reuters reports that the infamous Pool Boy was the guy poking Becki — and the Falwell story is kinkier than Jerry Jr. let on:

Giancarlo Granda says he was 20 when he met Jerry and Becki Falwell while working as a pool attendant at the Fontainebleau Miami Beach hotel in March 2012. Starting that month and continuing into 2018, Granda told Reuters that the relationship involved him having sex with Becki Falwell while Jerry Falwell looked on.

Granda showed Reuters emails, text messages and other evidence that he says demonstrate the sexual nature of his relationship with the couple, who have been married since 1987. “Becki and I developed an intimate relationship and Jerry enjoyed watching from the corner of the room,” Granda said in an interview. Now 29, he described the liaisons as frequent – “multiple times per year” – and said the encounters took place at hotels in Miami and New York, and at the Falwells’ home in Virginia.

His friendship with the Falwells eventually soured, Granda told Reuters, in part because he wanted to dissolve his ties with the couple and fell into a business dispute with them.

More:

Becki Falwell did not respond to emails or phone and text messages from Reuters. After Reuters presented its initial reporting early last week to the Falwells, a lawyer for Jerry Falwell, Michael Bowe, said the evangelical leader “categorically denies everything you indicated you intend to publish about him.”

On Sunday night, however, as Reuters was preparing to publish this article, Jerry Falwell issued a statement to the Washington Examiner in which he said that his wife had had an affair with Granda and that Granda had been trying to extort money from the couple over the matter. Granda denies any such intent, saying he was seeking to negotiate a buyout from a business arrangement he says he had with the couple.

And:

The material Granda showed Reuters includes screenshots from what Granda said was a FaceTime conversation he had with the Falwells in 2019. During that call, Granda said, Becki was naked as the two discussed their relationship while Jerry peeked from behind a door. Reuters was able to verify Granda’s description of the screenshots.

Granda also shared an audio recording that he says captures a conversation he had with the Falwells in 2018. In it, Becki complained about Granda describing his relationships with other people: “He’s like telling me every time he hooks up with people. Like I don’t have feelings or something.” Jerry then chimed in: “You’re going to make her jealous.” “I’m not trying to do that,” Granda replied.

Read it all. If this is true, then the head of Liberty University and his wife are, or have been, swingers.

I never imagined that I would ever be able to write the words “kinky” and “Falwell” in the same sentence, but 2020 just keeps opening up new opportunities for awful.

This puts Falwell Jr.’s performative masculinity in the public eye in new context. Stuff like this tweet (that he later deleted) criticizing a pastor who himself had criticized Trump:

Jerry Jr. was literally a cuck (cuckold), and, if Granda’s account is true, he participated in his ongoing cuckolding willingly. He did all this while presenting himself as a Christian leader.

It raises an important question too about whether or not the Trump campaign used knowledge of the Falwells’ affair to pressure Jerry Jr. to endorse Trump. Former Trump legal fixer Michael Cohen told Tom Arnold that he handled a situation down in Florida in which somebody had some compromising boudoir shots of Becki Falwell that he (Cohen) had to obtain. Funnily enough, right after that, Jerry Jr., who was lined up to endorse Ted Cruz for president, flip-flopped to Trump. Amazing, eh?

Last fall, Politico published a long piece about the culture of fear at Liberty University. From the piece:

Longtime Liberty officials close to Falwell told me the university president has shown or texted his male confidants—including at least one employee who worked for him at Liberty—photos of his wife in provocative and sexual poses.

At Liberty, Falwell is “very, very vocal” about his “sex life,” in the words of one Liberty official—a characterization multiple current and former university officials and employees interviewed for this story support. In a car ride about a decade ago with a senior university official who has since left Liberty, “all he wanted to talk about was how he would nail his wife, how she couldn’t handle [his penis size], and stuff of that sort,” this former official recalled. Falwell did not respond to questions about this incident.

More than simply talking with employees about his wife in a sexual manner, on at least one occasion, Falwell shared a photo of his wife wearing what appeared to be a French maid costume, according to a longtime Liberty employee with firsthand knowledge of the image and the fallout that followed.

Falwell intended to send the image to his and Becki’s personal trainer, Ben Crosswhite, as a “thank you” for helping his wife achieve her fitness goals, the employee said. In the course of texting, Falwell accidentally sent the message to several other people, necessitating a cleanup.

In a statement, Falwell denied this. “I never had any picture of Becki Falwell dressed in a French maid uniform, and never sent such a non-existent photo to Ben Crosswhite.”

Crosswhite did not respond to requests for comment.

This is the behavior of a man who is … compensating for something. Men who are secure in their masculinity do not behave like this. And men who are not screwed up in the head do not take pleasure in other people fantasizing sexually about their wives, or — if Granda’s claims are true — watching other men have sex with their wives.

Lo, look what came next in the Politico story:

The Falwells’ close relationship with Crosswhite is the source of consternation for some of Liberty’s top brass because of what they characterize as a sweetheart business deal Falwell had the university offer Crosswhite.

Read the whole thing. 

Now that we know from Jerry Jr.’s confession that he helped set up his wife’s lover with a business in Miami, there are legitimate questions that need to be asked about whether this Crosswhite thing in Lynchburg was similar — this, if it is true that Jerry Jr. sent Crosswhite a French maid shot of Becki. Ben Crosswhite and the origins of his business might well be completely on the up and up. But what we have now learned about kinky Jerry and Becki Falwell operated, these questions must be asked, and answered by the Liberty board.

As you may recall, the Liberty board recently suspended Jerry Jr. from his leadership role at the university following the controversy over his racy Instagram shot from a yacht party. After all this, there is no way Liberty can have Jerry Jr. running anything at the university ever again. The school’s reputation is going to take a massive hit from this — and I understand that there will probably be more scandal news coming.

The pridefulness of Jerry Falwell Jr. is staggering. I want to remind you of this from the Reuters story today:

The material Granda showed Reuters includes screenshots from what Granda said was a FaceTime conversation he had with the Falwells in 2019. During that call, Granda said, Becki was naked as the two discussed their relationship while Jerry peeked from behind a door. Reuters was able to verify Granda’s description of the screenshots.

Granda also shared an audio recording that he says captures a conversation he had with the Falwells in 2018. In it, Becki complained about Granda describing his relationships with other people: “He’s like telling me every time he hooks up with people. Like I don’t have feelings or something.” Jerry then chimed in: “You’re going to make her jealous.” “I’m not trying to do that,” Granda replied.

The only way Reuters could verify that description is if its reporter was able to see the screenshots. Naked Mrs. Falwell, often called “the first lady of Liberty University,” talking by FaceTime with her lover while her pervy husband looks in. This, in 2019! And the audio recording of the two Falwells chastising Becki’s lover for being inconsiderate of her feelings — in 2018!

The Falwells continued their weird arrangement with Granda while 100 percent aboard the Trump train. When Jerry Jr. spoke at the 2016 GOP Convention, he was apparently in a love triangle with a man having sex with his wife. If he wasn’t, then he has a lot of explaining to do about those images and the audio recording.

What sleazy people, Jerry and Becki Falwell. Because Liberty University is so heavily controlled by him, and so thoroughly associated with him, it is going to be very hard for it to come through this crisis. The Swingin’ Falwells’ sins do not make the faculty, staff, and students of Liberty into sinners, but they will stain anyone associated with that institution.

What did senior Liberty leadership know about Jerry and Becki’s lifestyle, and when did they know it? They must be held accountable. I’m sure that for the overwhelming majority of the Liberty community, Jerry Jr.’s confession and the Reuters story come as a shock. What will they do about it?

The Falwells’ relationship with Pool Boy predates Donald Trump’s ascension to political power. Still, the only Evangelical leader more closely associated with Trump than the Rev. Robert Jeffress of First Baptist Dallas is Jerry Falwell, Jr. A minority of conservative white Evangelicals have been saying for a long time that this embrace of Trump is going to hurt their witness to the culture. But whoever thought that Donald Trump’s embrace of Jerry Falwell Jr. would hurt his political campaign?

Here’s a video on the Trump YouTube channel, of Becki Falwell, Giancarlo Granda’s former mistress and a board member of Women For Trump, joining Lara Trump in 2019 to talk about strengthening families. Wonder how much longer that’s going to stay there?

 

UPDATE: I want to make clear that it is not fair to blame all conservative Evangelicals for the Falwell scandal. It is not even fair to blame all Liberty University people. The problem for conservative Evangelicals — and, I think, for all of us conservative Christians — is that the Falwells’ sanctimony and scandals fit into a powerful narrative that many liberals wish to believe about us: that we are all sexual hypocrites who preach one thing while doing another.  That is neither fair nor accurate, but when things like this happen, the burden of our high standards falls on all of us.

The only thing we can do is to recognize clearly and without qualification the failures of leadership, and not to engage in whataboutism, but rather, simply, to call our own to repentance, and to repent ourselves. And for the record Catholics have no room to get on their high horse about the sins of Evangelical leadership, nor do us Orthodox and other Christians. The purification of our churches is a severe mercy.

UPDATE.2: I did not see this in the first Reuters story, but in this updated version, there is embedded a 1:51 recording of a conversation between Becki and Pool Boy, in which Jerry Jr.’s voice is heard approving of their relationship. Listen to it for yourself. The Falwells have a lot of explaining to do. How Liberty could allow either of them to have a thing to do with the university after this is unthinkable.

UPDATE.3:

BREAKING: Three sources affiliated with the @LibertyU board of trustees and administration tell me that Jerry Falwell Jr has just submitted his resignation. Developing…

— Jonathan Merritt (@JonathanMerritt) August 24, 2020

UPDATE.4: It’s official, Jerry’s out — the Washington Post reports.

UPDATE.5: So, what do you figure is going to happen with the Falkirk Center, the conservative Christian think tank Jerry Jr. and Charlie Kirk started late last year at Liberty U? This is from the front page of the center’s website:

Imagine that Jerry Jr. started this thing knowing what he was involved in privately. Unbelievable.

UPDATE.6: Woo-eee, now Jerry Jr. denies he resigned! What a soap opera!

UPDATE: We have a new statement from Liberty that says Jerry Falwell Jr. agreed to resign, and then he withdrew his resignation.

I spoke with Falwell just now who confirmed it. "It's still up in the air," he told me.

https://t.co/EQH96qy1sO

— Sarah Pulliam Bailey (@spulliam) August 25, 2020

The post Falwell Family Values appeared first on The American Conservative.

Working From Home: Pros & Cons

In a survey this summer by The New York Times, the newspaper found that an overwhelming majority of people were “satisfied” with working from home, and with 47 percent saying they were “very satisfied” with it.

I have been working at home since the summer of 2011, when I started writing for The American Conservative from my apartment in Philadelphia. That fall, we made the decision, generously supported by my TAC bosses, to relocate to south Louisiana so I could help take care of my aging parents in the wake of my sister’s death. I have not worked in an office in almost a decade. It is hard to imagine doing it again. Mostly, I like it, but it does have down sides. Here’s my short list of the pros and cons:

PROS

Easier to set your own hours
Can work in t-shirts and sweatpants, which is far more comfortable, and saves real money on dry cleaning
Commute is from bedroom to kitchen table
Insulation from an era of ideologically-induced office-culture neurosis. You don’t have to worry as much about being accused of some potentially career-ending offense against woke colleagues if you don’t have to see them
No jerky bosses or obnoxious colleagues to deal with
Easier to manage a busy family’s schedules. For example, I’ve been able to do things like take a kid to music lessons and work from a nearby coffeeshop, while my wife is at meetings at the school where she teaches

CONS

There are some businesses that really can’t provide an adequate substitute for face-to-face collaboration — and for them, the cons are obvious. But if the kind of work you do doesn’t require that, then I can only think of one con, and it’s a big one: loneliness and isolation. I did not realize until I began living the workplace eremetic life how much I enjoyed seeing people in the office. I didn’t often socialize outside the workplace with co-workers, but just seeing them every day (well, the ones I liked) was a greater pleasure than I realized at the time. You might not have to see jerky bosses and obnoxious colleagues, but you miss the kind, fun, personable people.

For me, this has been exacerbated by the fact that after leaving Philly, I lived in places where it wasn’t possible to walk out the front door and go to coffee shops, pubs, or any other gathering place. It’s not like it’s impossible to have a social life this way, but you do have to work a bit harder to, you know, see people, other than your family. I’m not very good at that, and I find that it has been way, way too easy to drift into isolation … and to be okay with that.

Fred Hiatt, from the op-ed page of the Washington Post, makes an important point about the difficulty of passing on a workplace culture via remote working. Excerpt:

But in at least two other ways, both of them I think applicable to many workplaces besides our own, working remotely forever seems unsustainable.

First, we’re managing now because we know each other. We’ve been colleagues, in many cases for years. Without giving it much thought, we’ve chit-chatted about each other’s families and favorite television shows, adapted to each other’s quirks, come to share in a workplace culture.

Now we’re drawing on that social capital, in a sense, without a good way to replenish it. Over time we will begin to lose track of each other’s children, pets and interests. We’ll have fewer points of common reference. Inevitably, some of us will leave, others will be hired — and how will the workplace culture be passed down then?

If we have to, we will find ways to answer that question. But they won’t be as satisfactory as sharing physical space.

Even today, when we still know each other well, we’re losing a lot by being apart. Some of our best ideas grew out of casual, accidental conversations as we waited for coffee to brew or watched side-by-side out our eighth-floor windows as a thunderstorm approached.

Similarly, there’s no way at all that education can be accomplished equally well remotely than it can in person. There is absolutely no way that church can be done this way, either.

But overall, I think that the “work from home” model is for most of us a real improvement — especially in the age of wokeness. Having worked in an office where I had to learn to be afraid of a certain employee, and to work around him, after a groundless “hostile work environment” accusation, it is a massive relief to work in an environment free of that kind of thing, and free from the social pressure to conform to whatever the company’s woke office culture demands. At home, nobody knows if you’re posting the “Workers of the world, unite” sign on your cubicle wall, or not. All they care about is whether or not you’re getting your work done. As it should be.

What do you think? Have you been working from home during Covidtide? Do you prefer it? What are the good parts, what are the bad parts?

The post Working From Home: Pros & Cons appeared first on The American Conservative.

Trump Team Chaos

Kellyanne Conway announced Sunday night that she’s leaving the White House to try to fix her broken family:

Conway informed Trump of her decision Sunday night in the Oval Office.

Her husband, George T. Conway III, a conservative lawyer and outspoken critic of the president, is also stepping back from his role on the Lincoln Project, an outside group of Republicans devoted to defeating Trump in November. He will also take a hiatus from Twitter, the venue he has often used to attack the president.

In a statement, Conway called her time in the Trump administration “heady” and “humbling,” and said she and George were making the decision based on what they think is best for their four children.

“We disagree about plenty,” she wrote of her and her husband, “but we are united on what matters most: the kids. Our four children are teens and ‘tweens starting a new academic year in the middle school and high school that will be conducted remotely from home for at least a few months. As millions of parents nationwide know, kids ‘doing school from home’ requires a level of attention and vigilance that is as unusual as these times.”

Conway continued: “This is completely my choice and my voice. In time, I will announce future plans. For now, and for my beloved children, it will be less drama, more mama.”

Good call. Her 15 year old daughter had been making a constant scene on social media, and told the public she wanted to be emancipated from her mother and father. The kid is a hot mess, and needs her parents to be parents. I’m glad the Conways made this call. Family is far, far more important than politics. This is one case in which a famous person quits to spend more time with her family, and really means it.

But coming on the eve of the Republican convention, this is just more chaos for Trump. Rich Lowry and Ramesh Ponnuru of National Review wrote a strong, solid analysis of why Trump is losing the race at this point. Excerpts:

The fault is not in his stars but in his tweets, erratic behavior, scattershot belligerence, and denials of reality, which had already made him radioactive before what he sometimes calls the “Wuhan flu” ever emerged.

Trump is thin-skinned, self-obsessed, small-minded, intellectually lazy, and ill-disciplined. These never seemed to be great qualities in a chief executive, but they have caught up with Trump over the last six months in particular. They have played into his poor handling of the coronavirus crisis and the aftermath of the killing of George Floyd. When times became more serious, he remained as unserious as ever.

More:

Particularly in the circumstances of a novel pandemic, the president needs a process that brings him relevant information, structures his deliberation, allows him to adapt to new developments and correct mistakes, and guides the rest of the government in executing his decisions. And he must act in concert with Congress, governors, public-health experts, business leaders, and others, all of whom have their own roles to play. Nobody could perform this job perfectly.

What we have under Trump is very nearly the mirror image of this ideal. He relies on gut instinct and gets his information from what he happens to see on television or hears from friends. He is extremely disinclined to acknowledge mistakes, process bad news, or think beyond the news cycle. The structure his staff has built around him is designed more to manage his ego and shield him from bad news than to yield wise decisions. His understanding of the relationship between the president and other political actors is rudimentary, causing him to alternate between passivity and assertions of total control.

This is key:

Some well-wishers urge Trump to talk about a second-term agenda, but he cannot do it credibly when he has done so little to advance a first-term one. Immigration and health-care plans are always just about to be unveiled, but never are. “Infrastructure week” has been deferred so often as to become a running gag. What he is really offering is four more years of enraging liberals. That promise, at least, is something he can deliver on.

Read it all.One of the most effective things Joe Biden said in his convention speech last week was that he was going to do what Trump promised to do (e.g., build infrastructure), but failed to accomplish. It was a fair shot at Trump, because it’s true.

There is not even a hint of a second-term agenda. Here’s a clue: this press release from the GOP on convention eve:

There’s not going to be a Republican platform this year. This is just saying, “Whatever Trump does, we support.” They wouldn’t have needed to all be in the same room to hammer this out. They know perfectly well that there’s no point in doing so. This astonishing document appears to confirm that the Republican Party exists now as a personality cult. Did you see that Trump is now going to speak on each of the four nights of the Republican convention? Why not? If he’s the only thing the party stands for, it stands to reason.

In fact, many of us on the Right would like to see strong nationalist-conservative government. But we are going to have to wait for some future Republican politician to give it to us.

 

The post Trump Team Chaos appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Millennial’s Guide To Millennial Anti-Wokeness

A reader who wishes to be anonymous wrote me a really good letter about the “Why Wokeness Is A Big Deal” post (which, if you haven’t yet read, please do before you comment on this letter).

I’m writing to respond to your latest piece “Why Wokeness Is a Big Deal,” because, as is often the case, you’ve addressed something neglected by almost everyone else. (In the unlikely event you print any of this, please don’t post my name!)

It doesn’t matter very much, but for context, I’m a millennial, probably around your correspondent’s age. I grew up in a secular liberal but not very political environment in New England. The featured correspondent’s remarks highlighted something that I think needs to be addressed before we can address almost anything else: millennials aren’t mindreaders.

He seems intelligent, educated, and open to debate, but he cannot follow your arguments. Why do some ideas “conjure” up others? “Why must one lead to the other?” For a lot of millennials or even younger people, these are the questions going through their heads when such things are discussed.

This argument necessitates some broad generalizations, so please forgive my resort to generational labels and sweeping statements, but I’ve noticed many baby boomer parents failed to impart a lot of “background knowledge” needed to understand the way society works, and, even with the consequences now apparent, they appear no closer to realizing that this disconnect exists. Their arguments depend on assumptions that many millennial kids were never let in on, and won’t be successful until this is remedied.

I get the sense these parents went through something similar with their own parents, but they were still raised by people who had internalized the value framework underlying these assumptions. This grounding kept them from going too far off course, even if they saw it as old-fashioned or unnecessary. They had an intuitive understanding, but not one they’d absorbed systematically or taken very seriously. With little emotional investment in the framework, they unsurprisingly failed to say much about it to their own kids. The result was more or less totally losing the plot—the kids aren’t rejecting their parents’ values; rather, they are functionally ignorant of what those values are.

Again, I say this very generally—there are many exceptions, and I think this was the result of various social trends/rapid change, rather than a moral or intellectual failing.

As on so many other subjects, Abraham Lincoln explained this issue better than anyone else. His first public speech, written well before he became a father, focused heavily on how parents have to care enough to make the case for the system to their kids, or a basic understanding of what is worthy of protection, and why, will be lost. One paragraph basically argues that everyone should talk incessantly about American values, the spirit behind them, and how they connect to each other to form a foundation for the system (in his words, “the Constitution and Laws” of America). He even argued for a special focus on infants, to eliminate the possibility that any child could experience a moment of doubt: “Let reverence for the laws, be breathed by every American mother, to the lisping babe, that prattles on her lap… ”

To put it bluntly, you can’t win an argument by yelling “free speech is important, so knock it off with the cancel culture stuff!” if you’ve never convinced your child that free speech is important! [Emphasis mine — RD]

None of the writers opining on this refer to talking about such things with their own kids. I get this may have to do with basic privacy concerns, but there’s a suspicious lack of references to parenting. I definitely get the sense you are the type of parent who has these discussions with your own kids, and appreciates the importance of them, but your reply points to a single culprit: “The fact that young Americans born and raised after the end of the Cold War have no idea what communism was, how it worked, and why it destroyed societies, is a grave error on the part of our educational institutions.”

Everyone pins it on universities, but they are so successful because there’s no resistance to begin with. Those commenting typically belong to the most affected class: well-educated professionals. They possess communication skills. They don’t necessarily need to make an elaborate chart, but they do need to talk their own kids. The education system was never going to adequately convey such complex, controversial issues to every student, and something like that should never be entrusted to mass indoctrination.

And that’s the other problem: the issue here is any sort of totalizing system, not Marxism or socialism, so focusing on the latter doesn’t really help people understand it. (To clarify, I’m not denying a connection between communism and totalitarianism—such systems inevitably lead to totalizing thought because of the top-down control and legibility they require.) The corporate or neoliberal mindset that became dominant post-Cold War is quite totalizing—it may not be as bad as communism, but the relevant point is that unlike communism, it is educated millennials’ native habitat, and they are more likely influenced by its reasoning than the Soviets’.

Such reasoning has erased many connections older people think is common sense, but, as you say, your views on race were “received as gospel,” and you “were saturated” in them. You didn’t arrive at them by logical reasoning so much as absorption from the environment. When millennials reached adulthood, they weren’t fortunate enough to be surrounded by the inspiring rhetoric of Martin Luther King, Jr., or even traditional American self-reliance. Rather, as your correspondent said, “Many millennials, myself included, have spent a majority of our adult lives adjusting to academic settings and polarized political environments dominated by the terms and attitudes contained in Baylor training manual….It actively thrives in everyday circles and even dominates the discussions of professionals, shaping the decisions of professional and public institutions. In that sense, I imagine that most working millennials who read your article experience the adoption of these new terms as [ei]ther good or inconsequential.” (My emphasis).

King spoke of individual conscience, human dignity, and creative maladjustment. Many young people have only heard such ideas equated with frivolous and irresponsible behavior. The result is that rejecting the system brings to mind not images of liberation and independence, but losing your health insurance. This is why so many focus on on policing issues via institutions, especially Human Resources departments. They are used to systems of pervasive authority, and have been taught to obey it. The training manual language is not the language of capitalism or socialism, but of bureaucratic control in its many forms. You ask, “Or what if you simply resent being manipulated and coerced like this?” The purpose of such language is to deaden the natural revulsion to heavy-handed manipulation of oneself and others.

It’s getting worse with younger generations. At this point, the starting point of discussions has to be “utopia is not possible,” because it doesn’t appear this has been conveyed, and it is still mostly absent from the conversation. That assumption is fundamental to classical liberalism.

Free speech norms are not the failed product of well-intended people who thought good ideas would win out in the end—it’s not premised on perfection. It is premised on the idea that government interference with speech (with some narrow exceptions) guarantees constant conflict, because you won’t get universal agreement on anything, least of all controversial or political issues. And it’s dangerous because such an authority, once established, can be wielded by anyone who comes to power in the future.

But such dynamics can easily seem counterintuitive absent historical context and concrete illustrations. Especially those raised in illusions of a meritocratic, expert-managed utopia in which we know all the right answers and expressing doubts equates to being “difficult” or “weird.” (Some people do involve their infants in politics today, at least for the photo ops, but few are apt to teach their toddlers about the Constitution—people might think they are weird!! Surely it’s better to just tell them to go along to get along, smile and nod, take a picture wearing the approved slogan…)

Your response pushes back on utopian thinking explicitly, which was refreshing to read. However, you frame it as a secondary point rather than the dispositive one: “This is not only unjust and unrealistic, but completely unworkable as a policy to run a society or an institution…We will never create utopia on this earth. The best we can do is to tinker with the system to patch holes when we see them, and to find the best achievable balance between liberty and equality. This is not a heroic politics, but it is a livable one. What the people at Baylor, and everywhere that social justice ideology is proclaimed and instituted, are doing is creating more injustices, and communities riven by suspicion and resentment — and constant culture war. It is not only unjust, but it also does not work.” (My emphasis.)

Such framing has been dominant, but I think that “THIS DOES NOT WORK AT ALL, AND HERE’S WHY” should be front and center! Justice and everything else is necessarily secondary—no matter how important justice is, you will not achieve it by choosing a system doomed to collapse or even backfire, so choosing such a system can never be justified. But in order to understand this, people must know they have options other than obeying or seizing control of whatever existing power arrangements happen to be in place at a given moment.

What a great letter. Lots to think about here. First thing that comes to mind is the (entirely understandable) error so many Boomer parents like mine made: thinking that so much of what they took for granted as The Way The World Works was stable, and didn’t need to be articulated, explained, or defended to their kids.

Cultural change has only accelerated since the 1960s. I hear from young pastors that what they’re now seeing is that much of what older generations thought of as “Christianity” was really just cultural habit — and that actual Christian religion, having depended too heavily on a cultural framework, is collapsing among the young, who were formed, and are being formed, by a very different cultural framework.

An example: for Christians of my generation (Gen X) and older, the idea that marriage is one man and one woman, exclusively, was obvious, based on Scripture and tradition. It still is very clear, I think, but it is not seen that way by Millennials and Gen Z, who were raised in a culture in which sex, gender, and sexuality is far more fluid and detached from the authority of tradition, Scripture, and anything other than the sovereign self. Older Christians, if they’re paying attention, find themselves having to make arguments for things that were not contested before. Sexual orientation and gender identity are by no means the only ones, but they are the most fundamental, I think, among Christians.

What if we have been so focused on how morality has been shifting — whether to celebrate it as evolving progressively, or to lament it as declining — that we have ignored a concomitant shift in political values? For an illiberal person of either the left of the right, this values shift can be seen as both positive and negative. But for older citizens who, whether left-wing or right-wing, were formed by the broad values of liberalism (e.g, free speech, religious liberty, freedom of association) — we might well be politically what my Boomer parents were religiously: people who took far too much for granted, and failed to prepare our kids for the world as it is.

The post A Millennial’s Guide To Millennial Anti-Wokeness appeared first on The American Conservative.

Why Wokeness Is A Big Deal

A reader wants to know why I write so ofter about wokeness at Baylor University — as distinct, I take it, from other universities. There are a couple of answers to that question.

First, I used to live in Texas, and developed a number of friends and acquaintances at Baylor. I have a network there, even of people I never met, but who inevitably know someone I do. People leak things to me. Nobody is leaking things to me from other universities like they leak to me from Baylor.

More importantly, if they were, I would probably be less inclined to write about it. It’s not news when a public or private university embraces wokeness. It’s not even really news when a Catholic university does. It is news, however, when a big Baptist university deep in the heart of Texas does. This is particularly so when well within my own memory — in the first decade of this century — Baylor’s leadership at the time aspired for it to become a bastion of Christian orthodoxy in higher education. This was so attractive that some Catholic scholars told me back then that they preferred teaching there. Tom Hibbs, who moved to Baylor around 2003 to run the Honors College (and who recently became president of the University of Dallas), said at the time that he felt far more free to be an orthodox Catholic at Baptist Baylor than he did at his previous institution, the Catholic Boston College. I was a big public champion of Baylor’s vision and mission back then.

So it has been really striking — and dismaying — to watch the university transform itself so swiftly into an oasis of wokeness. I get the main reason why this happened: the Baylor football sexual assault scandal, which ran from 2011 to 2016, and cost the university president, Ken Starr, his job. It’s hard to make a plausible case for conservatism on campus when the conservative administration let that happen. Mind you, it’s not logical to blame “conservatism” for what happened, much less to claim that progressivism/wokeness is the cure. But that’s where we are. Anyway, I watch what’s happening to Baylor as a rare case (well, the only one I can think of) in which a Christian university that only the day before yesterday sought to establish and maintain a conservative-ish identity, now flipping overnight to embrace the opposite. This week, I spoke to a conservative white Evangelical, age 23, doing graduate work, and he told me it’s mind-boggling how many of the conservative white Evangelical professors at his undergraduate alma mater are now embracing Critical Race Theory, and seeing no conflict with their morals, politics, or philosophy. Something big is happening, and it’s happening all over.

I received the following letter last night from a reader, who gives me permission to publish it so long as I take his name off. He identifies himself as a lawyer and Baylor alumnus. It was a challenge to me, made honestly and graciously; I accept it. First, here’s what he wrote:

Today I read — with great interest — your piece, “‘Equity’ is Not ‘Equality’, Comrade.”   I received a link to the article from a Baylor professor with whom I share many laments about the school’s direction, albeit on different grounds from those expressed in your recent commentary.  If you don’t mind, I would like to share some thoughts and respectfully pose a challenge.

For all the fine points you make, I truly see a chasm between what you and your youngest readers see as obvious truth.  I am among the readers whose ears do not find terms such as “whiteness” to be jarring, but I nevertheless listen to your concerns without understanding the arguments for why such terms are so threatening and conjure imagery of tyranny and soviet socialism. Why must one lead to the other?

Many millennials, myself included, have spent a majority of our adult lives adjusting to academic settings and polarized political environments dominated by the terms and attitudes contained in Baylor training manual. I submit that the concepts it contains are hardly specialized.  Wokeness is no longer the exclusive domain of the progressive activist or the left-leaning Twitter mob. It actively thrives in everyday circles and even dominates the discussions of professionals, shaping the decisions of professional and public institutions. In that sense, I imagine that most working millennials who read your article experience the adoption of these new terms as other good or inconsequential. I am relatively conservative and worry about free speech much more than the prospect of my fellow citizens deciding to adopt socialism if they so choose.

Although you and I probably agree on a lot of things, I am not clear on how we get from a recognition of something like racial injustice and the desire to remedy it to the dystopia you seem to warn about.  At the risk of oversimplifying a task that would require some intellectual heavy lifting, I would propose a chart showing three things, each in their own vertical column: (1) a woke/progressive value; (2) why it is mistaken; and (3) how it directly leads to the consequences you believe it will have. Alternatively, a chart or narrative showing the logical steps from correct values, to erroneous values, to socialism.  Would you please consider making some of these connections for some of your readers?

For example, why is allyship problematic? An employee who objects to forced allyship should capitalize on the freedom they have in this country to seek employment elsewhere. It is a longstanding truth that you are not required to agree with what your government on everything it stands for, and those whose beliefs pose an irreconcilable conflict that keeps them from performing essential job duties or feel unwelcome should work elsewhere. I know many private businesses whose values align perfectly with such a conservative, Christian worldview and would gladly welcome such people among their ranks.  Christians such as you and I do not need to feel welcome, or even tolerated, everywhere.  So why does allyship, or even whiteness, portend such dire consequences? Is it simply because ideas with which conservatives disagree will soon have the force of law?

I have attached an example of a type of chart that could show how an argument might proceed, not that you need it from me.  I took the time to make it because I know you are a serious intellectual and I want to hear more of your arguments.

But respectfully, you might consider showing exactly how you arrive at your end point.  Your conclusions and predictions may very well be right, but I do not yet see it clearly.  To use the below attachment as an hypothetical example (not reflecting anything I’ve heard you argue), how do we proceed from step to step? Does the progressive takeover of educational institutions guarantee changes in that the voting majority will be progressive? Does a progressive worldview of the voting majority necessitate a progressive public policy, not to mention one that is upheld as constitutional?  Without recognizing the immense barriers progressive ideas would have to destroy in order to create the dystopia you suggest, potential consequences of perceived destructive ideological danger are purely speculative (however logical they may be).

I hope I do not presume to tell you your business, seriously misunderstand your column, or show myself a fool for not clearly seeing a cause-and-effect between progressive values and an American dystopia. Whatever progressive path Baylor or our country takes, I pray it evolves into an opportunity not for fear, but to discover truth, and allows good people who share our faith to act as witnesses to the love God has for all people.

Regardless, I look forward to enjoying your new book and will continue to read your columns.

Here’s the chart the reader made:



I appreciate the tone of the reader’s letter, and the chance to explain myself more clearly.

I’ll start by saying something that Millennial and Gen Z readers probably don’t appreciate, because it happened before their time. It is hard to overstate the degree to which people of my generation (I’m 53, Gen X) were saturated with Martin Luther King-style race liberalism growing up — the “not the color of your skin, but the content of your character” stuff. It was true, and received like gospel by many of us — even though, as fellow white Southerners can tell you, it caused conflict with older Southern relatives. We were told about the evil of segregation and Jim Crow, saw the injustice of it, and saw the solution to it as doing away with all structures and practices that treated people differently on the basis of skin color or ethnic origin.

This led a number of us — conservatives, anyway — to oppose affirmative action on the principle that you do not battle the effects of unjust discrimination by imposing unjust discrimination. This gets to a deeper principle that separates conservatives from liberals on these matters. Generally speaking, conservatives believe justice requires equality of opportunity; liberals believe it requires equality of outcome.

So, on the conservative view, if a city’s population were, say, 30 percent black, but the number of blacks on an office team made up only five percent, that fact alone would not be evidence of racism. It might be a sign of racism, if there were indications that people of color faced barriers to being hired in that firm, but it’s not dispositive.

But this is not at all what today’s antiracist ideology holds. As Coleman Hughes writes in his review of Ibram X. Kendi’s How To Be Antiracist:

If the book has a core thesis, it is that this war admits of no neutral parties and no ceasefires. For Kendi, “there is no such thing as a not-racist idea,” only “racist ideas and antiracist ideas.” His Manichaean outlook extends to policy. “Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity,” Kendi proclaims, defining the former as racist policies and the latter as antiracist ones.

Every policy? That question was posed to Kendi by Vox cofounder Ezra Klein, who gave the hypothetical example of a capital-gains tax cut. Most of us think of the capital-gains tax, if we think about it at all, as a policy that is neutral as regards questions of race or racism. But given that blacks are underrepresented among stockowners, Klein asked, would it be racist to support a capital-gains tax cut? “Yes,” Kendi answered, without hesitation. And in case you planned on escaping the charge of racism by remaining agnostic on the capital-gains tax, that won’t work either, because Kendi defines a racist as anyone who supports “a racist policy through their actions or inaction.”

This is not only unjust and unrealistic, but completely unworkable as a policy to run a society or an institution. But “antiracism” has been embraced uncritically by many universities and other institutions. Baylor University, for example, is teaching antiracism to its undergraduates. It’s a good example, in fact, of how these radicals use language to conceal the radicalism of their claims.

What is the opposite of antiracist? Pro-racist? Racist? Nobody wants to be on the opposite side of antiracism. So if you are presented with the opportunity to endorse antiracism, unless you really understand what’s going on, you are likely to do so. Besides, who is going to be the brave Baylor freshman who stands up in the “cultural humility” class and dissents from the antiracism doctrine the instructor is proclaiming? Who is going to be the brave employee to out himself as a potential racist in the eyes of his company by saying he doesn’t buy this stuff?

My correspondent said he didn’t understand why this stuff made people like me think of totalitarianism. Here is a passage from my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies, in which Pawel Skibinski, a Warsaw historian, talks about how totalitarians use language in a particular way to manipulate others:

Skibiński focuses on language as a preserver of cultural memory. We know that communists forbade people to talk about history in unapproved ways. This is a tactic today’s progressives use as well, especially within universities.

What is harder for contemporary people to appreciate is how we are repeating the Marxist habit of falsifying language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning. Propaganda not only changes the way we think about politics and contemporary life but it also conditions what a culture judges worth remembering.

I mention the way liberals today deploy neutral-sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives. And they imbue other words and phrases— — hierarchy, for example, or traditional family — with negative connotations.

Recalling life under communism, the professor continues, “The people who lived only within such a linguistic sphere, who didn’t know any other way to speak, they could really start believing in this way of using of words. If a word carries with it negative baggage, it becomes impossible to have a discussion about the phenomenon.”

Teaching current generations of college students who grew up in the postcommunist era is challenging because they do not have a natural immunity to the ideological abuse of language. “For me, it’s obvious. I remember this false use of language. But for our students, it’s impossible to understand.”

I would say to my correspondent: “Do you see how the very term ‘antiracism’ as it is used conditions and manipulates the discussion of racial conflict, racial discrimination, and how to discuss it? If you object to anything that the self-described antiracist educators propose, you open yourself up to accusations of being racist.”

Many of those same woke terms work in the same way. They frame the discussion in a way that leads to particular conclusions.

The reader brings up “whiteness,” another common term and concept in woke discourse. There is nothing in principle wrong with studying the social construction of the concept of what it means to be white. For example, there was a time in this country when Italians were not thought to be white. How did that change? What does it mean? This is certainly fair to study, as is “white supremacy,” which historically refers to the apartheid-like social and legal system of the pre-Civil Rights South.

But social justice discourse uses the concept of “white” in a specific way. James Lindsay’s essential “Translations From The Wokish” dictionary explaining, in plain English, the meaning of social justice jargon, in this entry explains what these activists mean by things “white.”

I don’t want to get into the specifics here — spend some time on Lindsay’s dictionary, and you’ll learn a lot about the way we speak today — but I simply want to point out that the discourse the social justice/Critical Race Theory people use is a tool for redistributing power on the basis of identity, and manufacturing consent of those to be disempowered by manipulating the way they think and speak. If you are familiar with Marxist-Leninist terminology and discourse, you will be all too aware that that form of totalitarianism saw people not in terms of individuals, but in terms of group identity.

Which brings us to this passage from Live Not By Lies:

One imagines an entry-level worker at a Fortune 500 firm, or an untenured university lecturer, suffering through the hundredth workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and doing their very best not to be suspected of dissent. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it at all. As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives. They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.

For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship. The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

A softer, bloodless form of the same logic is at work in American institutions. Social justice progressives advance their malignant concept of justice in part by terrorizing dissenters as thoroughly as any inquisitor on the hunt for enemies of religious orthodoxy.

This, to answer my correspondent’s question, is what is wrong with “allyship.” What does it mean to declare yourself to be an “ally” of, say, a gay colleague? You wish to identify that you support him. Fine and good. I am an Orthodox Christian, but if I worked in an office, I would strive to support all my co-workers in our common project. But what if I believed that declaring that I was an “ally” violated my conscience, by coercing me to appear to endorse homosexuality itself? Is it not possible to be committed to supporting my gay co-worker, and treating him fairly, without publicly endorsing everything about him? In fact, anyone who declined to declare themselves to be an “ally” of someone for any reason — sexuality, race, whatever — would immediately be suspect.

Why won’t you sign? Are you a bigot? If you’re not a bigot, then why won’t you sign? And so forth. It’s a form of coercion, one that has nothing whatsoever to do with being a good co-worker or fellow student. Imagine that you are an office worker or student in the 1950s, as the Cold War was raging. Your office requires all workers to attend a course on “100 Percent Americanism,” and at the end, requests that everybody sign a Pledge of Loyalty to America, and wear an American flag lapel.

What if you love your country, but dissent from some of the claims in the 100 Percent Americanism program? Like, what if the program’s manifesto claimed that American democracy was a perfect form of government. That’s not true, you think; look at legal segregation, and how it treats black citizens. Besides, you think, what does any of this have to do with what we do at this factory: make widgets?

Or what if you simply resent being manipulated and coerced like this? So you don’t sign the Pledge, and you don’t war the flag pin on your lapel. Now you have to worry that all your co-workers will wonder if you are secretly a Communist. After all, if you loved America, why would you refuse the Pledge and the pin?

You see the point?

It was helpful to me that the Baylor alumnus wrote that

Wokeness is no longer the exclusive domain of the progressive activist or the left-leaning Twitter mob. It actively thrives in everyday circles and even dominates the discussions of professionals, shaping the decisions of professional and public institutions. In that sense, I imagine that most working millennials who read your article experience the adoption of these new terms as other good or inconsequential.

I have been saying for some time that what had been confined to campuses has become far more general. It is a very bad sign, though, that “most working millennials … experience the adoption of these new terms as [either] good or inconsequential.”

They are neither. That this comment came from an educated Millennial professional, making it in good faith, makes me hopeful that Live Not By Lies will be useful in combatting this ideology. From the book:

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

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

See his point? Marxist discourse was confined to academics for a long time, until suddenly it wasn’t. Ordinary people found their lives controlled by concepts that had only decades earlier been confined to professorial journals and discussions. Similarly, now that wokeness has spread like wildfire through elites and their networks, we are going to have to deal with it, and the destruction it causes, for a very long time.

If it provided a truthful and accurate view of the way the world worked, that would be one thing. But it is an ideological system loaded with malicious assumptions, though, like Marxism, it aims to rectify injustice. Bo Winegard, an academic who was “cancelled” for his heretical opinions, quotes Kendi to make an important point here:

The NBA example is a good one. No one wants the NBA to “look like America.” So why aren’t the professional antiracists concerned about the NBA? Where is the moral consistency? If there’s no moral consistency, you might wonder if the wokeness/antiracist ideology is not really about “social justice” and “fixing the original sin of racism,” and is really about something else. More deeply, I invite my correspondent to consider that some of the problems of racial injustice cannot be fixed without destroying valuable liberties, and leaving everybody worse off. This was exactly the experience of peoples under Communism. As I wrote above, they began with a certain ideal of social justice, and ended up oppressing, impoverishing, imprisoning, and even exterminating millions in their quest to eliminate inequality. Good intentions and worthy goals to not grant moral absolution.

Going back to the reader’s letter, I should clarify that I don’t really worry about economic socialism. I don’t want to live under it, but that’s not my primary concern in my writing about wokeness and social justice. I’m far more interested in the way this ideology stands to affect free speech, freedom of association, religious liberty, and racial discrimination. One reason that I particularly grieve the way it is taking hold at Baylor, a Christian university, is because I believe it is a counterfeit of true social justice, as I explain in this passage from Live Not By Lies:

The term social justice has long been associated with Christianity, especially Catholic Christianity (the term was coined by a nineteenth-century Jesuit), though now it has been embraced by younger Evangelicals. In Catholic social teaching, “social justice” is the idea that individuals have a responsibility to work for the common good, so that all can live up to their dignity as creatures fashioned in God’s image. In the traditional view, social justice is about addressing structural barriers to fairness among groups in a given society. It is based in large part on Christ’s teachings about the importance of mercy and compassion to the poor and the outcast.

But Christian social justice is difficult to reconcile with secular ideals of social justice. One reason is that the former depends on the biblical concept of what a human being is—including the purpose for which all people were created. This presumes a transcendent moral order, proclaimed in Scripture and, depending on one’s confession, the authoritative teachings of the church. A just social order is one that makes it easier for people to be good.

Peter Maurin, cofounder of the Catholic Worker movement, was a truly Christian social justice warrior. (Interestingly, Father Kolaković introduced Maurin’s writing to his Family in Bratislava.) Maurin distinguished Christian social justice from the godless Marxist view. For Marxists, social justice meant an equal distribution of society’s material goods. By contrast, Christian social justice sought to create conditions of unity that enabled all people—rich and poor alike—to live in solidarity and mutual charity as pilgrims on the road to unity with Christ.

In our time, secular social justice has been shorn of its Christian dimension. Because they defend a particular code of sexual morality and gender categories, Christians are seen by progressives as the enemies of social justice. Catholic philosopher Michael Hanby insightfully links sexual radicalism to the scientific roots of the Myth of Progress. He has written that “the sexual revolution is, at bottom, the technological revolution and its perpetual war against natural limits applied externally to the body and internally to our self-understanding.”

Without Christianity and its belief in the fallibility of human nature, secular progressives tend to rearrange their bigotries and call it righteousness. Christianity teaches that all men and women—not just the wealthy, the powerful, the straight, the white, and all other so-called oppressors—are sinners in need of the Redeemer. All men and women are called to confession and repentance. “Social justice” that projects unrighteousness solely onto particular groups is a perversion of Christian teaching. Reducing the individual to her economic status or her racial, sexual, or gender identity is an anthropological error. It is untrue, and therefore unjust.

Moreover, for Christians, no social order that denies sin, erecting structures or approving practices that alienate man from his Creator, can ever be just. Contrary to secular social justice activists, protecting the right to abortion is always unjust. So is any proposal—like same-sex marriage—that ratifies sin and undermines the natural family. In a 1986 encyclical, Pope John Paul II denounced a “spirit of darkness” that deceitfully posits “God as an enemy of his own creature, and in the first place as an enemy of man, as a source of danger and threat to man.”

Christians cannot endorse any form of social justice that denies biblical teaching. That includes schemes that apply identity politics categories to the life of the church. For example, answering calls to “decolonize” the church means imposing identity politics categories onto theology and worship, turning the faith into radical leftism at prayer.

Faithful Christians must work for social justice, but can only do so in context of fidelity to the full Christian moral and theological vision through which we understand the meaning of justice. Any social justice campaign that implies that the God of the Bible is an enemy of man and his happiness is fraudulent and must be rejected.

Any theory or scheme of social justice that holds out members of any group to be morally innocent or morally guilty by virtue of their membership in that group cannot be reconciled with Christianity. Period. Any social justice scheme that construes membership in a community solely in terms of power relations, absent factors like grace, mercy, solidarity, and sacrificial love, cannot be reconciled to Christianity.

So, to return before ending to the reader’s chart:

I contest the premises.

First, what do we mean by “disparate treatment, de facto or under law”? I don’t really disagree with this, but I think we should recognize that disparate treatment can be just under certain conditions. For example, the Supreme Court has rightly held that religious institutions, given their nature, have the right to hire only people who share a commitment to the ideals and practices of that institution. That is disparate treatment, but it’s a byproduct of laws guaranteeing religious liberty — an important principle of liberal democracy.

Second, I strongly disagree with the idea of “racial equity.” Nobody can deny that a history of disparate treatment has had material consequences for victims of these laws and practices. But this is a fact of complex human societies. The factors that lead to positive or negative outcomes for individuals are so vast and complicated that it is impossible to come up with a scheme to make outcomes more uniform.

Ibram Kendi believes that supporting a capital gains tax cut is racist because blacks are historically underrepresented among stockholders. Well, guess what: country people, both white and black, in south Louisiana are historically underrepresented among stockholders. So are Vietnamese immigrants. If a capital gains tax cut is immoral, it’s not because most black people, or Southern rural people, or Vietnamese immigrants, don’t own lots of stock. Kendi’s scheme is absurd.

Some people are born with natural advantages over others. Physically attractive people have a natural advantage when it comes to gaining film roles. Unusually tall people have a natural advantage when it comes to joining a professional basketball team.

Others are born to social advantage — their parents are wealthier than others, or better connected. But this is complicated stuff. Perhaps that social advantage comes from their parents’ way of life. In Hillbilly Elegy, J.D. Vance talks about the chaotic life he had growing up poor and/or working class in Appalachia, and how that way of life conditioned him to fail at holding a job. If not for the US Marine Corps causing the seeds of discipline his grandmother planted within him to seed and ultimately bear fruit, he might not been able to finish college and become a success. Vance is white, but was born into a broken family without wealth, and to a mother who struggled with drug addiction. What does “whiteness” mean to him, and his success? Is the son of a wealthy black New Orleans lawyer disadvantaged by his blackness, and Vance, who grew up poor in Appalachia, advantaged by his whiteness?

It’s impossible to sort this stuff out. There are so many contingencies. Kamala Harris’s father was from Jamaica, as Barack Obama’s was from Kenya. Neither are the descendants of African slaves brought to America. How can they be considered disadvantaged for social justice purposes? Are they disadvantaged, while the successful children of my friends who immigrated from Ukraine two decades ago, arriving here speaking little English, with almost nothing in their pockets, considered advantaged, because of the color of their skin? When I lived in Dallas, I knew a young man whose skin was as white as mine. He was a Bosnian Muslim who came to America with his mom and dad as a little boy, a war refugee. They arrived penniless, and spoke not a word of English. He was a very hard worker, and a cheerful guy. He managed a restaurant when I knew him. I don’t know if he ever went to college, and in any case I imagine he must be nearly 40 today, but let’s say he ended up at Baylor today, a guy with his background. What does “whiteness” mean to him? How is he an oppressor of people of color — this Bosnian Muslim who arrived with nothing, not even a word of English?

Like I said, impossible to sort out. I believe that a just social order will provide for equality of opportunity, and maintain a structure that enables people who live fairly, with self-discipline, and work hard, to achieve reward for their efforts. I do not believe that guaranteeing certain outcomes for people on the basis of factors inherent to their identity (including, I should say, legacy admissions to elite colleges) is just.

So, to answer the question posed by my correspondent’s chart, Step 3 is wrong because it is based on a fatally flawed premise in Step 2. Put crudely, it requires robbing a man who came by what he has honestly to compensate a man who has less, perhaps through no fault of his own — but that doesn’t give him a right to the first man’s property.

What I strongly encourage people like my correspondent to do is to think very hard on the difference between equality and equity, and whether the loss of freedoms required to bring about a society that is equitable (not just in material terms) is worth it, or is even fair. And, I encourage y’all to meditate on the experience of the USSR and the Soviet bloc, and how badly the entire system ran because it allocated positions of responsibility not to those who knew how to do their jobs, but on the basis of ideology.

We will never create utopia on this earth. The best we can do is to tinker with the system to patch holes when we see them, and to find the best achievable balance between liberty and equality. This is not a heroic politics, but it is a livable one. What the people at Baylor, and everywhere that social justice ideology is proclaimed and instituted, are doing is creating more injustices, and communities riven by suspicion and resentment — and constant culture war. It is not only unjust, but it also does not work.

The fact that young Americans born and raised after the end of the Cold War have no idea what communism was, how it worked, and why it destroyed societies, is a grave error on the part of our educational institutions. I hope my little book Live Not By Lies helps to turn things around.

UPDATE: A reader responds:

Here is another way to respond that I think is worth considering: an analogy to Mark Regnerus’s Cheap Sex.

I’m assuming you have read the book (you have blogged on it right?) [Note: Yes, here. — RD] here so I’ll speak generally. Regnerus is showing how sex and the drive for sex is not just another desire among others, but rather it is a drive that is deeply rooted in us and which structures our society. It cannot simply be disentangled from our entire social order. We might have though sexual liberation would be an unqualified good–more sex and therefore more pleasure for everyone. But it didn’t work out that way. By messing with the natural order of sex, we have undermined society. And liberating sex has actually made is less pleasurable and we do less of it.

I think there is a critique of the Woke that is very similar only instead of sex for everyone, it is more like status/honor/power for everyone. But not status/honor/power the traditional way–earned via social contribution–but status/honor/power as being given. As though status/honor/power is this good that the state can divy up and distribute like money. Moreover, the status/honor/power is given according to a standard that represents an inversion of the value system that rewards competency: status/honor/power is achieved by victimhood status.

This is approaching Nietzsche’s critique of Christianity. I think Nietzsche was criticizing a distortion of Christianity, but that is what wokeness is: a perverted interpretation of the “first shall be last”.

What are the social consequences of this inversion of values? Or “cheap status”? I think it will be ruinous in the same category that cheap sex has been and every bit as undermining of the social order.

The post Why Wokeness Is A Big Deal appeared first on The American Conservative.

Brayden Harrington, Hero

Joe Biden’s speech at the convention last night was good — not a barn-burner, but upbeat, inspiring, optimistic, and refreshingly normal. We could use refreshingly normal.

But the speech of the evening belonged to Brayden Harrington, a 13 year old boy who stutters, and who explained how Joe Biden, who also stutters, gave him advice on how to speak more clearly when you give a speech. Brayden expressed his thanks for how Biden comforted and inspired him. Check this two-minute speech out:

I have a son who stutters, and let me tell you, as hard as it looked for Brayden to give that little talk, I assure you that it was far, far more difficult. I had tears in my eyes last night watching that brave kid struggle to say his words — tears, because I know from raising a boy who stutters how much courage and grit it took for him to stand before a camera and give that message.

So, this morning, it was a shock to see what a Catholic writer friend of mine tweeted. John Hendrickson, an Atlantic editor who is a stutterer, and who wrote a long, fantastic piece in January on Biden’s struggle with stuttering, called him out:

Austin, it may not surprise you to learn, is author of the recently published The Catholic Case For Trump. The book is 208 pages long, but that one word — “W-w-w-w-w-w-what?” — tells you all you need to know about its case, from this author. This is a particularly nasty case of what Adam Serwer once said about Trump and his supporters: “The cruelty is the point.”

I only hope Austin never has to watch a child suffer as my wife and I have had to do with our son, or the Harrington family has had to do with theirs. I’m not a Biden supporter, but I have long found his natural empathy with people to be the most appealing thing about him. Austin Ruse’s tweet this morning really brings that home — and brings home the contrast between Biden and Trump.

UPDATE: A reader points out that Ruse was not making fun of Brayden, but Joe Biden for stuttering. If that is true, then I apologize for accusing him of mocking Brayden, but I still think it is revolting that he would make fun of Biden or anybody else for stuttering. Again, I have a son who stutters, and understand with particular insight the kind of pain that people who stutter, especially kids, go through, especially when people make fun of them.

The post Brayden Harrington, Hero appeared first on The American Conservative.

Joe Biden, President Of Cardi B(abylon)

Maybe you read my short jeremiad about “Cuties,” the upcoming Netflix series that sexualizes 11 year old girls. Well, this morning I had to go to the grocery store, and was listening in the car to a discussion on the NPR talk show 1A, in which the guests were talking about the standout pop culture moments this summer. 

The host asked them about the mega-hit “WAP” by Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion. I wrote about it here last week. Here are some of the lyrics that I posted:

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah

Yeah, you fu*kin’ with some wet-a*s pu*sy

Bring a bucket and a mop for this wet-a*s pu*sy

Give me everything you got for this wet-a*s pu*sy

Those are among the cleanest lyrics in the entire song. Here is a link to lyrics for the whole thing. 

If you don’t want to read them — and I don’t blame you — you should at least know that the two women who sing it talk about how they want to be forced to perform oral sex until they are gagging and choking. They portray themselves as whores (their word) who have sex for money. And

I’m a freak bitch, handcuffs, leashes … You can’t hurt my feelings, but I like pain.

There’s even dirtier stuff, but you get the picture.

This song debuted at No. 1. It was streamed a record 93 million times in the US in its first week of release, and the video was seen over 60 million times within 48 hours of its release. Cardi B., who once worked as a stripper, and has spoken of how back then, she would invite men to hotel rooms to drug and rob them, instagrammed about being so grateful that “I want to hug the LORD.”

OK, so that’s “WAP”. It is the cultural mainstream. If you haven’t heard of it, then that just shows how far out of the mainstream you are in 2020. How mainstream is Cardi B.? Elle magazine, which put her on the cover, had Cardi B. do a live Zoom interview with the Democratic nominee for President of the United States.

Joe Biden told her that

One of the things that I admire about you is that you keep talking about what I call equity—decency, fairness, and treating people with respect.

Right. Nothing says “respect” like rapping about how you want a man to put his genitals in your mouth until you choke.

What a sick joke this culture is. I’ve said before that I believe Donald Trump is a morally repulsive man. But I don’t want to hear anyone talk about how Joe Biden is such a moral exemplar when he is willing to embrace someone who stands for the things that Cardi B. does. This is something I do not understand about the progressive elites. On NPR this morning, the guests on 1A (here, just past the 13:00 mark) were talking about “WAP” and the reaction to it. A writer for Billboard lauds “the sexual freedom of this song,” and laments the double standard that lets male rappers get away with sexually explicit songs without criticism. He adds that — “Cardi and Megan have huge young fan bases,” the writer said. He believes that the fact that women rappers have triumphed with such a sexually explicit song is therefore “really remarkable as a cultural shift.”

What he means in context — listen to it yourself to understand — is that Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion are teaching young girls that they can be just as raunchy as boys, with no apology.

On the show, the black writer Brooke Obie praised the song as an example of “women singing about their own bodies and what they want.” It is “empowering,” said Obie. She added:

“People are upset because whenever a woman is actually owning her own sexuality, and not being objectified, there is a kind of conservatism that goes with this.”

Yeah, read the lyrics. There’s nothing that says “empowering” and “not being objectified” like that.

I know perfectly well that this is not the first time a rap song has had filthy lyrics. What is so remarkable to me is how completely mainstream this stuff is now, to the point where a presidential nominee wants to associate himself with a singer of this filth.

Just before our first child was born, back in 1999, my wife and I watched a PBS Frontline episode called “The Lost Children of Rockdale County.” It was about a syphilis outbreak in a high school in a prosperous Atlanta suburb. As the state (and Frontline) investigated, what emerged was a destructive culture of reckless, promiscuous sexuality — orgies with high schoolers, but including some middle schoolers — and parental neglect. Read the transcript here. Excerpt:

INTERVIEWER: Did any of the girls describe the sex as pleasurable?

Prof. CLAIRE STERK: Initially, they described the sex as pleasurable, and pleasurable in terms of it being physically pleasurable, but also psychologically, like, this was a initiation into the next step of their life. It was part of their development that was taking place. Over time, however, very few of the girls talked about the sex in terms of it being pleasurable at all. It became something that was painful, that in some cases they couldn’t even remember what they did anymore. So it became very negative.

INTERVIEWER: Do you ever think they might have done it because they wanted to be accepted by the boys?

D.J.: I don’t think it was a real pressure issue. I mean, it might have been for them. Subliminally, it might have been. Subconsciously, it might have been. But it really- I mean, there really wasn’t any pressure to. It was more of- they just gave in, really.

INTERVIEWER: How did the guys in general treat the girls?

AMY: They were mean to them a lot. They treated them like they were just- I don’t know, not trash, but not very, like, respectable. And the girls seemed not to care. I don’t know why. I guess they just- I think most of it was the alcohol that they were buying because the guys always bought alcohol. They just- they knew that we would like it, and so- but they didn’t treat us like we were anything real important.

INTERVIEWER: You never got angry at them?

AMY: I did a few times. But I couldn’t really do anything about it because they just- they wouldn’t care. They’d just tell me to go home or something.

INTERVIEWER: Why didn’t you?

AMY: I don’t know. I don’t know. I just- I would be alone then.

There’s a part where some of these attractive normie high school girls — remember, this is a school where 85 percent of the graduates would go on to college — are telling the interviewer about their favorite music:

NARRATOR: Katy and her friends are freshmen at one of Rockdale’s three public high schools.

INTERVIEWER: What’s the typical age for girls to lose their virginity?

KATY, BRIDGET, CHRISTINE: Thirteen. Fourteen. Thirteen or fourteen.

BRIDGET: Fourteen.

INTERVIEWER: That’s typical?

GIRLS: Uh-huh.

INTERVIEWER: What kind of music do you guys like?

GIRLS: Rap.

INTERVIEWER: Like what?

GIRLS: Like, Master P. Tupac, definitely. Oh, I love Tupac.

INTERVIEWER: What do you like about rap?

GIRLS: The beat. The beat. And the words. And it’s just, like, loud. You can really get up and dance.

CHRISTINE: And the way that it’s, like- they can talk about something that’s, like, completely stupid, like drugs and stuff. [crosstalk] But it’s the way they put it, it sounds interesting.

INTERVIEWER: Give me an example.

CHRISTINE: I can’t think of a song.

GIRLS: [singing rap] Oh, take three witches and put ’em in a [unintelligible] I take clothes off you, and I’m blowing [unintelligible] mind. Take one more before I go [unintelligible] Seven bitches get f–ked at the same time. The [unintelligible] she can suck a ding-dong all day, all night, all evening long. Bitch has never done it. She says she never tried. [unintelligible] mother-fu–ing [unintelligible] if the bitch is a good trick. Anybody can talk to a bitch and get the bitch to f–k, but how many [unintelligible] talk to a bitch and get their d–k s–ked like me? A pimp that you never saw [unintelligible]

INTERVIEWER: That’s about group sex.

GIRLS: Yeah.

INTERVIEWER: Is that something anybody does around here?

GIRLS: Uh-huh!

Please, I’m asking you, watch or read the transcript of “The Lost Children of Rockdale County”. This was 21 years ago, but it is also completely contemporary. After we watched it back in 1999, my very pregnant wife and I talked about how we would have to be a lot more vigilant about pop culture and our children than we thought. And we have tried to be. One of the great lies that parents tell themselves about pop culture is, “Oh, they thought Elvis was outrageous back in the day.” This is an argument from relativism that serves the interest of parents who honestly don’t want to be bothered patrolling the line to protect their kids. The filth of rap music was part of a wider toxic brew that those children of affluent people in suburban Atlanta stewed in. You watch that show, and it becomes crystal clear that these kids were abandoned by their parents and the adults in their lives.

Look, with reference to the lyrics in that passage above, people aren’t wrong to say that male rappers have been getting away with filth for a long time. But come on, is that really the argument worth having, the one about the double standard? I don’t want my sons to think that this is the way to treat women, or to think about sex and sexuality, or to regard their own manhood. Nor do I want my daughter to think this way, or to consider men who do to be suitable partners. Period. The observations that the NPR commenters were making today is typically trite, self-degradation-as-empowerment garbage that we hear from the left. Unsurprisingly, one of the female commenters went on to say how much she has been enjoying a cable show about strippers in Mississippi, and the empowering messages it has been sending about the dignity of sex work.

Who are these people — the ones who make these shows and who advocate for them in the media — and why do we let them into our lives?

Behold, here is Yale-educated Washington Post columnist Alyssa Rosenberg, explaining why “WAP” is “completely filthy, and we could use a lot more pop culture like it.” Excerpts:

To get the obvious out of the way, the lyrics for “WAP” and the music video for the track are among the filthiest things I’ve ever seen in mainstream American popular culture. But at a moment when movies, music and even some TV are increasingly younged-down, and when changes in the law and an unprecedented economic environment could accelerate the homogenization of entertainment, there’s something bracing about Cardi B and Megan Thee Stallion’s vulgarity. “WAP” is decidedly not for kids, nor for all adults.

And honestly, we could use more culture that isn’t appropriate for everyone.

She writes that

The mistake conservatives who attack raunchy or violent pop culture always make is to argue that culture should be smaller rather than more expansive.

And:

I sympathize with parents who feel exasperated or frightened by the way the Internet has torn down the walls that once separated “Dora the Explorer” from the enterprising strippers of Starz’s “P-Valley,” not to mention QAnon conspiracy theories, Islamic State execution videos and actual pornography. But the fact that modern parenthood is a constant race to keep parental control settings current and to stay ahead of the almighty algorithms isn’t an argument for making pop culture itself more tame and generic.

What odd criticism — as if the only reason, or the main reason, conservatives object to “WAP” is because kids are listening to it, or might listen to it.

Not that that’s a bad reason! As the late, left-wing media critic Neil Postman argued way back in 1994, in his great little book The Disappearance of Childhood, childhood as we know it ends when, thanks to technology (in his era’s case, cable television), children can have direct access to material that was once considered something that only adults had the maturity to handle.

The broader objection is that what was once considered smutty, or at least something not fit for the public square, is now completely mainstream. The fact that Joe Biden believes (probably correctly) that his campaign will benefit from being associated with the singer who has created one of “the filthiest things [a cheerleading Washington Post columnist has] ever seen in mainstream popular culture” is a remarkable sign of our decadence and decline.

You don’t have to listen to Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion, of course, but you do have to share a public square with tens of millions of people who do, and who have made their raunch mainstream entertainment. Look at that high school in Rockdale County for an idea of what becomes of a community that marinates itself in these ideas and concepts.

Back when The Benedict Option was new, I would hear arguments from some Evangelicals saying that they believed that their kids needed to stay in public school to be “salt and light” to unchurched kids. Leaving aside the fact that a lot of kids who go to Christian school are probably listening to Cardi B. too, I would still say: how are your kids going to be salt and light to a community that embraces the moral code of Cardi B.? Be honest with yourself. We are in late Rome. We are in Babylon. We are in Weimar. The people in positions of culture-making (the entertainment industry) and culture-moderating (the news media) are destroying us. Don’t be complicit. Don’t be their target. Refuse, resist, and rebel!

The post Joe Biden, President Of Cardi B(abylon) appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Cuties’

So, I worked hard yesterday morning to write a long, thoughtful post dissecting a New York Times columnist’s views on race.  And then I worked hard in the afternoon writing a long, thoughtful post dissecting the way the woke use language to deceive and indoctrinate people.

And then I see that the lunatic Laura Loomer won her Congressional primary in Florida and that Trump  halfway endorsed QAnon in his press conference, because they like him.

So I’m thinking: the world is crazy. And then I see the child porn that the filthy, disgusting Netflix is bringing us in September, and I think yeah, burn the whole damn thing down. Here is the official synopsis:

Eleven-year-old Amy lives with her mom, Mariam, and younger brother, awaiting her father to rejoin the family from Senegal. Amy is fascinated by disobedient neighbor Angelica’s free-spirited dance clique, a group that stands in sharp contrast to stoic Mariam’s deeply held traditional values. Undeterred by the girls’ initial brutal dismissal and eager to escape her family’s simmering dysfunction, Amy, through an ignited awareness of her burgeoning femininity, propels the group to enthusiastically embrace an increasingly sensual dance routine, sparking the girls’ hope to twerk their way to stardom at a local dance contest.

Eleven. Years. Old. Here’s the trailer:

Twerking their way to stardom. Eleven years old. Reed Hastings is the founder and CEO of Netflix. Here is he and his leadership team — the whole lot of them grooming little girls for sexual exploitation. These are little girls, and this Netflix show has the acting like strippers as a way of finding their way to liberation.

What is wrong with these Netflix people? Do they not have children? Do they think our daughters are only valuable insofar as they can cosplay as sluts who are sexually available to men? What is wrong with you, Netflix? How can you live with yourself, sexually exploiting children like this?

There is nothing politicians can do about this. But it sure does make me care less about the crackpottery going on with the Republican Party when filth like this, which is beyond the ability of politics to address, goes mainstream.

Reed Hastings. I hope sometime this fall a Senate committee calls him to Capitol Hill and forces him to talk about how proud he is that he has 11 year olds twerking on his degenerate network.

 

The post ‘Cuties’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Equity’ Is Not ‘Equality,’ Comrade

A reader who works for a federal agency (he asked me not to disclose which one) writes about his recent experience in a leadership training program.

Twenty percent of the training, 1 day’s worth, is devoted to woke diversity.  I have attached the sanitized version of the power point that was presented to us.  Going back, I realized this document did not have all the woke aspects that were presented to us.

I have spent decades in liberal bastions of academia (student, grad student and professor on the tenure track) and federal government.  Diversity has been preached as a good unto itself.  But diversity trainings have changed over time.  They have become much more woke.

1. Equity instead of equality.  Equality is no longer the goal.  Rather equity and ensuring equal outcomes.  The examples were that pay, bonuses, raises, etc were provided the same across racial groups. The trainer did not mention equality or equal opportunity at all.   It was all about equity and equal outcomes.

2. Allyship.  It is no longer acceptable for people to exhibit tolerance.  We must be allies who accept and embrace however people identify themselves.  One of the largest topics was allyship particularly for LGBTQ.  I must accept and embrace sinful behavior or else.  I can’t just tolerate and work with people fairly, I must embrace all aspects of them and their behavior.

3.  The training had the beginnings of a struggle session.  The facilitator stressed repeatedly and at length that we need to make ourselves uncomfortable by self introspection and that we should change our beliefs.

4. The facilitator repeatedly associated the term “Fair and balanced” with bigoted and biased people whose actions are clearly discriminatory.

This is in  the Trump administration.  I can’t even begin to imagine how bad things will become when this training is given in the Biden administration.  But this is the carryover from the Obama administration.  One of the major initiatives from the Obama administration was “Cultural Transformation” and increases in the Civil Rights HR staff.  Those same people who were hired then are still in here now.  Trump just does not seem competent enough to root out this evil.

Please understand clearly what this federal agency manager is saying: it is not enough to be fair and tolerant; you must affirm, or you are seen as a bigot.

People also really need to educate themselves on the difference between “equity” and “equality”. You see the word “equity” used a lot by these diversocrats, and it’s very easy to think that it’s just a synonym for equality. Not so. Prof. Jeff Polet has a good piece up at the Law & Liberty site explaining how “equity” really means the end of equality. Excerpts:

Official policy recommendations no longer argue for racial equality but for equity. The transition has been so seamless and so uncommented upon that its occurrence may strike the observer as inconsequential. Many, to the degree they reflect on the change in usage, might regard the words as synonymous. But for those of us who cling to the rapidly diminishing view that words are carriers of meaning and that semantic distinctions matter, especially if we have any hope of being precise, the substitution of “equity” for “equality” has serious consequences.

In law and theory, “equity” refers to fairness and impartiality and was instituted under the common law by “equity courts,” whose job it was to provide legal remedies to specific cases where legal remedies were not extant or sufficient; as in, for example, a trademark infringement where simply awarding monetary damages wouldn’t be sufficient remedy but had to be accompanied by a cease-and-desist order. It didn’t operate according to strict legal rules or codes and it allowed flexibility in the application of principles of justice. It could not operate if it presumed guilt or innocence in advance by virtue of membership in a specific class. To go back to the trademark example, one can’t assume that just because the defendant is Asian that a trademark violation occurred. Furthermore, “equity” in its most common usage refers to “ownership,” a concept that seems to have little relationship to its academic usage.

But as Polet explains, that’s not what “equity” means in the mouths of the woke. It means tearing down any and all structural barriers that these ideologues believe stand in the way of equal outcomes. It means no end of destruction for the sake of creating utopia. As the New Discourses site points out, “Where equality means that citizen A and citizen B are treated equally, equity means “adjusting shares in order to make citizens A and B equal.” Therefore, “‘equity’ requires giving some identity groups privileges in order to redress the perceived imbalance.”

This is the thinking behind the “Nice White Parents” podcast serial from The New York Times that I wrote at length about over the weekend.  It’s about race and inequality in the New York City public schools. The reporter, Chana Joffe-Walt, says in one episode: “I think the only way you equalize schools is by recognizing this fact and trying wherever possible to suppress the power of white parents.”

So, there you have it: the only explanation for disparate educational outcomes between races in the public schools is white racism. The only solution is to redistribute power away from white parents. This is precisely why New Discourses calls the “equity” crusade a form of “social communism.”

If you aren’t familiar with the specialized vocabulary the Diversity & Inclusion activists and bureaucrats use, you will not see coming the kinds of radical changes they want to make. Below are some images from a training manual used by the diversity office at Baylor University, to train teachers and staff on “cultural humility,” one of the goals of the university’s New Student Experience program, which is how Baylor transitions freshmen into the university’s life. Notice how Baylor does not push for “racial equality,” but for “racial equity”:

 

 

“Cultural humility” sounds so innocent, even Christian. But this is the slogan under which Baylor is radicalizing its students to the left. I wonder how many people who send their kids or their alumni donations to Baylor University know that the flagship Texas Baptist university is teaching students that “heterosexism” is evil, that “whiteness” exists and is a source of evil, and “patriarchy” — which Southern Baptist churches, which do not let women serve as clergy, practice — is also evil.

This ideology is everywhere now, and being taught through institutional authorities. Take a look at this passage from Live Not By Lies, on how the ideology that led to the Russian Revolution, spread, and observe the parallels to this. We are in the “gospel in the factories” stage of our own revolution, which is going to lead to soft totalitarianism:

Marxism stood for the future. Marxism stood for progress. The gospel of Marxism lit a fire in the minds of prerevolutionary Russian radicals. Their priests and the prophets were their intellectuals, who were “religious about being secular.” Writes historian Yuri Slezkine: “A conversion to socialism was a conversion to the intelligentsia, to a fusion of millenarian faith and lifelong learning.”

Far-left radicalism was initially spread among the intellectuals primarily through reading groups. Once you adopted the Marxist faith, everything else in life became illuminated. The intellectuals went into the world to preach this pseudo-religion to the workers. These missionaries, says Slezkine, made what religious believers would call prophetic revelations, and by appealing to hatred in their listeners’ hearts, called them to conversion.

Once they had captured Russia’s universities, the radicals took their gospel to the factories. Few of the workers were capable of understanding Marxist doctrine, but the missionaries taught it to those capable of translating the essentials into a form that ordinary people could grasp. These proselytizers spoke to the suffering of the people, to their sense of justice, to their often-justified resentment of their exploiters. The great famine of 1891–92 had laid bare the incompetence of the Russian ruling classes. The evangelists of Marxism issued forth prophetic revelations about the land of milk and honey awaiting the masses after the revolution swept away the ruling mandarins.

Most of the revolutionaries came from the privileged classes. Their parents ought to have known that this new political faith their children preached would, if realized, mean the collapse of the social order. Still, they did not reject their children. Writes Slezkine, “The ‘students’ were almost always abetted at home while still in school and almost never damned when they became revolutionaries.”

Perhaps the mothers and fathers didn’t want to alienate their sons and daughters. Perhaps they too, after the experience of the terrible famine and the incompetent state’s inability to care for the starving, had lost faith in the system.

Live Not By Lies will be published in just over a month. Pre-order it at that link. I have written an extensive study guide that I will make available for free on this blog when the book comes out. We need to be ready for what’s coming. The revolution is being proclaimed by universities, federal agencies, corporations, and other institutions. Not even Trump has been able to stop it.

The post ‘Equity’ Is Not ‘Equality,’ Comrade appeared first on The American Conservative.