Rod Dreher's Blog, page 124

About Charles Péguy’s Mystique

Last week I wrote about the French Catholic 20th century writer Charles Péguy and “mystical politics.” The occasion was a favorable review concerning a new book about Péguy by Matthew Maguire. I puzzled over a famous line of Péguy’s: “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” I said that I understand the idea that politics must be rooted in fealty to transcendent truths, and I think I understand Péguy’s idea that that mysticism has to lead one to embrace sacrificial love. More:

Even so, I don’t really understand what Péguy is getting at here. If it’s a mysticism ultimately grounded in sacrificial love, how do you discern the good kind of mysticism from the bad kind? After all, to the Nazis, Horst Wessel was a martyr. The totalitarian Left has its martyrs too, those who gave it all up for the Sacred Cause. I suppose I’ll need to buy the book if I want to know — or maybe we have Péguy readers in this blog’s audience, and they can enlighten me.

Well, whaddaya know, Matthew Maguire himself wrote me to explain. Here is his letter:

Rod’s question is important. What prevents Charles Péguy’s “mysticism” from justifying Nazism?

For Péguy, the claim that “everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics” does not express a fascist’s enthusiasm for the irrational and for the “strong gods” of tribe or nation. It means that the ultimate source of legitimate political authority is a transcendent love of truth and universal justice that is understood only with honesty, humility, and sacrifice— often quotidian sacrifice. A mystical “love of the truth” is of enormous importance for Péguy, and sustains what he calls “the most legitimate rights of peoples” and the need to protest even a single “insult” to “humanity” as a whole, regardless of race or ethnicity. The authenticity of that mysticism is demonstrated by the specific ways in which it acts in the world and relates to others.

Yet what is truth? Péguy recognizes the importance of discrete empirical truths (of criminal guilt and innocence, for example). But the love of justice and truth that inspires us to find them and act rightly with what we know ultimately seeks and participates in God’s infinite love, justice, and truth. For all that, our human love does not possess the beloved, and the continuous vision of God cannot be enjoyed by human beings in this world. For that reason, different groups of people, of different beliefs, can move toward empirical truths from diverse angles of approach, and participate in the transcendent love that animates their devotion to truth and justice in different ways and to various degrees of fullness.

Péguy turns to his own experience to explain what he means. In those two or three decades before the First World War when French society was viciously divided— as America is today— the conflict between religious skeptics and Christians was especially bitter, and waged amidst pervasive anti-Semitism. It was then that Alfred Dreyfus, a French Jewish officer, was falsely accused of working as a German spy and convicted of treason.

In the early years of what became the Dreyfus Affair, Péguy saw that there were Jews, and Christians, and secular French republicans truly devoted to liberty, equality, and fraternity who, few as they then were, all dared to speak and act upon their recognition that one man (heretofore unknown to most of them) had been wrongly accused and punished. They made that commitment when the case was apparently closed, and when most of their fellow citizens considered further controversy pointless in an already polarized nation. Their cause afforded them no opportunities. It would have been expedient to say and do nothing.

Each of these religious and secular groups brought something of their own distinctive character and historical experiences to the struggle, said Péguy, and tested one another’s commitment. Yet they shared a willingness to reject arguments on behalf of personal advantage and “pragmatism.” They began to live out a pluralistic contrapuntal solidarity through their mystical love of truth and justice. In time, their mystique brought about an astonishing result: a single wrongly decided case was not forgotten, but became an event in national and global history.

Péguy said that as each group worked for truth and justice, they did not set aside their distinctive convictions in order to preserve a superficial comity, but followed their mystical commitments without apology. This sets his thought apart from a powerful tendency in Anglo-American liberalism from Hobbes to Rawls, in which deeply-held religious and metaphysical beliefs are generally undermined or attenuated in the name of preserving social peace. For Péguy, distinctive mystical loves of truth and justice ultimately create political legitimacy; it is the politicized corruption of mysticism that is that legitimacy’s undoing.

If the differences among them remained, what did those Christians, and secular French republicans, and Jews share that made them authentically mystical? For Péguy, they devote themselves to what he calls a “perfect horizontality of justice,” regardless of their own collective identities. They fight the inevitable betrayals of the mystical by their own groups as well as against their own groups— avoiding culpable indifference and chauvinism on the one hand, and a refusal of communal responsibility on the other. They must also be vigilant. A mystique easily becomes a political movement that lives off its initial source, yet has become a cynical strategy for exercising power.

Péguy’s foremost example of authentic mystical action was his great friend Bernard-Lazare. He was Jewish, and he drew tirelessly upon his literary talent to defend Dreyfus when he had few defenders. But after the Affair, Bernard-Lazare broke ranks with many supporters of Dreyfus (the overwhelming majority of them secularists of Christian heritage) who had begun a campaign of administrative and legal vengeance upon French Catholics, a campaign that he recognized was immoral. Similarly, Bernard-Lazare understood that the conflicts of his time among Christians, Jews, and Muslims had to be seen on the same level, regardless of which group was victim or perpetrator. He saw that many Catholics were right to be angry about the persecution of Armenian Christians by Ottoman Muslims, but wrongly went silent when Jews were persecuted by Romanian Christians. A truly mystical “horizontality” did not make such distinctions.

In this way, Nazism had nothing of Péguy’s mysticism. Racist and contemptuous of the very notion of a universal humanity, obsessed with violent political domination, Nazis performed no sacrifice out of transcendent love for others in the name of truth, justice, and the rights and dignity of everyone. They opposed that love no less than they opposed pluralist solidarity, and were without any mystically effective “horizontality.”

Péguy had real flaws, intellectually and personally. But he lived out this mystical love of justice and truth. Often he did so by avoiding membership in a ready-made political collective, refusing to be either “progressive” or “reactionary.” Throughout his work, both words are used pejoratively.

His ardent French patriotism could turn into nationalism, especially as he sensed the approach of war with Germany. Nonetheless he said that if France were to invade Germany as a would-be hegemon instead of the other way around, he and others would be the first to give “the example not only of desertion, but of insurrection and revolt” against his own government. When Germany indeed invaded France in 1914, he fought as a French officer and died in battle just north of Paris.

Péguy practiced a kind of mystical horizontality within Catholicism as well. Few Catholics were more willing than he to argue against jettisoning parts of their faith (especially its bold supernatural claims) to make it more respectable in modern, secular, bourgeois culture. He was convinced that was the way to a complacent semi-skepticism if not unbelief, covered over with sentiment and self-congratulation.

Yet while he trusted the teaching of the Church, he was unsparingly critical of the ways in which many clergy and Catholic lay people ignored the suffering of the materially precarious and the destitute, while an increasingly inescapable capitalism took what little they had. He was no less critical of those Christians who maintained a morally and spiritually poisonous rapport with anti-Semites, or who were themselves anti-Semitic. For him, both prominent Catholic “progressives” and “reactionaries” had betrayed Christian mysticism.

It must be thus, since to be first of all a “progressive” or “reactionary” is to conceive linear historical time as the supreme dimension of time. Progressives and reactionaries alike too easily set aside the cyclical qualities of our individual and historical experience. But above all, the linear time with which they are obsessed has no living relationship to eternity, which for Péguy gives our lives patience, humility, and depth. If a linear “march of history” is the only sort of time that counts, the temptation to be an ideologue— idealizing the past or the future, and wanting one’s favored abstractions to be vindicated with demonstrable success and coercive power over enemies— becomes very strong indeed.

Today, some Christians, disoriented by the decline of Christianity in the West, move toward the wan approach that Péguy decried, hoping to refashion Christianity as a sort of easy bourgeois civil religion. Among Catholics who reject that accommodation, others have recently sought to rehabilitate the politique offered variously by Charles Maurras and Carl Schmitt, whose catastrophic failures of judgment in the last century are entwined with its worst horrors.

Péguy is one of those thinkers who can inspire us to move more nimbly and forcefully through the time given to us. Like him, we can act in relation to different pasts and more diverse possible futures, set free to be neither progressive nor reactionary. A continuous, mystical relation to eternity offers an infinite richness, and makes it possible to act faithfully, truly, justly, and creatively— within and beyond the deeply entrenched political positions around us.

Thanks to Rod for giving me the chance to respond.

Thanks, Prof. Maguire, for writing. The book is Carnal Spirit: The Revolutions of Charles Péguy. It’s from a university press, and therefore expensive. But if you are moved by what you read here, then it won’t be too much.

The post About Charles Péguy’s Mystique appeared first on The American Conservative.

Cardi B. & The Conservative Christian Island

I complain a lot about how the coastal-based mainstream media doesn’t really see a lot of Americans whose demographic characteristics fall outside their narrow left-liberal confines. Here’s a surprisingly good piece by Elizabeth Dias in The New York Times, writing about white Evangelicals in rural and small-town Iowa who are still standing with Donald Trump. What I liked about the piece is that she mostly gets out of the way and let these people speak for themselves. She starts with a January 2016 speech that GOP primary candidate Trump gave at Dordt College there:

Christians make up the overwhelming majority of the country, he said. And then he slowed slightly to stress each next word: “And yet we don’t exert the power that we should have.”

If he were elected president, he promised, that would change. He raised a finger.

“Christianity will have power,” he said. “If I’m there, you’re going to have plenty of power, you don’t need anybody else. You’re going to have somebody representing you very, very well. Remember that.”

Why did Evangelicals go for Trump in the end? More:

Theories, and rationalizations, abound:

That evangelical support was purely transactional.

That they saw him as their best chance in decades to end legalized abortion.

That the opportunity to nominate conservative justices to the Supreme Court was paramount.

That they hated Hillary Clinton, or felt torn to pick the lesser of two evils.

That they held their noses and voted, hoping he would advance their policy priorities and accomplish their goals.

But beneath all this, there is another explanation. One that is more raw and fundamental.

Evangelicals did not support Mr. Trump in spite of who he is. They supported him because of who he is, and because of who they are. He is their protector, the bully who is on their side, the one who offered safety amid their fears that their country as they know it, and their place in it, is changing, and changing quickly. White straight married couples with children who go to church regularly are no longer the American mainstream. An entire way of life, one in which their values were dominant, could be headed for extinction. And Mr. Trump offered to restore them to power, as though they have not been in power all along.

Well, that last clause is pure editorializing. If you are a religious conservative living in rural Iowa, it has been a very long time since you felt that you were in power in this culture, and that your values were dominant. Maybe it looks like that to a progressive young reporter at The New York Times, but culturally (as distinct from politically), conservative Christians haven’t been dominant for decades.

More to the point, the kind of communally cohesive conservative Christianity that these people in Iowa are living is a relic of a bygone era. There’s a fantastic 1995 book called The Lost City, by the journalist Alan Ehrenhalt, who writes about Chicago in the 1950s. He writes about the virtues of strong communities back then, and how those communities came apart for various reasons, but most of all because Americans began to want more individual freedom. This is not a conservative or a liberal book, but rather a book about the big changes in American society in the 1960s and 1970s, and the price we paid for them. Ehrenhalt writes that we want community back, but edited: all the good things of the 1950s, with none of the bad things.

But that’s impossible. “There is no easy way to have an orderly world without somebody making the rules by which order is preserved,” writes Ehrenhalt. “Every dream we have about re-creating community in the absence of authority will turn out to be a dream in the end.” More:

There is no point in pretending that the 1950s were a happy time for everyone in America. For many, the price of the limited life was impossibly high. To have been an independent-minded alderman in the Daley machine, a professional baseball player treated unfairly by his team, a suburban housewife who yearned for a professional career, a black high school student dreaming of possibilities that were closed to him, a gay man or woman forced to conduct a charade in public — to have been any of these things in the 1950s was to live a life that was difficult at best, and tragic at worst. That is why so many of us still respond to the memory of those indignities by saying that nothing in the world could justify them.

It is a powerful indictment, but it is also a selective one … Our collective indignation makes little room for the millions of people who took the rules seriously and tried to live up to them, within the profound limits of human weakness. They are still around, the true believers of the 1950s, in small towns and suburbs and big-city neighborhoods all over the country, reading the papers, watching television, and wondering in old age what has happened to America in the last thirty years. If you visit middle-class American suburbs today, and talk to the elderly women who have lived out their adult years in these places, they do not tell you how constricted and demeaning their lives in the 1950s were. They tell you those were the best years they can remember. And if you visit a working-class Catholic parish in a big city, and ask the older parishioners what they think of the church in the days before Vatican II, they don’t tell you that it was tyrannical or that it destroyed their individuality. They tell you they wish they could have it back. For them, the erosion of both community and authority in the last generation is not a matter of intellectual debate. It is something they can feel in their bones, and the feeling makes them shiver.

I’m going to use an admittedly extreme example to highlight what these Iowa conservatives fear. This is a link to the official video for “WAP,” a song by Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion. Since it was released on Friday, that video has had over 62 million views, and hit No. 1 on Spotify and Apple Music. It’s being widely played on radio. Cardi B., a Grammy winner, and Megan Thee Stallion are two of the most successful hip-hop artists today. I warn you about the video, though: it is absolutely filthy. “WAP” means “Wet A*s Pu**y.” Here is the chorus:

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

The chorus is pretty tame compared to the rest of it. Here’s a link to all the lyrics. We are a long, long way from the 1950s. This is what mainstream pop culture is in 2020. An essayist on NBC News’s website calls it, “Deliciously filthy.” The big controversy about the video is a lot of people complaining that a cameo by Kylie Jenner is an example of white privilege.

Screenshot from “WAP” video

This filth is the most popular song in America right now. This would be inconceivable in a world in which conservative Evangelicals were dominant, or even remotely close to dominant. I bring “WAP” up here to point out that this kind of thing is a big part of what has grieved and frightened those Iowa Evangelicals. Journalists can’t seem to conceive of this cultural conflict in any terms other than “Right-Wing White Bible Thumpers Are Mad That They Can’t Push Everybody Else Around Anymore.” Maybe Diaz sees it that way — I’m not sure. Her editorial comment suggests that she probably does. But the rest of her story from Iowa indicates something more complex. Excerpts:

Church is still what really holds the community together. A day earlier, on Sunday, the Driesens had gone to services in the morning and at night. They unplugged the router and turned off their cellphones. They read the Bible. Sioux Center was quiet on Sundays, when it is easier to name what is open — the Pizza Hut, the Culver’s, the Walmart — than what is not.

Mr. Driesen spoke of the policies that were important to him, all the usual conservative issues. Small government. Ending abortion. Judges who share his political views. “Traditional families,” he said.

“Unfortunately, there’s just more divorce than there used to be,” he said. “There’s more cohabitating. I think it is detrimental to the family. I just think kids do better in a two-parent home, with a mom and a dad.”

I grew up in the rural South in the 1970s, and church was not at all at the center of our community’s life. These rural Iowa Evangelicals are living in a time capsule. I’m not criticizing them at all! I can see why this way of life means something to them, and why they feel threatened by what’s going on outside the boundaries of their community. More:

She remembered how when her mother was a child about 20 miles north, the public school still started the day with prayer. But when she was growing up, it stopped. Her church, Netherlands Reformed, started a private Christian school in Rock Valley, and so she went there instead.

They send their children to that same school, which still has some of the same teachers.

“We don’t know any different,” Mr. Driesen said. “For a lot of people around here, that’s just what you do. You have the same classmates all the way through. And it holds the community together.” His siblings left the area for a while, but then they came back.

They want the Christian education for their children “so we don’t have to have them indoctrinated with all these different things,” he said. “We are free to teach them our values.”

“So far,” Ms. Driesen clarified. “That’s where we see Trump as a key figure to keep that freedom.”

More:

Ultimately Mr. Trump recognized something, said Lisa Burg, a longtime resident of nearby Orange City. It is a reason she thinks people will still support him in November.

“The one group of people that people felt like they could dis and mock and put down had become the Christian. Just the middle-class, middle-American Christians,” Ms. Burg said. “That was the one group left that you could just totally put down and call deplorable. And he recognized that, You know what? Yeah, it’s OK that we have our set of values, too. I think people finally said, ‘Yes, we finally have somebody that’s willing to say we’re not bad, we need to have a voice too.’”

Explained Jason Mulder, who runs a small design company in Sioux Center: “I feel like on the coasts, in some of the cities and stuff, they look down on us in rural America. You know, we are a bunch of hicks, and don’t know anything. They don’t understand us the same way we don’t understand them. So we don’t want them telling us how to live our lives.”

He added: “You joke that we don’t get it, well, you don’t get it either. We are not speaking the same language.”

And:

They want America to be a Christian nation for their children. “We started out as a Christian nation,” she said.

“You can’t make people do these things,” he said. “But you can try to protect what you’ve got, you might say.”

He thought about November, and felt confident Mr. Trump would win. He sees Trump flags all over as he drives. Something has shifted in the country, he said, and he is looking ahead to who might even come after Mr. Trump.

“I feel like we are safe for four more years,” he said. “You know. So that’s a good feeling.”

Read the whole thing. 

I see all this as profoundly tragic.

From the Diaz story, it seems clear to me that these Iowa Evangelicals seek power not for the sake of pushing others around, but rather to hold on to what they have. Can you blame them?

Think of it like this. I lived in Washington DC for part of Mayor Marion Barry’s tenure. He was spectacularly corrupt, and very popular with black voters. I couldn’t understand that at the time. Didn’t they see that he was taking advantage of them? That he wasn’t doing them a bit of good, and only playing them for fools? I was young and idealistic then, and thought that ideas were what made the political world go around. What I see now is that black people in DC were the majority, but felt powerless, because they were largely powerless. They identified with Barry because the people who hated him also hated them (in their mind). There was something about Marion Barry that made them feel that he had their back, that if he was mayor, then they weren’t as powerless as they thought. The truth is, Barry did them no good at all, but was quite good at performing the role of populist antagonist to the white people in Congress who controlled the District’s fate without being accountable to its voters, and to the white business establishment.

Think of the relationship between Trump and these besieged white Evangelicals as like the one between Marion Barry and besieged black DC voters. It’s not an excuse, but it is an explanation.

Another analogy. In Syria, almost all the Christians support the Assad regime. Is it because they approve of Bashar al-Assad? No (though maybe some do). It’s because they know that Assad is the biggest, baddest bully on the block, and that he has their back. If he goes, the Islamists will cut the Christians’ throats.

Christians in Iowa are not in the same position as Christians in Syria. Donald Trump is not Bashar al-Assad. But you see the analogy.

What I find so tragic about these Iowa Evangelicals is that they really are extremely decent and good Midwestern people. But they do not understand the nature of the threat to their way of life, and maybe they misunderstand it in a way similar to how the Times reporter does. That is, it seems to me that they all believe that politics — the use of the state’s power — is the key factor. It is significant — Supreme Court rulings, for example, can be quite meaningful — but the man who sits in the White House has no effect on whether or not Cardi B. and Megan Thee Stallion’s degenerate song goes to No. 1. The people in Washington have little to no effect on all kinds of things moving through the broader culture.

For example, Obergefell was a Supreme Court ruling of major historical and social importance, but that ruling, which made same-sex marriage constitutionally mandated, would not have happened had there not been a massive shift in fundamental values within the culture — first among the elites, and then among the masses. Had Obergefell gone the other way at the Supreme Court, gay marriage would have remained under control of the states. I believe that today, nearly all states would have gay marriage, and those few holdouts that didn’t would not be far behind.

I wonder how many of the teenagers in Sioux Center have mobile phones, and unrestricted use of them. Those devices matter incomparably more to the future of the community’s values than who lives in 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue. A reader of this blog the other day identified himself as a public school teacher in Louisiana. I could tell by his e-mail address the parish in which he teaches. Trump won 70 percent of the vote there in 2016. He mentioned that in the past few years, he has seen a big jump in the number of students identifying as sexually fluid, and gender fluid. Interracial lesbian dating is a thing in his school. Last year, a friend in my own hometown (pop. 1,800) sent me a party pic of a lesbian couple attending the middle school dance together. The idea that voting for Trump is going to keep a family “safe for four more years” from these changes is insupportable.

My sense here is that the narrative — that you can keep yourself safe from harmful social change by voting for a particular presidential candidate — is important for these folks to believe, because if it’s not true, then they are on much shakier ground than they know. Conversely, it’s important for a lot of people who don’t live in rural and small-town Iowa to believe that these people are simple right-wing white nostalgists who are trying to stop beneficial progress (sorry, “Progress”). Don’t look at the scummy culture that upchucks something like Cardi B. and “WAP,” and wonder what kind of world your daughter is growing up in when a song like that is the No. 1 single; instead, stay focused on these awful corn-fed Christian Trump voters, and their doomed quest to hold on to political influence.

Everybody is lying to themselves.

The other day, Rolling Stone published a massively self-righteous and stupid essay by the scientist Wade Davis, on how the Covid-19 crisis signals “the unravelling of America.” He’s a Canadian, and jammed it full of unbearable Canadian pieties about how Canadian life is so much better than American life, because — well, read it for yourself. But also read this fantastic takedown of the piece by Deanna Kreisel, a left-wing American academic who taught college for 13 years in Vancouver, where Davis lives. She tears into Davis’s “spiteful, toxic anti-Americanism” from the anti-Trump left, and whales the tar out of him.

That said, I believe Davis is correct here:

More than any other country, the United States in the post-war era lionized the individual at the expense of community and family. It was the sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. What was gained in terms of mobility and personal freedom came at the expense of common purpose.

The sociological equivalent of splitting the atom. That’s a great insight. Perhaps he’s blinded by his prejudices, but what Davis can’t see is that the atom-splitting spread throughout the industrialized nations. Nobody escaped it, certainly not after 1968. This is what the bestselling French novelist Michel Houllebecq’s work is about. Kreisel calls him out on Canada’s own problems on this front. Left-wing people tend to see the costs of individualism solely as a matter of economics and social policy; right-wing people tend to see it solely as a matter of familial and communal atomization. They are both right. This is what Alan Ehrenhalt speaks to in his 1995 book: what was gained, but what was lost, with postwar individualism.

Sorry, I’ve gotten far afield from rural Iowa. Let’s circle back. I think Dias is wrong, or at least I don’t think the quotes in her report support her thesis that they voted for Trump because he promised to restore them to power. I think rather he offered to protect them for a while longer from the changes in the broader culture. Maybe that’s a distinction without much difference, but I think it’s meaningful. Read the quotes in Dias’s story, and you don’t hear people who want to push around others. You hear people who love what they have, and are afraid it’s going to be taken from them.

They’re right. It is going to be taken from them. And they’re going to give away a lot of it without knowing what they’re doing. And Trump can’t stop this, or even slow it down very much.

But if you think that the passage of power from the ideals embodied by small-town Iowa Evangelicals to whatever we have now is to be welcomed without regret, you’re also wrong. A culture that marginalizes and snuffs out what those Iowans represent is without the means to prevent Cardi B. and the corporations and media who champion her from colonizing it and destroying what is best in our people. The cornfields of Iowa aren’t my idea of paradise either, but America would be a much better place for all of us if those farm families were still the American mainstream. In Weimar America, those prairie Calvinists are the freaks, and Cardi B. is the mainstream. God help us.

I wonder: How many young people in this Iowa island of conservative Christianity are listening to Cardi B. and enjoying her degenerate work? That is going to reveal more about the future of that community and its traditions than who wins the presidency his fall.

I also wonder: What if Trump and Cardi B. are on the same side, deep down, and neither one knows it?

 

 

The post Cardi B. & The Conservative Christian Island appeared first on The American Conservative.

Liberty U. Suspends Falwell The Frat Boy

The trustees of Liberty University, founded by the late Jerry Falwell Sr., finally located their collective spine, and put Liberty president and chancellor Jerry Falwell Jr. out on indefinite suspension. What crossed the line? This Instagram message:

It’s an image of Jerry Jr. and his wife Becki’s personal assistant. The unzipped pants were part of a white-trash costume party being held on a yacht where the fundagelical macher was vacationing with family and friends. He later deleted that Instagram post, but the damage had been done. Imagine the arrogance of being the head of a conservative Evangelical college, and not only partying like that, but putting it out on social media!

Politico writes:

Liberty University has a strict code of conduct for students that, among other things, prohibits students from having sexual relations outside of a “biblically-ordained” marriage and consuming media with lewd lyrics, sexual content and nudity.

On Wednesday, Falwell said he had “apologized to everybody” for the photo but also defended the incident as a vacation “costume party” that was “just in good fun.” He added: “I’m gonna try to be a good boy from here on out.”

Jerry Jr. did a call-in interview with a Lynchburg radio station to try to explain himself. He might have been as sober as a judge on that call, but he sure does sound drunk. Listen to it and judge for yourself.

Emma Green at The Atlantic writes about the latest:

With Falwell’s ouster, one of the most influential evangelical institutions in the country is facing an identity crisis: There’s never been a time when Liberty wasn’t led by a Falwell. The president has also lost one of his most prominent ties to the evangelical community. Donald Trump earned credibility in Christian circles four years ago in part because Falwell promoted him as the evangelical champion, and now it’s not clear who Falwell speaks for. Liberty’s leaders see Falwell’s statements and actions as unbecoming of a Christian leader, especially for someone in such a high-visibility role. But most of all, Christians inside and outside of Liberty fear Falwell has tarnished the mission of the school, and of evangelicalism—to “train champions for Christ.”

More:

Falwell’s supporters at the school were willing to rationalize his behavior and focus on his strengths. But this is the “Achilles’ heel of evangelicalism,” Karen Swallow Prior, an English professor who recently left Liberty, told me. “We put so much emphasis on the redemption narrative that we are too willing to excuse sinful behavior, and not hold people accountable.” This culture of forgiveness and redemption, she added, is why so many evangelical leaders are willing to overlook bad behavior in Trump.

Someone on Reddit calculated that

Here’s David French’s take on “the decline and fall of Jerry Falwell”. Excerpts:

If you know anything about American Evangelical higher education, the shocking thing about the board of trustees’ decision to place Liberty University president Jerry Falwell on an “indefinite” leave of absence isn’t that it happened, but that it took so long. And no, I’m not naïve. I know full well that Evangelical educational institutions have often suffered from low-integrity leadership in the past. But the general rule has been clear—misdeeds must be done in secret for the leader to survive. He must conceal his sin. The instant his wrongdoing becomes open and notorious, the leader must leave.

Jerry Falwell, however, was blazing a new trail. He was living his sin out loud, careening from controversy to controversy even as his students and faculty lived under the traditional, strict moral rules of Christian education. In response, Falwell didn’t bother pretending to be a spiritual leader. Instead, his argument was the higher education equivalent of “scoreboard!” His success excused his sin.

French says that Evangelical institutions have long recognized that their leadership class has to live by higher ethical standards:

For several years, however, Liberty flipped this script. The president lived life with greater freedom than his students or his faculty. The message sent was distinctly unbiblical—that some Christian leaders can discard integrity provided their other qualifications, from family name to fund-raising prowess, provided sufficient additional benefit.

French cites the stunning and swift decline in Liberty’s enrollment applications (this taken from a Liberty annual report):

That makes sense to me. My niece is an Evangelical Christian who graduated from high school this spring. She has long wanted to go to Liberty. She ended up at a state school, which was far more affordable, but I had warned her about the risks of getting a Liberty degree. She is completely apolitical, and deeply devoted to her church. I’m quite sure she was only focused on the good side of Liberty, and knew nothing of the antics of Falwell Jr. I warned her, though, that as long as Falwell Jr. is in the saddle, he’s making a Liberty diploma toxic to potential employers. It may not be fair at all, but that’s how the world works.

Again, I’m sure she made her decision based on financial prudence, but surely a greater than 50 percent falloff in applications in the three years of Trump’s presidency has something to do with the fact that Liberty only makes headlines when Jerry Jr. has done something obnoxious.

I’m wondering now if Junior’s fall will free the tongues of people at Liberty to talk about the weird, skeezy aspects of the Falwell lifestyle. For example, will we finally learn what really happened in the Miami Beach Pool Boy scandal? You might have heard of the Pool Boy escapade, but unless you read this 2019 Brandon Ambrosino piece in Politico, you might not know that there’s all kinds of serious controversy at Liberty over Falwell Jr.’s administration — and that people who work there have been scared to death to talk about it.

UPDATE: A reader who teaches at a college writes:

FWIW, those aren’t crashing numbers at Liberty. The final number, the one that counts, is matriculates-the number of new students who actually show up. 3,143 is actually an increase. If they are doing that on a third the number of applications they have likely adjusted their recruitment strategy to better target students who are genuine prospects.

 

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Downtown Chicago Looted AGAIN

Look what :::checks woke catechism::: the police made Chicago citizens do in the early morning hours:

Hundreds of people swept through the Magnificent Mile and other parts of downtown Chicago early Monday, smashing windows, looting stores, confronting police and at one point exchanging gunfire with officers, authorities said.

The officers had stopped several people on Lake Street near Michigan Avenue when shots were fired from a passing car around 4:30 a.m., nearly five hours into the widespread vandalism, according to police spokesman Tom Ahern. No officers were shot but a squad car was hit, he said. It was not known if anyone in the gunman’s car was shot.

Ahern said other officers were injured through the night. Earlier, an officer was seen slumped against a building by Grand and Wabash avenues as other other cops tended to him. It was unclear what had happened to him. Ahern had no details on the injuries.

The looting began shortly after midnight as people darted through broken store windows and doors along Michigan Avenue carrying shopping bags full of merchandise. Cars dropped off more people as the crowd grew. At least one U-Haul van was seen pulling up.

Police made “a lot of arrests” and recovered at least one gun, officials said. One woman with shopping bags in her hands fell on the sidewalk as an officer was chasing her. Another woman appeared to have been pepper-sprayed. A rock was thrown at a squad car.

More:

It was not clear what sparked the latest vandalism, though in several spots graffiti against the police was seen.

Of course. Because the police, see, are the real problem.

From the Chicago Sun-Times:

[Police Superintendent David] Brown said “the seeds for the shameful destruction we saw last night” started with a police-involved shooting in Englewood Sunday afternoon. About 2:30 p.m., officers responded to a report of a man with a gun. He fled as they arrived, Brown said, and fired at officers. They returned fire, striking the man, who was taken to the University of Chicago Hospital and is expected to survive. The 20-year-old man had previously faced charges of domestic battery, reckless conduct and child endangerment, Brown said.

So cops were responding to reports of a career criminal with a gun. He shot at them. They fired back, and hit him. This is somehow wrong? More:

After the shooting, a crowd gathered in the area. “Tempers flared, fueled by misinformation,” Brown said. Shortly after that, police became aware of “several social media posts” about looting planned downtown. He said the department reacted by deploying 400 officers to the downtown area.

The first looting incident, Brown said, was at 87th Street and the Dan Ryan Expressway, but “soon, car caravans were headed into the Loop” to begin looting.

Caravans of criminals. Today, the downtown of America’s third-largest city is shut down and sealed off.

The Narrative-maintainers are going to have to be working extra-hard today to defend their project. Chicago, by the way, has had 466 homicides this year, putting the city on track to have its deadliest year in over a decade. 

Three weeks ago, Chicago Mayor Lori Lightfoot, who is black, had to call police out to protect her house from Black Lives Matter protesters demanding defunding of the cops. I don’t know why the mob was so mad. Mayor Lightfoot had already taken down the Christopher Columbus statues. What more can a deranged mob of racialists want?

Looter shouts “I can’t breathe” as she runs through store looking for something to remove security tags. #Chicago pic.twitter.com/uElON1OYmf

— The Columbia Bugle

Woke Teachers Vs. Parents

Matthew R. Kay is a teacher at Philadelphia’s Science Leadership Academy. He also does teacher training and advocacy around “antiracism.” (I put it in quotes, because the term has specific ideological meaning.) In a 2019 interview, he said:

To teachers who “see” race and feel no need or desire to bring it into their lessons, I earnestly ask, “Why don’t you?” There are a few viable reasons why one would not wish to insert race into any particular classroom conversation.

You have to not only be willing to bring race into almost any classroom discussion, but you also have to agree with his particular woke interpretation of how to discuss race. And if you don’t? Kay recently wrote that “sometimes, you’ve just gotta step over them” — this, referring to those who disagree with his opinions about race and racism. He doesn’t want to change his opponent’s minds, but plow right over them. Such is the Social Justice Warrior mindset. There can be no good-faith opposition to their views.

Kay writes about “the intractability of individual colleagues’ racism” — which, if true, would be awful. But everything in his column leads one to suspect that all you have to do to prove yourself an intractable racist is to disagree with Matthew Kay. The point here is that Kay does not believe that dissenters deserve respect.

Over the weekend, he tweeted the following:

 

He made his Twitter account private after those tweets blew up. They ought to have blown up! Here is a public school teacher worried that parents will listen to what they are saying to students — and interfere with the teachers’ efforts at “destabilizing a kids [sic] racism or homophobia or transphobia.” That is, Matthew Kay doesn’t want parents interfering with propagandizing their children.

How many teachers agree with this kind of thing? I find it utterly infuriating. This approach destroys the kind of trust that has to exist between teachers and parents for the school to be successful. I would not want my kid instructed by Matthew Kay, or any teacher who believed in his mission to turn kids against their parents’ beliefs. Seriously, even if you are progressive, you surely must recognize how, well, destabilizing this is of public support of public schools. It is an outrageous exploitation of a teacher’s relationship to minor students, and a violation of the parents’ trust.

 

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Silence Of The Front-Row Witnesses

A reader who ask that I withhold his name, and who is not white (you’ll see why this may be important), writes:

I was once a first responder. Over ten years ago, I responded to a call at a women’s shelter for a mother who’d been savagely struck in the face by her husband (or ex-). When we arrived on scene, she was lying down and her face was severely swollen and she was in great pain. Worst of all, she had a her two young children with her (a boy and a girl), neither of whom seemed in any emotional distress, but were also probably too young to understand what was going on.

Appalled by the severity of her injury, I had her immobilized for the transport to the hospital. Upon her arrival, she had her head and neck restraints removed and the nurse asked if she was able to move her head, which the woman struggled to do. It got uncomfortable to watch and, after turning things over, we left the room and the patient to, hopefully, the appropriate care.

Like most events in this line of work, you compartmentalize and all but forget these incidents. Years later, however, as racial tensions began to boil up again, I thought back to that incident and realized how troubled I was by it. It wasn’t just the fact that a woman was so severely beaten and her children had to witness their mother in such agony, but that this sort of thing was happening on a regular basis, yet, nobody really has any idea.

What I mean by this is that Whites are cited as the greatest threat to Black life in this country. Yet, I can guarantee you, the person who struck that Black woman wasn’t White. I don’t know for sure, of course, but I don’t believe in narratives. I believe in statistics. In all likelihood, the person who hurt that woman was a Black man.

When academics, elites, the media, and left-wingers of the public criticize law enforcement, they often treat them as ignorant of or even perpetuating the horrors of the reality of life for Blacks and other racial/ethnic minorities in this country. But that’s not what I’ve seen and I’m fairly certain that’s not broadly the case. If anything, it’s the cops and other first responders who are often the front-row witnesses to these terrible acts that disproportionately affect people in the Black demographic. Worse, the cops are often the only defense they have against their predators.

Where are the academics, elites, media folks, and others? Are they the ones who respond to these incidents, often times exposing themselves to the risk of death and injury to prevent bloodshed? Are they the ones who take them to the hospital and treat their injuries? Are they the ones who, afterwards, have to write up reports about what they witnessed, testify in court, deal with the possibility of a less-than-desirable legal outcome, and try to forget about everything they saw and heard so they can move on to handling the next tragedy? Would any of them want to do this? If they don’t, that’s fine. But if they want to pass judgment, shouldn’t they at least bother themselves to learn something about the people who do the job and the reality they deal with?

This is what infuriates me most – the willful ignorance and complete lack of interest in finding out what the facts are. These people live inside bubbles and trust only what their emotions are telling them. And it makes sense – violence, after all, is the province of emotion. So why’s it so difficult for them to understand that even the most poised police officer can’t always let everything roll off? Isn’t that what we want out of our cops – humanity, not robotics?

I mentioned Sam Harris once, I’ll mention him again – he was absolutely correct when he said the reaction to George Floyd’s death was a moral panic. People are so convinced they saw a murder happen on video and they’re not sure how else to react other than to press the self-destruct button while scurrying their cowardly selves to the escape pods. I’m an atheist, but may God have mercy on their souls.

Intense.

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Architecture Of Soft Totalitarianism

The Wall Street Journal reports (paywall):

A small U.S. company with ties to the U.S. defense and intelligence communities has embedded its software in numerous mobile apps, allowing it to track the movements of hundreds of millions of mobile phones world-wide, according to interviews and documents reviewed by The Wall Street Journal.

Anomaly Six LLC a Virginia-based company founded by two U.S. military veterans with a background in intelligence, said in marketing material it is able to draw location data from more than 500 mobile applications, in part through its own software development kit, or SDK, that is embedded directly in some of the apps. An SDK allows the company to obtain the phone’s location if consumers have allowed the app containing the software to access the phone’s GPS coordinates.

More:

Numerous agencies of the U.S. government have concluded that mobile data acquired by federal agencies from advertising is lawful. Several law-enforcement agencies are using such data for criminal-law enforcement, the Journal has reported, while numerous U.S. military and intelligence agencies also acquire this kind of data.

Many private-sector companies in the advertising and marketing world buy and sell geolocation data, sometimes reselling it to government agencies or contractors. But the direct collection of such data by a business closely linked to U.S. national security agencies is unusual.

Anomaly Six was founded by defense-contracting veterans who worked closely with government agencies for most of their careers and built a company to cater in part to national-security agencies, according to court records and interviews.

A marketing expert tells the Journal:

“I think the average consumer doesn’t have a clue,’ he said.

If you have a subscription, read the whole thing. Thanks to the reader who sent this in.

As I write in Live Not By Lies, surveillance capitalism has already laid the basic infrastructure for soft totalitarianism. For example:

“People think that they are safe because they haven’t said anything controversial,” says Kamila. “That is very naive.”

After the fall of the Berlin Wall and Germany’s 1990 reunification, the German government opened the vast files of the Stasi, East Germany’s secret police, to its victims. None of the Soviet Bloc states had a surveillance apparatus as thorough as East Germany’s, nor had any communist rivals developed a culture of snitching with roots as deep and wide in the population. Historians later discovered that vast numbers of East German citizens, with no prompting by the government, volunteered negative information about their friends and neighbors.

“Across the country, people were on the lookout for divergent viewpoints, which were then branded as dangerous to the state,” reported the magazine Der Spiegel. This practice gave the East German police state an unparalleled perspective on the private lives of its citizens.

Should totalitarianism, hard or soft, come to America, the police state would not have to establish a web of informants to keep tabs on the private lives of the people. The system we have now already does this—and most Americans are scarcely aware of its thoroughness and ubiquity. 

The rapidly growing power of information technology and its ubiquitous presence in daily life immensely magnifies the ability of those who control institutions to shape society in according to their ideals. Throughout the past two decades, economic and technological changes—changes that occurred under liberal democratic capitalism—have given both the state and corporations surveillance capabilities of which Lenin and Stalin could only have dreamed.

It’s not paranoid if it’s true, people.

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Guns, Dems, Civil War

A reader writes:

I was reading your articles and many updates to how and why a second Civil War could come to the US and felt like you were missing the most likely scenario.  Then I read how you wrote that you are more of a 1st Amendment supporter and think some conservatives are too focussed on the 2nd.   This perception of yours may be causing you to discount what I think is the likeliest route to a 2nd Civil War.

This is the path that I see:

Biden wins the Presidency and the Democrats take the Senate and keep the House.  The federal government then follows up on Biden’s statement that the most popular rifles in the US should be illegal.  They remove then remove the protections on gun manufacturers so that even if a gun manufacturer did nothing wrong, the manufacturer would still be required to pay for any damage that gun caused.  This would bankrupt all gun manufacturers. [Note: Biden’s platform calls for removing protections on gun manufacturers. — RD]

The US has something like 8 million miles of roads and highways, 140,000 miles of railroad track and 160,000 miles of electric power lines.  No government can defend all of that.  If Biden wins and semi-automatic rifles are banned, then the “Resistance” will likely begin with individual attacks on shipping.  It would not take a large percent of gun owners to shut down the economy of the US.  Puncture enough fuel tanks on semi and locomotives and most shipping stops.  Hit a few key long distance transmission power lines and the blackouts will be extensive.

Since no government can defend that many miles of infrastructure, especially since most of those miles are in red areas with county police likely sympathetic to the shooters, house by house gun confiscation would be the only remaining option to a federal government trying to control the damage.  This is what would trigger many states to secede and likely cause mutiny in much of the armed forces.

I live in the rural part of VA.  Democrats took over total control of VA government this past session.  They proposed many bills to curtail the civil rights of gun owners.  The response at the county level in rural areas was tremendous.  More people came out to these county government meetings than had ever happened before.  Your writing implies you either disagree with this or that you are unaware of this response.  My county, a fairly crunchy and granola rural county voted to be a gun sanctuary county for the state and not enforce state laws that restricted civil rights related to guns.

While I hope this does not happen as it will cause untold suffering, deaths, and loss, I am preparing for this to happen.  My family has purchased guns for the first time, we obtained training and we are stocking up on ammunition.  We are preparing more food stores and learning to save our own vegetable seeds.

I was unaware of the rural counties’ response in Virginia. That is big news. And the reader’s scenario puts into a certain perspective yesterday’s news that the Democratic New York State Attorney General is going after the NRA in an effort to dismantle it entirely. Note well that she once called the NRA a “terrorist organization.” Readers of this blog who say that the AG is only going after the NRA because there’s a lot of evidence that it has been run corruptly are not credible. There is, alas, evidence that the NRA has violated its nonprofit status, and if so, there is no problem in principle with a state investigation. But you’d have to be an idiot to think that this particular Attorney General is only motivated by a desire that the gun-rights lobby be administered more honestly. If the AG of Texas had called Planned Parenthood an “exterminationist organization” and announced that he was going to use allegations of internal corruption to dismantle it, everyone on the Left would know exactly what was going on.

I saw yesterday a story saying that the NY AG announcement would hurt Trump’s re-election bid. Not a chance! If anything, this will help Trump by rousing his base — especially if there is more civil unrest this fall. The idea that a Democratic president and Congress would work to even partially disarm the American public at a time when left-wing rioters have been burning cities — well, it’s hard to think of a stronger impulse to gig the pro-Trump vote than that.

I don’t understand how the Left thinks. I get that many of them strongly oppose Constitutional gun rights. It so happens that millions of Americans oppose them on this, intensely. So you have the New York AG calling a press conference to announce that she’s going after the NRA for the sake of dismantling this “terrorist organization” — this, in an election year, in which a pro-gun control Democrat is running for president. What kind of message does that send to the millions of Americans who cherish their Second Amendment rights? Somehow, though, we’re going to get people on the Left who really will not be able to wrap their minds around the fact that more than a few people resent them for what they’re doing.

I see this as tied to the media’s role in obsessing over Critical Race Theory, and making it a big part of its coverage (I wrote about this earlier today — really shocking data.) For at least seven years now, the mainstream media has been propagandizing Americans into being radically suspicious of and hostile to each other on the basis of a dubious far-left ideological theory. When racial strife erupts in the country in violence, or within a racialized politics, the media Leftists and those who take what they say as the gospel truth will be shocked that there is so much racism in America.

What do these two stories have in common? Left-wing people who think that the only possible reason to disagree with them or to resist them is bigotry, bitter-clinging, and suchlike.

By the way, I grant the good faith of you readers who have protested against even talking about the prospect of civil war in this country, calling it dangerous. I would caution you, though, to consider this point made by Johns Hopkins professor Michael Vlahos here in TAC a couple of years ago:

Disbelieving war makes it inevitable. People will always disbelieve that we could come to blows, until we do. Delegates at the “Democracy” party convention in Charleston, in the summer of 1860, were still in denial of the coming fury. No one dares imagine another civil war playing out like the last, when two grimly determined American armies fought each other to the death in bloody pitched battles. It is unlikely that a third American civil war will embrace 18th and 19th century military dynamics. Antique Anglo-American society—organized around community “mustering”—was culturally equipped to fight civil wars. Today’s screen-absorbed Millennials are not. So what?

But the historical consequences of a non-military American civil war would be just as severe as any struggle settled by battle and blood. For example, the map of a divided America today suggests that division into functioning state and local sovereignties—with autonomy over kinship, identity, and way of life issues—might be the result of this non-bloody war. This could even represent de facto national partition—without de jure secession, achieved through a gradual process of accretive state and local nullification.

So what would a non-military civil war look like? Could it be non-violent? Americans are certainly not lovers, but they do not seem really to be fighters either. A possible path to kinship disengagement—a separation without de jure divorce—would here likely follow a crisis, a confrontation, and some shocking, spasmodic violence, horrifyingly amplified on social media. Passions at this point would pull back, but investment in separation would not. What might eventuate would be a national sorting out, a de facto kinship separation in which Blue and Red regions would go—and govern—their own ways, while still maintaining the surface fiction of a titular “United States.” This was, after all, the arrangement America came to after 20 years of civil war (1857-1877). This time, however, there will be no succeeding conciliation (as was achieved in the 1890s). Culturally, this United States will be, from the moment of agreement, two entirely separate sensibilities, peoples, and politics.

Don’t say it can’t happen here. If you think that, you will be at risk of making the kinds of mistakes that make it happening here more likely.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

FYI, re your blog post “Guns, Dems, Civil War”, I’ve acquired a semi-automatic mini pistol (Sig Sauer P365) and had my first session with a private trainer at a target range this afternoon. At the end of the month, I’ll attend his class for qualifying for the Michigan concealed pistol license (CPL). When I obtain it, I’ll start “packing heat”.

Until this afternoon, I hadn’t fired a weapon since leaving the Army in 1969 and debated with myself for the last couple of years whether or not I should get a CPL and carry a pistol. The riots around the country this summer, as well as my concerns with safety in my neighborhood (where I have been mugged and where there are often break-ins), finally prompted me to take action. My wife reluctantly went along.

I’m getting more than a few e-mails and messages like this. A friend e-mailed today to say that he had just joined the NRA. He forwarded to me the “congratulations” message he received confirming his membership, and added:

Amazing. I hated them only 8 months ago.

Times are changing.

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VerBruggen: New Floyd Video Changes Nothing

I appreciate this piece by National Review‘s Robert VerBruggen explaining why he doesn’t believe that the new eight-minute police bodycam video in the George Floyd case meaningfully changes the narrative. Excerpts:

The video does clarify some things, especially the precise degree to which Floyd resisted arrest. But I would urge anyone whose mind changed dramatically upon watching it to ask themselves: Why does it surprise you that Floyd resisted arrest? And why does it change your view of how the cops behaved in a completely different part of the encounter?

In reality, nothing in the video is all that unexpected, and nothing in it changes the fact that law-enforcement officers kept a handcuffed, obviously unwell man face down, with a knee on his neck, for about eight minutes, including two minutes after they failed to find a pulse. The second-degree-murder charge against Derek Chauvin is likely a stretch, as Andy McCarthy detailed back in June, but the other options available to the jury — third-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter — remain entirely plausible.

He goes on:

Now, until this video came out, we didn’t know for sure the extent to which Floyd resisted arrest. But the only way it could surprise you that he resisted is if you dismissed or didn’t read what the police reports said from the beginning, preferring instead to buy into other testimony that claimed he hadn’t resisted at all and the escalation of the incident was 100 percent the fault of the cops. (Even in the document that introduced a new second-degree-murder charge against Chauvin, prosecutors noted that the cops had to try to “force” Floyd into their car and that Floyd “stiffened up and fell to the ground.”) In a later post, Dreher admitted that he “didn’t go looking for” additional information about the case before. “I assumed the Narrative — white cops torture black suspect to death — was true, or mostly true. We had video, did we not?”

Uncritical acceptance of one-sided tales before all the information is available is what brought us the “hands up, don’t shoot” canard five years ago, and apparently it was widespread in the Floyd case too. In the former ordeal, the narrative obscured the fact that the shooting was outright justified. But in this one, it’s distracting us from the real issue, which is what the cops did after they got Floyd under control.

Robert is right to fault me for uncritically accepting the common narrative. I knew that Floyd had resisted arrest, but I had no idea the extent to which he had, and how he had done it. I imagined that the resistance was brief, and that the police badly overreacted. What the new videos show, though, is that his resistance was constant — for eight minutes — and it included shrieking, “I can’t breathe!” when the only thing restraining him was handcuffs.

Why might this make a difference? Because it could establish that George had been talking nonsense for eight minutes before he was subdued on the ground, including claiming that he couldn’t breathe. The police, as we now know, made a fatal mistake in not taking him seriously when, flat on the ground, he claimed he couldn’t breathe. I do not know to what extent that may exonerate the police of the charges against them, or to what extent it mitigates their moral culpability. My point in the controversial earlier posts was that the encounter between Floyd and the cops was a lot messier than I assumed — and should the rest of the media decide to report on those videos, I believe that a lot of people will find their understanding of the narrative altered too. (You can watch them here, at the Daily Mail site).

I also knew that Floyd had drugs in his system, but until the new police bodycam footage emerged, I had not looked into which drugs he had in his system, and to what degree. Nor was I aware that he had a heart condition the coroner ruled “severe.” Mind you, all of that information was available in the autopsy released days after his death. I had not troubled to look closely at the autopsy, because I was so focused on what to me was the obviously insane cruelty of Chauvin kneeling on his neck, and the other cops watching without saying anything. Again: it was my fault that I was so shocked by the new video, because I had not dug into the details, rather took for granted the general thrust of the media accounts. That failure is on me. And to be completely honest: this May 29 piece in The New York Times mentioned in detail how Floyd resisted arrest, including things captured on the newly released videos. It is my fault that I didn’t know this.

Anyway, read VerBruggen’s whole piece. He says that nothing that happened before Chauvin put his knee on Floyd’s neck is likely to matter much. He may well be right. As I said before, and as I’ll repeat here: it may turn out in the trial that Chauvin’s action was completely indefensible, both legally and morally. Like VerBruggen, I still find it hard to imagine how kneeling for that long on the neck of a subdued suspect can be justified, though I’ve received a few e-mails like this:

I just read your article “Why George Floyd Died” and the many updates. This is the first time I have seen your site and I appreciated your honesty and thought process. That said I would like to share a couple of thoughts that I did not see in your article.

1. You seemed upset that the information in the video was not presented earlier. However, there were plenty of videos that did show much of the “pre-knee on neck” video that did show the officers acting appropriately. This is not directed at you so much as the entire mob of people who were so upset but did not bother doing the research before they condemned someone. I was not surprised by the new video because I reviewed the other information that was available a week after the incident. Even the indictment noted that he could not breathe before he was on the ground.

2. The knee to the back of the neck looks awful but is not a choke hold or even a “blood choke”. I am a martial artist and an engineer and have a decent understanding of this. To cause asphyxiation by preventing the blood from going to the brain you have too close both of the carotid arteries in the front of the neck. I know there are also two smaller arteries in the back of the neck but they are well protected and will cause the same effect. Think about it: have you ever seen anyone choked out by only touching the back of the neck? It would not be possible to cut off the air or blood with the position of the knee on the neck. I know it looks bad and I had to demonstrate it myself to my adult children. There were others who were qualified to discuss this and to demonstrate. One was a college wrestling coach. However, instead of listening to information he was called a racist and fired for demonstrating a fact. You will see it noted that this is dangerous but you will not be told why so that you can assume it is because you can choke someone out. Not the case. It is dangerous because you can injure the spinal cord and base of the skull.

3. You question the morals of the officer but if you understand number 2 above, you realize that he has seen this before and is holding George in a position to protect George, the officers, and the people around him. People under the influence of narcotics can change temperament very quickly. You should research Excited delirium yourself. Whether it is a legitimate medical name or not, the actions the people do is well known. And restraining someone in that condition is the morally correct thing to do.

Please investigate my claims but do not use my name. I cannot afford to be fired right now.

I had not realized that a wrestling coach had been fired for questioning the received narrative — but it’s true. “His behavior was not consistent with our equity initiatives and nondiscrimination policies,” said the school district spokesman. Unbelievable. Maybe this coach was mistaken in his claim. But fired for discrimination because he claimed that the knee on the neck did not kill Floyd? How is that legal?

Another correspondent who said he is familiar with this restraint technique said that we don’t know if the officer was applying significant pressure to Floyd’s neck. Again, I expect that these claims will be well explored in the trial, but let me ask you readers (doctors and those with professional knowledge) if they can possibly be true. I genuinely want to know. I am grateful to work for a magazine that will not fire me for asking.

We know from the official autopsy found “no physical findings that support a diagnosis of traumatic asphyxia or strangulation.” The medical examiner still called it a homicide, saying that Floyd likely died from “the combined effects of Mr. Floyd being restrained by the police, his underlying health conditions and any potential intoxicants in his system.” The question then becomes to what extent did the neck restraint contribute to Floyd’s death, and whether or not using that restraint was permissible under Minneapolis PD guidelines (because if it was, then that will lessen the officer’s legal culpability). In thinking about it further, the fact that Chauvin held Floyd down for three minutes after a fellow officer no longer detected Floyd’s pulse probably makes a third-degree murder conviction more likely. I understand that even though Chauvin is being tried for second-degree murder, the jury could convict him on a third-degree charge, which does not require proving intent to kill.

Anyway, thanks again to Robert VerBruggen for helping me to better understand this case.

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Maybe Let’s Not Abolish The Police

The New York Times — !!!! — reports from Seattle on those who suffered from a lack of police presence in the recent troubles there. Excerpts:

Faizel Khan was being told by the news media and his own mayor that the protests in his hometown were peaceful, with “a block party atmosphere.”

But that was not what he saw through the windows of his Seattle coffee shop [located in CHAZ — RD]. He saw encampments overtaking the sidewalks. He saw roving bands of masked protesters smashing windows and looting.

Young white men wielding guns would harangue customers as well as Mr. Khan, a gay man of Middle Eastern descent who moved here from Texas so he could more comfortably be out. To get into his coffee shop, he sometimes had to seek the permission of self-appointed armed guards to cross a border they had erected.

“They barricaded us all in here,” Mr. Khan said. “And they were sitting in lawn chairs with guns.”

More:

Leaders in many progressive cities are listening. In New York City, Mayor Bill de Blasio has announced a plan to shift $1 billion out of the police budget. The Minneapolis City Council is pitching a major reduction, and the Seattle City Council is pushing for a 50 percent cut to Police Department funding. (The mayor said that plan goes too far.)

Some even call for “abolishing the police” altogether and closing down precincts, which is what happened in Seattle.

That has left small-business owners as lonely voices in progressive areas, arguing that police officers are necessary and that cities cannot function without a robust public safety presence. In Minneapolis, Seattle and Portland, Ore., many of those business owners consider themselves progressive, and in interviews they express support for the Black Lives Matter movement. But they also worry that their businesses, already debilitated by the coronavirus pandemic, will struggle to survive if police departments and city governments cannot protect them.

This is interesting:

Many are nervous about speaking out lest they lend ammunition to a conservative critique of the Black Lives Matter movement. In Portland, Elizabeth Snow McDougall, the owner of Stevens-Ness legal printers, emphasized her support for the cause before describing the damage done to her business.

“One window broken, then another, then another, then another. Garbage to clean off the sidewalk in front of the store every morning. Urine to wash out of our doorway alcove. Graffiti to remove,” Ms. McDougall wrote in an email. “Costs to board up and later we’ll have costs to repair.”

Yeah, lest they themselves start connecting the dots and having Unwanted Conclusions about the Black Lives Matter movement, and what it has become. These progressives mugged by reality might become conservatives, and then their lives would be over, I tell you, over. I predict that they will mount a heroic struggle to maintain cognitive dissonance.

Read it all.

I do not dispute that the police, broadly speaking, need to be reformed. Breonna Taylor died as the result of police executing a no-knock search warrant. How can we justify no-knock warrants? If somebody burst into my house unannounced in the middle of the night, you can bet that I’m going to come out of my bedroom shooting. I was pleased to see that the Louisville police chief suspended the use of no-knock warrants in the aftermath, but I would like to see them banned nationwide. That’s just one reform that could happen; there are others. I find it deeply regrettable that the outrageous police shooting of Breonna Taylor has been racialized by activists. She was an innocent person who died because of aggressive and unjust (though probably legal) police action. Unless there’s evidence that Louisville police only used no-knock warrants on black people, I can’t understand why her death has to be racialized. No-knock warrants are a danger to everyone. (If there’s something about this case that does make it racial, please educate me on it.)

But reforming the police is not the same thing as abolishing the police. In fact, Gallup this week released some very interesting poll findings. Take a look:

When asked whether they want the police to spend more time, the same amount of time or less time than they currently do in their area, most Black Americans — 61% — want the police presence to remain the same. This is similar to the 67% of all U.S. adults preferring the status quo, including 71% of White Americans.

Meanwhile, nearly equal proportions of Black Americans say they would like the police to spend more time in their area (20%) as say they’d like them to spend less time there (19%).

Gosh, it’s almost as if the views of activists, journalists, and commentators in the national media are not the same as views of actual black people who live under the oppression of crime.

Anyway, all credit to New York Times reporter Nellie Bowles for that complex, detailed report. I really do urge you to read it, to learn what the ordinary business people, of all races, had to suffer under CHAZ, which the Seattle city government permitted to terrorize residents of Seattle’s Capitol Hill neighborhood.

I want to say one more thing about the two posts I had up earlier this week about how the new police bodycam footage from the George Floyd incident made me question the received narrative about what happened to Floyd. (First post here, second post here.) I do not think that the new footage necessarily absolves the police officers of criminal wrongdoing, or even moral fault, in Floyd’s death — that remains to be seen in the criminal trials — but they do add much-needed context for what led to the neck restraint under which Floyd died. As I wrote earlier this week, I had made assumptions about both Floyd and the way he died that turned out on second examination (prompted by the new videos) to be far too simplistic. If you read those blogs and/or Twitter this week, you saw that that did not go over well with a lot of people.

This morning I was thinking about that, and recalled a conversation I had a few years back with an ex-cop after the Alton Sterling shooting here in Baton Rouge. That was a racially charged event in which two white city police officers got into a scuffle with a black man outside a convenience store, and shot him dead. My ex-cop friend is no longer a cop in part because he became disgusted with the brutality of doing his job. That is, with the overall brutality that even good police officers have to deal with as part of their job, but also with police brutality that crosses legal and moral lines. My point is, this ex-cop is especially sensitive about police brutality. Well, the ex-cop walked me through security cam footage, frame by frame, analyzing what the officers did, what Sterling did, and what it meant. His conclusion was that the officers could have done things differently, and maybe had a different outcome, but they had done nothing wrong, and that Sterling really had reached for the gun of one of the officers he had pinned to the ground. The ex-cop told me that these officers would likely not be charged, and if they were, they would probably be acquitted, because they had followed established procedure.

Sure enough, after a lengthy investigation by the Obama-led US Department of Justice, no charges were brought. A subsequent state investigation had the same result.

It was eye-opening to me to be shown the Sterling video and guided through it with the eyes of a trained law enforcement professional, particularly one known to me as someone who would not be naturally sympathetic to the police in brutality cases. It taught me how little people outside that world understand about police procedure, and how we can’t rely wholly on our own untutored eyes to tell us fully and accurately what we are seeing in cases like this. This is why we should be grateful for our dispassionate legal system, flawed though it may be. What feels true, and what is true, are often two different things.

My brother in law is a firefighter in Baton Rouge. A few years ago, I used to have the chance to talk to firefighters every now and then, because of that connection. I found myself in a conversation with one of them once, on the subject of police brutality. He said that in his work — at the time he was stationed in a poor black part of town, one of the most violent districts in the city — he has seen police officers, both white and black, treat civilians in a less than ideal manner. It bothered him. But, he added, it’s hard for people who don’t live or work in those neighborhoods to understand how violent everyday life is for the people who live there. The middle-class idea of stability and structure is completely alien, this man told me.

He gave me an example of something he saw with his own eyes. They got a call one night on a domestic disturbance. A woman had been badly beaten by her male partner. Because there was a medical aspect to the call, the firefighters had to go too, as well as the police. Both the woman and her alleged attacker were black. The firefighter told me that the woman was in bad shape. The police were so shocked by it that one of the cops — a black officer — started manhandling the black suspect. The black officer was so disgusted that a man could do that to a woman that he cut loose on the suspect. It was wrong, said the firefighter, but seeing how badly beaten the woman had been, he could understand how that black cop lost control.

And yet, said the firefighter, the beaten woman would not cooperate with the police, and would not press charges against the man who so badly beat her. Sadly, that happens in domestic violence cases, and is why bad men often get away with it. The firefighter explained, though, that the code of Never Cooperate With Police is very powerful in that poor black community, to the point where some people would rather take beatings than be seen helping the police. My sense was that the firefighter — a white man — was trying to convey to me how difficult it is to police those communities, and how violence and disorder are so deeply a part of the community’s life that it defies the ability of middle class people to comprehend.

I emphasize strongly: the firefighter was not justifying any of this! He was only saying how his own experiences as a bystander to many of these encounters between police and civilians in that poor black part of the city taught him that most outsiders don’t understand the complex and tragic dynamics there. This was years ago, probably in the aftermath of the Sterling shooting, but the sense that stayed with me of this conversation was that the white man, who was born and raised and lived in the suburbs, was finding that the longer he worked in the inner city, the less he understood human nature.

I wonder what people like that are thinking and saying these days. Well, if they’re white, they’re not talking on the record, and maybe not off the record. The price could be your job. If they’re black, maybe they’re not talking either, because the pressure within their own communities to hold to the eff-the-police narrative could be strong. But when you’re speaking anonymously to a pollster, you are more free to say what you think. Most black people in America are happy with the police presence in their communities, and a significant minority wish the police would spend more time there. Only one in five black Americans want less police presence in their communities.

That same poll, note well, finds that fewer than one in five black Americans are confident that if they encountered police, that police would treat them with courtesy and respect. That’s a shocking number that reveals a lot of work to be done to build trust. Black people, overall, want police in their neighborhoods, but they want to have confidence that they will be treated decently by them. Those citizens deserve to have that confidence. We all do.

The point here is that there is a greater middle ground on the question of policing and racism than you would think from the general narrative promulgated by the national media. That powerful Times story today about how those racial activists, especially white antifa members, bullied and even brutalized shopkeepers and others in CHAZ, is exactly the kind of complexifying story we need to read to give us a more complete picture of what’s happening in America now.

Given the documented fact that US media has given itself over dramatically to a far-left Critical Race Theory framework for reporting on and interpreting race in America, I don’t know how likely we are to see those stories. But today’s Nellie Bowles piece in the Times is a welcome counterexample.

One last thing: I’ve been texting last night and this morning with a white friend who is a middle-class professional today, an observantly Christian family man, but who grew up in Section 8 housing. He finds himself frustrated by Republicans, for the usual reason, but really repulsed by middle-class liberal discourse (and middle-class Christian discourse) about crime, poverty, and race. He tells me that he knows perfectly well how violent and chaotic poor neighborhoods often are, because he grew up in one — and again, he’s white. He says, “I want my children around non-dangerous people of whatever color, and away from chaos and crime. Every parent wants that.”

He thinks both professional liberals and professional conservatives are usually full of crap, because they don’t know what it’s like to live around poor people. The poor — the black poor, but also all the poor — become not real people, in all their humanity, but rather screens onto which others project their ideals, their fears, and their hatreds. I grew up not in poverty, but around a significant amount of rural poverty, so it’s not as easy for me to do this as it is for some people, but still, I am sure that I do it. This is something I need to work to overcome.

The thing that middle-class people assume is normal is Order. Poor people don’t have that luxury. My wife’s father told a story about how years ago, when the black pastor Tony Evans (whom he used to know) came to south Dallas, Pastor Evans and his wife set up a program for the children of the church. They let the kids come over to their house after school, so they could do their homework and be safe while their parents were still at work. According to my father-in-law, the pastor and his wife were shocked to find their house full of kids who would come in from school and fall sound asleep on the floor. Day after day.

Eventually they discovered why: these kids, all of them poor or at least economically distressed, lived in such chaotic circumstances that when they got to a safe, well-ordered place (their pastor’s house), they were able to let down their guard, and sleep. Something that middle class people take for granted was for those poor children a luxury only made possible by the kindness of their new pastor.

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