Rod Dreher's Blog, page 125

America’s Racialist Liberal Media

A couple of years ago, Prof. Michael Vlahos, who teaches strategy and war at Johns Hopkins, published an essay here in TAC talking about how America has often been a place of cold civil war, despite the official story of national unity (minus the Late Unpleasantness of 1861-65). He wrote in the piece that we were headed for a new civil war, and explained his thinking. In talking about the stages of a country headed to civil war, he mentioned this:

Othering. Here, the barren and inhospitable new civic space is dominated along looming, fortified lines. Warring identities have concluded that the only solution is the complete submission of the enemy party, and both sides are beginning to prepare for an ultimate showdown. Othering is a transforming process, through which former kin are reimagined as evil, an American inner-enemy, who once defeated must be punished. The most familiar metaphor of American othering was the 1770s practice of tarring and feathering. This less-than-lethal mob punishment corresponds—in shaming power and severity—to mob vengeance pervasive today on social media outlets such as Twitter.

Hence, to work fully as othering, the process must be public, result in the shame of the transgressor, and show that true virtue is in command. More than anything, othering is a ceremonial act designed to bring shame not just on the single person being tarred and feathered, but the entire community to which he belongs. The political object of #MeToo is not the numerically bounded set of guilty men, but rather the entire population set of all men. The political object of Black Lives Matter is not racists, but rather all whitepeople. The political object of the LGBT movement is not homophobes, but rather the whole of straight cisgender society whose reality compass they seek to transform.

The targeted other, equally seized by virtue, operates today from an angry defensive crouch. Thus do corporate elites support marquee Blue “social justice” agendas on Twitter, Facebook, and YouTube while censoring counterarguments and comment by Red. This is exactly the goal in this struggle: namely, to condition moderates to widespread acquiescence of a loud and insistent Blue agenda, while subtly coercing them to choose sides. They do this by arraigning Red as social losers, the future minority tribe, on their eventual way to the dustbin of history.

Red and Blue already represent an irreparable religious schism, deeper in doctrinal terms even than the 16th-century Catholic-Protestant schism. The war here is over which faction successfully captures the (social media) flag as true inheritor of American virtue.

Think about this in light of political scientist Zach Goldberg’s new piece in Tablet about how the media prepared us for this moment of tense racial conflict. Excerpts:

Countless articles have been published in recent weeks, often under the guise of straight news reporting, in which journalists take for granted the legitimacy of novel theories about race and identity. Such articles illustrate a prevailing new political morality on questions of race and justice that has taken power at the [New York] Times and [Washington] Post—a worldview sometimes abbreviated as “wokeness” that combines the sensibilities of highly educated and hyperliberal white professionals with elements of Black nationalism and academic critical race theory. But the media’s embrace of “wokeness” did not begin in response to the death of George Floyd. This racial ideology first began to take hold at leading liberal media institutions years before the arrival of Donald Trump and, in fact, heavily influenced the journalistic response to the protest movements of recent years and their critique of American society.

Starting well before Donald Trump’s rise to power, while President Obama was still in office, terms like “microaggression” and “white privilege” were picked up by liberal journalists. These terms went from being obscure fragments of academic jargon to commonplace journalistic language in only a few years—a process that I document here in detail. During this same period, while exotic new phrases were entering the discourse, universally recognizable words like “racism” were being radically redefined. Along with the new language came ideas and beliefs animating a new moral-political framework to apply to public life and American society.

Goldberg republishes the graphs he made after doing a deep dive into the Lexis/Nexis archive of news stories. They show the frequency with which certain words and phrases showed up in the media each year. For example:

This is how the media pushed America to get racially woke:

This occurs by a process of concept creep—a stretching of the terminological and normative boundaries of what constitutes racism and racist behavior. In other words: The racialization of things that weren’t previously viewed or understood through the lens of race. The upshot is that the more aspects of social life the media racializes, the more “racism” there is for the media to report on.

In 2011, just 35% of white liberals thought racism in the United States was “a big problem,” according to national polling. By 2015, this figure had ballooned to 61% and further still to 77% in 2017.

You think racism got that much worse in six years, so that double the number of white liberals thought it was a “big problem” in America? Goldberg goes on to say that the percentage of black and Latino Democrats who say they know someone who is racist did not really increase over that time — but it shot way up among white Democrats. In other words, white liberals — who totally dominate our media class — came to believe that America is a more racist place than do blacks and Latinos who share their politics.

More:

The divergent moral reactions toward perceived inequities have not emerged in a vacuum. Rather, the informational or media environment interacts with underlying orientations to elicit them. Members of society can be encouraged to see themselves and others as belonging to homogenous in-groups and out-groups. They can, further, be made aware, through frequent reminders and exposure, of the outcome disparities between them and the pervasiveness of discrimination. Finally, these inequalities must be framed as illegitimate and resulting from the past and/or present injustices perpetrated by the advantaged against the disadvantaged. Taken together, and in the context of the “Great Awokening,” white people need to see themselves as belonging to a collective that enjoys illegitimate privileges at the expense of racial others. Similarly, nonwhites need to be frequently reminded of their victimhood and unjust social position. They see themselves as belonging to a collective that is bound by their experience of racial oppression. The effect overall in terms of the coverage at publications like the Times and Post is that quite often, articles about racism are not reports about events occurring in a particular time and place—they are part of a totalizing theory of the world.

Having seen how powerfully the media’s ideology-driven writing has changed attitudes over the last decade, it is important to note this from Goldberg. Emphases are mine:

For decades, the term “racial equality” was the ubiquitous framework for understanding and evaluating racial justice. This is now changing as “equality” gives way to newer concepts such as “racial equity,” which refers to the redistribution of resources from the supposedly privileged to the supposedly disadvantaged as a means to redress claimed discrimination. As Ibram Kendi puts it: “If discrimination is creating equity, then it is antiracist. If discrimination is creating inequity, then it is racist … The only remedy to racist discrimination is antiracist discrimination. The only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination. The only remedy to present discrimination is future discrimination.” Thus the goal is no longer ‘racial equality’ or equal treatment under the law. It is, rather, the attainment of a state of the world in which all groups have equal outcomes—even if some are deliberately disadvantaged in the process. Until very recently, “racial equity” was a largely unfamiliar phrase only rarely featured in the pages of the major newspapers. But this has changed dramatically in the last few years. In 2013 “racial equity” constituted 0.000003% of all words in The New York Times. One year later, it was being used six times more frequently (0.00019%). And, by 2019, nearly 32 times more frequently (0.000096%). Remarkably, in The Washington Post, “racial equity” was not only being used 27 times more frequently in 2019 (0.00032%) than in 2013 (0.00012%), but its rate of usage actually surpassed that of “racial equality.”

I bet most people think that “equity” is a synonym for “equality.” That’s not how these woke journalists and academics see it. What Goldberg’s analysis predicts is that the mainstream media are propagandizing the country to prepare it for racial oppression and the seizure of property for redistribution. Or, to put a fine point on it, they are providing the ideological framework for elites to justify redistribution.

You think elections don’t matter? You think judges don’t matter?

One more excerpt:

What the data presented here suggests is that editorial decisions made over the past decade at some of the most powerful media outlets in the world about what kind of language to use and what kind of stories merited coverage when it came to race—whatever the intention and level of forethought behind such decisions—has stoked a revival of racial consciousness among their readers. Intentionally or not, by introducing and then constantly repeating a set of key words and concepts, publications like The New York Times have helped normalize among their readership the belief that “color” is the defining attribute of other human beings. For those who adopt this singular focus on race, a racialized view of the world becomes baseline test of political loyalty.

Read it all. It’s wonky and full of data, but very, very important.

What Goldberg has documented in great detail is a successful propaganda effort that has set Americans against each other along racial and ethnic lines. I sometimes joke that I read The New York Times for the same reason analysts of the Soviet Union read Pravda: to know how the Soviet elites thought, and what mattered to them. Well, for the past decade, this is what not just the Times, but all the elite media have been thinking. They have been preparing us for something terrible.

How can we fight it? Almost every single day I receive an e-mail or a message from somebody who says, “I agree with you, but I can’t say so, or I would risk losing my job.” I understand. But we are not powerless. In Live Not By Lies, I cite Solzhenitsyn:

“We are not called upon to step out onto the square and shout out the truth, to say out loud what we think— this is scary, we are not ready,” he writes. “But let us at least refuse to say what we do not think!”

For example, says Solzhenitsyn, a man who refuses to live by lies:

• Will not say, write, affirm, or distribute anything that distorts the truth

• Will not go to a demonstration or participate in a collective action unless he truly believes in the cause

• Will not take part in a meeting in which the discussion is forced and no one can speak the truth

• Will not vote for a candidate or proposal he considers to be “dubious or unworthy”

• Will walk out of an event “as soon as he hears the speaker utter a lie, ideological drivel, or shameless propaganda”

• Will not support journalism that “distorts or hides the underlying facts”

“This is by no means an exhaustive list of the possible and necessary ways of evading lies,” Solzhenitsyn writes. “But he who begins to cleanse himself will, with a cleansed eye, easily discern yet other opportunities.”

We can do at least this. We can stop believing what these propagandists are telling us. We can refuse to hate ourselves, our neighbors, and our country, just because they want us to. And we can prepare ourselves for strife to come. Read Michael Vlahos. What our media have been doing is Othering. It’s not going to stop there. The history of the 20th century shows very well how effective mass media propaganda can be at stoking racial and ethnic hatred to serve the goals of those in power.

The post America’s Racialist Liberal Media appeared first on The American Conservative.

America: Land Of Depression?

From the late Australian poet Les Murray’s memoir of depression:

I came to see that the tone of much in the Totalitarian Age that may now just be drawing to a close exactly resembles clinical depression. It is the secret co-opted fuel of many Causes, and is not exposed for what it is because it is as common, and exploitable, on one side of politics as the other. If, as shrinks tell us, a fifth of all people in this stressed age will suffer at least one depressive episode in their lives, there is clearly an enormous pool of potential recruits among people who haven’t identified the real roots of their trouble and so will reliably hate substitutes or near-enough versions. We’ve all observed the desperate bored fatigue which overcomes activists when any topic not on their agenda is raised, or the bristling that arises when playful spin is put on their obsessions. If you are energy-depleted, it’s natural that you will have time only for a manageable list of issues, insisting that all talk be about those, and in deadly earnest. At the heart of all the proclaimed love of abstractions and absolutes there is the characteristic inability to love actual persons, or to forgive them. Because they are usually the wrong persons, and we can only forgive as it were outwards, starting with those who are the real source of our pain. We have to identify these, and face our own actions in respect of them, giving ourselves and them the benefit of proportion. So far as we know, neither we nor they had lived before, or come into the world well prepared for what we’d encounter. We couldn’t always get it right the first time.

Via the Resident Theologian blog.

I liked that quote so much, and love Les Murray’s poetry so dearly, that I just bought the book on Kindle. Murray, you should know, had Asperger’s syndrome, which is high-functioning autism. He was, at least for a time, what we today call an “incel” (involuntary celibate). Murray later married and had five children. He was diagnosed at age 50 with clinical depression. Here are the lines in the book that precede what you read above:

The prime site of my illness, then, was sexual. Common enough. As I unearthed my buried troubles, I saw how closely bound up they were with features of modern society that I loathed, such as demonstrations, in which I always heard the echo of the schoolyard, or radicalisms which seemed to enlarge the schoolyard into a whole ideal world. In the chants of early militant feminism, I heard the accents of Taree High. In a column I used to write for the short-lived Independent Monthly, I coined the term ‘erocide,’ meaning the deliberate destruction of a person’s sexual morale, and speculated that we victims of that process probably outnumber all other victim-groups combined, but we will never rise up and demand redress. We are too deeply shamed, and too darkly aware that those rejected for reproduction or pleasure are scapegoats for the pain which sex entails even among the attractive.

Anyway, what if we are depressed as a nation, and have been for a while? What if 2020 is so freaking awful because the Covid-19 lockdowns have exacerbated our condition? What if one hidden wound in the body politic is sexual frustration — the frustration of those who cannot find connection with others, for whatever reason, and the misery of those who, seeking release, have turned to pornography, and seduced by the lie that it is an adequate substitute for bodily communion with a beloved, have become enslaved by it?

What would it mean for an entire civilization to commit erocide?

What if the militancy of activists, marching on the streets and through the institutions, is really a manifestation of desperate bored fatigue?

What if we want to burn it all down because it’s interesting to see things go up in smoke?

What do we do then? Thoughts, readers?

 

The post America: Land Of Depression? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Democratic Attack On Gun Rights

I’m not a Second Amendment purist — the First Amendment is my thing — and often believe that many fellow conservatives go way too far in their absolutizing of gun rights. That said, this news today out of New York is very alarming:

The New York attorney general, Letitia James, filed a lawsuit Thursday seeking to dissolve the National Rifle Association, alleging that years of corruption and misspending had irreparably undermined its ability to operate as a nonprofit.

The lawsuit sets up a legal confrontation that could take years to play out and will leave the 148-year-old N.R.A. — long the nation’s most influential gun-rights lobby but recently hobbled by financial woes and infighting — fighting for its survival. The attorney general’s office previously presided over the dissolution of President Trump’s scandal-marred charitable foundation, but the N.R.A., with more than five million members, is a far larger organization that is expected to put up a more prolonged fight.

Ms. James also sued four current or former top N.R.A. leaders, seeking tens of millions of dollars in restitution, including Wayne LaPierre, the longtime chief executive. The others named in the suit are John Frazer, the organization’s general counsel; Josh Powell, a former top lieutenant of Mr. LaPierre’s; and Woody Phillips, a former chief financial officer.

The suit accuses the N.R.A. and the executives of “violating numerous state and federal laws” by enriching themselves, as well as their friends, families and allies, and taking improper actions that cost the organization $64 million over three years. The attorney general has regulatory authority over the N.R.A. because it is chartered as a nonprofit in New York. She is also seeking to oust Mr. LaPierre and Mr. Frazer, and to bar all four men from ever serving on nonprofit boards in New York again.

Read it all. 

If you have a basic familiarity about the way Wayne LaPierre has spent money on himself over his tenure as the NRA’s head, you’ll know that he is a difficult person to defend. Read this, and try to maintain with a straight face that the LaPierre regime is not corrupt. Rank and file NRA members, sick of seeing their dues going to pay for the high life of LaPierre and NRA organizational elites, are mad as hell, and they’re right to be.

The New York AG sees weakness in the LaPierre rot, and is using it to try to destroy the gun rights group, which she once referred to as a “terrorist organization.”

LaPierre and his team have left the NRA vulnerable to attacks like this, no question. But let’s be clear about what this is: a Democratic attempt to exterminate what has been an extremely effective defender of gun rights. If LaPierre’s personal and professional problems are leaving the NRA open to this kind of attack, then they have to go; the cause is more important than they are. Still, the lesson from this is that this is what the Democrats will do in power. Once Biden is in the White House, I expect the full force of the federal government to come down on the NRA as part of a longer war against Second Amendment rights. Perhaps Biden has more sense than to pick that particular fight, given that it’s easier to wage that particular battle as AG of New York than AG of the United States.

Still, this is a shot across the bow about the future of gun rights in a Democratic-rule America. I hope Second Amendment advocates won’t be manipulated into thinking that defending the LaPierre regime is the same thing as defending the NRA and the Second Amendment cause. The New York AG makes it clear that she’s not really concerned about cleaning up the NRA, but destroying it.

Why she made this move just a few months before the fall election, I don’t know. This is going to rile up the Right, and it should. But let us not miss this lesson: we on the Right are not going to be able to sustain ourselves in the many battles ahead with the resurgent progressive Left if we have leaders and organizations that care more about self-aggrandizement and comfort than in fighting for principles and causes.

 

The post Democratic Attack On Gun Rights appeared first on The American Conservative.

Charles Péguy And Mystical Politics

From an article in Hedgehog Review by Jay Tolson, who favorably reviews a new biography of the French Catholic poet Charles Péguy, who died in World War I:

Much as he liked Benda, Péguy found his extreme rationalism arid and unsustaining, particularly when it came to fostering solidarity among the citizens of a nation. Péguy’s conviction that all politics begins in mystique—that is, in the very mysteriousness of shared transcendent beliefs and myths—made him a shrewd and prophetic critic of the conditions of social separation and anomie that have repeatedly provoked ultranationalist populism in modern democracies, usually to disastrous effect.

One might similarly fault [biographer Matthew] Maguire’s rather scant handling of Péguy’s differences with the reactionary Catholics. While his dealings with Charles Maurras could be cordial—Maurras even reviewed some of his work favorably—Péguy was deeply bothered by the way Maurras and others of the Catholic right instrumentalized religion to advance their antiliberal program. The craven clericalism of the right also repelled Péguy, finally driving him to abandon churchgoing altogether, though he remained supportive of Catholic charitable work and, in his heart, deeply committed to the beliefs of his faith.

More:

Péguy believed that advocates of metaphysical hegemony on both the left and the right were foes of the liberal arts that were indispensable to republican democracy. Joined invisibly in their shared immanentism, these hegemonists embodied the deep intolerance of late modernity—and therefore were to be exposed and resisted for what they so dangerously espoused. Call it one of the great tragedies of modernity that the warnings of this clear and prophetic voice were lost not just to his time but to the century that has since unfolded.

Read it all. I’m tempted to get Maguire’s book, given my interest in Péguy (who re-started the annual walking pilgrimage from Paris to Chartres), and because I’m curious about his critique of the “immanentism” of the Left and the Right of his day.

The conditions of social separation and anomie that led to ultranationalist populism exist today, of course, and, I think, account for the increasing radicalization, on both the Left and Right, of our politics. What I would like to know, and that this new biography can answer, is why Péguy thought late modernity worth defending, given that it is responsible for the disenchantment of the world, and the exorcism of mystique from the body politic.

Could it be that he believed that as deficient as late modernity is, the likely alternatives — dictatorship of the Left or the Right — would be much worse? Péguy was not a liberal, but rather a democratic socialist. I poked around a little on the “Look Inside” feature of Amazon.com, and found a bit of information about Péguy and mystique. Maguire says that the most famous sentence Péguy ever wrote is, “Everything begins in mysticism and ends in politics.” According to Maguire, this simply means that any just political order must be founded on shared convictions about ultimate reality. From the book:

The idea of mysticism (or, less poetically, metaphysics) as the basis for politics is not new:

More:

That critique sounds a lot like today, does it not? Wokeness is an attempt to re-enchant politics from the Left. We don’t have an articulated Nationalism to do the same from the Right, though we may yet; Trumpism was the start of something, but it died in the desert of his ego.

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.

There must be in this something of Eliot’s famous line about if you will not have God, you should be prepared to pay your respects to Stalin. That is, the idea that no society can live for long with a politics that is merely procedural. But how can we establish a politics on shared transcendent belief when most people no longer believe in anything but themselves? You cannot coerce people into believing something that they don’t; that way lies tyranny.

An aside that I believe is related. The other day, a Czech Catholic reader of Live Not By Lies (I sent him an advance copy for review) wrote to me to say:

The people described in the book — the ones you suggest the readers should emulate — were a tiny fraction of a minority. Almost nobody is like that. They prevailed alone, as single families, or, sometimes, in the smallest possible groups. When the time came these people were joined by many others who were not like them but did not want to live in lies.

But why? What was the truth they were after? It was not Christianity or faith per se. In my opinion, it was the roots.

The roots were Christian, obviously, but that did not play a direct role. It was the long historical narrative the Czechs, or Slovaks, etc. wanted to be, and stay a part of. Communism was always viewed as something totally alien and imported. Is American culture/history strong enough — or even definable enough — so it can eventually rejoin the few fools who will dissent and survive the upcoming totalitarians?

I think that American totalitarianism is qualitatively a new experiment because it is being applied to a culturally splintered and historically young environment. From this perspective, the current attempts to rewrite and reframe American history make all the sense. When the US plunges into its totalitarian future, nobody will emerge, and the dissent, like John Savage, will eventually fizzle out.

That was extremely sobering. This man, a Catholic, believes that it wasn’t Christian faith that helped his people resist Communism (those who did resist, that is), but rather the mystique of sharing a long tribal history — a history that was entwined with Christianity, but that was broader than Christianity.

We don’t have that here, do we?

The post Charles Péguy And Mystical Politics appeared first on The American Conservative.

Letter From An Angry Middle-American Vet

On my “Is A New Civil War Possible?” thread, I posted this reader e-mail as an update:

Just read your latest blog regarding the possibility of a new civil war and had some thoughts. I live in a suburb outside [mid-size Midwestern city] with my wife and two school-age children. [My city] is similar to Austin or Seattle or Portland in that it’s a deeply Progressive city surrounded by a rural conservative population (big difference is that there are more African-Americans here). I’m from [a small town in this state], but after serving for six years as an Army Infantry Officer, my wife and our two kids settled in [this area] because there is little opportunity in the rest of the state.

I say this all because I feel like I’m living on a fault line between the two sides of this civil war we are talking about. Ten minutes south of me they are protesting for Black Lives Matter and demanding government mandated shutdowns over COVID; ten minutes north of me they are holding outdoor high school graduations and Back the Blue rallies. My wife and I are conservative Christians who are very active in our church; our next door neighbors and good friends both work for universities and are very liberal. We hang out several times a week and get along well but avoid talking about anything that could lead to uncomfortable conversations. I’d like to think that we model what a good friendship across party lines is but I don’t have much faith in that.

It’s difficult to picture what a civil war would look like because while the differences between urban and rural are very striking, there are plenty of us in the middle who would have to make very tough decisions on which way to go. My wife and I both work in the corporate sector and feel like we are being slowly backed into the corner with our traditional beliefs and values. If the violence of the cities spills into the suburbs I can’t picture us standing and fighting as we’d be outnumbered. Even though there is a healthy mix of conservatives in our area, how many of them are prepared to fight back? Fortunately, we have family in the rural parts of the state to retreat to, but we’d be forced to give up our jobs and our house and the way of life we enjoy.

And that is how I think this will play out. People with traditional values will be forced to retreat to the rural areas and accept a different standard of living ( which might be better, who knows) while ceding the urban and suburban centers to the Left. We’ll take up a defensive posture with our guns as we really do not desire to use our weapons except for in self-defense. We’ll leave the Left to build their utopian society and they’ll leave us alone because in all reality they’ll have nobody to come tell us what to do. They’ll need rural America to provide them with some food and we’ll need them for…something.

Hmm, sounds kind of like the Benedict Option. Maybe it’s wishful thinking to believe we’ll be left alone but I still believe that Law Enforcement and the military lean right, so I can’t imagine them coming after us. Anyway, thanks for your work, I’ve enjoyed reading you for the past several years and will be sure to get the new book when it comes out.

I heard from that reader just now, and post his letter with his permission (I’m hiding his state):

Thanks for posting my email on your “New Civil War” thread. I don’t want to beat a dead horse, but I think this is a topic that really needs discussing. Some of my fellow readers seem to be naive or maybe just unfamiliar with some aspects of this current culture war and I wanted to offer some insight. Not saying that I have the answers, just giving my perspective.

As I mentioned, I am an Army veteran living in a [Midwestern] big-city suburb. I grew up in a poor rural farm town, put myself through college through a combination of athletic and academic scholarships, student loans, and part-time work. My only privilege comes from the fact that I had a large family support structure that could only offer love, encouragement, and a firm religious foundation as opposed to any monetary support. Following college, I joined the Army to serve my country in a time of war and to support my young wife and son. I was commissioned as an Infantry Officer and led soldiers  in Afghanistan on two separate occasions before I was wounded in combat and forced to medically retire.

Following my retirement, we moved back to [this Midwestern state] and I began working in the manufacturing sector in various leadership roles. My wife works in corporate retail. We’ve made a nice life for ourselves and our two kids in what I would call an upper middle class lifestyle. We’re certainly not rich and the COVID lockdowns have definitely affected our livelihoods. My company implemented several weeks of furloughs to make up for lost sales and her company just had a massive reduction in force in which she was thankfully spared. It’s not in the national news, but our region is home to the headquarters of many retail companies and last week was a bloodbath with regards to layoffs. Hundreds if not thousands of middle-class people lost their jobs spread out over a handful of companies.

I say this because many of your commenters are snidely asking who on the conservative side is going to fight in this so-called “civil-war”. It is people like these who will. The people who have quietly tried to live their lives in middle America. They are not racists. They are not homophobic. They just want the ability to enjoy the freedoms we are supposed to have in this country and want the same for everyone else. Not all of them are conservatives, but since they are mostly white, the Left has no place for them (I’ll admit the establishment Right doesn’t either).

There seems to be this impression that the only people on the Right who have guns are 65 year old NRA Boomers living in Hickville, USA. This is laughable. I have a lot of friends from the military spread out over the United States who I am connected with on social media or send text messages with from time to time. Most of us have a very similar perspective on what is going on around us. We signed up to serve our country during wars that in hindsight cost us a lot of blood and treasure. We came home to a country that is divided on class and race, which is confusing to us because we formed bonds with each other during war that transcended those divides. We aren’t treated particularly great by the government, who just wants to push pills to make us go away, or corporate America, who wants to use us as marketing props. We just want to live in the country that we thought we were fighting for and be free to work hard and raise our kids how we see fit. We don’t deny things could be better for a lot of people in America, but know the current proposals on the table won’t solve our problems.

By the way, we have guns and we know how to use them. Most of us would rather not do so, as we’ve seen firsthand the devastating effects of war, but we will defend ourselves if we have to. We aren’t planning raids on government buildings or seeking vigilante justice on the streets. But if an Antifa mob comes to burn down our neighborhoods you better bet that we’ll be willing to meet them at our front door.

We’re not there yet, but barring some miracle we’ll be there at some point. There are a lot of people in the middle getting squeezed from both sides right now. Corporate America sells us out for profit on one side while Progressive America chastises us as privileged bigots on the other. Another COVID lockdown is going to crush the economy even worse than the first time and put a lot more people out of work. We’re backing a lot of people into a corner and there are few places left on this earth to escape to. Nobody wants another civil war, but we are doing a damn good job at creating the circumstances for it to happen.

Discuss.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

My first thought is that we have actually undergone two civil wars, the first being the War of Independence. The Adams breakdown of support, generally supported by historical research, would indicate that support for independence remained fairly weak for much of the war. I would classify the War of Independence, as many have, as a British Empire civil war or a British North America civil war.

As a historian who has studied conflicts and also US history, I am also frightened by the rhetoric. My old preacher said that when you start to see national institutions breaking apart over politics, such as the Protestant denominations before the civil war, conflict is not far behind.

In all honesty, I see pathways to civil war regardless of who wins in November.

Should Trump win, I do believe we will see secession movements in blue states dominated by major cities. Personally, I favor a “let our erring sisters go in peace” approach.  Additionally, any states seceding after a Trump victory will be obligated to leave their rural areas in the Union to join other states or to form new ones.  We would end up with a string of Singapores or Chile shaped countries in coastal areas, I speculate.

Civil war after a Biden win would be another thing entirely. It would be urban and rural warfare fighting over control of the nation-state more than secession attempts. I see no way the blue states and cities could win in such a scenario. Rural areas have hundreds of millions of guns, many in the hands of irregular warfare combat veterans ranging from the ages of 18 to 80. The same topography that made Appalachia appealing to John Brown still exists, but now is honeycombed by countless thousands of miles of uncharted mine tunnels and natural limestone caves.  The Rockies are like Afghanistan writ large in terms of landscape.

In other words, even if a Democrat led war effort could muster support from most of the military and law enforcement community, they would have to fight a war Democrats warned us against for two generations – another Vietnam.

I also do not see the war progressing as the Midwestern letter writer expects. Like Canaan, US urban areas can be cut off from each other at least at ground level and possibly even besieged to an extent. US cities are vulnerable in ways that country areas are not, especially since a civil war would cut them off of energy and food supplies unless shipped from overseas.

Also, the urban population of the US by and large does not own arms and is less likely to have experienced military training.

Civil war is the worst possible outcome of our current political crisis, which is why I personally say that if cities want to leave the Union they are not worth a fight.  I hope and pray that the country finds a way to live and let live, but I am losing optimism on that front.

This e-mail jolted me, and I’ll tell you why. The break-up of the United States is, for me, an unthinkable catastrophe. At this point, it’s only a theoretical exercise. But let’s say some version of it did come to pass. I live in a big blue city inside a red state. If there was any sort of formal break-up, I would go back to my home parish and stand with my family and the people with whom I grew up. Simple as that. Depending on the particulars, I might talk my way out of it, but that’s my instinct.

Realizing this made me understand the US Civil War in a way I hadn’t quite done before. We talk about the Southerners being “traitors” to the Union, and maybe that’s true. I don’t want to argue that. But what I am saying is that they were being loyal to their primary institutions: their families and their people. If that meant betraying America, then they were going to betray America. Emotionally and psychologically, this is the same kind of thing we hear about soldiers in combat: they don’t ultimately fight for America the Beautiful, the blessing of democracy, the US Constitution, or any of that. They fight for each other.

Don’t misunderstand: I believe that breaking up America would be a terrible idea! I don’t want to fight my fellow Americans. If people wanted to go, let them go. How many people today, I wonder, care so much about preserving the Union that they would be willing to go to war to keep California or Texas from seceding? I don’t, and it’s not because I hate California or Texas. How about you?

But if we’re gaming out scenarios as a thought experiment, and if Blue states and regions sought to separate in some way from the rest, I would leave the Blue if I were living there, and go live in the Red, with my tribe — even if it cost me money. I wonder how common that sentiment is. I talked yesterday with a Louisiana friend who was telling me yesterday about how in his experience with his adult children and their friends, so many people of the younger generations just don’t have that same experience of natural roots that we older people do.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

Yep. This is very much the situation I’m in right now, except that I’m not a veteran. Living in suburbia, conservative, family guy; trying to make sense of the culture wars right now with some objectivity, and getting told that trying to see things “objectively” is itself patriarchy and racism.

My wife and I are closet conservatives, even in our relatively mild suburb in a red state. Most of our friends and peers have gone WAY to the left of the past several years. My wife and I, at least once a week, converse about current events, and these conversations always end the same way: we can’t tell anyone else we know about this. No one. We’d lose all our friends and social support.

I’ve been putting off buying a gun for years now, because I really loathe the idea of having them around my kids. But we recently decided it’s time to get one and get trained. I hate that. I hate all of this.

We have several close (white) friends who also live in the suburbs, but will regularly drive downtown, protest police “brutality” for a few hours, then pick up a $6 coffee on the way back to their gated neighborhood and make sure that their day’s work is all over social media to show what good “allies” they are. One recently posted that it was unfair, dangerous (and of course racist) for the local police to form barricades around public buildings during these protests, because (and I quote) “if a few buildings need to burn, let them burn.” I’m not sure how to tell these people they will feel differently when it is their cookie-cutter McMansions burning, and that that’s what they’re heading towards. But again, if we were to tell them that, we’d be accused of (you guessed it) racism.

It’s like our society wants to die. Die of Covid, die of mob violence, die of existential boredom. I don’t always agree with your conclusions, but that’s why I follow your blog so closely: the Benedict Option was a prescient book; every day it looks more like the only solution conservative, or even independent-thinking, people are going to have. I’m just so sad about it all. This is NOT the future I want for my kids.

God have mercy.

The post Letter From An Angry Middle-American Vet appeared first on The American Conservative.

George Floyd And ExDS

Lots of mail this morning on yesterday’s George Floyd post. It says something about our times that people are writing to me saying they agree, but can’t say so for fear of losing their jobs. They know that in this free country, there are some lies that we have to live by. It is quite revealing that so many people seem angry that this new bodycam footage has come out, complicating the received Narrative. Why? I can see why professional activists would be angry, but this new bodycam footage shows that the Minneapolis cops aren’t the depraved monsters we all saw on the previous footage — that they had been struggling with a hysterical, possibly delusional man who had spent nine minutes refusing to do anything the cops told him. This doesn’t mean that the cops are morally or legally innocent of wrongdoing — though they might be — but it does mean that the case is more complicated than we have been led to believe by the media and others.

I’m as guilty as anybody. I thought Chauvin was a monster, and have said so on this blog. What kind of man puts his knee on another man’s neck for almost nine minutes, while the subdued man says he can’t breathe, and then dies? A monster. The new bodycam footage, though shows that as part of his nine-minute shrieking freakout prior to being put on the ground, Floyd had claimed, “I can’t breathe!” even though he was standing up, unrestrained except for the cuffs. Maybe he really couldn’t breathe because he was having a panic attack, or was overdosing on fentanyl (which was found in his bloodstream in a high quantity). Or maybe he was just talking smack to keep them from putting him in the squad car. Whatever the truth, the cops made the fatal judgment that he was not serious when he was on the ground with Chauvin’s knee in his neck, saying he couldn’t breathe.

I don’t know precisely how that complicates matters legally, though lawyers have been writing to say (see updates) that it’s going to be very hard for the government to prove beyond a reasonable doubt that the cops are guilty as charged. This June piece by former federal prosecutor Andrew McCarthy is a somewhat technical walk-through of the charges, and what prosecutors have to prove (McCarthy believes that Chauvin and two of the three other cops should have been charged with something, but that Minnesota AG Keith Ellison has overcharged them, making it more likely that they won’t be convicted of anything). Morally, it’s up for debate, but I don’t see how one can admit into evidence the nine minutes of video prior to Floyd being subdued on the ground and still believe that this is an easy case to adjudicate morally.

A reader writes to say that complicating information was publicly available before the new bodycam footage, and that I, like others, either didn’t see it, or didn’t go looking for it. In my case, I didn’t go looking for it. I assumed the Narrative — white cops torture black suspect to death — was true, or mostly true. We had video, did we not? That reader sends this June 11 piece in Medium, by Gavrilo David, that works against the received Narrative of Floyd’s death. Excerpts:

The [initial George Floyd] video is unquestionably horrific.

But in our rush to condemn an aggressive use of force and pursue justice for George Floyd, we have ignored crucial information which is necessary in judging the conduct of the officers. While nothing can absolve George Floyd’s death, these facts do cast doubt on the appropriateness of a murder charge for Chauvin, and paint a more nuanced picture of the events leading up to the tragic encounter.

There are six crucial pieces of information — six facts — that have been largely omitted from discussion on the Chauvin’s conduct. Taken together, they likely exonerate the officer of a murder charge. Rather than indicating illegal and excessive force, they instead show an officer who rigidly followed the procedures deemed appropriate by the Minneapolis Police Department (MPD). The evidence points to the MPD and the local political establishment, rather than the individual officer, as ultimately responsible for George Floyd’s death.

More:

These six facts are as follows:

George Floyd was experiencing cardiopulmonary and psychological distress minutes before he was placed on the ground, let alone had a knee to his neck.
The Minneapolis Police Department (MPD) allows the use of neck restraint on suspects who actively resist arrest, and George Floyd actively resisted arrest on two occasions, including immediately prior to neck restraint being used.
The officers were recorded on their body cams assessing George Floyd as suffering from “excited delirium syndrome” (ExDS), a condition which the MPD considers an extreme threatto both the officers and the suspect. A white paper used by the MPD acknowledges that ExDS suspects may die irrespective of force involved. The officers’ response to this situation was in line with MPD guidelines for ExDS.
Restraining the suspect on his or her abdomen (prone restraint) is a common tactic in ExDS situations, and the white paper used by the MPD instructs the officers to control the suspect until paramedics arrive.
Floyd’s autopsy revealed a potentially lethal concoction of drugs — not just a potentially lethal dose of fentanyl, but also methamphetamine. Together with his history of drug abuse and two serious heart conditions, Floyd’s condition was exceptionally and unusually fragile.
Chauvin’s neck restraint is unlikely to have exerted a dangerous amount of force to Floyd’s neck. Floyd is shown on video able to lift his head and neck, and a robust study on double-knee restraints showed a median force exertion of approximately approximately 105lbs.

Let’s be clear: the actions of Chauvin and the other officers were absolutely wrong. But they were also in line with MPD rules and procedures for the condition which they determined was George Floyd was suffering from. An act that would normally be considered a clear and heinous abuse of force, such as a knee-to-neck restraint on a suspect suffering from pulmonary distress, can be legitimatized if there are overriding concerns not known to bystanders but known to the officers. In the case of George Floyd, the overriding concern was that he was suffering from ExDS, given a number of relevant facts known to the officers. This was not known to the bystanders, who only saw a man with pulmonary distress pinned down with a knee on his neck. While the officers may still be found guilty of manslaughter, the probability of a guilty verdict for the murder charge is low, and the public should be aware of this well in advance of the verdict. 

[highlight in the original text]

Gavrilo David then goes into detail on each of those six points. Again, David’s piece was published almost two months ago. I was unaware of it until two different readers sent it to me. David writes:

From the 911 transcript, we know that George Floyd was acting “drunk” and “not in control of himself” before the police were called. The 911 caller is concerned that such an “awfully drunk” man would attempt to operate a vehicle. This is an important departure from the earlier media reports, which indicated the officers were only called over a counterfeit bill.

“Um someone comes our store and give us fake bills and we realize it before he left the store, and we ran back outside, they was sitting on their car […], and he’s sitting on his car cause he is awfully drunk and he’s not in control of himself” […] He is not acting right […] and [he’s] not acting right so and [he] started to go, drive the car.”

This information on its own is of no significance. In fact, aggressively restraining someone who is experiencing distress only makes that restraint all the more heinous. But as will be seen later, when this information is seen in light of George Floyd’s behavior, it led the officers to suspect he was suffering from ExDS — a far more dangerous scenario than simple distress.

Did you know that the original 911 report from the store owner said that Floyd was “awfully drunk and … not in control of himself”? I didn’t. I should have. Part of the reason that I had decided that the MPD overreacted was that I couldn’t believe they were so hard on a guy who was just trying to pass fake bills. As David says, this is really important information to helping us understand the context of the officers’ actions.

This is really interesting too. Remember that Gavrilo David published this on June 11:

For reasons not yet known, Minneapolis is refusing to release the officers’ body cams of this moment. This information is important in order to determine how Floyd was acting the exact moment the officers pulled him from the police car. It is unconscionable that this information has not been released to the public. We must assume, given all relevant information already known, that their reason for pulling him out of the car was his continued resistance as noted in the government complaint.

This is true! Now that we have seen the bodycam footage — which someone leaked to the Daily Mail — we know that Floyd was acting crazily when they pulled him from the car, and was physically resisting being put into the car.

Look at this passage about ExDS (excited delirium syndrome), in light of the new bodycam footage. Remember that David published this almost two months ago:

It must be understood that the public does not yet have enough information to conclude whether the police were accurate in their assessment of ExDS. We have some information indicating that the determination is correct, but absent the full body cam recording, we are unable to make a complete judgment on this point. This is discouraging, because the entire case rests on this point. We know that two officers believed he was experiencing ExDS, and that the other two officers did not comment to the contrary. We also know that George Floyd had some symptoms of ExDS, but we do not know if he had all symptoms of ExDS, or if he had any symptoms indicating the contrary. Below are the symptoms, affixed with whether we know he experienced the symptom or not:

Sweating [Y]
Police Noncompliance [Y]
Lack of Tiring [Y]
Unusual Strength [?]
Pain Tolerance [?]
Tachypnea [?]
Tactile Hyperthermia [?]
Bizarre behavior generating calls to police [Y]
Suspected or known psychostimulant drug or alcohol intoxication [Y]
Erratic or violent behavior [?]
Ongoing struggle despite futility [Y]
Yelling/shouting/guttural sounds [?]
Agitation [Y]
Inappropriately Clothed [N]
Mirror/Glass Attraction [?]
Suspected or known psychiatric illness [N]
Failure to recognize or respond to police presence at the scene [likely N]

Some of these symptoms can only be determined from body cameras. Unfortunately, other symptoms can only be determined by the officers’ account. It is not possible to know whether he was experiencing tactile hyperthermia except by asking the officers who had touched his skin. We will have to work with these limitations in our analysis of the event. However, that both the brand new officer (Lane) and the veteran officer (Chauvin) suspected ExDS is not poor evidence. And that no officer objected to this determination must also be considered.

Well, the bodycam footage is now available, and as David guessed from the testimony, Floyd fits most of these symptoms to a T. Everything we see on the new bodycam footage supports the officers’ diagnosis of ExDS. Again, this is crucially important in understanding why the cops reacted as they did later.

This is from a white paper on ExDS that the Minneapolis PD depended on for formulating its response:

“ExDS subjects are known to be irrational, often violent and relatively impervious to pain. Unfortunately, almost everything taught to LEOs about control of subjects relies on a suspect to either be rational, appropriate, or to comply with painful stimuli. Tools and tactics available to LEOs (such as pepper spray, impact batons, joint lock maneuvers, punches and kicks, and ECD’s, especially when used for pain compliance) that are traditionally effective in controlling resisting subjects, are likely to be less effective on ExDS subjects.”

“The goals of LEOs in these situations should be to 1) recognize possible ExDS, contain the subject, and call for EMS; 2) take the subject into custody quickly, safely, and efficiently if necessary; and 3) then immediately turn the care of the subject over to EMS personnel when they arrive for treatment and transport to definitive medical care.”

“In those cases where a death occurs while in custody, there is the additional difficulty of separating any potential contribution of control measures from the underlying pathology. For example, was death due to the police control tool, or to positional asphyxia, or from ExDS, or from interplay of all these factors? Even in the situation where all caregivers agree that a patient is in an active delirious state, there is no proof of the most safe and effective control measure or therapy for what is most likely an extremely agitated patient.”

“There are well-documented cases of ExDS deaths with minimal restraint such as handcuffs without ECD use. This underscores that this is a potentially fatal syndrome in and of itself, sometimes reversible when expert medical treatment is immediately available”.

Gavrilo David adds:

Each of these bullet points is of the utmost importance in understanding Chauvin’s state of mind. These points must be re-read and thoroughly understood before pronouncing judgment on an officer who was simply following these statements during the arrest. If you are skimming this article I advise you to spend time on these bullet points. Remember: the officer’s job is to follow protocol, not to re-write protocol during an arrest. It is the politician’s job to ensure that the protocols are correct, no the police officer’s.

Here is a knockout paragraph:

It’s important to understand that the public — including journalists — are not well-versed in ExDS, and consequently do not have a good intuition as to what constitutes excessive force. As noted in the white paper, “there is no proof of the most safe and effective control measure,” “any LEO interaction with a person in this situation risks significant injury or death”, “this already challenging situation has the potential for intense public scrutiny coupled with the expectation of a perfect outcome […] Unfortunately, this dangerous medical situation makes perfect outcomes difficult […].” It would helpful here to examine ExDS in depth, and compare it to the George Floyd case.

I plead guilty to this. I didn’t know that ExDS was until reading this Gavrilo David piece. David discusses cases of ExDS in which the suspects died of it even though they were not being restrained as Chauvin did to Floyd. He links to a video of a Las Vegas man’s case in which the police did everything right, but the man still died of ExDS. Why? Because, according to the Journal of Emergency Medical Services, “The patient with excited delirium, however, continues to fight the restraints until cardiac arrest occurs.”

There are documented cases of this happening (Gavrilo David links to them). If George Floyd had ExDS, it is possible that he would have died no matter what these cops did or didn’t do. It explains why George was extremely agitated for the nine minutes or so before he was put on the ground, and refused to do what the cops said. It explains why he said he couldn’t breathe, and was in full-blown panic. If he had ExDS, then he wasn’t listening to the cops. He was in the grips of a drug-induced psychosis, and was doomed to keep resisting the cops until his heart gave out.

Maybe that’s not the explanation for what happened to George Floyd. But the evidence points to it.

Gavrilo David writes at length about ExDS. I strongly encourage you to read it all. And I urge you to go watch the new bodycam footage at the Daily Mail‘s story.

If Gavrilo David could determine all this two months ago, why has it not been widely reported in the media? Again, I admit that I didn’t go looking for this information because I assumed that the story we were all being told by the mainstream media was a full account of what happened. Now it is clear that we were not told the whole story. It appears quite plausible that George Floyd died as the result of his “severe” (the coroner’s word) heart condition and the psychosis induced by the potentially lethal dose of fentanyl he had ingested, and the methamphetamine.

Maybe Derek Chauvin killed him. But maybe he did not. Why is it considered to be a moral outrage to consider facts that undermine the received Narrative?

Defense lawyers are going to present all of this to Minneapolis juries, who will take it into consideration when they decide whether or not these police officers are guilty. It is very important that the rest of us know this information too. George Floyd’s death is still a tragedy. The new information helps us determine the moral nature of the tragedy, and, of course, whether or not it was also a crime.

Maybe George Floyd’s death is not a manifestation of a grand battle between Good and Evil. Maybe it was a case of an ordinary police encounter with a man so high on drugs that he is a danger to himself and others — an encounter that ended badly. If this is so, why is that not good news? Why would people not be relieved by the possibility that vicious racist killer cops were not policing the streets of Minneapolis that day?

I gotta ask too: why did the City of Minneapolis not release this bodycam footage? Why would they hide it?

UPDATE: The official autopsy revealed that George Floyd had Covid-19 at the time of his death:

Apropos of nothing in particular, I wonder what scientists think are the combined risks of opioid use and COVID-19 infection, and how that might interact with the likelihood of unexpected cardiac arrest.https://t.co/Sz4Z3KFNyE https://t.co/937tKjhiOt pic.twitter.com/mpTaoRHE1h

— Spotted Toad (@toad_spotted) August 5, 2020

UPDATE.2: A reader who is a lawyer writes:

I always assumed that Floyd resisted arrest, so the video says nothing to me on that point.  Few arrestees say “yes, I’m on heroin, maybe some Fentanyl.”

Once he’s cuffed and on the ground on his stomach, you or I could hold him down with a knee on his low back.  The knee to the neck while smirking at the camera was a power trip, a “because I can” move.  Chauvin’s defense may turn on how “passively resisting” is defined for purposes of the neck restraint.  I’d say cuffed and refusing to get in a squad car is passive resistance that doesn’t justify the neck restraint, while fighting the cuffs or the cops is active resistance, but it depends on the policy definitions.  In any case, it’s hard to say anything in the original 9-minute video was “active” on Floyd’s part.

“Stop resisting” is dirty-cop horseshit.  I’ve handled one police brutality case.  A ‘roid-raging officer handcuffed my client, put him face down in a parking lot, then started smashing his head into the gravel, then keyed his radio and shouted “stop resisting” several times.  My client (a former prosecutor) thought he was being set up to be killed, because he wasn’t resisting other than trying to keep his head from being smashed into the gravel, so the cop’s instruction made no sense.

All that said, the video and toxicology would provide a good defense in most cases.  I prefer the toxicology angle – that he probably died of the drugs.  Speaking as not-a-criminal-defense-lawyer, though, I think if Chauvin contributed to the death, it could still be murder, even if it’s not the main cause.  So it might not matter if Floyd would’ve died 20 or 30 minutes later and Chauvin merely hastened the death.  If you find a shooting victim who won’t survive, and you put him out of his misery with a bullet to the head, it’s still murder.  The prosecution may prove that Floyd would’ve survived if he’d lasted five more minutes so the EMS could give him a shot of Narcan.

I say the video and toxicology would be good defenses “in most cases.”  I think Chauvin will be convicted of … something.  I don’t know Minnesota criminal law, so I can’t say what.  “Murder” is not always intentional killing, but the intentional use of deadly force, maybe the use of deadly force with reckless indifference to whether someone is killed.  So accidentally shooting the toddler in the yard instead of his big brother is murder.  Hitting someone with a pool cue can be murder.  In more states, the latter would end up being manslaughter because of “heated blood.”  That might be the right outcome in this case, although it’s Chauvin’s cool blood that makes mine boil.  In most states, there are “lesser included offenses” with crimes like murder, so an overcharged defendant can be convicted of a lesser offense that has some (not all) of the elements of the charged offense.  That can be second-degree murder, manslaughter, negligent homicide, etc. – all depends on state law.  They’ll convict him of something, and rightfully so.

I don’t know that the knee on the neck was a “power trip.” That was the prescribed procedure for the MPD. Whether that was wrong or right is a different question, but if Chauvin was following established department procedure, how can we be confident that it was a “power trip” move?

UPDATE.3: Another reader writes:

Thank you for letting us have a deeper understanding of what happened prior to the killing of George Floyd.  I still believe it was grotesque abuse of police power, and a tragic, unnecessary death.  It shows me more than anything that we need to train police in de-escalation techniques, while weeding out those cops who should be nowhere near the force, including the cop who killed him.

But we tend to beatify people like George Floyd after tragic and outrageous events befall such victims (and I DO consider him a victim), and this warps our understanding of how events played out.  We often find these are dysfunctional men with multiple run-ins with the law, erratic behavior, drug problems, and who resist the police in ways which put themselves and the cops in hazard’s way.  This in no way excuses bad policing, or this particular killing, but it’s important to understand that the paeans being made to Mr. Floyd are the kinds of things we say of the dead, but wouldn’t apply to him while he lived.  The people which police encounter on a day-to-day basis are typically not the kinds of people we want our children to grow up to be.

On another note, let’s state the obvious that Rayshard Brooks was a fool, who might as well have run into traffic.  He wasn’t merely “asleep in his car” as the media reports, but black-out drunk in his car.  The police were hyper-professional with him, up to, through and including the moment he decided to violently resist a legal arrest, and grabbed what he likely thought was the cop’s pistol (the taser is intentionally designed to mimic that of a handgun) to run away with it.

Again, the cops didn’t absolutely *need* to shoot him under those circumstances.  It is a tragic situation which is almost entirely the fault of Rayshard Brooks.  Again, it’s a matter of needing to better train the cops in these situations – and to discuss publicly How to Act Around Legitimately Nervous Armed Police.  To simply reduce this to a cold-blooded killing of a black man by racist cops is absurd.  I am certain, as a white man, I would not be living to write this if I had acted in the same idiotic fashion as Rayshard Brooks.

The post George Floyd And ExDS appeared first on The American Conservative.

China’s AI Present, America’s AI Future

Rod DThe American people, in my judgment, don’t have much clue about the totalitarian potential of the technology we have welcomed uncritically into our lives. From Live Not By Lies:

Kamila Bendova sits in her armchair in the Prague apartment where she and her late husband, Václav, used to hold underground seminars to build up the anti-communist dissident movement. It has been thirty years since the fall of communism, but Bendova is not about to lessen her vigilance about threats to freedom. I mention to her that tens of millions of Americans have installed in their houses so-called “smart speakers” that monitor conversations for the sake of making domestic life more convenient. Kamila visibly recoils. The appalled look on her face telegraphs a clear message: How can Americans be so gullible?

To stay free to speak the truth, she tells me, you have to create for yourself a zone of privacy that is inviolate. She reminded me that the secret police had bugged her apartment, and that she and her family had to live with the constant awareness that the government was listening to every sound they made. The idea that anybody would welcome into their home a commercial device that records conversations and transmits them to a third party is horrifying to her. No consumer convenience is worth that risk.

“Information means power,” Kamila says. “We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you

know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police

have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!”

Kamila pointed out to me the scars along the living room wall of her Prague apartment where, after the end

of communism, she and her husband had ripped out the wires the secret police used to bug their home. It turns out that no one in the Benda family uses smartphones or emails. Too risky, they say, even today.

Some might call this paranoia. But in light of Edward Snowden’s revelations, it looks a lot more like prudence. “People think that they are safe because they haven’t said anything controversial,” says Kamila. “That is very naive.”

One of the stupidest things I ever did was spitting into a vial and sending it to one of the DNA companies. Yes, it was fun to find out the ethnic composition of my DNA. It was fun for my wife to do the same, and put to rest a family legend for her. But now not only does a company have our DNA, our foolish action compromises the genetic security of our children. Stupid, stupid, stupid. Last month, a big hack at a DNA company revealed the most intimate information of a million people — their genetic profile — to law enforcement. 

Nobody forced me to give my DNA to that company (not the hacked one, by the way). I did it because I couldn’t resist the urge to know more about where my ancestors came from, and if I was susceptible to certain genetic medical conditions. Now that I’ve released that information, it’s gone, and I can’t get it back. I wasn’t tricked into doing that, and neither was my wife. We aren’t naïfs about this stuff, either. We knew the risks, but chose to dismiss them, because we were really curious about our genetic profiles.

I also know a lot more than many people do about surveillance technology in smartphones and smart devices. I would never get a smart TV or an Alexa, but I have a smartphone. I choose to take the risk because that device has become central to the way I live. I bet I will live to regret this.

I urge you to read Ross Andersen’s big piece in The Atlantic about what the Chinese are doing with artificial intelligence and surveillance technology.Excerpts:

China already has hundreds of millions of surveillance cameras in place. Xi’s government hopes to soon achieve full video coverage of key public areas. Much of the footage collected by China’s cameras is parsed by algorithms for security threats of one kind or another. In the near future, every person who enters a public space could be identified, instantly, by AI matching them to an ocean of personal data, including their every text communication, and their body’s one-of-a-kind protein-construction schema. In time, algorithms will be able to string together data points from a broad range of sources—travel records, friends and associates, reading habits, purchases—to predict political resistance before it happens. China’s government could soon achieve an unprecedented political stranglehold on more than 1 billion people.

More:

China has recently embarked on a number of ambitious infrastructure projects abroad—megacity construction, high-speed rail networks, not to mention the country’s much-vaunted Belt and Road Initiative. But these won’t reshape history like China’s digital infrastructure, which could shift the balance of power between the individual and the state worldwide.

American policy makers from across the political spectrum are concerned about this scenario. Michael Kratsios, the former Peter Thiel acolyte whom Donald Trump picked to be the U.S. government’s chief technology officer, told me that technological leadership from democratic nations has “never been more imperative” and that “if we want to make sure that Western values are baked into the technologies of the future, we need to make sure we’re leading in those technologies.”

Despite China’s considerable strides, industry analysts expect America to retain its current AI lead for another decade at least. But this is cold comfort: China is already developing powerful new surveillance tools, and exporting them to dozens of the world’s actual and would-be autocracies. Over the next few years, those technologies will be refined and integrated into all-encompassing surveillance systems that dictators can plug and play.

The emergence of an AI-powered authoritarian bloc led by China could warp the geopolitics of this century. It could prevent billions of people, across large swaths of the globe, from ever securing any measure of political freedom.

This story is breathtaking — I mean, what it reveals about the shocking detail of what the Chinese state can and does know about its population. One more bit:

Until recently, it was difficult to imagine how China could integrate all of these data into a single surveillance system, but no longer. In 2018, a cybersecurity activist hacked into a facial-recognition system that appeared to be connected to the government and was synthesizing a surprising combination of data streams. The system was capable of detecting Uighurs by their ethnic features, and it could tell whether people’s eyes or mouth were open, whether they were smiling, whether they had a beard, and whether they were wearing sunglasses. It logged the date, time, and serial numbers—all traceable to individual users—of Wi-Fi-enabled phones that passed within its reach. It was hosted by Alibaba and made reference to City Brain, an AI-powered software platform that China’s government has tasked the company with building.

Last one, I swear:

In the decades to come, City Brain or its successor systems may even be able to read unspoken thoughts. Drones can already be controlled by helmets that sense and transmit neural signals, and researchers are now designing brain-computer interfaces that go well beyond autofill, to allow you to type just by thinking. An authoritarian state with enough processing power could force the makers of such software to feed every blip of a citizen’s neural activity into a government database. China has recently been pushing citizens to download and use a propaganda app. The government could use emotion-tracking software to monitor reactions to a political stimulus within an app. A silent, suppressed response to a meme or a clip from a Xi speech would be a meaningful data point to a precog algorithm.

Read it all. Of particular interest to my readers is how China is crushing Islam among its Uighur population. A state that can do that to Islam can do it to Christianity. This is religious and cultural genocide, and China is getting away with it, because everybody wants to be on China’s good side. A lot of money to be made there, you know. (I’m looking at the NBA, but it’s way beyond that.)

An unspoken premise of the piece — which is very, very good — is that the United States would never do to its citizens what China is doing. That is a massive error in judgment! The totalitarian instinct is well developed among America’s progressive elites, especially the younger generation. Do you honestly believe that the people who run Silicon Valley, who are in charge of top universities and major companies, would not seize that ring of power to identify and suppress racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, white supremacy, and all the other social evils that so vex the imagination of the left?

I don’t. I don’t trust them. The most militant among them hate conservatives and traditionalists more than they love classical liberal virtues. I find a technology-empowered left within the rising establishment to be a far greater threat to liberty and democracy than anything on the right, if only because the right is so weakly represented among the elite networks. Still, it’s conceivable that in the future, some would-be right-wing dictator could seize that ring of power and use it to secure his own totalitarian rule (and given the nature of AI and surveillance technology, the rule could not be merely authoritarian, but would have to be totalitarian).

Here’s what I think is the most likely scenario: the 2020 election results (whether they favor Biden or Trump) sets off a fresh and more intense round of civil unrest, as the economy sinks further into Covid-related misery. At some point in the next decade, the government and allied business and institutional leaders will convince themselves that much more intrusive monitoring of individuals is necessary to prevent violent disorder. They will convince themselves that they are doing it for Good reasons — that is, to fight white supremacy, bigotry, and the like. They will sell it the same way the Bush administration sold the Patriot Act: as necessary to protect us from Them — except “Them” will be American citizens on the religious and political right.

I could be wrong, but I don’t think I am. In the Atlantic piece, Ross Andersen makes a brief but plausible case for why the US needs to keep up with AI research, so it is not outstripped by authoritarian China. It makes sense, for the same reason that it made sense to build nuclear weapons to keep up with the Soviets. But in the same way, we are building for our own doom. It is quite foolish to assume that our country would not deploy technology like that against the American people. Have you read Snowden? The biggest advantage the Chinese government has over us is that it doesn’t have to contend with constitutional democracy. The second-biggest advantage it has is that it doesn’t have to be hypocritical, and pretend that it is not doing, and would not do, what it clearly and unapologetically is.

 

 

The post China’s AI Present, America’s AI Future appeared first on The American Conservative.

Is A New Civil War Possible?

I’ve recommended this many times in this space, and want to do it again: the 1980s-era Granada television documentary about the Spanish Civil War, which raged from 1936-39. It’s all in English (Granada is a British TV production company), and is quite balanced. The first episode (see here) covers the background to the conflict, in the years 1931-35. It details how Spaniards came to hate each other so much in that time that they were ready to shoot each other. It makes for discomfiting viewing as an American in 2020.

There’s a new website, A New Civil War, that aggregates news and op-eds from both the left and the right, on the subject of the possibility of such a conflict in contemporary America. In an American Greatness op-ed, the sites authors, Clifford Humphrey and Juan Davalos, say:

In June, we counted 23 articles written about the prospect of a new or cold civil war in the United States. In July, that number doubled to 46. That’s no mere “uptick.”

Right or wrong, these prognostications from both Left and Right are significant for what they reveal about the nature of the political division in the United States. Interest in this topic will only increase as we approach the election in November and whatever lies beyond it.

For this reason, we are launching a website dedicated to collecting and cataloging all the news and opinions on the prospect of a new civil war. We do not aim to be alarmists but to bring attention to the fact that both Left and Right are talking about this topic, and to make it easy to follow that conversation.

By gathering all of the rhetoric on what is perhaps the most important political subject in the last century and a half in one place, we hope that Americans may better understand the nature of our divisions and work to discover unifying solutions.

Take a look at the site, and bookmark it. They really do have pieces from both sides there. I found Damon Linker’s latest, in which he asks the question, “Can America split up?” Excerpt:

When I try to wrap my mind around what it would look like for political violence to break out and start spreading like brushfire through the country, I come up short. The historical Civil War was waged as a traditional military conflict over territory, with discrete battles, campaigns, victories, and surrenders. That’s because the dispute mapped precisely onto the physical world. The North could have allowed the Confederacy to walk away, but it didn’t, and so the two sides fought it out, with the South eventually losing, bringing the war to a decisive end.

But today? We talk of red states and blue states, but that’s obviously simplistic. It’s not even possible to speak of an archipelago of progressive coastal cities arrayed against a much less densely populated inland empire of conservatism. The fact is that even small cities in America are significantly more liberal than the small towns and countryside that surround them. I live in an inner-ring suburb of Philadelphia that is heavily Democratic, but just a few miles from my house there are neighborhoods and towns filled with loyal Republicans. We are politically intertwined. That’s the way a country is supposed to be — at least when those on different sides of political disputes don’t hate each other.

Do we hate each other? And if we do, what are our viable options as a polity? I don’t know how to answer those questions. What I do know is that it is long past time to begin posing them.

I think the main reason we can’t think very productively about the prospect of a new civil war is because our thinking is conditioned so heavily by history (this is what Linker is talking about in the passage I quoted). It’s why so many Americans today can’t grasp the rising totalitarianism in our society: because their idea of totalitarianism is conditioned by the experience of the Soviet Union and its satellites. In this vision, totalitarianism is about secret police bugging your phone,  gulags, torture, etc. This is wrong. Totalitarianism, in its most essential form, is about the politicization of every aspect of life, and a state with the means to enforce that single vision. In our case, it’s not just the state, and maybe not even mainly the state, but also major corporations, mass media, and other institutions of our society.

The main reason I insist on the phrase “soft totalitarianism” is because I’m trying to shake up the people who won’t recognize as totalitarian anything short of gulags and secret police. Technology has changed what it means to be totalitarian — that is, how elites (governmental and otherwise) within a modern society can see to it that a single view is permitted, and those who dissent from it are marginalized and punished. It is entirely possible that they may get what they want without resorting to “hard” methods. Anyway, my views are all in Live Not By Lies, which we can argue about when it is published in about seven weeks.

If we miss the potential for creating a soft totalitarian society, then we might also miss the potential for a civil war. The culture war has been a civil war by other means. Take the idea of armies fighting each other along battle lines off the table. We are not looking at state secession, and so forth. It would be impossible, in 2020, to do what was possible in 1861. I live in a blue city-parish in a ruby red state. The people of Baton Rouge would be completely divided themselves on which polity to align themselves with — and this would be repeated in most red states, and many blue states too, with the countryside opposing the urban left. The new civil war, if it comes, will primarily be carried out within institutions, all of which are controlled by the left, with purges against the right. But it could turn violent if militias begin attacking each other, and/or if the police cannot stop outbreaks of violent protest and crime. There could be other ways, I’m sure — and we need to think about them, and talk about them, and attempt to stop them before they start.

The root of it is rage. In that documentary to which I link above, a Spaniard who fought on the Nationalist side in the civil war says that by 1935, all sides despised each other so thoroughly that when they saw someone from the other side walking down the street, they reacted as if they were looking at a demon. I think that’s entirely possible here. Think about the coming election. If Trump loses, does anybody think he’s going to go quietly? No, he’s likely to behave as if the result was illegitimate, no matter how fair the election is demonstrated to have been. He will urge his followers to resist the new president. If Trump wins, though, I expect many on the left to refuse to recognize the legitimacy of the election, no matter how fair it is demonstrated to have been — and even if Joe Biden concedes. In either instance, I predict that a significant minority of Americans will not recognize the legitimacy of the president, and will conclude that democracy is a system that can be gamed by the Forces of Evil.

In his column, Damon Linker asks: What are the forces that bind us as Americans? Right now, I’m having trouble seeing those as greater than the forces that are tearing us apart. What could turn that around? The deepest reason for my pessimism is that we have become a people who cannot see any good greater than our own desires. This is not a left-wing or a right-wing thing; it’s who we are here in late modernity. It’s the Triumph of the Therapeutic. 

UPDATE: A reader writes:

Thank you for your posting this morning.  I agree that a new Civil War in the US will not be like the last one – and that one was horrific enough.  Some historians are now pushing the total death toll closer to 700,00-800,000 from the war – well beyond the official military casualties by looking at the wider net of destruction the war cast.  When talk of the need or the advisability of a Civil War began emerging on the Right during the late 2000’s early 2010’s, especially after Romney’s defeat, I kept saying, it won’t be Gettysburg 2.0 it will be Guernica 2.0.

The Spanish Civil War seems the most likely parallel in many ways, but even so, it is interesting to dig into the numbers and specifics of the last war to find it wasn’t as neat and tidy as we remember.

When I moved to the South and began studying the local history of my new home I was astonished to discover that my current home county voted against secession in it’s state’s vote in 1861.  When the main town was invaded by the Union Army in 1865 it was generally warmly received and little or no violence ensued.  Earlier in 1864, even the nearby and much larger metropolis welcomed (or at least some of the community did) the Union Army, and then when it was retaken by the South there were recriminations and reprisals that were then repeated when the city fell a second time to the North in 1865.  Also, there were plenty of places, especially in the mountain counties, and Missouri and Kansas, that were far more like Spain than we want to remember.  I thought the generally lousy movie Cold Mountain did a good job of showing this world of bushwhacking, as does the movie The Free State of Jones.

On top of that we aren’t attempting to be a Christian Civilization (flawed and hypocritical as it may have been) that we were in 1861-1865.  Then further couple that with modern weapons, technology, the fact that the army would likely break up and fight itself (there are plenty of progressive officers, perhaps a slight majority, especially in the upper echelons) and we’d have a royal, bloody, horrid mess.  It would be people fighting house to house, neighborhood against neighborhood, roving armies and militias, and the minorities of all kinds (politically, religious, ethnic) killed, evicted, and harassed in any given territory held by the other side.  There would be reigns of terror and reprisal killings and massacres.  I know, I’ve heard people right and left making stupid blood curdling statements when they thought no one would disagree or take them seriously, but if you are willing to say, as one political activist did in my presence, assuming I was a liberal, “we just need to put all those f**** … against the wall” referring to local politicians of the right, and I’ve heard similar statements from people on the right, we’ve a problem.  A new Civil War would be the worst of all possible worlds.  Plus most people in 1865, North and South grew their own food or at least knew how to or live by hunting and fishing, not so now.  The suffering would be horrific, look at any of the Civil Wars — Syria, Iraq, and think of that in the US.

Any time someone wants to advocate for a Civil War or anything that pushes us toward one we should seek to counter that sort of talk.  I do wonder though, if talking about it at all, is a dangerous thing.  Having a discussion, only seems to garner more discussions.  I think we need to make an effort on both sides of the political aisle to throw cold water on all of this.  I used to think that most American’s were too apathetic to care, but I think that many of our boiling and legitimate grievances and hurts, as well as the more dangerous imagine ones are eating away at us, and that is why destroying all the symbols that helped bind us together is so dangerous.  If “all men are created equal” is no longer sufficient, along with “we the people” there isn’t anything left to hold us together.  When a nation founded on an idea gives up on the idea, there isn’t much left.

I agree with this, mostly, but I do believe that it’s important for us to talk about the prospects of civil war, no matter how remote them seem at the present time, for the sake of making Americans take seriously where all this unbounded rage could end up. Is that really what we want?

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

Just read your latest blog regarding the possibility of a new civil war and had some thoughts. I live in a suburb outside [mid-size Midwestern city] with my wife and two school-age children. [My city] is similar to Austin or Seattle or Portland in that it’s a deeply Progressive city surrounded by a rural conservative population (big difference is that there are more African-Americans here). I’m from [a small town in this state], but after serving for six years as an Army Infantry Officer, my wife and our two kids settled in [this area] because there is little opportunity in the rest of the state.

I say this all because I feel like I’m living on a fault line between the two sides of this civil war we are talking about. Ten minutes south of me they are protesting for Black Lives Matter and demanding government mandated shutdowns over COVID; ten minutes north of me they are holding outdoor high school graduations and Back the Blue rallies. My wife and I are conservative Christians who are very active in our church; our next door neighbors and good friends both work for universities and are very liberal. We hang out several times a week and get along well but avoid talking about anything that could lead to uncomfortable conversations. I’d like to think that we model what a good friendship across party lines is but I don’t have much faith in that.

It’s difficult to picture what a civil war would look like because while the differences between urban and rural are very striking, there are plenty of us in the middle who would have to make very tough decisions on which way to go. My wife and I both work in the corporate sector and feel like we are being slowly backed into the corner with our traditional beliefs and values. If the violence of the cities spills into the suburbs I can’t picture us standing and fighting as we’d be outnumbered. Even though there is a healthy mix of conservatives in our area, how many of them are prepared to fight back? Fortunately, we have family in the rural parts of the state to retreat to, but we’d be forced to give up our jobs and our house and the way of life we enjoy.

And that is how I think this will play out. People with traditional values will be forced to retreat to the rural areas and accept a different standard of living ( which might be better, who knows) while ceding the urban and suburban centers to the Left. We’ll take up a defensive posture with our guns as we really do not desire to use our weapons except for in self-defense. We’ll leave the Left to build their utopian society and they’ll leave us alone because in all reality they’ll have nobody to come tell us what to do. They’ll need rural America to provide them with some food and we’ll need them for…something.

Hmm, sounds kind of like the Benedict Option. Maybe it’s wishful thinking to believe we’ll be left alone but I still believe that Law Enforcement and the military lean right, so I can’t imagine them coming after us. Anyway, thanks for your work, I’ve enjoyed reading you for the past several years and will be sure to get the new book when it comes out.

The post Is A New Civil War Possible? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Living In The 8:20

A reader writes:

I am an educator at a Catholic school in Canada (I’ll refrain from being too specific). I’ve been at this position for about 3 years. I am a product of the Catholic education system. I never went to public schooling except for university.

At first, I was very excited to start a new job in education. I had planned to become a teacher for a number of years. I thought this would be a good experience to see if teaching was right for me.

I had also recently come back to the Catholic faith and was actively practising and volunteering within my parish. For me, this was a win-win situation as I would be able to practice my faith in a Catholic environment.

However, I soon realised that this was not the Catholic education that I was brought up in. From the get go, I could see that an overwhelming majority of my colleagues didn’t respect or even understand basic Catholic theology. To make matters worse, we were forced to hire more and more non-Catholics to help fill an employee shortage. Some of them had no idea about the Catholic faith and practices.

A majority of staff members espoused various beliefs that were in direct conflict to Catholic teaching. Almost everybody else was pro-choice, pro same sex marriage and supportive of some elements of the woke tyranny that we are now seeing. Staff members took pride in bashing the Catholic faith and calling it archaic! Almost nobody took a traditional stance on things such as marriage, gender and sex. If you did have a personal opinion that actually matched the Catholic Church’s, then you would essentially be ostracised and ridiculed.

We did have a pro life club, but it was a joke to say the least. Students were open in saying that they joined it just to get out of school. Other teachers would often mock the club and the teacher sponsors who were in charge of it. I can’t recall talking to a student or staff who legitimately believed in the pro life cause. When the heartbeat bills in your country came out, I expected various staff members to be supportive. To my dismay, almost all of them repeated the typical woke narrative that these men were just trying to control women and that America was full of misogyny and sexism that had gotten worse since Trump.

To make matters worse, there is hardly any religiosity amongst the students. Most of them don’t go to Mass, and those that do are often too embarrassed to admit it. Many openly challenge Catholic teachings in class, which is then met by teachers just shrugging their shoulders and for the most part agreeing with them. We have various LGBT students who are allowed and encouraged to embrace themselves. We have male students wearing makeup and borderline cross dressing. In response, the administration simply says that they will not police what people wear, despite there being a clear uniform guideline.

When we do have school Masses, the priests often go on about the same thing over and over again. “Be nice and help one another” sermons that don’t have any substance in them whatsoever. The one time a visiting priest came in and talked about how being a Catholic requires discipline and hardship, he was mocked behind his back and never invited back again. Our Religion classes often revolve around “kumbaya” and being accepting of everybody regardless of how they live their life. There is literally nothing substantive in the topics that we discuss. Catholicism to these people is simply believing in some higher power and being nice to your neighbour.

To make matters worse, our school has sold out to international students and special needs students. International students often pay a drastically higher tuition, while special needs students generate more funding from the government. Our staff is stretched to the max, and is seeing increasingly high turnover rates. When confronted about this, our administration simply states that our school is concerned about “equality and equity” and the whole woke education crap that has infiltrated pretty much every level of schooling in the province. Discipline is extremely discouraged and teachers have been reprimanded for rightfully putting a disrespectful student in their place. We are also discouraged from penalising students for handing in late work. People are walking on eggshells trying to please students and their parents. Oftentimes teachers will have to chase down a student to get homework or a project as we are heavily discouraged from failing a student, even if their lack of work or abilities completely warrants it!

Overall, my experience in education has not at all been a good one. Not to mention that my Catholic faith has suffered. The mindless platitudes that we hear at school Masses and the lack of any religiosity amongst staff members has me rethinking my faith. I thought Catholic education would provide relief from the woke tyranny. Instead, I found that the Pink Terror you and other readers speak of, have infiltrated the very institution that I grew up in. I have chosen not to become a teacher anymore as I don’t wish to work in an environment like this for the rest of my life. While the experience hasn’t been as horrific as the ones you have posted before, it has been eye opening and soul shattering that this is what Catholic education looks like in 2020.

I shared that e-mail with one of my Catholic teacher friends, who has been telling me similar things about his school. In his response, he said in the many years that he has been on faculty,  he estimates that maybe about one in 20 of the students his school has graduated still practice the faith. As he sees it, it’s not just the ethos of the school, but the ethos of the people who send their kids to it.

This teacher — let’s call him Mr. Smith — told me that he attended Catholic high school in a red state, and graduated decades ago. He’s bitter about it, and says that the entire purpose of that school was to train Catholics in his hometown on how to be good middle class conformists, not Christians. Not one of his religion teachers believed in the Resurrection, he said. How did he know this?

“I asked.”

Mr. Smith said he lost his Catholic faith after that, but regained it later, in the process or re-conversion. He had to teach himself all the things that he never got in Catholic school, or in his parish. Today, said Mr. Smith, he figures that 80 percent of the Catholic schools in the US are pretty much like the Canadian Catholic school the reader above describes. Mr. Smith estimates that there are about 17 percent that are wavering, but only about three percent that really teach the faith and take formation of students seriously. He said:

There’s about 3% that are rock solid, but very few of these are diocesan. Most are Ben Op independent Catholic schools. But there are literally about 100 of these nationwide. At best.

Of course you are free to disagree with him. I can’t identify Mr. Smith for obvious reasons. All I can tell you is that he is a veteran Catholic school teacher who knows that world pretty well. I would invite everyone involved in a religious school (teachers, administrators, parents, and students), Catholic or not, to reflect on the extent to which the Canadian Catholic teacher’s description of his school fits your own.

Smith and I kept texting last night. He is pretty down about the future of Catholicism in this country, post-Covid. In his view, the virus and its forced breaking of the habits of mass-going is going to devastate US Catholicism. Mr. Smith says that Covid will have been an apocalypse for the American church, because it will have revealed its true condition — something that will be undeniable once the crisis passes, and Catholics are free to return to masses unimpeded. Mr. Smith predicts that Americans will see a European-style collapse in church attendance.

We have been living, he said, in a condition “like the eight minutes twenty seconds between when the sun dies and we experience it.” He’s talking about the time it takes for light from the sun to reach earth. If the sun suddenly went out, it would take eight minutes and twenty seconds for people on earth to realize it, because that’s how long it will take for the sun’s final rays to arrive here.

That 8:20 metaphor has been sticking with me since my conversation with Mr. Smith over the weekend. An alternative title for The Benedict Option would be The 8:20 Project, given that the point of that book is that we are facing the collapse of Christianity, and that Christians should use the time we have now to prepare themselves, their families, and their communities for a situation unlike that seen in the West since the collapse of the Roman Empire. No, the Church itself did not collapse when the Roman state and economic apparatus did; my point is that there was a dramatic collapse of a civilizational ethos and system. For Christianity in the advanced industrial nations of the West, the 20th century was like the 4th century was for the Western Roman Empire: a period in which decay advanced to the heart of the civilization, but the institutions and habits of the old ways still remained, concealing the depth of the rot. Historian Edward J. Watts’s book The Final Pagan Generation is a startling account of how the world of pagan Rome declined rapidly during the fourth century, even though all the outward signs were relatively normal.

Imagine a school like the Canadian Catholic one above, but set in fourth-century Rome. Now imagine it is a school whose purpose is to educate young Romans within an ethos that instructed them also in piety towards the gods of Rome. What if that school instead made all the motions of teaching the old religion, but in truth was faking it, and even taught the precepts of the new religion? And what if deep down the parents of these young Roman children didn’t really care about this, but rather wanted their youth to gain whatever knowledge they needed to succeed in what Roman society was becoming? How likely do you think it would be that these Roman schools would successfully transmit the faith to the next generation?

That’s what Christians in 21st century America are facing. We are living in the 8:20. We are a post-Christian civilization, but most people haven’t yet realized it. Those who do must busy themselves making preparations for keeping the light alive through the long night ahead. I’ve mentioned here before, and mentioned over the weekend in conversation with Mr. Smith, the story I heard from a German Catholic I met in Rome. This man told me that he and his Catholic friends have accepted that at some point in their lifetime, and certainly in the lifetime of their children, the institutional Catholic Church is going to collapse in Germany. They are busy now thinking of ways to keep the faith alive. One thing they can do is to form their children strongly in the faith at home, and to encourage them to marry only other strong Catholics raised in the same way. Endogamy, in other words: marrying within the “tribe.”

That’s one way to live in the 8:20. There are others; there has to be. I talk about them in The Benedict Option, but that book is not meant to give all the answers, but rather to catalyze creative thinking among Christians living in the 8:20.

Do you not believe that we are living in the 8:20? Please explain yourself.

If you accept that we are living in the 8:20, what are you going to do about it? Can you point to rallying points for the faithful? Here’s one: Martin Saints Classical High School in suburban Philadelphia, a strongly Catholic, Benedict Option-style Catholic school started by laity who are completely supportive of the Catholic Church’s Magisterium.

This is not, by the way, a questions for Catholics only. The sun that is going into eclipse by our godless civilization is not just a Catholic sun.

UPDATE: Great comment by reader Annie of Arc, who is a Catholic convert:

In the last ten years I have met a half-dozen people employed by the Catholic Church who do not seem dead set on destroying the Church, or who do not consider it their personal middle-class fiefdom with a few hymns. What does one do when one is raising small children, but every single authority figure from the Church to the Government to Education to the Media, seems absolutely hellbent on smashing everything around them? I pray everyday for either a miracle by which my family will have enough money to go buy land and a well in some quiet place, or for a tragedy to come sooner rather than later so that perhaps there is something left to pick up.

There are a great many people who read you with an angry eye, looking to scorn the people who say “the sky is falling.” This is because the sky has not fallen for them, and thank goodness they have been so blessed. There are people who accuse those of us who are worried of merely pining for Eisenhower and public Christian prayer. My goodness, what a joke. It is not “mere Christianity” which is vanishing before our eyes, it is the shared trust and structures and pace of life which allow people to be mentally healthy.

Over the weekend I was asked to talk with some young women trying to navigate the culture and figure out how to build families (no adult entrusted with their education ever considered it important!), and when I talked about my fear of raising daughters in a culture saturated with porn they became despondent: they’re living it. They’re living the brutality, the lovelessness, the dull glaze of addiction which overtakes the victim as much as opiates. They talked about how the culture is so rootless, you make friends for 2 years and then 90% of your friend group has relocated. These were strong, healthy, inquisitive, bright young women, certainly not all Christian, completely capable of navigating the urban coastal scenes, and they are saying behind closed doors that what once was natural and normal has been decimated. It takes angelic strength to do what almost everybody once did. Young people don’t know how to form relationships let alone families. Young men don’t know how to build intimacy. Young people are having pills pushed on them from every angle, and who are they not to take them when everything is so broken and they really are hurting?

The public Christianity of my grandparents generation was a joke, a wicked joke that ushered this age forward. Nonetheless it was still a real structure, not totally melted by the French philosophers or the American cults of speed, power, control. Without the public Christianity the rot has come to the surface and we see it in millions of suffering mentally ill young people who are absolutely lost. God have mercy on us.

UPDATE.2: I’ve been reading for the past three days a book recommended by a reader: The Revolt Of The Public And The Crisis Of Authority In The New Millennium, by Martin Gurri. It’s really eye-opening. So far in the book, it’s an analysis of how and why the Internet is so politically revolutionary, like nothing we’ve ever seen. It’s about information theory and the radical undermining of traditional hierarchies and authorities by the Internet. I’m not too far into the book, but it helps me understand why, for example, same-sex marriage went from being unthinkable to inevitable almost instantaneously. Yes, it took about twenty years of sustained campaigning by its supporters, but to make a social change as radical as changing the definition of marriage in such a short time is virtually without precedent.

I have said since the mid-2000s that same-sex marriage is inevitable because it depends on what most people already believe that marriage is: a contract between two people who love each other, and wish to formalize their commitment. Marriage was believed to be something more than that up until around the middle of the 20th century. That’s why the divorce culture was so quick to be accepted. You cannot separate marriage and divorce from the Sexual Revolution, and as Philip Rieff and others plainly saw, there is an inverse correlation between Christian faith and the Sexual Revolution.

By the early part of the 21st century, traditional beliefs about marriage had grown very thin. When the news and entertainment media began campaigning to normalize homosexuality, the mass audience began to see that an alternative to the status quo was possible. Yes, it is certainly true that the news media had no interest in presenting the traditionalist case fairly or with balance, and it is unquestionably the case that the entertainment media propagandized for the cause. But we must not neglect the fact that they were planting seeds in soil that had been well-tilled by forty years of Sexual Revolution, with its valorization of sexual individualism and autonomy. What the masses needed to see was that the way things were, in terms of marriage, did not have to remain that way.

Now, progressives flatter themselves, and make a serious mistake, by believing that History is unfolding according to a plan, and that History’s plan favors their beliefs and priorities. The election of Donald Trump and the victory of the Brexit referendum are two counterexamples to the “right side of history” thesis. Nevertheless, events rarely come as a bolt out of the blue, even if they feel that way to many of us, owing to our own epistemic bubbles. One reason many conservative Christians have rejected the Benedict Option diagnosis (i.e., that Christianity in the West is in what might be a terminal decline) is because they still see people showing up at church on Sundays, and most people they know still more or less believe in God.

A small but telling example: Just last night I was talking to my mom, who is in her 70s, and she said that she was appalled that an obituary for a friend of hers did not mention that the woman was a member of such-and-such church. I knew the lady too, and I knew that she had not been to church for half a century. My mother said yes, that’s true, but the lady had been baptized in that church, and was therefore a member. I’ve noticed this is a fairly common view among my parents’ generation: that to be formally a member of a church, however tenuous the connection, is the same thing as being a Christian. And in some sense, they’re right: to have been baptized is to be in some mystical sense part of the universal Church. But sociologically speaking, it’s not very meaningful. The lady who passed away did not raise her children in any church, and none of them, and none of her grandchildren, to my knowledge, are churchgoers. Christianity has de facto ceased to exist in that family’s line.

In 2002, I went to Catholic mass near Amsterdam (I was Catholic then). There only people among the small congregation who didn’t have gray hair was a family. We introduced ourselves to them, and they invited Julie and me and our toddler over to dinner. We talked about their experience as practicing Catholics in the Netherlands, a profoundly post-Christian nation. The father said that he was one of eleven children born to a Catholic family in Rotterdam. He must have been in his mid-40s when we met, and he told me he was the only one of his siblings who still practiced the faith. Eleven children baptized into the church, but only one still Catholic in any socially meaningful sense.

Anyway, my point is this: when people conceive of an alternative to the status quo, and experience it as a realistic possibility for themselves, it undermines the status quo. This is pretty basic stuff, I grant you, but social change can happen in the same way that Hemingway’s character said he went bankrupt: gradually, then suddenly. In the Netherlands, the middle-class consensus behind the Christian faith collapsed suddenly in the 1960s. It had been shattered by the war and the Nazi occupation, and people tried to rebuild it afterward, but their hearts weren’t in it. When the first winds of the counterculture began to blow, the whole thing fell apart.

Mr. Smith, above, believes that the Covid crisis, which has halted churchgoing in many places, will prove to be one of those events that causes most Catholics to recognize that they have been going through the motions for a long time, regarding mass attendance, and that they won’t feel any special obligation to return when things get back to normal. I hope he’s wrong, but I’m strongly inclined to believe him. And I bet other churches — non-Catholic ones — will suffer something similar. I really hope I’m wrong about this, but reading this Gurri book makes me think that Covid will have proven to have been a real crossroads moment in which a whole lot of churchgoing people reckon with their lack of conviction, and slough off their commitment to church.

The post Living In The 8:20 appeared first on The American Conservative.

American Totalitarianism

It’s not just me who thinks the US is sliding into a woke-led totalitarianism. Prof. Andrew Michta, writing in last weekend’s Wall Street Journal, says that America is “resegregating.” More:

Czesław Miłosz, a future Nobel Prize-winning poet who had just defected from Poland, began work in 1951 on a book called “The Captive Mind.” Even as Stalinist totalitarianism tightened its grip on Eastern Europe, many Western European intellectuals lauded the brave new world of Soviet communism as a model for overcoming “bourgeois forces,” which in their view had caused World War II. Living in Paris, Miłosz wrote his book, which was published in 1953, to warn the West of what happens to the human mind and soul in a totalitarian system.

Miłosz knew from experience, having lived through the Communist takeover, how totalitarianism strips men and women of their liberty, transforming them into “affirmative cogs” in service of the state and obliterating what had taken centuries of Western political development to achieve. Totalitarianism not only enslaved people physically but crippled their spirit. It did so by replacing ordinary human language, in which words signify things in the outside world, with ideologically sanctioned language, in which words signify the dominant party’s ever-changing ideas of what is and is not true.

Since the death of George Floyd in Minneapolis, nationwide protests, which quickly turned to riots, have been hijacked by the neo-Marxist left, morphing into an all-out assault on American cities and institutions. This assault is underpinned by an audacious attempt to rewrite history that turns specific past events into weapons not only to overpower political opponents but also to recast all of American history as a litany of racial transgressions.

The radicals have turned race into a lens through which to view the country’s history, and not simply because they are obsessed with race. They have done so because it allows them to identify and separate those groups that deserve affirmation, in their view, and those that do not. What is taking place is the resegregation of America, the endpoint of which will be the rejection of everything the civil-rights movement stood for.

Michta offers a solid, useful definition of the difference between authoritarianism and totalitarianism; the woke militancy is unquestionably totalitarian:

What is driving the radical protesters and rioters—who are enabled and manipulated by the “digital intelligentsia” in the press and an expanding segment of the political and business classes—is contempt for the freedom of anyone who fails to comport with their image of a just society. In authoritarian systems those in power seek to proscribe certain forms of political speech and social activity. Totalitarians claim unconditional authority to reach deep into each person’s conscience. They prescribe an interpretation of the world and dictate the language with which citizens are permitted to express that interpretation. Authoritarian regimes leave largely untouched the private civic sphere of human activity; totalitarians destroy traditional value systems and reorder the culture. That is why they are harder to overthrow.

More:

This is about more than statues and history. Those who control the symbols of political discourse can dominate the culture and control the collective consciousness. If you doubt this, ask yourself why there has been so little backlash from ordinary, non-elite Americans. Our sense of self has been progressively deconstructed. We feel in our bones the wrongness of the violence being visited on the nation but lack the language to speak against it.

And:

American society is faced with a stark binary choice. Either we push back against the unrelenting assault of the neo-Marxist narrative, or we yield to the totalitarian impulse now in full view in our politics. It is no longer enough to wait for the next election, or to pin our hopes on a “silent majority” that will eventually stop the madness. There may be no such majority. If there is, its members may no longer be able to articulate what they see unfolding around them.

Read the whole thing (if you have a WSJ subscription; it’s behind a paywall).

None of this is news to me, of course — all of this and much more is in my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies — but what struck me the most about Michta’s essay is his speculation that there may not be a “silent majority” waiting to rise up against this.  

Last week in this space I wrote about a long lunch conversation with a pastor who is deeply frustrated by what he says is the inability of his fellow clergy to grasp the scale and the significance of the present crisis within the churches (or rather, the related crises of people falling away from the practice of Christianity, and those who remain knowing nothing at all about the faith, meaning their ties are highly tenuous). In his telling, the pastors he knows either refuse to acknowledge the facts right in front of their noses, or get angry at him for pointing them out. The result is a leadership class in the churches that huddles in false security behind the Maginot Line in their mind. They are not prepared to fight the war that’s actually upon the church, and are not preparing their flocks to resist.

I told the pastor over lunch that I had been dealing with this kind of thing for the three years since The Benedict Option was published. Lots of pastors and church leaders — Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox — have rejected the book’s diagnosis and prescription without giving any indication of having read it. As Alan Jacobs has written about this phenomenon, Dreher might be wrong in his prescriptions, but only a blind person could deny that the churches are in big trouble today. So what’s their solution? (says Jacobs). “More of the same things we’ve been doing” is a suicidal strategy.

Having read Michta’s piece this morning (thanks to the reader who sent it), I think I understand better why these pastors are so paralyzed with fear. They may have no strong reason to believe that their congregations would be behind them if they stood up to this madness. Four years ago, when I was traveling around researching The Benedict Option, I spoke to the pastor of a large conservative Protestant congregation. He told me the main obstacle he faced in his congregation was the constant fear of the people. What they were afraid of, though, were the threats they perceived Out There: e.g., radical Islam. He said that when he would preach on other things, things that had to do with the spiritual lives and threats they faced within their own hearts, they tuned him out. They only wanted to hear that the threats were external. He was pretty discouraged, and I found out later that he left that congregation.

Mind you, these were all conservative people, theologically and otherwise. But they had a fixed idea of what the threat to their existence was, and it had nothing at all to do with their way of life. This pastor I talked to, I don’t know if he supported the Benedict Option idea, but having spent time with him, I came to believe that he absolutely was trying to pastor that church in a way to make its members more truly and deeply Christian, and that he (the pastor) understood deeply how the currents of ordinary American life bear the church farther and farther from shore. But if his account of the congregation was true, the people of that church did not want to hear any of this. They only wanted their own prejudices validated.

I heard something very similar from the pastor in Louisiana with whom I lunched last week. (I wrote about it in “The Finder-Friendly Pilgrim Church,” in case you missed it.)

Now, think about that in context of the Michta column. Michta isn’t writing about religion. He’s writing about an American public that has been so propagandized and demoralized that it cannot see the true nature of the threats to it, or if it can, it lacks the wherewithal to respond appropriately. The rot has gone very deep. On this blog, I report on things going on within the culture of universities, of major corporations, of schools and religious institutions, and so on — as well as reporting on things happening in the public square. We are witnessing the dismantling of American liberal democracy, and the conditions under which it thrives. It is an emergency, but relatively few people are treating it like an emergency.

Are people waiting for this supposed “silent majority” to rise up and save the day? With Michta, I ask: How do you know that such a silent majority exists? I know a lot of people are planning to vote for Trump as their contribution to the fight against this madness. Vote for Trump if you want to, but understand that all of this has happened under Trump. I think there’s no question that it will accelerate under Biden, and in that sense, a vote for Trump is reasonable. But don’t think for one second that Trump is going to stop any of it. He doesn’t know how. Whether Trump is re-elected or not, the war on faith, family, and the foundations of American democracy will continue.

Again, let me be clear: I’m not telling you to vote for Trump, or not to vote for Trump. I am telling you that your vote matters a lot less than you might think.

Here’s a big reason why: consumer surveillance technology. The Houston Chronicle reports:

Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you’ve likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret “surveillance scores” – digital mug shots of millions of Americans – that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy.

People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences.

CoreLogic and TransUnion say that scores they peddle to landlords can predict whether a potential tenant will pay the rent on time, be able to “absorb rent increases,” or break a lease. Large employers use HireVue, a firm that generates an “employability” score about candidates by analyzing “tens of thousands of factors,” including a person’s facial expressions and voice intonations. Other employers use Cornerstone’s score, which considers where a job prospect lives and which web browser they use to judge how successful they will be at a job.

Brand-name retailers purchase “risk scores” from Retail Equation to help make judgments about whether consumers commit fraud when they return goods for refunds. Players in the gig economy use outside firms such as Sift to score consumers’ “overall trustworthiness.” Wireless customers predicted to be less profitable are sometimes forced to endure longer customer service hold times.

Auto insurers raise premiums based on scores calculated using information from smartphone apps that track driving styles. Large analytics firms monitor whether we are likely to take our medication based on our propensity to refill our prescriptions; pharmaceutical companies, health-care providers and insurance companies can use those scores to, among other things, “match the right patient investment level to the right patients.”

More:

Surveillance scoring is the product of two trends. First is the rampant (and mostly unregulated) collection of every intimate detail about our lives, amassed by the nanosecond from smartphones to cars, toasters to toys. This fire hose of data – most of which we surrender voluntarily – includes our demographics, income, facial characteristics, the sound of our voice, our precise location, shopping history, medical conditions, genetic information, what we search for on the Internet, the websites we visit, when we read an email, what apps we use and how long we use them, and how often we sleep, exercise and the like.

The second trend driving these scores is the arrival of technologies able to instantaneously crunch this data: exponentially more powerful computers and high-speed communications systems such as 5G, which lead to the scoring algorithms that use artificial intelligence to rate all of us in some way.

Read it all.

This is the basis for the coming American version of China’s social credit system. Notice that none of this has to do with the government. If you think totalitarianism is only something that the state can impose, you’re wrong. This is what Woke Capitalism is doing to us. We are in a different world now. As I write in Live Not By Lies:

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

The rising generation of corporate leaders take pride in their progressive awareness and activism. Twenty-first

century capitalism is not only all in for surveillance, it is also very woke.

Nor is it hard to foresee these powerful corporate interests using that data to manipulate individuals into

thinking and acting in certain ways. [Age of Surveillance Capitalism author Shoshana] Zuboff quotes an unnamed Silicon Valley bigwig saying, “Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behavior.” He believes that by close analysis of the behavior of app users, his company will eventually be able to “change how lots of people are making their day-to-day decisions.”

Maybe they will just try to steer users into buying certain products and not others. But what happens when

the products are politicians or ideologies? And how will people know when they are being manipulated?

If a corporation with access to private data decides that progress requires suppressing dissenting opinions, it

will be easy to identify the dissidents, even if they have said not one word publicly.

Pre-order to read the whole thing when it comes out September 29.

I’m telling you, this new order is already largely in place, and we are passively accepting it. We are being conditioned to accept it. I am absolutely not saying that we should surrender to it — in fact, quite the contrary. What I’m saying is that it is no surprise that the American people have been demoralized and manipulated. The “silent majority” is not going to save us, because if it even exists, it is likely already neutralized, or soon will be — and might never understand why or how. We should be standing behind political leaders who recognize the threat from this data grabbing, and who are prepared to fight it, and fight it hard. (Donald Trump is not that leader; Sen. Josh Hawley and Sen. Mike Lee might be.) But in the meantime, we should be preparing ourselves for the long resistance. Totalitarianism is coming. It will be softer than what existed in the Soviet bloc, but totalitarianism it certainly will be.

The post American Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.