Rod Dreher's Blog, page 131

Attempted Putsch At Princeton

What a remarkable document this is. It’s a July 4 letter to the president and administration of Princeton University, from some BIPOC faculty and allies, demanding a revolution in the storied Ivy. Excerpts:

Anti-Blackness is foundational to America. It plays a role in where we live and where we are welcome. It influences the level of healthcare we receive. It determines the degree of risk we are assumed to pose in contexts from retail to lending and beyond. It informs the expectations and tactics of law-enforcement. Anti-Black racism has hamstrung our political process. It is rampant in even our most “progressive” communities. And it plays a powerful role at institutions like Princeton, despite declared values of diversity and inclusion.

Anti-Black racism has a visible bearing upon Princeton’s campus makeup and its hiring practices. It is the problem that faculty of color are routinely called upon to remedy by making ourselves visible; by persuading our white colleagues to overcome bias in hiring, admission, and recruitment efforts; and by serving as mentors and support networks for junior faculty and students seeking to thrive in an environment where they are not prioritized. Indifference to the effects of racism on this campus has allowed legitimate demands for institutional support and redress in the face of micro-aggression and outright racist incidents to go long unmet.

At this moment of massive global uprising in the name of racial justice, we the faculty—Black, Latinx, Asian, and members of all communities of color along with our white colleagues—call upon the University to take immediate concrete and material steps to openly and publicly acknowledge the way that anti-Black racism, and racism of any stripe, continue to thrive on its campus. We call upon the administration to block the mechanisms that have allowed systemic racism to work, visibly and invisibly, in Princeton’s operations. We call upon the University to amplify its commitment to Black people and all people of color on this campus as central to its mission, and to become, for the first time in its history, an anti-racist institution.

Did you know that Princeton was a Klucker kampus? I did not. And now, to the demands, which include:

Implement administration- and faculty-wide training that is specifically anti-racist in emphasis with the goal of making our campus truly safe, welcoming, and nurturing for every person of color on campus—students, postdocs, preceptors, staff, and faculty alike. Require the participation of staff members who work with students and student groups, like “Free Expression Facilitators” and Public Safety officers. This training should be led by an outside facilitator, selected in consultation with student representatives and expert practitioners (e.g., Race Forward), and become an integral and annual component of our faculty institutional culture. To be clear, this type of training is by no means one-size-fits-all; it is challenging, and it necessarily moves participants through stages of vulnerability, productive discomfort, and reflection. Thought must be put into determining which approaches will be most effective for academic units on a case-by-case basis and in consultation with experts in both social science and anti-racism. Support and guidance in this process must be a University priority and conducted in-person (or, given the COVID-19 restrictions, live and interactive).

In other words, bring in woke commissars. More:

Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary. As of the fall of the 2019-20 academic year, faculty of color make up only 7% of the laddered faculty, according to figures provided by the Office of Institutional Research, but they are routinely called upon to exert influence in hiring committees and to stand as emblems and spokespersons of diversity at Princeton. Being required to chiefly and constantly “serve” and “represent” in the interest of administrative goals robs the imagination and interrupts any possibility of concerted thought. Faculty of color hired at the junior level should be guaranteed one additional semester of sabbatical on top of the one-in-six provision (and on top of any leave awarded through University or Bicentennial Preceptorships).

Special salary and vacation bonuses for being a person of color? Really? And notice how being given special input in faculty hiring, and being asked to take a particular role in helping Princeton be more diverse, is an intolerable burden, one that should be compensated.

More:

Remove questions about misdemeanors and felony convictions from admissions applications, and all applications to work and/or study at Princeton. In recognition that mass incarceration and predatory policing not only menace the safety of all people of color at the University and their families but also hinder our community’s progress towards racial justice, heed the Princeton Faculty Call to Action to Divest from Private Prison and Detention Corporations.

So Princeton wouldn’t be able to ask potential students if they have been convicted of a felony, because that’s racist? So much for campus safety.

Here’s a big one:

Constitute a committee composed entirely of faculty that would oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research, and publication on the part of faculty, following a protocol for grievance and appeal to be spelled out in Rules and Procedures of the Faculty. Guidelines on what counts as racist behavior, incidents, research, and publication will be authored by a faculty committee for incorporation into the same set of rules and procedures.

Racist research?! Racist publication?! To be decided to a faculty committee?! This is where the Princeton president ought to tell this mob to turn around and go back to their offices. This is absolutely unacceptable in a university.

Read it all. There’s a lot more, of course, and all of it would make it impossible for Princeton to function as a community of learning. Why? If the university implements even half of these demands, it would turn campus into a grievance-centered ideological hothouse. Mind you, the signatories of this letter include a number of prominent professors, and not just from arts and humanities faculties.

What happens at America’s Ivy League schools eventually works its way across academia. We had better all hope that the president and administration of Princeton turn back this radical putsch, firmly. A leading Yale professor whose wife was the victim of racist cancel culture (and a pusillanimous administration) there, observes:

That these people do not see that their actions are McCarthyite and inconsistent with the foundations of a university is deeply concerning. Or perhaps they do? https://t.co/ZYGo1WqQZo

— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) July 9, 2020

It really is McCarthyite. If you go through that letter and substitute versions of “100 percent Americanism” every time you see “antiracism” and its variants, it will be crystal-clear what’s going on here. This Hannah Arendt quote, from her The Origins Of Totalitarianism, describes the stance of pre-totalitarian elites that opened the door to hell. It is relevant here:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

UPDATE: A Princeton professor writes:

I am a Princeton professor who signed the letter that you wrote about today.  I am also a devout Christian and a daily reader of your blog.  I used to write (poorly) for our campus conservative magazine when I was a student here at Princeton, so my perspective is probably different from my co-signers.  I particularly appreciate the ways in which you wrestle publicly with your thoughts on difficult topics.  On these issues, I believe you are too reactionary — in response to sometimes overwrought and reactionary rhetoric from the left — and I would urge you not to dismiss everything without more thought and empathy.

In general, your arguments proceed too quickly down the slippery slope and presume the worst possible outcome.  Your warnings are well-heeded — it is appropriate to know the dangers before embarking on a given path, to make sure you don’t fall down the slope.  It’s safest not to start down the slope at all, but what if the right place to be is somewhere uncomfortable, holding two seemingly contradictory ideas in tension in a constant struggle?  I find this is often where faith leads for me: balancing justice and mercy, faith and works, even the very nature of God as three-in-one.  This is what I think the Bible means when it says that the gate is narrow and the way is hard – you can err in two directions, and finding the balance is incredibly difficult.  CS Lewis wrote about how the devil sends evils into the world in pairs of opposites, and “he relies on your extra dislike of the one error to draw you gradually into the opposite one.”  All of which is to say that I think we are often called to stand in a deeply uncomfortable place, and that navigating issues of race is one of those times.  I think your fear of totalitarianism has pushed you too far to the other extreme.  Admittedly, I’m sure that I am often wrong in both directions, and I clearly don’t have many answers, only a feel for the struggle.

The deepest danger, as you point out, is the potential to upend academic freedom by having a committee that could review professorial conduct and writing.  I agree with your fears here, in abstract, that such a committee could become harmful if not watched closely.  However, in practice, I doubt that would come to pass — perhaps I am too naive — and worry more that tenure allows professors to act with complete impunity in all matters, with almost no enforceable discipline for behaviors that would easily get you fired in a normal corporate environment.  I have little fear that this committee would be able to threaten or harm any of our deep conservative thinkers, but the current lack of any discipline has allowed some very troubling behaviors to persist unchecked among our faculty.

I also see a link between the lack of official structures of discipline and the rise of “cancel culture” and the power of the mob, which I strongly oppose.  When egregious acts go unchecked, it creates a sense of powerlessness that can only be overcome by mass action and unrest.  These mobs initially set their sights on “worthy” targets, though with no checks on their power.  And, given how mobs work, they can rapidly proceed to overreach and chaos.  We saw this to some extent with the “me too” movement; obvious and egregious examples of sexual impropriety went unpunished for decades by official channels, until victims had enough.  The ensuing uprising played an essential role, and clearly did more good than harm, but in some instances went too far and did not afford any due process.  This could have been avoided with a more appropriate and rigorous official channel to consider and act against harassment.  I fear we are at a similar place now on race issues, where a lack of consistent and enforceable standards that can be widely agreed upon will give way to a less fair and systematic approach.

With regards to rewarding invisible work, it is indisputably true that there is significant inequity in workload for a number of reasons across faculty members in a department.  Faculty jobs are complicated — we teach and do research, but also serve on committees, mentor students, and engage with a broader intellectual community.  When considering raises and promotion, all of this information is used, at least to some extent.  While some of this work can be measured — how many students did you have, how were your teaching reviews, what funding did you raise, what papers did you publish — important mentoring interactions with students are difficult to measure.  The faculty in my department is

There are also clearly structures in place that are not explicitly racist, but produce widely disparate outcomes for a variety of reasons.  Disrupting these systems can lead to better outcomes for everyone, but can in particular close racial gaps.  For instance, several years ago I was tasked with examining our required freshman engineering sequence – primarily a healthy dose of math, physics, chemistry and computer science.  During freshman year, rates of attrition from the school of engineering were significantly higher among racial minorities than the school average.  This mostly stemmed from differences in high school preparation – some students had seen more math and physics than others, and the traditional college courses are taught in basically the same way as good high school courses.  Students who had seen less would misinterpret differences in preparation and prior exposure as differences in ability.  We sought to address this disparity, not in an explicitly race-focused way, but by teaching the same material with a new approach: focusing on applications, especially ones linked to societal challenges.  This had the dual benefits of connecting the material to the reason we were teaching it, but also it simply didn’t look like anything that any student had seen before at first.  This avoided the issue where students assume they can’t succeed (“stereotype threat” in the lingo).  Three years later, attrition from our program is dramatically down across the board with no real demographic gaps.  I think this demonstrates that we need to look at our systems of education and find ways in which we can innovate and see if it can address systemic inequities.

This has gotten long, but my main point is not to let fear of overreach lead you to dismiss legitimate grievance.  Sometimes the right place to stand is uncomfortably in the middle of a slippery slope – good thing we have a Rock to stand on.

Regards

Andrew Houck
Professor, Electrical Engineering
Princeton University

I appreciate Prof. Houck taking the time to respond. If there are any professors at Princeton who declined to sign the letter, or who intend to decline if asked, I would like to hear from them.

UPDATE.2: Here’s a strong column by Princeton professor Jonathan T. Katz, about why he did not sign. Excerpts:

I am friends with many people who signed the Princeton letter, which requests and in some places demands a dizzying array of changes, and I support their right to speak as they see fit. But I am embarrassed for them. To judge from conversations with friends and all too much online scouting, there are two camps: those cheering them on and those who wouldn’t dream of being associated with such a document. No one is in the middle.

He says that there are some good things in that long letter. Yet:

But then there are dozens of proposals that, if implemented, would lead to civil war on campus and erode even further public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education operate. Some examples: “Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary” and “Faculty of color hired at the junior level should be guaranteed one additional semester of sabbatical” and “Provide additional human resources for the support of junior faculty of color.” Let’s leave aside who qualifies as “of color,” though this is not a trivial point. It boggles my mind that anyone would advocate giving people—extraordinarily privileged people already, let me point out: Princeton professors—extra perks for no reason other than their pigmentation.

Read it all. It is encouraging that at least one faculty member at Princeton is against the proposal, and troubled to make his opposition public, and explain it.

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Monsters Of Cancel Culture

Here’s the latest wisdom from the actress who originated the role of Eliza in Hamilton on Broadway:

Cancel culture: If you are “cancelled” but do not wish to be, you must WORK to EARN back people’s respect by owning up to the thing that cancelled you in the first place, LISTENING to others, EDUCATING yourself, and ADVOCATING on behalf of the people that you have offended/harmed

— Phillipa Soo (@Phillipasoo) July 8, 2020

When I tell you that these cancel culture goons are monsters, I mean it. They are all Little Anthony from that famous Twilight Zone episode. He’s the brat who had all the adults in his life terrified of him because he could destroy them if he was displeased with them. Here’s a summary clip:

A reader passes along an infuriating story of cancel culture from Denver. This poor liberal white guy who runs a super-hippie-ish, woke chain of yoga studios found his business destroyed virtually overnight from BIPOC staffers. From the Colorado Sun‘s story:

The owner of Kindness Yoga, and one of the most well-known yogis in Denver, is struggling to piece together the words to explain what happened — in the span of a week — to his once-stellar reputation and his 19-year-old business. He is stunned, though remorseful. He is eager to speak up, yet on edge for fear of saying anything that could make all of this any worse.

”My goal is to represent our attempts at being a diverse, inclusive place where people felt like they belonged,” he begins, slowly. “I may not say things perfectly … I’m practicing learning how to speak in a way that is more inclusive and caring of diversity.”

He’s shattered. What happened? This:

Harrington, a straight, white guy who expanded Kindness to nine studios and 160 employees across metro Denver, announced last week that he was closing them all after a handful of yoga teachers, including a Black woman and a transgender man, called out Kindness on social media for “performative activism” and “tokenization of Black and brown bodies.” The teachers’ public comments, following a Black Lives Matter post on Kindness’ Instagram page that they termed too little, too late, evoked a backlash that was fierce and immediate.

Within 48 hours, as the nightly protests over police violence unfolded around the Capitol in Denver, just three blocks from Kindness’ Capitol Hill studio, the yoga company received nearly 400 emails from students who were upset, including many wanting to cancel their memberships. A week later, the emails had reached 800 and counting. Harrington has yet to read all of them, but with each one he opened, the direction his already precarious business was heading grew ever more clear.

“Performative activism” means that he was an activist, but the woke police decided that he didn’t really mean it. Harrington is so woke that prior to the blow-up, his studios even had segregated person-of-color yoga nights

But outside the public space of yoga class, some teachers who identify as gay or trans or as BIPOC (Black or Indigenous people of color) were asking for change and said they got no meaningful response from management.

The grievances aired on social media in the last several days described — with few specifics — a culture where the voices of minorities and LGBTQ teachers were not heard. In interviews with The Colorado Sun, yoga teachers Jordan Smiley, who is Indigenous and transgender, and Davidia Turner, who is Black, said the white management team at Kindness was not willing to put in the work to make change.

For example, Turner said, the board of directors declined to hire an outside diversity expert as she suggested, instead “cherry-picking” certain diverse members of the staff that they felt comfortable talking to about race and inclusivity. After hearing that Kindness’ website was too white-centric, management then invited people of color and other minorities to an hours-long yoga photoshoot. They were accused of “tokenism.”

After she helped destroy the man’s livelihood, and put 160 people out of work, Davidia Turner blames Harrington for being upset:

Turner also posted a video to her blog, railing against the former CEO’s tears as well as Harrington’s expression of “sadness” regarding her resignation.

“The weaponizing of sadness and tears is infuriating,” Turner said in her viral video. “It is one of the more insidious factors of white supremacy and whiteness. And it is used as a tool and as a tactic to make me feel in this Black body that I have done something inherently wrong to bring this sadness upon you.”

On her Instagram account, Turner asked her 4,520 followers to continue calling out not just Kindness but other yoga studios. “This is a rallying cry for every white-owned yoga studio to step the (expletive) up and be better,” she wrote. In a post called “action steps,” she provided Harrington’s email and phone number and requested that people not only ask Harrington to “provide reparations” to his minority teachers, but to cancel their yoga memberships.

Davidia Turner and Jordan Smiley, a trans indigenous yogi who helped wreck Kindness Yoga, are starting their own yoga studios. What better way to launch than by convincing people that your former employer (and future competitor) is a racist whose business deserves to be destroyed — and oh, by the way, tell him to pay us “reparations.”

An older black man, an immigrant who taught at Kindness, can’t understand why these people went after Harrington:

“As a Black person, I have been asking this myself the last few days: How come I never felt it? How come I never experienced it?” said Abraham, who is a father of two and a retiree from the City of Denver. “I’m not shy. If I catch you doing something, I am going to call you out.

“I didn’t see it. I loved the place — that’s why I made it home.”

To Abraham, Kindness felt like it was owned by its teachers and students. They set the tone for its culture. Some students paid as little as $1 to attend a class because that’s what they could afford, he said.

Lord have mercy, this studio let poor people come train for a token amount, to do them a favor. But now it’s gone, because Little Jordan and Little Davidia accused Harrington of thinking Bad Thoughts.

Read it all. 

The only way this might stop is for people like Harrington to find a lawyer who will work pro bono, and sue privileged bullies like Davidia Turner and Jordan Smiley into the ground. Harrington’s not going to be the guy to do it. Read the story to the very last line, and see how this abused progressive is trying to convince himself that he deserved what happened to him, because of “white privilege.”

No. The privileged people here are the Sacred Victims, Smiley and Turner, who have the power to destroy a two-decade old business that seemed to do a lot of good, and to be a model of progressive social-justice virtue. Harrington’s convictions are not mine, but I bet you’d have to look hard in Denver to find a small business owner who had done more right by the local community, in terms of progressive values, than him. None of that saved him when the tumbrils came. René Girard once wrote: “The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.”

You can never do enough to pacify woke activists. They are totalitarians. They will not be happy until you entirely submit.

Today The New York Times sent me an electronic survey to fill out, explaining why I cancelled my subscription. One of the things I said was that I have come to believe that the Times runs its newsroom with active malice for people like me. Culturally and politically, I guess that I am about as far as you can get from the Kindness Yoga man. But none of that matters to the woke. What matters is that he is white and male and heterosexual, and therefore, the Enemy. The woke pogrom against Patrick Harrington did not happen in a vacuum. It happened in a culture that is articulated and amplified by our major media. The media gatekeepers have helped create this monster, and they’re feeding it.

UPDATE: A Czech friend writes:

Ah, but Harrington is the most logical target here. There is no point in attacking a Klansman. What would be the value? To prove that he’s racist? No. The target must be innocent and on the same side to instill fear in their own ranks so no one is secure in their position. They will purge themselves first – over and over again.This is straight out of the NKVD playbook.

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Big SCOTUS Win For Religious Liberty

Finally, some good news!:

The Supreme Court ruled 7-2 on Wednesday in favor of two religious schools that argued they should not have to face employment discrimination lawsuits brought by former teachers.

The case concerned the “ministerial exception” to employment discrimination laws that protects religious employers from certain lawsuits brought by employees. It was brought by two Catholic schools in California that were hit with discrimination lawsuits by teachers whose employment was terminated.

“The religious education and formation of students is the very reason for the existence of most private religious schools, and therefore the selection and supervision of the teachers upon whom the schools rely to do this work lie at the core of their mission,” Justice Samuel Alito wrote for the court.

“Judicial review of the way in which religious schools discharge those responsibilities would undermine the independence of religious institutions in a way that the First Amendment does not tolerate,” he wrote.

Alito’s opinion was joined by Chief Justice John Roberts and Justices Clarence Thomas, Stephen Breyer, Elena Kagan, Neil Gorsuch and Brett Kavanaugh. Justices Sonia Sotomayor and Ruth Bader Ginsburg dissented.

The buzz I’m hearing from some of my religious liberty lawyer friends is that today’s ruling is a big boost for David French’s theory that Chief Justice Roberts and Justice Neil Gorsuch are trying to carve out a judicially imposed via media between gay rights and religious liberty.

I was delighted to see that in the majority opinion, Justice Samuel Alito cited The Benedict Option as grounds for stating how important religious schools are to people of faith:

It’s humbling to discover that one’s work has been cited by a Supreme Court majority in an important religious liberty defense case. I am grateful to have had the opportunity to do my part to protect religious liberty and religious schools. If you haven’t yet read The Benedict Option, I hope you will re-consider. All the bad faith jibes that it’s nothing but “head for the hills” propaganda were implicitly knocked down by Justice Alito today. The arguments put forth in that book made a difference in the way SCOTUS ruled in an important case building a wall of protection around the communities of religious schools. If Justice Alito takes the book seriously, maybe you should too.

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Progressives Against Free Speech

There’s an “open letter” in Harper’s magazine signed about 150 intellectuals of the Left and center, decrying cancel culture. Here’s what it says:

Our cultural institutions are facing a moment of trial. Powerful protests for racial and social justice are leading to overdue demands for police reform, along with wider calls for greater equality and inclusion across our society, not least in higher education, journalism, philanthropy, and the arts. But this needed reckoning has also intensified a new set of moral attitudes and political commitments that tend to weaken our norms of open debate and toleration of differences in favor of ideological conformity. As we applaud the first development, we also raise our voices against the second. The forces of illiberalism are gaining strength throughout the world and have a powerful ally in Donald Trump, who represents a real threat to democracy. But resistance must not be allowed to harden into its own brand of dogma or coercion—which right-wing demagogues are already exploiting. The democratic inclusion we want can be achieved only if we speak out against the intolerant climate that has set in on all sides.

The free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted. While we have come to expect this on the radical right, censoriousness is also spreading more widely in our culture: an intolerance of opposing views, a vogue for public shaming and ostracism, and the tendency to dissolve complex policy issues in a blinding moral certainty. We uphold the value of robust and even caustic counter-speech from all quarters. But it is now all too common to hear calls for swift and severe retribution in response to perceived transgressions of speech and thought. More troubling still, institutional leaders, in a spirit of panicked damage control, are delivering hasty and disproportionate punishments instead of considered reforms. Editors are fired for running controversial pieces; books are withdrawn for alleged inauthenticity; journalists are barred from writing on certain topics; professors are investigated for quoting works of literature in class; a researcher is fired for circulating a peer-reviewed academic study; and the heads of organizations are ousted for what are sometimes just clumsy mistakes. Whatever the arguments around each particular incident, the result has been to steadily narrow the boundaries of what can be said without the threat of reprisal. We are already paying the price in greater risk aversion among writers, artists, and journalists who fear for their livelihoods if they depart from the consensus, or even lack sufficient zeal in agreement.

This stifling atmosphere will ultimately harm the most vital causes of our time. The restriction of debate, whether by a repressive government or an intolerant society, invariably hurts those who lack power and makes everyone less capable of democratic participation. The way to defeat bad ideas is by exposure, argument, and persuasion, not by trying to silence or wish them away. We refuse any false choice between justice and freedom, which cannot exist without each other. As writers we need a culture that leaves us room for experimentation, risk taking, and even mistakes. We need to preserve the possibility of good-faith disagreement without dire professional consequences. If we won’t defend the very thing on which our work depends, we shouldn’t expect the public or the state to defend it for us.

Overall it’s a good letter. As I said, the people who signed it range from the center to various reaches of the Left. It’s exactly the kind of thing that people of the Right ought to welcome from men and women of good faith to our Left. It’s not the place for us to “whatabout” the letter, but rather to be grateful that these prominent intellectuals took a public stand.

The Harper’s letter is smoking out some bad actors. Take a look at this tweet by a Vox critic-at-large, complaining about a fellow Vox writer who signed the letter:

This person “feels less safe” at the office of the online magazine because one of its prominent writers put his name on a letter defending free speech! And VanDerWerff doesn’t want Yglesias fired, but is nonetheless siccing the social media mob on him for having the gall to question cancel culture.

You see now the importance of the Harper’s letter. If I were running Vox, I would fire VanDerWerff over this and make no apology. If this VanDerWerff person critic has a problem with Yglesias’s signature, then take it up privately with the editors. But no: VanDerWerff shared it on social media for the sake of ginning up the woke mob against Yglesias for creating a hostile work environment. There’s no other possible explanation. VanDerWerff looks like a toxic person.

Look at this: a fellow transwoman, a columnist for The New York Times, is now regrets having signed up:

Ah yes, here it is — the first official apology for signing a statement condemning the climate of conformity, fear, and mutual surveillance that has descended upon public intellectual life: pic.twitter.com/Pc5HJFvv70

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) July 7, 2020

This is like Salma Hayek endorsing the novel American Dirt until the woke mob came for it, frightening her into retracting her remarks.  Boylan’s retraction is precisely a testimony to the power of the woke mob to intimidate people into obedience. Boylan supported the statement as a matter of principle — but then saw that it meant standing alongside such icky people as J.K. Rowling.

Since I started writing this post, we have another retraction, this one from a historian:

I do not endorse this@Harpers letter. I am in contact with Harper’s about a retraction

— Kerri Greenidge (@GreenidgeKerri) July 7, 2020

Why did she sign it if she didn’t agree with the statement? Seems like Prof. Greenidge only believes in free speech when all the cool kids do.

The socialist writer Freddie de Boer nails it in his blog comment about the Harper’s letter. Excerpt:

Please, think for a minute and consider: what does it say when a completely generic endorsement of free speech and open debate is in and of itself immediately diagnosed as anti-progressive, as anti-left? There is literally no specific instance discussed in that open letter, no real-world incident about which there might be specific and tangible controversy. So how can someone object to an endorsement of free speech and open debate without being opposed to those things in and of themselves? You can’t. And people are objecting to it because social justice politics are plainly opposed to free speech. That is the most obvious political fact imaginable today. Of course Yelling Woke Twitter hates free speech! Of course social justice liberals would prevent expression they disagree with if they could! How could any honest person observe out political discourse for any length of time and come to any other conclusion?

You want to argue that free speech is bad, fine. You want to adopt a dominance politics that (you imagine) will result in you being the censor, fine. But just do that. Own that. Can we stop with this charade? Can we stop pretending? Can we just proceed by acknowledging what literally everyone quietly knows, which is that the dominant majority of progressive people simply don’t believe in the value of free speech anymore? Please. Let’s grow up and speak plainly, please. Let’s just grow up.

When I first read it, I thought that the Harper’s letter was a worthy but anodyne defense of liberal values of free speech and open-minded discussion. I was wrong. This tweet from one of the organizers of the letter:

Afraid to sign a letter defending free speech.

A reader wrote me last week to tell me that cancel culture had come to his family. I can’t give details, because he asked me not to post it, but the gist of it is that he made an extremely mild joke about cancel culture — and they all turned on him, bigtime. These are white conservative Christians. Some of them have written him to formally disfellowship him. He told me that he had long thought I was exaggerating about the totalitarian nature of this phenomenon, but he believes it now.

And, in the past week, I’ve had two different people reach out to me to say that they’ve come to realize that certain friends of theirs would have no hesitation denouncing them to a tribunal for being a thought criminal. This is real. I’m grateful for the Harper’s signatories for directly and indirectly helping to demonstrate this.

From my upcoming book Live Not By Lies:

The US-born doctor said he had heard his immigrant parents warn him about the dangers of totalitarianism all his life. He hadn’t worried—after all, this is America, the land of liberty, of individual rights, one nation under God and the rule of law. America was born out of a quest for religious liberty, and had always been proud of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that guaranteed it. But now there was something about what was happening in Indiana that made him think: What if they were right?

It’s easy to laugh this kind of thing off. Many of us with aging parents are accustomed to having to talk them down from the ledge, so to speak, after a cable news program stoked their fear and anxiety about the world outside their front door. I assumed that this was probably the case with the elderly Czech woman.

But there was something about the tension in the doctor’s voice, and the fact that he felt compelled to reach out to a journalist he didn’t even know, telling me that it would be too dangerous for me to use his name if I wrote about him, that rattled me. His question became my question: What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? What if we really are witnessing a turn toward totalitarianism in the Western liberal democracies, and can’t see it because it takes a form different from the old kind?

During the next few years, I spoke with many men and women who had once lived under communism. I asked them what they thought of the old woman’s declaration. Did they also think that life in America is drifting toward some sort of totalitarianism?

They all said yes — often emphatically. They were usually surprised by my question because they consider Americans to be hopelessly naive on the subject. In talking at length to some of the emigrants who found refuge in America, I discovered that they are genuinely angry that their fellow Americans don’t recognize what is happening.

What makes the emerging situation in the West similar to what they fled? After all, every society has rules and taboos and mechanisms to enforce them. What unnerves those who lived under Soviet communism is this similarity: Elites and elite institutions are abandoning old-fashioned liberalism, based in defending the rights of the individual, and replacing it with a progressive creed that regards justice in terms of groups. It encourages people to identify with groups—ethnic, sexual, and otherwise—and to think of Good and Evil as a matter of power dynamics among the groups. A utopian vision drives these progressives, one that compels them to seek to rewrite history and reinvent language to reflect their ideals of social justice.

Further, these utopian progressives are constantly changing the standards of thought, speech, and behavior. You can never be sure when those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before. And the consequences for violating the new taboos are extreme, including losing your livelihood and having your reputation ruined forever.

People are becoming instant pariahs for having expressed a politically incorrect opinion, or in some other way provoking a progressive mob, which amplifies its scapegoating through social and conventional media. Under the guise of “diversity,” “inclusivity,” “equity,” and other egalitarian jargon, the Left creates powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse and marginalizes dissenters as evil.

It is very hard for Americans who have never lived through this kind of ideological fog to recognize what is happening. To be sure, whatever this is, it is not a carbon copy of life in the Soviet Bloc nations, with their secret police, their gulags, their strict censorship, and their material deprivation. That is precisely the problem, these people warn. The fact that relative to Soviet Bloc conditions, life in the West remains so free and so prosperous is what blinds Americans to the mounting threat to our liberty. That, and the way those who take away freedom couch it in the language of liberating victims from oppression.

“I was born and raised in the Soviet Union, and I’m frankly stunned by how similar some of these developments are to the way Soviet propaganda operated,” says one professor, now living in the Midwest.

Another émigré professor, this one from Czechoslovakia, was equally blunt. He told me that he began noticing a shift a decade or so ago: friends would lower their voices and look over their shoulders when expressing conservative views. When he expressed his conservative beliefs in a normal tone of voice, the Americans would start to fidget and constantly scan the room to see who might be listening.

“I grew up like this,” he tells me, “but it was not supposed to be happening here.”

It is happening here. Those Americans who grew up under communism know totalitarianism when they see it. Listen to them!

UPDATE: A friend tells me that he hears from people who have opposite experiences to the familiar narrative on this blog about cancel culture, and they think I’m distorting the true picture by only publishing one side of the narrative. I told my friend that I literally never get any letters from readers who offer a counternarrative. He said that they won’t write me because they’re convinced I won’t publish them. That’s a circular argument and a self-fulfilling prophecy, obviously. But look, let me invite you whose experiences run counter to the usual narrative I publish from readers to write me to offer your testimony. If it’s a thoughtful letter, I’ll publish it.

The post Progressives Against Free Speech appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Kampf Of The Woke

If you look at the front pages of The New York Times and the Washington Post these days, they are absolutely obsessed by race. And not just by race, but by a specific progressive take on race. It seems like just yesterday that we were told by liberals that it was slander to say that they were going to be going after statues of the Founders next. In today’s New York Times, there is an appeal by a white descendant of Thomas Jefferson to take down the Jefferson Memorial, because racism. Last week, a Times black columnist demanded that “Yes, Even George Washington” has to be cancelled. On July 4, the Washington Post published at Washington and Lee University demanding that not only the Confederate general’s name be struck from the school, but also the first president’s … because racism.

From the digital front page of the NYT now:

Look, Trump is often exactly what they say he is. But the lack of self-knowledge at the Times is infuriating. That newspaper focuses incessantly, and obsessively, on “cultural flash points” having to do with race.

And so it goes. This came out today:

“Findings suggest Washington journalists may be operating in even smaller, more insular microbubbles than previously thought, raising additional concerns about vulnerability to groupthink and blind spots.” https://t.co/JEEKL42R5J

— Jon Ward (@jonward11) July 6, 2020

Not just Washington journalists, but New York journalists too, and all elite journalists. Remember political scientist Zach Goldberg’s amazing finds last year on the Lexis/Nexis database, of how American journalists have gone berserk writing articles using woke, identity-politics jargon? The whole Twitter thread is here. This is one of many examples:

They’re all like that. Now, let me ask you: if you saw the number of mentions of “Jewish privilege” in the US media go from around 200 in 2012 to 2,600 in only four years, wouldn’t you wonder what the hell was going on with our media? If you were Jewish, would that not make you look for the exits?

I bring the Jewish example up for a specific reason. I have mentioned in this space from time to time over the years the profound impression made on me by an exhibit I saw back in 2000 at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial. It was about how the German people had been prepared for the Holocaust by a couple decades of propaganda that taught them to dehumanize Jews. I cannot find online a representation of that exhibit; if someone else can, please email a link or post it in the comments. It might have been “Deadly Medicine: Creating The Master Race,” but I’m not sure. I have never forgotten what I learned there. The gist of it was to demonstrate that the Holocaust didn’t come from nowhere — and in fact its basis preceded the Nazi Party.

Nazi propaganda presented Jews as “parasites” — but in that, they were only exploiting a concept that had been around since the Enlightenment. For example, the influential German Enlightenment philosopher J.G. von Herder wrote that the Jews were a “parasite” on Gentile nations. By the late 19th century, with the rise of Darwinism and the eugenics movement among mainstream medical authorities, people began speaking of nations as “bodies.” Jews, therefore, were characterized in mainstream media (at least in Germany) as “parasites” burrowing into the body. Around the turn of the 20th century, there was a mass “hygiene” movement in Germany — a push for healthiness and cleanliness. At the same time, eugenics dominated medical discussion, as it also did in Britain and the United States. The most progressive, science-minded people embraced eugenics, though no one did it with the fervor of the Germans.

Take a look at this:

International Hygiene Exhibition, 1911 promotional poster: The eugenics movement pre-dated Nazi Germany. A 1911 exhibition at the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden included a display on human heredity and ideas to improve it. (Deutsches Historisches Museum, Berlin, via US Holocaust Memorial Museum)

Remember: progressive, well-meaning, scientifically disposed people embraced the hygiene movement and its eugenic aims. As Christine Rosen wrote in her stunning 2004 history Preaching Eugenics, about how religion and science intersected in the early 20th century,  eugenics was a progressive cause at the time. In this 2005 interview, Rosen explained what she found in her research:

Across denominations and faiths, the Protestants, Catholics, and Jews who supported eugenics were overwhelmingly from the liberal end of the theological spectrum. This did not mean that they were politically liberal, of course, but they did tend to share a commitment to a non-literal reading of scripture and were optimistic about the benefits that modern science might bring to bear on the many pressing social problems they felt the country faced. Most of the religious supporters of eugenics had long ago reconciled their faiths with evolutionary theory, for example, and many of them had considerable experience in charities and corrections work, which colored their views about things such as degeneracy and poverty. Broadly speaking, why did they support it? These were religious leaders who embraced modern ideas first and adjusted their theologies later. Most of them did this because they sincerely believed, with most progressives at the time, that eugenics would alleviate human suffering.

Who opposed eugenics? Rosen:

Some of the most vigorous opponents of eugenics were Catholics and conservative Protestants. In books and periodicals, they registered their complaints about eugenics and its outgrowths—including immigration restriction and compulsory sterilization of the “unfit.” Catholic detractors usually cited natural law teaching in their opposition to eugenics, while conservative Protestants (many of whom still resisted evolutionary theory), drew on scripture. They did have some impact; indeed, Catholic lobbying efforts at the state level were successful many times in preventing the passage of state eugenic sterilization laws.

And:

What are your biggest concerns? If Preaching Eugenics is written in another 100 years, what will be the story of today’s religious communities and leaders?

The first concern I have is that so few Americans know the history of eugenics in our own country; they believe eugenics was something only Nazis practiced. But it happened here first. Related to this is the idea that just because the state is not imposing eugenics (as it did in the U.S. in the early twentieth century through compulsory state sterilization laws) that we no longer practice eugenics. But choosing the sex of your child or using amniocentesis to test for Down syndrome and then aborting the child are both forms of eugenics, and I share with many observers a concern about the expansion of this individual, consumer-driven form of eugenics. This, combined with our many reproductive technologies, threatens to upend our conceptions of the family, of the responsibilities of one generation to the next, and possibly even of what it means to be human.

How might we look back on today’s religious leaders in 100 years? I think we would find that they had almost entirely ceded authority to bioethicists – a profession that now tackles these questions from the ivory tower rather than the pulpit. And unfortunately it does not always bring to bear the same ethical and moral insights that religious leaders do. I hope to see much greater participation by religious leaders of all faiths in the future – in the public discussions about these new technologies and in the individual guidance they offer to their congregants.

The important things to remember here:

Eugenics were totally mainstream and progressive in the early 20th century
Progressive churches, and progressive institutions, embraced the movement
In Germany, the mainstream press and medical establishment began to medicalize sociology and politics, speaking of the German people as a body, and Jews as parasites on that body

As I recall making my way through that exhibit at Yad Vashem, I was deeply shocked by how the exhibit traced the slow boil of propaganda — pre-Nazi rule! — training the German people to think of Jews as a biological threat. It’s terrifying because we know where all this was heading, and what the Nazis did with something that had already been put in place unwittingly by German medical institutions, the media, and leading progressives.

By the time Hitler took power, all those years of media talk about hygiene, parasites, and the German body politic had conditioned Germans to accept Nazi racial “science,” for the common good.

One more thing. The journalist Christopher Rufo writes here about the kind of thing that is getting to be common around the country:

The City of Seattle held a training session for white employees called “Interrupting Internalized Racial Superiority and Whiteness.”

So I did a public records request to find out exactly what this means. Let’s go through it together in this thread.

Is The Church’s Officer Class Surrendering?

I’m getting more and more e-mail from Evangelical readers who have had it with Evangelicalism, and have reached a breaking point this spring. The common thread is frustration with wokeness in the church, and a belief that Evangelicalism is too thin and culture-bound to offer resistance to anti-Christian forces. I wrote recently about a reader who is a person of color, but couldn’t stand how her Evangelical megachurch was replacing the Gospel with woke identity politics. She and her husband are now trying out an Orthodox church.

Just now I received the longest, most detailed letter I have yet gotten from an Evangelical. I present it below, slightly edited to protect the reader’s identity:

I am writing you because like another reader of yours I have decided that I need to say this and even if not read or noticed, for my own sake I want to write this down. I never comment in the comments section because honestly, I’m too afraid. I need my job, and I work for the most woke company that has bought into it all, diversity, inclusion, BLM, LGBT, transgender, all of it.

What I am going to say is this: Your warnings about the church’s increasing danger in this culture is absolutely on point, and your warnings that the church is not heeding your warnings are absolutely true. You’re right not only because you see the warning signs and know the history, but the Bible tells us that man is sinful and will unleash terrible devastation on himself and others.

I want to give you this perspective from a “dyed in the wool” evangelical. I have read you for a long time and and have recently startedThe Benedict Option because I want to become serious about this. May I offer my thoughts on the evangelical church and its response to BLM  and “social unrest” and why it is another example in a long string of them of the evangelical church’s slide into the culture? Let me start with my bona fides.

I grew up in a small rural church in the Midwest in the 60s and 70s, which was part of a small Baptist association that is still thriving today but with none of the influence of the Southern Baptist Convention. We were a fundamentalist church, and though the teaching lacked depth at times, they truly stuck to the fundamentals of the Christian faith.

As as adult I filtered through Baptist churches with stints in the “Bible church” movement (the forerunner of today’s seeker friendly church movement). For about 6-7 years I attended an Episcopal church in Central Texas and at that time the priest was conservative and took a lot of flack when he pushed back against the ordination of gay priests. Ironically for me, some of the sweetest times of fellowship with Christians was in that church. In 2007 I left Texas to attend seminary at a small fundamentalist Christian college and seminary in the [Midwest]. I graduated in 2011 with a master’s in theology. I now attend a large suburban Southern Baptist church in [major Midwestern city]. I actually considered Orthodoxy a couple of years ago as I began to become increasingly disillusioned with the evangelical church but this Baptist girl just couldn’t make the move. I have most recently studied Reformed Theology and am moving there from a doctrinal standpoint.

I want to say to you that many of our churches and our shepherds have abandoned us in these times. I have watched through the years the evangelical church descend into frivolity and complete unseriousness and irrelevance. Everything from the insipid music, the “praise” teams, the canned women’s Bible studies from women of dubious theology, the story telling that substitutes for the Scriptures from the pulpit, the delivery of supposedly biblical truths delivered through Sesame Street videos that flash words and images and Bible verses across the screen, the watering down of the Gospel to bring the bodies in, and the lack of development of any biblical worldview.

I want to add one thing to indicate where I come from as an evangelical Christian on Trump. I was heartsick as I watched Trump rise and beat out all his competitors on the Republican front. I was vocal and adamant that he was a terrible choice. I didn’t vote for him, but then again I lived in a state where that was a safe  “protest.” I’m like Ben Shapiro: Trump has surprised us in some ways, and sometimes he (accidentally, probably) stumbles into a conservative position. He supports Christian causes, but from political expediency not personal conviction. He is unsuited for his office and he deserves to lose, and his family “advisors” deserve to lose. But we Christians don’t deserve Biden, and I blame Trump for letting that happen. What a complete and total fool he is.

Recent events have only exposed the evangelical church’s complete capitulation to the culture. I honestly believe that the evangelical church won’t suffer in coming days and years because they’ve already received their thirty pieces of silver and are going to do just fine. It is the Benedict Option Christians who will suffer.

Let me tell you about a couple of things that in the last two weeks have been disturbing to me in relation to recent events. It is the culmination of years of leaning into the culture to please the culture. It’s the evangelical church’s latest attempt to be relevant to the culture that they long ago adopted as its own.

J.D. Greear recently told us Southern Baptists that we should be saying “Black Lives Matter.” [Note: Greear said he does not support the Black Lives Matter organization — RD] He even does this in a “Come on, guys, don’t be stubborn about this” tone. Now, this is the same man who was willing recently to affirm a lie about God’s order for mankind’s flourishing (transgenderism) so he could be polite and not ruin a witnessing opportunity. I know that he’s trying to overcome the Southern Baptist Convention’s unseemly past. (For the record, the Baptist association that I grew up in had Southern roots and honestly there were some pretty racist people in our church. Fortunately, I had a father who was disgusted at that and told his children so.) But Greear assigns guilt to his faithful who honestly are trying very hard to be faithful stewards of the faith, who are serious about the Gospel and give money and their personal time to sharing the Gospel to all races, all levels of income, all cultures. I know many people personally committed to sharing the Gospel and living out the faith. They volunteer hours of work to serve all peoples of color, ethnicity and culture.

Secondly, I support two missionaries in two separate mission organizations. One is a missionary to [Third World continent] and the other is a missionary to [Third World country]. Both are dedicated men who have spent their lives in service to spreading the Gospel to the world.

Both mission organizations came out recently with statements that had the following themes in common:

POC suffer disproportionately from racism and it’s a structural, systematic facet of American life. POC are always under attack.
Police brutality is common and directed almost solely at POC.
White people, including us Christians, suffer from bias of which we tend to be unaware. In short, we are guilty.
Racial reconciliation is not possible without the Gospel (which is true).
They are now committed to diversity and inclusion and racial reconciliation.


So now even the Gospel is subverted to meet the needs of the gods of Diversity and Inclusion. They have pimped the Gospel to to appease people who will never be appeased. They have declared that the purpose of the Gospel is racial reconciliation rather than reconciliation of sinful man to a holy and righteous God. We now seek racial reconciliation with one another to be right with God. Racial harmony is good, and it’s a public good. But we’re a fallen world and making it the reasonfor the Gospel is to engage in wishful thinking for a utopia that in the end has the potential to destroy our Gospel mission.

What’s interesting to me is to whom these messages are directed. Surely they know that Shaun King or BLM or Antifa is not going to wander over to their site to see how enlightened and committed they are. I have to assume that they are talking to us, their faithful donors. Slamming faithful donors will not bring those who need it to the Gospel. What irony.

Another thing that is happening with regularity is the flagellation of good people of faith. I’ve known many evangelical people of faith through the years. We actually do live out our salvation. We tithe regularly and much of our money goes to ministries that share the Gospel with peoples of all colors and ethnicities. Our community ministries serve the poor, immigrants, and people of all colors. We really are mindful of the need to examine ourselves in the light of God’s holiness. We really do want to be in harmony with our brothers and sisters of color. But the Diversity and Inclusion gods are angry and now we learn that it’s not been enough, nor if recent history is an indicator, it never will be.

I do want to emphasize — out of necessity in these conversations — that I, like all my Christian family, friends and fellow Baptists, was appalled at George Floyd’s death. It was a terrible wrong, a terrible injustice. There’s no doubt that in our minds that police, maybe not a majority but too many, are brutal. I have my own deeply unsettling experience with the police, so I know they can be nasty and brutal.

I  want to digress to comment on Tim Keller’s The Sin of Racism. One of your readers alerted me to this. Tim Keller is obviously a stalwart of the faith and one does not dismiss him lightly. He has dedicated his life to the faith and to the preaching of the Gospel. We have to admire that and respect that. He has much influence and because of him, there will be many who will enter the eternal state to live eternally with God.

He has many good things to say, all biblically correct, but it devolves into the usual critical race theory claptrap, even adopting the language of the SJW at times. There is one massive, glaring thing missing in his conclusions. If we as Christians are to call one another to holy living and to confront sinfulness in the church then there is one thing that would vastly improve the lives of POC. That one thing is to restore the family unit. I went to Tim Keller’s church’s website. It appears that his staff — and no doubt his congregation — is mostly white and Asian (not all but mostly). I dare to say that if 70% of his staff or his congregation were not married, were not living in the same home as their children and had fathered children out of wedlock, he would not have a church. If any man on his staff left his wife and family for another woman and fathered a child out of wedlock, he’d initiate church discipline. If there was a rush of people who came into his church without the benefit of marriage, and kept fathering children without the benefit of marriage, he’d do something.

A boy with his biological mother and father in the home can withstand almost any adversity, including racism. A boy without a father withstands little of what life throws at him. Even secularists understand that children in broken homes suffer. To withhold this admonition from a people, the very admonition that benefits your church and that assures human flourishing, because you don’t want to offend or because of the color of their skin or because they have suffered, that is a sin. To assume that your fellow POC brothers and sisters in Christ can’t handle this admonition but your white congregants can—I call that racism. To assume that they don’t have the Christian maturity to handle this but your white congregants do—I call that racism. If racial harmony is good, then so is family formation. If racism is a sin, then failure to provide for your own is a sin (1 Timothy 5:8). (The only prominent evangelical that has actually tackled this is John MacArthur. And, in the spirit of fairness an internet search finds that Keller at least touches on it but from a social justice perspective. I also am not familiar with his full body of work, so I always leave open the possibility that I have misconstrued his position.)

One of Keller’s solution is for white people to read several books, one on over incarceration in the criminal justice system. I contend that a young man who is responsible for caring for his wife and children, who has a job and comes home every night to his family has little time for gangbanging or settling scores with a gun. That translates into fewer encounters with the police. A side benefit of that is we don’t have to do his reading homework.

Our church leaders have failed us, are failing us in this time. John 10 describes this situation: “I am the good shepherd. The good shepherd lays down His life for the sheep.The hired hand is not the shepherd, and the sheep are not his own. When he sees the wolf coming, he abandons the sheep and runs away. Then the wolf pounces on them and scatters the flock. The man runs away because he is a hired servant and is unconcerned for the sheep.” Many of our current Christian leaders (I am particularly focusing on the evangelical community here because that is what I know) are not shepherds, they are the hired hands. They are leaving us to the wolves.

One last thing about our Christian leaders’ capitulation to the BLM movement and everything else woke. I don’t really know how much longer I will be able to work for a company that is becoming increasingly strident about all things progressive. I’m beginning to see that the day is likely coming when I will be required to hang out the “Workers Of The World, Unite” sign or be fired. We’ve already had the discussion in a manager’s meeting about White Supremacy and the sins of white males (I am not making this up). I make a really good salary and that salary makes it possible for me to be a part of the Great Commission. When I learn that the mission organizations or the church I support are toeing the line of wokeness, I feel that it only contributes to the whole atmosphere of intolerance that will eventually harm me. Yes, they always attempt to temper their message with the caveat that “the only way to get there is through the Gospel” (see arguments above) but as Douglas Murray says (paraphrased and maybe even a bit mangled) “be careful about what you embed yourself in” and “they think they are doing it for an easy life but it builds up hell for the future.” I’ve not seen any evangelical organization push the full agenda of  BLM, and they are careful to skirt the full narrative, but to push this narrative even on the fringes nonetheless gives tacit support and endangers those like myself who question even a part of it. I’ve been faithful in my support, both in terms of money and prayer, but they are building up hell for me. Don’t they know that if I lose my job, they lose their support?

I have been listening to a number of secular individuals who are speaking the truth of this: Douglas Murray, Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, Andrew Sullivan, Matt Taibbi, Heather Mac Donald, Lionel Shriver, Glenn Loury, John McWhorter and of course, more of Tucker Carlson. You’ve spoken before of forming alliances with people who are not your natural alliances or of like faith but with whom you might be aligned in battle. I’m beginning to think that it is brave secularists who are most likely to protect our interests, even to some small degree. I fully understand that we don’t put our trust in man but rather in God to save us. But God has used those not of the faith before to bring about his plans. It certainly won’t be the evangelical church, which has already caved and is gaslighting its flock. This Baptist girl is drawing encouragement from these people. These people are telling me to be brave, to not speak a thing that you know to be a lie, to not be afraid.

My final and complete trust is in the God I serve but I do feel increasingly alone. I say only neutral things at work even to my friends. I watch what I say to just about everybody even Christians. I am on FB and follow several cooking and hobby sites, but I’ve unfriended all my work friends, pared down my friend’s list, made my page private and closed off my feeds to everyone but myself. I rarely post. I am not on Twitter or Instagram and now I’m really glad that I never got on those sites. I’ve decided that I will begin to develop my own version of the Benedict Option. To that end, I am developing a prayer life that will sustain me now and into the future. I am reading, studying and meditating the Scriptures daily. I pray that my Gospel will always be pure, untainted by the gospel of the culture. That, I believe is the foundation for a Benedict Option that will be sustained.

Please don’t give up on your warnings. I believe that many will not take you seriously, but remember that the prophets of the OT preached for years and years and years. Many times they grew discouraged even crying out to God, “How long, O Lord.” It may be that in the end you are able to only call out a faithful remanent, but for God’s purposes that is enough.

Thank you, reader, for your long letter, one that must have been painful for you to write. Once again I confess that I don’t understand the world of Evangelicalism very well, so I don’t have a strong basis on which to comment on this reader’s letter. I invite you Evangelical readers to do so.

It reminds me, though, of this strong criticism in Crisis, the Catholic magazine, of the well-known Catholic apologist Bishop Robert Barron. The author, a layman named Auguste Meyrat, attacks Bishop Barron for not being willing to lead the church in the face of attacks on statues, particularly of canonized Catholic saints (St. Junipero Serra and St. Louis, King of France). Bishop Barron had said on his blog that the laity ought to be leading in those instances. Meyrat says:

Overall, Bishop Barron’s response is sadly, though unsurprisingly, inadequate. While he intends to channel President Kennedy in his call to service—ask not what your Church can do for you; ask what you can do for your Church—he fails to explain what laypeople should actually do. The majority of Catholics, and people in general, aren’t sure how much they should resist the current anti-Christian iconoclasm, or if they should even resist it at all. This is probably due to the fact that most Catholic clergymen have been notoriously mealy-mouthed in the pulpit, hardly going further than preaching platitudes and raising money for the Bishop’s Annual Appeal.

And this in turn stems from a lack of leadership from their bishops. Bishop Barron’s description of what constitutes the responsibilities of a bishop is tellingly deficient: “We can indeed lobby politicians, encourage legislative changes, and call community leaders together.” He doesn’t mention that bishops also ordain priests, preach to their diocese, and lead programs in faith formation. No, for Bishop Barron and most of his colleagues, their title and duties are primarily political. They are public figures who happen to represent the Church, not the other way around.

As such, they would never dream of risking their good standing among society’s elite by denouncing any popular movement—unless it’s associated with President Trump, as Archbishop Wilton Gregory demonstrated a few weeks ago. This is why Bishop Barron completely ignores the question of whether destroying statues of Saint Junípero Serra is right or wrong. Instead, he references a weak statement on the issue, made by the Californian bishops, which tries to appease both sides, teach a little history, and ultimately settle nothing.

Meyrat concludes:

It has become clear, especially in light of the passivity and complacency of Church leadership, that reforming the Church and Western culture will have to be a grassroots movement. Laypeople will need to have families, preserve tradition, form close communities committed to the gospel, and, yes, show some courage against the thugs attacking their property and freedoms, as Mr. Mark Williams did last week in Saint Louis, Missouri.

There is no alternative.

Read it all.

Well, I do know a lot about Catholicism, but I have not been following the Catholic bishops’ response to the current cultural crisis closely enough to feel comfortable offering a comment. But in general, I have held for the past few years that the Catholic Church, and all churches (including my own), cannot wait for priests and hierarchs to lead. We should not be against them (as long as they are teaching and governing according to our particular communion’s orthodoxy), but to wait on them to tell us what to do is a fool’s game. The hour is late, and the battle is upon us. Nearly twenty years ago, when I was a Catholic, a Catholic priest told me something very close to this. I was lazy, though, and found it much easier to complain about the failures of the bishops and the institutional church than to work on building something good within the church. That was a big, big mistake. Whatever your church — Catholic, Evangelical, Lutheran, Anglican, Orthodox, etc. — don’t you make the same one.

UPDATE: In fairness, let me ask you pastors and others in church leadership: Is the laity surrendering? What’s wrong with them in this crisis, from your point of view? What do you wish you were seeing from them?

The post Is The Church’s Officer Class Surrendering? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Straight Fire From Tucker Carlson

Straight fire from Tucker Carlson in his interview with The Federalist Radio Hour. Excerpts:

There is a revolution in progress. I can’t stop it. I’m just a talk show host, but I can certainly say what I think about it and encourage other people to do the same. I mean, again, this is a bias that’s inherent to my business that I think that change begins, always, when you describe what’s happening. Words are the seeds of action. And I’m just so struck by how few people have articulated what’s going on.

And it’s not that they don’t understand it. They do. They’re just too afraid. And I find that contemptible. I’m not particularly brave. I’ve never served in the military. I wouldn’t want to, you know I’d be afraid. So it’s not like I’m some particularly courageous person. I’m not. It’s just that so many people who should be brave are fleeing the scene, and that just didn’t enrages me.

I mean, it really is like watching absent fathers drink during the day and you keep thinking Where are your children? Where’s your wife? Like, why aren’t you doing your duty? How can you abandon them and continue to live with yourself?

That’s what I think of our leaders right now, almost all of them. You know what I mean, like we had a home invasion. You were the only one who could operate the shotgun, and you’re at the bar and turned your cell phone off, you know, when the kids got beaten up and mom got raped and they burned the house down. You know, because you left. You were supposed to protect us. I know that may sound melodramatic, but that’s actually how I feel about it.

More:

This is the first revolution I’ve ever heard of this aims downward. I mean, this is an attempt by the most privileged people in our society to crush and humiliate the least privileged in our society. Again, you have to wonder why. There’s something really ominous about that. There’s something really, in addition to, you know how sinister it is and how just immoral what they’ve done is, it’s just a level of kind of bad sportsmanship that I can’t even process. You know what I mean?

The middle of the country is dying. The middle class is dying. The American middle class for the first time in modern history has seen its life expectancy decline, mostly thanks to fentanyl but there are other factors too. So these are the people who have the least, who are in the worst shape, and yet they are the explicit target of the rage of the rioters who really are the ruling class.

I don’t understand that. Why would you attack the weakest in your society? It’s grotesque. It’s contemptible.

The answer is that these are Marxisants who have substituted culture for class. It’s how they can be fabulously wealthy and powerful, yet consider themselves to be oppressed, or allies of the oppressed.

On the uselessness of Republican politicians and establishment figures:

I  mean there’s no more pretending. In a crisis, anyone who won’t defend you is with the enemy. Period. I know Kay Cole James [president of the Heritage Foundation], and she’s perfectly nice person. I’m not against her as a person. You know I’m not against Ron Johnson, you know, I’m not against Jim Lankford, two United States senators who today introduced legislation to abolish Columbus Day.

… A mob of revolutionaries are trying to eliminate American history. Why are they doing that? Not because they don’t like the aesthetics of the Columbus statue. No, they’re doing it because they understand that when you eliminate people’s past, you get to control their future. It’s a power grab.

If anyone doesn’t understand that, and anyone who plays along, wittingly or not, is your enemy. Period. So, I mean that’s just what it is. It, kind of, it all becomes very clear. So I’m happy about that because we don’t have to guess.

And I know Ron Johnson and I know Jim Lankford, and I like them both. I think Lankford’s legitimately smart, represents maybe the most conservative state of the union. But doing something like this puts Jim Lankford, you know, on the wrong side. The mob shows up at my house, I know for a dead certainty that Jim Lankford is not going to get out of the chair to save me or my family. Period. And therefore, Jim Lankford is not my friend. Jim Lankford is, in this moment, my enemy. Not personally, but factually.

Listen to (or read) the whole thing. It’s very clarifying. See, this is why more and more people on the Right are listening to Tucker Carlson: he’s not kowtowing to Conservatism, Inc.

UPDATE: An interesting comment from a reader:

Unsaid is the fact that the vast majority of the country, myself included, entirely accepts as orthodoxy most or all of those leftist advances.

Future of the American right is class based. Large scale culture war is indeed over or will soon be. It was a useful game while it lasted, but people like Tucker are increasingly useless to anyone with a concern for power, since they can’t win. Cultural right is incapable of conceptualizing a coalition of anyone other than themselves. This toxicity makes you useless and isolated in spite of clear plurality versus other groups which is naturally of great value. Either a plutocrats or a working class party is the future, either will disregard old culture war matters except for class specific undertones. Former outcome is much more likely.

Don’t complain about Conservative Inc surrendering your position when you’ve neglected alliance building. You’ve made it of no use to them anymore. You’re 20th century Germany – individually the strongest player on the board by a significant margin, but so toxic and threatening to all other players that they put aside old rivalries very quickly in order to dogpile you. The German eurocrats, by turning that menace on its head, ironically were far more astute players at solidifying German dominance over Europe than the earlier bands of militant nationalists.

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Lot & The Benedict Option

This morning, I received an e-mail from a reader of The Benedict Option who said that she and her husband have moved from Britain to France, in search of a Benedict Option Christian community. She’s asking me if I can put her in touch with my French friends. I am in the process of doing so. I also saw this short Peter Leithart reflection about Lot and the destruction of Sodom. The two are connected. Let me explain.

A year or two ago, in the Q&A portion of one of my Benedict Option talks, I cautioned the audience against thinking that one could fully escape, in a physical sense, the corruption of the world. It’s not simply a matter of original sin, i.e., that the line between good and evil runs not between us and the world, but down the middle of every human heart. And I didn’t mean also in the sense that you can’t get to a place where the world cannot find you. Both of those things are true.

Nevertheless, I think for some people — indeed, maybe even for most people — moving to a different location might be the right thing to do. We have to at least consider the possibility. It is possible that a city, or a place, can be so overrun by spiritual and moral corruption that righteous people have to leave, for the sake of saving their souls. As individual Christians, or Christian families, discern that question for themselves, I advise that they be realistic about what they can accomplish by moving away — and what they can’t. That said, it still might be the best idea for them. It’s a matter of discernment.

That said, consider Leithart’s point (but if you don’t know the story in Genesis of Lot and Sodom, read it here.) Leithart argues that Lot, Abraham’s kinsman, might have left Sodom, but the corruption in Sodom had infected Lot. Leithart notes that Lot, standing at the door trying to keep the mob away from his guests (angels in disguise), offers them his daughters to be raped — a sign, says Leithart, of how corrupted he already was. In the end, the angels had to more or less drag Lot, his wife, and daughters out of Sodom in advance of its destruction. As we know, Lot’s wife was so enmeshed in it that she violated the angels’ instructions not to look back, and was turned into a pillar of salt. We don’t have to believe that she literally was in order to grasp the mythological truth the story teaches.

What people who are only casually aware of the Biblical story don’t realize is that Lot and his daughters took refuge in a cave, where the daughters got their father drunk, and had sex with him. You can take Lot and his daughters out of Sodom, but you can’t take the Sodom out of them.

Leithart writes:

Even if Lot is mostly on the side of the angels, he hasn’t taught his household the ways of justice. He can’t convince his sons-in-law to leave, and his wife looks longingly back to the city and is turned to salt. This shows the distance between Lot and Abraham. The Lord chooses Abraham so that he will lead his house in justice. Lot left his homes in Ur and Haran, but he isn’t ready to leave Sodom. For all his good qualities, for all his hospitable righteousness (2 Pet 2:7), Lot is more deeply enmeshed in Sodom than he appears. He is a man at the doorway, a Janus who turns this way and that. He may be a just man, but for the author of Genesis that’s not enough. A truly just man forms a just family.

With Abraham, God creates a new kind of human, a man who is willing to leave his past to follow the Lord to an unknown land, a man who is willing to sacrifice his future in the confidence that the Lord will restore it. Genesis encourages us to mimic the faith of Abraham, but it also includes Lot as a foil. Lot’s life teaches us that tragedy isn’t always the result of a single titanic wrong. It can be the product of a series of small misjudgments and missteps, of hesitation at the doorway.

Read the whole thing.

The lesson for all of us is that we might think that we are a righteous family living amid great sinners, and we might think that we are training our households up in the Lord’s ways, but we might be lying to ourselves. The fact that Lot and his family were so hesitant to leave the city that they had been told was doomed reveals something deep about them — something that came out in the cave later.

Here endeth the lesson.

UPDATE: Good comment from a reader:

Thanks for posting this, Rod. It brought to mind the post from last week – “For Christians, It Really Is a Catastrophe.” I didn’t have a chance to comment then, but this post on the story of Lot is a chance to go back and revisit it.

In that earlier post, a mother wrote about the parents at her school who are solidly orthodox Catholics but committed to helping their children enter elite institutions. This describes my own upbringing in the world of 1990s JPII-era Catholicism. I went to a Catholic high school which had a pretty well-thought out religious education plan and orthodox teachers. However, when we applied for colleges, people’s priorities came out, and it was pretty ugly. With their parents’ encouragement, my classmates were going to get as much money and worldly power as they could, and they had no time for somebody who was a bit ambivalent about those goals and might want to study the liberal arts.

Leithart’s explication of the Lot story got me thinking about how religious believers try to raise their children. In many cases, the parents have the right principles and lead exemplary lives, but cannot bring themselves to follow through on their principles to the point where they might set their children on other paths in life. As long as their children don’t put at permanent risk a future successful career, the parents won’t push them too hard to think through the implications of their religious beliefs and will tolerate a great deal of sex, drinking, and drugs. And, often, the parents have made their own compromises and have their own things they won’t let go. I think (or, maybe, hope) the problems don’t get to the point they did in Lot’s story, but there are a lot of demons lurking underneath the surface.

Being counter-cultural in today’s society isn’t that tough. Just think through the steps you would want to take to ensure your children have a modicum of knowledge of their religious tradition and can be somewhat skeptical of the ideals the world holds out for them. For instance, have a slightly larger than normal family (say, 4 kids), sacrifice a bit (e.g., put money for a vacation into private school tuition), and hold a slightly stricter line on media consumption or smartphone use than other families in your social circle. I’m not sure that’s enough, but it will certainly accentuate the differences between one’s own family and the outside world.

Since so much of raising a family these days comes down to finding the right social circles and right sorts of peer influences, moving is certainly and option, but beware you aren’t carrying the demons with you when you leave.

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Colin Kaepernick Hates America

Well, okay then, you multimillionaire ingrate. For all its faults, this country has made you richer and freer than anywhere else on earth.

Let’s remember this from a couple of weeks back:

NFL Commissioner Roger Goodell is encouraging a team to sign free-agent quarterback Colin Kaepernick.

“If he wants to resume his career in the NFL, then obviously it’s gonna take a team to make that decision,” Goodell told ESPN’s Mike Greenberg on a special edition of “SportsCenter” on Monday. “But I welcome that, support a club making that decision and encourage them to do that.”

Kaepernick, who led the San Francisco 49ers to Super Bowl XLVII, hasn’t played in the NFL since the 2016 season when he peacefully protested social injustice and police brutality by kneeling during the national anthem.

Goodell also expressed his desire for Kaepernick’s participation in the NFL off the field, welcoming his voice on the social issues that plague the country today.

“If his efforts are not on the field but continuing to work in this space, we welcome him to that table and to help us, guide us, help us make better decisions about the kinds of things that need to be done in the communities,” Goodell said. “We have invited him in before, and we want to make sure that everybody’s welcome at that table and trying to help us deal with some very complex, difficult issues that have been around for a long time.

“But I hope we’re at a point now where everybody’s committed to making long-term, sustainable change.”

Go ahead, NFL, embrace this America-hater. I can’t wait to see how that’s going to work out for you.

Remember that to the American media, when Trump defends America, it’s race-baiting demagoguery. When Colin Kaepernick denounces America, it’s veritably from the mouth of God.

UPDATE: Kap’s friends. I firmly believe in their right to do this. I believe just as firmly that they are rotten people. I may be wrong about this, but I suspect that they represent a majority of those who run America’s newsrooms and institutions.

Protesters outside the White House have now set a big American flag on fire while chanting: America was never great! pic.twitter.com/448IPYUR0y

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) July 5, 2020

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Trump At Rushmore: One Speech, Two Nations

Here is a link to a transcript Donald Trump’s Mount Rushmore speech. I thought it was a good speech, poorly delivered (the president seemed weary). Excerpts:

Our founders launched not only a revolution in government, but a revolution in the pursuit of justice, equality, liberty, and prosperity. No nation has done more to advance the human condition than the United States of America and no people have done more to promote human progress than the citizens of our great nation. It was all made possible by the courage of 56 patriots who gathered in Philadelphia 244 years ago and signed the Declaration of Independence. They enshrined a divine truth that changed the world forever when they said, “All men are created equal.” These immortal words set in motion the unstoppable march of freedom. Our founders boldly declared that we are all endowed with the same divine rights, given us by our Creator in Heaven, and that which God has given us, we will allow no one ever to take away ever.

1776 represented the culmination of thousands of years of Western civilization and the triumph of not only spirit, but of wisdom, philosophy, and reason. And yet, as we meet here tonight, there is a growing danger that threatens every blessing our ancestors fought so hard for, struggled, they bled to secure. Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values, and indoctrinate our children. Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials, and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities. Many of these people have no idea why they’re doing this, but some know what they are doing. They think the American people are weak and soft and submissive, but no, the American people are strong and proud and they will not allow our country and all of its values, history, and culture to be taken from them.

More:

Our people have a great memory. They will never forget the destruction of statues and monuments to George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, Ulysses S. Grant, abolitionists and many others. The violent mayhem we have seen in the streets and cities that are run by liberal Democrats in every case is the predictable result of years of extreme indoctrination and bias in education, journalism, and other cultural institutions. Against every law of society and nature, our children are taught in school to hate their own country and to believe that the men and women who built it were not heroes but that were villains. The radical view of American history is a web of lies, all perspective is removed, every virtue is obscured, every motive is twisted, every fact is distorted and every flaw is magnified until the history is purged and the record is disfigured beyond all recognition. This movement is openly attacking the legacies of every person on Mount Rushmore. They defiled the memory of Washington, Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt. Today we will set history and history’s record straight.

Before these figures were immortalized in stone, they were American giants in full flesh and blood, gallant men, whose intrepid deeds unleashed the greatest leap of human advancement the world has ever known. Tonight I will tell you and most importantly the youth of our nation the true stories of these great, great men. From head to toe George Washington represented the strength, grace, and dignity of the American people. From a small volunteer force of citizen farmers, he created the Continental Army out of nothing and rallied them to stand against the most powerful military on earth. Through eight long years, through the brutal winter at Valley Forge, through setback after setback on the field of battle, he led those patriots to ultimate triumph. When the army had dwindled to a few thousand men at Christmas of 1776, when defeat seemed absolutely certain, he took what remained of his forces on a daring nighttime crossing of the Delaware River. They marched through nine miles of frigid darkness, many without boots on their feet, leaving a trail of blood in the snow. In the morning, they seized victory at Trenton after forcing the surrender of the most powerful empire on the planet at Yorktown, General Washington did not claim power but simply returned to Mount Vernon as a private citizen.

When called upon again, he presided over the Constitutional Convention in Philadelphia and was unanimously elected our first president. When he stepped down after two terms, his former adversary, King George called him the greatest man of the age. He remains first in our hearts to this day, for as long as Americans love this land, we will honor and cherish the father of our country, George Washington. He will never be removed, abolished, and most of all, he will never be forgotten. Thomas Jefferson, the great Thomas Jefferson, was 33 years old when he traveled north to Pennsylvania and brilliantly authored one of the greatest treasures of human history, the Declaration of Independence. He also drafted Virginia’s constitution and conceived and wrote the Virginia Statute for Religious Freedom, a model for our cherished First Amendment. After serving as the first Secretary of State, and then Vice President, he was elected to the presidency. He ordered American warriors to crush Barbary pirates. He doubled the size of our nation with the Louisiana Purchase and he sent the famous explorers Lewis and Clark into the west on a daring expedition to the Pacific Ocean. He was an architect, an inventor, a diplomat, a scholar, the founder of one of the world’s great universities and an ardent defender of liberty. Americans will forever admire the author of American freedom, Thomas Jefferson, and he too will never, ever be abandoned by us.

Abraham Lincoln, the savior of our union, was a self-taught country lawyer who grew up in a log cabin on the American frontier. The first Republican president, he rose to high office from obscurity based on a force and clarity of his anti-slavery convictions. Very, very strong convictions. He signed the law that built the Trans-Continental Railroad. He signed the Homestead Act given to some incredible scholars as simply defined ordinary citizens free land to settle anywhere in the American West, and he led the country through the darkest hours of American history, giving every ounce of strength that he had to ensure that government of the people, by the people and for the people did not perish from this earth. He served as commander in chief of the U.S. Armed Forces during our bloodiest war, the struggle that saved our union and extinguished the evil of slavery. Over 600,000 died in that war, more than 20, 000 were killed or wounded in a single day in Antietam. At Gettysburg 157 years ago, the Union bravely withstood an assault of nearly 15,000 men and threw back Pickett’s Charge. Lincoln won the Civil War. He issued the Emancipation Proclamation. He led the passage of the 13th Amendment, abolishing slavery for all-time and ultimately his determination to preserve our nation and our union cost him his life. For as long as we live, Americans will uphold and revere the immortal memory of President Abraham Lincoln.

Theodore Roosevelt exemplified the unbridled confidence of our national culture and identity. He saw the towering grandeur of America’s mission in the world and he pursued it with –

– In the world and he pursued it with overwhelming energy and zeal. As a Lieutenant Colonel during the Spanish-American War, he led the famous Rough Riders to defeat the enemy at San Juan Hill. He cleaned up corruption as police commissioner of New York City, then served as the Governor of New York, Vice President, and at 42 years old, became the youngest ever President of the United States.

He sent our great new naval fleet around the globe to announce America’s arrival as a world power. He gave us many of our national parks, including the Grand Canyon. He oversaw the construction of the awe-inspiring Panama Canal and he is the only person ever awarded both the Nobel Peace Prize and the Congressional Medal of Honor. He was American freedom personified in full. The American people will never relinquish the bold, beautiful and untamed spirit of Theodore Roosevelt.

No movement that seeks to dismantle these treasured American legacies can possibly have a love of America at its heart. Can’t happen. No person who remains quiet at the destruction of this resplendent heritage can possibly lead us to a better future. The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice, but in truth, it would demolish both justice and society. It would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance and it would turn our free and inclusive society into a place of a repression, domination, and exclusion. They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced.

One more passage:

Those who seek to erase our heritage want Americans to forget our pride and our great dignity so that we can no longer understand ourselves or America’s destiny. In toppling the heroes of 1776, they seek to dissolve the bonds of love and loyalty that we feel for our country and that we feel for each other. Their goal is not a better America, their goal is to end America.

In its place, they want power for themselves, but just as patriots did in centuries past, the American people will stand in their way and we will win and win quickly and with great dignity. We will never let them rip America’s heroes from our monuments or from our hearts. By tearing down Washington and Jefferson, these radicals would tear down the very heritage for which men gave their lives to win the Civil War, they would erase the memory that inspired those soldiers to go to their deaths, singing these words of the Battle Hymn of the Republic, “As he died to make men holy, let us die to make men free, while God is marching on.” They would tear down the principles that propelled the abolition of slavery and ultimately around the world ending an evil institution that had plagued humanity for thousands and thousands of years. Our opponents would tear apart the very documents that Martin Luther King used to express his dream and the ideas that were the foundation of the righteous movement for Civil Rights. They would tear down the beliefs, culture and identity, that have made America the most vibrant and tolerant society in the history of the earth. My fellow Americans, it is time to speak up loudly and strongly and powerfully and defend the integrity of our country.

Read the whole thing.

There were some strong partisan jabs (e.g., the thing about the violence-stricken cities being run by “liberal Democrats” was true but inappropriate in a Fourth of July speech), but most of this speech was an entirely appropriate defense of the Founding and the Founders. If an American president — not just Trump, but any American president — cannot or will not give a speech like that on the occasion of Independence Day, this country is in deep trouble.

Well, you should read how the mainstream national media covered the speech. Here is a link to The New York Times‘s story. Excerpts:

The text of the report reads:

With the coronavirus pandemic raging and his campaign faltering in the polls, his appearance amounted to a fiery reboot of his re-election effort, using the holiday and an official presidential address to mount a full-on culture war against a straw-man version of the left that he portrayed as inciting mayhem and moving the country toward totalitarianism.

“Our nation is witnessing a merciless campaign to wipe out our history, defame our heroes, erase our values and indoctrinate our children,” Mr. Trump said, addressing a packed crowd of sign-waving supporters, few of whom wore masks. “Angry mobs are trying to tear down statues of our founders, deface our most sacred memorials and unleash a wave of violent crime in our cities.”

A “straw-man version of the left”?! There is no “straw-man” to it! Trump is 100 percent telling the truth there. The New York Times, as a matter of fact, is leading the charge to defame and destroy the American founding in the imagination of the nation. As you know, the Times said when it launched its 1619 Project that its aim is to “reframe history” to put slavery at foundation of America, as opposed to the Declaration of Independence from Britain. Thus would the entire American project be conceived in terrible sin. If you believe that America was founded intentionally as a slaveocracy, as the 1619 Project claims, then of course you despise all the Founders and their monuments. You must therefore despise America. This is not a “straw-man” version of the left. This is what many on the left actually claim — and the Times is their tribune.

More from the Times:

Mr. Trump barely mentioned the frightening resurgence of the pandemic, even as the country surpassed 53,000 new cases Friday and health officials across the nation urged Americans to scale back their Fourth of July plans.

So now they’re criticizing him in a news story for what he didn’t say?

Yes, Trump laced his speech with some partisan barbs, but if you depended on the Times to give you the substance of what the president said, you were misled.

What about the Washington Post? Here’s how it headlined its story:

From the text:

At the foot of Mount Rushmore’s granite monument to his presidential forebears, President Trump on Friday delivered a dark speech ahead of Independence Day in which he sought to exploit the nation’s racial and social divisions and rally supporters around a law-and-order message that has become a cornerstone of his reelection campaign.

“Sought to exploit”? Editorializing much? How about “acknowledged,” or some other neutral word?

More:

Trump focused most of his address before a crowd of several thousand in South Dakota on what he described as a grave threat to the nation from liberals and angry mobs — a “left-wing cultural revolution” that aims to rewrite U.S. history and erase its heritage amid the racial justice protests that have roiled cities for weeks.

Praising presidents George Washington, Thomas Jefferson, Abraham Lincoln and Theodore Roosevelt, the men carved into the cliffs behind him, Trump declared that their legacies are under assault from protesters who have defaced and torn down statues. As he has done with increasing fervor in recent weeks, the 45th president denounced not just rioters and vandals but also much of the social movement that propelled the mass demonstrations in response to the killings of black men at the hands of police.

“The radical ideology attacking our country advances under the banner of social justice. But in truth, it would demolish both justice and society,” Trump said. “It would transform justice into an instrument of division and vengeance and turn our free society into a place of repression, domination and exclusion. They want to silence us, but we will not be silenced.”

That story is no longer the main Post account of the Rushmore rally. The Post‘s top-billed story now wraps the Rushmore speech into a story under this headline:

The Post characterized the Rushmore speech as one more example of Trump’s “race-baiting” — as if criticizing Black Lives Matter and its affiliates is in itself a racist act. Look, Trump does not speak of race and ethnic issues with sensitivity, and I have at times cringed at some of the things he has said (e.g., his equivocation over Charlottesville). But it is not at all clear from the Post story where the Post’s reporters would draw the line between legitimate criticism of the racial justice movement and racist criticism of same.

One gets the strong feeling from our national media that there can be no legitimate criticism of the racial justice movement, that to object to anything they say or do is racist.

Trump was also right to point out that a “new far-left fascism” is rising. I document a lot of it in my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies. The mainstream media deny it — but too many people are seeing it happen right in front of them, with their own eyes, to be gaslit.

Again: most of what Trump said was true, and an important defense of America and its heritage by an American president, on the eve of the American national holiday. The problem is that even truths, when they come out of Trump’s mouth, sound hollow and discordant. Had, say, 90 percent of that speech been delivered by any previous American president, it would have been received and reported as a vigorous and uncompromising endorsement of American history and the American founding.

Anyway, look, if Trump leaves a bad taste in your mouth, or even if you cheer him without reservation, I have a recommendation for you. If you want to read a staggeringly powerful Fourth of July address by one of the greatest Americans who ever lived, a man who knew America’s greatness, but also called her with prophetic thunder and lightning to repent of the evil of slavery, read Frederick Douglass’s 1852 Independence Day address, which asks, “What is the Fourth of July to a slave?”

UPDATE: Wow, I just found this: Douglass’s descendants read that address!

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