Rod Dreher's Blog, page 132

America Surrenders To Covid-19

Well, this is inspiring:

After several months of mixed messages on the coronavirus pandemic, the White House is settling on a new one: Learn to live with it.

Administration officials are planning to intensify what they hope is a sharper, and less conflicting, message of the pandemic next week, according to senior administration officials, after struggling to offer clear directives amid a crippling surge in cases across the country. On Thursday, the United States reported more than 55,000 new cases of coronavirus and infection rates were hitting new records in multiple states.

At the crux of the message, officials said, is a recognition by the White House that the virus is not going away any time soon — and will be around through the November election.

I’ll give the White House grudging credit for leveling with the American people, but what a massive defeat this has been for our country. Thomas Chatterton Williams, who lives in France, writes about how shocking it is to watch his native country fail like this. Excerpts:

Glued as I am to the news from the U.S.—where I was born and grew up and travel frequently— I couldn’t shake the feeling that France was also opening up recklessly early. But I was wrong to worry. As Donald Trump’s America continues to shatter records for daily infections, France, like most other developed nations and even some undeveloped ones, seems to have beat back the virus.

The numbers are not ambiguous. From a peak of 7,581 new cases across the country on March 31, and with a death toll now just below 30,000—at one point the world’s fourth highest—there were just 526 new cases on June 13, the day we masked ourselves and took the train back to Paris. The caseload continues to be small and manageable.

America, however, is an utter disaster. Texas, Florida, and Arizona are the newest hubs of contagion, having apparently learned nothing from the other countries and states that previously experienced surges in cases. I stared at my phone in disbelief when the musician Rosanne Cash wrote on Twitter that her daughter had been called a “liberal pussy!” in Nashville for wearing a mask to buy groceries.

That insult succinctly conveys the crux of the problem. American leadership has politicized the pandemic instead of trying to fight it. I see no preparedness, no coordinated top-down leadership of the sort we’ve enjoyed in Europe. I see only empty posturing, the sad spectacle of the president refusing to wear a mask, just to own the libs. What an astonishing self-inflicted wound.

The view of the US from abroad is something rather less than MAGA, he says:

If the country sparked fear and intense resentment under George W. Bush and mild resentment mixed with vicarious pride under Barack Obama, what it provokes under Trump has been something entirely new: pity and indifference. We are the pariah state now, but do we even see it?

Trump has failed as president, but the failure on Covid is something shared by both liberals and conservatives. Trump’s pride, coupled with the ideological belief of many conservatives that the Covid danger was fiction, caused the failure from the Right. The self-righteous ardor that led progressives to take to the streets to protest George Floyd’s killing, and that led woke medical professionals to give it their blessing, because the mobs were being foolish for a good cause, caused the failure from the Left. And then there were the non-ideological failures who just didn’t want to let a deadly virus spoil their fun.

David Brooks has it right:

I’ll be delighted when Trump goes, but it’s worth pointing out that it wasn’t only because of Donald Trump that Americans never really locked down, and then started moving around again in late April.

It wasn’t Trump who went out to bars in Tempe, Austin and Los Angeles in June. It wasn’t Trump who put on hospital gowns and told the American people you could suspend the lockdown if your cause was just. Once you told people they could suspend the lockdown for one thing, they were going to suspend it for others.

Our fixation on the awfulness of Donald Trump has distracted us from the larger problems and rendered us strangely passive in the face of them. Sure, this was a Republican failure, but it was also a collective failure, and it follows a few decades of collective failures.

I just read a Twitter thread by a young LSU med student who has the virus. Here:

As the Fourth of July weekend commences, I urge everyone to take precautions to fight #COVIDー19. I’m going to share my battle as a 23 year old very active male with this VERY REAL and novel virus to shed light on some of the typical and atypical symptoms of the virus.

— Stewart Lockett (@stew_lock) July 3, 2020

Sorry for being so down about all this. It’s just so damned frustrating.

Inauguration Day: “This American carnage stops right here and stops right now. We are one nation – and their pain is our pain.”

122,000 Americans dead from Coronavirus and counting: “We need to live with it.” https://t.co/wKgw9BDmec

— Ari Schulman (@AriSchulman) July 4, 2020

I’m watching the beginning of the Trump pageant at Mount Rushmore. They’re playing 1980s oldies over the speakers there, preceding the president’s arrival. It’s so kitschy and cheap. Casino-owner rhinestone junk.

I’m old enough to remember the last time the country felt defeated like this: 1980, the final year of the Carter presidency. There is no Ronald Reagan galloping over the horizon, though.

UPDATE: So, I watched Trump’s speech at Mount Rushmore. Of course I agreed with all of it. It was a powerful speech, though he seemed weary delivering it. His lines about how we will never let the left tear down the monuments were great, but the delivery was entirely flat, as if he didn’t really believe it. I got more of a punch from the speech reading The New York Times‘s presentation of it on their front page:

Here’s how the Washington Post presented it:

They make me sick, our national media. They really do. If Obama had given a speech like this, they would have presented it as a standard patriotic address. It was not a “dark speech.” It was a speech that asserted things that were uncontroversial just a few years ago. Ninety percent of this could have been given by the kind of Democrats we have until four years ago. Not anymore. Trump sounded worn out and defeated tonight, but the text of the speech — it was superb. Still, Trump has lost it. We needed to hear what he said tonight, but it needed to be delivered by someone who could make good on those words. Instead? Well:

At base he’s a deeply unserious person, and in serious times that’s no longer amusing or reassuring. Some people want a revolutionary firebrand and some people want a adamantine protector, but no one wants a clownish irrelevancy. The world moved, and left him behind.

— The End Times (@TheAgeofShoddy) July 4, 2020

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Diversity Is Not Our Strength: An Example

A reader sends in this YouTube of a highly contentious Zoom meeting this week of the New York City Community Education Council for Manhattan District 2. It’s a public body, so it’s got to be visible to the public. What a spectacular sh*tshow of Social Justice Warrior insanity! They’re all lefties who seem to hate each other. I’ve cued it up to a couple of exquisite moments of knife-fighting. Look:

Here’s another. These are crazy people!

In this segment, a Latino board member lays into Broshi and Goldberg, two Jewish progressives on the board, accusing them of not caring about black and Latino kids, of being so caught up in “white fragility” thinking that they want to keep minority kids ignorant so they will — I’m not making this up — continue to take out loans that keep them in chains to finance the comfortable lifestyles of the Broshis and the Goldbergs. When her turn to respond comes, Broshi falls all over herself to apologize for exercising “white privilege” in a way that offended the Latino guy, and then admits that she has “forty-plus years of white supremacy” to unlearn.

I’m telling you, this is like watching a slow-motion pile-up. It’s hard to turn away.

Here, after one Asian board members says he’s not convinced that the behavior of a white male board member — who had been denounced as racist for putting the black child of a black friend on his lap during a board meeting — was actually racist, a female Asian board member says that she cannot work with any of the other board members if they don’t accept the maximalist claims of what racism is, and refuse to “do the work” of re-educating themselves in this ideology. Watch:

The Asian woman accuses the board president, a white woman, of racism. The white woman denies it. Another white woman, Robin Broshi, jumps in to accuse the board president of wrongdoing for defending herself against the accusation. Shortly thereafter, a white male board member agrees that he was accused of racism, but denies that the accusation was valid. Broshi says here that if the accuser is a person of color, then the accusation is true, even if the white person claims to be innocent.

Then comes Donalda Chumney, a deputy community superintendent from the Board of Education. She gives a long, jargon-filled assessment of the state of the district’s schools, then says here that the school system can’t progress until everybody is willing to talk about — you guessed it — race. They’ve just been at each other’s throats for over an hour because a white board member, in the previous Zoom meeting, had a black friend’s kid on his lap, and quipped that his living room was integrated!

Now, you may wonder: Why, Rod Dreher, are you talking about this? Aren’t you once again cherry-picking progressive craziness to make a cheap point? 

In fact, it’s important to see what happens when Social Justice Warriors take over a public body. The reader, a small-l liberal, who sent it to me said:

That is a long, tedious video. I can’t in good conscience recommend watching it. And yet! Is there any better illustration of what awaits us if the people who believe themselves to be anti-racist win and the small-l liberals lose?

He is absolutely correct. This video, which features people (council members) who are Jewish, white Gentile, Latino, East Asian, and South Asian, is an absolute disaster of racialism and ideological policing. If you want to know what post-liberalism looks like in a pluralistic society, there you have it. For all its problems, I can’t see any governing system available to us in our pluralistic, multiracial democracy than classical liberalism. Just drop in on any of the clips I’ve embedded or linked to above, and see what a freaking catastrophe the race-conscience, post-liberal progressives bring about. It is the perfect follow-up to the liberal writer George Packer’s much-discussed piece last fall about how race-conscious progressivism is destroying New York City public schools.

Diversity can only a strength when factions can be united under principles, not tribal loyalties and ideological commitments.

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Will Ghislaine Maxwell ‘Kill Herself’?

After watching the Netflix documentary series on Jeffrey Epstein, I wondered, why isn’t Ghislaine Maxwell in custody? Apparently she was on the lam. The FBI arrested her yesterday in her luxury New Hampshire hideout. She will have to be refused bail, because she is an extreme flight risk. But the government ought to put her in a glass cell in the middle of Times Square. Ghislaine Maxwell is likely to end up dead like Jeffrey Epstein, for whom she pimped.

Don’t tell me that you are one of those people who believes Epstein really killed himself. Back in January, Mickey Kaus pointed to this autopsy photo of the laceration around Epstein’s neck (it’s mildly gross, so beware) [UPDATE: Sorry, the previous link was to an Oren Cass book I recommended to a friend today; it’s fixed now), saying that it is impossible to look at that and believe that he was killed by hanging himself with a sheet. He’s right; that laceration was clearly made by a wire, possibly a garrotte. The sheets, by the way, had no blood on them, even though Epstein’s neck clearly bled.

Guardian columnist Marina Hyde roasts Ghislaine and Jeffrey’s close friend Prince Andrew, who claims to be “bewildered” by the turns the case is taking. Of Andrew, she remarks with lip-smacking Britishness: “Oh dear. One finds oneself karma’s bitch.” More:

This, alas, is why it’s so hard to believe all the frightful bollocks about “not knowing” being spouted by so many rich and powerful former friends of Epstein. One of the most telling admissions in Filthy Rich, the Epstein documentary currently showing on Netflix, comes from the former telephone engineer on Epstein’s private island. “You tell yourself that you didn’t know for sure and you never really saw anything, but that’s all just rationalisation. Jeffrey Epstein, he was a guy who concealed his deviance very well – but he didn’t conceal it that well.”

Well, quite. There are many cases of huge and systematic abuse where we still pander to the people who turned a blind eye to it, by saying that it was “a sophisticated operation”. Epstein’s operation was certainly expensive. But was it sophisticated? How sophisticated is it really when your private Caribbean property is known locally as “Paedophile Island”?

Hyde compares it to Michael Jackson, who was obviously a pedophile, though a lot of people preferred to avert their gaze. You can understand Jackson’s servants doing that, she says — after all, he was their source of income — but Epstein’s rich and powerful friends? Hyde:

But please don’t suggest Bill Clinton, an extremely clever man, was too stupid to make basic assumptions, or that even Prince Andrew couldn’t have glommed on once Epstein had been convicted of procuring an underage girl for prostitution. Those are just the presidents and the prince; there are countless others besides. Perhaps Ghislaine Maxwell will fill in some of the blanks behind their blankness.

For now, you might think the truly bewildering thing is that so many people didn’t say anything. You might think it’s absolutely bewildering that these intelligent, privileged, financially cosseted individuals never confronted Epstein about something even they must have felt iffy calling a “lifestyle”. And yet, it isn’t bewildering. There is, of course, a perfectly simple reason why they never did the right thing. They didn’t want to.

Read the whole thing. 

And if you haven’t watch the Netflix documentary, please do. I thought I knew everything there was to know about the Epstein case, but the ins and outs of how in 2007, the then-US Attorney Alex Acosta worked a sweetheart deal with Epstein’s lawyers, and cut local law enforcement and the victims out of the loop, was news to me. (Not that it hasn’t been reported — I think the Miami Herald had it when the story first broke — but I either hadn’t read those details, or had forgotten.)

US Attorney General Bill Barr has said that Epstein’s alleged suicide was because of “a perfect storm of screw-ups.” Well, maybe. I don’t believe it for a second, but maybe. But now, if Barr doesn’t have his own agents guarding Maxwell 24/7, and something happens to her, then it will be impossible to deny a conspiracy, and impossible to believe that he wasn’t part of it.

Ghislaine (pron. “gullayne”) Maxwell is many things, but stupid isn’t one of them. Were she and Epstein working for the Mossad, as a new book claims? Last year, Vicki Ward, one of the journalists who has bird-dogged the Epstein case most aggressively, wrote about her interview with “a former senior White House official”:

Epstein’s name, I was told, had been raised by the Trump transition team when Alexander Acosta, the former U.S. attorney in Miami who’d infamously cut Epstein a non-prosecution plea deal back in 2007, was being interviewed for the job of labor secretary. The plea deal put a hard stop to a separate federal investigation of alleged sex crimes with minors and trafficking.

“Is the Epstein case going to cause a problem [for confirmation hearings]?” Acosta had been asked. Acosta had explained, breezily, apparently, that back in the day he’d had just one meeting on the Epstein case. He’d cut the non-prosecution deal with one of Epstein’s attorneys because he had “been told” to back off, that Epstein was above his pay grade. “I was told Epstein ‘belonged to intelligence’ and to leave it alone,” he told his interviewers in the Trump transition, who evidently thought that was a sufficient answer and went ahead and hired Acosta. (The Labor Department had no comment when asked about this.)

Members of Congress should start making noise about protecting Maxwell, to send the strongest possible signal that what happened to Epstein in custody will not be allowed to happen to her.

For the uninitiated, here’s a good ten-minute backgrounder on Maxwell from Netflix:

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NFL Divides America For ‘Diversity’

The Yugoslavification of America by its elites proceeds apace. The Woke NFL really outdoes itself with this one:

“Lift Ev’ry Voice And Sing,” traditionally known as the Black national anthem, is expected to be performed live or played before every Week 1 NFL game, and the league is considering a variety of other measures during the upcoming season to recognize victims of police brutality, a source familiar with the league’s discussions told The Undefeated on Thursday.

The song would be performed before “The Star-Spangled Banner,” the source said. The NFL’s season opener is scheduled for Sept. 10, with the Kansas City Chiefs hosting the Houston Texans.

Having recently displayed increased awareness about the problems of systemic racism, the NFL, in collaboration with the NFL Players Association, is also considering listing the names of victims on uniforms through decals on helmets or patches on jerseys. The NFL also may produce educational programs about victims, among other plans.

Unbelievable. Nothing against the Black National Anthem, but it is a powerfully symbolic gesture, and not in a good way, to give it equal footing with the National Anthem. Is “The Star-Spangled Banner” not the national anthem for black Americans too? Because that’s what this move is saying. It’s just head-shaking to have spent the last 50 years working to make the promises of America fulfilled for black Americans, who are every bit as American as anybody else, and now wake up to be told that actually, at the closest thing we have to a collective ritual — professional sports events — we are going to hear two national anthems on football’s opening day.

What’s next on the woke agenda? Starting an NFL Negro League? That’s where the logic of this is going.

Do you know how expensive it is to go to a professional football game? Look. Will the NFL really prosper by turning football into racially-charged anti-police pageants? Maybe so. I supported the right of NFL players to kneel at the National Anthem as a form of protest — but not Drew Brees being shamed into violating his conscience and kneeling, and certainly not this. You watch: they’ll start rolling Colin Kaepernick around the fields before games in a Popemobile to bless the crowd.

That said, conservatives who lament the politicization of professional sports behind racial causes need to step back and consider how the US military politicized professional sports to galvanize people behind its own valorization. Back in 2011, Andrew Bacevich, the historian and retired Army colonel, wrote a powerful piece about this phenomenon.  Excerpt:

In recent decades, an injunction to “support the troops” has emerged as a central tenet of that religion. Since 9/11 this imperative has become, if anything, even more binding. Indeed, as citizens, Americans today acknowledge no higher obligation.

Fulfilling that obligation has posed a challenge, however. Rather than doing so concretely, Americans—with a few honorable exceptions—have settled for symbolism. With their pronounced aversion to collective service and sacrifice (an inclination indulged by leaders of both political parties), Americans resist any definition of civic duty that threatens to crimp lifestyles.

To stand in solidarity with those on whom the burden of service and sacrifice falls is about as far as they will go. Expressions of solidarity affirm that the existing relationship between soldiers and society is consistent with democratic practice. By extension, so, too, is the distribution of prerogatives and responsibilities entailed by that relationship: a few fight, the rest applaud. Put simply, the message that citizens wish to convey to their soldiers is this: although choosing not to be with you, we are still for you (so long as being for you entails nothing on our part). Cheering for the troops, in effect, provides a convenient mechanism for voiding obligation and easing guilty consciences.

“Black Lives Matter” is going to be the “support the troops” of this decade.

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Stabbie Girl Gets Cancelled

Remember Claira Janover, the recent Harvard grad who made a viral TikTok saying that if someone has the “Caucasity” to say “all lives matter” to her, she’s going to stab them and watch them bleed out? She was fired by Deloitte, her new

employer, over it. Here’s a short YouTube that features her first TikTok, and now her sobbing over how “Trump supporters” have ruined her life:

Mostly, I don’t care. She is a typical bully: she can dish it out, and didn’t care if the lives of others — Wrongthinkers — were ruined, but when her methods are turned on her, she sobs her eyes out. She says that she feels sorry that Deloitte could not tolerate some like her, who “is going to make an indelible change in the world, who is going to have an impact.” What self-righteous hooey. You might be able to get away with that rot on Harvard Yard, but the real world is not college, for once.

I must say, though, how much I hate cancel culture. This horrible brat did not deserve the foul language and threats of violence she received. Nor did she deserve to lose her job over her idiotic, racist TikTok. I don’t believe that most other people on the other side do either, though. I think we’re better off learning to tolerate as much garbage social media as we can, because there will be no end to the trench warfare if we don’t. But as long as these Social Justice Warrior monsters use their power to ruin the lives of others, I support pressure to hold them to the same standards that they inflict on others. You can tell that it never, ever occurred to this privileged Ivy League snowflake that she might face accountability for her vicious, violent, racist rhetoric.

If you don’t want to watch the video, here’s a brief Twitter clip:

COMPARE AND CONTRAST: Harvard grad Claira Janover says she’s lost Deloitte job over TikTok stab threat.

She’d want the same for anything you said online that she didn’t agree with.

No sympathy petal. pic.twitter.com/Js09sbMpR7

— Ministry of Truth (@BanTheBBC) July 2, 2020

I think this was a Learning Moment for Miss Janover. Sadly, I think she will have several more of those in her life. What’s interesting is that her emotive performance probably would have gotten her all kinds of kudos at Harvard. She must have thought that that would continue. It never seems to have occurred to her that a corporation might not want such an unstable person working for them. Can you imagine what the office would have been like with this toxic person in it?

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View From Your Table

My daughter Nora loves the thin-fried catfish at Middendorf’s, on Bayou Manchac. We haven’t been in a year or so. Today, we took a field trip there. It took a while to get in — it’s a big place, but they’re social-distancing, so there’s a wait — but Lord have mercy, was it ever worth it!

Take a look at this:

UPDATE: Presenting Mark B.’s Netherlandic clafoutis, which I promised to post ages ago, but it kept slipping my mind!

 

Here is the recipe from Mark, who lives in Holland:

CLAFOUTIS

Ingredients

3 medium sized eggs
100 gram white or powdered sugar
8 gram vanilla-sugar (one little package usually)
200 gram whole milk
200 gram whipped cream (I said double cream before but I am not sure what that is now. In Dutch it is called ‘slagroom’ which translates in English as whipped cream. It has a fat percentage of 35%. One does not whip the cream here of course).
one vanilla stick (if that is not possible, 2 tablespoons of vanilla-extract will do as well.
50 grams of basic white wheat flower
180 grams  of prunes in glass (drained weight)
280 grams of of cherries in glass (drained weight)
about 50 grams of almond flakes
1/4 teaspoon of salt

Take a glass cake pan (glass works better than metal here in my experience) with diameter about 24 cm/9,44 inch and rub the inside with butter (unsalted!). Then drain the prunes and cherries and dip them dry with kitchen paper gently. Distribute them evenly over the bottom of the cake pan.

Put in a bowl the eggs, sugar, vanilla sugar, flower, milk, whipped cream, vanilla essence from the vanilla stick or extract, salt and mix it to a smooth batter/baking mix.

Pour the batter gently over the prunes and cherries, filling the cake pan. Then sprinkle the almond flakes over the surface till it is completely covered with flakes. Put it in a pre-heated oven that is 180 degrees Celsius / 356 Fahrenheit and bake it between 30-40 minutes. The clafoutis is ready when the edge has risen up and has browned and the middle is not liquid anymore on the surface.

Enjoy!

BTW: If one wants a less creamy and soft inside and prefers a more dense inside with a bit of a bite, just increase the amount of flower. Some people do 100 grams but I don’t like that, you basically get a kind of sweet very thick (tortilla like) fruity pancake in that way. It’s all a matter of preferences and taste of course.

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America’s Dostoevskian Moment

Here’s a powerful piece by Daniel Mahoney, perhaps the nation’s pre-eminent Solzhenitsyn scholar, about what’s at stake for the United States this Independence Day 2020. Excerpts:

As we approach this Fourth of July, the United States is consumed by reckless violence, nihilistic silencing, and a systematic assault on the nation’s cultural and political patrimony. The voices of sanity are few, and civic courage is in short supply. The exemplars of such courage in the Anglo-American tradition — Washington, Lincoln, U.S. Grant, Teddy Roosevelt, and Winston Churchill — are under assault from angry extremists who topple statues with impunity and demand absolute conformity. Government at every level appears impotent as indignant fanatics rule the streets. We have arrived at the unthinkable: “America’s Jacobin moment,” as an editorial in the Wall Street Journal aptly put it. What has happened to our republic?

Our talking heads, the so-called “chattering classes,” pretend that this eruption of insanity has something to do with the quest for racial justice. That could not be further from the truth. Black Lives Matter — the movement, not the slogan — is in fact a racialist and ideological organization that denies common humanity and a morality applicable to all human beings. Professed enemies of decency and restraint, these Maoists and para-Marxists demonize all white people and anyone of any race or religion who challenges their bizarre and fanatical worldview, as well as the police (whose immediate abolition they demand). Of course, they do not believe that all black lives matter: Those black people, including children, cut down by urban violence in Chicago or Baltimore every weekend, or aborted at higher numbers than they are born in New York City, don’t pass ideological muster. Black lives matter, of course, because all lives matter, but that elementary truth is now verboten.  All races are equal, but in BLM’s universe, some are more equal than others. This is a recipe for hatred and perpetual social conflict.

About the mob:

 They are defined by ignorance, ingratitude, and envy. Their ignoble “passion for equality,” as Tocqueville called it, is a grotesque perversion of the noble moral and civic equality that underlies the American proposition. This desire to tear down, to destroy and repudiate the patrimony of our fathers, is incompatible with civilized existence.

It is time to reopen Dostoevsky’s “Demons,” the most penetrating exposé of modern nihilism ever written. Even in the early 1870s, Dostoevsky exposed the spirit of pure destruction that could only pull down and never build anything worthy of human beings. The revolutionaries portrayed in his pages promise to cut off Cicero’s tongue and poke out Shakespeare’s eyes, to the applause of an educated society that fawned before fashionable barbarism. Dostoevsky, in his most prescient and prophetic mode, predicted that 100 million people would perish if such nihilists and fanatics ever came to power. It was given to that great soul to see many things, as another great Russian writer once observed.

Read it all. 

I am thinking about something a Dutch historian once told me about the cultural revolution that swept over the Netherlands in the 1960s. It had been such a settled, orderly, bourgeois nation. The Second World War and the Nazi occupation shattered something deep in the Dutch. After the war, they tried to rebuild what they had, but it was a feeble replica. When the winds of the counterculture began to blow, the establishment institutions collapsed, as if the revolution were inevitable.

I fear that we are seeing the same thing here, in part because there is no pushback against the mob and its demands.

By the way, I strongly recommend The Idol of the Age, Prof. Mahoney’s most recent book of cultural criticism and religious analysis.

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What Can The Church Say Today?

A white Evangelical reader writes:

It was a combination of things that culminated with reading your “Republicans Who Deserve to Lose” that brought me some clarity to my growing despair at the utter implosion of Christian leadership and laity with regard to the BLM indoctrination sweeping the nation and beyond. I need to vent but not sure I have many people with ears to hear so sending to you. Even if you don’t read it, I’ve gotten it off my chest.

I’ve been watching how the Christian community is responding to All Things Racist. The first thing was understandable and ignorable: black boxes on my Instagram feed from my church-going friends, a smaller number posting pics of protests they attended (including a prayerful protest my family joined), and more posting their commitment to “listening and learning.” After that came the awkward sermons of acknowledgment and sadness, trying to appease the angriest parishioner without ignoring the gospel. While I waited for some sharp gospel-filled article or a voice of authority on the subject in toto, I was momentarily encouraged when a friend who had been part of a large meeting of mostly black ministers and execs of mercy ministries relayed their hopefulness that “this time is different” re the white churches’ positive response.

But then the arguing started: Christians espousing what amounts to either a “there’s no racism in America anymore” disclaimer or “how dare you question Robin DiAngelo” retort. I kept thinking this was just the emotion of the hour and when reason prevailed, we could have a more nuanced, productive conversation. Then last night I read a missive written by Dr. Tim Keller regarding “The Sin of Racism.” This article was essentially an Intro to Christianity book report on what the bible says about racism (yes, racism exists; yes, it’s a sin; no, it didn’t start in 1619; yes, you should repent and do something about it). I sat there, read it through, read it again, and began to despair. This is the highly regarded, retired pastor of a leading Evangelical church of very smart movers and shakers,  Important People doing Important Things, and this is what that community needs to hear? This is all Christian leaders are capable of? At first I thought it was ghost written, just to get something official from him out there. But the more I’ve thought about it, as I consider the initial responses and subsequent discourse in other Christian circles, I’m beginning to think that this is actually all the general Christian community can handle. We are so badly catechized that we can barely muster basic Christian facts. Another representative sermon this week was encouraging us to look within ourselves for our racism and to consider where we’ve been blind. All very well and good for junior high youth group, I suppose, but, Oh My God, while we’re all on our personal listening tours, Satan has taken the ball, changed the rules, and is heading home with the trophy.

There is no way on earth the church at-large is prepared to respond to the evil cancel-culture religion sweeping the country, which will only exacerbate the race problem that the muddled Christian mind is just now discovering. Right after I read the Keller piece, I read John McWhorter’s latest article, “Kneeling in the Church of Social Justice,” on what he calls the religion of third-wave antiracism. I guess I shouldn’t be surprised that an atheist can recognize a new religion better than the average church-goer, when that church-goer barely registers that they’re in a religion themselves. There should be Christians responding to the DiAngelos from a Christian perspective, they should be talking to politicians with a gospel-centered response to the evil of racism. There should be tangible steps articulated by Christian leaders to help heal our nation. Without the basic tenets of Christianity included in the process going forward, it will not succeed. Instead we get Church 101, and frankly, it’s not encouraging. Those black Christian leaders may need to reassess their hopefulness. I think they’ll have to go it alone and hope it’s not too late by the time the rest of the church catches up.

This inspired me to set down some thoughts of my own about what the church has to offer to guide our thinking about what’s happening now. It’s how I’m using my own faith, and personal experiences, to think through this moment.

Most of you readers know that I was born in the late 1960s, in a small town in the Deep South. I was in the first generation of kids to go through fully integrated public schools. Though we were no longer formally segregated, blacks and whites were de facto segregated, socially, for many years. When I graduated high school in the mid-1980s, the town still had separate proms.

There is no way that any reflective white person who grew up in the South, and who knows anything about its history, can deny the fact of racism — and not only the fact of it, but the fact that its shadow is very long. As I grew older, and learned more of this history, I grew in awe of the spiritual power of the Civil Rights Movement, and of the black pastors who led it. Even before I became a serious Christian myself as an adult, I saw in the writing of Martin Luther King, Jr., and the willingness of the Civil Rights activists to bear suffering without seeking vengeance, something life-changing and holy.

Here is a link to a 1957 sermon by MLK. The whole thing is breathtaking, and piercingly relevant to our crisis. Look at this part:

A second thing that an individual must do in seeking to love his enemy is to discover the element of good in his enemy, and every time you begin to hate that person and think of hating that person, realize that there is some good there and look at those good points which will over-balance the bad points. I’ve said to you on many occasions that each of us is something of a schizophrenic personality. We’re split up and divided against ourselves. And there is something of a civil war going on within all of our lives. There is a recalcitrant South of our soul revolting against the North of our soul. And there is this continual struggle within the very structure of every individual life. There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with Ovid, the Latin poet, “I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do.” There is something within all of us that causes us to cry out with Plato that the human personality is like a charioteer with two headstrong horses, each wanting to go in different directions. There is something within each of us that causes us to cry out with Goethe, “There is enough stuff in me to make both a gentleman and a rogue.” There is something within each of us that causes us to cry out with Apostle Paul: “I see and approve the better things of life, but the evil things I do.”

So somehow the “isness” of our present nature is out of harmony with the eternal “oughtness” that forever confronts us. And this simply means this: That within the best of us, there is some evil, and within the worst of us, there is some good. When we come to see this, we take a different attitude toward individuals. The person who hates you most has some good in him; even the nation that hates you most has some good in it; even the race that hates you most has some good in it. And when you come to the point that you look in the face of every man and see deep down within him what religion calls “the image of God,” you begin to love him in spite of. No matter what he does, you see God’s image there. There is an element of goodness that he can never slough off. Discover the element of good in your enemy. And as you seek to hate him, find the center of goodness and place your attention there and you will take a new attitude.

I could not in a thousand years have articulated it like that, but this is what I believe, and what I try to live up to, though I often fail. What other choice do we have?

I came to this through my reading of Scripture, through contemplation, and the practice of the Christian faith. You don’t need me to tell you what the Bible has to say about racial hatred. That is — or should be — Christianity 101, as the letter-writer said. The Bible is not going to give us a 50-point plan for Ending Racism In America. For as long as there are human beings, there will be prejudice. We are wired that way. It is impossible for most Americans to detect any difference at all between Serbs and Croats, but these ancient rivals very much see the difference between themselves. I could not detect the difference between an Ulster Protestant and an Ulster Catholic, but men have killed each other over that difference, until fairly recently, and, God forbid, may do again. The black writer Thomas Chatterton Williams today, in a thread about why it makes no sense to capitalize the B in “black” but not the W in “white,” said:

There are 371 tribes in Nigeria alone. How can even all the various immigrants from Nigeria, from Igbo to Yoruba, be said to constitute a single ethnicity? Let alone belong to the same ethnicity as tenth-generation descendants of Mississippi sharecroppers.

— Thomas Chatterton Williams

Tucker Carlson: Leader Of The Opposition

Tucker Carlson Tonight becomes highest rated cable news program in historyhttps://t.co/vxns1dyQtD

— Disrn (@DisrnNews) July 1, 2020

And he did it even when all the Woke Capitalist advertisers abandoned him!

I was never a fan of Trump rallies, but watching Tucker Carlson’s nightly monologue (when it goes online; I don’t have cable) has become must-see TV. There’s a reason this guy has the No. 1 cable news show in America. If you’re a conservative, especially if you’re a conservative demoralized by and disgusted with the Republican Party these days, Tucker is the place to go to keep your spirits high.

Here’s a link to last night’s monologue. Below, I’ve embedded an especially relevant excerpt:

The future of the Republican Party is being worked out every night in the first segment of Tucker Carlson Tonight. In 1993, James Bowman wrote a cover story for National Review about this hot talk radio host, Rush Limbaugh, crowned by the National Review cover as “the leader of the opposition.” Today, in 2020, Tucker Carlson has made himself that. As Trump fades, Tucker Carlson is taking what was good and true in Trump’s critique, and carrying the flag into battle. He’s going to be a kingmaker in Republican politics. Who knows? He might even one day be the king.

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‘Spoiled Children Of Human History’

Watch this clip from New York City. Beware if you’re watching it at work — a few F-bombs dropped:

‘Half of you don’t even have a college education’ https://t.co/gwZN3TLhQJ

— Ed West (@edwest) July 1, 2020

I’m not saying that there should be violence. In fact, I’m saying there should not be. But if anybody needs his face slapped, it’s that fatmouthing punk.

Such a powerful symbolic moment is caught in that short clip. It clarifies. This leftist loony shrieking curses at the police, telling a black cop that he’s a “traitor” to his race. Mocking the police for not being educated. Boy oh boy, the mask falls, doesn’t it?

Here’s a conversation I liked:

This revulsion is more powerful than anything else which is why it breaks down into screaming fits of aristocratic hysteria, literally waving the card of a privileged education in the face of an “unprivileged” person while insulting them for their lack of privilege.

— Tara Ann Thieke (@TaraAnnThieke) July 1, 2020

“Screaming fits of aristocratic hysteria.” Great phrase. Came to mind when I saw this TikTok of a Harvard graduate who says she will stab anyone who says “All Lives Matter” and watch them “bleed out.”

Rob G., a reader of this blog and frequent commenter, often recommends Christopher Lasch’s posthumously published 1995 book The Revolt of the Elites and the Betrayal of Democracy. Lasch wrote as a man of the Left, but like Wendell Berry and Philip Rieff, his insights have been absorbed and championed by the Front Porch Republic tribe on the Right. I’ve been thumbing through my old copy of Lasch this morning (it’s interesting to see what I underlined when I first read the book in the 1990s). That book is even more relevant today than it was when it first came out twenty-five years ago. Here’s the opening chapter:

Lasch goes on to say that “upper-middle-class liberals” despise the lowers, and “find it impossible to conceal their contempt for those who stubbornly refuse to see the light — those who ‘just don’t get it,’ in the self-satisfied jargon of political rectitude.”

Lasch quotes Ortega’s indictment of mass man as guilty of “radical ingratitude” — which, for Lasch, describes the new American elite. It’s amazing to read this book, which was written at the beginning of the process of true globalization, and to encounter how much Lasch understood about what globalization was, and the way it would affect not only economic class, but cultural values. The final words of Lasch’s first chapter really do bring the dread when read from anno Domini 2020. He’s talking about “middle-class nationalism” of the kind looked down on by elites:

You will surely want to read the whole thing. Again, the historian Lasch writes from the old-fashioned patriotic American left. This book is a curious thing: something that sounds like a volume from a lost world (which it is), and simultaneously a book that could have been written about events of the past few months.

If a choice has to be made — and the radicals are forcing us all to do so — then count me on the side of the cops instead of these privileged nitwits. The NYC police are now going to take a $1 billion cut to their budget. I hope the New York politicians who have forced this moment like what they’re going to get. Talk about radical ingratitude: wait till they all discover what the police are for.

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