Rod Dreher's Blog, page 134

Man Defeats Self In Racism Struggle Session

Here’s a very fine woke meltdown from Rob McCann, the CEO of Catholic Charities of Eastern Washington. In it, he condemns himself as racist, all white people as racist, and the Catholic Church as racist. He also says his organization doesn’t have enough people of color on the board. Funnily enough, he doesn’t offer to resign to make room for a BIPOC:

When the Spokane newspaper wrote about the self-hating McCann’s confession, this was the response from a local NAACP leader:

Kurtis Robinson, president of Spokane’s chapter of the NAACP, expressed mixed feelings about the video.

“I look at it at its surface and say, ‘Good, it’s about time.’ And at the same time I hear myself say, ‘It’s about time,’ meaning it hasn’t been said until now,” Robinson said.

It’s great that he speaks about systemic racism and the systemic privilege that has perpetuated the problem, said Robinson, who is Black.

“I was challenged to not look at it through a hyper-critical lens because people of color have been promised this countless times – and we’re still here,” Robinson said.

McCann abased himself, denouncing himself, his church, and his entire race — but it wasn’t enough. Nothing ever will be.

This country is losing its mind. But you knew that.

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America’s Valve-Slamming Nervous Breakdown

Meet Clair Hall, formally known as Bill Hall. This is the commissioner in Lincoln county, Oregon who mandated that face masks are required, but only if you’re white. pic.twitter.com/75pONfp50Z

— John 8:32

Radical Chic At The Beach House

This e-mail went out to all students at Yale Law school today:

Black, Indigenous and organizers of color are fighting for the right to live with dignity and safety in America. This is emotionally and physically exhausting work. Due to systemic racism and racial capitalism, it is much less likely that organizers of color will have access to disposable income or vacation properties to take much needed breaks this summer. A critical way we can support the fight for justice in this country is through donating space and resources so that Black leaders and leaders of color can rest and rejuvenate.

Here is a form you or your parents/relatives/friends can fill out if you have resources to offer, to help BIPOC organizers in the Northeast take much-needed vacations.

The things that are most needed are: empty places to stay/vacation homes, and money to rent a car or AirBnB. Also needed: camping gear and cars to borrow.

The deadline is next week (the end of June), so that the people organizing this can start matching everyone up.

If you don’t have access to these resources yourself but know people at this school or beyond who do, please share the link with them too and ask them to sign up: bit.ly/vacation-offering

Thanks,

Sarah

—

Sarah Eppler-Epstein

they/them

Yale Law School 2021

To be clear, Mx. Eppler-Epstein does not seem to be the organizer of this charitable venture, only the conduit of information to Yale Law students. You should read the form. It includes this priceless piece of privileged snottery:

Verily, the snaggletoothed rustic doctors and bloodsucking devil nurses are just lying in wait there at Cape Kluckerville General, ready to pounce on the young BIPOC idealists!

I am sure that saintly Tom Wolfe is looking down from heaven with a sh*t-eating grin on his face.

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Melanie Diodati Speaks Truth To Power

Recently Melanie Diodati, a Catholic theology grad student at Villanova University, tweeted out her disgust with the Catholic university’s public stance contrary to the Church’s teaching:

Villanova is proud to be an ally of the LGBTQ community and ashamed to be Catholic so I’m ashamed to attend here and that’s that pic.twitter.com/KkQcC6e4PW

— Melanie (@MelanieDio) June 22, 2020

You may recall my blogging in years past about ultrawoke Villanova theologian Katie Grimes, America’s Theological Sweetheart. For example, though she’s white, and a Catholic theologian teaching at a Catholic university, she has written that the Catholic Church is suffused with “white supremacy,” and that the Eucharist and baptism are sacraments compromised by race hatred. She was ahead of her time! Also, she queers Thomas Aquinas. So that’s the environment that Melanie Diodati studies in.

You can imagine how well her tweet went over in her department. Now she has tweeted out some updates:

Hi everyone. I have news to share with regard to this entire situation.

A few days ago I tweeted a picture of Villanova social media actively aligning itself with the gay pride flag, and the LGBTQ community as a whole. Although as Catholics, we ought to love and respect all https://t.co/8NdCqkV9Mu

— Melanie (@MelanieDio) June 26, 2020

That woman has guts — and, unlike the department she’s leaving, the Catholic faith. A Catholic university theology department that makes room for Katie Grimes, but not Melanie Diodati, has shown its soul, or lack thereof. Diodati will shake the dust off of her feet, and thrive in her next school. What an inspiration she is! If you were put to the test like Melanie Diodati was, would you pass?

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Benedict Option: The Only Option

Reader Bill Tighe e-mails this piece from the Catholic trad site One Peter Five. The author is Brendan Buckley, a Naval officer. He writes:

Since its publication in 2017, many of my Catholic friends have criticized Rod Dreher’s Benedict Option: “It’s too pessimistic. Christians shouldn’t run for the hills. Besides, the culture isn’t in decline. We just elected a pro-life president.” These were some of the common responses I would get after sharing my enthusiastic thoughts on the bestseller. However, just three years later in 2020, it seems that the Benedict Option has become the only option for the survival of our faith in the 21st century. The faithful have not found staunch leadership at the highest levels of the Church hierarchy willing to brace the Church’s gates against the battering ram of our rotten culture. With the help of holy priests willing to teach in an orthodox manner, lay Catholics must take up a large part of passing on the Faith to future generations themselves.

Buckley talks about the unwillingness of many priests and bishops to take a stand for unpopular truths, and about how cancel culture has been coming for faithful Catholics. More:

Additionally, in some Catholic parishes and dioceses, laity now hear sermons and messages that sound more like “woke” social justice “morality” than the teachings of the Holy Catholic Church and Our Lord. This is even happening at the highest levels of the Church. Consider that the Vatican itself praised Black Lives Matter as a nonviolent organization while criticizing priests who resisted closing their church doors for COVID-19 as “adolescents”. None of this can be reconciled with the Catholic faith. A brief glimpse at the “What We Believe” section of the Black Lives Matter website proves instantly that it does not align with Catholicism in any way. It is in fact explicitly Marxist, a fact the group’s founder recently and proudly admitted in a live interview. And perhaps the “adolescent” priests who criticized church closures really believe what they preach: that the sacraments are essential to our eternal salvation and are more “essential” than any business.

Buckley, a Latin mass Catholic, goes on:

For Catholics who haven’t already, it is time to implement the Benedict Option. When barbarians sacked Rome, Saint Benedict kept the flame of orthodox Christian discipline alive in the hills of Italy. In cities and towns in which they are available, Latin Mass parishes offer Catholics many ways carry this flame. If the United States and Western Europe fall to the “woke” barbarians of 2020 and beyond, we need to prepare our families and ourselves for what is to come.

Amen, brother. Read it all.

I cannot emphasize Buckley’s message too strongly. In the Ben Op follow-up, Live Not By Lies (to be published on 9/29), I tell the story of Father Tomislav Kolakovic, a visionary priest who, in 1943, saw totalitarianism coming to Czechoslovakia, where he served, and organized underground networks of faithful Catholics. Five years later, when the communist seized dictatorial powers, Father Kolakovic’s network became the backbone of the underground church in the Slovak region. Regular readers have seen me mention his name a lot here, but I bring it up again in this context because this blog tends to get readers whose first introduction to it is particular posts.

Father Kolakovic’s example is important in context of Buckley’s comments in part because when he first started sounding the alarm about the coming totalitarianism, and organizing the laity, some in the Slovak church establishment looked at him askance. They thought that it was dangerous for Father Kolakovic to be trusting so much in the laity. Father Kolakovic, though, knew that when the communists took over, they were going to try to crush Christianity by subduing the clergy. That is exactly what happened. A well-formed, spiritually disciplined laity, accompanied by clergy who had not been compromised, and who were willing to suffer, kept the faith alive under persecution.

Slovak historian Blanka Kudlacova has recently written an academic paper about the role of the Catholic Church in Communist Czechoslovakia. She writes:

According to Jakubčin, “The Church was the only legally operated institution in Communist Czechoslovakia, the worldview of which was not identical with the official state ideology of Marxism-Leninism, moreover, it defied it.” That was the reason why representatives of the state power devoted great attention to the Church and its activities and wanted to break the impact of the Church on society.

Kudlacova, who teaches in the department of education at Trnava University, writes that the Marxist government flooded the zone with communist propaganda aimed at the country’s youth.

One of the religious groups that went ‘underground’ after 1948 was the community Family [orig. Rodina]. The community was formed in Bratislava in 1943 and its founder was the Croatian Jesuit Tomislav Kolakovič (1906- 1999), who came to Slovakia in this particular year33. Kolakovič, having good knowledge of Soviet politics, presupposed establishment of a Communist regime in Slovakia and, therefore, tried to prepare the members of Family for existence in the tough times of Socialism . Family consisted mainly of university students who used to meet in small communities, so-called circles [orig. krúžky or stretká] that had an educational-formative nature both in a religious and personal sense.

Back then, Bratislava was the only university town in Slovakia and, thus, the members of Family came from all parts of Slovakia. Kolakovič travelled with them to their homes and thus established contacts with priests and laymen across Slovakia. The aim was to educate mature Christian personalities. The communities of the Family used to meet every Sunday morning. The meeting would start with a Mass, followed by breakfast and exchange of information on the political situation and news from the life of the Church, a so-called “briefing.” The activities of the Family gradually spread from Bratislava to the

whole of Slovakia.

After the Communists took power in 1948, members of the Family began to meet secretly and had to carry out their activities very carefully. After their discovery by the Communists in 1951, hard sentences and imprisonment for many of its members followed.

When they emerged from prison, these Family members got to work implementing the teachings of the Catholic Church using the methods taught to them by Father Kolakovic, who had been expelled by the government in 1946. The first secret meeting they organized with university students was in 1966. Writes Kudlacova: “The secret activity was performed mainly by active laymen, secretly ordained priests and votaries, but also official priests who also had to carry out the unauthorised activities secretly.”

The official Catholic hierarchy was so strongly oppressed by the State that it could do little. The underground bishop Jan Chryzoztom Korec, serving as an ordinary street cleaner and mechanic, was the secret church’s spiritual father (after the end of communism, Pope John Paul II made him a cardinal). The Family was a form of the Benedict Option: of Christians coming together to pray, study, and build thick communities that could help them withstand both persecution and the insanity of a completely ideologized environment.

That last part is something many of us Americans fail to appreciate. If you’ve paid any attention to the sociology of religion, you know that the younger generations are falling away from Christianity, especially historically orthodox Christianity, in dramatic numbers. Whatever the institutional leaders of our churches are doing, it’s not working. Brendan Buckley is right: the laity have to take things into their own hands instead of sitting back waiting for the clergy to get its act together.

As I have written here many times before, an orthodox Catholic priest told me the same thing back in 2001, when I was a Catholic, but I didn’t take it seriously. He told me and some other conservative Catholics that everything we said about how messed up the Church was was true, and that it was also true that no bishops were coming to save us. You all have so many resources available to you these days, he said, enabling you to educate yourselves and your children in the faith. Don’t be complacent!

Alas for us laymen and laywomen listening, complaining about the failures of the institutional church was much easier and more pleasurable than doing the hard work of building the structures of faithful community. That failure was not on the institutional church: it was on us. It still is. If the young Catholic students of 1940s Czechoslovakia had not listened to Father Kolakovic, and instead simply sat around waiting for the bishops and priests to tell them what to do, they would have been flattened by the communists after the 1948 putsch.

In my own communion now, the Orthodox Church, a senior bishop — the newly appointed Greek Orthodox Archbishop, who is the head of the Greek church in America — said recently that he was no fan of the Benedict Option:

I am not for the so-called “Benedict Option,” a retreat from the world to some form of Christian “Hasidism” that seeks separation based on external forms. We may not be of this world, but we have surely been placed in this world to be agents of change, and indeed transfiguration.

Based on this familiar mischaracterization of my work, I would bet my 2021 tithe that the good archbishop has not read The Benedict Option, and is just going on what the liberal Greek Orthodox guys at Fordham told him about it after he arrived in the US in 2019. I would suggest that he read the book for himself. The situation in the Greek Orthodox Church in America is calamitous. Back in 2012, according to the GOA’s own research, 90 percent of Americans with Greek roots are no longer in communion with the Orthodox Church.

And how orthodox are the Orthodox? Back in 2011, when I was living in Philadelphia, I had lunch one Friday with a friend who had been raised Greek Orthodox, but who had been an Evangelical for most of his adult life. He was curious as to why I wasn’t eating meat. “You know, Orthodox abstain from meat on Fridays,” I said. He told me that he had been raised in the Greek church, and had done all his elementary and secondary schooling in the Greek Archdiocesan cathedral school (through eighth grade), and had never been told that Orthodox Christians are expected to fast from meat during the week.

Three years ago, the Pew Research Center included Orthodox Christians in its study of American Christianity. It did not separate out Greeks from other jurisdictions, though overall, Greeks alone make up about 60 percent of American Orthodoxy. The Pew data on Orthodoxy (see here) don’t go into much detail on theological issues, but it appears that US Orthodox Christians dissent from Church teaching in some significant ways. Majorities favor abortion and homosexuality, and 27 percent say that the Bible is not the Word of God.

I’m not picking on the Greeks. All of us Orthodox Christians have a lot of work to do to build up our orthodoxy, orthopraxy, and evangelism. I am only saying that the Benedict Option is something we Orthodox need as much as the Catholics do — and that we should not realistically expect the hierarchy to take a leading role here. The new Greek archbishop went to a Black Lives Matter march in Brooklyn recently. One is certainly pleased that the Greek Orthodox primate stands up against police brutality and against racism, but as the What We Believe page of the Black Lives Matter website indicates, the organization is directly opposed to some fundamental teachings of Orthodox Christianity. Nevertheless, the Greek archbishop said to Greek News:

The vast majority of our faithful appreciate the emergency [sic] of “Black Lives Matter”, and I was overwhelmed by the support I have received by peacefully marching in Brooklyn to declare that racial injustice cannot be tolerated. I know that some few are worried about some political associations, but, as a Church and as a Church leader, there is a responsibility to speak up and speak out for justice and the rule of law for all people.

I will continue to speak and to act in the ways that are consistent with the Gospel of our Lord Jesus Christ and with the high office with which I have been entrusted by our Holy Mother Church.

OK, but as the BLM website says:

We make space for transgender brothers and sisters to participate and lead.

We are self-reflexive and do the work required to dismantle cisgender privilege and uplift Black trans folk, especially Black trans women who continue to be disproportionately impacted by trans-antagonistic violence.

We build a space that affirms Black women and is free from sexism, misogyny, and environments in which men are centered.

… We disrupt the Western-prescribed nuclear family structure requirement by supporting each other as extended families and “villages” that collectively care for one another, especially our children, to the degree that mothers, parents, and children are comfortable.

We foster a queer‐affirming network. When we gather, we do so with the intention of freeing ourselves from the tight grip of heteronormative thinking, or rather, the belief that all in the world are heterosexual (unless s/he or they disclose otherwise).

Well. Insofar as the laity have to strengthen the gates of the church against the battering ram of this rotten culture, I stand by the Benedict Option as something Christians within the Orthodox Church (and the Catholic Church, and all churches) need in this time of crisis. I hope that the archbishop will read the book and agree. As Brendan Buckley writes, “If the United States and Western Europe fall to the ‘woke’ barbarians of 2020 and beyond, we need to prepare our families and ourselves for what is to come.” There’s no if about it.

 

 

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Are White People Bloodsucking Devils?

Here’s a letter to the editor of the campus newspaper written by Nikole Hannah-Jones (then Nicole Hannah) in 1995, when she was a student at Notre Dame:

(Via The Federalist)

She went on to become the Pulitzer Prize-winning genius behind The New York Times‘s 1619 Project, which claims that slavery is the basis of the American founding. Recently a critic on Twitter said the recent riots ought to be known as the “1619 Riots” — a distinction Hannah-Jones accepted with pride, but then deleted her tweet.

As far as we know, there has been no discipline of Hannah-Jones within the Times. Publishing an op-ed from a Republican senator calling for troop deployment to stop rioting is the kind of thing that gets you fired at the Times. But if you publicly welcome the branding of those riots as a spinoff of the Times‘s signature project — hey, no problem!

I don’t think it’s fair to hold what Hannah-Jones wrote in college against her. To be sure, there’s no doubt that if a similar college-newspaper letter by Ross Douthat or David Brooks were unearthed, Nikole Hannah-Jones would be leading the mob calling for their firing and public ruin. But I believe across the board that people should not be held responsible today for things they wrote as students over two decades ago. Furthermore, in charity, I assume that she no longer believes that whites, as a race, are “bloodsuckers” and “devils.” I could be wrong, but again, in charity, I will assume that she no longer believes these racist things. What I would like to hear from her is when and how she ceased to believe them, if she in fact has. What changed her mind?

I would very much like to know how her moral judgment changed since then. And I think people ought to be asking this. If it’s fair not to hold her responsible for racist things she wrote in the 1990s, it’s also fair to ask her how she matured past those beliefs — again, assuming that she has. Surely The New York Times would not wish to employ a racist. Surely the Times deplores all racism, and makes no exception for anti-white racism. Surely.

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Trump’s End

A lot of people are talking about Tucker Carlson’s monologue tonight. More than anything else, it was directed at Donald Trump. I urge you to watch it. It’s about 16 minutes long, but it’s well worth your time. I haven’t seen anything yet that captures the current mood of the Right like this:

Tucker makes the obvious (to everyone but Trump) point that people have a right to expect their government to protect them from rioters — and their government is not doing so. When bad people see weakness in authority, they take advantage of it. This, by the way, is how the woke took over college campuses. This is how the woke took over media.

See this:

Cubans warned Venezuelans and now the Venezuelans are warning Americans that we shouldn’t sit idly by while our statues burn, street are renamed, and school curriculum is taken over. https://t.co/yLRTrLmN5s

— Ana Rosa Quintana (@ana_r_quintana) June 22, 2020

It’s happening, and the president is impotent. Trump was on a Hannity-hosted forum tonight. Look at this short clip. It tells you why he’s losing. The country is in serious trouble, and he’s like a child who has fallen off a sailboat far from shore:

Trump: If we didn’t do testing, we’d have no cases… There are so many names to this, I could name 19 names like Corona 19. pic.twitter.com/cuNlLhHP6I

— Acyn Torabi (@Acyn) June 26, 2020

Peggy Noonan’s new column is brutal. Here’s how it starts:

Something shifted this month. Donald Trump’s hold on history loosened, and may be breaking. In some new way his limitations are being seen and acknowledged, and at a moment when people are worried about the continuance of their country and their own ability to continue within it. He hasn’t been equal to the multiple crises. Good news or bad, he rarely makes any situation better. And everyone kind of knows.

On Wednesday a Siena College/New York Times poll found Joe Biden ahead 50% to 36%. It’s a poll four months out, but it’s a respectable one and in line with others. (A week before, a Fox News poll had Mr. Biden leading 50% to 38%. The president denounced it as a fantasy.) This week’s poll had Mr. Biden leading among women by 22 points—a bigger lead than Hillary Clinton enjoyed in 2016. He has moderates by 33 points, independents by 21. On Thursday a separate Times/Siena poll had Mr. Trump losing support in the battleground states that put him over the top in 2016. His “once-commanding advantage among white voters has nearly vanished,” the Times wrote.

More:

Nobody knows what’s coming. On New Year’s Eve we couldn’t imagine the pandemic, economic contraction and protests. We don’t know what will happen in the next four months, either. I believe in the phenomenon of silent Trump voters, people who don’t tell anyone, including pollsters, that they’re for him because they don’t want to be hassled. But eight, 10 or 14 points worth? No.

Good news or bad, he rarely makes any situation better. And everyone kind of knows.

There are plenty of people who are still plan to vote for Trump because they are afraid of the Democrats in power. But I don’t know anybody who is planning to vote for Trump who thinks he has done a good job and merits a second term. As Tucker Carlson said tonight in his powerful monologue, the crises this year should have played to Donald Trump’s strengths. That is, the strengths he sounded like he had. But it was all bluster. Noonan is right: when he was put to the test, repeatedly, he failed.

When a Republican presidential candidate has these kinds of numbers in Texas, four months before an election, you know things are really, really bad:

Again, watch the Tucker Carlson monologue from tonight, and consider: if things are so disordered with Trump in the White House now, just a few months before the election, in a time when he has every incentive to get tough on these rioters, what confidence can Republican voters have that a second Trump term would improve the situation?

Trump tweeted this earlier today:

Black Lives Matter leader states, “If U.S. doesn’t give us what we want, then we will burn down this system and replace it”. This is Treason, Sedition, Insurrection!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 25, 2020

The black man who said that on Fox News is not formally affiliated with BLM, according to a BLM spokesperson. Be that as it may, if Trump really believed that BLM members, or any of these rioters, are guilty of treason, sedition, and insurrection, then why is he only tweeting about it? He’s not only an old man sitting at home watching Fox and sending out tweets. He’s also the President of the United States. For the next few months, anyway.

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Shock Brigades Of BLM Exercisers

Seth Smith, a UC Berkeley student, was shot and killed the other day in what appears to be a random act of violence. Police are trying to solve the murder. Smith was a white man. UC’s chancellor Carol Christ e-mailed to faculty, staff, and students a note of condolence that included this paragraph:

We realize this is a difficult time for those of you who knew Seth. It is important to know that individuals may express their grief differently and we need to respect the different ways people react and support each other in the days and weeks ahead. Many of you may have had a close relationship with Seth and are feeling a sense of loss and disbelief. Others, like many of us, are experiencing stress, grief and anxiety related to the coronavirus pandemic and the recent murders of George Floyd, Riah Milton, and other Black Americans.

This is sickening. There is nothing that cannot and will not be racialized and politicized by our ruling class.

That is repulsive. This is the same kind of thing, but merely ridiculous.

They have specific workouts named after dead black people. For example:

MONIKA DIAMOND

Monika Diamond, a 34-year-old Black transgender woman, business owner and LGBT+ activist, was tragically killed in Charlotte, North Carolina on March 18, 2020. Diamond’s death is believed to be the fourth violent death of a transgender or gender non-conforming person in 2020.

From the Human Rights Campaign: “These victims were killed by acquaintances, partners or strangers, some of whom have been arrested and charged, while others have yet to be identified. Some of these cases involve clear anti-transgender bias. In others, the victim’s transgender status may have put them at risk in other ways, such as forcing them into unemployment, poverty, homelessness and/or survival sex work. Sadly, 2020 has already seen at least 15 transgender or gender non-conforming people fatally shot or killed by other violent means. We say at least because too often these stories go unreported — or misreported.”

Before the workout, follow @humanrightscampaign and read their article: A National Epidemic: Fatal Anti-Transgender Violence in the United States in 2019

Last week the Supreme Court ruled that LGBTQ+ people are protected from employment discrimination, however there are still few explicit federal legal protections for transgender or gender-expansive people. After the workout, check out Freedom For All Americans and follow @freedom4allusa.

The Monika Diamond Memorial Workout is on YouTube or Instagram.

Here is the workout memorializing a dead black trans woman. It includes “double pushup burpees,” because there’s really no better way to honor a dead black trans woman than by doing double pushup burpees. You cannot make this up:

The man arrested for shooting Monika Diamond is Prentice Bess, a black man who knew Diamond (born Jeremy Whitted). I have searched online and seen no reason to believe that the murder was a bias crime, much less a racially motivated one, as both alleged killer and victim are black. But let’s not let pass a moment to exploit the dead for social justice purposes. These stupid workouts are  “I love my dead gay son” (from the black comedy Heathers) level virtue signaling.

This passage from Live Not By Lies reveals what these totalitarians are up to:

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases — the personal is political — captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned [Hannah] Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

Infusing every aspect of life with ideology was a standard aspect of Soviet totalitarianism. Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

This is not innocent, this stuff. Everything in life must be subject to this ideology. Everything. 

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Historians’ Thomas Jefferson Meltdown

I’ve been writing this week about the ideological wars on the Progressphiles listserv for Democratic Party data and technology professionals. A reader who is on H-France, a similar listserv for academic historians of France, passes on news of a similar meltdown on that list — along with the emails that brought this to pass.

It all began with this June 16 request sent to the list, which is followed by thousands:

In the piece, Prof. Daut calls on the French government to remove a statue in Paris depicting Thomas Jefferson. It takes some cheek to be a professor at the university founded by Jefferson, and to make that demand. It is also a strange way of imposing US culture war fights on other countries. Daut, who is black, writes:

Here in the United States we have over a half dozen statues of Thomas Jefferson. While these monuments are meant to highlight an ideal history of Jefferson as one of the United States’s “Founding Fathers,” they also remind those of us unwilling to forget that our country’s third president, the architect of the Declaration of Independence, was also an enslaver and by many accounts also a rapist. Because he founded the University of Virginia, the monument to him in my city of Charlottesville, is one we must live with. The question is how? Perhaps, UVA might think about placing a statue of Hemings beside that of Jefferson.

But there is no reason why France—already troubled by its own long history of slavery and empire—should lionize the man who wrote in the US Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal,” and then turned around and declared in Notes on the State of Virginia, “never yet could I find that a Black had uttered a thought above the level of plain narration.” In fact, Jefferson can only be considered marginal to French history. During his time spent in France, he mostly carved out trade agreements, secured rights for consular officials, and cavorted about with his friend the Marquis de Lafayette. No, Jefferson does not belong in today’s global and multicultural Paris.

She proposes four figures, all people of color tied more directly to French history, who ought to replace Jefferson.

The next day, this response appeared on the H-France list:

Alec Shea, a PhD student at NYU, responded:

More:

Then the gloves came off:

And shortly thereafter:

Then we begin to learn that Gruder is a bad person:

Then we learn that there is nothing at all admirable about Thomas Jefferson — that the entirety of his life and its meaning must be judged by his slaveowning:

“Horrified and disgusted” that anyone would question Prof. Daut! Blake Gutt (he/him) is a freshly minted PhD who labors in the vineyards of medieval France and queer theory, and does not wish to know anyone who believes that a man like Jefferson can be redeemed in any way. If you believe that there is anything to be said for Thomas Jefferson, don’t try to say it to Gutt, for he/him will not speak to you.

This is a person who teaches the next generation of history students.

More character assassination of Prof. Gruder, who in this passage from a fellow historian is called out as an example of white supremacy infecting the discipline of academic history:

Harvard historian Mary Lewis chimes in to fault Gruder for criticizing Daut:

You see what’s happening? Gruder’s original letter challenging Daut as one historian to another is now construed by other historians as a racist act!

This is when the moderator steps in to shut down the discussion:

 

You might understand that. After all, what can possibly be accomplished when academics are dogpiling a fellow academic with ad hominem attacks for simply questioning the contentions of another academic?

But that’s not why David Kammerling Smith shut down this thread. As he explained in a subsequent post:

Translation: Prof. Gruder was at fault for questioning Prof. Daut. There was no apology from the list moderator to Prof. Grudern, who was smeared as a running dog of white supremacy. It sounds to me like they’re going to rewrite the rules to prevent ideas like Prof. Gruder’s from ever seeing the light of day.

The H-France list, recall, has several thousand readers, according to the one who sent it to me. He passed the entire exchange on; I have only cited a few key entries. The reader says to me:

The thread raises more than a few matters of legitimate historical debate (history vs. memory, the historian’s role as arbiter of the relationship between past and present) but what particularly struck me were two things: its pile-on effect, as big-name historians like Jennifer Sessions, David Bell and Mary Lewis stepped in to set the tone of an emergent consensus, and the weird “incident report” that, apparently, will be its result. The language is rather tortuous but one can only suppose that this report, which is”to be reviewed by an ad hoc committee whose members speak from traditionally underrepresented communities” as a corrective to the “quaint, archaic sensibility” of the list’s existing rules, constitutes a woke veto on future debate within this particular precinct of the historical profession.

It is useful to see how the sausage is made, is it not? If you are wondering how it is that a generation or two of American young people have come to hate their country, its history, and its culture, this semi-private exchange among professional historians helps clarify.

The post Historians’ Thomas Jefferson Meltdown appeared first on The American Conservative.

Mao More Than Ever

If you haven’t read this new Quillette essay by Eric Kaufmann, a political scientist at the University of London, you must. Kaufmann argues that this woke moment we’re in now is not normal, but something truly revolutionary, at least at the cultural level. It’s not just theory with him, but relies on data. Excerpts:

Statues toppled, buildings renamed, curricula “decolonized,” staff fired. The protests following George Floyd’s killing have emboldened cultural revolutionaries in America and Europe. The iconoclasts are changing minds, and could be in a position to enact a root-and-branch reconstruction of America into something completely unrecognizable to its present-day inhabitants. Imagine a country whose collective memory has been upended, with a new constitution, anthem, and flag, its name changed from the sinful “America” to something less tainted. Far-fetched? Not according to data I have collected on what liberal white Americans actually believe. Only a renewed American cultural nationalism can resist it.

Kaufmann argues that data show that far from riots driving the public toward Nixonian law-and-order reaction, the public is actually moving toward embracing the unsupported claims of Black Lives Matter.

The political scientist discusses here the way some of our perception of the world is socially constructed. As the “left-modernists,” to use his term, has marched through our institutions of liberal democracy — academia, the media, and so forth — they have catechized people in left-modernist sacred values:

Let’s apply this lens to the sacred values of left-modernist ideology. Is a white woman wearing a Chinese prom dress complimenting or insulting the Chinese? Most Chinese would probably take the former view, but a left-modernist ideological entrepreneur can spin this as cultural appropriation and white colonialism. In effect, the left-modernist socially constructs “harm” and “racism,” spinning something positive into a negative and seeking to sensitize Chinese people to the “fact” that they should feel insulted rather than proud. Those inducted into the religion of antiracism get the message and signal their virtue online, helping to propel people toward the new norm. If this were to catch on in China, the emotions Chinese feel when seeing the image of a white woman in a cheongsam would flip from pride to anger.

The same sensitizing dynamic works for history, literature, film, statues, and even words. Like Red Guards with a hair-trigger sensitivity for sniffing out the bourgeois, today’s left-modernist offense archaeologists outdo each other in trying to reframe the world as racist, sexist, homophobic, transphobic, ableist, and so on. Turning the principle of charity on its head, they insist on the most suspicious interpretation of a person’s motives when the subject matter is associated with their canonical totems of race, gender, sexuality. A Hispanic man flicking his fingers outside his truck window gets fired because this was photographed, tweeted, and spun as the “OK” white power sign. The result is an atmosphere where inter-personal trust is as low as humanly possible while discursive power flows to the accuser. The new cultural revolutionaries have constructed our emotional and conceptual reality.

Once “harm”, “racism” and other concepts become unmoored from reality, more of the world is remade. Statues which were long ignored become offensive. Complex historical figures like Jefferson or Churchill, who embodied the prejudices of their time, or elites like Columbus or Ulysses Grant, whose achievements had both positive and negative effects, are viewed through a totalizing Maoist lens which collapses shades of grey into black and white. If a historic personage transgressed left-modernist sacred values, their positives instantly evaporate and activists myopically focus on their transgressions.

Suddenly, an entire Orwellian world opens up: place names, history books, statues, buildings. When you’re equipped with the anti-racist hammer, everything begins to look like a nail. In this brave new world, it doesn’t matter whether a symbol like the Rhodes Scholarship has acquired a completely different meaning, or whether a statue has become a symbol of something completely different. All must be levelled to bring forth utopia.

Kaufmann did some research to find out the extent to which self-identified American liberals would accept radical de-Europeanizing of US culture. His results are shocking, and they reveal the extent to which the left-modernist cause — specifically the intersectional agenda at which Black Lives Matter is the center — is really about destroying America as we know it. What Kaufmann did was ask to what extent they would support absurdly radical things, like tearing down old buildings and remaking maps because they represent the old order, etc. And a lot of people said fine, let’s do it. Kaufmann:

Powerful collective memories and symbols always exclude, selecting from a wide palette of historical material. Their emotional appeal is enhanced by focusing on unity, excellence, and authenticity. This is why tourists visit old monuments, not modern buildings; why they like the architectonic unity and history of Paris or Shibam in Yemen, not modern high-rise jumbles like Tokyo.

The dynamics of cultural attractiveness mean that when it comes to national identity, people privilege the patina of age, which is associated with both native or settler origins, and moral archaism. The more indigenous and morally troubling past is favoured over the tolerant and superdiverse present; core nation-building regions like Tuscany over deprived peripheries like Sicily; and elite scribes like Socrates and buildings like the Acropolis more than the slaves and peasants who sustained and built them. All offend modern sensibilities. If today’s left-modernist puritans looked behind UNESCO’s world heritage sites to see how the sausage was made, they would dynamite our precious heritage. The only reasonable aim is to strike an accommodation between culture and equality, one that preserves the past while making space for alternative interpretations.

More:

In Orwell’s 1984, obliterating the past becomes the first task of the socialist regime:

Every record has been destroyed or falsified, every book rewritten, every picture has been repainted, every statue and street building has been renamed, every date has been altered. And the process is continuing day by day and minute by minute. History has stopped. Nothing exists except an endless present in which the Party is always right.

Substitute “racist” for “bourgeois,” or “white supremacist” for “capitalist roader,” and you find an analogous process of ironing out the particular in favour of the universal. Immanuel Kant’s crooked timber of humanity must be made straight, and the fundamentalist vision of societal perfection imposed on an imperfect past.

This is what is happening right here, right now. 

Notice, says Kaufmann, that all this is happening even though there is a man in the White House who ostensibly opposes all of it. This cultural revolution does not need to be led by a politician. He is irrelevant. The revolutionary commissars have taught us all well. You go to the website of the major media (newspapers and broadcast), and the catechism is laid out every day, with vigor. I have come to believe that in terms of cultural revolution, the media are now playing a role like Rwanda’s Radio Mille des Collines, the radical broadcaster whose anti-Tutsi messaging helped drive the genocide. No, I do not believe we are talking in America the killing of human beings. I do believe, though, that the elimination of our traditional American culture by teaching people to despise it as evil is exactly what The New York Times, the Washington Post, the networks, NPR, and the others are seeking to do.

If you had suggested this two me as recently as two months ago, I would have thought it extreme. Not anymore. Here is a relevant passage from my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies, which is full of advice from people who endured communism, on how to resist the soft totalitarianism coming to us:

Kundera says that what makes a leftist (of any kind—socialists, communists, Trotskyites, left-liberals, and so on) a leftist is a shared belief that humanity is on a “Grand March” toward Progress: “The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.”

If progress is inevitable, and the Communist Party is the leader of society’s Grand March to the progressive future, then, the theory goes, to resist the Party is to stand against the future—indeed, against reality itself. Those who oppose the Party oppose progress and freedom and align themselves with greed, backwardness, bigotry, and all manner of injustice. How necessary—indeed, how noble—it is of the Party to bulldoze these stumbling blocks on the Grand March and make straight and smooth the road to tomorrow.

“There was constant propaganda about how communism was changing the village for the better,” recalls Tamás Sályi, a Budapest teacher of English, of his Hungarian youth. “There were always films of the farmer learning to improve his life with new technology. Those who rejected it were [depicted as] endangering their families. There are so many examples about how everything old and traditional prevented life from being good and happy.”

Thus does the Myth of Progress become a justification for exercising dictatorial power to eliminate all opposition. Today, totalitarianism amounts to strict, forced regimentation of the Grand March toward Progress. It is the method by which true believers in Progress aim to keep all of society moving forward toward utopia in lockstep, both in their outward actions and in their innermost thoughts.

If you’re not willing to join the Grand March, pre-order the book here. I swear, you are going to need it.

How do we stop this? Kaufmann calls for a revival of “cultural nationalism,” by which it seems that he means a rededication to traditional symbols and narratives of American nationhood. It’s hard for me to see how that works, to be frank. To do that would mean, in the construal of our revolutionary media, a form of white nationalism. To be very clear: I do not at all agree that traditional American identity is “white nationalism”! But these are the terms in which the left-modernists have taught, and are teaching, Americans to see our own country. This is why the mobs are defacing and tearing down statues not just of Confederates, but of U.S. Grant, Francis Scott Key, George Washington, and Thomas Jefferson. It makes no sense to many of us, but it makes perfect sense if you assume that any expression at all of the old order is intolerable, and must be erased from the earth.

In China today, the Beijing government is making an all-out effort to eliminate traditional Uighur religion and culture. They are using concentration camps as part of their strategy. I don’t think it will come to that here, but I am less confident of that now than I once was. I am reminded this morning of Solzhenitsyn’s warning, with which I begin Live Not By Lies:

“There always is this fallacious belief: ‘It would not be the same here; here such things are impossible.’ Alas, all the evil of the twentieth century is possible everywhere on earth.”

Anyway, once you understand the logic of this ideology, you see that whether you mean it to or not, any defense of traditional sources of American identity will be construed by the ideologues as racially offensive. Traditional American nationalism, in their malicious view, is white nationalism. This is why although I strongly encourage you to read it all, I am rather skeptical of Kaufmann’s strategy for recovery. I do not doubt his good intentions at all, and in fact I share his view that absent a powerful Christian revival, only a strong cultural nationalism might stand a chance of defeating this evil. But I do not believe that the left-modernists will fight us on our own terms. They will insist that our beliefs amount to race hatred. How can you have “cultural nationalism” when the left believes that the nation itself is irredeemably racist and bigoted?

Look at The 1619 Project, which openly seeks to “reframe” American history around slavery as the founding event of the United States. If that is true, then the entire American project is hopelessly compromised. Nikole Hannah-Jones, the black New York Times writer who won a Pulitzer Prize for her role in conceiving and writing for the 1619 Project, was accused last week on Twitter of being behind the rioting, which the critic on Twitter called “the 1619 riots.” She tweeted back that she proudly accepts the designation.

There you have a prize-winning New York Times writer choosing to brand rioting against the existing social order after the Times’s signature project. Did these earn her a rebuke from the same bosses who fired James Bennet for publishing an op-ed by a Republican senator in which he called for troops to be sent in to stop the riots? Of course not. These are the 1619 riots, after all. In fact, today the Times publishes a long piece by Hannah-Jones saying we won’t have justice in America until white people transfer part of their wealth to black people. 

(Look, can American liberals please just shut their mouths when they criticize Viktor Orban for refusing migration to Hungary? He is trying to prevent what is happening here now from coming to his country: the dismantling of the nation and its institutions via race consciousness and hatred. America had been a model for how to live pluralistically, in relative peace and order. No more — the American left has seen to that.)

This is what I mean by comparing our media to that Rwandan radio station: they are preparing this country for racial violence. I won’t say “genocide,” though that’s what some right-wing radicals say. But I will call it racial violence. By conceiving of any defense of America’s traditions, its history, its great men and women, and its culture as “racist,” the left-modernists foreclose any way out.

I fear that there will be blood. I hope and pray that there won’t be, and I will be looking for any way to avoid it. But given the logic of the left, their neo-Maoist fanaticism, and their capture of the main institutions of American life, I am finding it hard to see escape routes. If there is blood, then the state will stop the bloodshed by making the totalitarianism harder and more explicit. Most Americans will want peace at any price — including the price of submitting to the surveillance state, and a Social Credit System. Watch.

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