Rod Dreher's Blog, page 136

Ancien Regime Change

Ross Douthat’s column today centers on the decadence that has befallen the American system of government. Excerpts:

It might surprise contemporary Americans that for most of our history, what we call “culture war” debates — arguments about rights, social justice, the moral organization of society — were often settled through democratic deliberation, rather than the kind of ruling the Supreme Court just delivered on gay and transgender civil rights. Congress debated and passed laws. State legislatures did the same. Constitutional amendments were proposed, passed, ratified — and when necessary, repealed.

Not anymore, as Douthat explains, concluding:

We may officially have three branches of government, but Americans seem to accept that it’s more like 2.25: A presidency that acts unilaterally whenever possible, a high court that checks the White House and settles culture wars, and a Congress that occasionally bestirs itself to pass a budget.

What sort of Republic this is, and whether we will keep it, is for a higher court than Neil Gorsuch’s to decide.

Read it all. 

I read this column after watching clips of another day of hysterical mobs tearing down statues in spasms of primitive iconoclasm. Look at what they did to a statue of a canonized Catholic saint:

Activists just toppled the Junipero Serra statue in Golden Gate Park here in San Francisco

Now they’re onto Francis Scott Key, slave owner and writer of the Star Spangled Banner pic.twitter.com/Ykv0hFMZvK

— Joe Rivano Barros (@jrivanob) June 20, 2020

And Francis Scott Key is down, *right* as a police officer says “you’ve made your point, we’re not gonna let you pull this statue down,” with the crowd cheering and shouting “next one!” pic.twitter.com/8sbjmhMRXf

— Joe Rivano Barros (@jrivanob) June 20, 2020

Nearby statue of Ulysses S. Grant is also toppled. He was a slave owner too, before the Civil War. That’s three for three this night. pic.twitter.com/Lyw6bXeOTO

— Joe Rivano Barros (@jrivanob) June 20, 2020

Meanwhile, in the nation’s capital:

And protesters just toppled the Albert Pike statue in DC pic.twitter.com/gEzJm0OYjd

— Perry Stein (@PerryStein) June 20, 2020

I knew nothing about Albert Pike, other than he was a Freemason. Turns out his life was really interesting, especially his relationship with Indian tribes; he fought for their causes in the courts. But of course he must be toppled too, because Everybody Must Go.

What is more interesting to me is not so much the iconoclasm of these left-wing haters as the fact that the police, and the public officials who control the police, are letting this happen. And national political leaders are barely saying a word.

This iconoclasm is a primitive manifestation of rage. These mobs are pulling down these statues and committing violence on them as substitutes for human beings they consider to be their intolerable enemies. There is no real reason behind a lot of this. They are exterminating all symbols of the social and political order. The liberal democratic order is under attack, and the police and politicians will not defend it, any more than university presidents, newspaper publishers, or other institutional leaders, will defend it.

I have mentioned here in the past the excellent 1980s-era Spanish Civil War historical documentary series, available on YouTube. Watch the first episode, on the background to the conflict. You will learn that after the king abdicated and the Republic was declared in 1931, anarchists began to sack and burn convents. That was the beginning of a spiral of violence that five years later broke out into open warfare.

Peter Hitchens, writing about this happening in Britain, said:

For the past few weeks have also demonstrated that all the pillars of British freedom and civilisation are hollow and rotten, and that we are ripe for a sweeping cultural revolution as devastating as the one Lenin and Dzerzhinsky launched in Petrograd in 1917.

Except that this time there will be no need to storm the Winter Palace, seize the railway station or the telephone exchange or the barracks. The Left are already in control of every lever of power and influence, from the schools the Tories are too weak to reopen to the police, the Civil Service, the courts and the BBC.

It is regime change. Do not worry too much about the statues which are now coming down. They mean surprisingly little. Worry more about the ones they are soon going to be putting up, and what they will represent. Perhaps our grandchildren will find the courage to pull them down.

Look:

This is happening in the capital of the global superpower and has been for several weeks. These images being sent around the world w/ lightning speed make an impression – namely that the US is chaotic, weak, unstable & seemingly intent on abandoning basic governance. https://t.co/qfbFJEakSC

— Boris Ryvkin (@BRyvkin) June 20, 2020

Read the British political theorist John Gray’s take on all this. Excerpts:

As some conservative commentators have observed, there are striking similarities between woke militants and the Bolsheviks who seized power in 1917. But what is unfolding, in the US and to a lesser extent in other countries, is at once more archaic and more futuristic than a twentieth century revolutionary coup. The current convulsion is an outbreak more closely akin to the anarchical millenarians movements that raged across Europe in the late Middle Ages, whose vision of redemption from history was shared by America’s founders, who carried it with them to the New World.

Nevertheless, Bolsheviks and woke militants do have some things in common. In late nineteenth century Russia, under the influence of their progressive parents, a generation of educated young people was convinced of the illegitimacy of the Tsarist regime. Dostoevsky’s Demons (1871) is a vivid chronicle of the tragic and farcical process by which progressive liberals discredited traditional institutions and unleashed a wave of revolutionary terror. Not only Tsarism but any form of government came to be seen as repressive. As one of Dostoevsky’s characters put it, “I got entangled in my data…Starting from unlimited freedom, I conclude with unlimited despotism.”

The woke generation have learned a similar lesson from their elders, this time about the failings of American democracy. Rejecting old-fashioned liberal values as complicit in oppression and essentially fraudulent, they extend their power not by persuasion but by socially marginalising and economically ruining their critics. As in the show trials orchestrated by Lenin’s disciple Stalin and Mao’s “struggle sessions”, woke activists demand public confession and repentance from their victims. Like the communist elites, woke insurgents aim to enforce a single worldview by the pedagogic use of fear. The rejection of liberal freedoms concludes with the tyranny of the righteous mob.

The difference between the Bolsheviks and the Woke, according to Gray, is that the Bolsheviks actually had a vision of what they wanted to see replace the order they destroyed. Other than “defund the police,” the Woke do not. Gray says the Woke are more like medieval millenarian cultists who only wanted to prove their moral purity by destroying. Says Gray, “In both cases, nothing needs to be done to bring about a new world apart from destroying the old one.”

One major difference is that the medieval cultists were the socially marginalized and oppressed masses. But our Woke are from the ruling classes. Gray:

But, possibly uniquely in history, their antinomian rebellion emanates from an antinomian establishment.

The rise of the woke movement has not occurred as a result of a takeover of American institutions by a dictatorial government. Key American institutions have overthrown themselves, while Trump’s attempts to assert dictatorial power have so far been ineffectual. It may be that the scenes of anarchy that are part of the uprising will work in Trump’s favour in November. At least a third of the American population is opposed to woke values, a number that could increase substantially the more the uprising involves public disorder. Equally, Biden may prevail by promising a more peaceful future and find himself compelled to rein in the insurgency in order to preserve some degree of public order. Either way America will remain more or less ungovernable.

More:

America is on the way to becoming a semi-failed state. Its soft power has collapsed, probably irrecoverably. Yet it does not follow that it will cease to be a globally powerful actor. In a competition with totalitarian China, an American regime that mixes authoritarian control with zones of anarchy may have a comparative advantage. …

As the woke movement spills over into parts of Europe and the UK, it should be clear that this is no passing storm. Here, as in the US, woke militants have few, if any, definite policies. What they want is simply the end of the old order. The paroxysm we are witnessing may be remembered as a defining moment in the decline of the liberal west. Perhaps it is time to consider how to strengthen the enclaves of free thought and expression that still remain, so they have a chance of surviving in the blank and pitiless world that is being born.

Hmm, John Gray’s classical liberal Benedict Option. Whole thing here.

This is a revolution led by the Establishment.

You’ve got rioters tearing down statues and spray painting them 1619. Whatever that is, it’s not “anti-Establishment.” It’s destruction by reference to an ideological project created, branded, & propelled by the republic’s most powerful media, cultural, and academic institutions.

— Omri Ceren (@omriceren) June 20, 2020

Here’s the Pulitzer Prize-winning New York Times writer taking credit for the riots toppling statues and tearing America apart:

It would be an honor. Thank you. https://t.co/W4HXKY8kCm

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) June 20, 2020

And here is a co-founder of Black Lives Matter openly admitting that they are Marxists:

BLM co-founder confirms what anyone who’s read their work knows: they’re proudly marxists. pic.twitter.com/vvUk5jTp7j

— Rita Panahi (@RitaPanahi) June 18, 2020

And yet, BLM is now the voice of the liberal Establishment. In many places who cannot criticize that organization without risking your job. Ask Tiffany Riley, the outgoing principal of a Vermont school, who was fired because she said she supports black lives but not the organization Black Lives Matter (see “The Left’s Rwandification Of America”).

I’m writing this while listening to the Trump rally in Tulsa. The country is in grave crisis, but he’s going on and on and on about how unfairly he was treated by the fake news media for drinking water and toddling down the ramp at West Point. His plan to deal with rioting and desecrating America public symbols, and the meaning ? Congress should pass a law banning flag burning. That’s his big idea. The country desperately needs a strong, intelligent, competent leader, and this is what we have. The weakness of this man is agonizingly apparent. The feebleness of the Democratic Party establishment, and liberal institutional leaders, in the face of the radical challenges from the Left is a sign of America’s decadence. So is this roostery strutting and barstool gibberish from Trump. Now is the moment for the Right to assert itself against these anti-American radicals, but in the moment of crisis, the leader of the political Right is nothing but bumper-sticker sloganeering.

Regime change. It’s happening. It’s not “regime change” in the sense of the changing of the ruling party. This is regime change in the ancien régime sense. It’s happening, and at this point, there doesn’t seem to be anyone prepared to stop it. Does this country even have the internal resources to stop it? Remember what Peter Hitchens said:

Do not worry too much about the statues which are now coming down. They mean surprisingly little. Worry more about the ones they are soon going to be putting up, and what they will represent.

UPDATE: Here is what’s going to happen. The Democrats are going to take power, in part because of Trump Republican incompetence and weakness. They are going to move to build a Social Credit System to fight “white supremacy,” which will be anything they don’t like. Censorship by Twitter, YouTube and others (you saw YouTube has banned as “hate speech” the video of the detransitioned man expressing regrets about his trans experience?), including demonetizing any independent dissenting media, is going to be part of this. The US will follow China in going cashless. This will mean that under the Social Credit System, it will be next to impossible to buy or sell or work if the state lists you as anti-social. It’s a lot harder to do this if we keep using cash, so watch the US government, under Democratic rule, push harder to make us cashless.

You think this sounds paranoid, but I’m telling you, this is already happening in China (read Kai Strittmatter’s great book about it all). This is coming here, and as I explain in my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies, ordinary people who have Alexas in their house, and who use smart devices, are preparing the way. The hour is much later than you think.

UPDATE.2: 

What has the party of law and order actually done to preserve law and order, aside from talk about it? https://t.co/G1RqNrOjgj

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 21, 2020

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Magic Artist Cancelled

A reader writes:

For the past few weeks, we’ve all been watching a crazy year get even crazier than most of us expected, and I think what we’re witnessing right now is the start of something that isn’t going to go away anytime soon. 

You’re absolutely right when you say that nowhere will be safe from the new soft totalitarianism. I tend to stick to my own fringe corner of the web for everything political, but I also frequent more mainstream sites for content related to my hobbies. Over the past few weeks, every single one of these sites has gone out of their way to proclaim their support of BLM and commitment to “anti-racism”. It seems that no one wants to face scrutiny for remaining silent, even when their usual content is far from political.

I think these commitments are more than just standard corporate lip service – they constitute the embrace of a quasi-religious ideology on all levels of society, and some people are starting to feel the consequences of their dissent: 

https://www.hipstersofthecoast.com/2020/06/wizards-ends-their-relationship-with-terese-nielsen/

Magic the Gathering (a trading card game that can be played in paper or online) has been one of my hobbies for a long time, and Terese Nielsen has produced some of the game’s most popular and most iconic art for nearly 25 years now. There will hardly be a fan of the game who doesn’t recognize her name and cherish her artistic contributions, yet today it was revealed that Wizards of the Coast (the company behind the game) will no longer work with her or even reprint her older artwork. 

Why?

Because woke Twitter-inquisitors decided that she needed to go. 

People went through her likes and the users she follows on social media and decided that what they found was reason enough for her to be cancelled. Among the list of her “crimes” are following alt-lite personalities Jack Posobiec, Mike Cernovich and Alex Jones (as well as being a “trans-exclusionary”, for which I have yet to see any evidence, especially given that she is a lesbian who was ostracized by her family as well as her statements to the contrary). 

She never insulted or harassed anyone nor engaged in heated political arguments, yet when the mob complained to her employer, they gave in. If a working relationship of 25 years and being one of the most well known artists of a popular game weren’t enough to protect her from being cancelled, this can happen to any of us. Especially those with public-facing jobs could soon find themselves in a position where they depend on the good graces of radical ideologues to be able to work.

This will get a lot worse before it gets better. 

According to Terese Nielsen’s website, she has lots of other projects going on. But for how long? The fantasy genre is not my thing, so I had never heard of her. Go to her website and see her work — she’s incredibly talented! But none of that matters now, not to the Inquisition.

 

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The Sacking Of Father Moloney

It has been a while since there was news from Boston of cravenness and cowardice on the part of its Catholic Archdiocese. The streak was broken this week. From the New Boston Post:

The Catholic chaplain has been forced out at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology because of an email message he sent Catholic students that questioned whether George Floyd died because of racism and stated that Floyd did not live a virtuous life.

Father Daniel Moloney, a priest of the Archdiocese of Boston, was asked to resign last week, according to the archdiocese.

“In the wake of George Floyd’s death, most people in the country have framed this as an act of racism. I don’t think we know that. Many people have claimed that racism is a major problem in police forces. I don’t think we know that,” Moloney wrote in an email message to the MIT Catholic Community, according to a news story published Tuesday night in The Boston Globe.

Moloney, according to the Globe story of Tuesday, June 16, wrote that Floyd should not have been killed by a police officer in Minnesota, but also stated that Floyd “had not lived a virtuous life” and that police “deal with dangerous and bad people all the time, and that often hardens them.”

Some students complained to university administrators, including the university’s Bias Response Team.

University officials contacted the Archdiocese of Boston, which quickly sought Moloney’s resignation.

What did Father Moloney write? Someone posted the text of his e-mail on Twitter. Here are the screen shots; notice that there is a bit of overlap in the text of the messages, in the images:

What on earth is wrong with this e-mail? He is simply stating a fact: that George Floyd had not lived a virtuous life, but that he did not deserve to die like this. Perhaps Father Moloney was speaking to some things that had been going around the Internet — I saw them myself — in which people minimized the horror of Floyd’s death by saying that he was a criminal who was high when he was arrested. Here is a priest telling his flock that even a great sinner possesses human dignity, and should not be treated that way.

The priest also said, truthfully, that we don’t know that Officer Chauvin acted out of racism. It’s not clear yet what his state of mind is. The thing that we can know for sure, though, is that Chauvin’s act was evil. He also makes the perfectly true and reasonable point that police officers, who keep us safe, put themselves into situations that could brutalize their consciences. It doesn’t justify such behavior, he says, but it helps us understand how Chauvin’s killing of Floyd could have happened. We don’t know that yet, so we need to be careful about passing final judgment on either man.

This is how sin works, the priest says: it spreads like an infection through all things human. And he is right. This is the tragedy of being human: even those who seek to do good may find themselves suddenly doing evil, and even those who have done evil may find themselves victimized unjustly. The Catholic Church opposes the death penalty because nobody loses their dignity as children of God, no matter what they have done. This is what the priest is reminding his flock.

The priest goes on to say that we depend on solidarity in a time like this. He notes how divided his flock is over the Floyd killing, the protests, and the riots, and calls them all back to charity with each other, not rash judgment. He points out that people who would have admired each other for their shared opposition to racism and other evils now find themselves hating each other. Again, the tragedy of sin. He ends by calling on his flock to seek to be peacemakers.

That’s it. That’s what Father Daniel Moloney wrote. But hotheads were outraged. How dare he speak of this tragic, complex situation as if there were more to it than simple right and wrong! How dare he remind people that everyone involved in this act of killing — Floyd, Chauvin, cops, the people they police, protesters, rioters, and people angry at the protesters and rioters — are all fellow human beings, and that we need to bear with each other in love and solidarity, as brothers and sisters!

That was too much for these hotheads, including an MIT official:

Suzy Nelson, an MIT vice president and dean for student life, sent an email to students calling Moloney’s comments “deeply disturbing.”

“By devaluing and disparaging George Floyd’s character, Father Moloney’s message failed to acknowledge the dignity of each human being and the devastating impact of systemic racism,” Nelson wrote.

This is a flat-out lie! Father Moloney’s e-mail was entirely about the dignity of each human being: Floyd, Chauvin, protesters, and everyone else!

God forbid the Archdiocese of Boston show any spine, or the faintest brush of integrity. It forced Father Moloney out, denouncing his e-mail as “wrong.” Perhaps MIT gave the Archdiocese no choice in whether or not the priest could remain in his post there, but why did the Archdiocese throw the young priest under the bus by holding him out as a villain here?

Father Moloney said what his flock needed to hear — but not what they wanted to hear. And for that, he paid a price. A Catholic reader e-mailed me to say:

We’ve all lost our minds, and the Church is as craven as the rest of them. They tell the guy to resign over having said two utterly sane things: I don’t know how you know that George Floyd’s death was necessarily a racist act (an argument Loury and McWhorter and have making prominently), and that racists are sinners in need of mercy. If THE CHURCH purges such heterodoxy from its midst, then there really is no place to hide.

This wouldn’t be the first time that faithful Boston Catholics needed to find a way to experience solidarity against the moral cowardice of the institutional church, now would it? What a thing it is to suffer more from the Church than for the Church…

Prof. James Matthew Wilson, a Catholic who teaches literature at Villanova, suggested on Twitter this week that people pondering Father Moloney’s message should read Flannery O’Connor’s short story “Revelation.”Pay attention to the words: “…even their virtues were being burned away.”

UPDATE: This just came in. The priest asked me to blur certain identifying remarks, and I’ve agreed. There’s a particularly important point he made, but he’s afraid if I publish it, it will out him to people:

I’m a Catholic cleric in a very progressive part of the country.  I am painfully aware that anything I say or do can and will be used against me, so I have been very aware of the buzzwords that would set the mob off and have avoided them like the plague.

Unfortunately, even with avoiding the bloodshot eyes of the mob, I still have received a couple of notes of grievance from people about not being sufficiently aligned.  One person stated that anyone who disagreed with him was a racist and they couldn’t dialogue with them because the other side was filled with hate.  My charitable read is that he thought I was thinking of the KKK or something… but my fear is that he meant a different group of people…people like you.

Another long long letter I received accused me of misogyny, arrogance, privilege, and countless micro-aggressions, if not outright racism.  The classicly ‘woke’ line was ‘it’s not the intention of your words, it’s just your impact.”  This was, ironically, right after they said that if they received a similar letter in their own profession they would be devastated.  I wonder what their intended impact was…   They were angry that I thought privileged white philosophers I’ve quoted could describe what’s going on today (which I believe is so much deeper than what most people would like to think) instead of… Ibrahim Kendi.  Their suggestion, not mine.

I do wonder which one might provide a more comprehensive Catholic position: a daily mass-goer steeped in Scripture, or an activist “millennial, raised in a Christian home, with both parents embracing a James Cone-like Black liberation theology, who believes” that Christianity’s main gist is “struggle and liberation,”(https://christiancitizen.us/how-to-be-an-antiracist-a-prescription-for-healing-america-book-review/), who wants to establish what sounds like an Orwellian committee on anti-racism to police every action by every company (and religious organization) in the United States?  I fear it’s already a fait accompli.

I would be curious your perspective on Alasdair McIntyre’s thoughts, especially in After Virtue.  I have seen a consistent erosion (or vacuum?) of a coherent social theory, even within the Church.  I learned all about Catholic Social Teaching in Catholic School… but never had a class on Catholic virtue.  I don’t think these are opposed to each other, but looking back on the Catholic Social Teaching Class, it was deeply moralistic: without any roots in the Incarnation or understanding of virtue — natural or supernatural!  I know some of my parishioners recognize what’s going on: they’ve told me — but I also know if I sent what they have told me around they would be cast out of their university positions and public jobs.

Well, The Benedict Option concept is based on MacIntyre’s work, so I’m not sure how much I need to elaborate here. I would just say two quick things. First, MacIntyre is correct to point out that without a telos, our moral reasoning is incoherent. I was not raised Catholic, and did not go through Catholic education. But I feel confident, based on all the things I’ve learned from Catholics over the years, as well as 13 adult years of practicing Catholicism, in saying that most Catholic education and formation is not organized in any way around a telos. On paper, it absolutely is — but that’s not how it works out in practice. In practice, it’s just a pious gloss on what MacIntyre calls “emotivism” — the belief that feelings are the decisive guide to moral truth.

Here is a quote from Strange Rites: New Religions For a Godless World, a fantastic new book published this week, written by Tara Isabella Burton. It’s a journalistic account of how religion is changing in post-Christian America, with particular focus on the rise of interest in DIY occultism:

Today’s Remixed religions valorize different forms of emotional experience — a person’s perceived “energy” as a clue to their bad character, a modern witch’s sense of divine presence during a spell casting session, a feminist’s “lived experience” as an authoritative account of living in the world — as the key to interpreting both their meaning and purpose. They value, too, authenticity: the idea that one’s actions are in harmony with one’s emotions. They’re less keen on rules, or doctrines, or moral codes they dismiss as restrictive or outmoded. They’re suspicious of moral or truth-claims that don’t root themselves in subjective experience. Three-quarters of Millennials (and 67 percent of the religious “nones” overall) now say they agree with the statement “Whatever is right for your life or works best for you is the only truth you can know,” compared with just 39 percent of the elderly. (And 47 percent of practicing Christians of all ages). They demand agency, creative ownership, in their spiritual lives, dissatisfied with the narrowness of options available. Among the most common saying I heard among the people I interviewed was “I make my own religion.”

(TIB gets those figures from this 2016 Barna study.)

MacIntyre saw it all coming in After Virtue (1981). For that matter, so did Philip Rieff in The Triumph of the Therapeutic (1966).

Here’s the second MacIntyre point I want to make, responding to my priest correspondent’s query. MacIntyre says that people learn moral reasoning through communities of practice. Catholics no longer have that — nor, I think, do many churches in contemporary America. That is, we are not living in communities where people share coherent ideas of right and wrong, and how to think morally. It’s emotivism almost all the way down. This is why I’ve promoted, via The Benedict Option, Christian communities coming together to raise their children within such small communities. It’s not failsafe, but it’s all we have.

UPDATE.2: A reader:

With respect, no, Candace wasn’t making a version of that argument. She states very clearly in her video that the killing was unjust and she hopes that Floyd’s family recieves justice. All she said is that she was uncomfortable with the way some people were elevating him into a saint, something some of your commenters are saying.

This is perceived bad only in the same way Father Moloney’s comments are being percieved as bad, because of tone-deafness and insensitivity.

Granted, Moloney’s message is far more nuanced than Candace’s were; and while she’s simply being contrarian to public sentiment, he leads towards a Christian message about finding brotherhood with each other and reading things people say with charity, rather than suspicion. But this same attitude of charity would apply to interpreting Candace’s remarks, wouldn’t they? The problem is many people who had a knee jerk reaction her video don’t care about nuance, so they don’t care about it in Moloney’s message, either.

If I have mischaracterized Candace Owens’s statement, I apologize and retract. I was going on the way it was repeated to me.

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Bostock & SOGI: A Christian Waterloo

I just got off the phone with a religious liberty lawyer, a Christian man whose name you’ve never heard, but who is deeply involved in the legal fight and in political strategizing, at a very senior level. I can’t say more than that, to protect his identity. He reached out to me in part because he wanted to tell me that The Benedict Option was right on target, and how crystal-clear that has become this week, with the Bostock ruling. He told me that he and his colleagues were commiserating after Bostock about the political realities facing religious conservatives.

They concluded that the political means to build the kind of world that my friend Sohrab Ahmari would like to see simply does not exist now. The Lawyer says that it’s looking like the only thing open to religious conservatives is the Benedict Option: building viable, resilient communities, even amid persecution, and making sure that we survive this new Dark Age.

I took notes on our conversation, and am publishing them with the Lawyer’s permission.

The Lawyer started by saying he read Andrew T. Walker’s piece in Christianity Today (“Bostock Is As Bad As You Think“). From that piece:

In an interview from last year with National Review, noted religious liberty scholar Douglas Laycock of the University of Virginia said that the Equality Act

goes very far to stamp out religious exemptions… . It regulates religious non-profits. And then it says that [the Religious Freedom Restoration Act] does not apply to any claim under the Equality Act. This would be the first time Congress has limited the reach of RFRA. This is not a good-faith attempt to reconcile competing interests. It is an attempt by one side to grab all the disputed territory and to crush the other side.

For now, the Religious Freedom Restoration Act remains intact, but its provisions are one election away from passage if Democrats take control of the Senate. Even still, that its provisions remain intact is no sure proof that it will give relief to those who appeal to it in future cases.

The Lawyer said Walker’s piece is correct, but that “RFRA is the least of my worries right now.”

What worries you most right now? I asked.

“The thing that worries me the most is Bob Jones and the application of that precedent not to churches, but to religious colleges and seminaries,” he said.

He’s talking about the 1983 Supreme Court ruling against Bob Jones University, the fundamentalist Christian school that at the time prohibited interracial dating, claiming a First Amendment religious liberty right to do so. The IRS revoked the school’s tax-exempt status for violating the Civil Rights Act. This was upheld by SCOTUS, which ruled that:

“Government has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education . . . which substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on [the University’s] exercise of their religious beliefs.”

The ruling made clear that it only applied to religious schools, not to churches.

On the phone today, the Lawyer told me that after Bostock, gay rights advocates have a clear shot at punishing religious schools, seminaries, and other religious institutions by taking away their tax-exempt status on discrimination grounds.

“All that has to happen is for a Democratic administration to gain control of the IRS, then move to strip the tax status of an institution on SOGI grounds,” he said. SOGI is short for “sexual orientation and gender identity.”

The only possible way he’s wrong, figures the Lawyer, is that the word “race” is written into all the titles of the Civil Rights Act; “sex” — which was expanded by Bostock to include “sexual orientation and gender identity” as well — is not. But the idea that the courts going forward will honor that narrow reading is far-fetched, he said, “Based on what we just saw Gorsuch write, I don’t know how we conclude otherwise.”

I asked him what he thought of David French’s counsel against Christian pessimism, in French’s  “God Save America From Fearful Christians” piece earlier this week.

“We’re going to know if he’s right in about two weeks, when the term is finished,” said the Lawyer.

He means that the Supreme Court will soon publish its rulings in three key cases of importance to social and religious conservatives. One is a case that will decide on the limits of a religious school’s right to discriminate in hiring based on the “ministerial exception” in the Civil Rights Act. Another is about the fate of Blaine Amendments, relics of 19th century anti-Catholic sentiment, passed to prevent states de facto from having to give money to Catholic schools. The case now before the court has to do with whether or not state scholarship money can be used at religious schools in states that still have Blaine Amendments on the book. The third is about a Louisiana law that restricts abortion access. 

“My guess is that it’s going to be a mixed bag,” said the Lawyer. He said the rumor he’s hearing is that pro-lifers are going to lose the Louisiana abortion case, that the Blaine Amendments will be overturned, and that there will be an “incremental victory” on the ministerial exception case.

The Lawyer sounded extremely skeptical of Christian optimism on the legal and political front, saying, “That ‘it’s not going to happen’ view. hasn’t served us well. A lot of things that we thought would never really happen are happening right now.”

The Lawyer said that the Bostock decision is more consequential for religious liberty than Obergefell, though of course the two are related. “It’s more significant because the ways the tentacles of the regulatory state are going to reach inside our lives are much more far-reaching than whether or not two gay men can get married,” he said.

The Lawyer brought up Sohrab Ahmari’s well-known belief that now is the time for social and religious conservatives to quit trying to reach a defensive accommodation within liberalism, and instead go on the offense. The Lawyer said that’s simply not realistic, not anymore. This is not defeatism; this is reality.

“Politically, I really don’t know where we go from here,” he said. “There are a lot of young people saying we need a big political operation to fight this. I’m old enough to remember when [big Christian political operations] existed.  It all failed. That’s why we’re here.”

The Lawyer emphasized that the thing I pointed out on this blog yesterday (see “The Thin Red Line”) — that only three GOP senators showed up on the Senate floor to argue against unanimous approval of the Equality Act — is a shocking sign of the political weakness of Christians on SOGI issues.

“We’re not seeing the facts for what they are,” he said, referring to social conservatives.

He said that in Washington now, a lot of Republican staffers on the Hill are writing off the silence of Senators and Congressman about SOGI and religious liberty as the natural effect of an election year. That is, you wouldn’t expect them to talk up SOGI controversy on the campaign trail. In the view of the Lawyer, this is a Republican rationalization for cowardice.

“Do you think that this is how the pro-life movement or the gun rights movement  would see it?” he asked. “They would salivate for a chance to talk about their issue, and defend it It’s your base! You stand up for what you believe in an election year.”

On the other hand, I said to the Lawyer, people are saying that we didn’t see more senators coming to the floor to argue against the Equality Act because that wasn’t necessary. If you only needed one senator to derail the voice vote procedural move, why send an army of them in to make speeches? So goes the reasoning. I told the Lawyer that I didn’t buy it, that I think the fact that most Republican lawmakers don’t want to talk about this stuff shows that they’re ashamed of traditional Christian teaching on SOGI, and don’t want to be seen defending it.

The Lawyer agreed.

“This just shows how bad things are politically,” he sighed. “We’re hosed. Absent a Great Awakening, these are the political materials we have to work with. Given the resources that we have, we have to figure out how we’re going to survive to fight another day.”

What he means, he explained, is that the Benedict Option claim that conservative Christians have lost the fight for religious liberty in SOGI cases is true, and that the political and legal efforts of Christians going forward have to take this grim reality into consideration. The only conservative Christians who ought to be optimistic after Bostock, he said, are those in Washington who run the direct mail fundraising operations of Christian lobbying organizations.

What I took the Lawyer to be saying is that no matter what the direct mail fundraisers say, we conservative Christians really have come to the end of the line on fighting the SOGI legal and political front in the culture war.

“We have been trying to hold the line protecting Christian businesses, and it  has been a really important effort,” he said. “But [post-Bostock], the world is really different for those Christian business owners, and there’s no getting that genie back in the bottle. It is worth us asking what are we actually trying to achieve [legally and politically] from this point forward. We really need to think about how we can preserve a place for ourselves in this new order.”

The answer, he said, has to be to figure out a way to protect our institutions and “our ability to construct those Benedictine walls.” Reflecting on the lack of a motivated political constituency, he said “I don’t even know if we can even do that now.”

Do ordinary Christians even understand what’s at stake? I asked.

“No, they probably don’t,” he said. “These times are waking a lot of us up, though. I think we can have a range of responses. We can be alarmed, and get angry, and take our last stand. But there’s another way for us to consider that helps us to fortify our own faith, and be prepared to endure what’s coming. Because it’s going to get really bad. We’re going to see things like people being cast out of their professions.”

The Lawyer spoke for a moment about his own specific situation, and how his personal and professional life may soon undergo a tremendous upheaval because of this cultural revolution. He foresees the real possibility of being disbarred because of his religious faith, and having to move to a part of the United States where he can still practice law — if there are any places left, that is.

This is not just some guy on the Internet. This is one of the most well-informed religious liberty lawyers in the country. He is reading the handwriting on the wall, and for the first time ever considering that it may be impossible to work in his profession in the United States of America, because he is a Christian.

After we finished the call, I went back to The Benedict Option to read the chapter on work in the new post-Christian order. This book came out three years ago. This passage, I think, is why the Lawyer called me today to say that after Bostock, the book has been vindicated as prophetic:

I have talked to a number of Christians in fields as diverse as law, banking, and education, who face increasing pressure within their corporations and institutions to publicly declare themselves “allies” of LGBT colleagues. In some instances, employees are given the opportunity to wear special badges advertising their allyship. Naturally if one doesn’t wear the badge, she is likely to face questions from co-workers, and even shunning.

These workers fear that this is soon going to serve as a de facto loyalty oath for Christian employees— and if they don’t sign it, so to speak, it will mean the end of their jobs, and possibly even their careers. To sign the oath, they believe, would be the modern equivalent of burning a pinch of incense before a statue of Caesar.

It will be impossible in most places to get licenses to work without affirming sexual diversity dogma. For example, in 2016, the American Bar Association voted to add an “anti-harassment” rule to its Model Code of Conduct, one that if adopted by state bars would make it simply discussing issues having to do with homosexuality (among other things) impossible without risking professional sanction—unless one takes the progressive side of the argument.

Along those lines, it will be very difficult to have open dialogue in many workplaces without putting oneself in danger. One Christian professor on a secular university’s science faculty declined to answer a question I had about the biology of homosexuality, out of fear that anything he said, no matter how

innocuous and fact-based, could get him brought up on charges within his university, as well as attacked by social media mobs. Everyone working for a major corporation will be frog-marched through “diversity and inclusion” training, and will face pressure not simply to tolerate LGBT coworkers, but to affirm their sexuality and gender identity.

Plus, companies that don’t abide by state and federal anti-discrimination statutes covering LGBTs will be not be able to receive government contracts. In fact, according to one religious liberty litigator who has had to defend clients against an exasperating array of anti-discrimination lawsuits, the only thing standing between an employer or employee and a court action is the imagination of LGBT plaintiffs and their lawyers.

“We are all vulnerable to such targeting,” he said.

Says a religious liberty lawyer, “There is no looming resolution to these conflicts; no plateau that we’re about to reach. Only intensification. It’s a train that won’t stop so long as there is momentum and track.”

David Gushee, a well-known Evangelical ethicist who holds an aggressively progressive stance on gay issues, published a column in 2016 noting that the middle ground is fast disappearing on the question of whether or not discrimination against gays and lesbians for religious reasons should be tolerated.

“Neutrality is not an option,” he wrote. “Neither is polite half-acceptance. Nor is avoiding the subject. Hide as you might, the issue will come and find you.”

Public school teachers, college professors, doctors, and lawyers will all face tremendous pressure to capitulate to this ideology as a condition of employment. So will psychologists, social workers, and all in the “helping” professions. And, of course, florists, photographers, backers, and all businesses that are subject to public accommodation laws.

Christian students and their parents must take this into careful consideration when deciding on a field of study in college and professional school. A nationally prominent physician who is also a devout Christian tells me he discourages his children from following in his footsteps. Doctors now and in the near future will be dealing with issues related to sex, sexuality, and gender identity, but also to abortion and euthanasia. “Patient autonomy” and non-discrimination are the principles that trump all conscience considerations, and physicians are expected to fall in line.

“If they make compliance a matter of licensure, there will be nowhere to hide,” said this physician. “And then what do you do if you’re $300,000 in debt from medical school, and have a family with three kids and a sick parent? Tough call, because there aren’t too many parishes or church communities who would jump in and help.”

In past eras, religious minorities have found themselves locked out of certain professions. In medieval times, for example, anti-Semitic bigotry in Europe prevented Jews from participating in many trades

and professions, shunting them off to do marginal work Christians did not want to do. Jews entered banking, for example, because usury was considered sinful by medieval Christianity, and kept off-limits to Christians.

Similarly, orthodox Christians in the emerging era will need to adapt to an era of hostility. Blacklisting will be real.

Oh, one more thing. Before we finished the conversation, I asked him if he had heard anything about the book I have coming out next, Live Not By Lies. No, he said, he had not.

“Well, I hate to tell you this, but it’s even more pessimistic than The Benedict Option.”

He laughed out loud. So did I. Hey, the humor may be black, but after the week this man has had, I got the impression he was grateful for any laugh at all.

“I think it’s realistic, though, but also hopeful, in a sense,” I explained. “I spent a lot of time talking to Christians who lived through much worse than what we are going to have to deal with, and they came through it with their faith and their integrity intact. The book is about advice from them about what to do. We’re not going to have gulags, but then, the people who hate us are not going to need gulags to get what they want.”

“No, they’re not,” he said. The Lawyer told me about a friend of his, an émigré from a formerly communist country in Eastern Europe, who has shared with him some of the things he had to endure living there.

“You should talk to him,” I advised. “What these Christians have to say to us today is precious wisdom.”

The post Bostock & SOGI: A Christian Waterloo appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Possessed

Portland wakes up to see what antifa did overnight. A century old statue of George Washington was toppled & set on fire with an American flag. “White fragility,” “Damn white men” & other messages are written on the moment. On the ground nearby: “Defund white men.” pic.twitter.com/zjrsZHJC9o

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) June 19, 2020

They did it, they really did it. Sucks to be George Washington right now… #Portlandprotest #statue #blacklivesmatter #PDXprotests #pdx #oregon #blm #acab #pdx #georgewashington #flagburning #StatuesMustFall pic.twitter.com/uwbTFoLUuq

— Garrison Davis (Teargas Glutton) (@hungrybowtie) June 19, 2020

So, this is where we are.

From the outside, it has long looked to me like Portland is a lawless city. Is there a government there? A police force? Why do they let this happen?

If this were a statue of Martin Luther King, Jr., would Portland authorities have let this happen? The questions answers itself.

According to the Oregonian, no one was arrested last night.

These people, and their many sympathizers who would never trouble to topple a statue of a Founder, but who approve of it all the same, bring to mind this famous passage from Dostoevsky’s The Possessed. Shigalov is a theorist of nihilism:

“He’s written a good thing in that manuscript,” Verkhovensky went on. “He suggests a system of spying. Every member of the society spies on the others, and it’s his duty to inform against them. Every one belongs to all and all to every one. All are slaves and equal in their slavery. In extreme cases he advocates slander and murder, but the great thing about it is equality. To begin with, the level of education, science, and talents is lowered. A high level of education and science is only possible for great intellects, and they are not wanted. The great intellects have always seized the power and been despots. Great intellects cannot help being despots and they’ve always done more harm than good. They will be banished or put to death. Cicero will have his tongue cut out, Copernicus will have his eyes put out, Shakespeare will be stoned—that’s Shigalovism. Slaves are bound to be equal. There has never been either freedom or equality without despotism, but in the herd there is bound to be equality, and that’s Shigalovism! Ha ha ha! Do you think it strange? I am for Shigalovism.”

The toppling of these statues are birth pangs of a new, violent, despotic order. This iconoclasm is massively significant. In Live Not By Lies, I write about how forgetting is an act of cultural power. The totalitarian regimes knew that consolidating their power over the captive peoples of Eastern Europe depended on controlling their cultural memories. The identity of a culture, like the identity of an individual, depends on memory. That is, the things we remember tell us who we are. Statues and monuments are physical embodiments of cultural memory. To defile and remove a statue is an attempt to force the society to forget the historical figure embodied by the statue, and what that figure symbolizes. In Washington’s face, it’s American democracy. You cannot get a more iconic symbol of the Republic than Washington.

Nobody thinks that Antifa is going to overthrow the Republic. But acts of desecration like this, of iconoclasm, is a test. Tearing down Washington statues is a ritual embodiment of the New York Times‘s 1619 Project, which openly seeks to “reframe” American history around slavery. Portland protesters spray-painted the figures “1619” on the desecrated statue of Washington — which is the right thing to do if you believe what the 1619 Project teaches: that the true foundation of America is not 1776, the Declaration of Independence, but the establishment of slavery. If the 1619 Project’s claims are just, then Washington must fall. And Jefferson, and all of them.

From Live Not By Lies:

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

Here’s an important example of this happening in our time and place. In 2019, The New York Times, the world’s most influential newspaper, launched the “1619 Project,” a massive attempt to “reframe” (the Times’s word) American history by displacing the 1776 Declaration of Independence as the traditional founding of the United States, replacing it with the year the first African slaves arrived in North America.

No serious person denies the importance of slavery in US history. But that’s not the point of the 1619 Project. Its goal is to revise America’s national identity by making race hatred central to the nation’s foundational myth. Despite the project’s core claim (that the patriots fought the American Revolution to preserve slavery) having been thoroughly debunked, journalism’s elite saw fit to award the project’s director a Pulitzer Prize for her contribution. Equipped with this matchless imprimatur of establishment respectability, the 1619 Project, which has already been taught in forty-five hundred classrooms, will find its way into many more.

Before Washington’s statue was toppled, Washington and what he stands for was toppled in the minds and memories of these people. Antifa are enacting what they learned in college.

They begin by destroying statues. They will end by destroying people. “Damn white men” they wrote on the Washington statue. Believe them. Something very, very powerful is happening here. Either we fight it, and fight it seriously, or we don’t. Either we defeat them, or we will be defeated by them. The fight is not just in the streets, with anarchists who desecrate monuments, but in classrooms, in families, in hearts and in minds.

Here is an important piece in the British magazine Unherd, by Matthew Goodwin. He’s writing about how Boris Johnson is losing the people who brought him to power — and he’s losing because under his premiership, statues are coming down all over Britain. Excerpt:

Activists who as recently as last year played a role in mobilising a revolt on the Right against the Conservative Party complain that there is a ‘moral vacuum’ at the heart of British politics — a failure to stand up against what they see as the relentless, onward march of cultural liberalism. “What are you conserving, Conservatives?” asked one former MEP. “What are you for?”

Conservatives might have political power but they seem to wield remarkably little cultural power. This concern was then put on steroids by the unfolding ‘Statue Wars’ that saw protestors unilaterally tear down or vandalise statues, attack police and desecrate cherished memorials. Rather than view this as an ephemeral by-product of the protests in America it is clear that it is another touchstone of our underlying values divide.

Leavers were horrified by the events. More than eight in ten disapproved of how statues were pulled down without consultation, the same proportion saw the events in Bristol as a ‘criminal act’ and six in ten disapproved of how the police failed to intervene. Many question why it took Conservatives so long to intervene in the debate and worry that much of this is the start of a broader assault on national heritage and culture — and one that is taking place while conservatives are actually running the country. The covering up of the statue of Winston Churchill appeared as a fitting symbol of this general timidity.

Same thing is happening here. Trump is weak. There are bound to be tens of millions of Americans watching these atrocities, watching their country being seized from them by anarchists, racists, children of the professional class and their cowardly, self-hating parents. They’re watching while cities burn, and the police stand down. They are watching their fathers — the fathers of their country — shat on by the mobs of demons.

They are not going to sit back and take this forever. Something is coming.

UPDATE:

There is literally nothing you can do. Literally nothing. Except keep doing whatever your new masters tell you to do, faster, higher, sooner, and with more guilt, shame, and will to "do better" (and probably to pay them for their emotional labor, etc.).

It's. A. Racket.

— James Lindsay, anti-revolutionary (@ConceptualJames) June 19, 2020

UPDATE.2: Reader Isidore the Farmer comments:

Like with ever progressive story, we were mocked three years ago for saying their actions and positions would lead to this. True of every form of progressive activism that exists, especially so as it relates to LGBT and race. They say you are crazy for suggesting they would ever take it that far, then they take it that far and say you are a bigot for disagreeing with them.

These are not good people. None of them…

Yes, I’ve had it. My “Law of Merited Impossibility” (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”) was meant as a joke, but the reality it pointed to was serious. Now it’s not even funny in a black-humor way. It’s just true. I don’t believe there is any limiting principle to the destruction that progressives will bring. I believe that there are sincere people among them — you can read them in my comments section — who honestly think it’s going to stop at X point. They are lying to themselves.

The post The Possessed appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Left’s Rwandification Of America

Victor Sengbe, a black resident of Oakland, thought it would be fun to put some rope-like things on a tree in a public park to help him and his friends exercise. They have been there for months. Now he’s part of a hate crimes investigation by the City of Oakland. More:

The Police Department provided five photographs of trees, some of which showed knotted ropes and one that appeared to have a piece of plastic pipe attached to a rope, hanging from tree limbs.

They have been removed by city officials.

Victor Sengbe, who is black, told KGO-TV that the ropes were part of a rigging that he and his friends used as part of a larger swing system. He also shared video of the swing in use.

“Out of the dozen and hundreds and thousands of people that walked by, no one has thought that it looked anywhere close to a noose. Folks have used it for exercise. It was really a fun addition to the park that we tried to create,” Sengbe said.

“It’s unfortunate that a genuine gesture of just wanting to have a good time got misinterpreted into something so heinous,” he told the station.

More:

[Mayor Libby] Schaaf said officials must “start with the assumption that these are hate crimes.” However, the mayor and Nicholas Williams, the city’s director of parks recreation, also said it didn’t matter whether the ropes were meant to send a racist message.

“Intentions don’t matter when it comes to terrorizing the public,” Schaaf said. “It is incumbent on all of us to know the actual history of racial violence, of terrorism, that a noose represents and that we as a city must remove these terrorizing symbols from the public view.”

“The symbolism of the rope hanging in the tree is malicious regardless of intent. It’s evil, and it symbolizes hatred,” Williams said.

Watch the mayor say it here:

Intentions do not matter. We will not tolerate symbols of hate in our city. The nooses found at Lake Merritt will be investigated as hate crimes. pic.twitter.com/B1f1SwZ4tK

— Libby Schaaf (@LibbySchaaf) June 18, 2020

Libby Schaaf, obviously, is white. Parks and Rec director Nicholas Williams is black. Both of them are card-carrying members of the Loony Left.

Except this isn’t really funny. Schaaf is the mayor of a city. She says flat-out that it doesn’t matter what the person who put the ropes up — a black man who used them for exercise! — meant by them; the fact is, someone felt “terrorized” by them, so the chief executive of the city has directed the government to “start with the assumption” that it was a hate crime.

So much that is wrong with contemporary progressivism is right there in this mayor’s words. It doesn’t matter at all that whoever thought they were nooses was a paranoid. It doesn’t matter at all that they were installed as aids to exercise. Now poor Victor Sengbe is going to have to deal with a hate crimes investigation, when all he wanted to do was exercise. Look on the bright side, at least he is black. If a white man had done it, he would already be facing war crimes charges, and would be on a flight to The Hague.

The Left is going to lead this country into racial violence. A reader e-mails tonight:

 I just can’t see all the media propaganda and mob mentality not leading to violence. It is leading to something isn’t it? Don’t you sense a spirit? A telos? What is the logical endpoint of all this? I swear, I can see this going no direction but violence and cleansing. It is a terrifying thought. 

Take a look at Tucker Carlson’s monologue from earlier this evening:

Excerpt:

[Democrats] don’t lie to themselves. They understand there is a revolution in progress. The death of George Floyd may have sparked widespread outrage. They may share that outrage. But they know that what is happening now has very little to do with George Floyd, or with people like him. Like all revolutions, the point is to destroy the current system and replace it with something new. But replace it with what? That’s the question the rest of us should be asking. We should know what’s coming.

We know what we have now. Our current system has been in place for hundreds of years. It is based on a simple idea: all people are created by God with equal moral value. Period. Every one of them. For that reason — and that reason alone — all Americans will be treated equally under the laws of the United States. In this country, we will judge you for what you do, not how you were born. That idea has been the defining principle of America since the 18th century. It’s the main reason we are the fairest society in the world. It’s the reason people move here. To the extent America has failed to live up to that principle, we are ashamed of it. We should be. Equality is the most important thing we have.

Now, for the first time in our history, we are witnessing a broad and powerful attack on that principle. Daily, we are told that all people are not, in fact, created equal. Some were born with moral stain. Others weren’t. Some Americans are guilty, some are innocent. Nothing can change this. It was determined at birth. All we can do is respond accordingly. People in favored groups must be held to one standard. Those in disfavored, morally tainted groups, must be held to another. The country will retain one set of laws, for the sake of formality, but we must apply those laws in very different ways, according to the DNA and background of the accused.

If this sounds familiar, that’s because the kind of system we just described — a system based on heredity and blood guilt — has been very common in history. It was the rule in feudal Europe, for example, and in the totalitarian regimes on that continent more recently. It’s still in practice in parts of the world. In North Korea, children are sent to prison camps for the sins of their ancestors. We’ve seen it here too. You may have wondered how politicians justified practices as perverse as slavery and Jim Crow. Simple: By arguing that all people were not created equal. Some had lesser moral value from birth. These people carried the stain of sin. You were allowed to treat them differently, based on who they were.

At the time, many understood that this was a lie. Slavery persisted for hundreds of years, but there were always some in authority who considered it evil — not just because it was abusive, which of course it was, but because its existence violated the central principle of America. They were right. Where are those people now? Look around? Is anyone in power defending absolute equality under the law? If there was ever a time to remind America that we all have equal value under God, that time is right now. But no. No one in charge is saying that. Our leaders are cowards when we need them to be brave. They’re muddled when we need them to think clearly. It’s possible they no longer even believe in equality.

A public school teacher in Vermont is on leave and may lose her job because she posted on her private Facebook page that she supports black people, but not Black Lives Matter:

School officials moved to fire Windsor School Principal Tiffany Riley on Friday after she wrote a social media post seen as critical of the Black Lives Matter movement.

The post, written Wednesday on Riley’s personal Facebook page, said she believes “black lives matter” but “I DO NOT agree with coercive measures taken to get this point across; some of which are falsified in an attempt to prove a point.”

Riley, who became principal of the K-12 school in 2015, wrote, “I do not think people should be made to feel they have to choose black race over human race.”

“While I understand the urgency to feel compelled to advocate for black lives, what about our fellow law enforcement?” Riley added, before saying, “just because I don’t walk around with a BLM sign should not mean I’m a racist.”

Tiffany Riley is white. So is the school superintendent, who called her comments “racist.”

A local elected political leader, Amanda Smith, has some ideas for how this school should react:

Smith, who has children enrolled in Windsor schools and is involved in the Black Lives Matter movement, offered four recommendations earlier this week that administrators could tackle over the summer. They include installing a Black Lives Matter flag, creating multicultural components to all classes and providing staff with information about combating racism.

Smith also hopes the district will institute a restorative justice program that will help students overcome racist beliefs.

But, she said, district officials didn’t take up any of those actions and responded to her with talk of a “nebulous committee that might talk about change.”

Amanda Smith is a white woman and lesbian activist in town. Here she is speaking at a June 7 Black Lives Matter rally in town:

Watch the clip. She’s on the verge of tears through most of her speech. She’s a graduate of Wellesley.

Another local BLM activist complained to the local paper about the New England town’s racism:

Iyanna Williams, 2015 Windsor High graduate, also said she was dismissed when bringing concerns and suggestions to district officials.

She initially contacted the school district earlier this month after noticing an American flag spray-painted into the Windsor School lawn.

“I just thought that that was out of character and given the current circumstances and climate of the world right now, I just wasn’t sure how comfortable I felt with that,” she said.

Iyanna Williams, an African American living in America, was offended by the American flag. She is an activist in the local Black Lives Matter chapter; in this June 7 local rally, she talked about how BLM is not just about black lives, but LGBT issues, environmentalism, and so forth. So if you don’t support those other issues, but do support black lives, it should be okay to criticize BLM, right?

Iyanna Williams lives in Windsor, Vermont, a rural, almost entirely white New England town of 3,500 people. And yet, officials there have destroyed the career of their elementary school principal because she says she supports black lives, but not Black Lives Matter. This is a small rural town. The newspaper says that Riley is a graduate of a high school 15 miles away. She’s from there. But these fanatical liberals have driven her away and made her unemployable — not because she doesn’t support black people, but because she doesn’t support the Black Lives Matter organization.

(She might well have a lawsuit against the school board too. There is a serious question as to whether or not the board can legitimately fire an employee for engaging in First Amendment-protected speech privately. I hope Tiffany Riley cleans them out.)

Again: the Left in this country is doing a hell of a job stoking racial hatred and paranoia. Persecutorial public officials like Libby Schaaf (white), Amanda Smith (white), and David Baker (white), are adding fuel to the fire. Where do they think this is going to end? One more excerpt from Tucker Carlson’s monologue:

We now accept the claim that some people deserve better treatment based on how they were born, and some deserve worse. This is the most poisonous and destructive of all ideas. Other nations understand that. Rwanda has made it a crime to make ethnic appeals during elections. They know well where that leads. Yet identity politics is accelerating here. It shouldn’t surprise you that most of the people pushing this poison are benefiting from it. They’re using the recent chaos to codify dangerous trends already in progress: a permanently unequal society, where some citizens are elevated and others are crushed —  winners and losers preordained by law.

At the time time — and this is always the tell — they lecture you with maximum self-righteousness about how they’re doing precisely the opposite.

… A couple of weeks ago, Governor Andy Beshear of Kentucky announced plans to bring universal health insurance to the state. But not for all citizens. Just for people with the right skin color. Everyone would pay, but only certain ethnic groups would benefit. Andy Beshear is still in office. No one has tried to impeach him for suggesting it. Ideas like this are everywhere now. They’re totally unchallenged.

This is the most divisive possible way to run a country. If you want to make certain your children hate each other, hold them to different standards. They will. There’s a reason racial tension is rising in the country. It’s by design.

The post The Left’s Rwandification Of America appeared first on The American Conservative.

On Race, Hillsdale Vs. Azusa Pacific

Some good news: Hillsdale College in Michigan not only would not be bullied into making a statement about Black Lives Matter, but also made an affirmative statement about why it would not. Here it is below in full. What an inspiring document:

Amidst the events of recent weeks, a number of alumni and others have taken up formal and public means to insist that Hillsdale College issue statements concerning these events. The College is charged with negligence — or worse.

It is not the practice of the College to respond to petitions or other instruments meant to gain an object by pressure. The College operates by reasoned deliberation, study, and thought. The following observations, however, may be helpful and pertinent.

The College is pressed to speak. It is told that saying what it always has said is insufficient. Instead, it must decry racism and the mistreatment of Black Americans in particular. This, however, is precisely what the College has always said.

The College is told that invoking the high example of the Civil War or Frederick Douglass is not permitted. Perhaps it is thought that nothing relevant can be learned about justice and equality from the words and actions of great men and women in history. Instead, the College is guilty of the gravest moral failure for not making declarations about … justice and equality.

The College is told that it garners no honor now for its abolitionist past — or that it fails to live up to that past — but instead it must issue statements today. Statements about what? It must issue statements about the brutal and deadly evil of hating other people and/or treating them differently because of the color of their skin. That is, it must issue statements about the very things that moved the abolitionists whom the College has ever invoked. 

It is told that failure to issue statements is an erasure, a complicity, an abandonment of principle. The silence of the College is deafening.

The College founding is a statement — as is each reiteration and reminder of its meaning and necessity. The curriculum is a statement, especially in its faithful presentation of the College’s founding mission. Teaching is a statement, especially as it takes up — with vigor — the evils we are alleged to ignore, evils like murder, brutality, injustice, destruction of person or property, and passionate irrationality.

Teaching these same things across all the land is a statement, or a thousand statements. Organizing our practical affairs so that we can maintain principles of equity and justice — though the cost is high and sympathy is short — is a statement. Dispensing unparalleled financial help to students who cannot afford even a moderate tuition, is a statement.

Helping private and public schools across the country lift their primary and secondary students out of a sea of disadvantages with excellent instruction, curricula, and the civic principles of freedom and equality — without any recompense to the College — is a statement. Postgraduate programs with the express aim of advancing the ideas of human dignity, justice, equality, and the citizen as the source of the government’s power, these are all statements. And all of these statements are acts, deeds that speak, undertaken and perpetuated now, every day, all the time.

Everything the College does, though its work is not that of an activist or agitator, is for the moral and intellectual uplift of all.

There may be something deafening in the culture—certainly there are those who cannot hear — but it is not from the silence of the College.

There is a kind of virtue that is cheap. It consists of jumping on cost-free bandwagons of public feeling — perhaps even deeply justified public feeling — and winning approval by espousing the right opinion. No one who wishes the College to issue statements is assumed to be a party to such behavior. But the fact that very real racial problems are now being cynically exploited for profit, gain, and public favor by some organizations and people is impossible to overlook. It is a scandal and a shame that compounds our ills and impedes their correction. Hillsdale College, though far from perfect, will continue to do the work of education in the great principles that are, second only to divine grace, the solution to the grave ills that beset our times.

If you are a college alumnus who donates to your alma mater, but that alma mater is surrendering to these ideological bullies, well, you can redirect your support to a college that has a spine. And when you are thinking about where to send your kids to college, well, these times are quite clarifying — and so is Hillsdale’s statement of principle.

By contrast, this email came in today from a teacher at Azusa Pacific University, one that most of us would think of as conservative, or conservative-ish. The teacher asked me not to identify them. They say if they are going to get fired over their principles, they want it to be because of something they said on campus, not something they wrote to a journalist. But as ever:

I do, though, think that concerned Christians should know what is happening on so-called Christian campuses.

The teacher writes (and I’ve slightly edited some of it to protect them):

I will begin with what seems to be a necessary disclaimer. I support open, free inquiry and the free exchange of ideas on campus and off. I think that I should hear from and engage civilly with colleagues with whom I disagree. I should listen with an open mind and should be willing to be persuaded. In our current moment, I should also understand that there will, justly, be visceral responses to events and that I should be as empathetic as possible, mourning with those who mourn (Romans 12:15).

Yesterday, our interim provost sent his email newsletter to faculty, naturally responding to ongoing protests and racial tensions and affirming that “We continue to stand with our Black brothers and sisters in opposition to the ongoing violence against them” (nothing on standing with good police officers, but I have heard rumors that we’ve beefed up our campus police presence–curious). The interim provost’s sentiment is mostly innocuous pablum. However, the email does not end there. We are hosting two events to discuss race and justice. There is, of course, nothing inherently wrong with this, but, knowing the political orientations of the faculty involved, I assure you that this will not really be academic or balanced. It will not be an opportunity for open and free inquiry.

In addition to these events, faculty are encouraged “to make a monthly commitment to read, watch, or listen to one of the resources” shared via a link which has also been provided to our students (here is the link). You’ll notice that the resources were not compiled by our faculty but by one of our many offices for diversity (can’t have too many). I have hardly investigated all of them, but from what I can tell, few, if any, of the resources, pretend to any kind of biblical approach to racial reconciliation, and many are outright hostile to the clear, orthodox teaching of scripture. There is one “narrative” presented (my kingdom for a new word for “narrative”). Of course, the 1619 Project made the cut but the 1776 Unites Campaign did not. Nothing from John McWhorter, Glenn Loury, Heather MacDonald, Jason Riley, Thomas Sowell, Omar Wasow, or Roland G. Fryer (to mention a few). You’ll also notice that pop wokeness is supreme (Really?! T.V. series as intellectual resources?! Sorry, I misread the purpose of this list–these are resources for “allyship,” not for intellect).

I really do urge you to click on the APU link and read that list of resources. It runs the gamut from left to hard left. There is nothing there — not one thing on that long list — that runs contrary to the progressive narrative. If this were a list at a secular university, it would still be startlingly unbalanced. It is incredible that this is comes from a Christian college, especially one that has a reputation for being theologically and culturally conservative. Look at this What We Believe page on the APU website. If you read it, you’ll think that this sounds like a perfectly normal conservative Evangelical college. It does not sound like the place where extreme forms of racial wokeness would be pushed on the faculty and students by the institution itself, at least not without some attempt at balance. But it is.

More from the teacher’s e-mail:

Faculty have also been encouraged to “consider” Harvard’s Project Implicit. “Consider” seems quite the equivocation.

Nothing is required of faculty at this point, but it’s early, it’s summer, and there’s a pandemic on. We’ll see what happens as we near the fall semester.

Of course, none of this should surprise anyone. Over the past several years, APU has drifted, and then run headlong, into the woke agenda. You are, of course, aware of our lack of conviction regarding biblical, traditional, orthodox, ancient views of sexuality. [Note: I certainly do; here’s a 2018 piece I wrote about “Queering Azusa Pacific University,” and “Professor: Azusa Pacific Is Losing ‘God First'”— RD]

Further, a few years ago, our faculty senate approved the inclusion of a link to the university’s bias-incident-reporting system in every syllabus (there were only a handful of objections, some more forceful and daring than others). Our system is in many respects less forgiving than that of Oberlin.

The teacher discloses a particularly egregious instance in which they were involved, and found themselves in hot water because they asked an ordinary question about an ideological claim made by diversity instructors. I’m leaving it out because I fear it would identity them. After it, they continue:

Last year, we had a conservative African American speaker come and discuss unpalatable ideas like the need for personal responsibility among his fellow Blacks. The talk was reasonably well attended, but it wasn’t a huge crowd. The few African American colleagues who did attend leveled ad hominem attacks (it’s “a minstrel show”), or gave their own lengthy speeches to provide the “counter-narrative” (the counter-narrative is the narrative at APU–later that week another African American guest speaker was given several opportunities, including our main chapel session, to proclaim the counter-narrative to our students). None of those colleagues addressed the actual data presented (and there was a lot of it). It was basically aspersions and emotions. The interim provost, who did not attend, later investigated the event because he heard reports that the guest speaker’s talk did not represent APU’s values. Although there were no repercussions for my colleague and the dean who organized the event, it was clear that the free exchange of ideas is not one of APU’s values.

Such is the state of affairs at this “leading” (as we like to call ourselves) Christian University. I can only imagine what things will be like should we return to campus in the fall as our administration anticipates.

Note that Hillsdale College is a nondenominationally Christian private college in the upper Midwest, and Azusa Pacific is an affirmatively Evangelical institution in southern California.

UPDATE: Sorry, an earlier version of this post — one I did not publish — said that the teacher asked me not to ID them or the college. When I re-read the letter, before I published, I realized there was only a request not to ID the teacher. There was no request to ID the college. So I re-edited this piece to reflect that, but forgot to take out a part of a sentence about the college. Apologies.

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Journalism That Serves The Party Line

The New York Times released today a staff memo announcing upcoming reforms to placate the woke mob. You can read the whole thing by clicking on Ben Smith’s tweet:

And @nytimes just emailed staff with plans to create “a more modern news organization that benefits from the wisdom of a larger and far more diverse staff.” pic.twitter.com/qLg9A231Xa

— Ben Smith (@benyt) June 18, 2020

Here’s a part that jumped out at me:

This is a perfectly Orwellian document, in context of what generated it. Remember that the woke mob within the Times raised hell because they didn’t want the Times publishing the op-ed of a Republican senator whose view on deploying the military to riot zones was shared by over half of Americans. Now, under the new Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion regime, the newsroom is going to be “a place where journalists can debate stories, exchange ideas, and candidly disagree, challenge and learn from one another.”

Read that again, without laughing.

About those bulleted points, they mean exactly the opposite of what they appear to mean. Under the new regime, stories in the Times will be less diverse. They will be more univocal, from the Left. This is about Managing The Narrative.

Here’s the thing: from my own newsroom experience, I’d bet that the newsroom executives issuing this edict (publisher A.G. Sulzberger, executive editor Dean Baquet, and two others) really do believe this Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion cant. You would find more cardinals of the Roman Curia who disbelieved the Nicene Creed than senior American journalism executives who doubted the Holy Trinity of Diversity, Equity, & Inclusion.

I wonder when the Times is going to start keeping up with the Washington Post, and publishing stories about ordinary people who said or did stupid things at a private party in the past? I am sure there are plenty of progressive propagandists in the Times newsroom ready and eager to straighten out the crooked timber of humanity by collective condemnation, public humiliation, and professional ruin.

 

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The Thin Red Line

An important drama played out in the Senate chamber today — important for what it says about politics, religious liberty, and the future. Stay with me here.

In the wake of Monday’s Bostock decision by the Supreme Court, Senate Democrats moved to have the Senate vote on the Equality Act, which was passed by the Democratic House, but has been bottled up in committee in the GOP-controlled Senate for some time. In brief, the Equality Act — here is a link to the full text of the bill — would write sexual orientation and gender identity (SOGI) into US civil rights law. If passed by the Senate and signed into law by the president, the Equality Act would have massive effects on society. Ryan T. Anderson explained some of them here. 

Have you, conservative reader, heard about this bill? Do you have any idea how radical it is? I bet not.

So, the Democratic Senators made a legislative move today to ask the Senate to approve the Equality Act by unanimous consent. Under the rules, a single senator who objected to this could stop the unanimous consent motion — but they would have to come to the Senate floor and do it openly. This morning on C-SPAN, I listened to Democrats make impassioned pleas for equality. Jeff Merkley, one of the Oregon Democrats, said that religious believers have always stood in the way of movements for equality, claiming religious liberty.

Only three Republican senators — Utah’s Mike Lee, Missouri’s Josh Hawley, and Oklahoma’s Jim Lankford — rose to speak against the Equality Act. If not for them, the bill would have passed and would be on its way to the president’s desk.

Mike Lee, in his remarks, pointed out that the Equality Act would demolish protection of women-only spaces like locker rooms and bathrooms, putting women who fear for their safety with biological males present there.

Josh Hawley pointed out that the Equality Act guts key provisions of the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, amending it to not apply to SOGI. It would force faith-based adoption agencies out of business unless they conformed. It would force doctors and nurses to perform, or assist in performing, abortions — and give them no conscience right of refusal.

Jim Lankford said that this bill is not about finding a middle-ground compromise, but about one side imposing its views on the other. If you like women’s sports — high school, college, and professional — then you should know that if this bill passes, it would be a violation of federal civil rights law to prevent a biological male who identifies as female from competing in women’s leagues.

So, the Equality Act will not be passed by the Senate today, thanks to these three GOP senators who took a public stand. But here’s my question: Why were there only three Republican senators willing to do this? Lots of Democratic senators showed up to argue for the Equality Act. Where were Republicans?

It is possible, of course, that had the bill passed, President Trump would have vetoed it. But maybe not. If no Republicans would have had the courage to vote against it, or object to unanimous consent, why should he have taken the risk to veto it? In any case, it is very clear that a Democratic Senate and a Democratic president will make the Equality Act law.

I talked to a Capitol Hill aide familiar with the process behind what happened today. He spoke frankly on condition that I don’t identify him.

“I’ll be honest with you,” he said. “For stuff like this, the initial knee-jerk response is ‘Mike Lee.’ Mike Lee is the the only one who can always be counted on to stand up to this stuff.”

The aide figures that Hawley’s speech Monday about the Bostock decision freed him to be able to join Lee. About Lankford, he’s uncertain.

The aide is frustrated with social and religious conservative lobbying groups, who, in his opinion, don’t fully appreciate the political dynamics at work.

“This is not about principle,” he said. “It’s about politics. If you polled every Republican member of the US Senate, they would agree that this [SOGI] stuff is bad. But they’re not afraid of social conservatives, and there is no political upside to standing up to this [SOGI] stuff.”

“Why should a political conservative from a red state waste political capital going to the floor if he’s not going to pay a price for not going to the floor?” the aide said. “The problem with social conservatives is that they have no political juice right now.”

The sharp negative reaction some religious and social conservatives had to the Bostock decision, which was authored by Justice Gorsuch, might be a wake-up call, the aide said.

“I think [GOP politicians] are realizing that [social conservatives] might just stay at home this time, because the bargain is not working out for them,” he said. “Maybe the establishment figures who actually run this party, who don’t share our values, and who just want to win, maybe they need to know that they have to have us.”

Speaking more broadly, the aide said that despite the shock Gorsuch decision in Bostock, social conservatives have gotten more from the Trump administration than they did from George W. Bush’s administration.

“The Trump administration does things that are important, but not flashy — things that still matter,” he said. “George W. Bush was an Evangelical who winked at the voters, and they expected him to do these things, but he didn’t. We have a president now who doesn’t necessarily share our values, but who understands that politics is a deal-making enterprise: you vote for me, I’ll give you what you want.”

I asked the aide what message he would send as a political insider to his fellow religious and social conservatives among the electorate.

“They need to stop trusting that anyone with an R in front of their name is doing the right thing behind the scenes, because they aren’t,” he said. “These guys are not spending real political capital and putting their necks on the line to fight for these priorities. Name a law that’s been passed in the last twenty years that’s a social conservative priority. A single law. The Partial Birth Abortion Ban was a long time ago [2003, in fact — RD]. It’s all judges. Judges, judges, judges.”

We see now, the aide said, the limits of that strategy.

Before we ended our call, the man paid me a compliment. He said, “The Benedict Option is going to go down in history as a prophetic book.”

I didn’t want to waste his time asking him to explain what he meant, and besides, it felt like fishing for a compliment. But I’ve been thinking about it as I’ve been preparing this post. Here is an aide, a man I know (through the assurances of mutual friends we have) to be a serious traditional Christian. He is working in national politics at the seniormost level, watching the dynamics of culture and law. And now, in 2020, he sees the message of the book to have been a prophetic warning to the church.

One of The Benedict Option‘s basic claims is that the hour is very late for traditional Christians, and that politics is not going to hold back, much less reverse, this cultural revolution. The book argues not for heading for the hills (as I say in the first chapter, there are no safe spaces), but for a conscious defection in place, and the immediate institutions of teaching and practices within families and religious communities. The idea is to create communities of resilience and resistance. It’s not escapism, but rather a call to discipleship that will produce Christians capable of suffering for the faith, and passing it on to their children, and their children’s children. It’s like in Terrence Malick’s great film A Hidden Life: the Catholic farmer Franz Jägerstätter could not hide from the Nazi Antichrist in his tiny Alpine village, but when the Nazis showed up there, and even seduced his Catholic neighbors, Franz and his family were not fooled. Because of their fidelity, they recognized evil when they saw it, and they were willing to endure the scorn of their village to stand for righteousness. Franz, of course, paid with his life.

The Benedict Option is about creating a church of Jägerstätters. They’re not going to arise overnight. And by the way, Live Not By Lies, out this fall, has more direct and urgent resistance counsel. I apologize if I come across as trying to sell books here, but I wrote these books because I am an Orthodox Christian father of Orthodox Christian children, and I see what is coming to America. I see that most of my fellow believers, both big-O and small-o, are almost completely unaware of how serious the situation is, and how thinly defended we are. We tell ourselves that if we just keep voting Republican, and keep being nice people, it’s all going to work out for us.

It’s not. The only thing today keeping the Equality Act — with its evisceration of religious liberty, its forced participation in abortion, and all the rest — from going to the president’s desk was three Republican senators who were not afraid to be smeared as bigots. The thin red line. In five months, we are going to have an election in this country. If the Democrats win the Senate and the presidency, it’s over. If you take this as motivation to vote Trump, and vote Republican, no matter what, you certainly have good reason.

But don’t be fooled: there are 53 Republican senators. Fifty of them did not show up to speak against the Equality Act today. Some may have had a good reason, but the fact is, they didn’t show. It fell to three men to hold the thin red line today. When it came time to risk being savaged in the media as a bigot because you stood up for religious liberty, for the rights of the unborn, for conscience rights of medical personnel, for the safety of women and the meaning of male and female — fifty out of fifty-three Republican senators chose silence.

If that doesn’t tell you social and religious conservatives where we stand politically in post-Christian America, I don’t know what it’s going to take. Prepare!

 

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Washington Elite’s Stalinist Halloween

Here’s how the story appears on the web front page of the Washington Post right now:

A stupid costume choice at a Halloween party two years ago is front-page news in the newspaper of record in the capital city of the Empire? What on earth? Here’s a link to the whole story. I read it first with bemusement at the moral panic, and then finally, with horror over what we are doing to ourselves.

Tom Toles, the Post‘s liberal Baby Boomer cartoonist, has a big Halloween party every year, in which the city’s media elite gather. In 2018, a white woman showed up in a tasteless costume:

A middle-aged white woman named Sue Schafer wore a conservative business suit and a name tag that said, “Hello, My Name is Megyn Kelly.” Her face was almost entirely blackened with makeup. Kelly, then an NBC morning show host, had just that week caused a stir by defending the use of blackface by white people: “When I was a kid, that was okay, as long as you were dressing up as, like, a character.”

Honestly, what kind of white idiot shows up in blackface these days? Granted, this was 2018, but blackface was extremely taboo then. That’s what Schafer’s joke was about: how Megyn Kelly got herself in a world of trouble by suggesting that blackface was not that big a deal.

Anyway, that’s what Schafer did. Partygoers Lexie Gruber (who is Puerto Rican) and Lyric Prince (who is black) confronted her about it. Schafer protested that it was a joke, that she was making fun of Megyn Kelly. Later, the pair confronted Schafer again:

But then Gruber and her friends moved inside, got drinks and found themselves in the crowded living room. Prince, who is 6-foot-1, easily spotted the woman in blackface and pointed her out to Gruber. “What should we do?” Prince said.

She approached Schafer. Prince said she criticized Schafer’s makeup and told her, “You look horrible” — a way of “clapping back” at the blackface without addressing race head-on. Prince said in an interview that she was worried about being stereotyped as an “angry black woman,” worried that someone might call the police.

“I felt very unsafe talking to that person in the first place,” she said. “I was in an environment that, if it got heated, it would decidedly not be in my best interest.”

Another guest, who spoke on the condition of anonymity to protect friendships, said Schafer laughed after Prince said her makeup was “very ugly.”

Gruber also said that “the woman basically just started laughing.”

Schafer agreed that she laughed but said that it was a nervous laugh, a sign of extreme discomfort, and that it came “only when she told me that I was ugly and had wrinkles. She told me, ‘You think you’re so meta,’ and I didn’t say anything. I didn’t argue with her.”

Prince said of Schafer: “She looked very proud of herself, as if she was eliciting the kind of response that she had been hoping for.”

Prince, a young woman who is over six feet tall, at a DC Halloween party hosted by a liberal newspaper cartoonist, felt “unsafe” because this middle-aged woman was wearing blackface. Offended? Sure. Appalled? Absolutely. But unsafe? Bullsh*t. This is Social Justice Warrior cant. I first heard it myself at a table in DC’s Adams-Morgan district in 1994, when I was having lunch with three liberal female friends, all of us in our twenties. One of them, seeing me cross myself before eating, asked if I was Catholic. Yes, I said. She asked if I was pro-life. Yes, I said. Then they all cut loose on me. One of the women, someone I had only met that morning, began trembling, and said she felt “unsafe” in the presence of someone who held my beliefs.

Anyway, there was a scene:

Three witnesses described Gruber as “yelling” at Schafer, and Gruber said that “there wasn’t a single person in that party who didn’t hear me when I spoke.”

Gruber and her friends left the party immediately after the confrontation.

More:

Schafer said that after the confrontation, she walked into the next room, “tried dancing and it just didn’t feel right, so I left.” She didn’t want a cabdriver to see her in blackface, so she had her cousin, who was at the party, drive her home.

The next day, says Schafer, she wrote an e-mail to Toles and his wife to apologize. She said she hadn’t meant harm, but had made a terrible mistake. More:

On her Facebook page, Schafer posts often about her opposition to President Trump and her support of immigrants, gun control, gay rights and anti-racism causes, including photos she took at marches and demonstrations she attended.

Schafer said she has spent many hours in therapy talking about “how carelessly I behaved. I’m deeply ashamed.”

This activist white liberal spent hours in therapy because she made a dumb, offensive joke that she intended to be making fun of someone she considered racist, but that was taken as racist. Sounds like she was extremely remorseful. You might be wondering why she didn’t call Gruber and Prince to apologize. It might have something to do with the fact that neither woman knew Tom Toles. They had come to the party as strangers.

Schafer wasn’t the only one in therapy.

Prince, too, has sought to work through the events of the evening with a therapist. “It was a humiliating experience for me,” she said. “I felt threatened and physically and emotionally exposed. . . . I felt powerless in a way that I never want to feel again.”

Liberals, my gosh.

Well, you know where this is going. Nearly two years later, in light of the Black Lives Matter moment, Gruber saw her chance. She contacted Toles, the party host, whom she didn’t know, and demanded that he participate in the public humiliation of his friend. From the Post:

Gruber felt compelled to revive the 2018 incident. Last week, she emailed Toles, whom she has never met.

“In 2018, I attended a Halloween party at your home,” she wrote. “I understand that you are not responsible for the behavior of your guests, but at the party, a woman was in Blackface. She harassed me and my friend — the only two women of color — and it was clear she made her ‘costume’ with racist intent.”

Gruber, a 27-year-old management consultant, told Toles that the incident had “weighed heavily on my heart — it was abhorrent and egregious.” She asked him to help her identify the woman.

Because he is a human being, Toles was reluctant to identify Schafer to this perfect stranger who meant her ill. Then Gruber, a consultant at Accenture who had a traumatic childhood, pulled out the progressive big guns:

But Toles did not give Gruber the woman’s name, and Gruber reacted sharply: “Hiding her name is a deliberate act of white privilege and cowardice, not friendship.”

Denounce your friends, or else! Toles offered to bring the parties together so Schafer could apologize and ask for forgiveness. Gruber wasn’t having it. She demanded a public apology:

She told Toles that he was not innocent in the conflict: “As you well know,” Gruber wrote, “we are an extension of the company we keep.”

Denounce your friends or else stand accused of being complicit with racism! With Gruber’s moral blackmail hanging over everybody’s head, the Post began working on a story about this incident involving their cartoonist. Then this happened today:

On Wednesday, after Schafer informed her employer, a government contractor, about the blackface incident and The Post’s forthcoming article, she was fired, she said.

Read it all. It’s long and very detailed. In fact, the length of the thing is part of the moral horror of what happened.

My first thought was that this is a real Bonfire of the Vanities moment in which Washington liberals destroy each other. Ha ha! You fools made this world for yourselves. Enjoy living in it!

But then I thought about how these vicious women, Gruber and Prince, destroyed this foolish woman’s life. She’s 54 years old, and has been publicly humiliated over a bad joke, and lost her job. She’ll be lucky to work again now, with this taint. Gruber refused the opportunity for Schafer to express remorse personally, and, in effect, compelled Toles to participate in the denunciation of his friend. And the Washington Post, which ought to have refused to have any part in the sleazy Gruber-Prince vendetta, dutifully and disgustingly went along with the progressive script, playing a key role in the destruction.

The Czech writer Milan Kundera’s first novel, The Joke, is about Ludvik, a student in Stalinist-era Czechoslovakia who is an enthusiastic Communist. Trying to tease a young comrade he finds to be too serious about politics, he tells a dumb joke making fun of the Communist Party, and is quickly denounced by all his friends. He is sent away to spend years working in a mine with other “subversives,” and his life is radically changed, leaving him permanently embittered.

In researching Live Not By Lies, I ran across lots of real-life stories like this. The story of Rudolf Dobias was one of the worst — and it is relevant to this DC story. Here is Dobias in his house in rural Slovakia, telling me the story of his imprisonment:

I wrote about him in this blog post last year. Excerpt:

When he was 20, and Czechoslovakia was still in the grips of High Stalinism, Mr. Dobias was arrested on charges of treason. He belonged to a Catholic scouting organization, and was falsely believed to have drawn a cartoon making fun of Stalin and Czech leader Klement Gottwald (both of whom had died by then, but it didn’t matter). Mr. Dobias was sentenced to 18 years in a prison labor camp, and sent to work in a uranium mine.

At 84, Mr. Dobias is in bad shape. He told us that his body is in pain all the time. Still, he sat for a 90 minute interview with me for my upcoming book. He insisted in our conversation that in prison, he was free, because he had interior freedom. As young as he was, the older men in prison with him, including a Catholic priest, took him on as a son, and encouraged him all the time, telling him that he was on the right path. He credits those men with deepening his faith in God by teaching him how to regard suffering as a means of drawing closer to Him. Notice that the comfort here was that his intense suffering was made bearable because it had meaning. That, and it was shared by all. Like everyone I’ve interviewed from the underground church on this trip, Dobias emphasized how indispensable it is to have close friends when you are persecuted.

After his release, Mr. Dobias struggled to find work, being a former political prisoner. He ended up as a miner, having to live away from home for long stretches. Even his children suffered. His little boy, for example, was not allowed to attend kindergarten because his father had been an enemy of the state. Mr. Dobias began writing successful children’s literature in the 1970s, but it wasn’t until after communism ended in 1989 that he was allowed to turn to writing literature for adults. Now he is now considered one of his country’s greatest writers.

He wasn’t even guilty of the joke, but Rudolf Dobias still paid for it heavily, and so did his family.

Sue Schafer is not being sent off to the uranium mines. But she will never be the same, because of her stupid mistake, because of the toxic twins Lexie Gruber and Lyric Prince, and the monsters who run the Washington Post, did what they did. An exquisite irony: Five days before Halloween 2018, Megyn Kelly lost her job at NBC simply for having been perceived as minimizing blackface. Schafer, a liberal activist, put on blackface to mock Kelly, who had been ruined professionally not for wearing blackface, but for seeming to minimize its offensiveness.

This is the world the progressives and their institutions like the Washington Post have created for us all. If you think it’s only going to affect them, you’re very, very wrong. These totalitarians are making it impossible to have a normal society. Here is a relevant passage from Live Not By Lies:

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

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

“Information means power,” Kamila says. “We know from our life under the totalitarian regime that if you know something about someone, you can manipulate him or her. You can use it against them. The secret police have evidence of everything like that. They could use it all against you. Anything!”

Kamila pointed out to me the scars along the living room wall of her Prague apartment where, after the end of communism, she and her husband had ripped out the wires the secret police used to bug their home. It turns out that no one in the Benda family uses smartphones or emails. Too risky, they say, even today.

Kamila and her son Patrik showed me their phones that night. They are not smartphones; the Bendas believe it’s too risky to have phones connected to the Internet. I thought that night that they really were scarred by their experiences under communism, and are maybe too paranoid. I don’t think that anymore. A couple of days ago I interviewed an American source who works for the Democratic Party, on the subject of cancel culture. He would only speak to me through an encryption service, and warned me strongly that it’s far too risky to communicate otherwise. If he had said that to me just a few months ago, I would have thought him paranoid too. Not anymore.

Researching the book, I learned that people living under communism had to be extremely careful about their social lives. You never knew who might be an informer. A single careless word might change your life forever, if the wrong person heard it, and wanted to hurt you. Imagine how that deforms society. In Budapest, a young Hungarian told me that Hungarian society has not recovered from the damage that aspect of communism did to civil society. Even today, three decades after the end of communism, she said, Hungarians still struggle to trust each other. When one false word, one dumb joke, can destroy your life, paranoia is a survival skill.

Again: we do not have gulags here, nor do we have secret police. But we are creating something similar. You now have to be extremely careful about your social circles. It ought to have been obvious to Sue Schafer that you don’t put on blackface in any context in this day and age. She made a mistake that she will be paying for for years to come. But what if Schafer had gotten into a conversation at the Toles party with these two, Gruber and Prince, and offered the opinion that Megyn Kelly had been treated too harshly for her blackface comments? What if they had gotten into a shouting match over it, and Lyric Prince decided that she felt “unsafe” in the presence of a white person who defended blackface-adjacent Megyn Kelly? And what if, two years on, Lexie Gruber decided to telephone Tom Toles and threaten to tar him as a racist for being friends with a woman who, at his party, defended a media figure who had lost her job for minimizing the offensiveness of blackface?

Do you think this story would have ended up differently under those circumstances? I don’t. I think we would be at exactly this same place.

Here’s the thing: it is fast becoming too risky to socialize with people you don’t know and trust. How can you be sure that a joke you tell, or an opinion you offer at a party, something that is said within the hearing of a SJW monster like Lexie Gruber, won’t be used against you on social media to destroy your reputation, get you fired, make you unemployable, and so forth? You can’t be. You think a heartfelt personal apology will save you from ruin? Not with toxic SJWs like Gruber and Prince on the prowl. People are going to have to withdraw from spending time socially with those who cannot be trusted. And the circles of trust are going to grow smaller as the stakes grow bigger, and paranoia abounds.

This is what it means to live in a soft totalitarian society. The government has nothing to do with it. The secret police didn’t come for Sue Schafer and her circle. Two merciless woke young women, and the Washington Post, did. We are doing it to ourselves. Correction: we are not doing it to ourselves; liberals and progressives are, aided and abetted by the disgraceful media. I have always thought Donald Trump was outrageous, even dangerously authoritarian, to call the media “the enemy of the people.” Now? Not so much.

Read that Post story. It is a kind of obituary for a free society.

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