Rod Dreher's Blog, page 138

Rayshard Brooks & Deadly Force

Here is the Atlanta police body cam and dashcam footage from the Rayshard Brooks shooting:

As you can see in the video, police arrived to find Brooks passed out drunk in his car at a Wendy’s drive-thru. They got him to pull over, then performed a field sobriety test, which he failed. You will notice throughout their encounter, the officers are professional and courteous, as is Brooks in response.

Trouble began when the officers told him he was too drunk to drive, and started to cuff him. Brooks resisted arrest. Both officers tried to wrestle him to the ground. You can hear one of them warn him to stop resisting, or he would be tased. Then you can hear a cop voice tell him to get his hands off the taser.

Brooks steals one of the police taser and begins to run away. Here’s how the New York Times broke down the scene on camera:

The security camera footage filmed at Wendy’s shows Officer Rolfe chasing Mr. Brooks. In seconds, Officer Rolfe passes his Taser from his right hand to his left hand, and reaches for his handgun.

While being chased, and in full stride, Mr. Brooks looks behind him, points the Taser he is holding in Officer Rolfe’s direction and fires it. The flash of the Taser suggests that Mr. Brooks did not fire it with any real accuracy.

Officer Rolfe discards the Taser he is carrying, draws his handgun and fires it three times at Mr. Brooks as he is running away. Mr. Brooks falls to the ground.

An investigator for the Georgia Bureau of Investigation put it like this last night:

“It does appear in the video that he is fleeing from the Atlanta police officers, that as he’s fleeing he turns back over his shoulder with what appears to the naked eye to be his Taser that the eyewitnesses told us they saw the individual have that belonged to one of the officers,” Reynolds said. “And as he turned it over, you’ll be able to see on the video the Atlanta officer, literally reach down to get his service weapon and as he gets his weapon, Mr. Brooks begins turning his body away from him, I presume to flee.”

I strongly urge you to watch the clip. The key sequence is when a fleeing Brooks turns to fire the stolen taser at Officer Rolfe. Rolfe then reaches for his pistol, and fires at Brooks, who by then has his back to the officer. This drama takes place in two seconds — from the 3:57 to the 3:59 point on the video. Understand, at the beginning of those two seconds, Brooks fires the taser at the officer, who makes a split-second (literally) decision to unholster his weapon and fire at the suspects.

The Atlanta PD’s use of deadly force policy is this:

1. He or she reasonably believes that the suspect possesses a deadly weapon or any object, device, or instrument which, when used offensively against a person, is likely to or actually does result in serious bodily injury and when he or she reasonably believes that the suspect poses an immediate threat of serious bodily injury to the officer or others; or

2. When there is probable cause to believe that the suspect has committed a crime involving the infliction or threatened infliction of serious physical harm (O.C.G.A. Section 17-4-20) and the employee reasonably believes that the suspect’s escape would create a continuing danger of serious physical harm to any person.

From a 2018 Vox explainer about when police officers are allowed to use deadly force:

Constitutionally, “police officers are allowed to shoot under two circumstances,” David Klinger, a University of Missouri St. Louis professor who studies use of force, said. The first circumstance is “to protect their life or the life of another innocent party” — what departments call the “defense-of-life” standard. The second circumstance is to prevent a suspect from escaping, but only if the officer has probable cause to think the suspect poses a dangerous threat to others.

The logic behind the second circumstance, Klinger said, comes from the Supreme Court’s decision in Tennessee v. Garner. That case involved a pair of police officers who shot a 15-year-old boy as he fled from a burglary. (He’d stolen $10 and a purse from a house.) The court ruled that cops couldn’t shoot every felon who tried to escape. But, as Klinger said, “they basically say that the job of a cop is to protect people from violence, and if you’ve got a violent person who’s fleeing, you can shoot them to stop their flight.”

The key to both the legal standards — defense of life and fleeing a violent felony — is that it doesn’t matter whether there is an actual threat when force is used. Instead, what matters is the officer’s “objectively reasonable” belief that there is a threat.

So, where are we? A drunken suspect violently resisted arrest, stealing an officer’s taser, and firing it at an officer as he ran from police. The cop fired at about one second to decide what to do. He shot the fleeing suspect. Was the suspect a sufficient threat to injure him or someone else? It seems that the “deadly force” judgment depends on that.

Let us stipulate here that drunk-driving Rayshard Brooks would be alive today if he had complied with the lawful orders of police, who treated him with courtesy. Let us stipulate that Rayshard Brooks would be alive today if he had not stolen a police taser and fired it at cops. Let us also stipulate that burning down a Wendy’s, as the Atlanta mob did, is not a reasonable response to a police-involved shooting that takes place in its parking lot.

Now, watch that video and put yourself in Officer Rolfe’s shoes. Could you make the call not to shoot, in a split second, under taser fire from a violent fleeing suspect?

Maybe Officer Rolfe — sorry, the now-former Officer Rolfe — really is guilty of using excessive force. I await the results of the GBI investigation. But I gotta say, I would never, ever want to be a city cop, not these days. Our cities are going to become unpoliceable.

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Race, Poverty, Privilege

A reader who is a senior physician writes in response to the “Hour Of Wolves And Shattered Shields” post. I have blurred some of this to protect her privacy):

Like the person who wrote to you, I too am having problems with the idea of white privilege. The house I grew up in was all that my parents could afford. It had no heating system and because the house was more than 120 years old, in poor repair, my mother refused to burn anything in the one fireplace. My room was so cold in the winter time that ice would form, several inches thick. My great grandmothers made quilts. Yet I slept with socks, long johns, a long night gown and a wool hat and buried myself beneath the quilts. My clothes for school came from the Salvation Army or Heart and Hand. More than once I was humiliated by classmates who recognized an older sister’s dress. I took a job with my local newspaper writing copy and taking photos of events in my county. I was 11. When I discovered I could also pitch stories to several other newspapers in neighboring counties, it was a red letter day. 10 cents per copy inch and 3 dollars per published photo. Processing my own B&W photos was cheaper than having it done professionally, so I kept more of my profit.

Fast forward to my undergraduate admission to [Ivy League college]. The child of high school dropouts, I got a complete financial package. One of my roommates was a young black woman from Manhattan. Her father was vice president of a prestigious organization and her mother was a full professor at Barnard. They lived in an expensive apartment near Central Park.

She and I are still friendly. Privilege was not what I felt when I met [name].

During my four years at [Ivy League college] (late 70’s-early 80’s) crime on campus was rampant. Twice I was attacked, beaten horribly because I did not have any money to give my attackers. Both times I required surgery. My attackers were black males. Privilege is not what I felt after those attacks.

A friend of mine was raped for hours at knife point — her attacker was black. A student in my [dorm] was nearly stabbed to death — by a young black male. Friends of one of my roommates were raped by two black males. A guy that I often spoke with at the gym was attacked by several black guys armed with bats. Even after they took his money and watch, they still attacked him.

I don’t hate blacks as a race. My black friends and colleagues know that. Having spent nearly my entire career taking care of blacks, Hispanics and society’s most vulnerable and being married to a Hispanic — I fail to see how I could be a racist. I have fostered the careers of several young black physicians — one of whom now teaches at [Ivy League school], another is a department chief in [major American city], a third has one of the biggest medical practices in [state]. Currently I am helping another, training him to be my successor.

None of this is what Martin Luther King promulgated. However, like the person you wrote about in your piece, I dare not speak my mind. In fact, I had to sign up for yet another diversity webinar that the Dean wants all program directors to watch. He also wanted us to wear our white coats, taking a knee for the cameras. Fortunately, I was working in trauma taking care of the myriad young black men who shoot each other every day in [this major American city].

On that last point, the reader makes me think about the most famous performer to come from Baton Rouge, my city: the rapper Boosie Badazz. Here he is from a video earlier in his career, shot in his north Baton Rouge neighborhood:

Can’t imagine why those gentlemen remain economically marginalized. Must be racism.

For its size, Baton Rouge is one of the most murder-ridden cities in the country. Last year, 75 percent of the victims were black males. If you know Baton Rouge, then you can read this map of 2019 homicides, and realize that they overwhelmingly took place in predominantly black neighborhoods.

But the real problem is police violence? Right.

UPDATE: Comment from Wyoming Doc:

I can absolutely see much of my own life in your correspondent above.

I too have been in academic medicine for decades. I have done everything I know to do to foster careers of physicians that are not only African-American, but also Hispanic, American Indian (real ones – not Elizabeth Warren types), and Asians. I did this because they are the ones who can go back to their communities with credibility – and be physicians.

I have had the privilege of mentoring dozens and dozens of these individuals that are now in practice all over this country. I am in touch with them constantly – I love to hear their stories. I feel that I am truly blessed to have had such influence on their lives. I know from my old students and residents that there is a struggle now for the soul of the African American community. Many of my old students understand the struggle – but also find the whole current approach just incomprehensible. They, like me, working in inner city hospitals, in the heart of the crisis, can easily see that there is so much more going wrong with our minority communities than “white privilege” or police problems. We physicians have known this for years – but no one listened. Your video above is absolutely representative of one of the big problems in young black men – the adulation of drug abuse, misogyny, thuggish behavior, and antisocial attitudes that our entire society now worships in their music and culture. Instead of the young men learning how to support families and be fathers, they emulate this behavior. It is truly a vicious cycle. And here is the core of the issue – I was in our inner city culture as a physician for 30 years, I have not a clue how to fix this problem.

Your readers may assume that I have white privilege. I came from a very very humble background in a very rural part of this country. Dirt poor. But my parents loved me – and gave me all the skills I needed to succeed in this life. Hard hard work was my life as a kid and young man. It has served me well as an adult.

And my wife? She is a Chinese immigrant. She grew up in an area of China that is still steeped in their traditional ways. She is a graduate of their version of MIT. She is 1000 times smarter than I am. The second that children came into our lives – she quit her job and her career. There was no question in her mind that would be done – there was no talking her out of it either. There has been very little TV watching or other screen time in our house. When it is on – it is PBS documentaries – Nature and Nova and American Experience. Certainly no video games. She has been teaching the kids Mandarin and English spelling, diction and vocabulary and writing since age 2. She began teaching math and science at age 4. They are outside running and playing 4-5 hours daily. They are doing Tai Chi and martial arts taught by her at home daily. We have gardens and plants – and it is now their job to manage them. The children beam when we eat their food. The Chinese way is intense mental stimulation and physical stimulation all at the same time every day of a child’s life.

This is going on all over this country in Asian households. Their children are considered their most important treasure – absolutely nothing else matters. Is it any wonder that their ACT and SAT scores in general are much higher than any other ethnic groups? I personally have been amazed at my wife’s tenacity. Her “teaching” simply is levels beyond anything I have experienced as a Caucasian growing up in this country.

And now – last night on her WeChat came a petition from her Chinese university’s alumni association. This issue has not received much media coverage in the last few weeks – but there is now a major push in universities all over America to quit using ACT and SAT scores as admission criteria. You see – many of our best universities admissions are loaded to the gills with Asian and Indian kids – the other races simply cannot compete on the basis of these scores. Therefore, we dump the scores. This development has been viewed as a hard slap in the face to the Asian community. Indeed, the title of the petition was “Do Asian Lives Matter?”

Rod – I am truly in a quandary. It is obvious to me that our society has a big problem with the development of young minority kids. If I was growing up with a father (probably not my mother’s husband) like the guy in your video – I can only imagine what would have become of my life. This has nothing to do with white privilege. This has nothing to do with police brutality. After being in the big middle of it for 30 years – I have ZERO solutions on how we break this vicious cycle. I know for sure it is going to take a lot more than defunding police and “throwing money” at the problem.

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Black Lives Matter Comes Home

On Friday, in my hometown, there was a Black Lives Matter rally in the same park where we have held Walker Percy Weekend events. I didn’t go — I haven’t left the house much since mid-March, when the Covid-19 thing hit — but a couple of (white) friends did. They said it was a hopeful, peaceful event. I was very glad to hear it, and I wish in retrospect that I had put on a mask and driven the thirty miles up to the country to march. It has been a difficult week for the town — a hard one, but a necessary one. Let me tell you a story.

Forty-nine years ago, the Historical Society started an annual festival called the Audubon Pilgrimage. Its intention was to use the time John James Audubon spent in West Feliciana Parish. From a 2010 travel story in The New York Times:

In June 1821 John James Audubon stepped off a steamboat in West Feliciana Parish and immediately wished he were back onboard. Audubon, poor and unknown, had arrived in plantation country to tutor a landowner’s daughter. It was humid, he missed his wife and sons, and he feared he would be awkward at his host’s table.

But his doubts disappeared when he saw how strikingly the landscape had changed from that of New Orleans, just 100-odd miles south. “The rich magnolia covered with its odiferous blossoms, the holly, the beech, the tall yellow poplar, the hilly ground,” he wrote in his journal, enumerating the wonders that greeted him. “Even the red clay I looked at with amazement.”

West Feliciana’s scenery has surprised other travelers in the years since Audubon visited. Its center today, St. Francisville, is a collection of historic cottages, old churches and newer buildings perched on a ridge above the Mississippi, 30 minutes north of Baton Rouge. Although it may be less celebrated than Natchez, Miss., 60 miles north, the region exudes the almost-supernatural beauty of which Audubon wrote.

For a short time, Audubon lived at Oakley Plantation, in a smallish house south of town, where he tutored the daughter of the plantation owner, and worked on his Birds of America portraits. He completed 32 while living at Oakley. Audubon had a phenomenally interesting life (read this story from Smithsonian Magazine to learn more). He left his wife Lucy in West Feliciana while he went to London to print Birds of America. Eventually he returned to fetch her, and they moved away.

I was four years old when the Pilgrimage started. I don’t remember a time without the Pilgrimage. All my life, I have taken it to be a celebration not of Audubon, but of the antebellum South. Every spring we had it. Tourists would come and visit our gorgeous plantations, admire the azaleas and other spring flowers, and get a taste of 19th century history. Some of the women would dress in period clothing, and gad about town. It was something the whole parish participated in, and by “the whole town,” I mean the white people. Even though half the population was black, there were no black people participating in this festival. And why should they? It was a celebration of a time and a culture in which their ancestors were enslaved on these same plantations.

Here’s the thing: I don’t think the incongruity ever occurred to me until I moved away for college. You might find this hard to believe, but if you grew up white in the South with this double-mindedness, you’ll know exactly what I’m talking about. When you look at it from the outside, you might think, good Lord, fellow white people, what are we doing? In 1990, my first year working as a journalist, in Baton Rouge, I told my editor I wanted to do a feature story on why my hometown had a festival that excluded the black half of the parish. He agreed with me that it was wrong, but being a wiser man than his crusading young underling, told me that this was not a good idea for me. I was sore about it. In time, I recognized that for complicated reasons, my editor had been right.

Well, that story was finally written, in a way — by my very progressive niece Hannah Leming, who is now living in Spain.

Last weekend, inspired by the George Floyd moment, she posted a change.org petition calling on the Pilgrimage to change its ways, and open itself up to black people and black history, or shut down. She wrote, in part:

I understand that the Pilgrimage is a tradition that a lot of people cherish and is a good form of tourism for our small town. I understand that it was created to celebrate an artist. But in turn, it celebrates slavery by hiding that part of the 1820s from the tour. If it truly is going to be an exploration of the past, we have to see all sides of history at that time.

I grew up going to the Audubon Pilgrimage wearing the dresses and dancing the Maypole. It was an enjoyable part of my childhood. But time, reflection and listening and learning from the Black community has made me realize that the Pilgrimage is part of the system of oppression.

When students are brought to the Rural Homestead for field trips, white and black students are either given or encouraged to buy wooden paddles engraved with their name and whips, both objects used to torture slaves, without any explanation.

I remember going to Oakley Plantation on a field trip and the whole plantation life being glorified and the real history of oppression never was told to me or my black classmates. We didn’t see the slave quarters and they were never even mentioned as being a part of this “educational” field trip.

When you really think about it, the Audubon Pilgrimage is a celebration of slavery. Does our Black community come out and do plantation tours and dress up “like the good old days”? No. Because the “good old days” are only for the white people who gained money off of slave labor and continue to benefit even today.

Well, no, it is not “a celebration of slavery.” That’s unfair, and I’ll tell you why I think so in a moment. I don’t recall when the State of Louisiana moved slave cabins to Oakley, which is a state park, but they are not original to the site. There were slaves on the original plantation, certainly, but the addition of slave cabins to the exhibit was done in recent years. I don’t know exactly when — perhaps after Hannah’s field trip — but the state relocated those cabins to Oakley, to give visitors a sense of what slave life was like.

But these are arguing over details. On the whole, Hannah is right. I was one of the early signers of her petition. I wrote there, in part:

This needs to happen. It’s not a conservative thing or a liberal thing: it’s about human decency, and justice. I didn’t realize until I was a grown man what a one-sided myth our local history was, as my generation was taught it. I had no idea until 2012 what the Civil Rights movement was like in our parish (e.g., that there had been a white near-riot on the courthouse lawn when a black pastor registered to vote on Oct 17, 1963 … just four years before I was born). Our common history is not only one of slavery and oppression, but those evils were real, and must be acknowledged, and repented of. How can the parish have a historic festival that leaves out half the people of the parish, and not only leaves them out, but celebrates an era and a culture that enslaved their ancestors? I hope there is a way to go forward with a new Pilgrimage that is truthful and fair, that celebrates the good that we share in common while acknowledging with sorrow the evil that is also our legacy.

The petition quickly garnered a thousand signatures, and they kept coming. One of the signers was Ann Dart, the daughter of the late Libby Dart, a distinguished local historian who was one of the founders of the Pilgrimage:

Hannah quotes my mother, Elisabeth Dart, in her capacity as a founding member of the West Feliciana Historical Society in her petition. What she does not quote is my mother’s initial opposition to resurrecting the Jim Crow tradition of opening up the plantation homes for touring. As a teenager growing up in St. Francisville, donning antebellum skirts and working in those homes, she was struck then by the hypocrisy of celebrating them on tour. She called them “earthly mansions built on spiritual dung heaps”. These beautiful monuments to wealth and privilege were built on the backs of black slaves owned by white men. She had misgivings about restarting that tradition in the late 1970’s, preferring instead that the art of John James Audubon be the focus. She was outvoted and the tradition was begun anew.

Some years later, her attempt to chronicle the other reality of life in antebellum West Feliciana was to establish the Rural Homestead. She and my father donated land that the original homestead stood on and they both supported its continued success every year. It was a half-measure at best during those fragile post-segregation times, but it was a start. Now is the time for a full- measure to tell the complete history of the parish—to include voices from the other realities of poor black and white residents, as a true historian would. I know that my mother would support that effort were she alive today to add her voice to that of the petitioners.

The Rural Homestead was a wonderful exhibit showing how life was for West Felicianians who were not living in plantations, but in dogtrot cabins. Hannah’s petition talks about paddles and whips, but those were not created for visitors to the Rural Homestead with any reference at all to slavery. The paddles were made by a local craftsman who made wood shingles for roofs; he would make paddles for children to take away as souvenirs. The whip-making was by an area craftsman who made them for cattlemen, and who came to demonstrate how people of the 19th century made them. It is unfair to claim that those things were presented as adjacent to slavery, though I have learned that that is how many local black people saw them. I want to make that clear here — that the story is more complicated than the petition presents it — even as I wholeheartedly agree that the Pilgrimage needs to change.

Well, as you can imagine, the petition caused quite an uproar in town. A number of black residents signed it, and in comments, spoke of their pain at having to go to Pilgrimage field trips as students, and to see celebrated a culture in which their ancestors were slaves, with no acknowledgement of the moral horror. Their pain is real, and absolutely justified. It cannot be ignored. Within days of the petition’s appearance, the Historical Society board met, and canceled the Pilgrimage permanently. It said in a statement that it will look for new ways to tell the parish’s history in a more balanced way.

I hear that there’s a lot of anger and hurt by some of the white folks who had been involved in the Pilgrimage over the years, and who believe it was unfairly targeted. I know most of these people, and though I haven’t talked to any of them about this, I am confident that they carried this festival on without malice, and without being aware that there was anything wrong with it. You non-Southerners are going to find this hard to believe, but it is entirely possible to live in a small town, observing the same rituals that your parents and grandparents did, and not realize that you ought not be doing what you’re doing, or at least that you ought to do it a different way. Remember me telling you that I didn’t realize there was anything wrong with the Pilgrimage until I went off to college? This is what it means to grow up white in a place like that. The power of collective myth is immense.

In my generation, the first to go through integrated schools, we didn’t use the n-word. We knew that we didn’t carry within us the segregationist outlook of our forebears, so we thought we were fine. I think the term “unconscious bias” is mostly a political construct, but you know, it absolutely applies to white people like us, back home. I guarantee you that at Pilgrimage time, most white people simply thought they were going to do something nice for tourists and celebrate our antebellum history. Who is against celebrating history? It’s educational, right? The absence of black people from any of it just didn’t occur to folks. That’s my guess, anyway. Even until last week, I figured that black people in West Feliciana regarded the Pilgrimage as my late father did: a bunch of stuff and nonsense, and an excuse for society ladies to wear fancy dresses and hats in the spring sunshine.

I was wrong. The pain the black residents expressed in their comments was shocking, but not surprising, if you think about it. At first I was disappointed that the Historical Society cancelled the Pilgrimage without at least trying to find a way to reconceive it in a more inclusive and historically accurate form. But then I thought about how difficult it would be to do. It’s very hard to keep alive the romance of moonlight-and-magnolias — which is what tourists want — when you also have to look squarely at the evil side of antebellum culture.

And then there’s the human dimension. Ann Dart, in her comment on the petition, spoke of “those fragile post-segregation times.” This is something that people of my generation and younger can’t appreciate, because we were little kids then. Only when I was older did I come to learn how hard some local people, black and white, worked to make integration of the public schools come off successfully. That didn’t happen until the late 1960s. For kids of my generation, it was the normal thing for blacks and whites to go to school together. It wasn’t too many years before I started elementary school there that Jim Crow was in full effect, and the Klan rode at night. I’m 53 years old, and this world ended around 1970, before I started kindergarten. Our white parents never, ever talked of it. On the comments to Hannah’s petition, there are remarks by younger whites from West Feliciana who testify that all of this had been hidden from them. It’s the truth.

I was angry about it, like Hannah, when I was her age, and began to realize how much history had been kept from us. But as I grew older, and learned more about the Civil Rights Movement, I came to see that the price of being able to kill segregation, and make one school system for all West Feliciana children work, was burying the past. Right or wrong, that was the decision made to keep the peace, and get on into the future as best we could.

Was it worth it? Well, West Feliciana has one of the best school systems in the state now. Our neighboring parish, East Feliciana, chose a different path. It established a segregation academy, where most of the white kids went to school. That parish is divided by race in ways that West Feliciana isn’t, because our parents generation learned how to make it work.

However, the price paid by black people of the parish included having to stand on the sidelines while the white people got to have their antebellum festival. The price paid by black people included sending their children on school field trips to hear whitewashed (!) history that edited out the unpleasant parts of the story West Felicianians told themselves about who they were. The “they” was white West Felicianians. Not black ones.

But now, that’s going to change. How very strange that the killing of a black man in Minneapolis led to a series of events that killed a small-town Louisiana festival that has been going on for nearly half a century. I am confident, though, that something good is going to come out of this. It is going to require hard work for whites and blacks to engaged each other, and a lot of patience and grace on both sides. But I have faith that the people of the parish are going to work out a way to face our common history together — the good and the bad that make us who we are.

I strongly reject the idea that we must despise plantation homes because of their connection to slavery. Slavery isn’t the only story of antebellum Louisiana, nor is Jim Crow the only tale of post Civil War West Feliciana that has any meaning. There is so much rich history there, black and white. Audubon’s legacy too is so vivid — much more vivid than I ever heard growing up. Here, from that Smithsonian Magazine story I linked to above, is a description of Audubon’s coming over from London to fetch his wife in West Feliciana:

By 1828 Audubon had convinced himself that Lucy expected him to amass a fortune before she would leave Louisiana, while she feared her husband had been dazzled by success in glamorous London and didn’t love her anymore. (Audubon hated London, which was fouled with coal smoke.) Finally, she insisted that he come in person to claim her, and after finding a trustworthy friend to handle a year’s production of plates for Birds, he did, braving the Atlantic, crossing the mountains to Pittsburgh by mail coach, racing down the Ohio and the Mississippi by steamboat to Bayou Sarah, where he disembarked in the middle of the night on November 17, 1829. Lucy had moved her school to William Garrett Johnson’s Beech Grove plantation by then, 15 miles inland; that was where Audubon was headed:

“It was dark, sultry, and I was quite alone. I was aware yellow fever was still raging at St. Francisville, but walked thither to procure a horse. Being only a mile distant, I soon reached it, and entered the open door of a house I knew to be an inn; all was dark and silent. I called and knocked in vain, it was the abode of Death alone! The air was putrid; I went to another house, another, and another; everywhere the same state of things existed; doors and windows were all open, but the living had fled. Finally I reached the home of Mr. Nübling, whom I knew. He welcomed me, and lent me his horse, and I went off at a gallop. It was so dark that I soon lost my way, but I cared not, I was about to rejoin my wife, I was in the woods, the woods of Louisiana, my heart was bursting with joy! The first glimpse of dawn set me on my road, at six o’clock I was at Mr. Johnson’s house; a servant took the horse, I went at once to my wife’s apartment; her door was ajar, already she was dressed and sitting by her piano, on which a young lady was playing. I pronounced her name gently, she saw me, and the next moment I held her in my arms. Her emotion was so great I feared I had acted rashly, but tears relieved our hearts, once more we were together.”

And together they remained, for the rest of their lives.

Isn’t that incredible? Find a way to tell that story — a dramatic reading of Audubon’s diaries. How about lectures on slave culture out at Oakley’s slave cabins? Some of the black country churches in West Feliciana trace their roots to slave families first evangelized on the plantations. What was the life of the black church like then? What role did they play in the Civil Rights Movement? Take a look at this incredible Ebony magazine story of a brave black pastor who risked the agony of a white mob to register to vote in 1963.What an incredible story! The heroism of the Rev. Joseph Carter. There might be some people alive who remember it.

Now, the fact is that the fathers and grandfathers of a lot of us white people alive today might have been in that courthouse lawn mob. In 2014, three Freedom Riders who had been present, and who had been shot at, came back to visit St. Francisville. I accompanied them to the courthouse where it all happened, and blogged about it here. This is what they saw that day, recounted in the Ebony story:

The bus pulled up in front of the St. Francisville courthouse. About 100 whites milled around in front of the building. … “Look at ‘em over there like a bunch of buzzards,” shouted one white. “Look like coons,” taunted another. “Are those your good niggers?” shouted still another white man. Curses and racial epithets disturbed the morning air.

… Rev. Carter signed a vote registration book and received a receipt. As he left the courthouse, a photographer snapped him. “Take his picture,” shouted a member of the white mob. “It may be the last one he takes.”

This makes me ashamed. But this is our history, and we must face it. It is a history of good triumphing over evil: the brave Rev. Carter became the first black person to register to vote in our parish in something like 61 years. He deserves a bronze statue on the courthouse lawn.

The history of West Feliciana also includes the founding there of the West Florida Republic, an independent nation in North America for something like 74 days, before the American imperialists came in and took us over. There was a large Jewish merchant community in the late 19th and early 20th century. There was a famous Civil War incident in which the combatants stopped the war to give a Union gunboat commander a Masonic burial in Grace Church cemetery. I’m telling you, the history is really rich. A re-imagined festival that dug deeper into the complex history of the place would be potentially great.

Here’s what I worry about, though: that having spent nearly half a century wrongly erasing blacks and slavery from the cultural remembrance of the antebellum times, we will overcorrect and cancel all mention of antebellum culture. Yesterday on Twitter, the writer Cathy Young repeated an old Russian joke she has told before:

File under “A Soviet joke for everything”:

1917. Raucous communist rally in St. Petersburg. Elderly granddaughter of a Decembrist (1830s liberal rebel) asks her maid what they want.

– No more rich people, Ma’am.

– Funny, my grandfather wanted there to be no more poor people… https://t.co/0C5oLeKCIZ

— Cathy Young (@CathyYoung63) February 6, 2020

My fear is that rather than making the cultural memory of our shared history richer for everybody, in the name of equality, we are going to end up making it poorer for everybody. This is what would happen if, in our moral ardor, we misconstrued the commemoration of antebellum history as “a celebration of slavery.” There is a lot more to the black historical experience in America than mere suffering. Eugene D. Genovese’s much-acclaimed book Roll, Jordan, Roll: The World The Slaves Made  details the complexity of black life under slavery, and how the culture of Africans in America developed under the pressures of slavery. And, there is a lot more to the white historical experience than mere infliction of suffering on blacks. That is as much of a distortion of fact as the Myth of Moonlight And Magnolias.

I am thinking this morning that these words of Walker Percy’s, published as a letter to the editor of The New Republic in 1957, are helpful. On the race issue, Percy was a Southern white liberal, an “integrationist,” which was a very courageous thing to be in Louisiana back then. Anne Percy, one of Walker’s daughters, told me about the time her father hid her sister and her mom in the attic when the Klan burned a cross on their lawn. Walker Percy had skin in the game. Here are parts of his letter in response to an article critical of the South and the Southern tradition:

 

More, about the argument against segregation:

Percy’s wisdom is needed today. If we want a more truthful and just commemoration of history, we have to change. That’s why I signed the petition. But if getting on the right side of contemporary liberalism means holding everything about the antebellum past, and the past before 1968, in contempt, count me out. That would be as false as the myth it replaced. You will never, ever get anywhere good if you require a people to despise their ancestors. If that is the price of admission to the circles of the enlightened today, it’s not one I will pay.

My guess is that one reason the Pilgrimage ignored black people for half a century is that white people were too snowflakey to allow the curse of slavery to mar their idealized portrait of our past. I can remember an older white woman saying to me in 1994, “Rod, you know, we have always been so good to our blacks.”

Our blacks. The children entrusted to our care.

Now, what occasioned our conversation was that this woman was engaged in a charitable effort to help the black community, and in her mind, she was joining the long line of white folks who had behaved with paternalistic charity towards black people. I didn’t challenge her because she was older, and trying to do a good thing for needy black people. There wouldn’t have been any point in it. I’ve thought about that statement a lot over the years, though. It is a story that local white folks — my people — tell to diminish or dismiss the cruelty of slavery and Jim Crow, and to distance themselves from the moral taint of it. The thing is, that lady said that line in total innocence. She got it from her mother, most likely. She never would have heard any counternarrative. It’s a self-flattering myth. There are lots of these around. The United States is always right. Policemen are always our friends. That sort of thing.

I heard commonly when I was a child the myth that lots of times, slaves loved their masters, who treated them like family. If you grow up with that narrative, it gets deep inside you, in ways you may not realize. Even though you know as an adult that it cannot possibly be true, you don’t think about it too much. For example, I’d bet cash money that no white people involved with the Pilgrimage today really believe that “we have always been so good to our blacks,” and would cringe if they heard it. But in order to put on the Pilgrimage year after year in good conscience, and to keep the black people you are excluding invisible, you have to at some point accept a version of that myth. After the events of this past week in West Feliciana, that is no longer tenable. This is fantastic news.

But what comes next? I know there are bound to be a number of white folks in the parish who believe that Hannah’s petition and what it uncovered “caused division.” The truth is, the division has been there all along; the black folks have just remained silent about it. Their silence allowed whites to think that blacks were fine with what was happening. They weren’t. We know that now, and we can’t un-know it. This is good. It’s time that lie was put down.

Can we tell a new story about ourselves, together? A story that is truthful, but also hopeful? A story that leads us to true repentance, true forgiveness, and true reconciliation? A story that allows us to hold the good and the bad in our gaze at the same time, and affirm the good while lamenting the bad — and denying neither?

I don’t believe in bloodguiltiness. I don’t believe that whites today inherited the guilt from the slaveholding culture, and the Jim Crow culture. But I also do not believe that whites are free from the moral responsibilities left by the sins of our forefathers. We may not be guilty, but we are responsible. We cannot claim as our own the parts of the past we like without addressing the parts we abhor. The truth of Faulkner’s memorable lines — “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” — was vindicated this week in my hometown. The future we make for ourselves depends on how we deal in the present with the past.

A little more armchair psychology. A few years back, when I interviewed an older black man for a book project, and listened to him tell stories of the suffering he and his family endured under Jim Crow, I felt a deep sense of shame, because these things were terrible. Gratuitously cruel. Some of them were things I had never known about. I had not done those things to them. I wasn’t even alive when they were done. But sitting there in his living room, I could not get away from the burning awareness that somehow, I was implicated in it, because my ancestors — none of whom held slaves — had been part of that society.

Sitting here in my kitchen right now remembering that interview, I recall at some point wanting, and wanting intensely, the old black man to forgive me. He wasn’t manipulating me; he was just telling me stories. But as he did, I acutely felt a sense of responsibility for it all. I must have felt guilt, because I wanted his absolution. You know, I make fun of those white people who have abased themselves at the feet of black strangers in these past couple of weeks, but I know what it’s like to feel that sense of shame (shame more than guilt), and to want release from it. Anyway, I suspect that a lot of white people in my home parish are like me: we want to think of ourselves as good, and maybe we really are good, for the most part. But we have no idea how to talk with our black neighbors about what happened. Do they hate us? They shouldn’t hate us … or should they? If we don’t talk about any of it, maybe we can continue to get along. Let’s just keep looking forward, and not go there.

What I’m telling you is that the ignoring of black history and black people in my parish was likely not done out of a sense of malice, but out of a weird, most likely subconscious, desire to avoid the accusatory black gaze. My generation learned from our parents and grandparents how to deal with this conflict: don’t talk about it. And recalling my discussion earlier in this post about how “fragile” things were immediately after integration, the silence option might have been the best one available to everyone, black and white, at the time. You have to remember that the parish went from a period when blacks and whites went to separate schools, Jim Crow was the law, and some local officials were in the KKK, to the sudden and mostly non-violent end of that world.

I was two years old when the local schools integrated, in 1969. As I told you, mine was the first generation to go to fully integrated schools. We had no idea about any of this history. Nobody talked about it, at least among whites. Was it the shame of defeat that whites couldn’t bear to discuss? Was it a practical realization that the struggle was over, and it was time to do whatever it took to construct a peaceable future?

Two years after the integration of the schools, the Historical Society launched the Audubon Pilgrimage. Coincidence? Maybe. Don’t get me wrong, I would and do support any effort to explore and celebrate history, no matter when it is announced, and knowing two of the Pilgrimage founders, I am confident that their intentions were not to conceive of the event as a reaction to integration.

But if I were a black person in West Feliciana, I wouldn’t think there was anything coincidental at all about any of it. And I would still be mad. Here’s what I would think happened: the federal government told these white people that they had to go to school with us, and they decided they would do that, but they would also create a civic ritual to keep alive memory of a community without us, or with us pushed to the margins, out of sight and out of mind.

That may not be what really happened. But if you’re a white person in West Feliciana, you have to reckon with the fact that this take looks mighty plausible. In religious terms, a “pilgrimage” is a journey to a holy place as an act of devotion. The word isn’t accidental: the Audubon Pilgrimage, in the hands of elite white women, eventually became an act of devotion to the memory of a lost world. It was a ritual, though a civic one, designed to keep memory alive — not memory of the whole truth, but memory of a mythical truth that constitutes consciousness of historical white identity. The participation of subsequent generations of white children in the collective ritual was a way of construing their cultural memories. Whether this was the intention or not, this was the effect. Nobody told us at the Pilgrimage that slavery didn’t exist. It was simply ignored, because it interfered with the way whites preferred to remember history. Me, I stayed quiet about it all when I moved back to town in 2011, because I thought that my non-participation in the Pilgrimage was enough. [UPDATE: My wife has just read this piece, and reminded me that we participated as a family in the Pilgrimage one year. I apologize for getting it wrong; I had honestly forgotten. And for the record, I don’t think it is morally wrong for someone to have participated in the Pilgrimage. — RD]

Now the spell has been broken. I am not at all party to the discussions of the Historical Society board to end the Pilgrimage, but it is instructive, I think, how quickly it all collapsed. They must have known, deep down, that the day of this kind of historical memory is done. Nobody wants to try to explain why a civic ritual focused on local history that leaves out the black half of the community is not racist in effect, if not necessarily in intent.

But again: what next? I suppose we could all adopt the strategy of the 1970s leadership in both communities, and not talk about it for the sake of keeping the peace. But why would we do that? Theirs was a strategy of desperation, based in historical contingency. We should be careful about judging them for it. One reason West Feliciana has a school system today that is one of the best in the state is because of the decisions those people, now all dead, made to do whatever they had to do to make it work. That was then; this is now. Times have changed. We, whites and blacks of the parish, have been living together in a modified way — in that we have been going to school together, and sitting at lunch counters together, and the like — for half a century. America has had a two-term black president. We can do this. 

I don’t believe we can do this without the church — I mean, the black churches and the white churches of West Feliciana. Our shared Christian faith gives us the mechanism for repentance, forgiveness, and reconciliation. Guilt and shame are a terrible burden. So is anger. I would not have phrased Hannah’s petition the way she did it, but I see her act as bringing about opportunity for the inbreaking of radical grace — if local people, white and black, will receive it — and of transformation.

This is the moment for the church in West Feliciana. Who else? It would be very easy to lose the moment of grace through unbending white defensiveness, or unappeasable expressions of black anger. Jesus Christ teaches a better way. West Feliciana is not like other places, places that have lost their faith. Belief in Christ is still real for many black and white folks alike in West Feliciana. Yesterday’s Black Lives Rally march there began with a long communal prayer. We need the faith now like we never have.

To be clear, I do not align with the Black Lives Matter movement. Look at its profession of belief, and you’ll see why. And BLM, the organization, calls for the defunding of the police. I strongly reject that.

But.

A few years back, I wrote a book that paid tribute to the kindness of the people in my home parish — a book that was truthful, and a love letter. I meant it. West Feliciana is a good place, filled with good people. If you’ve come to the Walker Percy Weekend at some point over the past decade, you’ve experienced that. But there can be no doubt that in the Audubon Pilgrimage, the official ritual celebration of communal memory, black lives did not matter in West Feliciana. This was wrong, and we have to say so, and mean it. And not only mean it, but do something about it. 

We can’t change the past. We can change the future. Funny to think of it, but in The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, Hannah’s abrupt revelation to me on a Paris street of a long-buried family secret changed the narrative I thought was true about our family. I came home emotionally shattered, and confronted my dad about it. As I wrote in the book, he couldn’t accept it. It was true what Hannah had blurted out on the boulevard, all of it, but acknowledging the truth, and renouncing the false narrative he and our family told itself about who we were, was too painful for him. He mostly denied it all till his dying day. They all did. As a family, we never recovered. The force of gravity of their family myth, the story that told them who they were and who I was, and the way the world was, was so powerful that none could escape its pull. By choosing not to reckon honestly with the past, they foreclosed on a future for our family.

Will it be the same for the parish, now that the truth about the Pilgrimage, and the fact that black lives have not mattered in it, has been spoken openly? I don’t know. My mother called just now to talk about the continuing fallout from Hannah’s petition. I mentioned to her that Hannah had revealed a myth-busting truth to me in Paris in 2012, and though things never were okay after that, her speaking the truth was a gift. My life would have been more peaceful had I never known what she told me, but it would have been worse. It is always better to live with a painful truth than with a comforting lie. Lots of people did not want to hear what Hannah said. All of us, myself included, needed to hear it, though. I am very far from her woke politics, but I am proud of her for speaking truth about black lives in West Feliciana, and opening the door for change.

UPDATE: Folks, reading some of the comments, please understand that in this post, I am not making general comments about life in America between whites and blacks. I am talking about a particular people, in a particular place, who are heirs to a particular set of historical circumstances. I am probably not talking about you.

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Matt Taibbi On Journalism’s Suicide

Holy cow, the left-wing journalist Matt Taibbi goes full Savonarola on progressive journalism. Excerpts:

It feels liberating to say after years of tiptoeing around the fact, but the American left has lost its mind. It’s become a cowardly mob of upper-class social media addicts, Twitter Robespierres who move from discipline to discipline torching reputations and jobs with breathtaking casualness.

The leaders of this new movement are replacing traditional liberal beliefs about tolerance, free inquiry, and even racial harmony with ideas so toxic and unattractive that they eschew debate, moving straight to shaming, threats, and intimidation. They are counting on the guilt-ridden, self-flagellating nature of traditional American progressives, who will not stand up for themselves, and will walk to the Razor voluntarily.

They’ve conned organization after organization into empowering panels to search out thoughtcrime, and it’s established now that anything can be an offense, from a UCLA professor placed under investigation for reading Martin Luther King’s “Letter from a Birmingham Jail” out loud to a data scientist fired* from a research firm for — get this — retweeting an academic study suggesting nonviolent protests may be more politically effective than violent ones!

Now, this madness is coming for journalism.

Taibbi tells the story of what happened to Lee Fang, a courageous left-wing journalist who was hammered into submission by progressive colleagues for quoting a young black man from Oakland who said that black violence against black people deserves attention too, and for questioning the strategy of protesters targeting immigrant-owned businesses. I was only generally aware of what the woke mob, led by woke journalists, did to Fang. It is a disgrace. It is beyond a disgrace.

More:

There is symbolism here that goes beyond frustration with police or even with racism: these are orgiastic, quasi-religious, and most of all, deeply weird scenes, and the press is too paralyzed to wonder at it. In a business where the first job requirement was once the willingness to ask tough questions, we’ve become afraid to ask obvious ones.

On CNN, Minneapolis City Council President Lisa Bender was asked a hypothetical question about a future without police: “What if in the middle of the night, my home is broken into? Who do I call?” When Bender, who is white, answered, “I know that comes from a place of privilege,” questions popped to mind. Does privilege mean one should let someone break into one’s home, or that one shouldn’t ask that hypothetical question? (I was genuinely confused). In any other situation, a media person pounces on a provocative response to dig out its meaning, but an increasingly long list of words and topics are deemed too dangerous to discuss.

The media in the last four years has devolved into a succession of moral manias. We are told the Most Important Thing Ever is happening for days or weeks at a time, until subjects are abruptly dropped and forgotten, but the tone of warlike emergency remains: from James Comey’s firing, to the deification of Robert Mueller, to the Brett Kavanaugh nomination, to the democracy-imperiling threat to intelligence “whistleblowers,” all those interminable months of Ukrainegate hearings (while Covid-19 advanced), to fury at the death wish of lockdown violators, to the sudden reversal on that same issue, etc.

It’s been learned in these episodes we may freely misreport reality, so long as the political goal is righteous. It was okay to publish the now-discredited Steele dossier, because Trump is scum. MSNBC could put Michael Avenatti on live TV to air a gang rape allegation without vetting, because who cared about Brett Kavanaugh – except press airing of that wild story ended up being a crucial factor in convincing key swing voter Maine Senator Susan Collins the anti-Kavanaugh campaign was a political hit job (the allegation illustrated, “why the presumption of innocence is so important,” she said). Reporters who were anxious to prevent Kavanaugh’s appointment, in other words, ended up helping it happen through overzealousness.

There were no press calls for self-audits after those episodes, just as there won’t be a few weeks from now if Covid-19 cases spike, or a few months from now if Donald Trump wins re-election successfully painting the Democrats as supporters of violent protest who want to abolish police. No: press activism is limited to denouncing and shaming colleagues for insufficient fealty to the cheap knockoff of bullying campus Marxism that passes for leftist thought these days.

More:

The traditional view of the press was never based on some contrived, mathematical notion of “balance,” i.e. five paragraphs of Republicans for every five paragraphs of Democrats. The ideal instead was that we showed you everything we could see, good and bad, ugly and not, trusting that a better-informed public would make better decisions. This vision of media stressed accuracy, truth, and trust in the reader’s judgment as the routes to positive social change.

For all our infamous failings, journalists once had some toughness to them. We were supposed to be willing to go to jail for sources we might not even like, and fly off to war zones or disaster areas without question when editors asked. It was also once considered a virtue to flout the disapproval of colleagues to fight for stories we believed in (Watergate, for instance).

Today no one with a salary will stand up for colleagues like Lee Fang. Our brave truth-tellers make great shows of shaking fists at our parody president, but not one of them will talk honestly about the fear running through their own newsrooms. People depend on us to tell them what we see, not what we think. What good are we if we’re afraid to do it?

By all means, read the whole thing. Nobody can doubt Taibbi’s leftist credentials. Don’t miss the part where he talks about how the media are creating an isolation tank in which none of their readers understand what’s actually happening in the world. They lie to the rest of us because they lie to themselves.

 

The post Matt Taibbi On Journalism’s Suicide appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Black Lives Only Matter When Whites Take Them’

This below is making the rounds. It purports to be a letter from a historian of color on the UC Berkeley history faculty, to his or her colleagues. I am pretty sure that it is not actually from a historian at Berkeley. There are only four black people on the history faculty there, and it would be far too easy to identify the author. Nevertheless, whatever the source, it’s important to engage with its claims, as Wilfred Reilly, a black political scientist at Kentucky State, says in this tweet:

I can confirm that the letter in the thread below was sent to me and Tom Sowell. It’s really worth reading, in a time of widespread panic. https://t.co/bknCdO39c3

— Wilfred Reilly (@wil_da_beast630) June 12, 2020

Here is the text of the letter. All emphases are in the original:

Dear profs X, Y, Z

I am one of your colleagues at the University of California, Berkeley. I have met you both personally but do not know you closely, and am contacting you anonymously, with apologies. I am worried that writing this email publicly might lead to me losing my job, and likely all future jobs in my field.

In your recent departmental emails you mentioned our pledge to diversity, but I am increasingly alarmed by the absence of diversity of opinion on the topic of the recent protests and our community response to them.

In the extended links and resources you provided, I could not find a single instance of substantial counter-argument or alternative narrative to explain the under-representation of black individuals in academia or their over-representation in the criminal justice system. The explanation provided in your documentation, to the near exclusion of all others, is univariate: the problems of the black community are caused by whites, or, when whites are not physically present, by the infiltration of white supremacy and white systemic racism into American brains, souls, and institutions.

Many cogent objections to this thesis have been raised by sober voices, including from within the black community itself, such as Thomas Sowell and Wilfred Reilly. These people are not racists or ‘Uncle Toms’. They are intelligent scholars who reject a narrative that strips black people of agency and systematically externalizes the problems of the black community onto outsiders. Their view is entirely absent from the departmental and UCB-wide communiques.

The claim that the difficulties that the black community faces are entirely causally explained by exogenous factors in the form of white systemic racism, white supremacy, and other forms of white discrimination remains a problematic hypothesis that should be vigorously challenged by historians. Instead, it is being treated as an axiomatic and actionable truth without serious consideration of its profound flaws, or its worrying implication of total black impotence. This hypothesis is transforming our institution and our culture, without any space for dissent outside of a tightly policed, narrow discourse.

A counternarrative exists. If you have time, please consider examining some of the documents I attach at the end of this email. Overwhelmingly, the reasoning provided by BLM and allies is either primarily anecdotal (as in the case with the bulk of Ta-Nehisi Coates’ undeniably moving article) or it is transparently motivated. As an example of the latter problem, consider the proportion of black incarcerated Americans. This proportion is often used to characterize the criminal justice system as anti-black. However, if we use the precise same methodology, we would have to conclude that the criminal justice system is even more anti-male than it is anti-black.

Would we characterize criminal justice as a systemically misandrist conspiracy against innocent American men? I hope you see that this type of reasoning is flawed, and requires a significant suspension of our rational faculties. Black people are not incarcerated at higher rates than their involvement in violent crime would predict. This fact has been demonstrated multiple times across multiple jurisdictions in multiple countries.

And yet, I see my department uncritically reproducing a narrative that diminishes black agency in favor of a white-centric explanation that appeals to the department’s apparent desire to shoulder the ‘white man’s burden’ and to promote a narrative of white guilt.

If we claim that the criminal justice system is white-supremacist, why is it that Asian Americans, Indian Americans, and Nigerian Americans are incarcerated at vastly lower rates than white Americans? This is a funny sort of white supremacy. Even Jewish Americans are incarcerated less than gentile whites. I think it’s fair to say that your average white supremacist disapproves of Jews. And yet, these alleged white supremacists incarcerate gentiles at vastly higher rates than Jews. None of this is addressed in your literature. None of this is explained, beyond hand-waving and ad hominems. “Those are racist dogwhistles”. “The model minority myth is white supremacist”. “Only fascists talk about black-on-black crime”, ad nauseam.

These types of statements do not amount to counterarguments: they are simply arbitrary offensive classifications, intended to silence and oppress discourse. Any serious historian will recognize these for the silencing orthodoxy tactics they are, common to suppressive regimes, doctrines, and religions throughout time and space. They are intended to crush real diversity and permanently exile the culture of robust criticism from our department.

Increasingly, we are being called upon to comply and subscribe to BLM’s problematic view of history, and the department is being presented as unified on the matter. In particular, ethnic minorities are being aggressively marshaled into a single position. Any apparent unity is surely a function of the fact that dissent could almost certainly lead to expulsion or cancellation for those of us in a precarious position, which is no small number.

I personally don’t dare speak out against the BLM narrative, and with this barrage of alleged unity being mass-produced by the administration, tenured professoriat, the UC administration, corporate America, and the media, the punishment for dissent is a clear danger at a time of widespread economic vulnerability. I am certain that if my name were attached to this email, I would lose my job and all future jobs, even though I believe in and can justify every word I type.

The vast majority of violence visited on the black community is committed by black people. There are virtually no marches for these invisible victims, no public silences, no heartfelt letters from the UC regents, deans, and departmental heads. The message is clear: Black lives only matter when whites take them. Black violence is expected and insoluble, while white violence requires explanation and demands solution. Please look into your hearts and see how monstrously bigoted this formulation truly is.

No discussion is permitted for nonblack victims of black violence, who proportionally outnumber black victims of nonblack violence. This is especially bitter in the Bay Area, where Asian victimization by black assailants has reached epidemic proportions, to the point that the SF police chief has advised Asians to stop hanging good-luck charms on their doors, as this attracts the attention of (overwhelmingly black) home invaders. Home invaders like George Floyd. For this actual, lived, physically experienced reality of violence in the USA, there are no marches, no tearful emails from departmental heads, no support from McDonald’s and Wal-Mart. For the History department, our silence is not a mere abrogation of our duty to shed light on the truth: it is a rejection of it.

The claim that black intraracial violence is the product of redlining, slavery, and other injustices is a largely historical claim. It is for historians, therefore, to explain why Japanese internment or the massacre of European Jewry hasn’t led to equivalent rates of dysfunction and low SES performance among Japanese and Jewish Americans respectively. Arab Americans have been viciously demonized since 9/11, as have Chinese Americans more recently. However, both groups outperform white Americans on nearly all SES indices – as do Nigerian Americans, who incidentally have black skin. It is for historians to point out and discuss these anomalies. However, no real discussion is possible in the current climate at our department. The explanation is provided to us, disagreement with it is racist, and the job of historians is to further explore additional ways in which the explanation is additionally correct. This is a mockery of the historical profession.

Most troublingly, our department appears to have been entirely captured by the interests of the Democratic National Convention, and the Democratic Party more broadly. To explain what I mean, consider what happens if you choose to donate to Black Lives Matter, an organization UCB History has explicitly promoted in its recent mailers. All donations to the official BLM website are immediately redirected to ActBlue Charities, an organization primarily concerned with bankrolling election campaigns for Democrat candidates. Donating to BLM today is to indirectly donate to Joe Biden’s 2020 campaign. This is grotesque given the fact that the American cities with the worst rates of black-on-black violence and police-on-black violence are overwhelmingly Democrat-run. Minneapolis itself has been entirely in the hands of Democrats for over five decades; the ‘systemic racism’ there was built by successive Democrat administrations.

The patronizing and condescending attitudes of Democrat leaders towards the black community, exemplified by nearly every Biden statement on the black race, all but guarantee a perpetual state of misery, resentment, poverty, and the attendant grievance politics which are simultaneously annihilating American political discourse and black lives. And yet, donating to BLM is bankrolling the election campaigns of men like Mayor Frey, who saw their cities devolve into violence. This is a grotesque capture of a good-faith movement for necessary police reform, and of our department, by a political party. Even worse, there are virtually no avenues for dissent in academic circles. I refuse to serve the Party, and so should you.

The total alliance of major corporations involved in human exploitation with BLM should be a warning flag to us, and yet this damning evidence goes unnoticed, purposefully ignored, or perversely celebrated. We are the useful idiots of the wealthiest classes, carrying water for Jeff Bezos and other actual, real, modern-day slavers. Starbucks, an organisation using literal black slaves in its coffee plantation suppliers, is in favor of BLM. Sony, an organisation using cobalt mined by yet more literal black slaves, many of whom are children, is in favor of BLM. And so, apparently, are we. The absence of counter-narrative enables this obscenity. Fiat lux, indeed.

There also exists a large constituency of what can only be called ‘race hustlers’: hucksters of all colors who benefit from stoking the fires of racial conflict to secure administrative jobs, charity management positions, academic jobs and advancement, or personal political entrepreneurship.

Given the direction our history department appears to be taking far from any commitment to truth, we can regard ourselves as a formative training institution for this brand of snake-oil salespeople. Their activities are corrosive, demolishing any hope at harmonious racial coexistence in our nation and colonizing our political and institutional life. Many of their voices are unironically segregationist.

MLK would likely be called an Uncle Tom if he spoke on our campus today. We are training leaders who intend, explicitly, to destroy one of the only truly successful ethnically diverse societies in modern history. As the PRC, an ethnonationalist and aggressively racially chauvinist national polity with null immigration and no concept of jus solis increasingly presents itself as the global political alternative to the US, I ask you: Is this wise? Are we really doing the right thing?

As a final point, our university and department has made multiple statements celebrating and eulogizing George Floyd. Floyd was a multiple felon who once held a pregnant black woman at gunpoint. He broke into her home with a gang of men and pointed a gun at her pregnant stomach. He terrorized the women in his community. He sired and abandoned multiple children, playing no part in their support or upbringing, failing one of the most basic tests of decency for a human being. He was a drug-addict and sometime drug-dealer, a swindler who preyed upon his honest and hard-working neighbors.

And yet, the regents of UC and the historians of the UCB History department are celebrating this violent criminal, elevating his name to virtual sainthood. A man who hurt women. A man who hurt black women. With the full collaboration of the UCB history department, corporate America, most mainstream media outlets, and some of the wealthiest and most privileged opinion-shaping elites of the USA, he has become a culture hero, buried in a golden casket, his (recognized) family showered with gifts and praise. Americans are being socially pressured into kneeling for this violent, abusive misogynist. A generation of black men are being coerced into identifying with George Floyd, the absolute worst specimen of our race and species.

I’m ashamed of my department. I would say that I’m ashamed of both of you, but perhaps you agree with me, and are simply afraid, as I am, of the backlash of speaking the truth. It’s hard to know what kneeling means, when you have to kneel to keep your job.

It shouldn’t affect the strength of my argument above, but for the record, I write as a person of color. My family have been personally victimized by men like Floyd. We are aware of the condescending depredations of the Democrat party against our race. The humiliating assumption that we are too stupid to do STEM, that we need special help and lower requirements to get ahead in life, is richly familiar to us. I sometimes wonder if it wouldn’t be easier to deal with open fascists, who at least would be straightforward in calling me a subhuman, and who are unlikely to share my race.

The ever-present soft bigotry of low expectations and the permanent claim that the solutions to the plight of my people rest exclusively on the goodwill of whites rather than on our own hard work is psychologically devastating. No other group in America is systematically demoralized in this way by its alleged allies. A whole generation of black children are being taught that only by begging and weeping and screaming will they get handouts from guilt-ridden whites.

No message will more surely devastate their futures, especially if whites run out of guilt, or indeed if America runs out of whites. If this had been done to Japanese Americans, or Jewish Americans, or Chinese Americans, then Chinatown and Japantown would surely be no different to the roughest parts of Baltimore and East St. Louis today. The History department of UCB is now an integral institutional promulgator of a destructive and denigrating fallacy about the black race.

I hope you appreciate the frustration behind this message. I do not support BLM. I do not support the Democrat grievance agenda and the Party’s uncontested capture of our department. I do not support the Party co-opting my race, as Biden recently did in his disturbing interview, claiming that voting Democrat and being black are isomorphic. I condemn the manner of George Floyd’s death and join you in calling for greater police accountability and police reform. However, I will not pretend that George Floyd was anything other than a violent misogynist, a brutal man who met a predictably brutal end.

I also want to protect the practice of history. Cleo is no grovelling handmaiden to politicians and corporations. Like us, she is free.

/end

If anybody sees anything credible online about the origin of this letter, please post it in the comments. If it really did come from UC Berkeley, fine; if it really came from an part-time adjunct at Southwest Freedonia State, that’s fine too: the arguments and claims made in the text of the letter are what matters.

The post ‘Black Lives Only Matter When Whites Take Them’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Cost Of Liberal Silence

Andrew Sullivan knocks it out of the park today with a powerful piece denouncing the advancing soft totalitarianism in our culture. Excerpt:

In this manic, Manichean world you’re not even given the space to say nothing. “White Silence = Violence” is a slogan chanted and displayed in every one of these marches. It’s very reminiscent of totalitarian states where you have to compete to broadcast your fealty to the cause. In these past two weeks, if you didn’t put up on Instagram or Facebook some kind of slogan or symbol displaying your wokeness, you were instantly suspect. The cultishness of this can be seen in the way people are actually cutting off contact with their own families if they don’t awaken and see the truth and repeat its formulae. Ibram X. Kendi insists that there is no room in our society for neutrality or reticence. If you are not doing “antiracist work” you are ipso facto a racist. By “antiracist work” he means fully accepting his version of human society and American history, integrating it into your own life, confessing your own racism, and publicly voicing your continued support.

That’s why this past week has seen so many individuals issue public apologies as to their previous life and resolutions to “do the work” to more actively dismantle “structures of oppression.” It’s why corporate America has rushed to adopt every plank of this ideology and display its allegiance publicly. If you do this, and do it emphatically, you can display your virtue to your customers and clients, and you might even be left alone. Or not. There is no one this movement suspects more than the insincere individual, the person who it deems is merely performing these public oaths and doesn’t follow through. Every single aspect of life, every word you speak or write, every tweet you might send, every private conversation you may have had, any email you might have sent, every friend you love is either a function of your racism or anti-racism. And this is why flawed human beings are now subjected to such brutal public shamings, outings, and inquisitions — in order to root out the structural evil they represent.

If you argue that you believe that much of this ideology is postmodern gobbledygook, you are guilty of “white fragility.” If you say you are not fragile, and merely disagree, this is proof you are fragile. It is the same circular argument that was once used to burn witches. And it has the same religious undertones. To be woke is to wake up to the truth — the blinding truth that liberal society doesn’t exist, that everything is a form of oppression or resistance, and that there is no third option. You are either with us or you are to be cast into darkness.

Sullivan defends classical liberalism in the face of this totalitarian thinking:

Liberalism is not just a set of rules. There’s a spirit to it. A spirit that believes that there are whole spheres of human life that lie beyond ideology — friendship, art, love, sex, scholarship, family. [Emphasis mine — RD] A spirit that seeks not to impose orthodoxy but to open up the possibilities of the human mind and soul. A spirit that seeks moral clarity but understands that this is very hard, that life and history are complex, and it is this complexity that a truly liberal society seeks to understand if it wants to advance. It is a spirit that deals with an argument — and not a person — and that counters that argument with logic, not abuse. It’s a spirit that allows for various ideas to clash and evolve, and treats citizens as equal, regardless of their race, rather than insisting on equity for designated racial groups. It’s a spirit that delights sometimes in being wrong because it offers an opportunity to figure out what’s right. And it’s generous, humorous, and graceful in its love of argument and debate. It gives you space to think and reflect and deliberate. Twitter, of course, is the antithesis of all this — and its mercy-free, moblike qualities when combined with a moral panic are, quite frankly, terrifying.

Read it all. 

Sullivan recommends the Vaclav Havel essay “The Power of the Powerless” as an antidote. The life of Havel’s Greengrocer, the mythical figure who refuses to hang up the sign “Workers of the World, Unite!” in his shop window just to keep the communist authorities off his back. He suffers for his independence, but he has shown that it is possible to be free, even under oppressive conditions.

About the line in Sullivan’s column that I highlighted. One of the clear markers of totalitarianism is the insistence that no aspect of life can be free from politics. From Live Not By Lies:

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

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

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

It will not surprise you to learn that I write about Havel in Live Not By Lies. Here is a passage from my forthcoming book that speaks to the moment that we are in:

The dictatorship of thought and word under construction by progressives is a regime based on lies and propaganda. Most conservatives, Christian and not, recognize that to some degree, but too few see the deeper ramifications of accepting these lies. “Political correctness” is an annoyance; these lies corrupt one’s ability to think clearly about reality.

Once you perceive how the system runs on lies, stand as firmly as you can on what you know to be true and real when confronted by those lies. Refuse to let the media and institutions propagandize your children. Teach them how to identify lies and to refuse them. Do your best not be party to the lie—not for the sake of professional advantage, personal status, or any other reason. Sometimes you will have to act openly to confront the lie directly. Other times you will fight it by remaining silent and withholding the approval authorities request. You might have to raise your voice to defend someone who is being slandered by propagandists.

Judging when and how to confront the lie depends on individual circumstances, of course. As Father Kaleda says, the faith does not require one to actively seek opportunities for martyrdom. Most of us will be forced by circumstances and responsibilities to our families to be something less than a Solzhenitsyn. That doesn’t necessarily make us cowards.

But take care not to let reasoning prudentially turn into rationalization. That is the basis of ketman—and to surrender to that kind of self-defense will, over time, destroy your soul. Your consent to the system’s lies might buy you safety, but at an unbearable cost. If you cannot imagine any situation in which you would act like Havel’s fictional greengrocer, and live in truth no matter the cost or consequence, then cowardice has a greater claim on your conscience than you know.

We will now see which liberals are courageous in defense of liberal principles, and which ones lack the spine to stand up to the woke mob. J.K. Rowling this week showed that she is a liberal who will not be cowed. It’s easy to do this if you are fantastically wealthy, but don’t underestimate how much it can hurt to be eviscerated personally. She has been the target of trans activists for her feminism-based opposition to the trans lobby’s claim that there is no biological reality to femaleness. Excerpt:

Huge numbers of women are justifiably terrified by the trans activists; I know this because so many have got in touch with me to tell their stories. They’re afraid of doxxing, of losing their jobs or their livelihoods, and of violence.

But endlessly unpleasant as its constant targeting of me has been, I refuse to bow down to a movement that I believe is doing demonstrable harm in seeking to erode ‘woman’ as a political and biological class and offering cover to predators like few before it. I stand alongside the brave women and men, gay, straight and trans, who’re standing up for freedom of speech and thought, and for the rights and safety of some of the most vulnerable in our society: young gay kids, fragile teenagers, and women who’re reliant on and wish to retain their single sex spaces. Polls show those women are in the vast majority, and exclude only those privileged or lucky enough never to have come up against male violence or sexual assault, and who’ve never troubled to educate themselves on how prevalent it is.

The one thing that gives me hope is that the women who can protest and organise, are doing so, and they have some truly decent men and trans people alongside them. Political parties seeking to appease the loudest voices in this debate are ignoring women’s concerns at their peril. In the UK, women are reaching out to each other across party lines, concerned about the erosion of their hard-won rights and widespread intimidation. None of the gender critical women I’ve talked to hates trans people; on the contrary. Many of them became interested in this issue in the first place out of concern for trans youth, and they’re hugely sympathetic towards trans adults who simply want to live their lives, but who’re facing a backlash for a brand of activism they don’t endorse. The supreme irony is that the attempt to silence women with the word ‘TERF’ may have pushed more young women towards radical feminism than the movement’s seen in decades.

The last thing I want to say is this. I haven’t written this essay in the hope that anybody will get out a violin for me, not even a teeny-weeny one. I’m extraordinarily fortunate; I’m a survivor, certainly not a victim. I’ve only mentioned my past because, like every other human being on this planet, I have a complex backstory, which shapes my fears, my interests and my opinions. I never forget that inner complexity when I’m creating a fictional character and I certainly never forget it when it comes to trans people.

All I’m asking – all I want – is for similar empathy, similar understanding, to be extended to the many millions of women whose sole crime is wanting their concerns to be heard without receiving threats and abuse.

Please do read the whole thing. The main reason Rowling takes the position that she does, she says, is because she was violently sexually assaulted by her first husband, and deeply feels the responsibility to protect women and girls from violent males. She is right about that, too. May other true liberals find their voices now, while they still can.

The post The Cost Of Liberal Silence appeared first on The American Conservative.

I Don’t Believe The Media

Damon Linker has a really good column about the revolution underway in journalism. He focuses on the New York Times. Excerpts:

It’s important to clarify at the outset what the change is not aiming to do. The revolutionaries are not attempting to impose political or moral standards where they were once absent. No newsroom is politically neutral and no editorial page ideologically unbiased. Every community, every organization, and certainly every journalistic enterprise makes decisions about what’s acceptable and what isn’t, where lines should be drawn, and what kinds of statements belong on which sides of those lines. Reporters and editors make judgments every day about what’s worth thinking about, taking seriously, and engaging with.

The rebels want to move the lines and impose new standards. Ben Smith’s recent and very informative essay in the Times about the revolts erupting in America’s newsrooms helps us to understand the character of the proposed changes. The journalists Smith quotes and paraphrases believe that “fairness on issues from race to Donald Trump requires clear moral calls.” That news organizations need to be devoted to “the truth” rather than some spurious ideal of “objectivity.” That in all things “moral clarity” is required. And that a journalist determines whether he or she has achieved such righteousness by measuring the volume of applause from likeminded followers on Twitter.

But what’s absent from Smith’s essay may be even more illuminating than what’s in it. No one acknowledges the difficulty of achieving moral clarity. No one notes that there are precious few “clear moral calls” in life. No one demonstrates awareness that “the truth,” like justice, is something our country is deeply divided about. No one expresses an understanding of how those divisions shape everyone’s standpoint, very much including that of journalists themselves. Or concedes that understanding a country as complex and divided as the United States might require a little humility and willingness to suspend judgment for a time.

In place of difficulty, complexity, and complication, today’s journalistic revolutionaries crave tidy moral lessons with clear villains and heroes. They champion simplicity, embrace moral uplift, and seek out evildoers to demonize.

Linker says that the recent Times controversy was not really about making journalism better, but about how a progressive advocacy view of what journalism is conquering an older liberal view. He writes:

Liberals aren’t relativists. They’re people who recognize that achieving understanding is hard, that what justice entails and requires is deeply contested in the United States, and that a news organization that aspires to explain our fractious country to itself cannot be guided by the sensibility of a single-issue activist. Lines need to be drawn, but they should be drawn broadly. A serious news organization cannot exclude views championed by one of the country’s two major political parties and held by more than 40 percent of the country’s voters.

Read it all. And read Ross Douthat’s long, thoughtful dissection of the controversy, which includes this important passage:

Kendi’s books are popular, but his Department of Anti-Racism isn’t likely to appear in the Democratic Party’s platform, and generally the successor ideology has flopped on the campaign trail. Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee, while candidates like Julián Castro, Kirsten Gillibrand and Elizabeth Warren found the voters cool to their jargon and appeals. And the inchoate shape of the new movement, the way the locus of power and authority keeps shifting between different groups — the fierce lean-in feminist is suddenly recast as the despised Karen, Jews and Asians are welcomed as allies one moment and regarded as suspiciously “white-adjacent” the next — may make it especially hard to translate into normal party politics.

But in professional-class institutions the successor ideology has made tremendous headway — especially among younger white people, interestingly, for whom it seems to supply a substitute for the structures of civic and religious meaning that their baby boomer parents overthrew. The dynamic in which the pursuit of liberal goals blurs into successor-ideology ambitions is now visible everywhere in upper-middle-class America, from the Ivy League to the young-adult fiction industry, from public school systems in liberal cities to H.R. departments all over corporate America. Indeed the successor ideology seems particularly adaptable (as DiAngelo’s career attests) to the corporate world, where it promises a framework for regulating an increasingly diverse work force that conveniently emphasizes psychology and identity rather than a class solidarity that might threaten the corporate bottom line.

And of course, the influence of the successor ideology is palpable in the media as well, where as closures and consolidation have made the profession more upper middle class and metropolitan, the old biases of the liberal media have given way to a more crusading spirit.

Again, this shift is happening on a continuum with the pursuit of old-fashioned and laudable liberal goals — more diversity in hiring, equal opportunity instead of old boys networks, newsrooms that more adequately represent the communities they cover. But bound up with these goals is a growing newsroom assumption that greater diversity should actually lead to a more singular perspective on the news, a journalism of “truth” rather than “objectivity,” in which issues that involve black — or gay or female or transgender or immigrant — interests are covered less as complex debates and more as stories of good versus evil. (Obviously, having Donald Trump as president, with his birtherism, bluster and Twitter-feed authoritarianism, has made this transformation seem more urgent and essential.)

And because the media is more consolidated than in the past, its talent concentrated in a few cities with a few papers (like this one) bestriding the landscape and smaller outlets fading every day, it’s a mistake to see this change as just a return of the partisan journalism that dominated 19th-century America. We don’t suddenly have a Democratic and a Republican newspaper battling in every city once again. Instead we have a national media (with Fox News as the exception that helps solidify the rule) that moves as a herd but doesn’t think of itself as partisan — because partisans are partial and biased, and the assumption is that in rejecting neutrality we’re just moving toward the truth.

What Douthat is talking about here is how an illiberal left-wing ideology is sweeping through liberal elites, even as ordinary people have no idea what’s going on, or like it very much. Given media consolidation, this means that the national narrative is set by fewer media outlets — and that they are likely to be staffed by these illiberal leftists, and driven by their prerogatives. Old-fashioned liberals who run these institutions refuse to stand up to the hotheads, and thus surrender their institutions to the progressive mob. It has happened at colleges and universities, and now it’s happening to the media.

Jonathan Chait defends traditional journalism, from a liberal perspective. In his column, he says:

Without rehashing at length, my argument against the left’s illiberal style is twofold. First, it tends to interpret political debates as pitting the interests of opposing groups rather than opposing ideas. Those questioning whatever is put forward as the positions of oppressed people are therefore often acting out of concealed motives. (Even oppressed people themselves may argue against their own authentic group interest; that a majority of African-Americans oppose looting, or that Omar Wasow himself is black, hardly matters.) Second, it frequently collapses the distinction between words and action — a distinction that is the foundation of the liberal model — by describing opposing beliefs as a safety threat.

Working from these premises, many reactions by the left that might seem bizarre to somebody unfamiliar with this world (say, an older or more moderate person who doesn’t work in academia or the progressive movement) can make perfect sense. Since criticism of violent protests is racist, and racism obviously endangers black people, an act as seemingly innocuous as sharing credible research poses a threat to safety.

Read the whole Chait column. It tells the story of Lee Fang, a reporter for The Intercept whose views are far to the left of the Democratic Party on economics. He got crossways a black colleague, who at last invoked the Black Fatigue Rule to shut him up:

Tired of being made to deal with my coworker @lhfang continuing to push narratives about black on black crime after repeatedly being asked not to. This isn’t about me and him it’s about institutional racism and using free speech to couch anti-blackness. I am so fucking tired

— Akela Lacy (@akela_lacy) June 4, 2020

Fang had to apologize and abase himself to save his job.

See, this is why I would not go to work in a mainstream newsroom again, and why I discourage young people from becoming journalists. In this new world they’ve created, all it takes is an accusation from a person of color that your argument or truth claim harms them, and your career will be over. Even if you’re on the left, that will not save you. You must defer in all cases to the person of color, or face professional ruin. A.G. Sulzberger may be the publisher of The New York Times, and Dean Baquet may be the executive editor, but Nikole Hannah-Jones, who believes journalism should be all about advocacy, really runs that newsroom.

After this latest elite media spasm, which involves the Times, the Philadelphia Inquirer, and, I am sure, others to come (Washington Post, you’re next), I have noticed a sharp difference in the way I read the media. Any conservative has always known that the media are biased to the left. That’s just part of the deal. As someone who worked for many years in the mainstream media, I saw that confirmed countless times. But as I have explained over the years to my conservative friends outside the media, liberals in newsrooms don’t really understand the extent of their bias. They live in a cognitive bubble in which most or all of their friends are liberals, and news projects that explore and vindicate liberal preferences get rewarded. The point is, though, their bias is not conscious. Most of them really do try, within the epistemic limits of their perspective, to be fair.

I don’t believe that anymore. I believe that there are as many honest reporters in the Times newsroom as were there before last weekend, but I don’t know who they are. As a reader, they are just bylines to me. What we know now is that the work of those reporters is indistinguishable to the layman from the work of political advocates in news reporting and news editing jobs. We know that the current Times leadership has abandoned the old Abe Rosenthal dedication to “keep the paper straight” — meaning, to keep the newsroom as unbiased as possible in its reporting. We also know that the “straight” reporters — that is to say, journalists who just want to do as professional a job as they can — are now having to look over their shoulder in the newsroom to worry if some pissy little Red Guard is going to denounce them as secretly racist, or in some other way counterrevolutionary. How can this not affect their reporting?

Will we ever see reporting of facts like these that complicate the Narrative? Zach Goldberg is a PhD student in political science:

1/n Using the Washington Post Shooting Database (2015-2020), I entered the names of all ‘unarmed’ black and white police shooting victims into ProQuest and created a tally of search results.

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) June 10, 2020

2/n What I find is that news media content covering black victims is about 9x greater than that of white victims (whether one compares the medians or the means). pic.twitter.com/VRt79NgrqK

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) June 10, 2020

3/n To account for the skewed distribution of the data, I used a quintile/median regression to regress the # of results onto the incident/victim-relevant variables included in the Washington Post dataset. None of these variables explain the difference. pic.twitter.com/rk4hOcSInB

— Zach Goldberg (@ZachG932) June 10, 2020

Read the entire thread.

It’s important to make clear here that I’m talking about ideological corruption of the news pages, not the op-ed pages. It is now impossible to have confidence that what one reads corresponds to the truth, or at least as accurate a representation of the truth as is possible to reach. It’s a strange and unwelcome feeling to read newspapers and to worry that I’m being gaslighted. Once more, to make clear what I’m saying: we have gone from a situation in which one knows that a newspaper is reported with a left-wing bias, but that one could still count on journalists as professionals who made good-faith efforts to learn and report the complicated truth; to a situation in which journalists openly disdain the old-fashioned liberal approach to newsgathering and reporting, in favor of openly advocating an ideology in the news pages. This is a radical (= at the roots) change in American journalism. All those journalists, whatever their personal politics, who are committed to the older standards now find their credibility going forward indelibly stained by the ideological corruption of their colleagues. Not only that, but if they have any sense at all, they are going to labor in fear that simply doing what good journalists do, and reporting on the world as they find it, will set them up to be professionally ruined by the Red Guards.

And all this because the old-fashioned liberal. newsroom leaders who should have stood up to the mob were afraid to do so.

 

The post I Don’t Believe The Media appeared first on The American Conservative.

How Do We Fight The Woke Militants?

Walker Percy, Love In The Ruins:

Now in these dread latter days of the old violent beloved U.S.A. and of the Christ-forgetting Christ-haunted death-dealing Western world I came to myself in a grove of young pines and the question came to me: has it happened at last?

Two more hours should tell the story. One way or the other. Either I am right and a catastrophe will occur, or it won’t and I’m crazy. In either case the outlook is not so good.

Here I sit, in any case, against a young pine, broken out in hives and waiting for the end of the world. Safe here for the moment though, flanks protected by a rise of ground on the left and an approach ramp on the right. The carbine lies across my lap.

Just below the cloverleaf, in the ruined motel, the three girls are waiting for me.

Undoubtedly something is about to happen.

Or is it that something has stopped happening?

Five minutes ago, I saw an email from a reader who is in an online meeting with the staff at the institution where he works. He is learning that the institution, heretofore apolitical, is now being pushed very hard to the cultural left by an activist contingent within. He says they are taking advantage of the goodness and decency of all who work there, and who truly want to do the right thing on racial matters. The militant leftists within have free reign to dictate terms.

“Nowhere is safe,” he writes, of his profession. “What the f–k am I supposed to do?”

A lot of people are asking that same question. Another reader writes (I have slightly edited this to protect his identity):

My wife and I have been talking the last few days.

How do we fight?

I mean really. This is what we want to do, but with effect, and to the point, we want it to count.

The writer talks about his own institution, and how it will cave instantly the moment the woke mob targets it. He said he went into that line of work hoping to make a difference in people’s lives. Now, it’s all falling down, and falling fast. He continues:

Yet, I’m also a patriot, a citizen, and a man, and I’m looking at the leadership of the political, economic, and chattering class – ON THE RIGHT – and the churches, and all I see is surrender, head in the ass, pretend it isn’t happening, post it to Facebook, nothing burger. Even the conservative Lutherans have now began to put out “we need to listen more” crap, I’m seeing some of my Calvinist friends, hard-core, reformed types, who blacked out their FB images, because….misplaced sympathy, guilt, fear…I don’t know what.

I actually think for some there is real guilt over real racist feelings. I don’t think it is an accident that white liberal or liberalish upper middle class women are the most shrill about this. They are exactly the type of people who when they see a black man get the hee-bee-jeebees.

I, like you, was horribly bullied in school, but unlike you I found my tongue and later my muscles would protect me if I fought back. I learned to fight dirty and with spite, and I did some pretty evil bullying in my day, so the mob would leave me the hell alone. By my junior year in high school, I began to knock it off and repent, sitting in my little Baptist church on Sunday and hearing the Gospel was the ONLY thing that saved me. I’ve been on both sides of that cruel knife. Last night my son couldn’t sleep, he’s 7, he’s terrified from over hearing the news and occasional snippets of my wife and I’s conversation that the mob was coming to come and kill us and burn our house down. Not remotely likely, but I’m an historian by training – I increasingly think unless these gets done soon, we will be headed toward real violence. This isn’t 1968. We don’t have veterans of WWII in positions of power and we don’t have a Christian culture permeating American society. Likely Americans are easily bored, distracted, and now a-days, lazy.

Those behind this unrest will not rest however.

SO, the question of the hour is –

I want to fight back meaningfully, and I see no one, to help.

I have been trying to push back my whole life in my little Thomas Gray’s Churchyard kind of way, but it is not enough.

Short of going into the street with a gun and shooting these people, what options have those in power and positions of authority and influence have left us. I mean, what, I’m supposed to just repost Tucker Carlson on Facebook and retweet links to The American Mind while the country burns?

I think the difference between now and the past is – we don’t know our neighbors, we don’t have friends among our neighbors, the atomization of our society means we can’t form the committees of public safety and correspondence, the neighborhood watches, and the meetings on the village green – and so now, what do we do?

You and other pundits are calling for action, so put your money on the table.

Buy your book?

I’m not trying to be sarcastic, but what are we the average man and woman to do, I live in a part of the country I’m not from, I don’t know most people outside of my job and my church, our numbers are spiking up 30% yesterday, and many of the people in my own conservative church are starting to by into the silence=violence, white privilege bullsh*t, so what am I to do?

I am asking this in all humility, I am at a loss as to what to do to save my country and my civilization without seeking to harm people in other communities.

All the things we were supposed to do as good conservatives, and orthodox Christian were blind alleys and dead-ends, something I began to realize about 10-12 years ago, and the few things I thought would help have failed miserably.

My other fear, is if I were back home, where I know people, and know the lay of the land….my local conservative friends and family members would be too busy, too comfortable, too afraid to actually do anything, even if the mob came to their town. They would defend their shop or home, but there it would end, and only when the mob was in their front yard.

You wrote:

If we love ourselves and the treasure of our own culture as much as they hate us and it, we will find the guts to fight.

Well, how do we fight? God has put you and others in positions of intellectual or political leadership, how are you going to use this vocation.

If there is nothing more than don’t live by lies and die a martyr, that’s fine for the Christian side of my being, but my Scotch-Irish ancestors are all screaming, the hell that there is, if we were going to die martyrs for the color orange were going to die fighting!

Tell me.

The short answer is: I don’t know. 

I am not a political person. I have political views, but I don’t have a deep interest in politics and how it works. I am more attuned to religion and culture. That’s where my passions lie. Over the past few years, my political pessimism has grown as I have watched the Republican Party, the only political party in which social and religious conservatives have any voice at all, fail to defend principles and institutions that ought to be defended. As readers of The Benedict Option know, I had my red pill moment with the GOP when I learned from a face to face meeting in Washington that post-Obergefell, the Republicans in the House and Senate had no plans at all for legislation that would shore up religious liberty protections around religious schools and other institutions. They are afraid.

Notice right now that none, or almost none, of the Republican political leaders are speaking out against this progressive putsch. They are hoping that it will all go away, and that after Trump, they can get back to tax cuts and serving corporations, while making impotent gestures of support to religious and social conservatives. But this is not going to work. The game is up. Trump has been a terrible strategist and tactician, but he emerged because of some real and genuine grievances. Those aren’t going to go away.

My political pessimism comes from my religious pessimism, or rather, my pessimism about the loss of Christianity in the United States. In The Benedict Option, I quoted statistics, and made an argument that Christianity was very thin in contemporary America — that it was mostly a façade. Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, they call it. From the book:

Smith and Denton claimed that MTD is colonizing existing Christian churches, destroying biblical Christianity from within, and replacing it with a pseudo-Christianity that is “only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.”

MTD is not entirely wrong. After all, God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering—the Way of the Cross—as the pathway to God. Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.

As bleak as Christian Smith’s 2005 findings were, his follow-up research, a third installment of which was published in 2011, was even grimmer. Surveying the moral beliefs of 18-to-23-year-olds, Smith and his colleagues found that only 40 percent of young Christians sampled said that their personal moral beliefs were grounded in the Bible or some other religious sensibility.

Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the beliefs of even these faithful are biblically coherent. Many of these “Christians” are actually committed moral individualists who neither know nor practice a coherent Bible-based morality.

An astonishing 61 percent of the emerging adults had no moral problem at all with materialism and consumerism. An added 30 percent expressed some qualms but figured it was not worth worrying about. In this view, say Smith and his team, “all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”

This kind of Christianity is not prepared to suffer for the faith. It doesn’t even know what the faith is. How, then, can we expect a meaningful defense of any principles from Republican politicians when the churches themselves have been hollowed out?

This e-mail from a reader this morning (which I publish with the reader’s permission) really brought that home:

I read your recent article and discovered that Nikki Oliver was one of the CHAZ leaders.  She used to be a friend back in high school in Indiana.  It is so sad to hear the news.

We fell out of touch.  I don’t have the story after high school.  She used to be an outspoken Christian who attended a non-denominational megachurch.  The theology was fairly shallow and eventually, they built an even bigger church down the road.  Our public school, Pike High School, was decidedly liberal.  The school was huge–almost 3,000 kids by the time I graduated.  It was very diverse–racially, socially, and economically.  If you got into an honors or AP course, the education was decent but incredibly secular.  Outside of that elite group of students, it was just a daycare center for big kids.  Nikki and I were in the elite group.  We were both “good” church kids at the time (I was in a liberal mainline UMC church that lived, breathed, and died fuzzy moralism).

I could go on and say much more, but to be concise, the dogs of the public school and the academy (it appears) consumed her and the church gave her no real foundation.  I was just like her (actually she was kinder and more “Christian” than I was back then), but by the grace of God, before “leaving” Christianity, I realized I couldn’t leave something I didn’t know. “Mere Christianity” caught my eye at a bookstore and after a long journey, I am now in a PCA church that has blessed me more than I could imagine.

My point is this:  As you know, most of the “churches” out there will not be able to counter the secular forces in the world.  I can’t imagine sending my kids to a public school nowadays.  We need strong Christian institutions.  We need strong churches that are in but definitely not of the world.  We need strong schools.  As a business owner, I also know there will soon be a day when the mob may come for me.  We must be prepared and be prepared to suffer.  Nikki’s story and countless stories like her’s have spiritually hollowed out my generation.

Whether Trump wins in 2020 or delays the rise of the leftist totalitarians until 2024, the question is now not if but when they will come to power.  This is a sad time for our society, but perhaps, it will be an opportunity for a smaller but more beautiful church to shine its light more clearly than ever.

I am far more interested in the survival of the church than I am in politics. That’s why my recent work — The Benedict Option, and the forthcoming Live Not By Lies , do not offer political solutions. There are no doubt smart and faithful men and women working on those books now. Politics isn’t my calling. We have already entered into a dark age, in my view. It is likely that I, personally, will be supporting particular initiatives on the political front, as they emerge, but do not come to me looking for political solutions. I will happily point to the work of others doing what I believe to be good political work. The main thing I can do, as I see it, is to write as honestly as I can about things we can do in our daily lives to resist as the Imperium falls.

I am hearing from some of you who are astonished and appalled by how quickly church leaders are falling in the face of this assault. From what you are writing me, you are all supportive of efforts to identity and fight racism, but you are seeing (white) churches lose their minds in this current hysteria, and endorse things that are not Christian. I believe that many church authorities, desperate to be liked, will fail as leaders. In The Benedict Option, I talk about ways to build up longterm resistance. But please don’t expect leaders to ride to the rescue and save us from the mob. It will be wonderful if they do, but don’t expect it.

Here’s what I really worry about: that the coming battle will actually sideline many practicing Christians. That it will be between the Woke on one side, and white nationalists on the other. There is no way that authentic followers of Jesus Christ can endorse race nationalism of either the white or the black kind. In fact, a Christian reader emailed the other day:

A couple of years ago, an acquaintance of mine drifted slowly into the alt-right. This transition began with his own reactions against the elite anti-racism movement and the Democratic party. At first I was able to have very interesting conversations with him about his concerns, his growing sense of isolation, and his defensiveness and anger (which I completely understood and in many cases agreed with). It was even refreshing to have conversations with him.

But then it somehow tipped into strikingly different territory. He crossed a line into what I’d actually call white nationalism.

This is a heartbreaking thing to watch: to see a previously sensible, smart, kind, and nuanced person descend into spewing a sort of ethnocentric vitriol that denigrates others, while using valid concerns that I truly agree with as their justifying axioms. It feels like you’re going insane.

I had honestly always imagined (wrongly) that a white nationalist looked a certain way (like a mug shot of a serial killer, essentially), and had just always existed as such; but my friend’s journey in that direction was slow and subtle and even influenced by such small things as a couple of first coffee dates with super-woke girls he didn’t like. (This friend is not a Christian, so I don’t really know how that would affect the situation. I have to hope that perhaps with others for whom this is a risk, belief in Christ could steer them away from this kind of self-destructive and other-destructive idolatry.)

But with the woke movement pushing more and more destructive dynamics (and showing no sign of slowing those), I see whispers of the potential for these beginnings in other people as well. I have another friend with a family member she’s worried is headed down a similar road, so I know I’m not the only one concerned about this and worried about loved ones taking a very destructive course. How can we offer a healthier response to the culture war, before people get to the white-nationalist point? Any advice/resources would be appreciated.

The reader continues:

He was also a perfect target for someone who could be inducted into white nationalist ideology: an early-20’s white guy with a good bullsh*t detector, socially insecure, frustrated with his singleness, without much strong community network, without faith, coming from a broken family background, not sure where he fit in the world – my impression is that he didn’t have much to hang his hat on.

I suspect that when he realized what was happening – that people like him had become the scapegoats for woke elites’ claims that, by and large, were actually a violent power grab made in the name of “justice” – he just cracked at some point and likely threw his lot in with the only folks he saw who would offer him a valued place in their group. (This reminds me of ISIS’ recruiting tactics and targets.) I think having a strong community, or a family, or a faith, or a group of some sort gives most of us who are frightened of the coming (already here?) soft totalitarianism some ability to maintain our reason better, and not adopt an actively hostile ideology ourselves. But it is very frustrating talking to moderate or progressive friends who look at me like I’m crazy when I suggest that the anti-racism movement may be furthering white nationalism, giving fodder to a fringe movement that welcomes people like my old acquaintance, who may believe they have no other safe place to go. That’s not to let him off the hook for his choices (and I’m sure I’m grossly oversimplifying), but I think this is an important danger with the woke movement that doesn’t get talked about much. I’d love to hear your (or readers’) thoughts on that.

No, you can’t talk about that. A young Democratic strategist just got fired for tweeting out actual polling data pointing out that street violence helps Republicans:




David Shor is no longer employed — for doing his job, and warning his own party that their tactics are likely to help the other side!

Anyway, I hope that some of you readers will respond to the above reader’s call for help for resources to save her friend from white nationalism. What do the churches offer that could help lost young white men like that — young men who are not looking for racism, but who are sick and tired of being blamed for all the problems of the world?

They are looking for a strong god. Wokeness offers that. So does white nationalism. The true God is the God that gave the confessors of the communist yoke — the people I write about in Live Not By Lies — the strength to withstand everything those devils threw at them. We absolutely have to look to them to learn how to resist as Christians, not as racists! Wishy-washy Moralistic Therapeutic Deism is going to be burned up, and is now being burned up. There is going to be no middle ground left. Churches will either go militantly woke, or may turn to a Christianized version of white nationalism. The rest of us believers will be doing our best simply to hold our churches and families together, and not lose our members to the passionate ideologies tearing the country apart.

I welcome advice from you readers on how we can fight back. Not just resist passively, but actively fight back against the madness. And not just fight back, but fight back effectively. I get so weary of conservatives saying, of Trump, “At least he fights.” Yeah, he does, but the way he fights is usually foolish, and makes it harder to fight meaningfully, and win. I am eager to hear from more political-minded readers who have real strategy, not just performative bluster that doesn’t make a big difference.

One thing I believe conservatives have to be willing to do is to withdraw from supporting public and private institutions that endorse and implement wokeness. Take your money and your labor away. Stop supporting institutions and organizations that are working against you. If we don’t know yet how to effectively fight the putsch, at least we can stop supporting the organizations that putschists have conquered. Make leaders who capitulate to the mob pay a price. When leadership stands firm, reward them.

Note well: I am not going to approve any comments advocating race nationalism, and I anticipate that I am going to spike most progressive comments. If you are on the left, this is not something I want your commentary on, unless you can be constructive. I also welcome advice for the reader who is trying to reach out to her friend in danger of going white nationalist, to pull him back from that. Tragically, I believe that the future politics of America are going to be ethnocentric, militant, and angry. For years I have said here that the identity-politics left has no idea what kind of demons it is calling up by endorsing illiberal, positive discrimination on behalf of nonwhites. Well, they’re about to show themselves in a big way in Weimar America.

UPDATE: Sen. Josh Hawley delivered a strong speech on the Senate floor today. Good. So that’s one Republican who is going to fight politically. Keep an eye on him.

UPDATE.2: I just re-read Solzhenitsyn’s short essay “Live not by lies!,” and I have to tell you, if we did what he advises there, it would make a real difference in these circumstances. Seriously, think about it:

So in our timidity, let each of us make a choice: Whether consciously, to remain a servant of falsehood—of course, it is not out of inclination, but to feed one’s family, that one raises his children in the spirit of lies—or to shrug off the lies and become an honest man worthy of respect both by one’s children and contemporaries.

And from that day onward he:

Will not henceforth write, sign, or print in any way a single phrase which in his opinion distorts the truth.
Will utter such a phrase neither in private conversation not in the presence of many people, neither on his own behalf not at the prompting of someone else, either in the role of agitator, teacher, educator, not in a theatrical role.
Will not depict, foster or broadcast a single idea which he can only see is false or a distortion of the truth whether it be in painting, sculpture, photography, technical science, or music.
Will not cite out of context, either orally or written, a single quotation so as to please someone, to feather his own nest, to achieve success in his work, if he does not share completely the idea which is quoted, or if it does not accurately reflect the matter at issue.
Will not allow himself to be compelled to attend demonstrations or meetings if they are contrary to his desire or will, will neither take into hand not raise into the air a poster or slogan which he does not completely accept.
Will not raise his hand to vote for a proposal with which he does not sincerely sympathize, will vote neither openly nor secretly for a person whom he considers unworthy or of doubtful abilities.
Will not allow himself to be dragged to a meeting where there can be expected a forced or distorted discussion of a question. Will immediately talk out of a meeting, session, lecture, performance or film showing if he hears a speaker tell lies, or purvey ideological nonsense or shameless propaganda.
Will not subscribe to or buy a newspaper or magazine in which information is distorted and primary facts are concealed. Of course we have not listed all of the possible and necessary deviations from falsehood. But a person who purifies himself will easily distinguish other instances with his purified outlook.

No, it will not be the same for everybody at first. Some, at first, will lose their jobs. For young people who want to live with truth, this will, in the beginning, complicate their young lives very much, because the required recitations are stuffed with lies, and it is necessary to make a choice.

But there are no loopholes for anybody who wants to be honest. On any given day any one of us will be confronted with at least one of the above-mentioned choices even in the most secure of the technical sciences. Either truth or falsehood: Toward spiritual independence or toward spiritual servitude.

And he who is not sufficiently courageous even to defend his soul—don’t let him be proud of his “progressive” views, don’t let him boast that he is an academician or a people’s artist, a merited figure, or a general—let him say to himself: I am in the herd, and a coward. It’s all the same to me as long as I’m fed and warm.

UPDATE.3: From a professor in the comments section:

I am a full professor in the humanities at a major private university. Everyone on this blog would likely recognize my name if I published it here.

I’ve decided that at this point my life–I am in my late 50s–that proactively fighting is just not worth it for me. Over a decade ago I suffered a severe depressive episode after a student at my school sought to destroy me online by publishing, without my permission, a kindly penned private note to her. (It involved a “woke” topic. But I’ll just leave it at that). In any event, it seemed like hell for about two weeks, suffering night terrors, severe insomnia, excruciating brain zaps in the middle of the night, etc. I could have turned her into the provost’s office for violating the university’s honor code. But I knew if I did that I would create my own Streisand effect. Thus, I thought to myself, just suffer for a little while and it will go away. It did. But the episode changed me immensely.

So, with BLM and its insane sycophantic Jonestown-like disciples, I will not go out of my way to cause trouble, such as asking my university president difficult questions, boycotting the school’s required diversity training, and so forth. However, I will not lie, and I will not confess things I do not believe. That, of course, may be enough to attract negative attention from “the Woman.” (Take note: it’s not “the Man” anymore). So be it. I have a nice chunk of change in savings, retirement, and investments, and I am confident that I can find work at lower ranked institutions that would be more than happy to hire me. So for me, it’s not a question of money or finding work. It’s the emotional toll. I want to continue writing, doing first rate scholarship, and try as best I can to contribute to my discipline.

As far as my students go, I will continue to teach in a “Benedict Option” way, trying the best I can to “strengthen the things that remain” (Rev. 3) and pass on to them the best that has been thought, believed, and lived in Western Civilisation. My experience has been that students are hungry for such direction, but you have to present it to them in a way what meets them where they are at. You cannot presuppose anything. For this reason, I have found creative ways to introduce them to ancient and modern ideas that do not directly address contemporary concerns. As they say, I try to find “the thin edge of the wedge” and pound away, using self-deprecating humor, personal anecdotes, and a sense of joy in my teaching. (Don’t ever, I mean ever, underestimate the attractiveness and power of exhibiting love for one’s students). This results in them letting their guard down. (We used to call it in the old days “being open minded.” Back then “being closed minded” was considered disgraceful. Now it’s an essential qualification for employment at the New York Times. Go figure). On the other hand, I will not compromise in my lectures or acquiesce to altering my curricular plan to meet the non-academic demands of the Office of Diversity and Equity (if such demands in fact arise, though they have not yet). I realize that I can not avoid them forever, that at some point they will likely try to force me to confess my allegiance to their bizarre Uncivil Religion. At that point, I will be among my blessed predecessors, including Socrates, Jesus, St. Peter, St. Paul, and Dante. What an honor.

UPDATE.4: From a reader I know personally, and who correctly says she cannot identify herself:

Very few of us have practical freedom of speech anymore. Sure, the constitution lets us say it, but what good is that if it gets us mobbed?

I have been turning the “what to do??” question over in my head for months, years, really. I have no position of influence, no interest in politics, and no talents as an author. I do have a presence on social media both socially and commercially, and I keep the two separate for the most part. I detest virtue-signaling with all of my being and absolutely refuse to jump on bandwagons. The recent posting of black squares had me dislocating my eyes I rolled them so hard. This time I did learn that it’s not enough to be silent. I continued to post ordinary Instagram posts and refrained from making comments on any of the myriad black-square posts from my friends and family. This did not go unnoticed. As you’ve said many times, it’s not enough to refrain from dissension, one must JOIN IN. After 48 hours I had enough and disabled my account. I stopped posting on FB well over a year ago and blog extremely infrequently now. I have no voice.

The big thing in my favor is our livelihood is a safe one, not (yet) threatened by the woke mob. I have true sympathy for those in dangerous professions.

So what *can* I do? Frankly, I think I’ve come up with the most effective way to fight back in my power: I’m raising a pack of non-woke kids. We homeschool. We participate at church. We haven’t had cable in at least a decade. We talk about the stuff that goes on in the world. They learn about bias and considering context and source. They learn how words and statistics can be manipulated.  They learn that just because you see it online doesn’t mean it’s true. They learn that the world is not black and white, but all shades of grey. They know that paradise will never be found in this fallen world. They learn that no matter what, you must be kind, generous, polite, forgiving, even to those who wish you evil. They learn that the most important things in life aren’t to be rich, to “follow your dreams”, or to achieve what the world seems success, but to love God, to “work out your salvation with fear and trembling,” to love and serve others, to follow the examples of the saints of the Church. That is where true happiness lies anyway.

Of course I worry how things will all turn out; what parent doesn’t? I do my best and ask God to supply my deficiencies. So far we have a few young adults amongst the oldest and things look hopeful. I had previously taken the stance that I would support whatever they wanted to do, career/education-wise without trying to do the steering, but now I’m gently pointing out pitfalls in some professions (like academia, medicine, etc.) where they’re likely to be taken out for being Christians.

It’s all I can do, but if we all did this, there would be a cohort of stronger, less sway-able adults in the near future, able to withstand the coming storm.

UPDATE.5: From a reader:

I see a lot of black Christians, including in my own church, and I see that their faith, their family, their community, their politics and their activism and their witness are all in the same place, all in accord, mutually strengthening. These people are not the white woke militants and definitely not the violent rioters of any color. These are decent community people and devout believers. They can stand without weapons in front of militarised police, not because they’re hyped up on adrenalin or on deflected, externalised self-hatred, but by a surrender to God’s will and a knowledge that they’ve endured much worse in the past, including the recent past.

So what do we do – I’m guessing most of your readers are not in that demographic. Most of your readers are in atomised lives, with ‘modern, complicated’ fragmented family histories, tenuously attached to tenuous communities, and not quite sure if they can trust the moral authority of whatever church they’ve attached themselves to, consumer-like, at this point in their lives [sorry Rod – and that applies to me too].

Plan A would be a time machine where we go back and viciously purge our own churches of the hypocrites, paedophiles, rapists, thieves, shakedown artists, frauds, poseurs and other criminals who gutted our churches of their moral credibility. Go back in time and stand up, speak firmly, speak lovingly, speak in Christ but with a clear voice, against every line that was crossed. Not shout with hatred and condemnation – we did that, and it was about as effective as teargassing priests at an aid station in front of a church and then charging peaceful protestors with mounted police.

We don’t have a time machine, so – Plan B – we need to do now what we should have done then, and we need to make up for lost time.

The fear of our fellow man is not of God, that fear is the Enemy’s weapon. We need to leave the AR-15s in the safe, and leave our fear with the Enemy, where it belongs, and go out into public spaces, unarmed, open handed, open hearted, in faith. We need to show that we are not afraid and that we don’t need to be feared. We need to show that we will listen, but also gently and firmly insist that we also have a voice that deserves to be heard, and must be heard. We need to speak and act in the belief that the people we are afraid of and who are afraid of us, are our brothers and sisters in Christ, even when they are atheists or Marxists or “Antifa” or whoever.

In other words we need to get out in the public square like street preachers. Not concede the public square because of shame or discomfort, or physical fear, but come forth. Come forth not to argue, but to witness. We need to stop hiding, because hiding not only takes away our power to witness to others that we are good people, not to be feared, that we are on the same side, it also makes us invisible and thus allows those other people to imagine that we are the monsters that the divisive people claim we are.

So we need to witness and we need to ‘represent’, as black folks say. In the streets and in the public forums; not in our living rooms, not in our social media echo chambers, not on our TV echo chambers, not in the private spaces but in the public spaces. As we should have been doing for the last 50 years, instead of allowing ourselves marginalised and atomised and labelled as the enemy.

That’s what I’m trying to do now, just as of the last few days. It’s hard and painful. So far it’s working to the extent that as many people are coming out in support as are “cancelling” me. If that was an “R value” for a virus called Truth-2020, 1.0 is a pretty good R value. I will let you know how it goes.

Basically I’m just taking on board your text from Solzhenitsyn and carrying it out. I don’t think there’s much more we can do, and we can’t do any less, or we will fail, and history won’t even remember our names.

The post How Do We Fight The Woke Militants? appeared first on The American Conservative.

McCarthyites Of The Left

The Los Angeles Times runs a feature about Marie Cisco, who put together a blacklist of the theaters that aren’t speaking out in the proper way about Black Lives Matter.:

Cisco, a producer who has worked with the New York-based National Black Theatre, the Public Theater, Lee Daniels Entertainment and the Apollo Theater, was not surprised by the crickets coming from these institutions — self-professed bastions of liberalism and equality — but she felt hurt and angry all the same.

So Cisco created a public Google spreadsheet and titled it “Theaters Not Speaking Out.” It was open for anyone to edit, and it had a simple directive: “Add names to this document who have not made a statement against injustices toward black people.”

At 5:50 p.m. PDT on that Saturday, May 30, she shared the document on her personal Facebook page as well as with the Theater Folks of Color Facebook group to which she belongs. It has more than 7,000 members and serves as a supportive space for people to share thoughts and experiences about working in predominantly white institutions and provides a place to “unite around common concerns and plan collective direct action.”

More:

It did not appear to be a coincidence that the following day, and into June, theaters began posting messages of solidarity with Black Lives Matter en masse, black theater artists said. The response was problematic because often the statements were perceived to have come from a place of shame and felt slapped together and hollow, Cisco said.

More disturbing than the slowness to speak out, Cisco said, was the language of the statements themselves, many of which fell back on pledges of support without acknowledgement of the historical diversity problem in theater or commitments to take concrete steps to support black artists.

You got that? This one woman has taken advantage of this moment to create a blacklist of politically problematic theaters — and even denounces on it theaters that do not articulate her statement of obeisance in precisely the correct way.

I’m old enough to remember when arts people would have recognized McCarthyism when they saw it. Marie Cisco is a McCarthyite, but a McCarthyite for the left.

A reader sends a public open letter that went around to faculty and staff of a small college to which he is attached. I won’t quote the letter because I don’t want to risk inadvertently outing the reader. The author is a black student at the school, who reads the riot act to administration and faculty for not doing enough for black students in this time. She acknowledges that the school has taken steps, but they haven’t done exactly what she things black students deserve, in the way that they deserve them. The privilege being asserted by this kid, and the signatories to her letter: presuming to tell her college what they must say and how they must say it to avoid the taint of racism.

I figure the college will surrender. Nobody has the backbone to stand up for themselves these days. It’s all capitulation. Tucker Carlson is speaking his mind fearlessly, but advertisers are dropping him. You cannot air a program without advertisers. There are few people as cowardly as Big Business. In my forthcoming book, I talk about how Woke Capitalism is going to be the prime mechanism for enforcing soft totalitarianism. This is one reason why it has been so difficult for Americans to see something like this moment coming: we have always assumed that totalitarianism would be something emanating from the government. Conservatives, especially, have long bought into the myth that Business Is Good and Government Is Bad. In fact, Business can be just as bad as Government. But that’s another story.

The Birmingham public schools and public Housing Authority have severed all ties to Alabama’s largest church, over its pastor’s having “liked,” on Facebook, posts by Charlie Kirk, of the conservative Turning Point USA group. All the pastor did was like them on Facebook. Aside from the schools losing over $800,000 in rent from the church paying to worship on some of its properties, this is what will be affected:

The services provided by Christ Health Clinic included free COVID-19 testing for residents of Birmingham public housing. The Housing Authority of Birmingham Division voted on Monday to no longer allow church volunteers and clinic workers to do work at public housing communities.

The Church of the Highlands, Alabama’s largest church, provided free mentoring, community support groups and faith, health and social service activities at the Housing Authority of Birmingham Division’s nine public housing communities. The church did not receive any money for the services, but had an agreement to allow its volunteers at the facilities.

More:

The Church of the Highlands launched Christ Health Center in 2009 in Woodlawn to offer medical services to the Woodlawn area, including the Marks Village public housing complex in Gate City. The church and clinic attracted national attention for launching the first mass testing for COVID-19 in Alabama, March 17-22, administering about 2,200 tests at a drive-through set up on the church campus.

“Christ Health chose our Woodlawn clinic specifically for its proximity to Birmingham public housing communities and the people who call them home,” said Christ Health Center CEO Dr. Robert Record, who also attends and is on staff at the Church of the Highlands.

Think about who is being hurt here (hint: it ain’t the church administration). None of it matters. It’s all ideology. All the pastor did was like a political guy on Facebook, and now this.

And they’re just getting started.

It’s time for you people who laughed at the term “soft totalitarianism” to shut up. They won’t come for you — at first.

The post McCarthyites Of The Left appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘An Hour Of Wolves And Shattered Shields’

I received this poignant letter from a reader, who signed it with their real name, and institutional affiliation:

The hour is later than you think.

I teach at a small liberal arts college in the southern Appalachian mountains. We serve primarily poor black, white, and brown kids. 65% of them are first generation college students (like me) and hail from some of the worst poverty anywhere in the country. We are enrollment driven, funding is always an issue, but I think we make a difference.

Instead of figuring out how we are going to deal with a second wave of coronavirus, or how to replace international students who shore up enrollment while getting to play sports they love (and enriching a fairly cornbread corner of America) and may not come back after the pandemic, or the myriad other problems big and small that plague us, we are putting together a “social justice initiative” whose purpose as yet remains vague.

A general call went out to everyone. If you join, you’ll be expected to trumpet a hard-Left reading of woke ideology. If you refuse… well “silence is violence.” One proposal, made without irony, was to invite the community to campus to tell them how their whiteness makes them privileged and also racist. Mercifully, sanity reigned and the proposal foundered on the rocks of “we don’t think poor white people from Appalachia will be persuaded, and will likely resent being told their lives are somehow privileged.” But it won’t stop.

If you just want to teach, scratch out a living and make a difference, hoping the furies will forget about you: you are wrong. I took this job on purpose, praying to bring something of the liberal arts to my own people. And just be left alone, and yet… here we are.

Feel free to share my story, if you like, but please do keep my name off the web. I still have to figure out how to stay true to my beliefs and pay my mortgage.

It seems that a day has indeed come when the courage of men failed, and we have forsaken our friends and broke all bonds of fellowship. You know what comes next? “An hour of wolves and shattered shields…” It is here.

The quote is Aragorn’s:

Sons of Gondor! Of Rohan! My brothers! I see in your eyes the same fear that would take the heart of me! A day may come when the courage of men fails, when we forsake our friends and break all bonds of fellowship. But it is not this day. An hour of wolves and shattered shields when the age of Men comes crashing down! But it is not this day! This day we fight! By all that you hold dear on this good Earth, I bid you stand! Men of the West!

This is the battle. Are you going to let them beat you down? Teach you to hate your brothers with different skins, despise your ancestors, your traditions, your books, your music? Raise a generation of your sons and daughters who tear down statues and deface monuments, because they hold you and themselves in contempt?

I would rather stand with those poor hill people than with the entire faculty of most liberal arts colleges.

Look at what happened in St. Paul, Minn., yesterday, and the way Ben Domenech describes it:

Sculpted by an Italian immigrant who helped build Grand Central Station and his son, given as a gift during the Great Depression as a symbol of the acceptance of Italian immigrants in Minnesota. https://t.co/EviIr85fNk

— Ben Domenech (@bdomenech) June 11, 2020

This wasn’t a spontaneous action. According to the Minneapolis Star-Tribune, the gutless leaders of that state were warned in advance:

State officials said they had been warned about the action via social media. It was mentioned at a news conference an hour and a half earlier with Gov. Tim Walz. Public Safety Commissioner John Harrington said then that the patrol would meet the protesters and seek an alternative resolution.

The Democratic governor was very gentle in his remarks after this violence had been done to the statue, which was on State Capitol grounds:

Wednesday night, Gov. Tim Walz said he used to teach his students that many Minnesotans see the Columbus statue as a “legacy of genocide,” and said it is time to take a “hard look at the dated symbols and injustices around us.”

However, Walz says the removal of the statue was wrong in that protesters could have gone through the formal process.

“Even in pain, we must work together to make change, lawfully,” he said. “I encourage Minnesotans to have productive, peaceful conversations about the changes that need to be made to create a more inclusive state.”

He hates himself too, with his lutefisk backbone.

Are we really so demoralized as a people that we surrender to this violence? If we love ourselves and the treasure of our own culture as much as they hate us and it, we will find the guts to fight.

The post ‘An Hour Of Wolves And Shattered Shields’ appeared first on The American Conservative.