Rod Dreher's Blog, page 141

Havel’s Gourmet Grocer

This act of cowardice by a gourmet grocer in downtown Philadelphia should never, ever be forgotten. Di Bruno Brothers is an 80-year-old family-owned shop whose owners issued this abject, groveling apology, which amounts to the terrified Czech greengrocer of Vaclav Havel’s parable putting a “Workers of the world, unite!” sign in his shop window, to avoid trouble from the communist authorities. Look at what these lowlifes, one of whose locations was hit by looters, are apologizing for! Here is the text of their open letter (emphases in the original):

By now, you may be aware of a situation this past Monday at our Chestnut Street location involving the offer of complimentary lunch to Philadelphia Police Officers. The decision was made in haste after a night of destruction and looting. It was insensitive and we sincerely apologize. The sign was removed, and the policy is revoked.

In subsequent days we have been challenged to look at our actions and be self-reflective on the impact that they had on our employees and our community. We appreciate our employees and community for encouraging dialogue and growth, and we are committed to learning and reforming our efforts moving forward.

We stand in solidarity with the peaceful protesters against racism, injustice, and the senseless violence against people of color.

We believe Black Lives Matter and are unequivocally against police brutality.

We acknowledge that there has been a long history of racism and inequality in the country that has and continues to cause great pain. Di Bruno Bros. is committed to do our part towards a community that supports & elevates all people equally.

We recognize that our ability to rely on the assistance of the police to protect our store in times of unrest is a privilege that many in our city and country have not been afforded.

We will be devoting time, resources, and money to learn, understand, and reform as a company. We will be taking these steps immediately:

We have made donations to these four charities supporting the fight against police brutality and racial injustice. We understand that to combat these injustices we must support the cause not only monetarily, but through actions.

Philadelphia Lawyers for Social Equity: https://www.plsephilly.org/

Black Lives Matter: https://blacklivesmatter.com/

The Southern Poverty Law Center: https://www.splcenter.org/

NAACP’s Legal Defense and Education Fund: https://www.naacp.org/

Companywide racial injustice training for all management level employees before July 15, 2020. This will be Race Forward’s Building Racial Equity training on June 24th and July 7th. More information can be found here: https://www.raceforward.org/trainings

Our HR Department is looking forward to coordinating a meeting between employees and management in order to understand, not be understood. We welcome the opportunity to have constructive, positive discourse together in the near future.

Growth does not come in an instant, so we will sustain long-term efforts in addition to the above actions. In the long term, we will:

Allocate a meaningful percentage of our charitable budget to groups fighting against racial injustices, inequality, and equal opportunity

Develop a program for minority recruitment in our HR department

For 80 years Di Bruno Bros has been part of the fabric of Philadelphia and a leader in the small business and food community. We realize our position comes with great responsibility and what we say and do has meaning. We are committed to using our influence and voice to promote peace, equality, and unity.

Finally, to our employees who proudly wear the Di Bruno Bros uniform and to customers who come to us for great food and a sense of community every day: please know that we are committed to self-reflection and positive reformation. We believe that the best is yet to come for our community and our city.

Sincerely,

The Third Generation Owners of Di Bruno Bros.

Bill Mignucci Jr.

Emilio Mignucci

Billy Mignucci

 

Un-freaking-believable. They are apologizing for giving free sandwiches to police officers who had been on the street trying to protect the civil order after a night of rioting and looting! For that act of kindness, they are ashamed. And not only that, they are paying protection money to the progressive activist mafia.

I love good Italian food, but I wouldn’t eat a thing from this shop now. What a disgraceful display of cowardice. Woke capitalism at its worst. The thing is, you know that the Mignuccis are well aware that what they’ve done here is dishonorable.

The post Havel’s Gourmet Grocer appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Destruction Of Authority

Whatever you think of Gen. Mattis’s rebuke of President Trump, the importance of a highly respected retired Marine Corps general and former Secretary of Defense calling out the Commander in Chief cannot be overstated. Note this part:

When I joined the military, some 50 years ago, I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution. Never did I dream that troops taking that same oath would be ordered under any circumstance to violate the Constitutional rights of their fellow citizens—much less to provide a bizarre photo op for the elected commander-in-chief, with military leadership standing alongside.

We must reject any thinking of our cities as a “battlespace” that our uniformed military is called upon to “dominate.” At home, we should use our military only when requested to do so, on very rare occasions, by state governors. Militarizing our response, as we witnessed in Washington, D.C., sets up a conflict—a false conflict— between the military and civilian society. It erodes the moral ground that ensures a trusted bond between men and women in uniform and the society they are sworn to protect, and of which they themselves are a part.

He’s talking about Trump having deployed elements of the 82nd Airborne to Washington. If President Trump orders in more troops to restore order — as US Sen. Tom Cotton (R-Arkansas) calls for — we could easily be looking at a genuine Constitutional crisis. Cotton says that the US president has authority under the Insurrection Act to do this, and cites times in the past that this has been done, including President Eisenhower doing so to suppress white riots against desegregation.

What, though, would happen if military commanders, or frontline troops, refused to obey the Commander in Chief, on grounds that his orders were unconstitutional?

This is not strictly a legal question. It’s also a question of moral authority. Trump has very little of that. In a crisis like this, you can see very clearly the cost of his having spent his presidency demeaning and wasting the authority of his office on idiotic Twitter fights and one pointless controversy after another. True, such a move by the president would likely be popular. As Sen. Cotton points out:

Not surprisingly, public opinion is on the side of law enforcement and law and order, not insurrectionists. According to a recent poll, 58 percent of registered voters, including nearly half of Democrats and 37 percent of African-Americans, would support cities’ calling in the military to “address protests and demonstrations” that are in “response to the death of George Floyd.” That opinion may not appear often in chic salons, but widespread support for it is fact nonetheless.

Still, a president making the call to send in American troops to apply potentially deadly force against Americans is not something to be taken lightly. It is one of the gravest acts any president can do. Trump has the legal authority to do it, but it’s not difficult to foresee a situation in which some troops might wonder if they were doing the right thing.

However this crisis abates, it seems clear that the Trump presidency will not recover, even if somehow Trump wins four more years. It’s about authority which, again, is not the same thing as power.

On the subject of authority, the past week has also seen the authority of public health experts — and the authority of their media megaphones — blown sky high by the George Floyd protests. For months now, these experts and their media cheerleaders (including, to some extent, me) have been warning about the importance of social distancing to flatten the Covid-19 curve. The conservative blogger Matt Walsh has a stunning roundup of media warnings that right-wingers who violate social distancing are death-bringers.

But when people hit the streets en masse to protect police brutality, the public health voices fell largely silent, and so did the media. Three weeks from now, we will know if the protests spread Covid. Conservative critics of social distancing advocates like me are not yet vindicated. Three weeks will tell the tale. But what is undeniable now is that nobody will listen to public health authorities or the media again on the matter of Covid-19. Right-wingers treated Covid-19 not like a virus, but like a political construct — and what do you know, when the Floyd killing happened, left-wingers behaved just like the right-wingers they criticized earlier. Covid was such a threat that we had to shut down the economy, and forbid people from going to church, but not so much of a threat that we had to scream at people to stop protesting, because they were going to get us all sick.

Here’s the thing: what if Covid-19 really does come roaring back in the next few weeks? If the authorities tell people to go back to their houses and follow social distancing, people will refuse. All church people have to do is say that they’re going to pray for racial justice.

And one more authority thing. The New York Times op-ed editor James Bennet is taking massive incoming fire from the left for publishing that Tom Cotton piece — even from Times staffers. Many of them are saying that simply publishing the op-ed puts the paper’s black staffers in danger.

This would be laughable if it weren’t so serious. The Times op-ed section has published acres and acres of commentary favoring the protests from every conceivable angle. If you depended on the Times op-ed page as an accurate barometer of what Americans believed about the protests, you would be radically uninformed. In this one instance in which they published the opinion of a US Senator, calling for the military to stop the riots — a belief that most Americans share, including 37 percent of black Americans — Times staffers scream bloody murder. They retreat to that infuriating leftist claim that speech that makes certain people feel “unsafe” must be prohibited.

Kudos to Bennet for holding his ground, but do not miss what’s happening here. We don’t yet know how many people on the NYT staff feel this way, but so far, “dozens” (in the words of the Times‘s correspondent) of voices there who believe that people who want the military to step in to stop nights and nights of rioting in American cities are objectively putting black people in danger just for stating their opinion. 

And look, here is the Times‘s recent Pulitzer Prize winner for the 1619 Project:

I’ll probably get in trouble for this, but to not say something would be immoral. As a black woman, as a journalist, as an American, I am deeply ashamed that we ran this. https://t.co/lU1KmhH2zH

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) June 4, 2020

Here is that same person yesterday defending rioting and looting as not-violence:

"Violence is when an agent of the state kneels on a man's neck until all of the life is leached out of his body. Destroying property, which can be replaced, is not violence. To use the same language to describe those two things is not moral" –@nhannahjones on CBSN pic.twitter.com/GGteXRFwAr

— CBS News (@CBSNews) June 2, 2020

Think about that when you consider the authority The New York Times has. Some of you always say when I bring this up, “Who cares what the Times says? It’s in New York.” I’ll tell you who cares: nearly the entire media ecosphere — broadcast and print — which takes its cues from the Times.

Let’s be clear: the problem is not that they disagreed with the Cotton op-ed. It’s that they think his writing it, and the Times publishing it, is a threat to the life and safety of black people. What a disgusting, manipulative, ideological canard. These are dozens of staffers who work for the most powerful media institution in the US, and maybe the world, saying this. It is a stunning abdication of basic journalistic professionalism. I don’t know whether or not I agree with Cotton, but I absolutely would have published his op-ed were I in Bennet’s position.

At issue here is not the authority of The New York Times op-ed page. Alas for us opinion journalists, op-ed pages aren’t as authoritative as they used to be. What is at issue is the authority of the newspaper’s reporting. When dozens of writers and editors for a newspaper believe that an ordinary opinion held by 58 percent of Americans is so vile that it doesn’t deserve to appear in the paper at all, what does that tell you about the contempt the people who put the paper out have for their countrymen?

What does that tell you about the narrative these elites are constructing, and what the ruling class plans to do with it?

UPDATE: What kind of authority will the NYPD have left after all this?

This is why we march. https://t.co/VHQnamG0Vf

— Chloé S. Valdary

Trump The Girardian Scapegoat

Gen. James Mattis has finally criticized the man he once served as Defense Secretary. Excerpt of his full statement:

Donald Trump is the first president in my lifetime who does not try to unite the American people—does not even pretend to try. Instead he tries to divide us. We are witnessing the consequences of three years of this deliberate effort. We are witnessing the consequences of three years without mature leadership. We can unite without him, drawing on the strengths inherent in our civil society. This will not be easy, as the past few days have shown, but we owe it to our fellow citizens; to past generations that bled to defend our promise; and to our children.

Personally, I think it’s undeniably true that Trump does not try to unite the American people, but I find it insupportable to believe that the riots tearing apart America today are the culmination of Trumpism. What’s more, why did Mattis have nothing to say about the rioting? Not even a line? A military veteran friend says Mattis’s statement sounds more like score-settling than anything else.

But leave that aside. What Mattis is doing here is opening up a way to resolve this crisis by making Trump a scapegoat, in the sense that the cultural critic René Girard meant. Look:

According to Girard, the primary means for avoiding total escalation came through what he calls the scapegoat mechanism, in which conflict is resolved by uniting against an arbitrary other who is excluded and blamed for all the chaos. With the guilty party gone, the conflict ends and peace and social order return to the community. Achieving social order in this way is only possible, however, if the excluding parties unanimously believe that the person or group expelled is truly guilty or dangerous.

Girard’s examination of different “myths of origin” revealed that scapegoats, regardless of their actual crime, have carried the weight of all of the community’s transgressions. Read inside out, these stories reveal much about primitive society’s attempt to curtail violence and restore order in a fragile world with no civil structures. All of human culture, according to Girard, is built upon the edifice of scapegoating and ritual repetition. This reading of culture, inspired by an insight into of the innocence of the victim made available in the Jewish and Christian scriptures, has made possible an increased awareness of this mechanism and its aftereffects, so as to interrupt these processes and achieve a different kind of peace.

If Girard’s theory is correct, then pinning the blame on Trump could be the way out of this catastrophe. To be clear, this does not have to do with Trump’s actual guilt. Everyone just has to convince themselves that he is the source of our conflict. I don’t see that happening, and even if it did, it would solve nothing, as Trump is not in fact the source of our racial and race-related problems.

The post Trump The Girardian Scapegoat appeared first on The American Conservative.

Culture War Back To The Future

Roger Kimball says all these riots and mayhem is a replay of 1968-72. Excerpts:

The violence that is exploding across the country now has almost nothing to doing with the killing of George Floyd, a black man, by Derek Chauvin, a white policeman. That was merely the catalyst for a process that has deep roots in American culture.

The moral is: ideas matter. For decades now, our colleges and universities (and increasingly our grades schools) have been preaching a gospel of cultural self-hatred. America, according to this gospel, is evil. The country is inextricably racist and beholden to an irredeemably exploitative economic system. The latest retelling of this creation myth is the Pulitzer-Prize-winning ‘1619 Project’ whose fundamental message is that America was started as a ‘slavocracy.’ According to this malignant fantasy, the Revolutionary War was fought primarily ‘to protect the institution of slavery.’ At last count, elements of this disgusting bit of historical revisionism were being adopted in the curricula of some 4,000 school districts.

They are also working themselves out the streets of our cities. One contingent is made up of ordinary or garden variety hooligans, young men and women (mostly men) who are out to loot and smash up whatever they can.

Kimball says that the woke intellectuals are more dangerous, because they spread their destructive ideology in the universities, which is how they get dispersed through networks of elites. Many of you readers are forwarding to me messages you are receiving from corporations and corporate leaders pledging allegiance to Black Lives Matter, but of course saying nothing (about hatred and violence) that contradicts the preferred progressive narrative.

Here is a passage from my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies that describes what is happening now:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who don’t, leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”

This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice—as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy—functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.

Back to Roger Kimball for a second. He writes:

It wasn’t long ago that we were assured that the ‘end of history’ was nigh: that a Western-style liberalism was on the verge of establishing itself the world over and that peace and amity were breaking out everywhere. But instead of that attractive version of the end of history, we are now witnessing something like the retribalization of the world: a violent turn against Western liberalism and its tradition of rationality, respect for individual rights, and recognition of a common good that transcends the accidents of ethnic and racial identity. Given this situation, it is all the more imperative that we educate our students in the Western tradition, that we teach them about the virtues of our society and its democratic institutions. Such education is the staunchest bulwark against the forces of disintegration we are facing.

To which I say: yes, but.

It is without doubt the case that we have to educate our students in the Western tradition, though we must do so with a much sharper edge that comes from awareness that we are teaching them to be cultural subversives. The things we will teach them run contrary to the new order. When I wrote in The Benedict Option about the importance of classical Christian education, my idea was that this form and content of instruction would parallel what the Benedictine monks did in the early Middle Ages: hand on to the next generation the knowledge it needed to know to keep truth and tradition alive through the long night of civilization.

We are there now. We have been there for a while, but surely now even the most ardent deniers have had their eyes opened by how quickly American cities have turned into zones of barbaric pillaging. If you are still thinking that things are fine, then I ask you: what is it going to take?

So if I agree with Kimball, why the “but”? Because I believe we have moved into a stage of our culture in which the dominant culture will not leave us alone in any way, on the grounds that leaving “racism” unaddressed anywhere is a moral failing. The pressure in the culture, from woke capitalism, from the news and entertainment media, and certainly from academia, will be overwhelming. In The Benedict Option, I wrote about the Benda family of Prague, who, like everybody else, had to send their children to communist schools. They had to teach them at home to reject the party line. In Live Not By Lies, I ask Kamila Bendova, Vaclav Benda’s widow, how they did it? In this excerpt from the book, she offers one part of the strategy:

Despite the demands of her job teaching at the university, Kamila made time to read aloud to her children for two to three hours daily.

“Every day?” I ask, stunned.

“Every day,” she affirms.

She read them fairy tales, myths, adventure stories, and even some horror classics. More than any other novel, though, J. R. R. Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings was a cornerstone of her family’s collective imagination.

Why Tolkien? I ask.

“Because we knew Mordor was real. We felt that their story”—that of the hobbits and others resisting the evil Sauron—“was our story too. Tolkien’s dragons are more realistic than a lot of things we have in this world.”

“Mom read The Lord of the Rings to us maybe six times,” recalls Philip Benda. “It’s about the East versus the West. The elves on one side and the goblins on the other. And when you know the book, you see that you first need to fight the evil empire, but that’s not the end of the war. Afterward, you have to solve the problems at home, within the Shire.”

This is how Tolkien prepared the Benda children to resist communism, and also to resist the idea that the fall of communism was the end of their quest for the Good and the True. After communism’s collapse, they found ways to contribute to the moral reconstruction of their nation.

Patrik says the key is to expose children to stories that help them know the difference between truth and falsehood, and teach them how to discern this in real life.

“What my mom always encouraged in us and supported was our imagination, through the reading of books or playing with figures,” he says. “She also taught us that the imagination was something that was wholly ours, that could not be stolen from us. Which was also something that differentiated us from others.”

It should go without saying that we must instruct our children that racism is evil. But this is part of any truly liberal education. What’s happening now is that ideologues, many of them not fully aware of what they are doing, are taking advantage of the persistence of an old and universal human evil — hating the Other by race — and using it to carry out a far more sweeping agenda. We cannot count on universities anymore. Here is part of the letter that Linda Livingstone, the president of Baylor University, one of the largest Christian universities in the US, sent out:

Require diversity training for all current students, faculty and staff, which we plan to roll out this fall. The University already requires diversity training for incoming students as well as for new faculty and staff – in addition to faculty search committees and student leadership – but this training now will occur on an annual basis for all current students, faculty and staff. Why is this the right thing to do? Our Christian values call us to love and respect one another, even in our differences, as we are all a part of God’s beautiful mosaic. Racial justice is not ancillary to the University’s mission; rather, it is – or at least should be – part of the mission. Equipping students for worldwide leadership and service requires that we – and they – recognize the depth of our own innate biases and prejudices, that we more readily name them and more ably and wisely resist them. To make this online training effective, we will leverage the continual training offered by our Equity Office and other groups that occurs throughout the academic year.

Numerous members of our campus leadership team have had the opportunity to participate alongside other Waco leaders in sessions provided by the Racial Equity Institute, which helps organizations and communities grow their understanding and analysis of structural racism and its cultural and historic roots. Additionally, plans are in progress to host several REI Groundwater sessions this fall for campus leaders throughout the University.

Students are learning more about diversity in campus-wide events, courses and organizations. Baylor faculty are encouraged to choose texts, lecture materials and projects to help students understand the intersections of race, gender, religion, class and culture. We must prepare our students to work alongside members of diverse populations and to embrace differences.

More:

It breaks my heart to live in a world that says a life is not valuable based on the color of one’s skin. I want our students, faculty and staff of color to know that you are valued and you are loved. The Black Lives Matter movement is more than just a catchphrase, a rally cry or social media tactic to garner support for protestors. It is a social movement to help people understand that once Black lives begin to matter; all lives will truly matter. At Baylor, we value our faculty, staff, students and friends of color. Black lives absolutely matter.

I wonder if Linda Livingstone, president of a Texas Baptist university, is aware that Black Lives Matter believes and promotes these things (copied from its website):

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

…

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

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

You see what I mean: all kinds of terrible ideas are going to be injected forcefully into the culture via elites, under the cover of antiracism. Don’t misunderstand: racism is a malignancy, and so is police brutality; decent people should stand up against them. But resisting these evils are going to occasion the embrace of other evils, masquerading as virtues and imperatives. Last night at bedtime I was reading The Name of the Rose, in which the cleric William of Baskerville was having a conversation inside the medieval monastery with an old monk friend, Ubertino. They were talking about heresies, and how Ubertino had caused other monks to be burned at the stake for alleged heresy. William objected to that; Ubertino could not understand why William had gone soft on defending the holy faith from those who would defile it with heresy.

I thought: human nature never changes.

Come on, do you really think that the problems at Baylor, if problems there are, are so great as to mandate annual diversity training? When I was working for newspapers, and our newsroom leaders frogmarched us through diversity training, it was an insulting exercise. Journalists were just about the last people in this country who needed to be told to be sensitive to racial and sexual minorities. If anything, they might have benefited from training in how to be sensitive to religious people, and working class people. But this wasn’t really about training in “diversity.” That was a sham. It was really about laying out an ideological catechism — an illiberal one, truth to tell, one that is all about re-ordering power relations, but carried out in the language of therapy and sentimentality.

The elite’s commissars are going to be lit up now. Here is a list of demands by the NAACP. I think these are perfectly reasonable, and should be implemented:

People have been asking what protestors want, and what policy changes could be made. Here’s what the @NAACP says: pic.twitter.com/fwYjXwC4QM

— JD Flynn (@jdflynn) June 3, 2020

But the commissariat is not going to be satisfied with this kind of commonsense reform. This is true:

the riots are extremely ideological in the strict sense that they are predicated upon power relations as interpreted by a ruling elite and not as they really exist.

— Nightmare Vision (@GodCloseMyEyes) June 1, 2020

Here is the party line laid down by the New York City Council’s chair of health policy:

Let’s be clear about something: if there is a spike in coronavirus cases in the next two weeks, don’t blame the protesters.

Blame racism.

— Mark D. Levine (@MarkLevineNYC) June 3, 2020

You see what’s happening: everything that authorities told us about the public health and moral imperative to practice social distancing was thrown completely out the window for the sake of these protests — and now we are going to watch the ideological rewriting of public health laws.

The media are ramping up the ideological indoctrination. Look at this lie:

Well,,,yes. pic.twitter.com/JHfVE6xoxB

— Ben Sixsmith (@BDSixsmith) June 3, 2020

I could go on. The point is that we have moved into a new phase of ideological conflict, one in which leftist elites hold the high ground. One major difference between today and the period Roger Kimball refers to is that in 2020, Woke Capitalism is a thing; the radicals hold power within corporations. Daniel McCarthy calls out the hypocrisy of the big corporations. Nike, for example, is Very, Very Concerned about white supremacy in America. Concentration camp for Muslim Uighurs in China? Not so much.

We can (and should) mock the hypocrisies of big corporations, but the realities of woke capitalism are far more serious. Again, a passage from Live Not By Lies puts things in the correct aspect:

The embrace of aggressive social progressivism by big business is one of the most underappreciated stories of the last two decades. Critics call it “woke capitalism,” a snarky theft of the left-wing slang term indicating progressive enlightenment. Woke capitalism is now the most transformative agent within the religion of social justice, because it unites progressive ideology with the most potent force in American life: consumerism and making money.

In his 2018 letter to investors, Larry Fink, CEO of the global investment company BlackRock, said that corporate social responsibility is now part of the cost of doing business.

“Society is demanding that companies, both public and private, serve a social purpose,” Fink wrote. “To prosper over time, every company must not only deliver financial performance, but also show how it makes a positive contribution to society.”

Poll results about consumer expectations back Fink up. Millennials and Generation Z customers are especially prone to seeing their consumer expenditures as part of creating a socially conscious personal brand identity. For many companies, then, signaling progressive virtues to consumers is a smart business move in the same way that signaling all-American patriotism would have been to corporations in the 1950s.

But what counts as a “positive contribution to society”? Corporations like to brand themselves as being in favor of a predictable constellation of causes, all of them guiding stars of the progressive cosmos. Woke capitalist branding harnesses the unmatched propaganda resources of the advertising industry to send the message, both explicitly and implicitly: the beliefs of social conservatives and religious traditionalists are obstacles to the social good.

So, let’s return to Roger Kimball’s words:

Given this situation, it is all the more imperative that we educate our students in the Western tradition, that we teach them about the virtues of our society and its democratic institutions. Such education is the staunchest bulwark against the forces of disintegration we are facing.

He is not wrong, but my view is that the forces of disintegration are far more powerful than this rhetoric implicitly acknowledges. Roger Kimball, the author of Tenured Radicals, certainly does not need to be educated in the toxicity of progressivism. He gets that. What I’m not sure that he gets is how resisting it is going to require much more than countercultural education. It is going to require forming generations henceforth in the awareness that if they hold on to their religion and their traditional beliefs — including a belief in the virtues of the Western tradition — they will be regarded by the dominant culture as moral reprobates, as outlaws. They will be hated, and in many cases made to suffer.

Can they do this? Can we raise children (and condition ourselves) like the Benda family did: to keep our eyes focused on truth in a culture that has given itself over to ideological madness? Can we bear witness even when it costs us something immense? Our livelihood? Our friends? Our liberty?

We had better figure out how to do this. It’s coming. It’s already here.

UPDATE: A reader from the previous thread posts a comment relative here:

I’ve said basically nothing about all of this George Floyd stuff on social media, because A) I don’t think social media is a platform for politics, and B) I didn’t feel I had anything useful to say.

I’ve still been looking at my social accounts, though, and tonight I saw a post from one of my lefty friends — a normal one, not one of the crazies. In block letters:

“PAY ATTENTION TO WHICH OF YOUR FRIENDS ARE STAYING SILENT AT THIS TIME.”

Like something right out of the Stasi. And yes, with all their other posts, it was quite clear they meant it exactly as I understood it.

So, that sentiment is out there, and it’s no longer confined to the loons: Private, unspoken thoughts are dangerous and cannot be permitted. Silence = violence. Not taking a side, for whatever reason, means taking the side of evil.

I figure loyalty oaths — actual loyalty oaths, not “wink wink, nudge nudge” loyalty oaths, like we have today — are probably inevitable at this point.

God help us all.

You already have to swear a Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion loyalty oath to work in a California state university.

The post Culture War Back To The Future appeared first on The American Conservative.

Language, Memory, & Soft Totalitarianism

The riots give us an excellent opportunity to see how the soft totalitarianism of the progressive left works.

Check out this tweet from an Associated Press reporter. The AP Stylebook is the standard reference book in most US newsrooms.

Feels like a good time to post AP’s guidance on the word looting: pic.twitter.com/hjxQWbSYAx

— Kimberlee Kruesi (@kkruesi) May 31, 2020

In other words, obscrue These Riot Days are accelerating the trends toward soft totalitarianism. The manipulation of language is a standard strategy for controlling the way people think. From my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies, here’s a passage taken from my interview with a Polish historian in Warsaw, Pawel Skibinski:

Skibiński focuses on language as a preserver of cultural memory. We know that communists forbade people to talk about history in unapproved ways. This is a tactic today’s progressives use as well, especially within universities.

What is harder for contemporary people to appreciate is how we are repeating the Marxist habit of falsifying language, hollowing out familiar words and replacing them with a new, highly ideological meaning. Propaganda not only changes the way we think about politics and contemporary life but it also conditions what a culture judges worth remembering.

I mention the way liberals today deploy neutral-sounding, or even positive, words like dialogue and tolerance to disarm and ultimately defeat unaware conservatives. And they imbue other words and phrases—hierarchy, for example, or traditional family—with negative connotations.

Recalling life under communism, the professor continues, “The people who lived only within such a linguistic sphere, who didn’t know any other way to speak, they could really start believing in this way of using of words. If a word carries with it negative baggage, it becomes impossible to have a discussion about the phenomenon.”

Teaching current generations of college students who grew up in the postcommunist era is challenging because they do not have a natural immunity to the ideological abuse of language. “For me, it’s obvious. I remember this false use of language. But for our students, it’s impossible to understand.”

Watch and listen for how the media — TV, radio, print — describe the rioters, and the riots. They’re going to start calling it an “uprising” — the New Yorker already has done so, and so has NBC News.

Watch also for how the rioting will be downplayed in favor of the real message, which is that America is a racist country.

The peaceful protest is entirely seperate from the rioting, you see. Though rioting seems to always happen at these protests. For years now. And there was that one where 5 cops were killed. And now cities are on fire. But it’s really peaceful, you understand, for the most part.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 2, 2020

The New Yorker is on the social media scene puffing an SJW grifter who explains why white people getting upset over riots and looting, if they are carried out by black people, is a racist act:

You can spend many years reading many books to try to understand liberal modernity, or you can just watch this 24-second video. pic.twitter.com/KyJLKAuzKM

— Michael Knowles (@michaeljknowles) June 2, 2020

The (white, Democratic) attorney general of Massachusetts said today that the riots are an opportunity for moral growth:

“We have a once in a lifetime opportunity,” Healey said in a speech to the Greater Boston Chamber of Commerce. “The challenge I pose to all of us this morning is: Will we seize it?

She referenced the protest and riots of the past few days over the death of George Floyd, a black man who died on May 25 after a Minneapolis police officer knelt on his neck for several minutes. “Yes, America is burning, but that’s how forests grow.”

Watch closely how elites manage the public discourse to gaslight us all into believing that we are not seeing what we’re seeing. Matt Walsh had an amazing series of tweets — gathered in one place here — about how the media covered anti-lockdown protests as selfish, reckless, even racist — but completely flipped the narrative when mass gatherings were in service of a cause the media endorse.

So what we’ve learned is that if you want to protest during a pandemic, do it safely by burning down buildings and beating the hell out of random bystanders. That way you’ll escape criticism from the media.

— Matt Walsh (@MattWalshBlog) June 1, 2020

Get this: public health experts are now coming out in favor of mass protests, for political reasons. It’s insane! Here I have been pulling my hair out in my red state over conservatives who refused to wear masks, and who treated Covid-19 like it was a political thing, not a public health matter … and now here are left-wing public health experts treating Covid-19 like it’s a political thing!

Dozens of public health and disease experts have signed an open letter in support of the nationwide anti-racism protests.

“White supremacy is a lethal public health issue that predates and contributes to COVID-19,” they wrote.https://t.co/EewPNgDSu3

— NPR (@NPR) June 2, 2020

I was already suspicious of authority, but after this, I am even more radically skeptical.

(Note well: I acknowledge, and I deplore, that there have been multiple instances of police brutality against media covering protesters — see, for example, this shocking instance from Australian TV. The point of this post is to talk about how the narrative is being constructed, and how the culture’s memory of events of this week will be shaped.)

Here, Mayor Bill de Blasio, who has allowed looters to run rampant in Manhattan, answers a Jewish reporter’s very good question:

Hamodia reporter asks why protest is allowed when prayer services aren’t.@NYCMayor @BilldeBlasio: “400 years of American racism, I’m sorry, that is not the same question as the understandably aggrieved store owner or the devout religious person who wants to go back to services”

— Matthew Chayes (@chayesmatthew) June 2, 2020

And:

Bill de Blasio on Jewish funeral mourners: The time for warnings has passed, you will be arrested.

de Blasio on Jewish schools: Don’t even think about it.

de Blasio on churches, synagogues, etc.: Sorry, no.

de Blasio on Floyd protesters: All good

The Day Trump Lost The Presidency

(Let me remind you from the start: because TAC is a not-for-profit entity, nothing I write in this or any post should be taken as telling anybody how to vote in a particular race. What I offer below is analysis.)

I believe that yesterday was the day that Donald Trump lost the presidency.

After days of urban rioting, the likes of which America hasn’t seen in over fifty years, the President of the United States finally deigned to show himself and address the nation. He gave a pro forma address in the White House, then, law enforcement personnel having gassed peaceful protesters to clear the way for the president to walk across the park to St. John’s Church, Trump strolled over, stood in front of the church holding a Bible, for a photo op.

A conservative white Evangelical pastor friend texted me his disgust:

Conservative Evangelical pastor txts: “He’s standing in front of one of the most theologically liberal churches in America holding a Bible that is not his and that he does not read while appropriating the symbols of a religion that he doesn’t observe. Yeah, I’m really impressed.” pic.twitter.com/FjFpZ2avZI

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) June 2, 2020

By bedtime, the White House had put out a short propaganda film:

pic.twitter.com/bKvTrqHomS

— The White House (@WhiteHouse) June 2, 2020

This is the act of a weak man who is left with nothing but to stand in front of a church flashing a Bible like a gang sign to get conservative Christians in line. It is pathetic. Today I see that he is going to visit a DC shrine to St. John Paul II — a purely political stunt. As a believing Christian, Trump’s cynicism disgusts me viscerally.

While the White House propagandists were making that video, Tucker Carlson was, well, reading the riot act to Trump on his program. Here is his entire 26-minute monologue. Carlson is disgusted by the leadership class in this country, which includes Trump’s weakness:

Trump’s weakness does not necessarily consist of his not sending in troops to shoot looters. It consists of him having no idea what to do other than create a pathetic propaganda moment that is so transparently cheap that it makes you throw up a little bit in your mouth. Trollope’s lines are a fitting epitaph for the MAGA dream, which died last night in front of St. John’s Church:

But the glory has been the glory of pasteboard, and the wealth has been a wealth of tinsel. The wit has been the wit of hairdressers, and the enterprise has been the enterprise of mountebanks.

To be fair, the crises that have hit the United States in 2020 would have challenged the most able chief executive. Trump’s weaknesses — in particular, his disinterest in mastering details and his habit of confusing bluster for substance — have made a difficult situation much worse. It is undoubtedly the case that the Democrats and the media are a serious threat to the kinds of things conservatives value, and it is certainly true that the press is dishonest. All of these things can be true, and at the same time, Trump’s incompetence and unfitness for the high office he holds made intolerably manifest.

Think of it: the malignity of the Bolsheviks did not make Tsar Nicholas II more competent to address the crises overwhelming Russia. Saying, “Trump is bad, but the Democrats would be worse” may be true, but at some point, that ceases to work as a rationalization for a president who does not know how to do his job.

It is not Trump’s fault that so many American cities are engulfed by riots. The Minneapolis Police Department has been under the control of Democratic mayors for decades. It’s not Donald Trump’s fault that roving gangs looted Manhattan last night — a city controlled by a Democratic mayor and machine, and a state governed by a Democrat. It’s absurd to lay all the blame for this on Trump.

But whoever was in the White House at a time like this would have to lead. One of the reasons Trump can’t lead is that he has been such a poor leader these past three years. He has power, but no authority, and the reason, in part, that he has no authority is that he has wasted it on stupid crap like this (he tweeted it this morning):

SILENT MAJORITY!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 2, 2020

There will be some Pavlov pooches out there in the MAGAsphere who will respond to this, but Tucker Carlson reads the situation correctly: people will not forgive him for his mishandling of this crisis. To be fair to Trump, it is hard to know what specific things he, Donald Trump, could do to make things better. He has labored so tirelessly to create ill will and to damage people’s confidence in him. Of course he has enemies who don’t play fair. All presidents do. It’s how you handle it that makes the difference. I posted the other day this passage from Bill Buford’s Among The Thugs, his electrifying 1990s book about embedding with English soccer hooligans. He’s talking about the self-pity of one of the mob. I posted it the other day as an example of the egotistical character of the rioters. But it is also characteristic of Donald Trump, unable to grasp the consequences of the way he has behaved as president:

Harry had been drinking since five that morning and had, by his own estimate, five imperial gallons of lager in his stomach, which, every time he turned, rolled of their own accord. Harry had been busy. He had been one of those who had abused the bus driver on the ride into the city, and he had abused the bus driver on the ride to the ground. He had urinated on a café table that had, in his inimitable phrasing, a number of “Eyetie cows” sitting around it, and he had then proceeded to abuse the waiters.

In fact he had spent most of the day abusing waiters— many, many waiters. Who could know how many? They all looked so much alike that they blurred into one indiscriminate shape (round and short). He had abused the Acting British Consul, the police, hotel managers, food vendors of every description, and any onlooker who didn’t speak English—especially anybody who didn’t speak English. All in all, Harry had had a good day out, and then, in the full, bloated arrogance of the moment, he saw the following: thousands of Italian supporters converging on Harry’s bus. They had surrounded it and were pounding on its sides—jeering, ugly, and angry. What right had they to be angry?

Do you see what they’re doing? Harry said to the bloke behind me, full of indignation. And then if there’s trouble, Harry said, they’ll blame the English, won’t they?

I believe there are a significant number of people in this country who are outraged at the rioting, and want civil peace restored. These are natural conservatives; a conservative president ought to be able to speak for them and act on their behalf. And they are listening to and watching this president, and coming to realize that in the clutch, he’s choking. There is nothing to him. Pasteboard and tinsel. A sham. Nobody fears him, and nobody respects him. The country needs General Patton, but we’ve got Captain Kangaroo.

They may be thinking that the best interests of conservatism would be served by going into opposition for four years, and trying to rebuild, instead of spending the next four years having to defend this man, and pretending that this Dumpster fire lights the way to a better future. After four more years of this, they may be reasoning, there may not be much of a Republican Party left.

UPDATE: You know what? If these riots continue, none of what I say here will matter in November. Trump can be as bad as he wants, but if ordinary people see the Democrats and their media lackeys making excuses for the rioters, they’ll vote Trump.

The post The Day Trump Lost The Presidency appeared first on The American Conservative.

Artist: ‘I’m Terrified To Speak’

A reader responds to my “road to soft totalitarianism” post from yesterday:

Thought you might find this interesting. Daniel Elder is a well-respected choral composer at least until recently.

Here is what Elder posted to Twitter:

[image error]

Don’t see much wrong with that. It’s understandable. But then, I’m not in the musician community. The reader is, and continues:

While what he said was in poor taste, the mob has been particularly cruel, especially on FB in choral music forums and by fellow musicians. Even after he explained, it wasn’t good enough.

Daniel Elder is a self described prolific writer of vocal and instrumental music. He is published with @jwpepper and Gia Music (which specializes in the works of the African diaspora).

How privileged Elder is to just be “done” w/ everything going on today.

cc: @GarrettMcQueen pic.twitter.com/TLJRNEy1aT

— blasianFMA

Humanity’s ‘Heart Of Darkness’

Literature professor Karen Swallow Prior is editor of a new series of classic novels reprinted with questions and commentary to guide Christian reflection and discussion on the material. The first two books in the series are Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, and Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility. I re-read Heart of Darkness recently for the first time since high school in the 1980s, and though it was published in 1899, as the European colonial era was heading for crisis, I was deeply struck by how resonant it is with our own time and place. Last week I interviewed Dr. Prior by e-mail about the novel, and why it matters today:

RD: Why did you choose Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness as one of the first books released in your new series?

KSP: The series will consist of six volumes. Do you have any idea how hard it is to choose just six of all the great literary works that I think everyone should read? I chose from within works in the public domain, which eliminated more modern works. But my area of specialty is eighteenth and nineteenth century British literature, so that wasn’t really a problem. It was a given that I would include a work by Jane Austen. So once I chose Sense and Sensibility, I wanted a counterbalance to a work that some might (wrongly) think of as girly and unserious, and it’s hard to get a work more notorious for being dark and serious than Heart of Darkness. The other titles I will include are Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte, Frankenstein by Mary Shelley, Tess of the D’Urbervilles by Thomas Hardy, and a token American novel, The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne. (I do reserve the right to change my mind, though.)

Another reason I chose Heart of Darkness is that it’s one of my favorite works to teach, especially in my literature survey courses which have a lot of students who aren’t English majors. Heart of Darkness—although a difficult, dense work—grapples with a lot of history and ideas that I think are of interest to a more general, though thoughtful, audience. Some of these ideas, which I discuss in more detail in the introduction, are colonialism, existentialism, and modernism. They sound heady, but once they are explained, it’s easy and fascinating to see how these ideas are at work not only in the novel but in the world today.

I hadn’t read the novel since high school, and was startled, here in middle-age, to discover how fresh it was, and relevant to our own time. We’ll get into this in a second, but let me ask first: how is it that a novel, especially one from 1899, can tell us more about the age in which we live than the morning paper?

This is a really good question. First, this is simply the way stories work. Instead of being histories about “us,” stories are about “them.” And because they aren’t about us—at least on the surface—they allow us the critical distance it sometimes takes to recognize hard truths. This is exactly why the Bible’s King David, who couldn’t recognize the sin in his own life, could see the great injustice in the story the prophet Nathan told him in about the rich man who stole the poor man’s lamb. We are often like King David. We can’t see our own sin and error as reported in the daily news, but we can see it in stories about other people, especially in other times. To paraphrase Emily Dickinson, the truth is “too bright” for us. Stories tell the truth “slant,” like an “explanation kind.”

Further, as William Faulkner famously wrote, “The past is never dead. It’s not even past.” From our finite, subjective perspectives, it’s natural to see things that happened before we were alive to witness them as “ancient history” or as “unprecedented” (ahem). We can read about events from 100 or so years ago and they seem so long ago. Yet, because they actually aren’t that long ago—and because the human condition doesn’t change—they ring familiar, even if that familiarity doesn’t register on a conscious level.

What does Conrad’s narrative tell us about the myth of progress in the 19th century West?

This is one of the richest aspects of the story Conrad tells. Conrad was writing at the end of the Victorian era, a time nicknamed the “age of progress.” And what human progress seemed possible at that time! The Industrial Revolution changed people’s lives in physical, tangible ways more dramatically than even the digital revolution has changed ours. Social and political progress was similarly revolutionary. Children’s and women’s wellbeing began to be protected by law. Education became available to all. A few more people were allowed to vote. And it seemed the sun would never set, so they said, on the British Empire. But then Conrad came along to remind us that the human condition never changes.

What does it tell us about the myth of progress today?

No matter how advanced our science, technology, and medicine become, the human heart will not progress.

There are competing ideas about progress. The liberal narrative is that the human condition can improve—if only we have more education, more funding, more tolerance, more whatever. The fundamentalist narrative (which the Bible does not actually support) is that things are always getting worse, and that society is on a continuous decline. I think we can look at human history and see how we gain can ground in one area, (women can vote, own land, and go to college!) and decline in another (we kill unborn babies on a grand scale!). The human condition overall is constant. The particulars change, but it seems like for every step forward we take a step back.

Some of this false hope stems, perhaps, from the metaphor of the machine that has dominated our thinking since the Enlightenment. Machines are great—but human beings are not machines. The technological advances simply do not have parallels in human beings. Our failure to make that distinction has had many implications for how we think about education, especially higher education, and the humanities. Indeed, perhaps the more we think the human condition can progress, the less accomplished we become in the humanities: poetry, painting, music, sculpture. I’m no art historian, but I’m not sure any art movement has surpassed the Renaissance masters.

I have been reading a lot this past year about the cultural conditions in Europe that led to totalitarianism in the 20th century. The route to totalitarianism led through World War I, of course. It’s eerie to see how the art and literature of the prewar era contained so many premonitions of what was coming. Is it possible to see Mr. Kurtz, the villain of Conrad’s novel, as the Twentieth Century Man? If so, how?

That is a perfect description of Kurtz. Without giving too much away for anyone who has yet to read the book, we can definitely say that Kurtz had set up his own sort of primitive totalitarian regime. And he was able to do this because, Conrad shows, what we call “civilization” turns out in the story to be little more than a pair of dress shoes you take off as soon as no one is around to see you. “Civilization” came to replace the goodness that is possible only through a genuine conversion that changes one on the inside and is not merely external conformity. Conrad was able to see where existentialism inevitably leads: to, in the words of Marlow, the narrator, a “choice of nightmares.”

Heart of Darkness is the story of one Twentieth Century Man. What we have now in the next century, is a society of Twenty First Century Men, all lobbing their choices of nightmares at one another in motions that eventually settle into the kind of polarization that characterizes our political, social, and religious life.

Excellent twentieth century dystopian works such as George Orwell’s 1984 and Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World showed us the world we were headed for (and, arguably, may have reached). But Heart of Darkness predicted how we were going to get there.

Before I re-read your edition of HOD, I watched “Apocalypse Now” for the first time since the 1980s. As moviegoers know, it is Francis Ford Coppola’s adaptation of the Conrad novel, set in Vietnam, late in the American war there. The sense of the exhaustion of Western civilization (as represented by the US military) was really intense. It is impossible to miss parallels in our own country today, in 2020. What aspects of contemporary American life do you see illuminated by Heart of Darkness?

The world Conrad depicts is divided into binary categories: civilized and uncivilized, light and dark, White and Black, Europe and the rest of the world. Conrad’s narrative shows how these categories are utterly inadequate. Such systemization is in some ways the essence of modernity, and it brought the world many gifts. But some of our binary categories reflect the created order and others contradict it. And by putting all his ideological and moral eggs into one categorical basket, so to speak, Mr. Kurtz becomes the thing he started out standing against. One hundred years later, we are still attempting to understand ourselves and solve our problems using exhausted categories. The political polarization we live in today, while exacerbated by various factors, is ultimately merely an exaggeration of our binary political system. The two parties have utterly collapsed into each other—bringing the rest of us into that destructive force.

The novel clearly shows the failure of the European colonial project, the mission civilisitrice. But Conrad does this without valorizing the African natives either. It seems to me that Conrad can’t be slotted easily into an anti-colonial left-wing critique. How is the novel read by liberals and progressives today?

The work’s ability to defy the categories we operate by today is the very thing that makes it complicated and intriguing—and that requires us to do hard thinking beyond any given categories and critiques. Heart of Darkness is by no means an anti-colonial, left-wing critique of the West. In fact, as I discuss in my introduction to the text, the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe considers it to be a racist text. And it is in many ways. But Heart of Darkness is likewise as powerful a critique of White Supremacy as one might find in its age, and perhaps ours. For Conrad, the race binary is another of those exhausted constructs.

What did Conrad mean by having his narrator, Marlowe, say that “all Europe contributed to the making of Kurtz”?

Well, it’s not the term that was used at the time Conrad was writing, and it’s not one that many people are comfortable of using in broad application, but he is really talking about the kind of White Supremacy that, first, assumes that all European ways of knowing, learning, governing, and “progressing” are superior—and then asserts that assumption on the rest of the world. Such an assumption is a form of pride in the end, the kind of pride that can lead to one trying to become like God—or become a god. Let the reader (who has already read Heart of Darkness—or Milton, or the Bible) understand.

Finally, you have produced this critical edition of Heart of Darkness as a Christian scholar, for Christian readers. What do you hope Christians take from this book?

I hope they can see the way some aspects of modernity—from Victorianism to existentialism to modernism–are woven into the fabric of the modern American church (particularly, evangelicalism, which is my own tradition). Heart of Darkness can help us to distinguish, as Samuel Johnson put it, “that which is established because it is right, from that which is right only because it is established.”

But, beyond all this, my real goal for this book and the series it’s part of is to entice and equip people, Christians especially, to read good literature! Christians are a people of the Word. Christians, of all people, are the ones who recognize the power and beauty of created things because we know its ultimate source. Great literature is challenging to read, to be sure. In a world filled with tantalizing amusements that require nothing from us in return, we all need some encouragement to think a little harder and dig a little deeper in order to gain the rich rewards and rich pleasures that come when we experience—and even more when we learn to enjoy—good art.

—

Karen Swallow Prior (@KSprior), the only person I know with cooler glasses than I have, is editor of new Christian study editions of Heart of Darkness and Sense and Sensibility.

The post Humanity’s ‘Heart Of Darkness’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

The iPad Thieves

On James Lileks’s blog, I found this short video of a Minneapolis small businessman, a Muslim immigrant, watching helplessly as black rioters loot his store. If you watch, be prepared for some bad language:

Lileks narrates:

Ah: the owner shows up. He appears Indian or Pakistani. He implores them to get out, please, at the pace of their own choosing. One man falls out of the window, carrying bags of merchandise.

The owner helps him up.

“Ipads!” says the narrator. “Insurance! Insurance! Ipads!”

The owner hears this and addresses the narrator: he doesn’t have insurance.

“Oh shit oh shit,” says the narrator. “He’s Muslim.”

This suddenly makes all this a bad to do, maaaaybe?

“Why aren’t we stealing from the white people,”’ someone says. A few people hand their phones back. They apologize.

“And his wife is pregnant. And his wife is pregnant.” It’s almost like there’s something close to remorse. But: “Reality in real life,” the narrator says.

That poor man. There he is, losing everything. He is humiliated by the mob, in front of his wife. Can you not feel for him? Every one of those SOBs who stole from that man are my enemy. Any political leader who does not take a hard and uncompromising line against the thugs that stole from that man are my enemy.

One of my favorite movies is the 1948 Italian film Bicycle Thieves. It could hardly have a simpler plot: a poor man who is desperate for a job to support his wife and young children. He finally lands one, but has to have a bicycle. His wife pawns her prized bedsheets — one of the only things of value this impoverished family has — to get her husband’s bicycle out of pawn. On the first day of work, a thief steals his bike. Most of the film follows the poor man’s search through Rome for his bicycle. He takes with him his little boy Bruno. What we, the viewer, see is a man fighting hard for his dignity, and seeing the theft strip him of that, in front of his son. It is excruciating.

That’s what I thought about when I watched that small shopowner, an immigrant, having to stand by and watch while the mob stole everything he had, as his wife watched her husband unable to protect the family’s business. The humiliation of it all.

The hatred that these mobs, and the people who apologize for them, are generating will be red-hot. Read the Lileks blog post for more. Major corporations are falling all over themselves to signal their virtue. “Black Lives Matter” has become the “Workers Of The World Unite” sign of Havel’s greengrocer myth: the sign shop owners put in their windows (so to speak) to avoid trouble.

Look at this from the digital front page of the Washington Post right now:

The New York Times digital front page is about the same as of this writing: nothing sympathetic to the innocent victims of these rampages — people like that immigrant business owner. The Post did publish a column yesterday by a Minneapolis Muslim woman whose family restaurant was burned down by the rioters. “Let it burn” she wrote; it’s the family’s sacrifice for justice. Masochists like this can find sympathetic ears in our national media.

Can people speaking out, without qualification or apology, for the mob’s victims? Do they count? Who tells their stories? Who cries out in rage for what they have had taken from them?

UPDATE: This is Manhattan tonight:

No cops anywhere. People are speeding down the street in SUVs. Total lawlessness https://t.co/CSmV9NZvgy

— Rachel Olding (@rachelolding) June 2, 2020

Uncontrollable amounts of looting going on now at 14th St and fifth Ave. Stores being empties by hundreds of people. pic.twitter.com/0bvAu95Mj9

— Rachel Olding (@rachelolding) June 2, 2020

Kids are splitting off into smaller groups in every direction around Midtown and looting en masse – some are getting in and out of cars to keep loading them up. I've seen two people who were filming the looting have their phones grabbed and smashed.

— Rachel Olding (@rachelolding) June 2, 2020

When I moved to New York City in 1998, it was so, so common to hear people say that Rudy Giuliani, who had been elected in 1994, had made such a difference in the life of the city. “You can’t imagine what it was like before,” they would say. That was a long time ago. Now, it’s back to the 1980s.

The post The iPad Thieves appeared first on The American Conservative.

Riots & The Invisible American

This letter came in the other day from a reader in San Antonio. I publish it with his permission. I know his real name, but am withholding it. He embedded photos from his local newspaper, the San Antonio Express News, which I can’t reproduce here without violating copyright. Here’s what the man wrote:

I’ve been a daily reader of your blog for at least a couple of years. With the exception of feeling about Trump, I agree with you on the majority of things you write.

I am a native Texan. I was born in San Antonio in 1956 and have lived in this once beautiful and peaceful city for the past 45 years. In all those years I have never … ever … seen the kinds of things that took place in our downtown last night.

I’m angry. I’m outraged. I’m pissed.

Early this morning, I went out to get our Sunday edition of Newspeak. [the San Antonio Express News]. I immediately opened it up to the front page to see what had transpired downtown the night before. The headline made it sound as if it was a relatively benign and peaceful protest with only a few minor incidents.

The other article on the page was basically a hagiography singing the praises of our Pajama Boy mayor – Ron Nirenberg … a Democrat.

I then went online to get more info and found the following photos from yesterday afternoon and last night. The online edition of Newspeak was more informative than the print edition, and the photos told the real story. I wonder how many voters, especially older ones, who rely on that deceptive print edition each week.

It apparently started off relatively peaceful …..

[photograph of peaceful protest]

But it devolved into this ….

[multiple photos of rioting]

By now you know the routine … rioting, fighting, police, tear gas, rubber bullets, broken windows, pillaged businesses … Repeat.

Luckily our governor sent State Troopers to help keep some semblance of order. I have no proof but, to me, that only tells me that our mayor and city council probably knew for a fact that this kind of thing was going to happen and had asked our governor for reinforcements in advance. Afterwards, our Pajama Boy mayor had to declare a state of emergency, issue a curfew and prevent anyone from going into the downtown area today.

Our mayor, and all 10 of our city council members are ostensibly “non-partisan” but they talk and act like any other liberal Democrat. Six are women, seven are Hispanic, one is black all are PC spouting liberals.

First they spent $500,000 to tear down the Civil War memorial that was in Travis Park and put the pieces in the basement of our sports arena.

Then they went after the Alamo and the Alamo Cenotaph. -They want to close off streets and turn the area into a kind of “living museum” that tells a more “inclusive” story of what happened there.

Then forbade Chick-fil-a to open a concession at our airport and they painted a Rainbow Crosswalk on a major street.

They’ve messed up Main Plaza in front of the courthouse by doing it on the cheap.

They passed a resolution that declared saying “China virus” is racist.

They mock and try to silence conservatives who disagree with them at city council meetings. My councilman, Manny Peleaz comes off as an arrogant SOB who thinks he knows better. They are changing this city beyond recognition.

As I said, San Antonio used to be a very peaceful, friendly, easy- going city. It seemed like we all got along without any major problems, no big police scandals, no school shootings or anything of that nature.

Now I understand what the Democrats mean when they say “Diversity is our Strength”. They’re not talking about our strength as one nation united. They’re talking about their strength as a political machine.

The Democrats have been stoking anger and racial resentment for political purposes for at least the past five years, probably longer, and things are finally coming to a boil and we see the results.

I’m a mild-mannered, middle-class, 63 year-old, gay, white male and I have been with my partner for 41 years. I have always obeyed the law and played by the rules. I put myself thru college in my 30s by working part-time, and with the help of Pell Grants and Work/Study jobs. I never had to take out student loans and I graduated debt free. I used to be a Democrat, but around 2015 it seems the Democrats started saying and doing crazy things … you know what I’m talking about. I voted for Trump. After Hillary lost, the Democrats doubled down on the crazy. I no longer recognize them or my liberal friends. Their ideology is foreign and they scare me and I have developed a severe case of cognitive dissonance.

My home is in a modest, but nice, neighborhood surrounded by a sea of very upscale mansions. We have an upscale HEB grocery store just up the street. A couple of years ago the store hired an armed security guard, who keeps a German Shepherd by his side. His patrol car is parked by the curb, with the engine and A/C constantly running, in case he needs to put the dog in the car.

Until very recently, I never had any desire to have a gun, but now, I wish I had bought one …. before it really is TOO LATE.

I have been scanning nearly all the major US news sources for their news and op-ed coverage of the riots. You know who you don’t hear from? People like this reader. They are invisible to our national media. I wonder how many of them there are. I have heard anecdotally from a handful of others who are saying nothing on Facebook and other social media now, because they are afraid of being denounced as racist, or worse, by their own friends and neighbors, who are taking loud, angry stands.

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