Rod Dreher's Blog, page 142

The Road To Soft Totalitarianism

It’s frustrating, having just finished writing a book, Live Not By Lies, but having to wait till late September for it to be published. So much of its content is highly relevant to the grave social crisis the US is experiencing today. Here’s how the book starts:

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

In 1989 the Berlin Wall fell, and with it Soviet totalitarianism. Gone was the communist police state that had enslaved Russia and half of Europe. The Cold War that had dominated the second half of the twentieth century came to a close. Democracy and capitalism bloomed in the formerly captive nations. The age of totalitarianism passed into oblivion, never again to menace humanity.

Or so the story goes. I, along with most Americans, believed that the menace of totalitarianism had passed. Then, in the spring of 2015, I received a phone call from an anxious stranger.

The caller was an eminent American physician. He told me that his elderly mother, a Czechoslovak immigrant to the US, had spent six years of her youth as a political prisoner in her homeland. She had been part of the Catholic anti-communist resistance. Now in her nineties and living with her son and his family, the old woman had recently told her American son that events in the United States today reminded her of when communism first came to Czechoslovakia.

What prompted her concern? News reports about the social-media mob frenzy against a small-town Indiana pizzeria whose Evangelical Christian owners told a reporter they would not cater a same-sex wedding. So overwhelming were the threats against their lives and property, including a user on the Twitter social media platform who tweeted a call for people to burn down the pizzeria, that the restaurant owners closed their doors for a time.

Meanwhile, liberal elites, especially in the media, normally so watchful against the danger of mobs threatening the lives and livelihoods of minorities, were untroubled by the assault on the pizzeria, which occurred in the context of the broader debate about the clash between gay rights and religious liberty.

The US-born doctor said he had heard his immigrant parents warn him about the dangers of totalitarianism all his life. He hadn’t worried—after all, this is America, the land of liberty, of individual rights, one nation under God and the rule of law. America was born out of a quest for religious liberty, and had always been proud of the First Amendment to the US Constitution that guaranteed it. But now there was something about what was happening in Indiana that made him think: What if they were right?

It’s easy to laugh this kind of thing off. Many of us with aging parents are accustomed to having to talk them down from the ledge, so to speak, after a cable news program stoked their fear and anxiety about the world outside their front door. I assumed that this was probably the case with the elderly Czech woman.

But there was something about the tension in the doctor’s voice, and the fact that he felt compelled to reach out to a journalist he didn’t even know, telling me that it would be too dangerous for me to use his name if I wrote about him, that rattled me. His question became my question: What if the old Czech woman sees something the rest of us do not? What if we really are witnessing a turn toward totalitarianism in the Western liberal democracies, and can’t see it because it takes a form different from the old kind?

During the next few years, I spoke with many men and women who had once lived under communism. I asked them what they thought of the old woman’s declaration. Did they also think that life in America is drifting toward some sort of totalitarianism?

They all said yes—often emphatically. They were usually surprised by my question because they consider Americans to be hopelessly naive on the subject. In talking at length to some of the emigrants who found refuge in America, I discovered that they are genuinely angry that their fellow Americans don’t recognize what is happening.

In the book itself, I make a case for what soft totalitarianism is, and how I believe it will manifest itself here. I won’t go into that here — believe me, we’ll have plenty of time to talk about it when the book is out — but I will say simply that by “totalitarianism,” I mean an all-encompassing ideology that seeks to control not just the actions, but the thoughts of those under its power. By “soft,” I mean to distinguish it from the “hard” totalitarianism of the Soviet-style dictatorships. This is going to be something much more akin to Aldous Huxley’s Brave New World than Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. It will be like James Poulos’s concept of the “Pink Police State” — hardline managerial progressivism that permits personal liberties, but restricts political ones. And it will be administered not wholly by the state, but by corporations and other institutions run by managerial elites, enabled by the vast network of surveillance technology that is already in place, thanks to the ubiquity of the Internet, smartphones, and smart devices.

The subtitle of my book is “A Manual For Christian Dissidents,” because I wrote it as a traditional Christian, for traditional Christians, who are going to be one (but only one!) of the targets of this regime. I wrote it to awaken us so that we may prepare for it, while we have time. In January, while I was still working on the first draft of the manuscript, I wondered how I was going to be able to persuade readers to open the book and give my thesis a fair hearing. Might it sound too extreme?

Then Covid-19 happened, and it became much easier to imagine a scenario in which the state would have to manage the masses for the sake of keeping pandemic from overwhelming us. And now comes the riots.

Let me tell you how I think this is going to go down.

Let’s start with this tweet from yesterday. I apologize for the profanity for ye who are bothered by such, but the tweet is important:

 

God this is such bullshit

Idiot libs who think they can ride this tiger aren’t paying attention

This isn’t 2015; it’s not chubby Yale sophomores yelling at professors over Halloween costumes, this is the real deal, loss of social control in multiple major cities simultaneously.

— Spotted Toad (@toad_spotted) May 31, 2020

I believe there is a straight line between Yale in 2015 — Prof. Nicholas Christakis being yelled at when he was trying to reason with students — and today. In the 2015 case, the students screamed bloody murder at him, and demanded to be yielded to. Christakis wanted to reason with them, but they didn’t care about that. The Yale administration sold out Nicholas and Erika Christakis, and gave the emotive students a big win. What happened at Yale didn’t cause this today, but it revealed the repulsive weakness of liberal institutions. They will not defend themselves when they are attacked from the left. And so it is today.

Here is a professor commenting on the prominent white-lady Egyptologist who tweeted out instructions for how to topple the Washington monument, because it’s an obelisk dedicated (she says) to white supremacy:

A society with elites this irresponsible, secure, and stupid is a society ripe for destruction. https://t.co/f4mgSYTtQu

— Darel E. Paul (@darelmass) June 1, 2020

Yes, that’s precisely correct.

At some point, the riots will end, or be ended. Maybe our weak, paper-tiger president will be thrown out of office in November over it, or maybe not. But this is how the Establishment — corporations, media, academia, and others — will act.

For background, read this great First Things profile of the late Sam Francis, by Matthew Rose. Francis . The late Francis was a far-right newspaper columnist who was a racist and an anti-Christian. In fact, before he died, he wrote that Christianity was the enemy of white racial consciousness. He might have been a bad man, but that doesn’t mean he was unintelligent, and without insight. One of the things you learn when you read work by writers on the far left and the far right is that even though they are very wrong about big things, they often have insights that elude people who are closer to the respectable center.

This was the case with Francis. Matthew Rose is a Catholic, and understands exactly where and how Francis, the anti-Christian racist, went wrong, and says so. But he knows why Francis is important — how Francis saw things that normie conservatives could not.

That said, take a look at this 2004 Francis column about “anarcho-tyranny”. He wrote:

“Society cannot exist,” wrote the great eighteenth century conservative Edmund Burke, “unless a controlling power upon will and appetite be placed somewhere, and the less of it there is within, the more of it there must be without.”

Restraints come from within when a population shares cultural and moral values; when they don’t, external force has to provide the restraints.

More:

Unwilling to control immigration and the cultural disintegration it causes, the authorities instead control the law-abiding.

This is precisely the bizarre system of misrule I have elsewhere described as “anarcho-tyranny”—we refuse to control real criminals (that’s the anarchy) so we control the innocent (that’s the tyranny).

Francis was focusing on immigration in this column. I don’t think immigration applies at all to the current situation. What is going to happen to us now is that to buy social peace, the Establishment elites, who have been saturated in Social Justice Warrior ideology, are going to impose a woke tyranny on everybody else. You might have thought that the economic collapse from the Covid pandemic would have forced universities to dismantle their diversity bureaucracies. Nope. Now maintaining and expanding them are going to be the price of peace. Expanding these things through corporations, media, and other institutions is going to be the new line.

What we will not be able to talk about is how a liberal democratic order requires a people capable of governing themselves. What we will not be able to talk about is how well our entire culture, especially since the 1960s, has catechized the American people in the lie that you can only become your real Self if you cast off restraints — and that any unhappiness you suffer is because somebody, somewhere, is not letting you do that. What we will not be able to talk about is the role ordered family life and developing bourgeois habits plays in academic and professional success.

All this, especially the last one, would lead to unwelcome conclusions (such as: it is very hard for a young person of any race, raised in a chaotic family structure, to develop the habits and skills that would take her out of poverty.) Instead, we will play the game. And everybody will have to lie about what they see with their own eyes, and what they know to be true. And real problems will be ignored.

For example, a just civil and economic order is one that fairly rewards people who work hard, treat others fairly, manage their resources well, and live by self-discipline (and, it must be said, one in which the police do not abuse their powers.) In all too many cases, the power-holders in our society have created an economy where those who were willing to live by that creed have not been rewarded for it. This is unjust, and demands reform. But the only kind of reform that our liberal and progressive elites are interested in is the sort that make it more difficult for the hardest-working, most self-disciplined Americans — those of Asian descent — to advance on the basis of their own accomplishments. The only kind of reform they are interested in is the kind that increases their own power as bureaucratic functionaries who allocate rewards to groups favored by the system (as well as to members of unfavored groups who have learned how to play the game).

Here, from Matthew Rose’s deeply considered profile of Sam Francis, is a description of the people Francis called “Middle-American Radicals” (MARs):

MARs feel they are members of an exploited class—excluded from real political representation, harmed by conventional tax and trade policies, victimized by crime and social deviance, and denigrated by popular culture and elite institutions. Their sense of grievance points both upward and downward. They believe they are neglected, even preyed upon, by a leadership class that favors simultaneously the rich and the poor over the middle class. “If there is one single summation of the MAR perspective,” Francis wrote, “it is reflected in a statement . . . The rich give in to the demands of the poor, and the middle income people have to pay the bill.” Francis seized on the idea that a major American demographic, so decisive to Republican success, was motivated not chiefly by an ideology, but by a feeling of being “disinherited” by its own nation. This corroborated his argument that a structural collusion existed between the powerful and the poor, who form a coalition against middle-class values and interests.

What is going to happen now will only deepen their radicalization. The managerial elites will identify all those who don’t go along with their reform program as the Enemy: racist, sexist, anti-gay, religious bigots. Black and Latino Christians are going to suffer too, as Christians. Look at Lee Jussim’s list of “dangerous ideas” — things that academics have said or written that caused them to suffer serious professional punishment. This is going to be even more severe going forward, and will manifest more powerfully in corporations and other institutions. All those social media posts we’ve been seeing since the weekend, in which people signal their loyalty to new ethic of antiracist public virtue? This is the ideology of those aspiring to be in the professional classes. Pledging fealty to it will be the cost of admission. This is something that has been going around a lot in the past few days:

Read that closely. Note that ordinary conservative views are construed as “white supremacy” — an evil that cannot be reasoned with, only destroyed. I write this in Live Not By Lies:

The contemporary cult of social justice identifies members of certain social groups as victimizers, as scapegoats, and calls for their suppression as a matter of righteousness. In this way, the so-called social justice warriors, (aka SJWs) , who started out as liberals animated by an urgent compassion, end by abandoning authentic liberalism and embracing an aggressive and punitive politics that resembles Bolshevism, as the Soviet style of communism was first called.

At the turn of the twenty-first century, the cultural critic René Girard prophetically warned: “The current process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.”

This is what the survivors of communism are saying to us: liberalism’s admirable care for the weak and marginalized is fast turning into a monstrous ideology that, if it is not stopped, will transform liberal democracy into a softer, therapeutic form of totalitarianism.

Events of the past week have put us on a rocket sled for this.

A couple of years ago, a reader drew my attention to the things a black radical philosophy professor at Texas A&M was saying to justify violence, especially against whites. I wrote several posts on it; here is one. I strongly encourage you to read it. I quote Curry claiming that America is undertaking the “systemic genocidal elimination of our people” — a hysterical, unjustified claim that has no basis in fact, and is only designed to terrify and incite black readers to racial violence. More Curry:

Fanon tells us that there are no innocents in the colonial situation. “Colonialism is not a type of individual relation but the conquest of a national territory and the oppression of a people: that is all.” The colonial context justifies itself to whites in the persecution and criminalization of Blacks, and in this way it knows that it is legitimate and permanent. Every white that participates in the colonial context, as if the tyranny against Blacks is the norm, and acceptable, in so far as it requires no individual action or culpability, is guilty of colonization, and as such is neither innocent nor absolved for being the particular manifestation of the colonial matrix. The possession of a white racial identity is a very real danger for African people insofar as that identity is embraced as the badge of white superiority. In this sense, every white is a concrete threat to the life of an African descended person, either as their executioner or the enforcer of white supremacy. Insofar as “whiteness” is the expectation of privilege, whiteness is also the expectation of those who cannot enjoy those privileges and the maintenance of their deprivation. Violence against whites is a revolt against both the colonial structures of the American context, as well as the rebellion against the individual whites who choose to claim the legacy of that oppression in a white racial identity.

Understand what he’s saying here: that there is no such thing as an innocent white person, and that violence against white people as white people is justified self-defense.

This is stone-cold evil. If Curry had been talking about Jews instead of “whites,” it would be instantly clear what he was calling for. It is very close to the ideological basis for the Red Terror, the mass killings undertaken by the Bolsheviks in 1918. In Live Not By Lies, I talk about this kind of thing:

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

You might think: yeah, this is bad, but this guy is an obscure intellectual, so what’s the big deal? Once again, a quote from Live Not By Lies:

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.”

The fact that Tommy Curry’s kind of violent, morally insane racist ranting is normative within academia tells you something about what the elite networks are prepared to believe, and enforce. The other day on CNN, Van Jones, a black commenter who is often one of the network’s most insightful analysts, said that the white people have “a virus in their brains” that allows them to turn racist in a heartbeat. He further said: “White people are always innocent — and their innocence constitutes their crime. It is too late to be innocent.”

Thus does a version of Tommy Curry’s madness make it out of the philosophy department to cable news.

Here’s what makes what’s coming worse for white Christians. There is no way — no way — that any faithful Christian can tolerate racial bigotry and still call himself faithful to Jesus Christ. Racism is a sin, straight up. You may not hate your brother because of the color of his skin, period. It is a compliment to Christianity that the white supremacist Sam Francis identified the Christian faith as an obstacle to the white racial consciousness that he wanted to see.

We are now in post-Christian America. The Millennials are the first generation in American history in which a minority identify as Christian. Only nine percent claim a non-Christian faith. Forty percent say they are unaffiliated with any faith. What, exactly, will keep them tied to the mast and unable to respond to the siren song of white nationalism — especially when they look around them and see that liberals have established a new order based on heightened racial consciousness for non-whites? The white working class is also dropping out of church. 

White Christians — except for the progressive ones, who already accept the respectable, illiberal racism popular on the Left — are going to be in the agonizing position of having to stand both against the racialist progressive Establishment, and against the angry white racialists whose radicalism will have been raised or intensified by the emergence and consolidation of the new progressive order. Living in truth will be very, very difficult — and will require sacrifices that we can only begin to imagine.

One last word, and a quote from Live Not By Lies:

At dinner in a Russian Orthodox family’s apartment in the Moscow suburbs, I was shaken by our table talk of Soviet oppression through which the father and mother of the household had lived. “I don’t understand how anybody could have believed what the Bolsheviks promised,” I said glibly.

“You don’t understand it?” said the father at the head of the table. “Let me explain it to you.” He then launched into a three hundred-year historical review that ended with the 1917 Revolution. It was a pitiless tale of rich and powerful elites, including church bureaucrats, treating peasants little better than animals.

“The Bolsheviks were evil,” the father said. “But you can see where they came from.”

I was chastened by this. The more I dug into Russian history, the better I understood where the radicalism came from. Ordinary Russian people had been kept down for so long that they were willing to believe that anything would be better than what they had. So, Russia had a revolution, and it got incomparably worse. As Solzhenitsyn wrote (and I quote in the book):

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

It could always be worse! We will never, ever live in utopia, where there is no racism, no bigotry, no suffering. Anybody who tells you that is lying to you, and creating false hope that is bound to be disappointed. And yet, the pain that calls out for relief is real. Watch this:

Two Black men aged 45 and 31 lament over how nothing has changed and then urge a 16-year-old to “come up with a better a way cause we ain’t doing it.”

The 16-year-old responds “yes sir.”

Generations of pain. I’m in tears. pic.twitter.com/27HVP2Y4Xt

— Fatima Syed (@fatimabsyed) May 31, 2020

It’ll shake you up. It should shake you up. The rawness of those men’s pain. It’s the kind of thing that will cause a man to believe in anything that promises him relief — even if it’s a poisonous lie. But then, we have become a country in which many people, regardless of their race, are willing to believe lies if the lies feel right to them, and suit their ideological preferences. Hannah Arendt said this kind of thing is a prelude to totalitarianism.

Read this poem by W.H. Auden — September 1, 1939 — about the start of the Second World War. It feels very contemporary. Here’s how it starts:

This decade that has just begun will be even lower, and more dishonest than the one that preceded it. And it will be a decade of soft totalitarianism. The Establishment will consolidate its control by implementing something like the Chinese social credit system, in which technology will be used to surveil the private lives — the thoughts, the words, the deeds — of the masses, who will be punished or rewarded by algorithms. Imagine the ideology represented by that pyramid applied via an algorithm to all your social media posts, online commentaries, and suchlike — and you being flagged in databases as Deplorable. The Chinese call this process “harmonization.” The American corporate and institutional elites are about to start harmonizing all of us dissidents. Donald Trump is too crude and foolish to know how to use political power to fight this. Besides, he has no moral authority — none — to stand against it.

This beautiful, deeply human moment offers a way out. Not white supremacy, not black supremacy; not Tommy Curry, and not Sam Francis; not revolution, but compassion (suffering with) and humanity:

This is how we transcend. pic.twitter.com/I3MXERUsL6

— Chloé S. Valdary

Rioters Burning St. John’s Church

 

My God. This is the historic Episcopal church across Lafayette Park from the White House. Every US president since James Madison has worshipped there. The mob is burning it down.

How much more of this are we supposed to take? They’re now destroying our history, our heritage. And the authorities are showing themselves powerless to stop it.

UPDATE: Thank God firefighters extinguished the blaze. Meanwhile, across the street:

The guardhouse at the White House has been set on fire. The police rushes forward and gassed the crowd. pic.twitter.com/Hi9XcSbpiJ

— Eric Angelo (@MrEricAngelo) June 1, 2020

Don’t worry, I hear that the president is about to reveal some important news on the Joe Scarborough case.

UPDATE.2:

The nation’s capital is legitimately on fire in every direction. This is unreal. pic.twitter.com/hXNJ0LticL

— Samantha-Jo Roth (@SamanthaJoRoth) June 1, 2020

My TAC colleague writes:

the nihilism of the “riots are good for Trump” crowd is, first — incorrect — but second, why would you want a chief executive of the most powerful empire in history who can’t quell a riot in front of his house?

— curtmills (@CurtMills) June 1, 2020

UPDATE.3:

Look at this: a credentialed Egyptologist idiot is telling people how to pull down the Washington monument.

PSA For ANYONE who might be interested in how to pull down an obelisk* safely from an Egyptologist who never ever in a million years thought this advice might come in handy

*might be masquerading as a racist monument I dunno

— Sarah Parcak (@indyfromspace) June 1, 2020

The elites in this country are such bloody idiots.

The post Rioters Burning St. John’s Church appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Failure Of Leadership

We are seeing our cities on fire in the worst civil unrest since the late 1960s, and here is what the President of the United States has had to say to the nation today:

That fool also tweeted out a QAnon conspiracy buff’s message today, but took it down. While the nation’s cities are burning, the President of the United States sat in the White House tweeting conspiracy theories.

And you know, we should probably count our blessings. If he went on TV to address the nation, Trump would probably make things worse. There he sits in the White House, impotent, an angry old man who doesn’t know what to do, and who, being utterly despised by half the country — but not feared! — cannot possibly gain control of the situation.

What a rotten time. In 1968, when Nixon ran on restoring law and order, there was at least good reason to believe that he was competent enough to address those challenges. Not Trump. A conservative can rightly conclude that Biden and the Democratic Party would do no good (think of Mayor Pajama Boy in Minneapolis, surrendering the Third Precinct), but whataboutism is cold comfort. The fact is, we have a massive national crisis underway, a crisis on top of two other crises — pandemic and economic collapse — and we are led by a buffoon who does nothing but sit on his backside and tweet. It’s infuriating!

But with the powerful exception of Atlanta Mayor Keisha Lane Bottoms — you have to watch her short address here — there have been few examples of strong leadership. The national media are perseverating on a narrative broadly sympathetic to the rioters. Today the Washington Post published a column by a woke masochist whose family-owned Indian restaurant in Minneapolis was burned to the ground by rioters, who says “let it burn” because racism. I guarantee you that 99 percent of all people, of all races, whose small businesses have been looted or burned by rioters do not feel this way. Democracy dies in darkness, you know; maybe the fires from torched businesses will shed the light we need.

Heather Mac Donald surveys the collapse in leadership:

On Friday, May 29, Minnesota governor Tim Walz explained his reluctance to mobilize the National Guard as an unwillingness to seem “oppressive.” Naturally, he apologized for his white privilege—“I will not patronize you as a white man without living [your] lived experiences”—and explained the feral violence as an understandable response to racial injustice: “The ashes are symbolic of decades and generations of pain, of anguish, unheard.” Few arrests were made after five days of rampant crime.

The media, visibly exhilarated by this latest explosion of black rage, had its own explanation for the chaos: people were outraged that the officer who had kept his knee on Floyd’s neck for a sickening eight-plus minutes had not yet been arrested and charged. But when that arrest came, along with murder and manslaughter charges after a lightning-fast investigation by the district attorney, the anarchy continued—not just in Minneapolis but across the country, intensified by Antifa radicals.

Political leaders elsewhere have been just as reluctant to use the necessary force to quell the violence. New York mayor Bill de Blasio called on police to use a “light touch” in response. New York governor Andrew Cuomo coolly predicted on Sunday, May 31, during his now absurdly irrelevant daily coronavirus press conference, that the violence would continue. “The explosion we saw last night we’ll probably see again tonight,” he said—obviously confident in his own physical safety, if not the safety of the rest of the state’s residents.

More:

Fittingly, the ideological handmaiden of this violence—academia—has already sprung into action. The chancellors and presidents of Harvard, the University of Arizona, the University of Pennsylvania, and Yale, among others, released statements over the weekend assuring their black students of their schools’ commitment to racial equity, in light of the George Floyd death—an event wholly unrelated to the academic. No college leader denounced the violence.

UCLA’s chancellor Gene Block, as well as the school’s $400,000 a year Vice Chancellor for Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and a parade of deans, announced that the Office of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion and the school’s legions of Equity Advisors would be coming up with new programs for “virtual reflection spaces” in which to “humbly acknowledge the pain.” The school’s Resources for Racial Trauma would be beefed up. The academic diversity bureaucracy has now been given a whole new excuse for existence and can be assured that it will escape the cost-cutting chopping block, even as universities beg the federal government for more coronavirus bailout money.

Read it all. 

I expect corporate, academic, and media leadership to be as weak and unprincipled as Evergreen State’s George Bridges, who let himself be stomped to a puddle by woke mobs. But we have a Republican president in the White House who is as useless in this crisis as teats on a boar. It is not the case that the fecklessness of liberal leaders, both political and institutional, somehow improves Trump. It doesn’t. Ann Coulter, who in 2016 wrote a book called In Trump We Trust, has had it:

If you are a conservative, where do you see hope right now? Serious question. I’m not talking about hope in the broad, reason-to-live sense; I’m talking about where you find hope that our leadership class, political and otherwise, are capable of dealing with this crisis.

UPDATE: As Ross Douthat wrote a couple of weeks ago:

But Trump didn’t want the gift [of presidential authority]. It’s not just that our president was too ineffective to consolidate power, that any potential authoritarianism was undermined by his administration’s incompetence. Incompetent he surely is, but in areas that involve his self-preservation (like the firing of inconvenient inspectors general) he still finds a way to wield his powers even when norms stand in his way.

But once you leave the sphere of petty corruption for the sphere of policymaking, Trump clearly lacks both the facility and the interest level required to find opportunity in crisis. In this case, confronted with the same basic facts as Orban, he showed no sense of the pandemic as anything save an inconvenience to be ignored, a problem to be wished away, an impediment to his lifestyle of golf and tweets and occasional stream-of-consciousness stemwinders. And when reality made ignoring it impossible, his only genuinely political impulse — the only impulse that related to real power and its uses — was to push the crucial forms of responsibility down a level, to the nation’s governors, and wash his presidential hands.

In this the coronavirus has clarified, once and for all, the distinctiveness of Trump’s demagogy. Great men and bad men alike seek attention as a means of getting power, but our president is interested in power only as a means of getting attention. Which is why, tellingly, his most important virus-related power grab to date has been the airtime grab of his daily news conferences — a temporary coup against the cable television schedule, a ruthless imposition (at least until the reviews turned bad) of presidential reality TV.

 

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Police Behaving Badly

I’ve been posting all weekend images of rioters and looters. Here’s a piece that collects video from all over the country of police brutalizing protesters. Excerpt:

Here is just a short list of scenes from the past few days:

A New York City police officer tore a protective mask off of a young black man and assaulted him with pepper spray while the victim peacefully stood with his hands up

New York City police officers, in two separate vehicles, rammed a crowd in a street. Separately, an officer in a moving police vehicle slammed someone with a car door and drove away

Security forces in Minneapolis marched down a quiet residential street and shot paint canisters at residents who were watching from their private porch

Police in Louisville raided a public square, confiscating and destroying water and milk, which is used to counter irritants like pepper spray

Atlanta police stopped two black people, inexplicably shooting them with tasers and tearing them out of their car

A New York City officer used two hands to throw a woman to the ground, reportedly calling her a “stupid fucking bitch”

San Antonio Police used tear gas against people. So did Dallas police. So did Los Angeles police. So did DC police. The list goes on.

Many people reported being shot by rubber bullets. MSNBC host Ali Velshi says he was shot after state police fired unprovoked into a peaceful rally. A freelance photographer in Minneapolis says she went permanently blind in her left eye after being shot by police.

Police have brutalized lawmakers participating in demonstrations, including New York State Senator Zellnor Myrie.

In the original piece, there are lots of links and embeds, which don’t transfer over here. Follow the link and read them, and see them. This is an important part of the story. Either we live under the rule of law — all of us — or we don’t. Brutal police officers undermine the rule of law. There’s a reason why a cop who abuses his power is especially bad. It’s the same reason why, when a priest is found to have molested a child, we don’t say, “Good news! Nearly all priests would never molest a child.” It may be true, but we must never cease to be shocked when someone in whom we invest so much social authority (and, in the policeman’s case, actual power) misuses that authority and power to harm others.

UPDATE: Reader Dukeboy1, a retired police officer, comments:

This ain’t beanbag, folks. You sit comfortable behind your keyboards and phone screens and harumph and stroke your chins over the violence. You apply sober, white, middle and upper- class values along with a expectation of reasonable, logical behavior to people who are none of those things.

You don’t believe that it’s really that bad. And because you’re weak, mentally and physically. You know that you don’t have it in you to face violence and in your weakness you fear all who can. And so you feel justified passing judgement against people who are capable of doing something you hope you never face.

Antifa is in Lexington, KY tonight. The entire department was called in to be there. The festivities were supposed to kick off at eight. Roll call was at five.

Last night was just supposed to be local yokels and malcontents. Everything was mostly okay until after 11 PM. Then they decided to try to take over police headquarters. That was a fun 30 minutes until order was restored.

Sometime in the night a load of bricks mysteriously turned up on the sidewalk down the street from headquarters. They were removed, but the theory is that was the obvious cache and another one or two are yet to be found. This has been the pattern in other cities.

In Louisville, Antifa soaked toilet paper rolls in gasoline and secreted nails inside the roll. When lit and thrown towards the police lines, the hope is that nails will injure officers trying to stomp the rolls out. They’re expecting that tonight.

This is real. It’s not theoretical. And it’s not a game. We’re four nights into this and it’s not going to let up until there are consequences.

I’m happy to be out and I’m encouraging everybody I know who has their time in to follow me.

The post Police Behaving Badly appeared first on The American Conservative.

St. Harry Loots Target

Here’s some news from USA Today:

Drifting out of the shadows in small groups, dressed in black, carrying shields and wearing knee pads, they head toward the front lines of the protest. Helmets and gas masks protect and obscure their faces, and they carry bottles of milk to counteract tear gas and pepper spray.

Most of them appear to be white. They carry no signs and don’t want to speak to reporters. Trailed by designated “medics” with red crosses taped to their clothes, these groups head straight for the front lines of the conflict.

Night after night in this ravaged city, these small groups do battle with police and the National Guard, kicking away tear gas canisters and throwing back foam-rubber projects fired at them. Around them, fires break out. Windows are smashed. Parked cars destroyed. USA TODAY reporters have witnessed the groups on multiple nights, in multiple locations. Sometimes they threaten those journalists who photograph them destroying property.

More:

Leggat, the security consultant, said intelligence reports from his colleagues indicate most of the hard-core protesters in Minneapolis are far-left or anarchists, and that far-right groups have not yet made a significant appearance. He said looting is typically done by locals – usually people with no criminal record who just get caught up in the moment.

But direct conflicts with authorities come from a mix of both locals and outside groups who see these conflicts as a core part of their mission. Many of the anarchists, he said, target banks, chain-type businesses and even luxury cars as symbols of corrupt institutions. He said even a peaceful protest can turn violent if outside agitators decide to participate, hijacking the message.

What interests me about this as least as much as the specific content is the fact that it is appearing in a major media outlet. I’ve been scanning the big ones these past few days, and you would not get the idea that the riots are any kind of shocking outrage. Ross Douthat’s column in the Sunday NYT — it was posted online this afternoon — is the first op-ed I’ve seen in a major media outlet strongly criticizing the riots. His piece, which focuses on how riots historically serve to empower the forces of reaction, is entirely commonsensical. Given how liberal social media has been reacting lately, I am quite sure he will be denounced for being insufficiently sensitive to the evil of white supremacy.

This afternoon I received a letter from a liberal(ish) white reader with whom I sometimes correspond. I’ve asked him if I can post it here, but haven’t heard from him yet. I can tell you generally, though, that he writes to say he has been truly shocked by how all his white liberal friends are acting now, at least on social media. His circle is all liberal urban professionals. He reports that he’s had a couple of really good conversations with black friends, telling them how they think about what’s going on. They’re really angry, and more sympathetic to the riots than he is, but he said the exchanges were good. Not so with his fellow whites, who have all denounced him as a fellow traveler of white supremacy simply for saying that riots are bad.

He said that the only way he can make sense of what he’s seeing among his white liberal friends is by understanding them as having accepted a kind of religion. He writes:

You shout out “praise the Lord!” by posting a meme about pigs. You cast out the devil by piling on the guy who raises a minor objection. And you deal with heretics by anathematizing them, because their reasoning isn’t based in the gospel, in this case the belief that as a White person your only role is to listen and offer support to activism by POC [people of color].

The reader adds:

I used to roll my eyes when you referred to “Weimar America,” but not anymore.

We’ve seen a fair bit of what this reader is talking about here in the comments section of this blog. To these true believers, one is not permitted to criticize the riots or rioters. I don’t think I’ve seen anyone actually endorsing the riots, but there has been a lot of “police brutality and racism are so bad that nobody has the right to criticize rioting over them” here. They meet objections with “how can you possibly compare a building burning to a man dying?!” — as if the horror of George Floyd’s killing, which nobody defends, justifies any response.

Look at this from a Philadelphia Inquirer reporter on the scene of Philly’s protests today. Earlier in the Twitter thread, she was sending out pictures of a large crowd demonstrating peacefully. Then they started to march. They arrived at the statue of former Philly mayor Frank Rizzo, and then:

Small fire now burning under the statue pic.twitter.com/nV8v9Bdvbw

— Anna Orso (@anna_orso) May 30, 2020

If you know anything about Frank Rizzo, you can easily understand why many people would want to take the statue down. He was not a good man. But that is a decision to be made democratically and deliberately, not by a mob. This is horrifying. Does anybody want to live in a polity ruled by a mob?

I’ve been re-reading, after many years, Bill Buford’s phenomenally good 1992 book Among The Thugs, a propulsive account of his embedding himself with English soccer hooligans, to find out how and why they do what they do. If you want to understand why people riot for fun, that’s the book to read. This passage is from Buford’s description of being in Turin with a crew of loutish supporters of Manchester United, there for a match against Juventus:

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?

This is exactly what I think of the rioters: that they are Harry, drunk not on lager, but on self-righteousness. And so are their bourgeois supporters.

My guess is that there are almost no people in major newsrooms who think this way — or if they do, they are too cowed to say it around their colleagues. And that this blind spot is affecting their coverage, and their ability to grasp fully what is happening. They’re more about managing the narrative than reporting the news. I have seen this personally in my years in newsrooms: how so very many journalists can’t play it straight when they’re reporting on issues that intersect with identity politics.

The American media (including me) did not see the Donald Trump election coming, and they’re going to miss the political blowback from these riots. I say that as someone who did not vote for Donald Trump, and who wishes we had almost anybody else in the White House right now in this time of grave national crisis, given that his big mouth is likely to make a bad situation much worse. Nevertheless, the fallout from these riots are going to push so very many middle-class and working-class people to the Right. Count on it. As Douthat writes:

[I]n hindsight the riots of 2015 — as well as the late Obama-era crime spike, and a cluster of high-profile cop killings in 2016 — helped create a late-1960s backlash moment in miniature. Republicans didn’t abandon prison reform; indeed, they eventually helped pass a criminal-justice reform bill. But they stopped talking about that issue, or talking like civil libertarians in general, and they nominated a figure for president who sounded like Nixon on a good day and George Wallace on the rest. Which meant that 18 months after the Baltimore riots, the violence’s major legacy was a still-wounded city — and the presidency of Donald Trump.

You can’t take this as proof that rioting never works, that it never succeeds in calling attention to an injustice that a more peaceful protest might incline the comfortable to downplay or ignore. But the political history of both the 1960s and the 2010s suggests a strong presumption against the political effectiveness of looting or vandalism or arson, to go along with the direct costs for the communities where riots are most likely to break out.

Minneapolis is an overwhelmingly progressive city that has been led by successive Democratic mayors for decades — mayors that, under the city’s charter, have total power over the police department. The City Council is Democratic. Minnesota is a Democratic state led by a Democratic governor. The fact that this repulsive episode of police brutality happened in such a place tells you that there’s a lot going on here that doesn’t fit the simplistic narrative that many liberals, especially media liberals, are fond of telling.

One more thing. Yesterday I was on the phone with a center-left friend who has a lot of experience in national politics. He talked about being present in an activists’ meeting a few years ago — Black Lives Matter, or some adjacent group, I can’t recall which — in which Jesse Jackson made an unscheduled appearance. Jackson came in, sat in the back, and listened.

Towards the end, said my friend, Jackson asked the young organizers what they thought of LBJ. All of them had a very low opinion of him. Jackson told them they were wrong, that under crude old Lyndon Johnson, and thanks to his leadership, Congress passed a massive amount of legislation that did practical good for black Americans. The point, said Jackson, is that you don’t get anywhere as protesters without knowing how to work in practical politics. And one of the most important lessons is that you cannot demonstrate for an abstraction, e.g., for an end to police brutality. You have to have concrete, specific demands in mind, otherwise you won’t get anywhere.

The riots are going to take this country somewhere, all right — but it’s not to a place that any of us want to go.

UPDATE: For a deep dive into how Social Justice has become a pseudo-religion, take a look at this great piece by James Lindsay and Mike Nayna in Areo. I draw on it in my forthcoming book Live Not By Lies, which argues that the country is moving towards soft totalitarianism, a form of integralism built around SJW religion. These riots are accelerating the Weimar stage. More on that in a separate post.

UPDATE.2: I want to point out, though, that there are a lot of journalists doing solid work under frightening conditions. Aside from that absurd “merry caravan” remark by the CNN reporter, it’s not the reporting from the scenes that bothers me, but the imbalance in the framing of the stories by their broadcast outlets and publications.

UPDATE.3: This just in from Chicago:

CHAOS: Police officers dragged through the street in Chicago

pic.twitter.com/DV8r8qHPyg

— Breaking911 (@Breaking911) May 30, 2020

They’ll blame the English, won’t they?

UPDATE.4: Here is a really interesting thread from an L.A.-based writer named David Hines. Click to read the whole thing; here are excerpts. He’s talking about how the riots are affecting the evolving views of the Left and the Right.

More:

Hines says that white nationalists are small and badly organized. But liberals reflexively blame them because they have to blame somebody for the riots, and they are incapable of allowing themselves to blame protesters, especially black protesters, who have to remain heroic in the liberal mind. When it becomes impossible to blame white nationalists, liberals will switch to blaming the white hard left (e.g., Antifa).

 

Read the whole thread.

UPDATE.5: The reader I mentioned above, the one who wrote me a long letter, has just given me permission to use it here:

Rod, I have to tell you, I have had a bonkers 48 hours on social media that ties in to a lot of what you have been talking about.

So, a tiny background–I have developed a bit of a reputation among my online friend circle as being the “article man”–I share 5-10 a day, usually from high-end center-left to left outlets but also from NRO, TAC, etc. I am blessed to have a pretty bipartisan and diverse group of friends, and by moderating discussions on the articles I post, I’ve created a sort of informal blog kind of like this one. I’ve been doing this for a decade or more. Also important to note for the following that I’ve posted many, many articles critical of police violence, exploring themes of White fragility and fear of Black men, etc. I am pretty evidently on the side of the left here to anyone who reads my articles.

So since the riots began in MSP, I’ve had two experiences that are very jarring. First, compared to previous incidents like this, especially Ferguson, there is a sudden and marked shift among my White, progressive-to-liberal professional peers. These guys are almost to a man posting content that more or less endorses violent rioting. Nobody’s come out to the point of “it’s good that this guy’s restaurant got torched” but there is a lot of “don’t tell me about riots when they didn’t arrest those goons with AR-15s at the anti-lockdown protests” and “when they protest peacefully like Kapernick no one listens, so we have to riot now.” This is coming from comfortable White professionals. My cousin, a White guy who works in a well-paying job for a Federal agency, grew up in relative privilege as the child of two lawyers, and currently lives in a middle-to upper-middle class leafy neighborhood, posted completely unironically today a meme calling policemen pigs. I know privileged radicals are a long-time thing, but he NEVER would have done this five years ago. This dude has always been a liberal, but is being genuinely radicalized–if armchair radicalized–by how woke everyone is becoming. It’s pretty terrifying to see these middle-of-the-road bougie White people dancing around endorsement of this riot. Gone is the sense of “I support your peaceful protest but hey, let’s not burn the city down.” Tangential to this is, compared to the last time this happened, a huge explosion in the posting of “I am an unqualified ally of POC, I won’t tell them how to grieve, I can only apologize for being a racist” stuff from the same group. When I posted a mild thought about how rioting enables right-wing authoritarians and destroys the communities POC live in for decades, I got huge negative responses, basically implying that by talking about anything other than Floyd’s death I was just shilling for the cops.

Second, I, like you, HATE a mob. I’m considerably to the left of you in many ways. And I know on this issue you’ve had the same response as me, which is sympathy for Black people who are the victims of police brutality. But the mob is terrifying and has been for all of human history. There’s a reason disturbances of the peace are so elementally frightening. Anyway, when I saw this explosion of stuff starting Thursday night, I got hot. I usually keep my FB interactions pretty low-key and in the role of moderator, but I confronted a few people about it, and when some people posted some muted shade about my anti-riot sentiments, I asked them to take the gloves off and tell me why I was wrong. So between comments and private messages, I had five substantial conversations yesterday, two with Black people (both college educated, one who still very much lives as part of the Black community, the other who is in a mixed-race marriage and from what I can tell travels in a mostly White social circle) and three with White people (a lawyer, a social worker, and a city bureaucrat).

Here’s what freaked me out: All 5 were hot, and all 5 were more sympathetic to the riots than I was. But, the conversations with the Black people were good. They pulled no punches but they listened to me, and they took the time to tell me why they felt the way they did. Both of them acknowledged the complexities of the situation, and left me with something to think about myself.

The conversations with the three White people were much worse. They kept circling back to “that’s you just shilling for White Authority” and “everything you say just sounds like you’re blinded by your White privilege.” One of them ended up very quickly at “because you are so blinded by your privilege, we’re not going to get anywhere with this, and until you can see this like an ally there is no use in us talking.”

This was a clear as day example of what you’ve posted on a few times–that woke White progressives are far more radical on these issues than Black people themselves. And the more I think about it, the more it came across as religious–my wife, who grew up in a conservative Christian milieu (I didn’t) calls “Jesus Juke” the pious prefacing of everything with “lord willing,” or “Praise God that….” This was total Jesus Juke, but for progressives. The gratuitous use of “ally,” “POC”, the handicapping emoji–it’s a way to demonstrate zeal and sincerity.

I want to be super clear–I’m not calling these people hypocrites (though I think they’d be on the phone to the “pigs” in about 30 seconds if a brick came through their window) or doubting their sincerity and genuineness. Dismissing this phenomenon and these people as snowflakes, or hypocrites, is a mistake many on the right make way too often. But what I felt like I was seeing was every bit a performative religious display, an Amen corner for the preacher. And what I came to realize was that, for the Black people I talked to, this was real life. The perspectives they had on it came from growing up scared of the cops, knowing people who’d been manhandled or profiled, and just navigating America and all the systemic racism in it (which I 100% believe is real) as Black people. So it was nuanced and grounded in reality. The White liberals, on the other hand, for them it was purely ideology and performance. It wasn’t their house on fire, and it also wasn’t the guy who could have been their brother or father or son with the boot on his neck. For them, it’s pure abstraction and ideology. And again–I’m not doubting their sincerity! Or that they have a right to have that view. After all, I’m a man–there’s a sense in which for me, abortion will always be an abstraction, but I still stand by my moral views on it. But Rod, for these guys, it’s church. You shout out “praise the Lord!” by posting a meme about pigs. You cast out the devil by piling on the guy who raises a minor objection. And you deal with heretics by anathematizing them, because their reasoning isn’t based in the gospel, in this case the belief that as a White person your only role is to listen and offer support to activism by POC.

I don’t know, Rod. My particular flavor of the faith is Calvinist, and it helps me. I don’t believe I got a signed document when I was born that said my threescore and ten would be during peaceful, plentiful times, or even that I’d get that many years. Rioting has been around as long as there’s been people. And if you think about it–how could we not be having unrest right now? Sudden, mass unemployment, teens out of school for months, people locked into their houses for almost as long ready to blow, leadership that only seeks to stoke the flames (talking about president Bozo Bull Connor here), and no bread and circuses (sports, concerts, etc.) for people to spend their evenings watching. The country is a tinderbox, officer Chauvin is the spark, and POTUS is just going to pour gasoline on the fire.

But I tell you, we’re in for some rough times. I used to roll my eyes when you referred to “Weimar America,” but not anymore.

UPDATE.6: A perfect example of liberal media cognitive dissonance:

Yeah, lotta Trump supporters assaulting CNN last night… what? pic.twitter.com/144cLuJFVU

— Mark Hemingway (@Heminator) May 31, 2020

UPDATE.7: Moving hearts and mind, the hard left is:

New York City tonight: “Protesters” desecrate St. Patrick’s Cathedral — one of the most sacred Catholic Churches in the world. pic.twitter.com/7KHueVmEw6

— James A. Gagliano (@JamesAGagliano) May 31, 2020

UPDATE.8: Yes, this is all about justice. Right.:

Warning graphic video: Protesters/rioters in Dallas beat store owner to possible death after he tried to defend his business pic.twitter.com/6UluVhbFZh

— Brandon Darby (@brandondarby) May 31, 2020

UPDATE.9: This is wrong too:

Share widely: National guard and MPD sweeping our residential street. Shooting paint canisters at us on our own front porch. Yelling “light em up” #JusticeForGeorgeFloyd #JusticeForGeorge #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/bW48imyt55

— Tanya Kerssen (@tkerssen) May 31, 2020

The post St. Harry Loots Target appeared first on The American Conservative.

Remember The Alamo

On Thursday night in San Antonio, someone defaced the Alamo Cenotaph, a monument to defenders of the historic nearby fort. This morning, a friend in Texas sends this, which is going around:

If you are a Texan, or have ever lived in Texas, you don’t need me to explain to you what the Alamo means to Texans. If you aren’t, or haven’t, I’m not sure that it is possible to convey how sacred the fort is to them. Or at least to many of them. Imagine if some vandals had sneaked into Mecca, and spray-painted “Am Yisroel Chai!” on the walls of the Kaaba. OK, that’s too strong a comparison, but not by a whole lot. The point is, this desecration is an extreme culture-war aggression. If you are comparing the Alamo site to some monument in your own state, you’re wrong. Believe me, I’ve lived in Texas, and I’m married to a Texan. I cannot think of any places like it around the country that are held in the same kind of esteem by the people of the state. The Alamo is the birthplace of Texas identity.

Today there are going to be pissed-off armed Texans, surrounding the Alamo while racial identity-politics radicals rally in the next door park on this weekend of national rioting. Maybe it’s just me, but I have the feeling that these men are not going to be like Mayor Pajama Boy of Minneapolis.

The post Remember The Alamo appeared first on The American Conservative.

Devil’s Night In America

Hell of a night in lots of US cities — especially Minneapolis, which Mayor Jacob Frey has handed over to rioters. Take a look at this business owner being interviewed on live TV. Caution: he drops an F-bomb:

I almost cannot believe what I just heard. Wow pic.twitter.com/n0qLH0acL2

— Jake Schneider (@jacobkschneider) May 30, 2020

Look at this jerky reporter on the ground in Minneapolis, propagandizing for the rioters … before he gets a bottle thrown at him. It’s a wonder he didn’t say, “Thank you, sir, may I have another?” Must sustain the Narrative:

A CNN anchor just said on live TV that the riots in MN were “entirely peaceful” and a “merry caravan” and then seconds later someone throws a bottle directly at him.

You can’t make this stuff up. pic.twitter.com/CtsYvBVzCH

— Andrew Surabian (@Surabees) May 30, 2020

Here’s Michelle Goldberg in The New York Times, maintaining the Narrative:

In Minneapolis protesters poured into the streets, where they met a far harsher police response than anything faced by the country’s gun-toting anti-lockdown activists. On Wednesday night, peaceful demonstrations turned into riots, and on Thursday Minnesota’s governor called in the National Guard.

Gosh, it’s almost like those gun-toting anti-lockdown activists didn’t start a riot. Notice how those “peaceful demonstrations” just “turned” into riots. Funny how that happened. If some Antifa creep throws a bottle at Michelle Goldberg, it’ll probably be Trump’s fault. Rioters in Atlanta smashed windows at CNN Center today and invaded the building. The cognitive dissonance in that newsroom must be a hell of a thing.

Meanwhile, back in the real world, a Minneapolis resident tweets tonight:

My neighborhood, burning. Median income $33k. Many have no transit. Our pharmacies, banks, gas stations, restaurants are destroyed. The six closest grocery stores are looted. Our post office is on fire. The nearest gas station is on fire. No response from our city or state.

— Ryan Griffith (@ryangriffith) May 30, 2020

These poor people have been abandoned by their government. The governor is a Democrat. Minneapolis hasn’t had a Republican mayor for decades. The Pentagon announced within the hour that it has put military police on alert to be sent to Minneapolis. As I write, I’m waiting for a 1:30 am news conference with the city’s useless mayor and the state’s governor. A local TV station reported just now that 75,000 — seventy-five thousand — demonstrators are expected in downtown Minneapolis on Saturday.

More:

Driving around Minneapolis tonight, it is shocking how few law enforcement you see. Seen cops on bikes patrolling downtown, but no sign of National Guard troops or other police. Strategy seems unchanged from the last few nights. Chaos erupts, with little attempt to stop it

— Holly Bailey (@hollybdc) May 30, 2020

A great point here:

Just a few weeks ago, 75 or so protestors at the Michigan capitol were going to get everyone killed; now hundreds of often tightly packed protestors gather in cities around the country and no one even mentions social distancing anymore https://t.co/yN7cp1iD6L

— Rich Lowry (@RichLowry) May 30, 2020

Riots underway in Dallas, and the Dallas Morning News editorializes in this headline atop its website now:

Look at what’s happening outside the White House now:

Rioters outside the White House are tearing apart the barriers piece-by-piece. #antifa #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/krfqIQYKpo

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) May 30, 2020

Andy Ngo has been covering Antifa for years, and was savagely attacked and forced into the hospital by them. He knows what he’s talking about here:

Imagine that: our media have been so hyper-vigilant about violent right-wing extremism over this past decade that they missed the big story: that Antifa has been building networks around the country. We now see the fruit of its labors. With Covid-19, the economic devastation it has caused, and now the urban riots, American cities are going to fare poorly this decade.

Here is some rare good news from this awful night, about a city that has real leaders:

UPDATE:

Masked militants ransacking the Justice Center in downtown Portland. Many came prepared with chemicals to start fires and weapons to break windows. #antifa #BlackLivesMatter pic.twitter.com/jkJCu3bc2n

— Andy Ngô (@MrAndyNgo) May 30, 2020

The post Devil’s Night In America appeared first on The American Conservative.

Weimar Minneapolis: The Day After

I encourage everyone to take a look at Minneapolis Star Tribune columnist James Lileks’s melancholic yet powerful blog take on what some of his fellow citizens have done to the city they share. He took a drive through the riot areas, and took pictures. He posts images of gang graffiti. The Bloods have been here (this is their territory in the city). Also a Mexican gang that is heavily involved in human trafficking — they tagged a wall.

Lileks says as he was writing this entry in his blog, the abandoned Third Precinct was burning, and the city was warning people to clear away, because there was concern that the gas lines had been cut, and there could be a huge explosion. But a woman on Twitter asked on the Antifa twitter feed, “Where can I donate for matches?”

Lileks, being a decent man, hid her ID on her tweet, and hides it here:

Lileks grabbed an image of graffiti from Minneapolis, from the Antifa livestream. It’s a quote from Marx:

This is who Antifa is. They have been telling us this for a long time. None of the nice establishment liberals want to listen. You see that kind of thing scrawled on the wall of a building in the city that’s in the process of being burned down by Antifa, and you might think differently about Trump’s obnoxious boast about shooting rioters. I wish he had been more statesmanlike, and laid down a hard line without being so provocative, but it’s hard to look at, and listen to, Antifa without believing that Trump is more right than wrong. These are the forces of domestic terror. They have shown who they are. And so have the nice white liberals like the California woman. She thinks she’s going to be safe when they come for her. Liberals have historically made that mistake a lot when dealing with revolutionaries.

Lileks:

It’s always odd how the people who preach destruction are assumed to have skills in constructing the replacement, as if the fervent desire to tear things down is just one element of an endlessly kaleidoscopic intellect that apprehends what is to be done, and precisely how to do it.

But the bread runs out. What then? Ah, look over there: another remnant of the old, cursed order. Burn it, and we will be free. Not from want, not from the rule of others, but at least free from the old ways and the whispering voice of one’s conscience. There is a new, louder voice in your ear now, and it approves of all that you do.

Until, of course, it doesn’t.

Read his entire post. 

As you know, I’ve spent the last year reading about the origins of totalitarianism in Russia (and, to some extent, in Germany), in an effort to understand our own times for my next book, Live Not By Lies. In fact, I was awake until six a.m. this morning, pulling an all-nighter to finish the final copy edit before the advance reader copies go out next week. It took me all night to finish because I kept toggling back to Twitter to follow the news from Minneapolis.

There was some resonance between the text I was editing, and the events playing out on social media. Watching people like that California woman Lileks cites urge on the rioters, and make excuses for them, brought to mind this Hannah Arendt quote from her great book The Origins of Totalitarianism; I cite this line in my own book. Arendt is talking about pre-totalitarian culture:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

Yes, that’s many of us, and that’s our media, too: either actively cheering for the destruction, or making excuses for it. Never mind that a mob has burned down a police station in an advanced liberal democracy. Never mind that the authorities stood by and allowed the mob to loot and burn businesses — people’s livelihoods, and the sources of food and daily necessities for many in that neighborhood. Destroy it all! Justice! Here is the beginning of a thread in which New York Times writer and recent Pulitzer Prize-winner (for The 1619 Project) Nikole Hannah-Jones characterizes the rioting as an “uprising,” and suggests (in her final tweet of the thread) that violence isn’t going to help here, but nothing else works either:

There’s a lot of consternation on here abt the uprising in Minneapolis & how the only means protestors can be effective is through non-violence.I hurt for the destruction like everyone else. But the fact of history is non-violent protest has not been successful for blk Americans.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) May 29, 2020

That’s just not true. Here’s a link to a fascinating series of tweets by a scholar who just published a paper studying the Civil Rights Movement of the 1960s. Violence did make a difference, the scholar says — but not in the same way. He found that when the state brought down violence on peaceful protesters, it moved the public towards sympathy with the protesters’ goals. But when civil rights protesters rioted, it had the opposite effect.

You’ll see this in Minneapolis. Before these riots, you had even right-wing people denouncing the cops. Check this out from Thursday:

I don’t know… I still don’t know what precipitated it. I don’t know why they had George Floyd on the ground. I don’t know, but I don’t care what it was, unless he fired a shot at them, and even then, there is no… What policy? What policy is there anywhere that mandates that kind of treatment of a suspect or prisoner who is totally under control?

(interruption) Okay. All right. So he passed a counterfeit bill in a store.

Fine.

That doesn’t come close to justifying what happened to him, with people watching that cop for five minutes kill the guy! There’s no other way to describe what happened. I understand people are out there calling it murder. It makes me so mad, I can’t see straight. So, I ask, how does something like that happen? There has to be some police manual or handbook.

Look, you people in law enforcement know I’m at the top of the list of people who support you and understand how hard your jobs are and the rigors and the arduous circumstances you have to go through every day. I still, given all of that, do not… I cannot find a way to explain that. I can’t find a way to justify it. I don’t care what the guy did. If it’s all about a counterfeit bill, it’s even…

Know who said that? Rush Limbaugh!

Limbaugh was not on the air today — he’s got advanced lung cancer, which might explain it — but it’s not hard to anticipate what is likely to come from him on Monday, when he’s broadcasting again. What the Minneapolis police did to George Floyd shocks the conscience of all decent people. It might be legal — a professor I was talking to today says that we’re headed for a re-run of the Freddie Gray trial in Baltimore, when the cops walked because they were using an approved method of restraint in arresting a subject — but it is incompatible with the rule of law, if you appreciate the difference. That is to say, if people are going to respect the law, then the law cannot permit things like this to happen, especially not at the hands of law enforcement.

Revising the Live Not By Lies manuscript last night, this passage jumped out at me in light of what’s been happening in Minneapolis:

At dinner in a Russian Orthodox family’s apartment in the Moscow suburbs, I was shaken by our table talk of Soviet oppression through which the father and mother of the household had lived. “I don’t understand how anybody could have believed what the Bolsheviks promised,” I said glibly.

“You don’t understand it?” said the father at the head of the table. “Let me explain it to you.” He then launched into a three hundred-year historical review that ended with the 1917 Revolution. It was a pitiless tale of rich and powerful elites, including church bureaucrats, treating peasants little better than animals.

“The Bolsheviks were evil,” the father said. “But you can see where they came from.”

The Russian man was right. I was chastened. The cruelty, the injustice, the implacability, and at times the sheer stupidity of the imperial Russian government and social order in no way justifies all that followed—but it does explain why the revolutionary Russian generation was so eager to place its hope in communism.

When I returned home from that Russia trip last fall, I dug deeper into the history of late imperial Russia. It really was incredible, how blind the ruling class was to all the deep problems in the country. If they didn’t care for the masses’ welfare, okay, but at least they should have had a sense of self-preservation. They didn’t. They thought the social order with themselves at the top — I’m not simply talking here about the royal family and the aristocracy — would last forever. They refused to see the sources of legitimate outrage.

And yet! The intellectuals and the cultural elites who knew that the days of the ancien régime were numbered were also blind and foolish, in the way that James Lileks up above accuses those who today want to burn down the present order. At a 1905 banquet at the Hotel Metropol in Moscow, the cultural impresario Sergei Diaghilev delivered this toast to the gathered intelligentsia:

We are witnesses of the greatest moment of summing-up in history, in the name of a new and unknown culture, which will be created by us, and which will also sweep us away. That is why, without fear or misgiving, I raise my glass to the ruined walls of the beautiful palaces, as well as to the new commandments of a new aesthetic. The only wish that I, an incorrigible sensualist, can express, is that the forthcoming struggle should not damage the amenities of life, and that the death should be as beautiful and as illuminating as the resurrection.

Twelve years later, when the Revolution came to Russia, sweeping away all that stood, Diaghilev was in Europe. He never returned home. He knew better. Solzhenitsyn, in The Gulag Archipelago (this quote below is also in my book), captures with these searing lines how blind the liberal critics of the exhausted old order were to what would replace it:

If the intellectuals in the plays of Chekhov who spent all their time guessing what would happen in twenty, thirty, or forty years had been told that in forty years interrogation by torture would be practiced in Russia; that prisoners would have their skulls squeezed within iron rings, that a human being would be lowered into an acid bath; that they would be trussed up naked to be bitten by ants and bedbugs; that a ramrod heated over a primus stove would be thrust up their anal canal (the “secret brand”); that a man’s genitals would be slowly crushed beneath the toe of a jackboot; and that, in the luckiest possible circumstances, prisoners would be tortured by being kept from sleeping for a week, by thirst, and by being beaten to a bloody pulp, not one of Chekhov’s plays would have gotten to its end because all the heroes would have gone off to insane asylums.

When our turn comes, we will make no excuses for the terror. That is the handwriting on the wall in Minneapolis. That is what idiot liberals like California Woman, the Good People Who Believe In Proper Things, are making way for. It’s what this rich white left-wing dirtbag is calling for:

Somebody help me w/the math. If it sadly took burning down 1 police precinct HQ + 22 other buildings to get them to arrest just 1 of the 4 killer cops, how many (unoccupied)cars is the City going to force the ppl to torch to get the other 3 cops running loose behind bars? Peace.

— Michael Moore (@MMFlint) May 29, 2020

Go on Twitter, or go read the media, and see how many right-thinking liberals and progressives are cheering on the rioting, and calling people who criticize it racist. As if believing George Floyd was treated unjustly requires one to cheer on thugs who destroy a city. As Michael Brendan Dougherty writes today:

If you’re so morally insensate or well-educated that you can’t make a moral judgment without referencing a study or chart, look at the long-term studies done on rioting. Riots harm their communities. They don’t reform them. They often initiate a general spike in violent crime. Baltimore saw this spike in the past half-decade. Riots dissuade individuals, families, and businesses from staying in or joining a community. Who wants to raise their kids in the neighborhood where the police station had to be evacuated before it was set ablaze?

You sentimental folks who say that the police were right to let everything burn, because property is less important than human life — this was the rationale the Democratic boy wonder mayor of Minneapolis used for ordering the evacuation of the now-destroyed Third Precinct building last night — are not thinking about how destroying property destroys the means by which the surrounding community lives. That cop Chauvin killed George Floyd, but the rioters have probably condemned his community to a slow death.

Though I understand emotionally why he said it, Trump should not have threatened to have forces under his command shoot looters. I’m a supporter of the castle doctrine (which not all states have), authorizing the use of deadly force if someone breaks into your property and threatens your life. But that applies to a homeowner. It’s not the standard for police or National Guard troops. Using deadly force to quell a riot is against the military’s rules of engagement, for one thing, and for another, it might violate the Constitution.Still, when you’re watching rioters run rampant over a city, sacking and burning businesses, and even the police station, while state and local authorities do nothing — well, you can see why he would pop off. As usual with Trump, he has no mature instinct to keep him from saying what he was thinking.

As disturbing as the president’s tweet was, it’s more disturbing, at least to me, that the Mayor of Minneapolis chose to let a mob seize and burn a police headquarters last night. This is far, far beyond a broken-windows moment. This tells you that a major American city is governed by a man and an administration that will not defend its institutions from sacking by barbarians. We can be pretty confident that the middle classes in Minneapolis will understand exactly what this means.

So yes, there are particular people to blame in this particular situation. But don’t lose sight of the big picture. We are a decadent society, one that — on both the political and cultural Left and Right — has failed to transmit the moral and religious values and practices, including economic practices, that would provide for and strengthen the common good. We are losing the capacity for self-government, and making way for an authoritarian social order, and maybe even a soft-totalitarian one. James Poulos calls it the Pink Police State — and Pascal-Emanuel Gobry said back in 2016 that it explains both Trump and Hillary Clinton.

The broader crisis is about an exhausted liberal democratic order that has been living off its accumulated moral and social capital for a long time, without replenishing it. Read Arendt — it’s all there, the diagnosis of decadence, and the warning of its consequences. Trump is not going to stop it; he may delay some of it, but don’t fool yourself: Trump is a manifestation of it, as sure as these liberals are. You don’t want to be like the nitwit intellectuals of late imperial Russia, or of Weimar Germany, having a grand time tearing down the old world, certain that whatever follows will be better. But you also don’t want to be like the Tsar and the Russian ruling class, serenely confident that everything will carry on as always, that you have no reason to pay attention to the grievances of the masses, and comforting yourself with the belief that an application of armed force will be sufficient to quell any objection to your rule.

Dark times. Something bad is coming. My book is a little guide for traditional Christians in how to prepare themselves for it. How disheartening and strange it was to toggle between my manuscript and my Twitter feed, and feel the immediacy of what these Christian dissidents from the Soviet era have to say to us.

UPDATE: Heard from my professor friend, who said I misinterpreted him. He says that this Minneapolis situation is going to be a rerun of Freddie Gray because the DA is getting ahead of his skis in charging beyond what they are likely to win a conviction for. He went on:

This is what people don’t understand: the police officers can be negligent or overly forceful in a way which creates civil liability or results in his firing WITHOUT committing a crime under our legal system as it currently exists. Our legal system is extremely deferential to police judgement on use of force within the boundaries of their duties.

The post Weimar Minneapolis: The Day After appeared first on The American Conservative.

Mob Drives Police Away

This is big. This is big. From a crime beat reporter at the Minneapolis Star Tribune:

And just like that, the MPD has surrendered its 3rd Precinct police station to protesters: “Airing information citywide, the 3rd Precinct has been compromised.”

— Libor Jany (@StribJany) May 29, 2020

From the paper’s courts reporter, on the scene. He says that the Third Precinct is on fire:

Yes fire in entry #GeorgeFloyd pic.twitter.com/dYwFm1ZRgk

— Chao Xiong (@ChaoStrib) May 29, 2020

Celebratory fireworks from the mob!

Fireworks over @MinneapolisPD 3rd Precinct after crowds swarm inside. No sign of police response to deter them yet. #NBCNews #GeorgeFloyd pic.twitter.com/6Tb8x9dMRe

— Morgan Chesky (@BreakingChesky) May 29, 2020

The 3rd precinct building is now on fire. Rioters are celebrating and posing for pictures in front of the flames. pic.twitter.com/j5IrK8ARUd

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) May 29, 2020

UPDATE: Libor Jany understands the symbolism of this moment:

A police station in a major U.S. city: https://t.co/F63IbLYw7f

— Libor Jany (@StribJany) May 29, 2020

UPDATE.2: The evacuation:

This is the moment when Minneapolis police officers abandoned the 3rd precinct building. Rioters chased them as they left and continued to throw objects at the police vehicles. pic.twitter.com/KoxAAYiUIN

— Julio Rosas (@Julio_Rosas11) May 29, 2020

UPDATE.3: “When the looting starts, the shooting starts.” Well then.

….These THUGS are dishonoring the memory of George Floyd, and I won’t let that happen. Just spoke to Governor Tim Walz and told him that the Military is with him all the way. Any difficulty and we will assume control but, when the looting starts, the shooting starts. Thank you!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) May 29, 2020

UPDATE.4: Consider the insanity of this: a public service announcement from the City urging the mob to step back from the police station they’re burning down, in case it goes all splodey-dope:

We're hearing unconfirmed reports that gas lines to the Third Precinct have been cut and other explosive materials are in the building.

If you are near the building, for your safety, PLEASE RETREAT in the event the building explodes.

— City of Minneapolis (@CityMinneapolis) May 29, 2020

No police in sight pic.twitter.com/baiDgxktNi

— Max Nesterak (@maxnesterak) May 29, 2020

Good; I hope they shoot anybody who tries to break in:

Lawful black firearms owners standing guard outside their businesses. pic.twitter.com/UyV5uHw3cW

— Ezra Levant

Goodbye Klobuchar, Hello Abrams

Did you realize that Derek Chauvin, the cop who killed George Floyd, had 18 complaints made against him over the course of his career? From CNN:

Only two of the 18 complaints against Chauvin were “closed with discipline,” according to a MPD internal affairs public summary. In both cases, the “discipline issued” column indicated that a letter of reprimand had been issued in response.

Chauvin was not the only officer on the scene that day with a history of complaints against him.

Former officer Tou Thao had six complaints filed with internal affairs, one of which was still open, according to the public summary released Thursday. The other five complaints had been closed without discipline.

The two other officers involved had no complaints filed against them, per MPD internal affairs.

No details of those complaints have come out yet. But come on — eighteen complaints? The public has a right to know what those complaints said. Was this a cop with a history of brutality? This stinks to high heaven.

And get this:

The Floyd case has put the national spotlight back on Klobuchar’s days as a prosecutor, particularly as it became clear Derek Chauvin, the officer involved in Floyd’s death, was involved in the death of another citizen while Klobuchar was prosecutor. Chauvin was one of six officers who fired on and killed Wayne Reyes in 2006 after Reyes reportedly aimed a shotgun at police after stabbing his friend and girlfriend. While the death happened during Klobuchar’s tenure at the helm of the Hennepin County Attorney’s Office, the case did not go to a grand jury until after she left the office and became a senator.

Klobuchar did not criminally charge other police involved in the more than two dozen officer-involved fatalities that occurred during her time as prosecutor. She left those decisions to a grand jury, a practice that was common at the time.

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, a black Democrat, is defending Klobuchar:

Minnesota Attorney General Keith Ellison, who was a lawyer and state legislator when Klobuchar held the prosecutor’s post, also defended Klobuchar’s record.

“The general and overall tone was that the office dealt fairly with criminal defendants within the law,” he said. “Now were there larger social movements that were of a concern? Yes. But they weren’t her fault.”

I’m not sure how you can blame her for grand juries choosing not to file charges. Fair or not, though, there is no way that she is going to be Joe Biden’s No. 2 after the Floyd killing. As a legal matter, her hands may be clean, but politically, she’s a goner. As a friend put it to me, thinking of Biden’s No. 2, “Stacey Abrams, here we come.”

You will recall that Abrams wrote last year, “Identity politics is exactly who we are and exactly how we won.”

In her much-discussed Foreign Affairs essay on identity politics, Abrams wrote:

My campaign championed reforms to eliminate police shootings of African Americans, protect the LGBTQ community against ersatz religious freedom legislation, expand Medicaid to save rural hospitals, and reaffirm that undocumented immigrants deserve legal protections.

She added:

The marginalized did not create identity politics: their identities have been forced on them by dominant groups, and politics is the most effective method of revolt.

Revolt. In the wake of George Floyd, and the riots, it’s going to be very, very hard for Biden not to choose Abrams. Trump is one lucky guy. If Abrams is on the Democratic ticket this fall, the campaign will be all about race and identity politics. God help us.

Politics aside, the Minneapolis police department has to find some way to release the details of the complaints made against Chauvin and the other cop (but especially Chauvin, who killed Floyd). If it turns out there is a history of this guy repeatedly being brutal to suspects, that would be a pretty clear indication that there is a deep problem with that police force.

UPDATE: A crime reporter for the Minneapolis Star Tribune tweets:

And just like that, the MPD has surrendered its 3rd Precinct police station to protesters: “Airing information citywide, the 3rd Precinct has been compromised.”

— Libor Jany (@StribJany) May 29, 2020

Protesters are burning the building. The Third Precinct police headquarters. The governor called in the National Guard earlier today, but it has apparently done no good.

UPDATE.2: Reader Dukeboy, a retired police officer, comments:

One other thing that was actually reported earlier but lost in the subsequent noise is that neck restraints are allowed by Minneapolis PD policy. From the Minneapolis Star- Tribune:

“In Minneapolis, kneeling on a suspect’s neck is allowed under the department’s use-of-force policy for officers who have received training in how to compress a neck without applying direct pressure to the airway. It is considered a “non-deadly force option,” according to the department’s policy handbook.

A chokehold is considered a deadly force option and involves someone obstructing the airway. According to the department’s use-of-force policy, officers are to use only an amount of force necessary that would be objectively reasonable.”

https://m.startribune.com/b…

I will interject here that for probably 18 out of the 23 years I was a cop, the dangers of positional asphyxia and the dangers of using neck restraints or chokeholds was a focus of defensive tactics training during yearly in- service training. When I first saw the video, I couldn’t believe what I was seeing because placing your knee directly on a suspect’s neck would have not been tolerated at my old department and it certainly wouldn’t have been taught as an approved technique.

However, policy and procedure at Minneapolis PD appears to be quite different from the way that my old department and most departments do business. A quick scan of articles published by various police defensive tactics experts in the last couple of days shows that the majority viewpoint is that the use of the knee on the neck is a bad idea.

But it appears that it was an approved technique by the Minneapolis PD. One more link, this one to a copy of the MPD policy manual from the city’s official website.

http://www.ci.minneapolis.m…

If that neck restraint was an officially approved tactic, then the liability and culpability rationalizations change. Instead of talking about Murder or an upper level of Manslaughter charge, we’re down at the lower end of the homicide scale, talking about negligent or reckless homicide at most.

The mob is not going to be happy with that.

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