Rod Dreher's Blog, page 148

Masks And Malignant Meritocracy: A Dissent

I received an excellent letter from a Canadian reader who disagrees strongly with me on an issue. I will respond to his criticism after the letter, but it’s too good not to share with you all. He asked me to keep his name out of it. Emphases are in the original:

For whatever reason I found myself troubled by your piece “Mask Truthers.”  I am not even sure what it is exactly.  Perhaps it is your utter contempt and disdain for anyone who would angrily refuse to wear a mask when they are out in public shopping or otherwise going about their affairs.  I found myself laying awake last night stewing about it, which is highly unusual for me.  I usually fall asleep easily to recitations of the Jesus Prayer or The Lord’s Prayer.  But last night I could not focus.  I am trying to do my devotions and cannot concentrate enough to read the Word.  I know that writing this will not free me from my thoughts but make them more solid in my consciousness, the wisdom of John Cassian thrown aside.  It’s not so much thoughts per se, but questions that keep swirling in my mind.

Why would someone angrily refuse to wear a mask in public?

Selfish idiocy is not enough of an answer.  Rush Limbaugh and Hannity spouting off are not enough of an answer.  I sense of it is that the answer is class related.  I know that different thinkers and commentators use different terms, but the one I like the best is “meritocracy.” They are the “achievers” or the offspring of former achievers.   In the “Big Five” personality analysis, these are people who are high in “conscientiousness.”  They are organized, dependable, keep deadlines and are hard working.  They are the 20% who do 80% of the work.  Many of them are the movers and shakers in media, in business, in government and so forth.  They are working actively as a class to cement their power and place in society.

As a realtor, I see this in my work all the time.  I show houses and apartments across the social spectrum, and from seeing the homes of the successful, it is not surprising that they are successful.  The houses are clean, organized and they have done everything needing to be done to stage their home, even without spending money on stagers.  When you go into the homes of working class people they are often cluttered and even when the attempt is made to stage the homes, they just can’t bring it off.  The homes of the very poor are reflective of chaos and disorder.  Walking into the apartment of a poor person, it is not hard to understand why they are poor.   As a baseline, there is a significant portion of the population who are not high on the “conscientious” scale who are just not diligent enough in all of life to “get ahead” in terms that the meritocracy has set for such things, so what make us think that they are going to be conscientious now?

Increasingly those who belong to the meritocracy, regardless of political persuasion, are increasingly “the experts.”  This is important.  Those who are in the upper reaches of society are the ones telling us how to live our lives.  They model their lives in the media and on social media.  My children are involved in competitive swimming.  Swimming is largely a sport of the meritocracy.  The parents are constantly posturing on social media, constantly engaging in social climbing, positioning their kids with other kids who are the “right” kids.  They are the same one posting vacuous “wisdom” on Facebook, who tweet politically correct disdain for Trump, who bake fresh bread and post it on social media in part because that is what all the “cool” people have done.  They post about the “literature” they read.  They post about the “films” they watch.  Important.  Meaningful. Deep.  They also post about the people they meet, the trips they take, the social gatherings they have.  All of it says “I am in.”  Even people on the fringes of the meritocracy, even those members of the meritocracy who do not share its core political beliefs still engage in all the social posturing and scraping and all engage in social media as a tool of their advancement.  Everyone wants to be seen as being in the club.  One of the cool, important people.  It’s high school writ large.

They are increasingly focused on “safety.”  In our pool, for the last 25+ years, we have been able to split the 50m pool into two 25m pools with dive starts from the shallow end.  We have done so without injury or incident for that entire time.  A couple of years ago, the daughter of a neurosurgeon dove too deep and brushed her hands on the bottom.  She gets freaked out, tells her dad, and her dad, a genuine concussion expert, makes a stink and now 25+ years of injury free shallow end diving has to come to an end because the concussion expert tells us its not safe.

The people who are most willing to embrace the shutdowns and social distancing are the same people who have all the personality traits and social tools to climb the social ladder.  I see them on Facebook and Twitter tripping over themselves to demonstrate how thoughtful and conscientious they are.  Social distancing is the new tool for social climbing.

Increasingly, the “experts” are using the expertise to secure and cement their social and cultural power.  And as you noted in a recent post, the experts hate the non-experts.  And the non-experts know it.  They have been diving into the shallow end of the pool their whole life, and now some expert is telling us we can’t because their whiny little Suzy touched the bottom of the pool.  And the non-experts resent it.  That resentment runs deep and it has built up over time.

Why are the experts so afraid?  Why are the experts so afraid of illness and dying?  Why are they so afraid of their own mortality?

I think there is a class divide along those who are afraid and those who are not.  It is not a faith thing, although I do think faith has something to do with it.  I suspect that the more one embraces the core myths of the meritocracy — the myth of Science (as the source of Truth and the means to solve all problems), Progress, Technology — the more one embraces the notion that we can protect ourselves from and overcome every problem we face, the more one seeks protection from every threat.  We can make every pool safe.  We can make every playground safe.  We can make the world safe.  Science and technology will do it.  The experts will guide us.

But so much of living a full and rich and deep life involves doing things that are not safe.  They are not safe emotionally.  They are not safe physically.  Increasingly, ordinary folk are coming to realize this.  They are not afraid.  And they are sick of the meritocracy using their fears and anxieties as tools for political, social, institutional and cultural dominance.  How best to protest?  By being militantly, irresponsibly, rudely “not afraid” is becoming the way to show up and protest the growing hegemony of the meritocratic expert class.

And all of the meritocratic toadies and scrapers trying to climb the ladder, who urge that we follow the advice of the experts, the vast majority of them are relatively secure in their incomes.  They are still getting paycheques.  They can order their groceries sent to the house.  And as a tool of social climbing they have to express how scared they are, and how good they are for “staying safe.”  Every time I hear or see the words “stay safe”, I want to scream.  No!  Live life!  Be not afraid!  And since it is Star Wars day, “Fear is the path to the dark side.”

Why do “ordinary” folk not trust the advice of the “experts”? 

This is an important question to answer.  Expertise is a real thing.  I have expertise in theology.  It is sometimes painful listening to people talk theology, the Bible and philosophy.  I am an expert in real estate sales.  It is often too exhausting to engage people on these topics because it takes too long to walk them through decades of learning.

The truth is, though, that in large part, the experts have lost the trust of the people.  They no longer believe that the experts are giving them the best advice.  They don’t trust the experts, plain and simple.  Increasingly the “experts” they trust are not in fact “experts” at all but people who challenge and disagree with the experts.

Why don’t people trust the experts? In part they are so often wrong.  They gave us the “ever war.”  They sit in their think tanks and on their commentary shows and safely in the policy halls and send the lives and hard earned dollars of ordinary folk off to die.  They told us globalism and free trade would make us prosperous when we felt our jobs were threatened.  They are the dreaded consultants.  Then, after we lost our jobs, and we went looking for work, they were undercutting our income by importing cheap foreign workers.  Even if we learned “coding”, all of that is getting shipped to India now anyway.  They may not know the word arbitrage, but they live the reality of its effects.  And they see the meritocracy urging more and more globalism and open borders and they wonder why their leaders care nothing for them.  They gave us no-fault divorce.  They call us hicks and rednecks.  They call us racists.  They hate us for our faith, if we still have one.  They tell us what to wear.  What to watch.  What to read.  They tell us how to eat.  One minute “fat free” foods loaded with sugar are good.  Next its high protein and low carbs.  So what is it?

NONE OF THEM EVER LOSE THEIR LIVELIHOOD OR THEIR WAY OF LIFE OR THEIR SOCIAL STANDING WHEN THEY ARE WRONG!!!

The musings of Dr. Fauci are no more scientifically rigorous than those two doctors whom YouTube de-platformed.  There has not been time for peer reviews or exhaustive double blind studies.  His is the advice that plays to the Safety Myth of the meritocracy.  Increasingly, we are seeing zero instances of Coronavirus as the benchmark for returning to normal life.  What if a vaccine is never developed?  There still is no AIDS vaccine.  There is still no herpes vaccine.

My sense is that expert class are increasingly seen as politically aligned with the movers and shakers in the meritocracy.    If you want to resist the growing hegemony of the meritocratic class over your life, what better way to do so than to be belligerently opposed to their advice and recommendations.  If diligence and conscientiousness are aligned politically with the experts who speak as the mouthpiece of the meritocracy and give them their orders, why is it so unreasonable to think that a lack of contentiousness would also become politicized as a counter-play?  We are seeing the results of what happens when the modus operandi of a Saul Alinsky becomes the tools by which the meritocracy cements and maintains its political control and cultural hegemony.  As soon as you hear someone say, “stay safe” or use the argument “we need to keep people safe” you know immediately which side they are on.  They have aligned themselves with the meritocracy.

Why would you bring guns to a state legislature in protest?

Because the meritocracy are a bunch of gun hating pussies that’s way.  It’s a show of “strength.”  It’s a statement, “You may have all the levers and instruments of political power, but we have all the guns.”  It has been my belief for a several years now that the politicization of our society and its radicalization are only going to get worse.  I also believe that if de-escalation is going to happen, the first steps must begin with the left and with the meritocracy.  They must begin walking back the Alinsky-ite attitude of the left.  They need to show “respect” to those that differ with them, who disagree with them and will not join them in the “climb” up the social ladder.  Calling them selfish morons and jerks only fuels the fires and widens the divide.

Why would people be willing to vote for and continue to support Trump?  Why, when there many more qualified and better people who could do the job and were willing to do the job?

If I were an American, I would have voted for Ted Cruz.  But the movers and shakers in the Republican Party hated him so much that they were willing to allow Trump to get the nomination rather than see Cruz win the nomination.  Why are so many people willing to vote for Trump?  It’s not just the red meat rallies.  It is not just that he thumbs his nose at the press and constantly battles with them.  Every other candidate was obviously a part of the meritocracy.  Even though Trump is super rich and was born with a silver spoon, he is gauche enough to be thought of as having a common touch.  He connected with people and made them believe that whatever he is, he isn’t one of “them.”  “Them,” the meritocracy, are so reviled and so hated that his supporters would vote for anyone, as long as they had no stench of “them” on themselves.  Anyone but a member of the meritocracy.   Trump understands this instinctively.  So, as long as he is seen as “not one of them” his base will follow.  And there is a large segment of the population willing to die of coronavirus than listen to the dictates of the meritocracy.  They are that hated and reviled.  But the leadership class in both parties do not see it, will not see it and wouldn’t believe it even if they did.  Nobody likes them.  There is no one other than Trump.  Tucker?  Name someone other than Trump who can or is willing to lead the fight against the growing hegemony of the meritocracy?  Do you think that the meritocracy is willing to stand down and end its war against the common people, the deplorables, to make peace and once again earn the trust of the people?  The common people know that they will do anything to destroy them.  Send their jobs overseas, flood the market with illegal aliens, wreck their families and towns and so forth.  There is already a war going on and people are starting to wake up to that reality.  Guns in the state house is only the beginning.  Who will fight for the common man?  Fight hard enough to win?  Right now the perception is that Trump is all they got.

What is your only comfort in life and in death?

This is the question that opens the Heidelberg Catechism, an amazing document and one of the core confessional teachings in the Dutch Reformed stream of the Christian faith.  Most of us who grew up in a church with roots in this tradition can give the answer of “The Catechism” from heart.  And it is this answer that makes me not afraid.  At the same time, I am also conscientious enough and polite enough to wear a mask, sanitize and stay home.  I also have two university degrees, am regularly asked to speak as an “expert” (preach from the pulpit), make a six figure income, send my kids to private (Christian) grade school and high school and we are on swim team.   By all metrics I should be a happy and contented member of the meritocracy.  But I just can’t do it.  I just can’t embrace it.  A big part of it is my Christian faith.  But I think a larger part of what turns me off from the meritocracy is that so many of them – people, who, on their own, seem like nice people – behave in way that reminds me of treatment I received in high school from the “cool kids.”  I see it at church.  I see it at swim team.  I see it on Facebook, Twitter and almost every time I turn on the TV.  Good looking “cool kids” telling me how to live my life and admonishing me to “stay safe.”  I don’t want to stay safe.  I want to live life.  I want to challenge myself in my faith journey to be as honest with myself as I can stand it and more.  I don’t want to be afraid.  I am not.  Why am I not afraid?  Because I share in a reality that is more real than the empty material world of the elites.  I don’t need to figure out what the world means to me, because it is already deeply imbued in its very fabric and foundation with meaning.  Truth, Beauty, Justice, and so forth are all out their waiting to be discovered, pondered and embraced.  Its not “safe” to pursue these things.  But I can do so knowing:

That I am not my own,

but belong –

body and soul

in life and in death—

to my faithful Savior Jesus Christ.

He has fully paid for all my sins with his precious blood,

and has set me free from the tyranny of the devil.

He also watches over me in such a way

that not a hair can fall from my head

without the will of my Father in heaven:

in fact, all things must work together for my salvation.

Because I belong to him,

Christ, by his Holy Spirit,

assures me of eternal life

and makes me wholeheartedly willing and ready

from now on to live for him.

For many in my community, these words are the ordering principle and foundation for their approach to life.  Why would I be afraid to live if I know that my life belongs to Christ?  Can a virus take away my salvation?  Can it separate me from the love of God that is in Jesus Christ?

Even though I am not afraid, I know others are, and so I try to respect that as best I can. I wear a mask and other than trips to the grocery store and a few house showings, I have allowed myself to be kept prisoner.  But I would much rather be living life.

I think you’ll agree with me that that was an excellent letter. Of course I disagree with some of it. I won’t stretch my response out. You’re welcome.

I don’t have “utter contempt” for people who “angrily refuse” to wear a mask when they go out shopping or otherwise to interact with people. That’s too strong. I do think it’s fair that I disdain their choice, though, because it strikes me as a pointless provocation, one that shows disdain for others. But I have explained this elsewhere.
I think this reader makes a very good point about “safety” and virtue-signaling among the privileged. Can anybody deny that what he’s talking about is a real phenomenon? No. I think the reader offers an important insight into the social psychology of refusing to wear a mask. That said, the virus doesn’t care whether you think you’re sticking it to the snobs. If you chose not to wear a seat belt because you wanted to spite the Safety Nazis, you’re putting your own life in greater danger. That’s not a perfect comparison, though, because the point of wearing masks in public is not to protect yourself, but to protect others from you if you are carrying the virus and don’t realize it.
The reader’s comments about the contempt many people have for experts are important. Again, there is the danger of what we call “cutting off your nose to spite your face” — that is, doing something that is harmful to one’s self-interest for the sake of making a useless point. I believe that the Canadian reader and I would draw the line between reasonable deference to expert opinion, and rejecting it, in a different place regarding coronavirus. That said, he’s not wrong to observe how “safety” is often a code word for a progressive power grab. That would actually be an interesting essay: how “safety,” the kind of thing that is usually associated with a conservative approach to life, became a hallowed principle among progressive elites, and in fact something that justified their ideological hegemony.
Which is just to say that I still think the Mask Truthers are wrong, and meaningfully, even dangerously, wrong. And though I am a gun owner and a supporter of the Second Amendment, I hate the public display of guns in a state legislature in a political context. But thanks to this reader’s great letter, I have a better sense of why they do what they do. The reader has given me a lot to think about, and for that, I thank him.

The post Masks And Malignant Meritocracy: A Dissent appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Apocalypse Any Day Now!’

It is no secret to my longtime readers that I have a doomy, gloomy outlook on the future of Christendom. I am prone to seeing total disaster just around the corner. It is a weakness of mine (peak oil, anybody?), but also, I would argue, a strength, in that I really do believe that I can see structural weaknesses within our culture that most Christians cannot or will not see. I write from the same stance as Flannery O’Connor:

“The novelist with Christian concerns will find in modern life distortions which are repugnant to him, and his problem will be to make these appear as distortions to an audience which is used to seeing them as natural; and he may well be forced to take ever more violent means to get his vision across to this hostile audience. When you can assume that your audience holds the same beliefs you do, you can relax a little and use more normal ways of talking to it; when you have to assume that it does not, then you have to make your vision apparent by shock — to the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

Funnily enough, I just recorded what was for me a wonderful video interview with Gavin Ashenden, the former Anglican chaplain to the Queen who recently converted to Catholicism. We talked for about an hour, though we could have gone all morning, at least from my end. We talked about the Benedict Option and the state of Christianity in the lands that were once Christendom. We understand each other, so there was no need to shout loud about metaphysics, spirituality, or anything else.

I don’t feel that way when I address the general public. People who know me personally know that my demeanor is usually cheerful, and that I’m the sort of person who believes he can ride out the apocalypse as long as there is ice to refresh his drink. My beau ideal is that great Chestertonian Marco Sermarini, who is every bit as convinced as I am about matters relating to decline and fall, but who is indefatigably cheerful. It doesn’t come from a place of happy-clappy optimism über Alles; it comes from the deep joy of a living Christian faith. I wrote about him and his merry hobbits in The Benedict Option, as you readers of the book know.

That said, I completely understand people who see me as a gloom-meister. Nobody who enjoys food and drink and good company as much as I do can be truly gloomy, but yes, I am forever seeing apocalypse around the corner. This is what Austin Ruse is responding to in his Crisis magazine column denouncing what he regards as my defeatism. The first line of his piece:

Rod Dreher lives in fear. It comes out in his life and certainly in much if not most of his writing.

As ever, I laugh at this. How many people who see how I actually live — Austin hasn’t seen me in decades — would consider it to be fearful? Nevertheless, a writer should always be willing to take criticism from the outside. I do believe that it is fair to criticize me for coming across as fearful, at least on a superficial reading of my work.

Ruse writes:

Mr. Dreher’s next book is an even more dire warning about the apocalypse facing orthodox Christians. Entitled Live Not by Lies, it will detail what he calls the “pink police state” and the “soft totalitarianism” that Christian traditionalists will increasingly experience at the hands of the “Homintern” of the gender-bending Left. He compares the Left’s iron grip—led by the vanguard of angry homosexuals—to living under the communist regimes during the Cold War.“My politics are driven entirely by fear of the left,” he admits, “specifically on matters of religious liberty and social policy.” And what if you’re not living in fear of the Left? Then “you are living in delusion,” says Mr. Dreher.

This is not fair, or an accurate representation of what I believe or have written. He gets those quotes from this blog post I wrote last year about fear and politics. 

When I say “fear of the left,” I don’t mean that I’m hiding under the bed hoping that the Homintern agents don’t find me. I’m saying that I fear what the left is doing to us, to make our civilization unlivable. In the same piece, I quote these comments from Bret Weinstein, a left-wing atheist professor who was driven out of his college by the woke mob, who warns that

“This is about a breakdown in the basic logic of civilisation and it’s spreading” @BretWeinstein FULL SERIES: https://t.co/zwEqbxXN5L pic.twitter.com/YmAmRRosOf

— Mike Nayna (@MikeNayna) April 28, 2019

Weinstein has emerged as a stout enemy of the woke mob — and he is doing it as a leftist. May the God in whom he does not believe bless him and aid him! Is Bret Weinstein afraid of the left? You bet he is — because he understands what the political and cultural left as it exists today threatens the things that he values about our civilization. He does not believe that most people are aware of how serious the threat is. Neither do I. But I try to be introspective, saying in that piece:

What I can’t decide is whether or not the particular fears I have are appropriate to the threat, or whether they distort my view of politics. The question in Brooks’s book made me realize that as opposed to the pre-Trump years, my view of politics is entirely driven by fear. I hate that, but when I try to talk myself out of it, I have to ignore far too much for the sake of acquiring inner peace. That I can’t do.

When I say my politics are driven entirely by fear, I mean that I see the threat posed by the woke left as so immense that resisting it has become the prime political directive for me. And even then, I admit that I could be wrong about this. But in order to keep inner peace about politics, I would have to deny what I see with my own eyes. I can’t do this. It is possible that I see through a distorting lens, but if so, then I see wrongly, but honestly. I don’t see cynically.

In that same blog post of mine from last year, I write, quoting David Brooks:

[Brooks:] We get to the point where the fear itself begins to take control. Fear generates fear. Everybody feels besieged — power is somehow elsewhere, with the malevolent forces who are somewhere out there, who will stop at nothing.

Fear puts a dark filter over everything. The fearful person is unable to hear good news, while any possible threat looms large. We are in the middle of one of the longest economic booms in our history, with wages finally rising again for the middle class. But nobody feels that because of the sense that it’s all about to come crashing down.

Fear runs ahead of the facts and inflames the imagination. Ninety percent of the time we’re not afraid of what’s happening to us, but of some catastrophic thing our imagination tells us might happen.

[Dreher] I get that … but I also see that the things that I’m most afraid of are actually happening. They really are going after Christian schools and businesses. They really are trying to ruin people by intimidating them into silence, and making them terrified for their jobs if they say the wrong thing to the wrong person. More broadly, the Christian faith really is withering away in our civilization. This has been measured. I think there must be a difference between healthy fear — meaning respect for actual dangers — and unhealthy fear, which is paralyzing, and destructive.

Ruse thinks I’ve given myself over to paralyzing, destructive fear. He writes:

It’s not that Mr. Dreher has given up: he writes about this stuff constantly. It’s that he preaches fear and defeat in all that he writes. This is hardly good for his readers.

That’s the essential problem with letting fear rule your life: you become defeated when, really, you should be joyful. Think about it. Yes, the world is going straight to Hell in a hand basket. But what did God do? He sent the likes of us! You, and me, and Rod Dreher.

Well, yes. But.

No one who has read The Benedict Option — and I have found that most of its fiercest critics have not read the book; I don’t know if Ruse has — can fairly say that I have surrendered to destructive fear. The book is full of discussion about ways to resist! There’s a chapter about education that extols the virtues of classical Christian schools. There’s discussion of what families can do, and what Christians can do when they come together — with real-life examples. The idea that the Benedict Option, and the things that I write, counsels surrender is simply false.

What I don’t do, either in the book or my writing, is allow people to think that political activism is the solution to our crisis. Hear me: I believe that political activism is important, and should continue. My objection is to the belief widespread among conservative Christians, my own tribe, that our problem is essentially a matter of not having gotten the politics right. Austin Ruse is a political activist by profession. He runs a United Nations lobbying organization called C-Fam. Good for him! I mean that seriously. He should keep going. What he does is not the problem, except insofar as ordinary Christians believe that kind of activism Ruse does is not only necessary (which it is), but sufficient (which it absolutely is not).

In my conversation this morning with Gavin Ashenden, which I’ll post as soon as he does, we talked about how hard it is for modern Christians to recognize what we have lost, and how serious this crisis around us is. In a real sense, what Christians lack today is a proper fear, in the “fear of the Lord” sense. That is, they don’t have a proper respect for the enemies of the faith. I can give you an example from a conversation I had with a Christian friend last week. She was telling me about how she and her husband have been very strict with their kids about smartphones and access to the Internet. For various reasons, including a desire to trust their kids’ Christian school peers, they allowed themselves to lower their guard — and it could have ended in disaster. They discovered that one of their kids was on the verge of being led into some pretty destructive stuff, and had concealed it all from the parents.

My friend was really shaken up by it all. She told me that she and her husband had believed that they were on top of all of this because they were the strictest parents in their kids’ school about smartphones and the Internet. Yet even they were deceived, because (as she sees it now) they underestimated the power of the malicious, destructive culture that thrives on the Internet to find a way to get to their family. It sounds like my friend and her husband lacked appropriate fear of the Internet, vis à vis their children. My sense is that these parents discovered the hard way that they believed that setting up relatively strict protocols in their home, and trusting the fact that their kids went to a Christian school, and hung out with Christian kids, would be enough.

It wasn’t. That family lives in a community a lot like the one Ruse says he and his family lives in. It was helpful, but not enough. The price of being Christian in post-Christian modernity is eternal vigilance.

So Austin Ruse and I are talking about two different kinds of fear. There is the neurotic fear that keeps you from going outside, because Something Bad Might Happen. And there is fear in the sense of “healthy respect for danger” — the kind of fear that would keep you from allowing your children to play in a park known to be infested with copperhead snakes.

Ruse surmises that my forthcoming book, Live Not By Lies, is a fraidy-cat manifesto, because as I have described it, it takes seriously what people who grew up under Soviet bloc communism are saying about what they are observing in our own society. This might end up being another book that a lot of bien-pensants never read, but think they understand. I hope not, but the Benedict Option example doesn’t inspire a lot of confidence. Anyway, the title is from an Solzhenitsyn essay. Solzhenitsyn said, in his introduction to a 1983 edition of The Gulag Archipelago, that people who tell themselves that what happened in Russia could not happen in their country are lying to themselves. It could happen anywhere on earth, he said. He was right about that — and these people who lived through communism, and who see things that they lived with back then manifesting themselves in Western society today, must be listened to.

All those who live in the US told me that they cannot get American friends to understand them. There is something doggedly optimistic in the American psychology. We confuse optimism with hope. And we cannot conceive that we are susceptible to the same tragedies of history that bedevil all other nations. We think we can go stomping through the high grass as we like and no serpent will strike at our heel, because we are an especially blessed people. One of my sources, a Czech who emigrated from communist Czechoslovakia to the US as a young man, told me that it is useless to try to explain any of this to Americans, that we Americans will have to learn this for ourselves. Maybe so. But I have to try, which is why I wrote the book.

In his Crisis column, Ruse seems to pooh-pooh the intense concern I have about LGBT and the future of Christianity. I’m sure that he and I have pretty much the same moral evaluation of the Sexual Revolution and its contemporary vanguard, the LGBT movement. I wonder, though, if Ruse has ever given sustained thought to why the LGBT movement triumphed as thoroughly and as quickly as it did. It’s an incredible thing. A friend of mine, a secular liberal in her 70s, and someone who is thrilled with what the LGBT movement accomplished, told me it’s the most amazing phenomenon she has seen in her lifetime (which includes the black Civil Rights movement). She is correct, too. The fact that it all seems so normal to us now is a big flashing neon sign of the times.

What it tells us is that the decay of Christianity, and the metaphysical basis upon which Christianity rests, is far advanced in this society. I wrote about that here, in a 2013 piece that became one of the most popular things I’ve ever written for TAC. If you want to know more, read that piece. My argument for most of the past twenty years has been that the LGBT movement succeeded so quickly because the Christian foundations of our society had rotted so completely, behind the façade of big churches and strong voter turnout. The world of intellectually engaged, activist conservative Christians is not the world in which most people, even most Christians, live. I used to be part of that world and its false assurances, until the sex abuse scandal revealed to me (among other things) the radical difference between the Christianity of books and journals, and Christianity on the ground. The fact that even a man as wise and worldly as Richard John Neuhaus could be deceived by his respect for appearances, and his belief that the line between good and evil ran between political and theological factions in the Catholic Church — that was a powerful lesson to me.

We live in Babylon, and the greatest struggle we Christians have among ourselves today is to keep Babylon from living in us. I have said here before (first of all, on the day that I saw it) that the recent Terrence Malick film A Hidden Life is the best evocation of The Benedict Option that I’ve ever seen (though to be clear, I have no reason at all to think that Malick knows anything about my book). Franz Jägerstätter lives in a Catholic village in the Austrian Alps. When the Nazis show up and demand that he swear allegiance to Adolf Hitler, an Antichrist, Franz refuses. Nobody in his village understands why he won’t just go along. But Franz knows. He pays for it with his life. (It’s a true story.)

The point of the Benedict Option is not to find a place to go hide where the evils of modernity cannot find you. They will always find you. The point is to live in such a way that when the Nazis show up asking you to swear allegiance to Hitler, you will have both the clarity of mind and the strength of heart to say no, no matter what it costs.

So many of us Christians today say yes to Babylon, even as we convince ourselves that because we hold anti-Babylon convictions, and vote for politicians we believe are Babylon’s enemies (Ruse’s next book is called The Catholic Case For Trump), and because maybe we even give money to activist groups that fight Babylon’s agents in the arenas of power, that we are the Good Guys. Then we can’t figure out why we keep losing. And we are losing. All the political victories in the world matter not at all if we cannot pass the faith intact along to our children. In Europe, this has already happened. In America, we are living through this nightmare. The numbers are all in The Benedict Option, and they don’t lie. But you have to read the book. If you haven’t read it, and seen the facts upon which I build my case, don’t come at me complaining that I’m inordinately fearful, or too gloomy. Ruse says

Yesterday, Catholic News Agency reported on a new biography of Pope Benedict XVI, published in German. The report quotes BXVI, from the book:

“But the real threat to the Church and thus to the ministry of St. Peter consists not in these things, but in the worldwide dictatorship of seemingly humanistic ideologies, and to contradict them constitutes exclusion from the basic social consensus.”

He continued: “A hundred years ago, everyone would have thought it absurd to speak of homosexual marriage. Today whoever opposes it is socially excommunicated. The same applies to abortion and the production of human beings in the laboratory.”

“Modern society is in the process of formulating an ‘anti-Christian creed,’ and resisting it is punishable by social excommunication. The fear of this spiritual power of the Antichrist is therefore only too natural, and it truly takes the prayers of a whole diocese and the universal Church to resist it.”

The battle that has engaged believers is happening not primarily at the political level, the level touched by activists like Ruse. The battle is at its core spiritual and metaphysical. You can’t prevail against the Gates of Hell if you are somehow convinced that your battle is with the Gates of Heck. So yeah, I’m apocalyptic, and maybe I lay that on a little too thick sometimes. I fully concede that the apocalyptic mode is hard to live inside for long — though we may soon find ourselves having to do so, as Christians under communist totalitarianism did. But a politicized, all-American, Trump-positive cheerfulness that effectively denies the gravity of the times, and the seriousness of the response called for, is no answer at all. It won’t even let you properly define the problem. “To the hard of hearing you shout, and for the almost blind you draw large and startling figures.”

The post ‘Apocalypse Any Day Now!’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Les Murray Vs. The Mob Inside

Reflecting on why the gun-toting men who stood watch over the Michigan legislature, to intimidate them, brought such antagonism out within me, and why all mobs do the same, sent me back to one of my favorite poems. It’s called “Demo,” and it was written by the great Australian poet Les Murray. Murray, who died last year, was on the autism spectrum, and was badly bullied as a boy in school. Here is his poem:

Demo

by Les Murray

No. Not from me. Never.

Not a step in your march.

not a vowel in your unison,

bray that shifts to bay.

Banners sailing a street river,

power in advance of a vote,

go choke on these quatrain tablets.

I grant you no claim ever,

not if you pushed the Christ Child

as President of Rock Candy Mountain

or yowled for the found Elixir

would your caste expectations snare me.

Superhuman with accusation,

you would conscript me to a world

of people spat on, people hiding

ahead of oncoming poetry.

Whatever class is your screen

I’m from several lower,

To your rigged fashions, I’m pariah.

Nothing a mob does is clean,

not at first, not when slowed to a media,

not when police. The first demos I saw,

before placards, were against me,

alone, for two years, with chants,

every day, with half-conciliatory

needling in between, and aloof

moral cowardice holding skirts away.

I learned your world order then.

There it is. That’s it. Notice that he condemns mobs as such, whether they are a crowd of angry protesters, whether they are journalists, and whether they are police. All I needed to know about mobs I learned while being alone for two years, in ninth and tenth grade, facing the chants, and the aloof moral cowardice of those who could have stopped it, but did nothing.

That taught me a deep and irresolvable suspicion of convinced crowds. You want to know why everything in me rose up in protest of the institutional Catholic Church’s abuse of children, and related abuse of those victims and their families when they sought redress? It’s there in the years 1980-82. That mob that was the bishops of the Catholic Church. That mob that was the Catholic laity, who averted their eyes from atrocity to preserve their innocence.

That experience helps me to understand why otherwise good people stayed silent in any and all kinds of situations. When I discovered via a friend that people we both knew from our town — old men who had died by then — had been part of a 1940s mob that lynched a black man for raping a white woman, but who in fact had been innocent, I knew where it came from. When I see progressive mobs setting upon professors (I think of Bret Weinstein and Nicholas Christakis, but there are many examples), I know. The thing I fear more than just about anything is the breakdown of law and order, of the sort that leads to mob justice.

When communism fell in Czechoslovakia, there were plenty of people who wanted revenge against their communist persecutors. And they deserved to have it! But Vaclav Havel stayed their hand. He told the crowd (not yet a mob) that we are not like them. He saved their dignity. The older I get, the more I stand in awe before the moral courage of the Civil Rights movement, and the inner strength it took for its leaders and their followers to refuse vengeance, in the name of a higher moral order. I confess that the lowest part of me is still, in some way, looking for vengeance against the mob.

Les Murray once said, in an interview with Image Journal:

In the sixties there was a kind of bohemian revolution which was about one molecule thick lying on top of an ancient ocean of force. It changes all the time because of impulses from below. It’s glittering too. It’s pulling people toward it. Dangerous. Absolutely untrustworthy.

Well, from that, you can deduce that I’ve never been handsome. People who are handsome and socially successful never notice these things, because they’re riding on them.

The ancient ocean of force — what a powerful symbol. It’s true. The powerful never notice that force, because they are surfing the wave. People who convince themselves that they are speaking on behalf of the powerless use that rhetoric as a shield to hide what they do from themselves, and to absolve themselves from their deeds.

Here’s the problem, though: if one adopts the view that is instinctive to me (though a learned instinct, which is paradoxical, but I meant it was a lesson learned so profoundly that it feels instinctive) — anyway, if one adopts my instinctively anti-mob stance, it makes collective action impossible. Last autumn, I was in the Warsaw apartment of Zofia Romaszewska, a grande dame of the Solidarity trade union movement. I talked to her about the lessons that we today can learn from the experience of Catholics in Solidarity. She went on and on about the importance of, yes, solidarity: of coming together and forming bonds of love and loyalty, to resist evil.

Of course she is correct. She is entirely correct. The Solidarity movement was not a mob; it was a movement that stood up to the communist mob in power. It could have become a mob, but it did not.

How did it not?

How can we tell the difference between a movement and a mob? It cannot be the righteousness of the cause. A mob that murders a murderer is a mess of outlaws. But as Murray tells us, and as experience bears out, it is possible for a mob to be a mob and stay within the law and social convention. And, a mob that prevents justice from being done is also a mob.

This is a mystery to me. I would appreciate your reflections on the matter of force and justice. I suspect that there is no ultimate answer, and that in the imperfection of our mortal lives, all societies will have to find a way to live with knowledge that the mob is in us all, and could emerge under certain conditions. But how do we know? Inside the experience, our passions likely blind us to the evil that we may do. All its passions are righteous to a mob. I was part of a mob that rushed to war in Iraq. For me, it was a mild mob, and we certainly did not recognize ourselves as a mob — that is, as a crowd convinced by its own passion, that it was righteous, and should prevail. But a mob it was, and I was guilty of surrendering to it, while thinking of myself as clear-minded and rational.

How do we form ourselves such that we are courageous and clear-sighted enough to join a movement for justice when the call goes out, but also courageous and clear-sighted enough to refuse to join what is not a movement, but is, in fact, a mob? To adapt Kierkegaard’s maxim to my own purpose, the problem is that collective action has to be lived forward, but can only be understood backward.

In his poem, Les Murray indicates that mobs are always about force. There is no cause pure enough to cause Murray to join a demonstration for it. That is where I am, but I admit the limitations of that stance.

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Woke Totalitarianism Wins A Big One

Some commenters on this blog think I’m way out of line saying that the totalitarian threat in the US comes much more from the left than the right. Didn’t I see the men with rifles in the Michigan statehouse? (Yes, I did — and I criticized them.) Those men, however out of line they were, are nothing compared with the power of liberals in academia and media to change the narrative of American history. This is what totalitarianism does. It not only tries to control your actions — that’s what authoritarianism is — but it tries to control the way you think. It does so by demolishing established cultural memory, seeking to replace it with new, ideologized ones — and demonizing anyone who disagrees with the official story, however falsified it is.

Here’s an important example. In 2019, The New York Times, the world’s most influential newspaper, launched “The 1619 Project,” a massive attempt to “reframe” (the Times’s word) American history by displacing the 1776 Declaration of Independence as the traditional founding of the United States, replacing it with the year the first African slaves arrived in North America. Let’s be crystal-clear here: The most powerful media source in the world decided that Americans should stop believing that the Declaration of Independence represents the nation’s founding, and instead accept that the real birth of American happened in 1619, when the first African slave arrived in North America.

No serious person denies the importance of slavery in US history. But that’s not the point of The 1619 Project. Its goal – through newspaper stories and essays, and an elaborate educational project involving schools — is to clear away the foundations of America’s national identity by rewriting its history to emphasize the experiences of the African-American minority. There is nothing wrong, and much right, with highlighting the role African-Americans played in the drama of the nation’s history. But progressives marching through classrooms and newsrooms today are rewriting history to serve an ideological agenda of reallocating power.

The implications for the 1619 Project’s claim are radical. No fair-minded American can deny that slavery is a central fact of US history. We have collectively understood the Civil War primarily as a savage fraternal conflict to determine whether the ideals of the Declaration and the Constitution applied to all Americans, or excluded black ones. The drama of American life, from generation to generation, has emerged from the conflict between our founding ideals, and our struggle to live them out more perfectly, within the limits of our own human fallibility.

The 1619 Project, however, denies that those ideals were anything other than a façade for white supremacy. By this twisted reckoning, Confederate slaveholders were more authentically American than Northern abolitionists. Bull Connor, the notorious Alabama police chief who turned police dogs on Civil Rights marchers, was a truer patriot than Martin Luther King.

The Times spread this story in acres of print on its pages, and in educational documents widely distributed in schools. Some prominent historians – including some well-known liberals — demolished the 1619 Project’s core claims in interviews with a socialist website. They blasted project manager Nikole Hannah-Jones’s wild assertion that the colonists broke from Britain to preserve slavery, Hannah-Jones dismissed them with a tweet. In it, she cast racialized suspicion on their objections because they are white:

Trump supporters have never harassed me and insulted my intelligence as much as white men claiming to be socialists. You all have truly revealed yourselves for the anti-black folks you really are.

— Ida Bae Wells (@nhannahjones) November 27, 2019

Teachers in hundreds of schools, including in Chicago and Washington, DC, have ordered 1619 Project educational materials. The Pulitzer Center says it has put The 1619 Project into 4,500 classrooms. The highly ideological account of American history will serve one goal: advancing identity politics, and the quest for power through identifying and demonizing outgroups despised by the Left. This is a textbook case of seizing and rewriting cultural memory for the sake of achieving power. If we do not possess the historical knowledge to know when we are being bamboozled; if we are too intimidated by allegations of bigotry to object; or if we simply don’t care about the past — then how can we resist the imposition of cultural amnesia?

If we can’t resist the rout of our cultural memory – if ideologues in power rewrite the past – then our future as a nation and a civilization will be in doubt.

Progressive history projects like the 1619 Project’s propaganda serve the larger goal of advancing the perceived political interests of the left’s preferred classes – often racial and sexual minorities — over others. To paraphrase Marx, in the past, historians and educators tried to interpret history in various ways; the point, however, is to change it.

The American news media is deeply complicit in this woke totalitarian project. As I have written in this space, last year Zach Goldberg, a political science PhD student at Georgia Tech, did a deep dive on the LexisNexis database, the world’s largest database of publicly available documents, including media reports. He searched the archives using progressive buzzwords that one sees everywhere in media today. What he found was jaw-dropping.

• In 2010, the number of articles mentioning the phrase “diversity and inclusion” was fewer than 1,000. In 2017, there were over 15,000 such articles.

• In 2010, there were 500 articles using the word “whiteness”. In 2017, there were well over 2,000. In the same period, the mentions of “critical race theory” – an academic concept teaching that “race” is a social construct created by white people to maintain their dominance – tripled.

• There were almost no articles with the term “unconscious bias” in 2010; in 2017, there were 6,000.

• In 2010, there were around 200 articles mentioning “white privilege.” In 2017, they topped 2,500.

• In The New York Times alone, the number of articles using the word “privilege” skyrocketed from 500 in 2010 to 2,400 in 2017. There was a similar trebling of the number of Times articles mentioning “discrimination” in that time period, and a quadrupling (from 180 to 800) of articles using the term “social justice.”

• The social justice jargon term “marginalized” didn’t exist in the Times in the year 2000, and in 2010, was used shy of 200 times. But in 2017, it appeared over 600 times in the paper of record. In 2010, the word “racism” appeared in the Times around 150 times; in 2017, there were 2,500 Times pieces mentioning racism.

Why do I bring all this up today? Because Nikole Hannah-Jones, director of the 1619 Project, won the 2020 Pulitzer Prize for Commentary for her introductory essay to the project. That is, the most elite award in American journalism, awarded by journalists to other journalists, went to a discredited historical project that amounts to woke propaganda.

If that’s not amusing enough, look at this:

A HUGE congratulations to our partners @nhannahjones & the @NYTmag for winning a Pulitzer Prize (@PulitzerPrizes) in the Commentary category for the incredible #1619Project! We are honored to be your education partner, and we look forward to more to come. https://t.co/8IrJEuGD5K pic.twitter.com/yOviXlTS05

— Pulitzer Center (@pulitzercenter) May 4, 2020

The Pulitzer Center is a sponsor of The 1619 Project. Surprise! The project’s lead writer won the Pulitzer Prize. To be fair, Pulitzer judges are not employees of the Pulitzer Center, but are leading US journalists. Still, the mutual pud-pulling here is pretty phenomenal. There has not been a more ideologically driven major award since the Nobel Peace Prize committee gave Barack Obama the 2009 award for not being George W. Bush.

The importance of today’s Pulitzer win for this woke pseudo-history is that it signals how deep the woke-totalitarian instincts go within the established US media. It’s a sign that the elite of American media do not care about truth when journalism supports a woke ideological goal. Mathematician James Lindsay explains why The 1619 Project is such an important project in the social justice warrior campaign. Excerpt from his Social Justice Encyclopedia entry (emphases are in the original):

The importance of the point about the 1619 Project not being a serious attempt at historical understanding but a project within critical race Theory is beyond calculability. This is because the standard approach to challenging the 1619 Project’s bogus claims and attempt to roll itself out into our society and educational system is to challenge its historical legitimacy, and this is unfortunately a necessary part of engaging with it. The trouble is, because the 1619 Project neither is history nor claims to be history, this necessary activity is ultimately severely limited in its purposed utility.

The 1619 Project’s deeper goal is not so much to rewrite history as it is to introduce an alternative narrative about history, one that offers a different—and critical—reading of history. It is therefore a project aiming not to inform or educate but to induce a critical consciousness about race and racism (see also, critical theory). That is, the goal of the project is to make it impossible to think of the founding of the United States without including ideas of both slavery and institutional, cultural, and structural racism. In some sense, then, showing up with historical facts to the battleground of the 1619 Project is a bit like showing up to a gun fight with a knife.

Critical analyses often have this purpose at their core. Their objective is, more than anything, to generate polarizing debate around themselves, which increases their potency. The strategy is simple. A critical counterstory such as we have in the 1619 Project is forwarded with the express purpose of generating debate around its validity and the critiques it raises. The next step is to characterize that debate in terms of the power dynamics critical theories exist to attempt to disrupt and dismantle: oppressor versus oppressed. So the authoritative history is cast as an oppressive narrative that upholds systemic power and oppression, and the critical revisionist counterstory is cast as a self-defensive alternative that can liberate the relevant victims from those systems of power and the injustices they create. People are therefore forced to pick a side not between truth and falsity—which are irrelevant to the politics of the critical agenda (see also, reality)—but between siding with oppression or liberation from oppression.

The reason for this unfortunate state of affairs is that within Theory (see also, postmodernism, Foucauldian, and Social Justice), the very concept of truth is rejected, and everything is made out to be a matter of warring narratives (see also, racial knowledge). From the perspective of critical race Theory, not only is there is no objective telling of history; no such thing can exist, in principle, even in reasonable approximation. There is merely your history and my history, white history and black history, and so on, and our own cultural biases inform all such narratives and are embedded in all methodologies that create those “narratives” (see also, episteme, truth regime, knowledge(s), and ways of knowing).

You may have missed earlier this year a Politico column by historian Leslie Harris, an African-American woman, who says that when she was asked by the Times to fact-check the 1619 Project’s claims, she warned them that Nikole Hannah-Jones was flat-out wrong to claim that American Revolution was fought to preserve slavery — but they blew her off. Naturally, Harris says in her column that the greater villains are conservatives who complain about the 1619 Project. But it does go to show how Pulitzer Prize-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones wasn’t going to let truth get in the way of the story she wanted to tell — and neither were her editors. In March, the Times kinda sorta changed its tune on that disputed point in the face of historians’ criticism. Hannah-Jones won her Pulitzer anyway.

It’s fine for conservatives to snicker over this ideologically loaded award, but I’m telling you, as a professional journalist, this is a big deal within the circles of academics and opinion leaders. It’s the kind of thing that provides an imprimatur of establishment respect for left-wing, racially charged pseudo-history that openly declares its goal to be discrediting the founding myth of the United States. If America was born for the purpose of defending slavery, then it has been a fraud from the very beginning. Not, as most of us have been taught, a flawed experiment in liberty — one that we fought a Civil War, and then had a Civil Rights Movement, to amend, and that each generation must struggle to bring to greater perfection — but thoroughly corrupt from the inception.

This claim, which has been shown to be factually unsupportable, is now what the Pulitzer Prize committee — the cream of US journalism and academia — believes is worthy of journalism’s highest honor. And now this woke, America-hating lie will almost certainly be taught in even more American schools, because hey, it won a Pulitzer Prize. The elites are validating themselves and their own woke worldview.

This matters, folks. This matters infinitely more than a bunch of neckbeards carrying guns in the Michigan legislature. Those men look frightening, but they are essentially powerless. These people, the Pulitzer judges, and the Times fabulists, hold the power that matters most: the power to rewrite history in the minds of future generations, in this case to fit a left-wing racialist ideological narrative.

We do not need to be told lies for the sake of holding us together as a nation (and denying or downplaying the role of slavery and racism in US history is a form of that kind of lying), but at least one can see the rationale for it. But what is the rationale for telling lies that tear America apart along racial lines? When I think of the Pulitzer judges, and the American media elites who are training the young to hate the ties that bind this country together, this passage from Arendt’s Origins Of Totalitarianism comes to mind:

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.

Substitute “their country” for “civilization,” and there you have it.

UPDATE: You may recall that the Pulitzer Prize committee awarded the 1932 Pulitzer Prize to Walter Duranty of the Times for his fake reporting that covered up Stalin’s famine. 

The post Woke Totalitarianism Wins A Big One appeared first on The American Conservative.

Travel When You Are Homebound

My friend Danny Heitman has a lovely essay in today’s Wall Street Journal, about how we can comfort ourselves during this homebound period by dwelling with gratitude on journeys we have made in the past. He writes about how he and his wife last year traveled to England and France to celebrate their 25th wedding anniversary, and how much pleasure he has derived lately reflecting on that trip. Excerpt:

Now, a world of temporary homebodies can take a look in the rearview mirror, learning—or relearning—what past travels sometimes teach.

This kind of armchair reminiscence, however confining, has a distinct advantage over travel itself. In memory, we tend to edit out inconvenient details, letting the luster of what’s left truly shine. When I think about our anniversary trip, the cramped airline seats and a gnarly sinus infection on my return flight have mercifully faded into the background. They’re easily obscured by more pleasant recollections, like our drive into the storybook splendor of the Cotswolds, or an afternoon aimlessly browsing for bargains in the bookstores of Charing Cross Road.

In this way, having traveled is far superior to actual traveling, something wannabe tourists now under lockdown can take to heart. Most of us travel in search of a story, but the pleasure of shaping the narrative comes only in retrospect—usually, within some quiet place back home.

Read the whole thing. It’s behind a paywall, but I found that accessing it through Danny’s Twitter feed opened it up:

For homebound travelers, looking at the road in the rearview mirror has pleasures of its own https://t.co/S2eVfM2PIh via @WSJ

— Danny Heitman (@Danny_Heitman) May 4, 2020

In the spirit of Danny’s column, I’d like to ask you all to offer reflections on two things:

1. A trip you made that delights you to reflect on today, in this time of confinement; and

2. A trip that you would like to make once everything opens up again, and assuming that you have the money to do so. What I’m looking for here is a place that has, for whatever reason, become more precious to you since the lockdown started.

I’ll start.

Past Trip That Means A Lot To Me

I have been blessed to have traveled a lot in my life. It’s hard to believe that we’re coming up on the one-year anniversary of my family’s trip to England. That was a marvelous journey. It was the only time I’ve been overseas with my entire family, except for our October 2012 trip to Paris. We stayed a month in a rented apartment. Reflecting on that journey — it seems too trite to call it a vacation — has given me great pleasure these past eight years, and certainly does these days, with all five of us living together again, Matthew home from college.

Paris is my favorite city, and of course it was a joy to be there for the usual reasons one finds it joyful to be in Paris. Here’s something I wrote about my final walk through the Luxembourg Gardens:

Late yesterday afternoon, I was walking alone through the Luxembourg Gardens, down paths I had not yet explored. The fall wind was shaking the trees, and I was so moved by the beauty of all around me that I would stop every now and then to take it in, in all its sublimity. There were old men in ratty sweaters smoking cigars and playing pétanque. There was a young man pushing a frail old woman in a wheelchair down one of the lanes. Mothers and fathers walked hand in hand with their children, who would scamper away to point at sculptures. I came to the intersection of a curving path with a straight one, and saw a statue of the late Socialist leader Pierre Mendes France. He was a secular Jew, but on this day, the day of All Saints, someone left him a spray of red roses, with a ribbon that said, “In homage to Pierre Mendes France.” There is grandeur in that, I thought.

And I thought: God, I love this city.

I kept pulling out my iPhone to take photos, hoping to capture a sense of the deep, rich autumnal beauty on display in this elegant park — a source of wealth open to everyone in Paris — but the images were pale shadows of the real thing. Finally I thought, Put the camera down. You can’t capture these moments. They are passing through your hands. Everything passes. Just be here, and be thankful.

We have so many wonderful memories of being together as a family in the city, with me showing my kids — at the time, they were thirteen, eight, and six — Paris at a slow pace. Because we stayed there for a month, we had the time to take it easy. My favorite memories are of the walks we would take through the Luxembourg Gardens, but also small things, like going with one of the kids every morning to buy hot fresh baguettes at the bakery around the corner. Like the shot above, which was when Julie and I took our tea-crazy six-year-old Nora to the tea-seller Mariage Frères to pick out some tea to take home. (I never post photos of my kids, but this was eight years ago, and they look very different now, so I’ll make an exception.) Things like this view from our apartment window of the next-door church, whose bells bookended our days (that’s the back of my little girl’s head):

We would have had fun no matter where we were, but because Paris is so personal to me, introducing the city to my children, and sharing it with them, was so, so satisfying, in a way that no other city could have been. In fact, as I was sorting through the photos on my laptop, looking for images that didn’t feature the faces of the kids, Nora sat by me on the couch, and we looked at pictures and video clips, and reminisced. Here is a screengrab from a low-resolution video I took in our flat, of her taking her first bite of macaron (in the form of a giant one from Maison Kayser), and her brother Lucas, then eight, photobombing her; she punched him.

Those little moments are the ones that remain in my mind, and give me such comfort and joy. Last year’s trip to England was lovely, but to me, London is not Paris, and besides, the kids are older now. Their age made things more enjoyable in some respects, e.g., they could better appreciate historic sites. But there’s just no substitute for a child’s wonder. Their mother and I had a whole month to luxuriate in their adventure in the wonderland that is Paris. Funny, but I don’t recall much the hard times we had — the sibling squabbling, and such — though they were definitely a thing. Time has activated poetic memory, and edited out all the unhappy moments. We are left with October in Paris, en famille, a time that will never be again, because they are no longer children.

Trip I Would Like To Take When This is Over

The most amazing journey I’ve ever taken personally was to Jerusalem and the Holy Land. I went in the year 2000, sent by my newspaper, the New York Post, to cover Pope John Paul II’s historic pilgrimage. As a Christian, it is hard to express how strange, even miraculous, it feels to walk and to stand in the places you have heard about and read about your entire life, from the earliest days of Sunday school. Walking the road to Bethlehem, I looked out over the fields, and imagined shepherds tending their flocks by night when an angel appeared to them to announce the birth of the Christ child. Those may have been the very fields! And here is Gethsemane; that ancient olive tree was growing here when Jesus and his disciples rested here on the night Jesus was seized by the Romans. That is the spot where Herod’s temple once stood, and under the roof of this church are the sites where Jesus was crucified, buried, and rose from the dead.

And on and on. There is literally no place like it for people whose lives and imaginations have been shaped by the world of the Bible. It makes your faith come alive like nothing else. It’s a long way to go, and not cheap to get there, but when the day comes when we can all travel again with ease, I hope to have saved the money to be able to take my wife and children there — to the Holy Land, the place where arose the stories that gave us life. I remember coming home from Jerusalem and telling my wife that one day, I would love to go back with her and our kids (we only had one then, and he was a baby). Well, that was 20 years ago. If we ever have the resources to make that pilgrimage as a family, I will make it happen. It’s too important to put off. I see that now. As Christians, we believe that God became a man, a Jew of this land, descended from the Jewish people, a pilgrim in these places, and no other. The rocks and hills and valleys of the Holy Land are sacred, but you don’t really understand what that means until you go there and touch them with your own hands and feet, and meet the people who are living there today, Arabs and Jews alike.

So, how about you? Recall a journey you once took, and why those memories matter to you today, and then talk about a journey you want to take, and explain why.

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Russian Bishop’s Covid-19 Advice

Bishop Pitirim (Tvorogov) of the Russian Orthodox Church was hospitalized with Covid-19, and has now recovered. He offered his thoughts about how to react to this pandemic. He is resident at the famous Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra (abbey), where lots of priests and monks fell ill with coronavirus. He explains how it happened:

Priests have placed and are placing themselves at great risk by hearing confessions. At greatest risk are those who don’t avoid the people, those who humbly offer themselves as a sacrifice to the sickness in feeble hopes that the sick parishioners will stay home. But their hopes were not justified.

Great Monday. [Monday of Holy Week] Morning. The gates of the Holy Trinity-St. Sergius Lavra are closed. Standing before them is an angry crowd, demanding that the Lavra be opened. The protesters behave themselves very aggressively, cursing and swearing. Vladyka Paramon opens the Lavra for all of Holy Week and Pascha.

The pestilence began on Great Friday. Our best clergymen got sick, some seriously. Vladyka Paramon [the abbot of the Lavra] also got sick; I got sick, as well as the Lavra elders and one of ours in the Academy. On Great Friday, appropriately, we were all nailed to the cross. And below the cross, also appropriately, was a crowd demanding a miracle. The miracle didn’t happen.

We have been criticized for abandoning the people. This is not true. We could only answer in one way—by getting sick ourselves, so that seeing our suffering, people would have pity on those who are still healthy; on their bishops, priests, and cantors.

Can you imagine the kinds of Christians who stand before the gates of a monastery closed during a pandemic, cursing the monks for not letting them in to give them what they consider to be rightfully theirs? Yes, I can — because we have seen behavior in a similar spirit among Christians in America.

Bishop Pitirim goes on:

We have to have understanding, patience, and humility. Well, and most importantly, repentance. We, my friends, have become very spoiled lately; we have forgotten about the living God, replacing Him with frequent Communion, feasts and pleasant fasts, rites, cross processions, and pilgrimages. This is all of course very good, but what is the aim? The aim is our salvation. So now the Lord has turned us back to that one and only aim toward which we should be striving.

Read the whole thing. 

That last paragraph is exceptional. In it, the bishop reminds us that all the things that appear to be the substance of our religious life are in fact nothing but signs pointing us to salvation, which for Orthodox Christians means theosis — to encounter the living God, to become filled with the Holy Spirit, and to be transformed. What Bishop Pitirim is saying is that the extraordinary challenge before Christians now is continuing on that path of conversion and transformation, as is our calling, without the usual aids to our pilgrimage. This is a test of our faith. 

 This experience has clarified for me a prime reason for the Benedict Option. When I was working on the book, and mentioned the idea to Father Cassian Folsom, who was then the prior of the Norcia monastery, he told me that families who don’t do some version of the Ben Op won’t make it through what is coming. I assumed that he was talking about the rising tide of secularism, and maybe he was. But now, with this virus, I see that the prior’s warning certainly applies here. If you haven’t internalized Christianity as a way of life, one that you carry with you in your heart even when you are not permitted to live the normal Christian life for a time, you won’t make it. This miserable time is a call to deeper conversion.

Recently an editor at the Wall Street Journal invited me to contribute to a symposium in which people contribute 600-word speeches that they would give to college graduates this year, in the pandemic. The paper published them over the weekend. They’re all behind a paywall; here’s my contribution, which calls on graduates to study the lives and examples of the Christian heroes who stood up to communism, and who sacrificed greatly for the true and the good. Excerpt:

A young man once confided to a religious elder his anxiety over the hard times in which he was living. This is natural, said the elder, but such things are beyond our control: “All we have to decide is what to do with the time that is given us.”

In fact, the anxious youngster was no man, but a hobbit, Frodo Baggins; the religious elder was the wizard Gandalf, to whom Frodo disclosed his fear on the road to the evil realm of Mordor. These heroes of J.R.R. Tolkien’s “The Lord of the Rings” saga came up in a conversation I had two years ago in Prague with Kamila Bendova, a key figure among Czech anticommunist dissidents.

Despite constant pressure from the secret police, Ms. Bendova and her late husband Vaclav Benda had raised their children under totalitarianism, teaching them all to be faithful Catholics. How had they done it? She talked about the many books she read to the kids. Tolkien was a particular treasure. Why Tolkien? I asked. “Because we knew that Mordor was real,” she replied.

The Mordor into which you all are now graduating has no doomed mountains or political prisons, no orcs or secret police. But thanks to the pandemic, it is still a frightening place. You did not ask to live in these times—but here you are. What to do?

The courage and vision of ordinary people who faced down Soviet communism can light the way forward through the darkness. Traveling last year in countries once under the Soviet yoke, I met many people who lived in defiance of their dark age. None of these heroes expected communism to collapse in their lifetime. They resisted in part because their Christian faith taught them to receive suffering as an opportunity to demonstrate love for God and others.

More:

Your mission is not their mission, exactly. But the Class of 2020, believers and nonbelievers alike, does have a mission. It is to be a source of light in a world suddenly shrouded by the pandemic’s darkness, a source of warmth in a world struck cold by the hand of fear. So ask yourself a radical question called forth by these Christian dissidents’ labors of love: What if the trying times you have been given are not a curse but a blessing—indeed, a severe mercy?

I’m convinced that the only way we ordinary, everyday Christians are going to get through this coronavirus trial is if we receive it as a severe mercy. Maybe our fear, and even our anger over the absence of services, is a diagnosis that reveals sickness in our souls. In my own case, I have had to face how dependent I had become on the Sunday liturgy to carry my spiritual life. It’s a tricky thing, because it’s a good thing to make the liturgy the center of one’s life, spiritual and otherwise. But as Bishop Pitirim points out, the liturgy (and all the rest) are not the living God; all these things are means of leading us to the lifelong and life-changing encounter with Him: theosis, or, to use a term more familiar in the West, sanctification. The point of our lives on this earth for Christians is to die to ourselves so that we can live eternally in Christ. Eternal life is not something that begins after we die; it starts now, when we start to die to ourselves. The coronavirus crisis, as Bishop Pitirim avers, ought to be regarded by Christians as an extraordinary opportunity to die to ourselves. They are a severe mercy.

I know people in various churches — Orthodox and Catholic, in particular — are mad at the clergy for not doing enough to support the religious life of the laity during this awful time. They may have a point, in particular cases (e.g., closing church buildings to private prayer), but on the whole, I strongly believe that we in the laity should show a lot of mercy to religious leaders now. They are having to deal with something real and terrible that nobody has ever had to deal with in living memory. My wife is on the parish council at our mission church, and I know from the things she has told me that the Orthodox bishops in our jurisdiction are trying to figure out how to open up safely. She was reading to me from one of the most recent documents sent down to the parishes by our bishop. I can’t quote from it, because it’s not public, but nobody can read that thing and fairly accuse our bishop of being indifferent to the needs of the faithful. It’s so clear to me that he and the others who have worked on that plan have been extraordinarily considerate of spiritual needs as well as health considerations.

I imagine something similar is happening in church leadership circles everywhere. We lay Christians cannot allow ourselves to be like that insolent Holy Week crowd, standing outside the gates of the monastery, cursing and demanding their “rights.” When we behave that way, we condemn ourselves. It is a difficult point to consider, but it’s true: the Divine Liturgy is the most precious gift we have, but if our attachment to the liturgy has become a stumbling block to theosis, then we must repent.

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Mask Truthers

Darel Paul correctly calls this, from Stillwater, Oklahoma, an example of right-wing “folk libertarianism”:

An emergency declaration that took effect at midnight Friday has been amended after businesses reported their employees were being threatened with physical harm by members of the public who didn’t want to wear face coverings.

Stillwater Mayor Will Joyce released the amended emergency proclamation just 16 hours after it was enacted, in response to concerns voiced by residents and the proprietors of businesses, according to a City of Stillwater release.

The changes make the wearing of face coverings in retail establishments optional rather than mandatory for customers, although it is still strongly recommended, employees are still required to wear them and the proclamation is extended to 11:59 p.m. May 31.

The emergency proclamation can be amended further as becomes necessary.

City Manager Norman McNickle issued a statement about the change and the controversy surrounding mandatory face coverings:

“In the short time beginning on May 1, 2020, that face coverings have been required for entry into stores/restaurants, store employees have been threatened with physical violence and showered with verbal abuse. In addition, there has been one threat of violence using a firearm. This has occurred in three short hours and in the face of clear medical evidence that face coverings helps contain the spread of COVID-19.

“Many of those with objections cite the mistaken belief the requirement is unconstitutional, and under their theory, one cannot be forced to wear a mask. No law or court supports this view. In fact, a recent Federal lawsuit against Guthrie’s face covering order was fully dismissed by the United States District Court for the Western District of Oklahoma.”

These thugs have been threatening store employees and owners with violence — for expecting customers to abide by public health guidelines that are no more than an inconvenience, and that lessen the chance that a deadly virus will infect them and/or spread through them.

Idiots. Selfish idiots. They are given the opportunity to ease back into normal life, by shopping, but they’re not going to do the minimum necessary to help the community be safer. So now business owners and other shoppers are going to be more at risk from the virus, because Rights. Man, that ticks me off. Selfish creeps.

But you know what? They’re getting this from Rush Limbaugh and some other prominent conservative talk show hosts:

Talk radio host Rush Limbaugh, the recent recipient of a Presidential Medal of Freedom from Donald Trump, was an early mask paranoiac. On April 20, he promoted the idea, later picked up by Ingraham, that masks are totems of control.

“It is clear that the mask is a symbol of fear, and when you see various people suggesting that we may now have masks as part of our public lives for the rest of our lives?” Limbaugh said. “Uh, why?”

For some conservatives, refusing to wear a mask has become just the latest way to thumb their noses at social distancing mandates. Talk radio host Dennis Prager said in a video that he refused to don one—and compared himself to Rosa Parks or dissident Germans in the Nazi era for his defiance.

Mask truthers are a thing, it turns out. I do not and cannot understand this idea on the Right that the coronavirus is a social construct that the Left is using to oppress us. How, exactly, does this differ from the Social Justice Warrior belief that saying a penis person is a man is oppressive? Man parts, lady parts, coronaviruses — they’re all political fictions.

A friend e-mailed this morning and said the latest WHO guidelines recommend against using masks for most people. This is so frustrating! In late February, the US Surgeon General said “no masks.” Then, a month later, the CDC said, “Yes masks.” What now? In my family, we are following the mask guidelines in public, but also using hand sanitizer, and limiting our excursions outside the house. It makes sense to us that masks may offer some protection. We don’t like wearing them, but it’s merely an inconvenience, and worth doing to protect ourselves and the supermarket check-out ladies, and the other workers we come in contact with. If it turns out that masks aren’t worth it, what have we lost by wearing them?

Note well, though, that the mask truthers aren’t refusing to wear masks because they don’t believe they help. That might or might not be true, but it’s a defensible position. They’re refusing to wear masks because they see them as a symbol of social control.

This is not the kind of conservatism I signed up for. In fact, one reason I consider myself a conservative is because, according to Russell Kirk, conservatism proper rejects ideological thinking. He wrote:

Ideology, in short, is a political formula that promises mankind an earthly paradise; but in cruel fact what ideology has created is a series of terrestrial hells. I set down below some of the vices of ideology.

Ideology is inverted religion, denying the Christian doctrine of salvation through grace in death, and substituting collective salvation here on earth through violent revolution. Ideology inherits the fanaticism that sometimes has afflicted religious faith, and applies that intolerant belief to concerns secular.
Ideology makes political compromise impossible: the ideologue will accept no deviation from the Absolute Truth of his secular revelation. This narrow vision brings about civil war, extirpation of “reactionaries”, and the destruction of beneficial functioning social institutions. …

Now I contrast with those three failings certain principles of the politics of prudence.

As I put it earlier, ideology is inverted religion. But the prudential politician knows that “Utopia” means “Nowhere”; that we cannot march to an earthly Zion; that human nature and human institutions are imperfectible; that aggressive “righteousness” in politics ends in slaughter. True religion is a discipline for the soul, not for the state.

Ideology makes political compromise impossible, I pointed out. The prudential politician, au contraire, is well aware that the primary purpose of the state is to keep the peace. This can be achieved only by maintaining a tolerable balance among great interests in society. Parties, interests, and social classes and groups must arrive at compromises, if bowie-knives are to be kept from throats.

Hannah Arendt, talking about the kinds of men that brought totalitarianism to Russia and Germany (here she speaks of writers and intellectuals):

To them, violence, power, cruelty, were the supreme capacities of men who had definitely lost their place in the universe and were much too proud to long for a power theory that would safely bring them back and reintegrate them into the world. They were satisfied with blind partisanship in anything that respectable society had banned, regardless of theory or content…

Arendt goes on:

The mob really believed that truth was whatever respectable society had hypocritically passed over, or covered up with corruption.

She says that one characteristic of modern mass man is that he will believe anything that suits his own imagination. “What convinces masses are not facts, and not even invented facts, but only the consistency of the system of which they are presumably part. … Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency.”

A society is pre-totalitarian when its people will only accept as “truth” what confirms what they prefer to believe. Arendt says that movements that turn totalitarian are those that manage to protect the frightened and uprooted masses from “the never-ending shocks which real life and real experiences deal to human beings and their expectations.” I have paid a lot of attention to the way this has been working on the political and cultural left. I think this has been the right thing to do, mostly because the left controls most of the institutions in this country. The media is so deep inside a progressive epistemic bubble that it doesn’t see how it functions to present the world in a way that is consistent with its ideological worldview. This is a fact. No matter how crazy the right behaves, this remains true.

I write about this so often that I trust I don’t have to elaborate on it in this blog post.

However, I don’t want to keep one bunch of ideologues out of political power, only to empower another set.

It’s hard to deny that many conservatives have reacted to Covid-19 more out of ideology than fact. That’s exactly what these Stillwater people have done: opposing wearing masks on ideological principle. It’s what Limbaugh is encouraging people to do. Heterodox Academy, the non-partisan academic group, studied the reactions of both liberals and conservatives. One puzzle they tried to sort out: conservatives are generally more sensitive than liberals to threats. But Covid is flipping that rule. Why? These social scientists did three studies:

The results were striking.  We found little evidence that different experiences with COVID-19 account for liberals’ and conservatives’ different views of the pandemic.  Instead, participants’ desired political outcomes more consistently accounted for ideological differences in disease threat perception. The figure below reports the indirect effects for both political beliefs and experiences across our three studies. These indirect effects are measurements of the degree to which the relationship between political ideology and perceived COVID-19 threat is accounted for by (a) desired political outcomes related to COVID-19 or (b) participants’ exposure to or experiences with the effects of the disease. As clearly indicated, it is participants’ political desires – and not their level of experience or exposure – that account for the different threats liberals and conservatives assign to COVID-19.

What kinds of ideological goals were most important in explaining conservatives’ relative apathy toward COVID-19?  Out of six, the strongest effects emerged for goals that involved government-imposed social distancing rules.  Conservatives oppose the government telling them when they can or cannot leave their homes; liberals support such policies.  Because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that conservatives dislike, conservatives appear motivated to downplay the severity.  Or conversely, because a threatening disease might validate government interventions that liberals do like, liberals seem motivated to magnify the threat.  Note that our results cannot say which of these is happening in greater measure.

Thus, it is these ideological lenses – and not direct experiences – that appear to explain better liberals’ and conservatives’ different views of the pandemic.  In a sense, the proverbial cart may be driving the proverbial horse: rather than the actual threat of the disease influencing political policy preferences, political policy preferences are influencing perceptions of disease threat.

Look at this part, though:

We found that the general effect of ideology on perceived COVID-19 threat significantly decreased at higher levels of experience with COVID-19.  Conservatives view the disease as less threatening than liberals, but this difference shrinks among participants who have been more impacted by the disease.  Thus, although a lack of experience did not account for conservatives’ lower threat perceptions, the more experience they had, the less their own ideological goals mattered.

Read the whole thing. Let me repeat: the more actual experience conservatives have with Covid-19, the more likely they are to take it seriously as a threat. Until then, though, most conservatives regard the virus with ideological eyes. Remember your Arendt: “Totalitarian propaganda thrives on this escape from reality into fiction, from coincidence into consistency.” Thus the Mask Truthers of right-wing talk media.

Hear me: I am not talking about people who argue that we have to have a compromise of some sort on the lockdown rules because they’re being economically ruined. That is a reasonable demand. We cannot keep going with the economy frozen like this. Letting people go out and shop and open businesses and do work while wearing masks seems like a commonsense compromise to me on the way to returning to something like normal (which we’re not going to have anyway until there’s a vaccine, or we have herd immunity, the latter of which is at least two years away). If it doesn’t work, well, we can try something new. But for these right-wing ideologues, it’s their way or the highway. Are they not going to be satisfied until people in rural America start dying of Covid-19? It’s crazy.

I was texting this morning about this stuff with a conservative Christian friend, who said this is what it looks like to him:

The Democrats are nasty as hell and hate people like us. The Republicans are absolutely batshit crazy. Can’t take a risk on the latter. Dems will make life very hard for Christians. GOP may well destroy the entire country.

I’ll finish with a letter from a Muslim reader with whom I have corresponded in the past. He wrote me about my “Weimar America and the Michigan Mob” post:

I’ve been thinking about what you wrote about the Michigan armed protesters, in particular, this line:

“That’s where the protesters lose me. They lose me completely. No lawmaker — and no professor, and no student, and no citizen of this democracy — should be afraid for their lives because of violent political actors, or from political actors that want people to think they are violent.”

It could be that the protesters are merely angry nuts looking for any excuse to sling a gun in a liberal’s face. It could be that they are such extremist libertarian ideologues that they view any restrictions on their beloved personal freedoms and right to consume a provocation to war. It’s a possibility, sure. Maybe even a probability.

But can you also see the possibility that some of these gunslingers have not had a paycheck for a month? That they don’t know when- or if- they will be able to go back to their jobs again?

I will be making it through this pandemic economically unscathed, alhamdulilah [praise God]. So too will the Governor of Michigan, and the state representatives. And the infanticide-loving Klanner governor of Virginia, who initially proclaimed it would take 2 years for them to fully reopen. As you can imagine from a guy who wants a khalifah [caliphate], I’m not a fan of secular liberal democracy. But one of the things I’ve always really admired about America is its smoothness and simplicity of bureaucracy. You don’t have to bribe anyone to get a driver’s license, or have your passport renewed, the system, annoying as it may be, just works.

But here’s the thing: the system doesn’t work in America because the people are better than in, say, Sudan. The low-level pencil-pushers in the Muslim world who take bribes and do other immoral things aren’t bad people, I know this from experience. They believe in God and have families like the rest of us. They are simply willing to do whatever it takes to keep food on the table. America doesn’t have this problem because it’s America.

But what do you think is going to happen when the dollar gets devalued to nothing? When unemployment hits 30, 40%? I really like what you said a couple days ago, America simply does not have the social capital to keep it together. “Should” lawmakers have to fear for their lives because of some disaffected citizen? It’s an irrelevant question. You may as well be asking whether heavy objects “should” fall when you drop them. If you are going to compare it to the Weimar Republic, compare it not to disenchanted intellectuals and the brutes they spawned, but to those ordinary people who were willing to do anything, anything at all, to stave off economic ruin.

This reader makes a good point. What I don’t get is why so many conservatives won’t even put on a mask as a measure that allows us to get the country moving again, because it violates their ideology. Russell Kirk called ideology “inverted religion,” and said that it “makes political compromise impossible.” I get it: for these right-wing ideologues, wearing a mask is like asking early Christians to burn a pinch of incense to Caesar.

What kind of bizarre deity is it that makes it blasphemous to put on a face mask amid a deadly pandemic, because it’s a symbol of government control? It’s a right-wing version of the left-wing deity who instantiates a metaphysics enabling its devotees to proclaim penises on a self-proclaimed woman to be a fleshy form of fiction, and anyone who denies that is an enemy of the people.

These kinds of conservatives believe that truth is whatever owns the libs. We are such a screwed-up country. I believe that we are closer to totalitarianism than at any time in our history. I still believe the greater threat comes from the left, for reasons I have made clear on this blog over the past couple of years, and that I will make more explicit in my forthcoming book. But this virus is showing that the conditions exist for some form of it to emerge from the right. I wish that weren’t true, but just look.

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Two More Years Of Covidtide

Y’all see this exciting news tonight?:

The coronavirus pandemic is likely to last as long as two years and won’t be controlled until about two-thirds of the world’s population is immune, a group of experts said in a report.

Because of its ability to spread from people who don’t appear to be ill, the virus may be harder to control than influenza, the cause of most pandemics in recent history, according to the report from the Center for Infectious Disease Research and Policy at the University of Minnesota. People may actually be at their most infectious before symptoms appear, according to the report.

After locking down billions of people around the world to minimize its spread through countries, governments are now cautiously allowing businesses and public places to reopen. Yet the coronavirus pandemic is likely to continue in waves that could last beyond 2022, the authors said.

“Risk communication messaging from government officials should incorporate the concept that this pandemic will not be over soon,” they said, “and that people need to be prepared for possible periodic resurgences of disease over the next two years.”

Check out this amazing piece in WIRED about the early history of Covid-19 in China, as pieced together from news and social media posts that the Chinese government later scrubbed from the country’s Internet, but captured by a reporter who screenshot them before they could be vanished. Excerpts:

Yue thought that she had become desensitized, but this post made her fists clench: It was written by Xiao Hui, a journalist friend of hers who was reporting on the ground for Caixin, a prominent Chinese news outlet. Yue trusted her.

She read on. “On January 22, on my second day reporting in Wuhan, I knew this was China’s Chernobyl,” Xiao Hui wrote. “These days I rarely pick up phone calls from outside of Wuhan or chat with friends and family, because nothing can express what I have seen here.”

Unable to contain her anger, Yue took a screenshot of Xiao’s post and immediately posted it on her WeChat Moments. “Look what is happening in Wuhan!” she wrote. Then she finally drifted off.

That post disappeared, and Xiao Hui had her access to WeChat cut off for spreading rumors. More:

It’s not hard to see how these censored posts contradicted the state’s preferred narrative. Judging from these vanished accounts, the regime’s coverup of the initial outbreak certainly did not help buy the world time, but instead apparently incubated what some have described as a humanitarian disaster in Wuhan and Hubei Province, which in turn may have set the stage for the global spread of the virus. And the state’s apparent reluctance to show scenes of mass suffering and disorder cruelly starved Chinese citizens of vital information when it mattered most.

Read it all. It’s incredible, the details. All gone down the memory hole in China.

Do you remember Wyoming Doc saying in this space on February 22 what his mother in law back in China was saying about what was happening there in her agricultural region?:

This city is in the middle of a vast agricultural area. Hogs, cows and chickens are a staple of their economy. My mother-in-law has told us that the “death stench” has permeated her city the past week or so and getting worse daily. She cannot even open her windows. Why? No one is going to work – and no one is taking care of the livestock. No shipments of grain are coming in for the animals — and throughout the land the animals are starving in the pastures. The bodies by the hundreds of thousands are just laying in the sun and rotting. All this while the industrialized part of China is beginning to have severe food shortages.

Think about that with the US meat supply facing disruption because too many workers are getting sick or afraid that they are.

In related Covid news, here is a link to the Eastern Virginia Medical School Covid-19 Protocol. Wyoming Doc says about it:

It is fairly easy to read, although there is some medical jargon.

It is pointing out the use of several things that have officially been poopood by the CDC and the NIH.  Namely never using steroids.  The entire issue with ventilation and how it is actually harming patients – and the actual use of some of the things the media has lambasted Trump about – namely PLAQUENIL.

Their purported success rate is startling. I would like to see this in a real study — this is some kind of protocol.

Pages 7,8,9,10 of this thing are unprecedented in all my years of medicine: a literal refutation and takedown of the “official narrative” and the experts.

I am amazed – I am putting this out on Facebook to get comments from my medical friends – I just wanted to share this with you. This is exactly what I am talking about medical debate. These guys are going against the authorities – putting their very necks out there. I am looking forward to seeing how this transpires over the next few days.  These are not 2 ER docs in a break room — this is real academic medicine at work.

Wyoming Doc quotes from the Eastern Virginia Med School document: The emphases below are his:

“The above pathologies are not novel, although the combined severity in COVID-19 disease is considerable. Our long-standing and more recent experiences show consistently successful treatment if traditional therapeutic principles of early and aggressive intervention is achieved, before the onset of advanced organ failure. It is our collective opinion that the historically high levels of morbidity and mortality from COVID-19 is due to a single factor: the widespread and inappropriate reluctance amongst intensivists to employ anti-inflammatory and anticoagulant treatments, including corticosteroid therapy early in the course of a patient’s hospitalization. It is essential to recognize that it is not the virus that is killing the patient, rather it is the patient’s overactive immune system. The flames of the “cytokine fire” are out of control and need to be extinguished. Providing supportive care (with ventilators that themselves stoke the fire) and waiting for the cytokine fire to burn itself out simply does not work… this approach has FAILED and has led to the death of tens of thousands of patients.

The systematic failure of critical care systems to adopt corticosteroid therapy resulted from the published recommendations against corticosteroids use by the World Health Organization (WHO), the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), and the American Thoracic Society (ATS) amongst others.  A very recent publication by the Society of Critical Care Medicine and authored one of the members of our group (UM), identified the errors made by these organizations in their analyses of corticosteroid studies based on the findings of the SARS and H1N1 pandemics. Their erroneous recommendation to avoid corticosteroids in the treatment of COVID-19 has led to the development of myriad organ failures which have overwhelmed critical care systems across the world.

Wyoming Doc calls this “the most important line”:

Our treatment protocol targeting these key pathologies has achieved near uniform success, if begun within 6 hours of a COVID19 patient presenting with shortness of breath or needing ≥ 4L/min of oxygen. If such early initiation of treatment could be systematically achieved, the need for mechanical ventilators and ICU beds will decrease dramatically.

Again, the importance of this, according to Wyoming Doc (and a second doc with whom I checked, who agrees with him), is that the doctors at this medical school are violating what the authorities tell them to do — and they are saving lives! 

 

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Weimar America & The Michigan Mob

Look at this:

Directly above me, men with rifles yelling at us. Some of my colleagues who own bullet proof vests are wearing them. I have never appreciated our Sergeants-at-Arms more than today. #mileg pic.twitter.com/voOZpPYWOs

— Senator Dayna Polehanki (@SenPolehanki) April 30, 2020

This is horrifying. I believe in the Second Amendment, and I think gun owners are often unfairly maligned by liberals, but this should never, ever have happened. These guys look like antifa. How on earth are legislators supposed to work with armed men standing over them like that? What if they had been members of the Black Panther Party, which did exactly this in California in the 1960s? — what would conservatives be saying today? Liberals are complaining about this, and they’re right to complain.

I am perfectly fine with angry citizens protesting. It’s taking weapons into a legislative chamber that is so alarming. As the Michigan state police have pointed out, that is legal in Michigan. It shouldn’t be, in my view, and even if it’s legal, it looks horrible. The way people protest says a lot about their cause. I have zero interest in paying attention to college kids who occupy the college president’s office. I have zero interest in taking antifa seriously, except as threats to civil order. And I have to say that any sympathy I had for these Michigan protesters went out the door when I saw that image of them on the balcony with guns. This is not the way we conduct legislative business in a democracy. A crowd becomes a mob when it behaves thuggishly. The fact that it is a left-wing mob or a right-wing mob does not matter: a mob is a mob is a mob.

I mentioned in an earlier post that I’ve been reading the critic Clive James’s book Cultural Amnesia, a collection of profiles of key 20th century figures. His essay about Hitler speaks to this point; I found a version of it in Slate. James writes, about how few people today remember how Hitler came to power, writes: “One of the drawbacks of liberal democracy is thus revealed: Included among its freedoms is the freedom to forget what once threatened its existence.” One of these factors was the efforts of right-wing German intellectuals, like Ernst Jünger, who paved the way for Hitler. They were “revolutionary conservatives” who believed that liberalism was decadent. James says that they realized only too late that Hitler didn’t care for their intellectual subtleties, except insofar as he could use them as a springboard to power.

It may seem unfair to condemn intellectuals who conspire to undermine vulgar democracy in favor of a refined dream for failing to foresee the subsequent nightmare. And Moeller was only one among many. But there were too many: That was the point. Too many ­well-­read men combined to prepare the way for a pitiless hoodlum who despised them, and they even came to value him for being a hoodlum: for lacking their scruples, for being a drum of nature. Among the revolutionary conservative intellectuals, Jünger is the real tragic figure. Unlike Moeller, Jünger was condemned to live. He saw the light, but too late. In his notebooks he gradually de-emphasized his call for a conservative revolution led by men who had been “transformed in their being” by the experience of World War I. In 1943, in Paris, he was told the news about the extermination camps. He finally reached the conclusion that he had been staving off since the collapse of the Weimar Republic he had helped to undermine: One of the men whose being had been transformed by their experience of the Great War was Adolf Hitler. The quality Jünger valued most had turned out to be the only one he shared with the man he most despised.

Turn off your Godwin detectors: I’m not saying that the Balcony Men are Nazis. What I am saying, though, is that citizens bearing guns inside the halls of a legislature, with the intention of influencing debate, is a line that should not be crossed in a civilized democracy. I don’t care how just their cause may be. What they did may be legal, but the symbolic display works to undermine law and order. How? By the strong implication that if lawmakers don’t do what they, the protesters, demand, there will be gun violence.

I am a gun owner. I was raised in a gun-owning household. My late father, like most of the men of his generation in our rural Southern community, taught their sons and daughters to treat guns with immense respect. Not to fetishize them, but to respect them. My father was a brave man, but I cannot imagine him going into the state legislature with a rifle slung around his shoulder. I cannot imagine him respecting the kind of men who act that way.

One of the reasons I have been willing to vote conservative, despite the rottenness of Donald Trump, is precisely because I see in the activist left, and the liberals who lack the courage to stand up to them, a direct threat to the rights of any and all who oppose the left. The many campus protests, in which college administrators over and over surrendered to the mob, have carried with them enormous symbolic weight. The rules of liberal democracy mean nothing to these mobs, who are so infatuated with their sense of righteousness that they deploy force to get what they want. And it works. As far as I can tell, the Democratic Party is the means by which the activist left will turn the whole country into a college campus. If you don’t believe that, spend some time looking into what Joe Biden and Barack Obama did with Title IX. Now think about Biden in power.

However.

When I see a bunch of angry white guys slinging rifles in the balcony of a state legislature, I see the right-wing version of what I despise about the left and its mobs. The left (well, the non-antifa left) hasn’t carried deadly weapons, but they haven’t felt they’ve had to. They have been able to use a more socially acceptable kind of force to achieve their objectives. I do not fight against left-wing mobocracy only to empower right-wing mobocracy. I did not just spend a year studying and writing a book about how left-wing totalitarianism comes into power, only to ignore similar behavior on the right.

A big difference is that left-wing mobs are privileged people whose mob antics effectively change the policies and discourse within powerful American institutions. The Michigan mob are notable for their relative lack of cultural power. That does not make what they’re doing right. Judging actions like this by the cultural influence of the actors is what the left does, and how they excuse the inexcusable when it is done by “vulnerable minorities” and their allies.

Just yesterday, I published a letter from a center-left reader who expressed his frustration that his liberal friends hate white working class people, and made a much bigger to-do over protesters carrying guns at a Pennsylvania rally than was reasonable, given how few gun-carriers there were. I stand by that letter, and agree with the writer. However, these Michigan protesters brought guns into the state legislature, and compelled some lawmakers to (reasonably!) wear bulletproof vests as they went about their business.

That’s where the protesters lose me. They lose me completely. No lawmaker — and no professor, and no student, and no citizen of this democracy — should be afraid for their lives because of violent political actors, or from political actors that want people to think they are violent. This kind of thing will mean the end of democracy, whether it comes from the left or the right.

And look who has spent the last two weeks encouraging it:

LIBERATE MICHIGAN!

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) April 17, 2020

It’s a hell of a thing, Weimar America.

The post Weimar America & The Michigan Mob appeared first on The American Conservative.

Morality, Media, & Tara Reade

Ben Smith, the media critic for The New York Times, calls out the mainstream news media for turning up its collective nose at Joe Biden accuser Tara Reade. Excerpts:

The mainstream American media in 1999, for reasons that are hard to explain or excuse today, got cold feet on a credible allegation of rape against the president. And after NBC News sat for weeks on an exclusive interview, Ms. Broaddrick went to the only people who would listen to her, Mr. Clinton’s partisan enemies at The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page. That move helped turn her straightforward allegation into a weaponized political story. And while Americans watching at home could make up their own minds about Ms. Broaddrick’s credibility, they were left with new reasons to shake their heads at the media.

The same thing is about to happen again. A former Senate aide for Joseph R. Biden Jr., Tara Reade, has accused the presumptive Democratic presidential nominee of sexually assaulting her in 1993. Reporters have found other accounts that indicate that she has been telling her version of events for a long time. There are, as with Ms. Broaddrick, reasons to doubt her story; there aren’t good reasons not to hear her out. As The Times’s executive editor, Dean Baquet, told me in an interview two weeks ago, Ms. Reade has “standing.”

And yet, Ms. Reade told me Wednesday that the only offers she’s had to appear on television have come from Fox News, including a call from the prime time host Sean Hannity. She has so far turned them down.

Smith makes it clear that he thinks that most in the media are guilty of a double standard here. He’s right. Biden finally went on national TV — on Morning Joe — to answer these allegations, in an interview with Mika Brzezinski. Whole thing here:

Biden denies the charge, but said he won’t open up his archives at the University of Delaware for inspection. The reason he was asked is that because Reade was working for Biden at the time of the alleged assault, there might be in the Biden papers a record of her allegation at the time.

Andrew Sullivan has a humdinger of a column laying into Biden for hypocrisy on this matter. Sully focuses on the lead role Biden took as Obama’s vice president in advocating for the administration’s draconian campus policies. Excerpt:

On Friday’s Morning Joe, Biden laid out a simple process for judging him: Listen respectfully to Tara Reade, and then check for facts that prove or disprove her specific claim. The objective truth, Biden argued, is what matters. I agree with him. But this was emphatically not the standard Biden favored when judging men in college. If Biden were a student, under Biden rules, Reade could file a claim of assault, and Biden would have no right to know the specifics, the evidence provided, who was charging him, who was a witness, and no right to question the accuser. Apply the Biden standard for Biden, have woke college administrators decide the issue in private, and he’s toast.

Under Biden, Title IX actually became a force for sex discrimination — as long as it was against men. Emily Yoffe has done extraordinary work exposing the injustices of the Obama-Biden sexual-harassment regime on campus, which have mercifully been pared back since. But she has also highlighted Biden’s own zeal in the cause. He brushed aside most legal defenses against sexual harassment. In a speech at the University of Pittsburgh in 2016, for example, Biden righteously claimed that it was an outrage that any woman claiming sexual assault should have to answer questions like “Were you drinking?” or “What did you say?” “These are questions that angered me then and anger me now.” He went on: “No one, particularly a court of law, has a right to ask any of those questions.”

Particularly a court of law? A court cannot even inquire what a woman said in a disputed sexual encounter? Couldn’t that be extremely relevant to the question of consent? Or ask if she were drinking? It may be extremely salient that she had been drinking — because it could prove rape, if she were incapacitated and unable to consent and sex took place. But Biden’s conviction that young men on campus should be legally handicapped in defending themselves from charges of sexual abuse occluded any sense of basic fairness. In 2013, the Obama administration codified new rules for treating claims on sexual harassment and assault, which, according to the civil liberties group, Foundation for Individual Rights in Education, abandoned “objective” or “reasonable person” standard, in order to protect young women from young men.

In 2014, the Obama administration issued another guidance for colleges which expanded what “sexual violence” could include, citing “a range of behaviors that are unwanted by the recipient and include remarks about physical appearance; persistent sexual advances that are undesired by the recipient; unwanted touching; and unwanted oral, anal, or vaginal penetration or attempted penetration.” By that standard, ignoring the Reade allegation entirely, Joe Biden has been practicing “sexual violence” for decades: constantly touching women without their prior consent, ruffling and smelling their hair, making comments about their attractiveness, coming up from behind to touch their back or neck. You can see him do it on tape, on countless occasions. He did not stop in 2014, to abide by the standards he was all too willing to impose on college kids. A vice-president could do these things with impunity; a college sophomore could have his life ruined for an inept remark.

Read it all. It’s quite powerful. Sully ends by saying that he plans to vote for Biden anyway, because Trump is just that bad, and if the comparison is between who has treated women worse, well, there’s no comparison at all. Sully: “But supporting Biden does mean I’ll be voting for a hypocrite who wants to ruin others’ young lives for what he has routinely and with impunity done.”

That’s a knockout line, because it’s true — even if Biden is innocent of Tara Reade’s allegation. Can anybody talk about “morality” in politics with a straight face now? All those #MeToo people who are crawfishing about Biden are as hypocritical as all the Christians who had once been appalled by Bill Clinton, but who forgot all about their principles when it came to Donald Trump.

I agree with Sully: it might be the case that a voter holds his nose and votes for Biden — or votes for Trump — because the alternative is worse. If you are a pro-choice feminist, for example, it really does make more sense to vote for a hypocrite like Biden to protect the Supreme Court. If you are a pro-life Christian, the same logic applies, on the Trump-voting side. Life presents us with tragic choices all the time, when there are no good options, only less bad ones.

But I really don’t want to hear lectures about morality in politics from Biden-positive #MeToo feminists or Trumped-out conservative Christians. Or, heaven knows, from the media.

The post Morality, Media, & Tara Reade appeared first on The American Conservative.