Rod Dreher's Blog, page 172

Gays Who Hate Pete Buttigieg

I’m on my way this morning to Bucknell University in Pennsylvania, where I am scheduled to appear with my friend Andrew Sullivan tonight to talk about religion, identity, and culture. Unfortunately, Andrew has taken ill, and will be patched in on video. But if you’re in the Lewisburg, PA area tonight, come see me and virtual Andrew. Here’s the announcement:

Tues., Feb. 18–Rod Dreher (author of The Benedict Option) and Dr. Andrew Sullivan (editor of Same-Sex Marriage Pro & Con: A Reader), American Religious and Sexual Identities: Coexistence or Cold Civil War? Two prominent writers will debate conflicting claims of secular sexual identities and religious freedoms, and whether that cultural divide precludes consensus on American identity today. 7 p.m. LC Forum.

One thing I hope Andrew and I get to talk about tonight is the bizarre rejection of Pete Buttigieg by the gay left. Gay writer Masha Gessen of The New Yorker explains the Pete hate. Turns out that Buttigieg is a normie, and that’s terrible! Excerpt:

The other, more mainstream, and often more visible kind of L.G.B.T. politics aims to erase difference. Its message to straight people is “We are just like you, and all we want is the right to have what you have: marriage, children, a house with a picket fence, and the right to serve in the military.” The vision of this politics is a society in all respects indistinguishable from the one in which we live now, except queer people have successfully and permanently blended in. To be sure, all kinds of queer people have been involved in both kinds of queer politics. But the politics of being “just like you” leaves out the people who cannot or do not want to be just like conventional straight people, whether in appearance or in the way we construct our lives and families.

More:

What makes Buttigieg an easy and reassuring choice for these older, white, straight people, and a disturbing possibility for the queer people who seem to be criticizing him for not being gay enough? It is that he is profoundly, essentially conservative. He is an old politician in a young man’s body, a straight politician in a gay man’s body.

This is really something. There is an openly gay, partnered man who is running for president, and who stands a decent chance of getting the nomination — and, if he does, becoming president. Yet for people like Masha Gessen, he is an Uncle Tom. That’s so repulsive. Buttigieg, in truth, is a radical candidate, in that he represents the complete mainstreaming of homosexuality and gay partnerships. If I were a gay person, I would be thrilled by what Buttigieg accomplishes just by being there in the race, and being pretty successful at it. I would be thrilled even if I wasn’t planning to vote for him, because Buttigieg’s success is a good sign of how much America has changed to embrace homosexuality, and gay people — and how quickly. The fact that the all-American, Beaver Cleaver Democratic candidate is an out and married gay man is the kind of thing that was completely unthinkable until the day before yesterday.

Buttigieg’s success is total vindication of Andrew Sullivan’s strategy, which was based on the idea that gay people deserve the right to live ordinary bourgeois lives, same as straight people. Masha Gessen’s objections, though, indicates the fundamental hatred some militant gay people have towards bourgeois society. That hatred is going to prove more politically important as the years go on. My prediction is the bourgeois revolution that Andrew Sullivan and other gay leaders started, and successfully lead, will end by devouring them, and by continuing to destroy the kinds of forms and customs that make society possible.

Good grief, not even a decade ago, it was considered too risky for a Democratic presidential candidate to endorse gay marriage. And now an actual married gay man is a leading Democratic presidential candidate! But that’s not good enough for queer hotheads. It’s so unjust that Gessen et alia are trashing Buttigieg for not being gay in the correct way, but that’s how woke activists are. Black conservatives, and indeed many black people who aren’t particularly conservative, but who aren’t militantly left-wing, have had to put up with this forever.

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The Rotten Legion

Benedict XVI’s failure to suppress the corrupt Legion of Christ religious order was a big mistake, as this new report from Crux News makes clear. Excerpts:

The cardinal’s response was not what Yolanda Martinez expected – or could abide.

Her son had been sexually abused by one of the priests of the Legion of Christ, a disgraced religious order. And now she was calling Cardinal Valasio De Paolis – the Vatican official appointed by the pope to lead the Legion, and to clean it up – to report the settlement the group was offering, and to express her outrage.

The terms: Martinez’s family would receive 15,000 euros from the order. But in return, her son would have to recant the testimony he gave to Milan prosecutors that the priest had repeatedly assaulted him when he was a 12-year-old student at the order’s youth seminary in northern Italy. He would have to lie.

The cardinal did not seem shocked. He did not share her indignation.

Instead, he chuckled. He said she shouldn’t sign the deal, but should try to work out another agreement without attorneys: “Lawyers complicate things. Even Scripture says that among Christians we should find agreement.”

Mama had a recorder, and got the whole conversation on tape. More:

De Paolis is beyond earthly justice – he died in 2017 and there is no evidence he knew of, or approved, the settlement offer before it was made. But the tape and documents seized when police raided the Legion’s headquarters in 2014 show that he had turned a blind eye to superiors who protected pedophiles.

In addition, the evidence shows that when De Paolis first learned about Resendiz’s crimes in 2011, he approved an in-house canonical investigation but didn’t report the priest to police. And when he learned two years later that other Legion priests were apparently trying to impede the criminal investigation into his crimes, the pope’s delegate didn’t report that either.

And a few hours after he spoke with Martinez, De Paolis opened the Legion’s 2014 assembly where he formally ended the mandate given to him by Benedict to reform and purify the religious order. The Legion had been “cured and cleaned,” he said.

In fact, his mission hadn’t really been accomplished.

And:

But De Paolis refused from the start to remove any of Maciel’s old guard, who remain in power today. He refused to investigate the cover-up of Maciel’s crimes. He refused to reopen old allegations of abuse by other priests, even when serial rapists remained in the Legion’s ranks, unpunished.

Read it all. 

They lie. They lie, and they lie, and they lie, these men in power. How can anyone believe them?

In this spectacular folly, you see how it happened, the Reformation. And you see how the Russian Revolution happened too. The leadership class — in Russia’s case, of the state and the church, which were tied closely together — refused to open its eyes to what was happening around it, refused to admit and to repent of its own corruption and exploitation of the weak. They really did think what they had would last forever. That they were invulnerable. That they could talk their way out of it.

De Paolis, chuckling: “Even Scripture says that among Christians we should find agreement.” What a disgusting lie that is! It’s a lie not because it says something false, but it’s uttering a truth for the sake of misleading someone into abandoning a just cause. I’ve said this story here before, and I’ll say it again. The very first story I wrote about priest sex abuse was in the summer of 2001, as a New York Post columnist. The adolescent son of an immigrant from Nicaragua was acting up. His father had not yet arrived in the US, and his mother needed help. She went to the local Carmelite priests in the Bronx. They turned the boy into their sex toy.

When the father arrived from Nicaragua, he and the mother went to the Archdiocese of New York’s vicar for Hispanic affairs. That bishop pulled out a checkbook and a written agreement that would transfer their power of attorney to the archdiocese’s lawyers. The father might have been a mere worker, new in this country and faced with a bishop, but he knew when he was being conned. He and the mother stood up, left, and went out to get a good Jewish lawyer and sue the bastards.

People who think that all these cases are about nothing more than scammers looking for a payday from the Church ought to reflect on the experiences of those immigrants, and people like Yolanda Martinez. Their children were defiled by the clergy. They wanted justice. They went to bishops, and got manipulation. This is, by now, and old story, but the past, apparently, isn’t even past.

The post The Rotten Legion appeared first on The American Conservative.

Camus, Church And China

On February 8, I moved a comment by one of our readers who is a physician (I know his real name, and have been in touch with him) up to post status. Read it here. It’s about the COVID19 virus, and what his Chinese wife’s family back home are going through. He shared terrifying details that we have not seen much in the US media. He urged Americans to prepare themselves for severe shortages of medical goods manufactured in China.

A couple of weeks earlier, when the news was just starting to get bad out of Wuhan, the doctor shared with me (and I passed it on to you all, with his permission) some material from his wife’s Chinese social media accounts. He explained that even highly educated, extremely secular Chinese people like his wife believe in Chinese astrology and numerology. He sent me these screenshots dated November 2019:

He does not read Mandarin, but said that they were sent to the WeChat groupserv for alumni of her college. He said it’s significant that even very well educated people send this stuff around. He writes that his wife translated the text from these images for him:

One of them lists off all the previous Golden Rat years and lists off the disasters that occurred. It then gets to 2020 – and right off the bat warns that a plague will come early in the year. That healthy people will just drop dead – and exhorting people not to eat wild game meat – you cannot make this stuff up. The remainder of the year will be filled with flooding and great hardship. Then the rest of it is some kind of astronomical discussion that despite my wife’s best effort I just simply do not understand.

The doctor and I have stayed in touch via e-mail. Last week, he responded to one of my e-mails with a letter that included this:

How has humanity handled pestilence in the past? I would point you to two books: THE PLAGUE by Albert Camus, and AND THE BAND PLAYED ON by Randy Shilts.

I will leave you with this quote from THE PLAGUE – which I think is really appropriate for today:

“In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists; they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence is not a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it does not pass away, and from one bad dream to the other, it is men who pass away.”

This afternoon I received the following letter from him. I publish it with his permission. I have only very slightly edited it to protect his wife’s family. You take this for what it’s worth:

Rod – you asked me for an update this weekend – so here it goes.

I did send you an email back last week – I am not sure you received it. I discussed my wife’s concern with the creeping totalitarianism of the People’s Republic punishing her family and also discussed and quoted what Albert Camus described with great skill in his masterwork The Plague – the complete ignorance of the population with the danger of a true pestilence.

If you did not receive, please let me know, and I will re-send.

Things with my wife have become much worse in multiple ways.

Her mother is still in quarantine, in her little apartment, eating only the rice she has in her house. She refuses to eat anything being delivered. The streets are empty, and no one is doing any kind of work or business. Small businesses all over town are imploding one by one. She is feeling well — and seems to have gotten over her illness — not sure it was Wuhan virus or something else.

We still have not heard a word from her father in over three weeks now.  My wife is just despondent about this — there are no words. He was in Beijing.

Her brother and his family are still in their apartment in [a Chinese megalopolis]. We get small updates from them on WeChat — there is no phone service at this time. [The city] remains under martial law; no one is working, no one is on the streets. If they want food, they order it; it is brought to the apartment front desk and they go pick it up. No one is allowed out of the building. They have drones flying by the windows on the 18th floor three times daily — they are detecting fever. If anyone has fever, the hazmat suit guys show up and drag them and everyone in that apartment away. There is a strange resurgence of the Cultural Revolution, in that neighbors are being encouraged to spy on and turn in their fellow neighbors. [City] is the size of Dallas/Fort Worth, and it is completely quiet, with no work being done.

Again – just common sense – would the government be doing all this for a little flu?

I have not been able to comfort my wife in some time. I have never seen her like this. She is a profoundly educated and worldly-wise woman. However, she has now reverted to her people’s former religion of Zen Buddhism – in a way that I find beautiful and scary at the same time. Her grandmother made sure she and her siblings knew their old ways, even in the Maoist China in which she grew up.

She has made from scratch these beautiful garments for herself and our kids. She calls them “mercy garments” — I get the feeling it is something like our version of “sackcloth and ashes”. When this all started, she looked me right in the eye and said, “We Chinese have forgotten our old traditions and our blessed ancestors. They are now telling us that they have not forgotten us.” She has constructed a Buddhist shrine in our front room – pic enclosed – and every evening it is covered in votive candles – and she and the kids bow and perform rituals, and chant. It is like Gregorian chant – but a bit different.

 

The doctor continues:

This weekend, I saw the look from the abyss in her eyes once again. If you recall, when her fortune teller wrote her last fall, he stated that the plague would begin in the winter and that Lunar New Year would not be celebrated. The next thing he said would happen would be the complete destruction of the crops — and this would be accomplished with locusts.

You can only imagine the look in her eyes – and the gushing of tears – when Mandarin TV announced that the locust swarms from Africa had arrived in Xinjiang, were gathering strength, and had not been this bad in decades.

The locusts really are there. Here’s today’s agricultural news:

Agricultural futures listed on China’s main commodity exchanges moved decisively higher on Monday as the UN issued a threat warning over a huge swarm of locusts that is migrating across Southwest Asia, prompting fears of a potential crop losses.

The migration, which has already travelled across Africa, the Red Sea and a substantial part of the subcontinent, reached close to China’s Southwestern border over the weekend according to media reports.

Cotton, rice and wheat futures in China led the rally across the whole agricultural complex, with contracts for all three products surging to a trade-stop on Monday as traders put on speculative longs.

More from the doctor:

The Industrial Heartland is now on its knees. If this locust plague begins to spread from Xinjiang into Qinghai, Gansu, Ningxia and Sichuan, that would put the Chinese breadbasket on its knees. That is where all the rice and wheat and other grains is grown. My wife’s fortuneteller by the way, stated that after the crops were ruined in the spring, the flooding would begin in the summer.

Again, my wife is a highly educated woman — a degree from their premier university — and up until now has been very secular in her life. I have this feeling that if my wife is behaving this way, it is probably going on all over China.

What is that going to mean for Xi Jinping and the People’s Republic? What would happen in America if large parts of the “Tribulation meme” inexplicably started to come true — what would that do to our cultural and civic life?

What the doctor is saying is how would it affect America psychologically and socially if the kinds of things people associate with Biblical End Times prophecy started to happen. More:

Now that China is the 2nd largest economy in the world – what effect will be had when things start to crater? What would the world be like with 1.5 billion Chinese in rebellion or even a Civil War? I have been thinking a lot about this lately – and do have a bad feeling that we will all be thinking about this a lot in the coming months.

As far as what we need to worry about here…

I still stand by my severe concerns about medication supplies. Generics especially are just not going to be produced effectively probably for the next 6-9 months at best. That means there will be very tight supplies – if there are any at all. Combine that with behaviour I am already witnessing, of patients getting 90 day supplies as fast as they can. We have both a severe supply problem, and now are having a run on the supplies we already have. This is going to be chaos in a few months.

However: I would urge you and your family members to get as much of their drugs as they can right now. DO NOT WAIT. I would also be buying a reasonable supply of things such as IBUPROFEN and MOTRIN (all made in China), cough syrups, stomach remedies, Band-Aids, gauze, and insulin needles, if they are needed.

This is not a joke.

There are entire industries in this country which are going to be severely affected – some already being affected. The cruise industry is already in deep trouble. The airlines are right behind them.

Hollywood is about to take a punch to the face. China is their second biggest customer — and who knows when the theaters will open again? And all over the American West – including my state – the tourism industry will be decimated. Great concern is already being expressed here in the local papers. The bookings from the Chinese are being cancelled right and left.

I am also concerned about the general ignorance that is being expressed in the commentariat all over the internet and social media. People are discussing issues like virology and epidemiology — and these people have not a clue what they are even talking about. I am a trained medical professional, and would not even dare to discuss and opine about things that people are talking about as if they are experts. Please, please read the quote from Albert Camus’ The Plague that I sent you last week. History is being repeated.

That quote again:

“In this respect, our townsfolk were like everybody else, wrapped up in themselves; in other words they were humanists; they disbelieved in pestilences. A pestilence is not a thing made to man’s measure; therefore we tell ourselves that pestilence is a mere bogey of the mind, a bad dream that will pass away. But it does not pass away, and from one bad dream to the other, it is men who pass away.”

Note well: this is correspondence from an American physician who married into a Chinese family, and who stays in touch with people on the ground there. I am not telling you to believe or disbelieve this doctor — again, whose identity I know. Think about what he’s saying, and compare it to what else you’re hearing and reading.

One mystery I can’t figure out: with so much of China idle, why is the stock market not reacting negatively? The Camus quote might explain it: that they think this is a bad dream that will pass. I’m reminded of something a senior investment banker told me years ago about being at a meeting at a Swiss chalet for the elites in his bank. It was a bacchanal. He realized that great wealth had made all his colleagues into fools. It shook him up so bad that when he returned to the US, he went back to practicing his Jewish religion — and he left that firm, shifting his investments into safe harbor. He told me that he was the only one of his colleagues who got through the 2008 crash without being wiped out, or close to it.

They all saw what was coming, he said — but they all told themselves that they could play one more round at the table before cashing out and heading to safety.

Now, I know that I tend to be alarmist about this stuff. Longtime readers will bear that in mind. Along those lines, you might have caught the World Health Organization’s news today that COVID19 infections in China seem to be declining, and the whole thing is not as bad as SARS or MERS. These are based on numbers reported by Chinese health authorities. Not sure why anybody should believe anything Beijing says. Questions have been raised about WHO’s closeness to the Beijing regime.

The Doctor responds:

I am not at all sure what the real numbers are, but the numbers that are troubling now are the ones coming out everywhere but China — the rise is exponential.  But nothing will be known for sure until we have accurate lethality and R0 numbers — and they are just not available.

Since I started writing this post, I just received another e-mail from the Doctor:

My wife and I just got off the phone. I thought you would find this interesting. Remember the two hospitals in Hubei that the world breathlessly watched as the PLA put them each up in 10 days?

Well, they have official Communist Party names — but what have the PEOPLE OF CHINA begun to call them in the vernacular?

One is known as the Mountain of the Fire Gods.

The other is known as the Mountain of the Thunder Gods.

Why is this important?  First of all, the use of the word God is strictly forbidden in Communist China. This is extraordinary.

Secondly, Fire and Thunder are the only two things in their ancient religion that can defeat Metal — as in the Year of the Metal Rat.

This is more evidence to me that something is brewing in the hearts and minds of the Chinese.  This kind of thing would have been UNTHINKABLE to do just a few months ago — and the perpetrators would have been instantly punished.  Communists do not allow thinking about gods and ancient religions.

I continue to have a feeling this is going to be a fascinating ride.

According to the Wikipedia entries for these two hospitals (linked above), these names were, in fact, given by the state — which is still really interesting! In traditional Chinese medicine, metal is associated with the lungs; fire and thunder defeat metal in the Chinese hierarchy, so the names express the belief that the lung disease COVID19 will be defeated.

Whether the Doctor’s account is precisely correct, or the Wikipedia accounts are, the point is basically the same: it really is interesting that the Communist rulers would either assign these names, or simply permit them. I remind you that Hubei province, the epicenter of the outbreak, is one of the places in China where the persecution of Christians by the Communist regime was most severe.

Two weeks ago, an unnamed Chinese pastor in Wuhan issued a public call for prayer. Excerpt:

“It is readily apparent that we are facing a test of our faith,” the pastor wrote. “The situation is so critical, yet [we are] trusting in the Lord’s promises, that his thoughts toward us are of peace, and not evil (Jeremiah. 29:11), and that he allows for a time of testing, not to destroy us, but to establish us.”

“Therefore, Christians are not only to suffer with the people of this city, but we have a responsibility to pray for those in this city who are fearful, and to bring to them the peace of Christ.”

The pastor emphasized that while Christ has “given us His peace,” that “peace is not to remove us from disaster and death, but rather to have peace in the midst of disaster and death, because Christ has already overcome these things.”

This could be a turning point in Chinese history. The early church gained respect and affection among the Romans in part because of the compassion its members showed the sick and dying during a plague time. In his early 4th century historical account, the bishop Eusebius wrote about how the Christians of Caesarea behaved when plague struck:

UPDATE: On an earlier coronavirus thread, this comment just appeared:

My wife is from Vietnam, and in 2015 we travelled there and I had the opportunity to meet some of her extended family, including a wonderful elderly aunt and some of my wife’s cousins with whom we stayed. Today my wife got word from her aunt that things in Vietnam are very bad right now because of the virus. They are completely swamped with Chinese citizens trying to get as far from China as they can run. None of the children are going to school in Saigon because they are all closed in order to mitigate the spread of the virus. Many people are getting sick, and many of them are dying, but nobody is allowed to speak about it, and they are arrested immediately if they do so. Her aunt and their family are lovely people, committed Catholics, and absolutely terrified.

I know nothing about Wyoming Doc, but I’m not prepared to write him off as a paranoid kook, because I trust the reports coming out of Vietnam from people I know. Things are far more dire over in the far east than are being officially reported.

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Walker Percy Weekend 2020

All, I just learned from Walker Percy Weekend World Headquarters that tickets for this year’s event (June 5-6) are now on sale. Get your tickets online here. Remember, we only sell about 400 of them — there’s not enough hotel space in St. Francisville for more. When they’re gone, they’re gone.

We’re still working on the schedule of speakers, but so far we have:

Not on the list above: Wendell Pierce, the film, television, and stage actor, who will be talking with me onstage about his beautiful 2015 memoir The Wind In The Reeds — which is to say, we’ll be talking about New Orleans and a sense of place. You know you want to walk down Royal Street in St. Francisville drinking bourbon with Bunk. Wendell has confirmed that he’s coming, but he’s agreed to fly in from London, where he’ll be filming Season 3 of Jack Ryan. That can be touch and go, dealing with TV shooting schedules. I tell you, though, to listen to Wendell talk about what it means to love New Orleans is a sublime experience:

It’s going to be a great time, y’all. Again, don’t delay getting tickets. Once they’re sold out, that’s that, and I can’t do anything about it. Also, once you buy your tickets, don’t delay making a hotel or other lodging reservation. We’ve learned recently that people last year already booked their rooms for 2020!

 

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Fearing The Left In Power

Here’s an update to yesterday’s “People Are Getting Sick Of It” post.

A friend, N., writes to say she recently paid a visit to a lifelong friend in another state. Her friend, a white woman, has become “a far-left liberal,” which doesn’t surprise N., given some of the thing the woman has had to deal with. N., who is gentle, sweet-natured, and fun-loving, goes on:

I had to listen to unmitigated left-progressive ranting for the whole time I visited and didn’t DARE disagree because of what you say here:

I would never discuss things like this with liberals, not because I don’t want to hear what they have to say, but because their self-righteousness and indignation is unbearable. Not every liberal, of course, but you never really know when you’re going to find yourself in a discussion with someone on the Left who will decide that you are not just wrong, but evil, and who will take it upon themselves to campaign against you, both personally and professionally.

She probably would have kicked me out and ended our friendship if she knew my husband voted for Trump. She really and truly believes that all human beings who do not agree with her are EVIL, and harbor deep motivation to keep the poor and the brown down.

She honestly, truly, madly, deeply believes that white men are intentionally and willfully and consciously planning ways to suppress the poor, the brown, the non-binary.

To listen to her is to see the paradigm of the far left which is that all of our current cultural and political system is true evil and true morality in an epic fight. I’m not kidding. These leftist people really do think that the “other” is 100% evil incarnate and that they must, MUST destroy the evil.

It is truly the Inquisition. If they got real POLITICAL power they would not see killing white men named Bob who voted for Trump as wrong but HOLY.

My friend gave me permission to use this on the blog, but only if I scrubbed any identity markers. On the off chance the progressive extremist pal from childhood read this, says my friend, she would cut my friend off.

I received another e-mail yesterday in response to this blog — this one from an emigre from a communist country, a guy I interviewed for my book. He writes to say that in one of our interviews, I asked him when he first started to sense that things were not right in America, and that they were starting to remind him of the Soviet-bloc life he fled. This morning, he said he didn’t have an answer for me at the time, but he now remembers:

The very first time I started to have an unarticulated feeling that something was seriously wrong was when discussing conservative views with my friends. They would lower their voices and look over their own shoulder. When I spoke — and I will not lower my voice let alone care who’s listening — they would grow fidgety, constantly scanning the environment. It started about ten years ago. It was a cognitive dissonance. I grew up like this but it was not supposed to be happening here.

The leftists, on the other hand, have no filter whatsoever. Just yesterday, sitting in my [local] coffee joint, I had to listen for hours to four fine, insufferable specimens of the Left. They were not lowering their voices. They were professing unquestionable truth and wanted everybody to know that. They might as well have been an SA soldatesque shouting in a Munich beerhall. All they needed was uniforms. Honestly, I had to work hard to suppress the urge to stand up and punch the ringleader in his smug face.

Finally, the libertarian writer Conor Friedersdorf writes about evidence that conservative students really do censor themselves. Excerpts:

Last spring, three professors at the University of North Carolina surveyed undergraduates to get a sense of the campus climate. Rather than focus on discrete controversies, such as the time in 2015 when UNC student protesters seized control of a room where a journalist was speaking, or the time in 2019 when a UNC student assaulted a sign-carrying anti-abortion activist, they sought to understand day-to-day undergraduate experiences. The results of the survey, distilled from more than 1,000 responses to email questionnaires, can’t be applied to every college in America, but the findings do illuminate what’s happening at a highly selective public institution in a swing state, where more than 20,000 undergraduates are enrolled.

The good news: In classes where politics comes up, large majorities of self-identified liberal and conservative students say that instructors encourage participation from both sides and want to learn from different perspectives, suggesting that concerns about faculty-indoctrination efforts are unfounded. Indeed, students reported that they worry less about censure from faculty than from peers.That brings us to the bad news:



While majorities favor more viewpoint diversity and free-speech norms, an intolerant faction of roughly a quarter of students believe it is okay to silence or suppress some widely held views that they deem wrong.






Students across political perspectives engage in classroom self-censorship.






Students harbor divisive stereotypes about classmates with different beliefs, and a substantial minority are not open to engaging socially with classmates who don’t share their views.






Disparaging comments about political conservatives are common.

The study found that the source of the problem is unmistakably the campus left. More:

Also troubling were the undergraduates who reported having kept an opinion to themselves in the classroom, even though the opinion was related to the class, because they were worried about the potential consequences of expressing it. Almost 68 percent of conservatives censored themselves in this way, along with roughly 49 percent of moderates and 24 percent of liberals.

Added: Expressing unpopular views “can reveal critical blind spots in prevailing thought patterns,” the authors of the report note, and even when a view is wrong, its refutation allows both parties “to better apprehend why the correct view must be true.” But “a substantial proportion of respondents fear social sanction, or even outright grading penalties, for sharing their views.” What’s more, almost a quarter of conservative students reported being more than slightly concerned that peers would file a complaint against them for speech related to a class they are in together.

And this:

Out conservatives may face social isolation. Roughly 92 percent of conservatives said they would be friends with a liberal, and just 3 percent said that they would not have a liberal friend. Among liberals, however, almost a quarter said they would not have a conservative friend. Would UNC be a better place without conservatives? About 22 percent of liberals said yes. Would it be a better place without liberals? Almost 15 percent of conservatives thought so.

This is NOT a “both sides do it” situation. This is overwhelmingly a problem of the Left. And within academia, the media, and (I believe, but can’t prove) within management ranks at corporations, the cultural Left totally dominates.

Read all of Friedersdorf’s piece. He says that the authors of the study warn that it’s not simply a left-right thing at UNC. The censorious liberals, they say, are still a minority, even among liberals. That might be true, but these silenced liberals have the power to stand up to the radicals from the left, but don’t do it. If alt-right students were intimidating campus progressives and liberals, and conservatives didn’t stand up to them from the right, I would consider those conservatives to be particularly complicit in creating the culture of oppression on campus.

I also believe that university administrations are complicit in creating these environments on campus, by hosting events like the “Tunnel Of Oppression” exhibits (UNC held one in 2017), and frogmarching students through what amounts to ideological indoctrination. When campus institutions promote critical theory and “social justice” perspectives, is there any surprise that the kind of people who are demonized under those ideological frameworks feel intimidated into silence?

My question is: what are state lawmakers going to do about it? In North Carolina, both houses of the legislature are controlled by Republicans, though the governor is a Democrat. If Democrats were in charge, do you really think they would sit back and do nothing if documented evidence emerged that significant numbers of liberals and racial minorities were silencing themselves on campus out of fear of the Right? If such large numbers of self-identified conservatives on campus said that they wouldn’t have a black friend, or a liberal friend, would Democratic lawmakers believe that there wasn’t a serious problem on the campus of a state university, and just sit back?

What needs to happen is defunding the campus diversity office, and redirecting that money to programs to teach students how to respect free speech and intellectual diversity, and to institute those norms.

The fact is, media and academia are not neutral about any of this. They are teaching people to hate anyone who dissents from the progressive narrative, to think that they are illegitimate and harmful. They are going to make democratic self-government in this country more difficult. My concern about the Right is that they are not engaged in meaningful opposition to this insanity. Deep down, I think most Republican elected officials are free riders on the frustration and anger of ordinary people in the face of this stuff. People will vote GOP because they know that the GOP does not endorse it, and can be counted on not to push it. But that’s not the same thing as actively pushing back. It’s hard to believe that people in North Carolina, for example, would be satisfied to pay taxes to support a state university that is so indifferent to the presence of so many students on campus who harbor such spiteful intolerance for those not like themselves.

This morning I heard from a Bernie Sanders supporter with whom I’m friends. He’s a Christian college student, and is backing Sanders 100 percent for Sanders’s economics, and because he despises Trump. He tells me that he is concerned that the Democratic Party is so sold out to wokeness on social issues that it is going to blow its chance to do structural economic reform. I suggested that he read political scientist Eric Kaufmann’s piece on why the Right can be flexible on economics, while the Left is paralyzed into supporting maximal social justice positions.

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How Far Will Dems Go For Trans?

Here’s a story from the UK about the top contender for leadership of the Labour Party, on how far she would take the party to defend transgender rights:

She called for changes to the 2010 Equality Act, which allows exclusions from women-only spaces, saying: “I want a right to self id [identification] for trans people, it’s not an easy journey to go on.”

It was put to Ms Long-Bailey that female victims of domestic violence have spoken of their “debilitating terror” and of the vital importance of a woman-only refuge.

But she replied: “We can’t use that as an argument to discriminate against transpeople.”

The BBC’s Andrew Marr suggested that – if holding such views triggered expulsion – “an awful lot of good feminists inside the Labour party would be caught by this”.

Rebecca Long-Bailey has described as transphobic Women’s Place, a group of Labour feminists who are campaigning to keep women’s domestic violence shelters spaces exclusively for biological women. When called on it by the interviewer, she waffled.

In the interview, asked about Women’s Place, Ms Long-Bailey insisted: “I’m not regarding any particular group as a hate group.”

Mr Marr replied: “You signed something that said so?”

This is something that American journalists ought to put to the Democratic presidential candidates. I don’t expect that they actually will do it, because on LGBT issues, American journalists behave like advocates. Still, it would be really useful to learn precisely where and how the Democrats draw the line on trans rights. All of them have come out in support of the Equality Act, which passed the Democratic-controlled House last year. The bill would expand federal civil rights law to include sexual orientation and gender identity. As ADF Legal has pointed out in its analysis of the bill last year:

Churches, religious schools, and other faith-based organizations that hold beliefs about marriage, sexual morality, and the distinction between the sexes would be punished if they refuse to give up policies and practices reflecting these beliefs.

Unlike many state and local sexual orientation/gender identity (SOGI) laws, the “Equality Act” has absolutely no exemption whatsoever for houses of worship and other religious entities. Even more, the “Equality Act” strips the faithful of the protections they possess under the Religious Freedom Restoration Act of 1993.

Churches and other religious organizations will violate the “Equality Act” if:

they require their employees to refrain from homosexual behavior;
they refuse to open up women’s restrooms to men who identify as women;
they use pronouns consistent with an employee’s biological sex rather than their professed gender identity; or
they refuse to include puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and “sex reassignment” surgery in their health plans.

The “Equality Act” will also forbid college students from using their federal tuition assistance at religious educational institutions that “discriminate” on the basis of sexual orientation or gender identity. Schools like Wheaton College, Biola University, and Taylor University will lose federal student aid if they continue to prohibit homosexual behavior or decline to let biological males who identify as women to play on women’s sports teams.

Women’s shelters will lose federal funding if they decline to let biological men who identify as women to share communal sleeping facilities with women, many of whom have been subjected to sexual abuse. Faith-based adoption and foster placement agencies will lose federal funding if they follow their religious beliefs and place children only with married, opposite-sex couples.

The “Equality Act” also would dramatically expand the definition of “place of public accommodation,” thereby subjecting a virtually unlimited number of organizations to new SOGI obligations. Counselors and medical professionals will face potentially ruinous liability if they decline to “affirm” a patient’s gender confusion, including by prescribing puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones, or performing sex reassignment procedures. That a health care provider might object on religious grounds would be wholly irrelevant.

If you’re a pastor or religious leader, or just a religious person, were you aware of the threat this legislation poses to your liberty? You aren’t if you depend on the mainstream US media to give an analysis of it. ADF Legal is a Christian organization, so naturally it focuses on the religious liberty aspect. Elizabeth Nolan Brown of the libertarian magazine Reason says it’s a big threat to liberty, and she certainly doesn’t say it as any sort of conservative:

Every American should be treated with dignity and respect, but our laws need to protect the Constitutionally guaranteed rights that we have,” the Alliance Defending Freedom’s Greg Baylor said on the Christian Broadcasting Network. If this bill passes, “we will see a proliferation of instances where Christians and others are being coerced to violate their beliefs in order to comply with such a law,” he warned.

At least that much is exceedingly likely. The bill specifically states that the federal Religious Freedom Restoration Act “shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under” the Equality Act, nor “provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement” of it.

While the worst and most paranoid interpretations of this bill are pure culture war pageantry, there are definite threats to religious and academic freedom. And there are legitimate uncertainties about what legislation like this would mean for the sorts of sex/gender-segregated spaces, services, programs, opportunities, and the like that people of all political persuasions support—the Girl Scouts and Boy Scouts, women-only co-working spaces, scholarship opportunities that exclude men, and so much more.

There is nothing in the Equality Act that exempts women’s shelters from federal civil rights law. Here’s a link to the text of the bill — see for yourself. Every single one of those Democrats standing for president should have to explain why they have endorsed this bill. Every single one of them should have to explain why being consistent with LGBT ideology is more important to them than the safety and well-being of women who have been beaten or sexually assaulted by males.

Gay conservative Brad Polumbo came out against the Equality Act last year because it goes way too far in demolishing religious liberty and conscience rights. For example, it could force physicians not only to treat trans patients (something that is perfectly fair), but also to provide sex-change surgeries and procedures, which is not. And the Act specifically targets the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, to make it less likely that religious defendants would have a shot at prevailing in court.

This is what we will have if a Democrat becomes president, and the Democrats retain control in the House, and gain it in the Senate. It’s not a “scare tactic” to point this out if it is true. The Democratic Party has lost all common sense on this issue. It is not just a threat to religious liberty, but to the safety of vulnerable abused women. Left-wing political parties in the West have lost their minds on this stuff — and we need journalists like Andrew Marr to put the hard questions to candidates.

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Was COVID19 Bioengineered By China?

A reader in the comments section urged me to join the Reddit COVID19 subreddit to keep up with the latest scientific information about the virus. I’m glad I did. This piece just appeared, analyzing the outbreak based on scientifically available information. It claims to be “the product of a collaboration between a retired professional scientist with 30 years of experience in genomic sequencing and analysis who helped design several ubiquitous bioinformatic software tools, and a former NSA counterterrorism analyst.” I’m throwing it out there and asking you readers who have a better sense of science to analyze it. The piece, which is long, concludes:

Given the above facts, either:

– A coronavirus spontaneously mutated and jumped to humans at a wet market or deep in some random bat cave which just so happened to be 20 miles from China’s only BSL-4 virology lab, a virus with an unusually slippery never-before-seen genome that’s evading zoological classification, and whose spike-protein region which allows it to enter host cells appears most like a bio-engineered commercial product, that somehow managed to infect its first three and roughly one-third of its initial victims despite them not being connected to this market, and then be so fined-tuned to humans that it’s gone on to create the single greatest public health crisis in Chinese history with approaching 100 million citizens locked-down or quarantined – also causing Mongolia to close its border with its largest trading partner for the first time in modern history.

– Or, Chinese scientists failed to follow correct sanitation protocols possibly while in a rush during their boisterous holiday season, something that had been anticipated since the opening of the BSL-4 lab and has happened at least four times previously, and accidentally released this bio-engineered Wuhan Strain – likely created by scientists researching immunotherapy regimes against bat coronaviruses, who’ve already demonstrated the ability to perform every step necessary to bio-engineer the Wuhan Strain 2019-nCov – into their population, and now the world. As would be expected, this virus appears to have been bio-engineered at the spike-protein genes which was already done at UNC to make an extraordinarily virulent coronavirus. Chinese efforts to stop the full story about what’s going on are because they want the scales to be even since they’re now facing a severe pandemic and depopulation event. No facts point against this conclusion.

Read it all. It’s pretty damned disturbing. What jumps out to me are 1) the connection between the former UNC scientist and the Wuhan lab, and 2) the fact that genetically, this particular coronavirus cannot (as of yet) be definitively linked to an animal species, and appears not to be explicable by natural evolution. What’s more, a white paper by Chinese scientists concluded that:

“In summary, somebody was entangled with the evolution of 2019-nCoV coronavirus. In addition to origins of natural recombination and intermediate host, the killer coronavirus probably originated from a laboratory in Wuhan.”

To be clear: it does not at all seem likely that this virus was intentionally released. If this analysis of the available data is correct, it appears that careless Chinese scientists let a virus intentionally engineered to be especially destructive to get out of the lab.

One more thing from the report:

Early research found that 2019-nCoV targets the ACE2 receptor, which is found in East Asians at roughly five-times the rate of other global populations, indicating that the Wuhan Strain 2019-nCoV was likely developed as part of a gain-of-function defensive project possibly linked to immunotherapy or vaccinations – never meant to leave the lab, but meant to serve as a Red Team to fight back against, not as an offensive weapon since the virus is likely wired to be much more virulent among Asian populations. Further support for this is the fact that the Wuhan BSL-4 virology lab was already actively looking into the risks posed from bat coronaviruses, and actively researching coronavirus treatments – by definition both of these projects would require live virulent strains of coronavirus.

This would indicate that the virus will not spread outside of East Asian populations at nearly the same rate. If this proves to be the case, then Chinese carelessness in the lab will have sickened and killed an untold number of their own people (and Japanese, Taiwanese, Koreans, Vietnamese, etc.), and deeply damaged the Chinese economy. Because globalism has connected us all tightly to China, when China gets the coronavirus, we all get sick, if only economically. The good news (relatively speaking) is that if this thing can be contained before it mutates, the non-East Asian world may pretty much dodge the bullet. The bad news for the non-East Asian world is that nobody is free from the economic effects of a plague-related Chinese economic collapse.

Again: read the whole thing. 

 

 

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‘People Are Getting Sick Of It’

I strongly recommend that you follow the Twitter feed of James Lindsay. He’s a mathematician who, along with Helen Pluckrose and Peter Boghossian, pulled off that awesome Grievance Studies hoax, in which they published absurd papers in academic journals devoted to feminism, queer studies, etc. For example, they reformulated concepts from Mein Kampf in feminist language, and published it under a fake name in an unsuspecting feminist journal. Lindsay is a combative atheist and, as far as I can tell, no kind of conservative. But he hates hates hates Social Justice Warriors, and he is not afraid of them. You have to admire that. Here is a threadroll of a recent series of his tweets:

Helen, Peter, and I just had a fairly interesting interview about the Grievance Studies Affair for the BBC, and the questions being so focused on the university and academia made me realize something I’m not talking about often enough: academia is barely a tithe of the problem.

It is absolutely true that Critical Social Justice ideas have been refined, developed, often produced, and most importantly given massive legitimacy they don’t deserve as a result of the university. It’s also absolutely true that they’re taught there as though they’re true.

It’s also true that academia has dropped its central charge of being a purely academic source of knowledge production and dissemination, plus being a cultural center, all of which the public generally relies upon to be nonpartisan (unlike think tanks, e.g.) and not-corporate.

Nevertheless, the reason people are taking to the right, and to authoritarians in right-wing populism and voting almost single-issue over Critical Social Justice stuff is only barely the university. It’s not even Fox News and other outlets cherry picking examples of the problem.

There’s an underlying reason those cherry-picked examples (available literally every day, often not looking like cherry picking at all, e.g., the Washington State legislature) are connecting with people and driving them away from the left, if not right: they connect.

Fox would be able to pull of some propagandist fooling of some of the people some of the time — its hardest base for sure — but nothing works better than telling that story and it really feeling true, and not just because it comes up all the time, like a drumbeat of propaganda.

Everyday people go to work every day and get emails about “diversity, equity, and inclusion.” They get demanded to sign on to these, take trainings in these, pay attention to these, hear about these, do these… day after day, week after week. It connects.

Everyday people come home from work every day and hear about “diversity, equity, and inclusion” programs in their kids’ schools, their grandkids’ schools. What did you learn about in school today? How America is racist? Oh… It happens a lot. It connects.

Everyday people go come home from work every day and turn on the TV, or get on the internet, and they see commercials touting diversity, shows with blatant Social Justice themes. People talking on the news about “racism” in everything again and again and again. It connects.

The problem of Critical Social Justice isn’t just a thing off in the universities somewhere in Narnia, and it’s not just some weird kids or activists. It’s at work. It’s at school. It’s at home. It’s in your relaxation and entertainment. People are getting sick of it.

Man, is this ever true. What I can’t figure out is whether the progressives who deny it really know what they’re doing, or are just so immersed in this stuff that they are completely insensitive to its ubiquity and noxiousness. Probably more the latter than the former. I haven’t worked in an office environment for a decade, but even in the old days, I watched the pre-SJW version of this stuff just turn the brains of journalists to mush. Robert Conquest’s Second Law of Politics helps explain American journalism: “Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.” What I saw in my twenty years of working in newsrooms was liberals — even skeptical ones — collapsing in the face of therapeutic progressivism around race, sex, and gender, and other progressive shibboleths. This stuff is kryptonite among journalists, who cannot resist the opportunity to crusade for those they hold to be victims.

But this is hardly surprising. Journalism is an overwhelmingly liberal profession! What is more interesting is how the corporate world has been taken over by these same values. The idea that corporations are in any way conservative is a badly outdated concept. What I hear often from conservatives within corporate environments is how progressive social beliefs are made the law (so to speak) of the workplace by being disguised as therapeutic methods of achieving diversity, inclusion, and equity. As ever, LGBT activists were pioneers in this, conquering elementary and secondary school culture by selling progressive cultural politics as “safety” measures. Middle, upper-middle, and wealthy people who populate these institutions and professions, especially in managerial ranks, quickly absorb this cultish religion, which they then use to bully people who don’t agree — especially both religious people and working-class people who have not been acculturated into these norms via college education — into submission.

The UK political scientist Eric Kauffman analyzes why parties of the Left are trapped by wokeness, even though it’s a loser for them. Excerpts:

Identity politics and multiculturalism are central motivating forces for the highly-educated activists who have dominated left-wing parties since the ’68 generation rose to prominence. These ideas tend to be considerably less popular than the Left’s economic offer, hence the bind the Left finds itself in.

Yet this alone cannot explain the inflexibility of left-wing parties. To do so requires an additional ingredient: the rise of political correctness. Political correctness functions as an emergent system that can push new ideas even when few people actually believe in them. Like the emperor’s new clothes, no one dares violate a taboo which may cost them dearly.

To be blunt, left-wing political correctness is more powerful than the right-wing variant. For instance, many social conservatives may dislike environmentalist candidates in their ranks, but dissidents on the left of a conservative party won’t have their character questioned and reputation trashed. By contrast, a left-wing politician who moves right on culture—calling for lower immigration or abolishing female-only shortlists, for instance—is likely to be accused of racism or sexism by radical online activists. This causes them intense embarrassment and, by triggering a social taboo, may lead others to pile on them to signal virtue. This can damage a person’s reputation well beyond politics. Something of this fate has befallen the patriotic leftists of Blue Labour in the UK, who are no longer welcome in Labour circles. Brexit-supporting Paul Embery, for instance, was kicked out of the Fire Brigades Union for criticizing the union’s position on Brexit. This, they alleged, made him an accomplice of the “nationalist Right” and thus a “disgrace to the traditions of the Labour movement.” No wonder few on the Left are willing to move right on culture.

The catalyst for the change has been the post-1960s “cultural turn” of the intellectual Left, away from class issues toward the problems of disadvantaged race, gender, and sexual identity groups. Social sanctions accompanied this change of sensibility.

Do they ever! In Nashville, I was asked by a visiting British person if I have any liberal friends. Yes, I said, but we never discuss politics or controversial cultural issues. I was a bit surprised to realize how completely I have shut down about politics and culture-war stuff in personal conversation with people I don’t know in advance are conservative. Many conservative friends of mine are Trump fans, and don’t like how negative I am about him, even though I’m not a NeverTrumper. But we can and do talk about it. I would never discuss things like this with liberals, not because I don’t want to hear what they have to say, but because their self-righteousness and indignation is unbearable. Not every liberal, of course, but you never really know when you’re going to find yourself in a discussion with someone on the Left who will decide that you are not just wrong, but evil, and who will take it upon themselves to campaign against you, both personally and professionally. In my own case, the nature of my job means that this kind of thing wouldn’t really hurt me professionally, but most people are not professional conservatives. I completely get why this kind of thing is not only uncomfortable in a social setting, but genuinely frightening for them in terms of their professional lives.

There’s a certain kind of person I tend to meet — people who don’t really know my work. When they find out that I work for a conservative magazine, they do a little rhetorical dance to find out where I stand on Trump. When they discover that despite my criticism of Trump, I’m not going to hate on them for being a Trump supporter, they let down their guard, and say what they really think. This happens a lot, always with middle-class corporate or professional types. It has happened so many times, usually when I’m traveling out of the South, that it makes me angry, on their behalf. These are people who have been made to feel ashamed for things they have no reason to feel ashamed of. And they live in fear in the workplace. When they hold a pro-Trump position with which I don’t agree, we talk about it like normal people. If the Left weren’t so censorious and powerful within certain institutions, liberals and progressives would be able to talk to these people and challenge them on their views. Maybe they would change the Trumpers’ minds. But that’s not how things work, not with these McCarthyite leftists.

The problem is that right-wing politicians win power when people disgusted by political correctness vote for them, but these things really don’t change. Have the media learned anything from this? Of course not — if anything, the identity-politics leftism has gotten more shrill. Has the Age of Trump caused corporations to ease up on the wokeness, or universities? Hardly! I wish Trump and the GOP would attack institutional wokeness more directly, like, for example, revoking Title IX, or at least greatly modifying it. The Republicans are scared too. Most of them come from the same bourgeois professional backgrounds, and move in the same class circles, as the shrill cultural leftists.

Did you see this piece the other day on Medium by a woman named Karlyn Borysenko, a New Hampshire Democrat who did something recently she never imagined she would do. Excerpts:

If you had told me three years ago that I would ever attend a Donald Trump rally, I would have laughed and assured you that was never going to happen. Heck, if you had told me I would do it three months ago, I probably would have done the same thing. So, how did I find myself among 11,000-plus Trump supporters in Manchester, New Hampshire? Believe it or not, it all started with knitting.

You might not think of the knitting world as a particularly political community, but you’d be wrong. Many knitters are active in social justice communities and love to discuss the revolutionary role knitters have played in our culture. I started noticing this about a year ago, particularly on Instagram. I knit as a way to relax and escape the drama of real life, not to further engage with it. But it was impossible to ignore after roving gangs of online social justice warriors started going after anyone in the knitting community who was not lockstep in their ideology. Knitting stars on Instagram were bullied and mobbed by hundreds of people for seemingly innocuous offenses. One man got mobbed so badly that he had a nervous breakdown and was admitted to the hospital on suicide watch. Many things were not right about the hatred, and witnessing the vitriol coming from those I had aligned myself with politically was a massive wake-up call.

She says that she has always thought of Trump and his supporters as horrible people, but the progressive bullying in her online knitting circle made her wonder if she had that right. The more she thought about it, the more curious she became about an upcoming Trump rally in her backyard. She went — and found that she really liked the people there. Even when she told them that she was a Democrat, they welcomed her. More:

Now, Trump is always going to present the best case he can. And yes, he lies. This is provable. But the strength of this rally wasn’t about the facts and figures. It was a group of people who felt like they had someone in their corner, who would fight for them. Some people say, “Well, obviously they’re having a great time. They’re in a cult.” I don’t think that’s true. The reality is that many people I spoke to do disagree with Trump on things. They don’t always like his attitude. They wish he wouldn’t tweet so much. People who are in cults don’t question their leaders. The people I spoke with did, but the pros in their eyes far outweighed the cons. They don’t love him because they think he’s perfect. They love him despite his flaws, because they believe he has their back.

Read the whole thing. Borosyenko says in the piece that she voted for Buttigieg in the NH Democratic primary, then went to change her party registration to Independent. Here’s proof:

Ok, it took a few extra days because of article going viral insanity, but here’s proof that I have officially left the Democratic Party. Bye bye @dnc, you shady bastards. #WalkAway pic.twitter.com/AJJQElyTYu

— Dr. Karlyn Borysenko (@DrKarlynB) February 14, 2020

Borysenko’s essay brought to mind this December 2016 letter I received from a reader, which I made into a blog post that drew lots of comment. It begins:

I’m a secular/agnostic Californian and longtime reader of your blog. I’ve enjoyed your books beginning with Crunchy Cons, and have valued your insights over the years.

Though you don’t know me, I feel like I know you and your family. And I want to share with you, from the liberal bastion of Northern California, that I am officially tired of the type of people who have surrounded me my entire life. In the wake of Trump’s election, I am experiencing “tribe fatigue.” I’m not tired of The Other, Detestable Tribe. I’m tired of my own.

A bit about me: I am a [deleted] with two young children. My parents were non-religious Democrats, and my ex-Catholic mom loathes organized religion to this day.

So I was raised a secular liberal. My college professors were secular liberals. During my journalism phase, my newspaper colleagues were secular liberals. My law school professors and peers were – in the vast majority – secular liberals. Almost everyone at my corporate law firm was a secular liberal. My California neighbors and friends are secular liberals, as are my colleagues. My mother, siblings, and their spouses are all secular liberals.

By all rights, I should be a member in good standing of their tribe, “liking” their Facebook posts and joining their candlelight vigils against the evil Trump Administration. But November 8 and its aftermath revealed to me that I am just so tired of these people. I can’t be like them, and I don’t want my kids turning into them.

I don’t have cable TV, so I can’t speak for television, but you know who you rarely if ever read about in The New York Times, or the Washington Post, or hear about on NPR? People like this. People like Karlyn Borysenko. To be fair to journalists, the Left has created such an environment in this country, with its cancel culture, that ordinary people are afraid to say what they really think, even if a reporter inquires in good faith. And I don’t for a second believe that both sides are equally at fault here. I remind you of Eric Kaufmann’s observation:

To be blunt, left-wing political correctness is more powerful than the right-wing variant. For instance, many social conservatives may dislike environmentalist candidates in their ranks, but dissidents on the left of a conservative party won’t have their character questioned and reputation trashed.

Are there vicious, nasty people on the Right who troll others and threaten them? Yes, there are (ask David French about that — his family was harassed mercilessly during 2016 for his Never Trump public stance). But those people are on the fringes of the Right. The haters and harassers on the Left are not just antifa, but are embedded and empowered throughout institutional bureaucracies. Remember James Lindsay:

The problem of Critical Social Justice isn’t just a thing off in the universities somewhere in Narnia, and it’s not just some weird kids or activists. It’s at work. It’s at school. It’s at home. It’s in your relaxation and entertainment. People are getting sick of it.

 

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American In China: ‘Stock Up Now’

I have been told three times in the last three days to stock up on basic supplies, including medicines, because there is about to be a huge shortage. The first two who told me this were doctors. Now this message comes via a friend, who got it from an old family friend in China. The author is an American who has been living in China for eight years. I have permission to share this as long as I take the author’s name off. The friend who shared it with me said that reading this, coming from a man she knows and trusts, has made the coronavirus threat real. The American in China sent it to his US friends. Read on:

TL/DR:  big impact coming on medical supplies, vitamins, and drugs.  Stock up now.

Hi all.  So the Corona Virus has shut down all of East and Central China and is now moving across other countries in Asia.  This is going to have deep and almost immediate effects on goods and products that are for sale in the US, on everything from auto parts to zippers.

Of greatest concern for now is what it will do to supplies of medical equipment and drugs, everything from band aids and cotton swabs and vitamins and prescription drugs of all kinds.  Also, protective gear like face masks and hazmat suits.

I strongly advise that you prepare your families accordingly, and consider begin stocking up on some of these items that will be in very high demand, very soon.  China makes of 90% of the drug ingredients and about 80% of the medical supplies used in the United States, and right now, nobody in China is making them at all.

I have been living in China for eight years and am on Wechat (a social networking app) with about 800 expatriate business executives across China.  The economy here no longer exists, basically.  It’s been closed for 3 weeks, and nobody really knows when the manufacturing sector or any of the factories will reopen.

Martial law has been declared in eight provinces with a total population of 500 million people, and the rest of us outside these zones have had our movements proscribed to going out to get groceries once every two days.  Army and police in the Eastern provinces (where most of the industry is) are arresting people who are outside their homes, though even that isn’t as effective as before because now so many military and police units are infected and unable to function.  There are very few flights available in; the roads and ports are closed, railroads shut down.  Even if a factory owner can get permission to open, his workers aren’t allowed to move, and he can’t ship product out.  This will go on for an indeterminate period.

For the kinds of drugs and supplies I’ve mentioned above, the export markets will not be getting any new production for many weeks.  These supplies and medicines are in critical and desperate supply here and the Chinese government has ordered local governments to procure whatever is necessary from factories and shops.  The true numbers of the infected and dead are many orders of magnitude higher than the official accounts, which nobody really believes anymore.

A quick note about care or aid packages:  in the event you have churches or friends here in Asia who ask you to send them medical supplies, those packages will likely never arrive to where you had hoped.  The customs officials have been ordered to seize any medical supplies for use in hospitals.  Even passengers arriving in airports are having their carry-on bags and stowed luggage searched for masks, respirators, rain gear (no kidding)—anything that could be used by hospital staff to protect themselves from what they’re dealing with—and it’s being confiscated.

With respect to the disease itself, I don’t think this disease can be stopped anything short of supernatural means.  Infections continue to soar, even under military-enforced quarantines that have been in place for almost a month.  You have to see the Army response here to believe it, and yet nothing has worked.  You mercifully haven’t had many cases there, yet, but I fear that you’re just six or seven weeks behind where we are in China, and four to five weeks behind Japan.  Only a miracle can stop it, and that’s what we need to be praying for. If you’re a man or woman of faith, get some more.  If at some point you left it or lost it, go back to where you saw it last, and pick it up again.

Meanwhile, an Italian friend sends this along from The New York Times. Excerpt:

“If this happens in Africa it will be a huge struggle because the health services are quite overstretched dealing with ongoing diseases like malaria and measles and the current Ebola outbreak,” said Michel Yao, the World Health Organization’s Emergency Operations Program Manager for Africa.

Africa was largely spared in 2002 and 2003 when the SARS virus, which also originated in China, spread around the world, killing nearly 800 people and infecting more than 8,000, mostly in China and Hong Kong. Africa reported only one case, in South Africa.

But the risk is far greater now, experts say. China and Africa have become intertwined in the last two decades as China has expanded its political, economic, and military ties to Africa, funding large infrastructure projects and pledging tens of billions of dollars in investments and loans.

Chinese citizens have flocked to Africa, working in industries ranging from manufacturing and technology to health care and construction. Estimates of how many Chinese are now living in Africa range from about 200,000 to as many as two million.

Air travel between China and Africa has increased exponentially in the last decade alone, from one flight a day to an average of eight direct flights.

He adds:

Yesterday I had an extensive chat with a colleague of mine whose wife is a microbiologist at [a major Italian university].

Africa is the major concern. The continent’s health infrastructure is virtually non-existent and China has huge interests and lots of people there. The Times reports about the 8 direct flights a day, but epidemiologists have calculated there are about 4,000 indirect flight routes between China and Africa.

On the up side, if the contagion is successfully contained until spring, we will have time until next winter to develop a vaccine or an anti-viral.

In the meantime, if the flu spreads to Africa, it will stay there all year round. In fact, for reasons not completely understood, the virus survives in tropical rainy climates much better than in temperate climate summers.

On the other hand, US experts are saying that we just don’t know if warm weather will retard the virus’s spread. That’s typically how it works with viruses, but we don’t have enough experience yet with this one to say for sure:

Influenza viruses, too, do not show typical seasonal patterns in tropical areas, and the new coronavirus has already landed in those parts of the world.

The new coronavirus “seems to circulate quite nicely in tropical areas,” such as Singapore, Fisman said in an email, “so it seems to me unlikely that it would stop circulating simply because of warmer weather.”

Lipsitch added that if temperature or humidity are important factors for this new virus, air conditioning could undermine some of the potential benefit hot and humid climates bring.

“An April end to the outbreak would be truly astonishing,” Lipsitch said. “I think it will just be getting under way in much of the world.”

If this thing reaches Africa, you can look for an exodus across the Mediterranean the likes of which history has never seen. European governments are going to have to sink those boats to prevent them from landing, or allow them to land, and be overwhelmed by the human tide of potentially disease-carrying people. One way or the other, it will be an apocalypse.

Wait, did I say “if this thing reaches Africa”? In the time I’ve been working on this post, news has broken:

BREAKING: Africa has its first case of @COVID19, in Egypt. This is the news we have been fearing and reporting on. #Africa #Egypt https://t.co/hIv9WoswAt

— COVID-19 Perspective (@nCoVPerspectiv1) February 14, 2020

(That’s a good news aggregator to follow on Twitter, by the way.)

A new paper from scientists at Los Alamos National Laboratory, where they work on disease modeling, is pretty alarming:

A recent paper estimates the R0 value for #Coronavirus at between 4.7 and 6.6. This is significantly higher than other estimates, and would make containment extremely difficult.https://t.co/1GbMbp8I4O #COVID19

— COVID-19 Perspective (@nCoVPerspectiv1) February 15, 2020

The director of the US CDC says that this virus will probably be with us for some time to come:

“We don’t know a lot about this virus,” he said. “This virus is probably with us beyond this season, beyond this year, and I think eventually the virus will find a foothold and we will get community-based transmission.”

This has been going around social media:

Coronavirus: “This virus… concerns me the most of everything I’ve worked on.” A scientist at the forefront of researching the coronavirus says it could “potentially” spread to 60% of the population.#Coronavirus #COVID19 #CoronavirusOutbreak pic.twitter.com/ls3AcaqMLj

— jimgreen (@sixtus_jimgreen) February 15, 2020

The question then becomes: what would the mortality rate be?

 

The post American In China: ‘Stock Up Now’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Christianity, Culture, And Politics

Here’s a solid critique of contemporary cultural conservatism, by the British writer Mary Harrington. She is a conservative herself, I gather, bbut is not impressed by the Christianized conservatism of some populist leaders and movements. She gets at the heart of the matter when she said that we can’t agree on the source of political authority.

This leaves would-be conservatives in a bind. If (with a few honourable exceptions still holding out for direct Vatican rule) political authority rests not in tradition (too restrictive on personal liberty) or democracy (probably rigged) or even God (don’t tell ME what to do!) or even in the lawyers, then what is left? Politics professor Matt McManus argues that the result is a postmodernism of the right as well as of the left: a series of nested calls for a return to authority, tradition and culture that all, on closer inspection, turn out to be largely delivery mechanisms for adversarial but hollow identity politics.

Having come unmoored from its roots either in the past, the divine, or the popular will, McManus suggests that this postmodern conservatism has warped a Burkean belief in tradition into a kind of moral cosplay whose main purpose is less seeking the good life than making a noisy defence of whichever identities its sworn enemies attack. As the postmodern liberal-left demonises heterosexual white males, so postmodern conservatism sets out to defend them; and so on.

Seen in this light, the problem with Orbàn and other borrowers of Christian clothing is not that they do not believe their own words. Inasmuch as they can mean anything, they genuinely identify as Christians. It is more that when all sources of authority are suspect, the only legitimate recourse is to the self: to identity, and identification.

More:

Without a sense of confidence in the roots of its political legitimacy, conservative values dissolve from concrete obligations to consumer accessories. This in turn is why Orbànist “Christian democracy” and many of its populist cousins find their most compelling realisation not in religious doctrine or observance, but in defining themselves against their outgroup. If “even an atheist is a Christian” then either no one is a Christian, or everyone is. The only way of defining what a Christian is, is in terms of what it is not: foreigners.

But if this is so, then in a postmodern environment, shorn of recourse to authority, cultural conservatism is a waste of energy. It cannot define what it wants. All is insubstantial; there is no exit from the Matrix, nothing left to conserve.

Read it all.

That “even an atheist is a Christian” phrase refers to something an Orban-supporting bishop said about Europe: that even atheists are cultural Christians, in the sense that they live within a culture built on Christian foundations, even if they don’t actually believe in God.

I understand that bishop’s sentiment, and I don’t think I would be as hard on him as Morrison. It’s the same sentiment behind the historian (and unbeliever) Tom Holland’s discovery that many of the things he values the most about our civilization are the gifts of the Christian religion. He wrote:

“We preach Christ crucified,” St Paul declared, “unto the Jews a stumbling block, and unto the Greeks foolishness.” He was right. Nothing could have run more counter to the most profoundly held assumptions of Paul’s contemporaries – Jews, or Greeks, or Romans. The notion that a god might have suffered torture and death on a cross was so shocking as to appear repulsive. Familiarity with the biblical narrative of the Crucifixion has dulled our sense of just how completely novel a deity Christ was. In the ancient world, it was the role of gods who laid claim to ruling the universe to uphold its order by inflicting punishment – not to suffer it themselves.

Today, even as belief in God fades across the West, the countries that were once collectively known as Christendom continue to bear the stamp of the two-millennia-old revolution that Christianity represents. It is the principal reason why, by and large, most of us who live in post-Christian societies still take for granted that it is nobler to suffer than to inflict suffering. It is why we generally assume that every human life is of equal value. In my morals and ethics, I have learned to accept that I am not Greek or Roman at all, but thoroughly and proudly Christian.

As a believer, I wince at the bishop’s advocacy of cultural Christianity, but let’s recognize that it’s not an empty concept. A liberal nonbeliever will have a far easier and happier time living in the lands that were once Christian than in, say, the lands that are Islamic. This is not an accident. And it is not a bad thing for people to be aware of that, and to wish to protect those things that Christianity brought — most especially the liberties of the Christian churches to be themselves. We are going to be a worse place once Christianity has completely faded from the public consciousness. I recognize that there is a potential blessing in this, because it will purify the Church. But a Russian Orthodox priest last year told me that we Americans shouldn’t be so blasé about what it may mean to lose Christianity as a public ethos. Christianity in Russia has not recovered from the Bolshevik persecution. I often meet Americans, Orthodox and otherwise, who rave about the rebirth of Christianity in Russia. It is certainly something to be celebrated, and to thank God for, but only a very small percentage of Russians go to church. The recovery of Christianity in Russia is going to be the work of generations, maybe even centuries, if it happens at all.

From a strictly theological point of view, cultural Christianity is as hollow as Harrington says.  But from a political point of view, I think we believers should not be as quick to dismiss it. I think often about a phrase I heard attributed to Orban: “I can give you things, but I can’t give you meaning.” He was talking about the limits of politics, and that people who expect politics to provide ultimate meaning are doomed to disappointment. It may be the case that Orban, a believing Protestant, would like to impose concrete obligations upon his people, but he is also a democratically elected leader. Is it really fair to expect him, or any democratically elected Christian leader, to govern an unbelieving and unwilling populace by imposing laws and policies that they do not and will not support?

It’s natural too that Christians would define themselves against the outgroup, especially when they are a minority within a pluralistic culture. Prior to the 18th and 19th centuries, European Christians had no reason to think of the political order as other than Christian. You only began to see parties like the “Christian Democrats” when it became possible to organize as a political party against the Christian ethos. I get that it can be problematic from a theological perspective to define oneself by what one is not than what one is — though Orthodox Christianity has long experience with apophatic theology (that is, a theological approach that defines God by what He is not.) Apophatic theology doesn’t easily apply to political categories, but I did want to bring it up to say that it is not unheard of for Christians to think in this way. Generally, I agree with Morrison that we have to be really careful when people say that being Christian is being “not Muslim,” for example — even though that it undeniably true.

If this sounds muddled to you, it’s because, well, it is. I’m trying to think through what Morrison is saying. I have an instinctive aversion to a Christianity that is merely cultural, because I take the claims of the Christian faith seriously. On the other hand, I try to resist the weird idea that any cultural expression of Christianity, or Christian cultural framework, is somehow a betrayal of Christianity. As the church historian Robert Louis Wilken has written, the Church was and is a culture, because that is how the theological ideas and transcendent realities to which the religion points are mediated to us mortals.

So: a Christian culture is necessary for the Christian religion to thrive, but it is not the same thing as the Christian religion. Those who confuse the two will end up losing both the Christian religion and the Christian culture.

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