Rod Dreher's Blog, page 174

Jordan Peterson Is Sick

Jordan Peterson has had a hell of a year. From the National Post:

Jordan Peterson is recovering from a severe addiction to benzodiazepine tranquilizers and was recently near death in an induced coma, his daughter Mikhaila said.

He is being treated at a clinic in Russia after being repeatedly misdiagnosed at several hospitals in North America, she said.

The University of Toronto psychologist who became an intellectual hero to a global audience by aligning self-help theory with anti-progressive politics was first prescribed the medication a few years ago to treat anxiety after what Mikhaila described as an autoimmune reaction to food. His physical dependence on it became apparent to his family last April, when his wife Tammy was diagnosed with cancer.

More:

Jordan Peterson has only just come out of an intensive care unit, Mikhaila said. He has neurological damage, and a long way to go to full recovery. He is taking anti-seizure medication and cannot type or walk unaided, but is “on the mend” and his sense of humour has returned.

So: a man who has been open about his struggles with depression becomes addicted to prescription benzos (e.g., Valium), and nearly dies in detox … and lots of people who hate Jordan Peterson laugh at that.

Unbelievable!

Here’s Jonathan Kay on the people who are taking pleasure in Peterson’s suffering:

Ironically, the anti-Petersonians now seem far more fanatical than Peterson’s most faithful fans. This became clear in recent days, when some of Peterson’s critics — including, amazingly, a professor at the University of Ottawa — went online to express satisfaction that Peterson is being treated for dependence on benzodiazepine, an anti-anxiety medication. It was a shockingly ghoulish response. It was also comically hypocritical, given that these are the same people who typically spend much of their waking lives boasting publicly of their commitment to social justice, and who insist on using the language of genocide to describe acts of misgendering or cultural appropriation. All cults dehumanize their critics and perceived enemies. And the self-described social-justice proponents who regard Peterson as a secular demon are no different.

More:

For those who want to understand the true Jordan Peterson, flaws and all, I recommend the above-referenced documentary, “The Rise of Jordan Peterson,” which was produced by the Toronto-based husband-and-wife team of Patricia Marcoccia and Maziar Ghaderi (whom I recently interviewed for the Quillette podcast). Lest you think this is hagiography, it’s not. In fact, Marcoccia and Ghaderi began the project well before Peterson rose to fame in 2016. Their original focus was Peterson’s deep involvement with a B.C.-based indigenous group, and they switched to a more general biographical focus only after he became a celebrated international figure.

One of the amazing things you will see in the film is that, wherever the filming takes place, ordinary passersby approach Peterson to tell him how his work has helped them overcome self-doubt and depression. This is the human reality behind the fact that Peterson’s self-help book has sold more than two million copies. Whatever you think about his academic ideas, he is clearly helping people make sense of the world.

When I look at the people who despise Peterson most, on the other hand, they are people who help no one — most of them being social-media addicts and literary mediocrities who could walk Toronto streets from dawn till dusk without a single person recognizing them, let alone thanking them for their work. So if you’re looking for demons, which fits the role more perfectly: the troubled academic who took medication to deal with his wife’s cancer and the strains of life in the public spotlight — or the social-justice hashtag sadists who revel in his misery?

Read the whole thing. That poor man has helped so many people. Pray for him. I cannot for the life of me understand the sort of wretched person who would delight in the pain of others who had done no wrong, but simply held dislikable views.

The post Jordan Peterson Is Sick appeared first on The American Conservative.

Meds From China

A physician who reads this blog sends along this summary of the Government Accounting Office’s report in December warning of the vulnerability of US drug supply lines. From the GAO report:

More than 60 percent of establishments manufacturing drugs for the U.S. market were located overseas in fiscal year 2018. FDA has estimated that about 40 percent of finished drugs and 80 percent of active drug ingredients are manufactured overseas. FDA is responsible for overseeing the safety and effectiveness of all drugs marketed in the United States, regardless of where they are produced and conducts inspections of both foreign and domestic drug manufacturing establishments. GAO has had long-standing concerns about FDA’s ability to oversee the increasingly global supply chain, an issue highlighted in GAO’s High Risk Series for the last 10 years. GAO recommended in 2008 (GAO-08-970) that FDA increase the number of inspections of foreign drug establishments. GAO found in 2010 (GAO-10-961) and 2016 (GAO-17-143) that FDA was conducting more of these foreign drug inspections, but GAO also reported that FDA may have never inspected many establishments manufacturing drugs for the U.S. market.

The GAO’s concern is about drug quality, but notice the part I highlighted above. Most drugs are made overseas. In this map from that GAO report, we see that over 400 such facilities are in China:

WIRED reports:

The biggest problem is that there is no publicly available information on what portion of which critical medicines originate in China, and specifically where those factories are located, she says. Pharmaceutical companies consider such information to be proprietary. “One of the big unknowns is how many products are sole-sourced—in which literally only one place in the world makes that raw material,” she says. “We don’t have good information on that at all.”

China has 15 percent of the world’s facilities that manufacture active pharmaceutical ingredients for 370 essential drugs, while the US has 21 percent of those facilities, according to the FDA. But the agency doesn’t know how much those facilities produce—if they produce anything at all.

That lack of information is unsettling. “What is the threat to our national health care if there is some kind of geopolitical issue or an outbreak like this or some kind of natural disaster? We really don’t know,” says Michael Ganio, director of pharmacy practice and quality at the American Society of Health-System Pharmacists.

More:

“All it takes is one plant to shut down to cause a global shortage. That’s because there’s such concentration of global production in China,” says Rosemary Gibson, author of China Rx and a strong advocate for rebuilding domestic capabilities.

“This is a warning to the United States and other countries,” she adds. “If you have a supply chain concentrated in a single country, no matter what country it is, that’s a risk of epic proportions.”

Congress should prepare legislation now to address this problem. It’s too late for the coronavirus crisis, but maybe not for future crises.

The post Meds From China appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Doric Columns Of Dachau

You’ll never believe what Trump is up to now!

This may not seem like the most dangerous thing we face, but it’s one of the warning signs of fascism and…wait for it…genocide. The cult of antiquity & the imposition of monuments to a nation’s mythical glorious past precede both of those disasters. https://t.co/4eyMfqK3FD

— Glenda Gilmore (@GilmoreGlenda) February 8, 2020

That’s an actual Yale University historian claiming that the White House’s desire that future federal buildings be constructed according to the Classical (Greco-Roman) style which is already standard in historic Washington buildings is a sign of the coming Nazification of America. (Note well: actual Hitler, and actual Mussolini, built horrible Modernist buildings as their signature styles.) If you don’t build this ugly-ass modern crap that nobody but professors and architecture critics like, you’re a Nazi!

In this great piece, Justin Lee waylays these screaming-meemies. Lee teaches at a Brutalist university (UC Irvine) so hideous that the producers of Planet of the Apes chose it as an example of dystopian architecture. Excerpts:

Knowledge of the post hoc ergo propter hoc informal fallacy seems not to have penetrated Yale’s rarified air. Even so, the Nazi infatuation with classicism was far from straightforward. They embraced a utilitarian and minimalist bastardization of classical forms. This “stripped neoclassicism” was modern in ways hostile to the neoclassicism embraced by the United States. Hitler himself rejected “stupid imitations of the past” and insisted that the modernist axiom “form should follow function” be observed. As the Oxford Dictionary of Architecture notes, Hitler was strongly influenced by Bauhaus, a quintessentially German aesthetic which many see as the apogee of architectural modernism. Bauhaus — its philosophy and some members of its school — was even used in the design of certain concentration camps. Contra Professor Gilmore, Doric columns do not lead to Dachau.

Lee cites one critic of the president’s saying that his proposal is a sin against “diversity.” Which is incredibly trite and idiotic. Ours is an Enlightenment Republic founded on the belief that Greco-Roman ideals are universal, and universally accessible. More:

Hurley’s concern over the aesthetic predilections of a “white male elite” can equally be extended to the modernist, postmodernist, and hypermodernist alternatives to classical and traditional architecture. Their origins are no less white. Indeed, for anyone who gives credence to the category of “whiteness” while also valuing consistency, these alternatives are significantly whiter. Whereas one encounters some version of metaphysical realism everywhere humans have established communities, modernism and hypermodernism are uniquely the products of white cultural decadence.

“Hypermodernism,” argues [Notre Dame architecture professor Philip] Bess,

is essentially modernism shorn of its confident consensus and moral and rationalist agendas. … Put another way, hypermodernism is modernism unmasked. It is subjectivism, relativism, and individualism writ in and at the scale of buildings and cities. Hypermodernism is the architecture of the global economy, taking as premises certain modern material conditions and construction practices, and therefore certain aesthetic possibilities that follow from them.

Hypermodernism is exactly what its detractors claim it to be: a nihilistic, often narcissistic, therapeutic technique for reconciling atomized individuals to their place within the enervating decadence of the late-capitalist order.

Read it all.It’s pretty great. Nothing, and I mean nothing, makes me more likely to sympathize with Trump than his enemies. Donald Trump, the building of Trump Tower and various casinos, is nobody’s idea of an architectural good-taste-haver, but good grief, when the academic and cultural elites accuse him of being a fascist simply for questioning the horrible buildings they uglify the public space with, using taxpayer money, then I’m all for him. Note well: if Trump wanted to build federal buildings in the style of condo towers or casinos, I’d be all against him. He’s talking about making federal buildings look like the classical style that most everybody loves and associates with the federal government. 

And for this, he’s a Nazi, according to a Yale professor and others.

The post-1950 buildings in Washington are almost uniformly hideous. They make you want to hate the government. When I first moved to DC, I would look at the old Classical buildings, and feel a sense of civic pride, of elevation. Then I would look at the more recent federal buildings, and feel that the state was nothing but a faceless hulk that wanted to crush people. This below, though not technically a US Government building, gets my vote for the ugliest Modernist carbuncle in Washington. It’s the Pan American Health Organization headquarters (1965):

 

I was surprised to realize it was the HQ of a government agency. I thought it was the Fram corporation’s mothership:

The post The Doric Columns Of Dachau appeared first on The American Conservative.

After The Nuclear Family

David Brooks has a big piece in The Atlantic today about how the nuclear family has collapsed, and how people are trying new ways of building family-like structures from the rubble. Excerpts:

If you want to summarize the changes in family structure over the past century, the truest thing to say is this: We’ve made life freer for individuals and more unstable for families. We’ve made life better for adults but worse for children. We’ve moved from big, interconnected, and extended families, which helped protect the most vulnerable people in society from the shocks of life, to smaller, detached nuclear families (a married couple and their children), which give the most privileged people in society room to maximize their talents and expand their options. The shift from bigger and interconnected extended families to smaller and detached nuclear families ultimately led to a familial system that liberates the rich and ravages the working-class and the poor.

This article is about that process, and the devastation it has wrought—and about how Americans are now groping to build new kinds of family and find better ways to live.

More:

When you put everything together, we’re likely living through the most rapid change in family structure in human history. The causes are economic, cultural, and institutional all at once. People who grow up in a nuclear family tend to have a more individualistic mind-set than people who grow up in a multigenerational extended clan. People with an individualistic mind-set tend to be less willing to sacrifice self for the sake of the family, and the result is more family disruption. People who grow up in disrupted families have more trouble getting the education they need to have prosperous careers. People who don’t have prosperous careers have trouble building stable families, because of financial challenges and other stressors. The children in those families become more isolated and more traumatized.

Many people growing up in this era have no secure base from which to launch themselves and no well-defined pathway to adulthood. For those who have the human capital to explore, fall down, and have their fall cushioned, that means great freedom and opportunity—and for those who lack those resources, it tends to mean great confusion, drift, and pain.

Read it all. Seriously, read it all. It’s superb, despite its flaws. Sociologists Wendy Wang and Brad Wilcox say the data on the “extended family” model that Brooks proposes are not encouraging. From my point of view, the essay’s major flaw is in its ignoring the role of religion. I wrote about this in a short essay posted at the Institute For Family Studies, and reproduced here. I agree that the nuclear family was unstable, for all the reasons Brooks cites. But I have a much more pessimistic view of where things go from here:

In The Atlantic today, David Brooks says the nuclear family has actually been falling apart for a hundred years. Carle C. Zimmerman would have agreed with him. In his unjustly forgotten 1947 book Family And Civilization, the Harvard sociologist said that Americans had built a culture that conspired against family formation—the very thing that makes our civilization possible. Zimmerman wrote:

There is little left now within the family or the moral code to hold this family together. Mankind has consumed not only the  crop,  but the seed for the next planting as well. Whatever may be our Pollyanna inclination, this fact cannot be avoided. Under any assumptions, the implications will be far-reaching for the future not only of the family but of our civilization as well. The question is no longer a moral one; it is social. It is no longer familistic; it is cultural. The very continuation of our culture seems to be inextricably associated with this nihilism in family behavior.

Zimmerman did not foresee the Baby Boom, which was just beginning as he published, but otherwise, he was on target. Though not a religious believer, Zimmerman observed that the Christian churches of the 1940s collectively represented the only force resisting the disintegration of the family.

It must have seemed that way once, but it has not been the case for a very long time. As Mary Eberstadt argued in her 2013 book, How The West Really Lost God, the very continuation of the church also seems to be inextricably associated with this nihilism in family behavior.

In talking with my own Christian friends struggling in their marriages, it is clear that in almost all cases—Protestant, Catholic, and Orthodox—the institutional church is not a meaningful part of shoring up their commitment to marriage, except in an abstract sense. For most, congregational life is the thinnest of communities. Catholics, for example, lament that their parishes are impersonal “sacrament factories.” Evangelicals tell me that their congregations may be somewhat thicker, but like all other American Christian churches, are so saturated by individualism that they can’t persuasively frame marriage as much more than a lightly sacralized contract between willing parties. There is no escaping modernity.

We will not have a revival of the family without a revival of religion—and not just sentimental, therapeutic Christianity, but a rigorous, disciplined, countercultural form of the faith that can impart to people the hope they need to embrace suffering and choose life amid the dissipation and decadence of the world.

Why are the churches so absent, or at least so impotent, in the task of forming and defending families? Brooks writes:

Eli Finkel, a psychologist and marriage scholar at Northwestern University, has argued that since the 1960s, the dominant family culture has been the “self-expressive marriage.” “Americans,” he has written, “now look to marriage increasingly for self-discovery, self-esteem and personal growth.” Marriage, according to the sociologists Kathryn Edin and Maria Kefalas, “is no longer primarily about childbearing and childrearing. Now marriage is primarily about adult fulfillment.” 

So is religion! And it became so at the same time that marriage and family were changing, under the same atomizing pressures. As early as the mid-1960s, the sociologist Philip Rieff identified the profound therapeutic shift in American culture, and the self-deceptive eagerness of the clergy to pretend it wasn’t happening.

Brooks explains that people today are experimenting with new forms of family-like communal living—“forged families” as he puts it—who are trying to find something to replace what we have lost. One can only hope for their success, but no reader of Zimmerman can be optimistic that family systems can recover absent real religious commitment. The same experimentation is beginning to happen here and there in Christian life. The renunciation of the contemporary concept of marriage and religion as about self-fulfillment, and the rediscovery of both as self-sacrificial, firmly grounded in the divine, is the only way out of this dark wood.

This is, obviously, a narrow and unappealing path, and not many will take it— until they learn, as the pilgrim Dante did at the start of his arduous journey, that all other ways forward are closed.

Family And Civilization is a work of historical sociology in which the author explains how the rise and fall of Greek, Roman, and medieval European civilizations depended on changing family forms. Zimmerman makes a case that the “atomistic” family—what we call the nuclear family—is always the final form before civilization collapses, having lost to hedonism and radical individualism what is needed to hold society together.

Zimmerman concluded his great book by reiterating that we know why civilization is falling apart—“the lack of a basic belief in the forces which make it work”— and we know that eventually, “the necessary remedy” will be applied.

Zimmerman’s tragedy is that he, as a man of social science and not of faith, could not admit the conclusion to which his premises lead: that civilization will not recover until it collectively rediscovers religion—one that, like early and medieval Christianity, puts family and fertility close to the center of both its authoritative belief system and lived experience.

We will not have a revival of the family without a revival of religion—and not just sentimental, therapeutic Christianity, but a rigorous, disciplined, countercultural form of the faith that can impart to people the hope they need to embrace suffering and choose life amid the dissipation and decadence of the world. It has been said before, and it remains true: we really are waiting for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

I believe that we will see a much stronger desire for socialism in the Millennial and post-Millennial generations, in part to make up for the loss of family, and the natural solidarity produced by familistic culture. I like this part of Brooks’s piece:

In other words, while social conservatives have a philosophy of family life they can’t operationalize, because it no longer is relevant [because the social and economic conditions that support the nuclear family no longer exist — RD], progressives have no philosophy of family life at all, because they don’t want to seem judgmental. The sexual revolution has come and gone, and it’s left us with no governing norms of family life, no guiding values, no articulated ideals. On this most central issue, our shared culture often has nothing relevant to say—and so for decades things have been falling apart.

He’s right about that. You won’t see progressives saying or proposing anything that would violate the sacred precepts of the Sexual Revolution. And, as we know, conservatives have been loath to propose anything that curtails economic liberty. But I think that is changing, and certainly conservatives have more room to maneuver on the right than progressives do on the left. On the Right, majorities are more willing to let go of free-market dogmas. In fact, after Trump, there will be no return to free-market neoliberalism. The candidates who will rise to lead the party are those who find some way to articulate Trumpist solidarity in an appealing, coherent, and policy-rich way. Progressives, though, are rigidly locked into their Sexual Revolution dogmas, because they have made an identity of sexual desire. To rethink sexual freedom is anathema.

The post After The Nuclear Family appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Blindness Of National Conservatism Critics

The journalist Anne Applebaum was at last week’s National Conservatism conference in Rome. To no one’s surprise, she didn’t like it. She did make a mistake, though, in her report for The Atlantic:

But other speakers in Rome also reflected an almost paranoid sense of persecution. The idea that “the nation” has been outlawed is clearly something that a certain breed of conservative now genuinely perceives to be true. The American Catholic writer Ron Dreher solemnly described a world in which he felt repressed, just as people had been under totalitarian communism. “The all-consuming ideology among us is … a globalist, victim-focused identity politics, often called ‘social justice,’” he warned, calling on audience members to think of themselves as Christians persecuted for their faith in the past.

Not sure what Ron Dreher of The American Catholic had to say, but the speech given by Rod Dreher, the Orthodox Christian who writes for The American Conservative is at the bottom of this post, printed in full.

Her misidentifying me and this magazine is a minor error, though. She is a superb journalist whose books I have learned from. I invite you to read the speech and decide if Applebaum’s characterization is fair or accurate. It will displease Applebaum to learn that I draw on her book about the Sovietization of Eastern Europe, Iron Curtain, in my own forthcoming book, ‘Live Not By Lies’. There are clear comparisons between the Sovietization of the former time, and the way that secular Eurocratic elites have been scrubbing European nations and peoples of their particularity, and their religion. You wouldn’t know this from Applebaum’s characterization of my words, but I spoke about what we in the West have in common today with the pre-totalitarian condition identified by Hannah Arendt, and how many people who lived under Soviet-bloc communism are today shouting the alarm that we are building the same kind of thing right here, right now. In my speech (again, it’s in full down below), I said that this totalitarianism, when it comes, will be “soft” (I used the James Poulos phrase “pink police state”), but it will be no less totalitarian.

[UPDATE: I should point out that it’s clear from my speech that I’m not saying that I “feel repressed, just as people had been under totalitarian communism.” I am describing a world that is quickly coming into being now, via the totalitarian ideology driving “social justice” and left-wing identity politics — an ideology that liberals like Applebaum can’t seem to muster opposition to. No enemies on the Left, perhaps?]

I can see why Anne Applebaum would deny that any of this is happening, or (to be charitable) cannot see it. Her class — her husband Radek Sikorski is a leading member of the Polish opposition party, and a Member of the European Parliament — will be on top if things continue in the way they are going. They are globalist elites. I don’t use that term in a pejorative sense, but rather a descriptive one. Applebaum, Sikorski, and men and women like them really are part of the transatlantic liberal establishment. They are representatives of what Douglas Murray has called the “Davos worldview”:

 the presumption that the future was inevitably one of greater integration, where states would be giving up ever-more sovereignty, borders would be less and less important, and the world presided over by a benign, internationalist, NGO-like political class.

They really do see people who resist their liberal internationalism as backwards, as irrational enemies of progress. Applebaum calls out the “almost paranoid sense of persecution” she heard in Rome. She should put herself in the position of a Catholic family in Spain, fighting for the right to opt out of hardcore gender ideology classes the Socialist state is attempting to force on every Spanish schoolchild. She should put herself in the position of the Christian university administrators in an American state who, I learned in Spain from a reliable source (and confirmed with another once I was back in the US), have recently been told point-blank by state legislative leaders that if they don’t change their rules on LGBT, the state is going to come at them hard.

Those are just two examples. My guess is that Applebaum, if she knows about this stuff at all, assumes that it is right and proper, and part of the process of implementing Progress. The only people in Spain standing up to this are the Vox Party, which is demonized by Applebaum’s class as “far right.” In the US, we can’t even count on the Republicans to mount a defense of religious liberty in these cases, but the only realistic hope we have at the moment is from judges appointed by the Antichrist of the Liberal Internationalists, Donald Trump.

My disdain for Trump and his pomps and works is known. But in the end, he’s the only hope people like me have to protect us from the designs of politicians that people like Applebaum support. I don’t think people like that are evil, necessarily, but I know that the order they believe in and fight for is hostile to things people like me believe in and fight for. I also know that their characterization of their political opponents is often about as accurate as her characterization of me and this magazine.

Applebaum devotes the last third of her essay to criticizing Viktor Orban, who showed up as the closing act. Excerpt:

At another point, Orbán also described his political philosophy as “Christian Democracy,” implying that this is something brand-new and radical. In fact it is very old: German, Dutch, and Belgian Christian Democrats were the founders of the European Union, and Angela Merkel, a Christian Democrat and the daughter of a Protestant minister, runs Germany today. She is Christian, but not in the way Orbán or many of the Rome panelists define themselves as Christian. Her Christianity offers moral guidance, not a way to divide “us” from “them.” The latter is an aggressive new political identity that many people in the room seek, especially if it will grant them the right to abolish the rule of law when they gain power.

Well, Angela Merkel’s Christian Democracy opened the doors of Germany, and therefore of Europe, to a million Islamic refugees. This is the kind of Christianity that is going to end Christianity in Europe, and maybe Europe itself, as we have known it since forever. If that’s “Christian democracy,” I prefer to listen to what Prime Minister Orban has to say.

I want to commend to you this balanced piece on the Rome conference by Douglas Murray, who spoke there. Murray says that world political and financial events have brought the Davos worldview into serious question, but there is still a problem with the reaction. He said, quite rightly, that the word “nationalism” is heard differently by American ears than by European ones. It is wrong, he said, to assume (as many postwar liberals do) that “nationalism” is always the cause of war. But it is equally wrong to assume that it is always benign; nationalism really did play a central role in 20th century European wars. Murray goes on:

To me, at any rate, this is the aspect of the National Conservatism Conference which was most interesting. There have been efforts in parts of the press to pretend that the entire conference was filled with unacceptable far-Right elements and the like. Certainly some of those who were present are from parties which have far-Right pasts and other new parties who may well be a cause for concern in the present.

But to dismiss all of these — let alone figures like Chris de Muth, John O’Sullivan and Hazony himself — as somehow engaged in far-Right politicking is so ignorant as to be embarrassingly revealing of the person asserting them. The idea that a conference organised by an orthodox Jew should have been in any way anti-Semitic is ridiculous. The idea that a conference addressed by several well-known gays was homophobic is equally lazy.

And yet, said Murray (who is openly gay), it can’t be glossed over that there really are some vicious people on the new European right:

Not every complainant is directed by ignorance or short-term political point-scoring. For the fact remains that across the continent of Europe there are dragons; there are movements like Casa Pound in Italy which would seem to want to replay the fascist past.

There are groups such as Jobbik in Hungary and Golden Dawn in Greece whose members have indulged themselves in the ugliest attempts to simultaneously deny and replay the brutalities of the mid-twentieth century. Anyone concerned to keep such things in history would be motivated by the most legitimate imaginable fears.

Murray is right about that. American eyes are particularly unprepared to pick out these necessary gradations on the European Right. For me, the fact that Yoram Hazony, an Orthodox Jew, was running this conference gave me the confidence that anti-Semites would be kept out of the hall — where they belong. There can be no legitimizing Jew-hating, period.

The problem, Murray continues, is that newspapers and politicians make no distinction between people who are on the respectable populist right, and these villains. “Is everything “far-Right” once anyone says so?” asks Murray. “If there is a reason why such claims are rarely interrogated it is because there is so little reward – and some considerable risk – in carefully interrogating them.”

Murray says that this careless “fascist” language does not clarify matters, but rather obscures them, and causes those who adopt it to falsely anathematize “whole countries and movements” who will be partners in the years ahead. Read Murray’s entire piece. 

I’ve said it here many times, and I’ll say it again: if you are depending on the US and UK media to inform you about what these conservative populists actually believe, you are making a big mistake. I commend to you this long reported piece from the New York Review of Books by Mark Lilla, a liberal, on new roads the Right in France is taking. (Unfortunately, it’s behind a paywall.) Lilla is not a man of the Right by any means, but he went to France to try to understand what’s happening there, instead of simply waving his hands and dismissing it all as a fascist renaissance. He writes:

Something new is happening on the European right, and it involves more than xenophobic populist outbursts. Ideas are being developed, and transnational networks for disseminating them are being established. Journalists have treated as a mere vanity project Steve Bannon’s efforts to bring European populist parties and thinkers together under the umbrella of what he calls The Movement. But his instincts, as in American politics, are in tune with the times. (Indeed, one month after Marion’s appearance at CPAC, Bannon addressed the annual convention of the National Front.) In countries as diverse as France, Poland, Hungary, Austria, Germany, and Italy, efforts are underway to develop a coherent ideology that would mobilize Europeans angry about immigration, economic dislocation, the European Union, and social liberalization, and then use that ideology to govern. Now is the time to start paying attention to the ideas of what seems to be an evolving right-wing Popular Front. France is a good place to start.

Lilla says the big Manif Pour Tous demonstrations against same-sex marriage in France is the key to the new French right:

The Catholic right’s campaign against same-sex marriage was doomed to fail, and it did. A large majority of the French support same-sex marriage, although only about seven thousand couples avail themselves of it each year. Yet there are reasons to think that the experience of La Manif could affect French politics for some time to come.

The first reason is that it revealed an unoccupied ideological space between the mainstream Republicans and the National Front. Journalists tend to present an overly simple picture of populism in contemporary European politics. They imagine there is a clear line separating legacy conservative parties like the Republicans, which have made their peace with the neoliberal European order, from xenophobic populist ones like the National Front, which would bring down the EU, destroy liberal institutions, and drive out as many immigrants and especially Muslims as possible.

These journalists have had trouble imagining that there might be a third force on the right that is not represented by either the establishment parties or the xenophobic populists. This narrowness of vision has made it difficult for even seasoned observers to understand the supporters of La Manif, who mobilized around what Americans call social issues and feel they have no real political home today. The Republicans have no governing ideology apart from globalist economics and worship of the state, and in

keeping with their Gaullist secular heritage have traditionally treated moral and religious issues as strictly personal, at least until Fillon’s anomalous candidacy. The National Front is nearly as secular and even less ideologically coherent, having served more as a refuge for history’s detritus—Vichy collaborators, resentful pieds noirs driven out of Algeria, Joan of Arc romantics, Jew- and Muslim-haters, skinheads—than as a party with a positive program for France’s future. A mayor once close to it now aptly calls it the “Dien Bien Phu right.”

The other reason La Manif might continue to matter is that it proved to be a consciousness-raising experience for a group of sharp young intellectuals, mainly Catholic conservatives, who see themselves as the avant-garde of this third force. In the last five years they have become a media presence, writing in newspapers like Le Figaro and newsweeklies like Le Point and Valeurs actuelles (Contemporary Values), founding new magazines and websites (Limite, L’Incorrect), publishing books, and making regular television appearances. People are paying attention, and a sound, impartial book on them has just appeared.

Whether anything politically significant will come out of this activity is difficult to know, given that intellectual fashions in France change about as quickly as the plat du jour. This past summer I spent some time reading and meeting these young writers in Paris and discovered more of an ecosystem than a cohesive, disciplined movement. Still, it was striking how serious they are and how they differ from American conservatives. They share two convictions: that a robust conservatism is the only coherent alternative to what they call the neoliberal cosmopolitanism of our time, and that resources for such a conservatism can be found on both sides of the traditional left–right divide. More surprising still, they are all fans of Bernie Sanders.

More:

The intellectual ecumenism of these writers is apparent in their articles, which come peppered with references to George Orwell, the mystical writer-activist Simone Weil, the nineteenth-century anarchist Pierre-Joseph Proudhon, Martin Heidegger and Hannah Arendt, the young Marx, the ex-Marxist Catholic philosopher Alasdair Macintyre, and especially the politically leftist, culturally conservative American historian Christopher Lasch, whose bons mots—“uprootedness uproots everything except the need for roots”—get repeated like mantras. They predictably reject the European Union, same-sex marriage, and mass immigration. But they also reject unregulated global financial markets, neoliberal austerity, genetic modification, consumerism, and AGFAM (Apple- Google-Facebook-Amazon-Microsoft).

One more passage, then I’ll stop:

That mélange may sound odd to our ears, but it is far more consistent than the positions of contemporary American conservatives. Continental conservatism going back to the nineteenth century has always rested on an organic conception of society. It sees Europe as a single Christian civilization composed of different nations with distinct languages and customs. These nations are composed of families, which are organisms, too, with differing but complementary roles and duties for mothers, fathers, and children. On this view, the fundamental task of society is to transmit knowledge, morality, and culture to future generations, perpetuating the life of the civilizational organism. It is not to serve an agglomeration of autonomous individuals bearing rights. [Emphasis mine — RD]

Most of these young French conservatives’ arguments presume this organic conception. Why do they consider the European Union a danger? Because it rejects the cultural- religious foundation of Europe and tries to found it instead on the economic self-interest of individuals. To make matters worse, they suggest, the EU has encouraged the immigration of people from a different and incompatible civilization (Islam), stretching old bonds even further. Then, rather than fostering self-determination and a healthy diversity among nations, the EU has been conducting a slow coup d’état in the name of economic efficiency and homogenization, centralizing power in Brussels. Finally, in putting pressure on countries to conform to onerous fiscal policies that only benefit the rich, the EU has prevented them from taking care of their most vulnerable citizens and maintaining social solidarity. Now, in their view, the family must fend for itself in an economic world without borders, in a culture that willfully ignores its needs. Unlike their American counterparts, who celebrate the economic forces that most put “the family” they idealize under strain, the young French conservatives apply their organic vision to the economy as well, arguing that it must be subordinate to social needs.

Most surprising for an American reader is the strong environmentalism of these young writers, who entertain the notion that conservatives should, well, conserve. Their best journal is the colorful, well-designed quarterly Limite, which is subtitled “a review of integral ecology” and publishes criticism of neoliberal economics and environmental degradation as severe as anything one finds on the American left. (No climate denial here.) Some writers are no-growth advocates; others are reading Proudhon and pushing for a decentralized economy of local collectives. Others still have left the city and write about their experiences running organic farms, while denouncing agribusiness, genetically modified crops, and suburbanization along the way. They all seem inspired by Pope Francis’s encyclical Laudato si’ (2015), a comprehensive statement of Catholic social teaching on the environment and economic justice.

I wish you could read the whole thing. The Catholic conservatives of Lilla’s piece are my people, politically, far more than anybody in the GOP as it stands today.  You might be able to download a version here.

To be clear, Lilla is not defending these conservatives — he is not a conservative — but seeking to understand them, and why they aren’t the same thing as neofascists. Predictably, the Washington Post‘s correspondent in Paris wrote a letter to NYRB accusing Lilla of carrying water for neofascists. It’s so blind, cloddish, and self-defeating.

Below the jump is my Rome speech.

ROME SPEECH

Rod Dreher

Five years ago, I received a phone call from an American physician, who was rather alarmed. He told me that his mother emigrated to America from Czechoslovakia. When she was young, she served six years as a political prisoner because she was part of the underground Catholic resistance to communism. Now, as an old lady living with her son and his wife, she said to her son: “The things I am seeing in this country today remind me of when communism came to my homeland.”

She was talking about the growing intolerance, even hysteria, from the Left against anything that conflicts with their ideology. I knew that political correctness was a big problem, but this sounded exaggerated to me. Maybe she is just a frightened old woman, I thought.

But over the next few years, I began talking to immigrants from the Soviet bloc – men and women who once lived with communism, but who escaped to the West. I would ask them: “What are you seeing today? Is this old Czech woman correct?”

Over and over, I heard the same thing: YES! It really is happening here. We can feel it in our bones. Almost all of them are quite frustrated and angry that no American believes them.

I understand the skepticism. I was skeptical too when the doctor first called me. Today, though, after interviewing a number of these people, and spending much of the last year traveling throughout the former communist countries of the East to interview former dissidents and political prisoners, I am convinced that they are right. Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn said:

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

It is not only possible here in the liberal democratic West, but it’s taking form right now. People who lived through communist totalitarianism are trying to sound the alarm. They are trying to wake the rest of us up before it is too late. As Marek Benda, a Czech politician who comes from a dissident family told me last year in Prague: “The fight for freedom is always with us. Only one generation divides us from tyranny.”

The fight against the new totalitarianism is the fight of our generation. It is here. It is now. And it cannot be avoided.

Before we go further this morning, let’s define our term. What is totalitarianism?

In her classic 1951 study “The Origins of Totalitarianism,” Hannah Arendt examined both the Nazi and communist movements in an attempt to discern why they appealed to the masses. Totalitarianism makes every aspect of life political. It not only seeks obedience from the people, but it attempts to force everyone to welcome their own oppression. We have to internalize the ruling ideology, and make it our own. As George Orwell put it, the goal is for everyone to learn to love Big Brother.

Many of the conditions that Arendt saw as the seedbed of totalitarianism are present today, in our decaying liberal democracies. Here is a short list of Arendt’s pre-totalitarian signs that we see very strongly in our society:

• Widespread loneliness and social atomization

• Loss of faith in institutions and hierarchies

• A desire to transgress

• A rise in the power of ideological thinking

• The increased use of propaganda

• The value of loyalty – to a person or to an ideology – more than expertise

• The politicization of everything

As I see it, we have two basic things that distinguish us from pre-communist Russia and pre-Nazi Germany.

First, the all-consuming ideology among us is not racist nationalism or Marxism-Leninism, but rather a globalist, victim-focused identity politics, often called “social justice.” The revolutionary class is not the German volk or the international proletariat, but the “marginalized” and “oppressed” – the Sacred Victim. Like Bolshevism, social justice is a utopian political cult. It sounds like a political platform, or maybe a therapeutic management system, but the best way to understand it is as a fanatical religion.

Second, the technological environment today is vastly different from a hundred years ago, when the twentieth century’s totalitarianisms emerged. The most important difference is that we now render all human life and experience as digital data that is storable, searchable, and that can be exploited by surveillance states and the surveillance capitalists of Google, Amazon, and others. The People’s Republic of China, for example, now has the capabilities and the will to surveil and to control its own people to a degree of which that Mao, Stalin, and totalitarian tyrants of the twentieth century could only have dreamed.

Here’s why many of us have been very slow to appreciate the totalitarian nature of contemporary liberalism. It’s because the emerging totalitarianism is not going to be a version of the grim scenario imagined by George Orwell in Nineteen Eighty-Four. Rather, it is going to be more like the alternative dystopia imagined by Aldous Huxley in “Brave New World.” Orwell imagined a world much like Stalin’s Russia, where the state controlled society by fear, pain, and terror. By contrast, Huxley imagined a world where the state controlled the masses through managing pleasure and comfort.

Western people will surrender political power to a state, and to authorities, who promise to protect their therapeutic desires – especially maximizing sexual freedom. It will do this through some version of China’s social credit system, where one’s freedom in society is decided by an algorithm that rewards or punishes one based on one’s beliefs, one’s friends, and so forth. As in “Brave New World,” the most important values will be “safety” and “well being.” If religious and political liberties threaten either, then they will have to be eliminated. This is already happening within universities and other institutions that, in a very Soviet way, are stigmatizing dissent as pathological.

This is what the American social critic James Poulos calls the “Pink Police State.” The Pink Police State – which entails the government, academic and cultural institutions, as well as large corporations — is the form that the new totalitarianism is taking.

So, how do we resist? The good news is that there are people who retain living memory of communist totalitarianism. They have seen this kind of thing before. They are warning the rest of us that we are walking into a trap. We need to hear them.

You will hear today speeches and comments by my colleagues who will speak of the resistance in political terms. This is important. But let us begin by talking about the cultural resistance, without which political resistance cannot succeed.

First, we have to reclaim and defend cultural memory.

When the Nazis invaded Poland, their ultimate plans were not simply to rule Poland, but to destroy the Polish nation. The Germans sought to do this the way all totalitarians do: by controlling the cultural memory of the Polish people. They had to make the Poles forget their history, and forget their religion.

A young Polish actor, Karol Wojtyla, committed himself to the patriotic resistance. But he didn’t pick up a gun! He and his theater friends wrote and performed underground plays on religious and historical themes. These theatrical events happened in secret. If the Gestapo had discovered them, all the actors and all the audience would have been shot. Wojtyla and the theater company literally put their lives on the line to keep alive the cultural memory of their nation.

We have to do the same in our time. The globalists try to make the nations ashamed of their heritage, in the same way the communists did to the masses they wished to control. We have to refuse this! We do not have to believe in a triumphalist myth of a golden age. We only have to look around us with eyes of gratitude for the good and beautiful things that our ancestors have given to us – and defend them as our own.

I should add that the ideology of consumer capitalism also tries to disconnect us from our past. If we are nothing but individuals defined by our desires, it’s easier to sell us things. We of the Resistance must declare that some things are not for sale! As John Paul the Second said, man is not made for the market; the market is made for man.

Second, we must establish and defend solidarity. I am not talking specifically about the Polish trade union. I am talking about something more intimate: the bonds among small groups of people.

In every postcommunist country I visited, I heard the same thing from former dissidents: that the strong bonds of solidarity with others gave them the courage to fight back. Last year, I stood in a secret underground room in Bratislava, where Catholic samizdat was printed for a decade. My guide was Jan Simulcik, a historian who, in the 1980s, was part of the underground who distributed that samizdat. He told me that like everybody else in the movement, he was afraid – but the camaraderie of his friends gave him the courage to keep going.

Dr. Vaclav Benda, a hero of the Czech resistance, worked to bring Czech people together, face to face, to remind them that they were actually a people. The state demoralized the masses by making them feel isolated and alone. As Dr Benda saw, the simple act of rebuilding social solidarity was counterrevolutionary. In our time, the state doesn’t force us to choose loneliness and isolation behind a glowing screen; we do it to ourselves. We can fight back by rebuilding the bonds of community in practical ways.

Third, we must strengthen our religion. I don’t simply mean that we must go to church more. Rather, we have to be far more radical than that. In my book “The Benedict Option,” I write about St. Benedict of Nursia, the 6th century Christian who responded to the collapse of the Roman imperial order by creating a parallel society dedicated to disciplined prayer and service to God. Over the next few centuries, the Benedictine monks played an absolutely key role in civilizing barbarian Europe. It began, though, with St. Benedict developing a Christian way of life that was resilient in the face of the extraordinary stresses of the early medieval period.

This past Sunday I made a pilgrimage to the cave in Subiaco where Benedict lived alone for three years as a hermit, praying and fasting and seeking the will of God. From that little hole in the side of a lonely mountain grew a seed of faith that, over the next centuries, would rebuild Western civilization. If you feel powerless and despairing, go to Subiaco and see what God can do with a single man who puts the search for Him above everything else.

We now live in a post-Christian civilization. Right now, while there is time, Christians at the local level must commit themselves to creating new ways of living out old truths. Every one of the anti-communist dissidents I interviewed were strongly believing Christians. Pawel Skibinski, a biographer of John Paul the Second, told me that humanity is like a kite. As long as it is connected to the earth by a string, it can fly very high. But if the line is cut, the kite falls to the ground.

We are the kite. The line is our connection to God. Without the God of the Bible, we will not be able to resist both the coming totalitarianism, or the parallel temptation to embrace evil forms of resistance.

Here’s what I mean. In 1939, the English poet W.H. Auden was living in Manhattan. He went to see a movie in a part of the city where lots of German immigrants lived. As a newsreel came on describing the Nazi invasion of Poland, German-speaking members of the audience leaped to their feet and began shouting, “Kill them! Kill them!”

Auden was deeply shocked by the nakedness of the evil displayed by the Nazi sympathizers. And he understood that mere humanism would not be enough to defeat it. After this dark epiphany, Auden returned to the church.

Finally, we must do the must counterrevolutionary thing of all: embrace the value of suffering. This strikes at the heart of the Pink Police State and its therapeutic totalitarianism.

If you are not willing to suffer the loss of social status; if you are not willing to suffer the loss of a job; if you are not willing to suffer the loss of freedom – and, if it comes to it, even your life – for the sake of the truth, then you have already surrendered to evil. This is the lesson we learn from the anti-communist resistance. The essence of their Christian hope was that suffering has ultimate meaning, if it is joined to the transformative passion of Jesus Christ.

The willingness to suffer for the truth is at the core of the final message Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn gave to the Russian people on the eve of his 1974 exile, in an essay titled, “Live Not By Lies!” A few years, later, the Czech dissident Vaclav Havel urged his readers to “live in truth.” Havel told a fable about a greengrocer who has the sign “Workers Of The World, Unite!” in his shop window – not because he believes the slogan, but because he doesn’t want trouble.

One day he removes the sign from his window because he wishes to live in truth. And he will suffer for it, says Havel. He might lose his business. He will not be able to travel. His children might not get into universities. The pain will be real. But his act will have ultimate value. The humble greengrocer will have shown that it is possible to refuse to conform to the official lies. It is possible to live in truth.

The life of Vaclav Havel, the first president of a free Czechoslovakia, and the other anti-communist dissidents shows that those who are willing to suffer for the truth might, in the end, triumph. Very few dissidents expected communism to end in their lifetime. They resisted communism because that was the right thing to do. What about us? What will we do in our time and place?

The Pink Police State is kindlier than its totalitarian predecessors, but in its ideology of globalist homogenization and technological reach, it is no less a threat to the existence of religion, of families, of tradition, and of peoples. Yes, we must fight it politically when we can, but we must also fight it inside ourselves.

I want to close by telling you about a hidden hero who deserves to be rediscovered. In 1943, a Croatian Jesuit named Father Tomislav Poglajen was organizing Catholic anti-Nazi resistance in his home country. When he learned that the Gestapo was going to arrest him, the priest fled to his mother’s country, Czechslovakia. He adapted his mother’s last name, Kolakovic, and began to organize Catholic anti-communist resistance.

Why anti-communist resistance? Father Kolakovic knew that the Germans were going to lose the war. But as he told the young Slovak Catholics who gathered around him, communism would ultimately come to power in their land. And that, he prophesied, would mean horrible persecution for the Church.

Father Kolakovic did not sit around waiting for it to happen. Instead, he organized cells around the country – groups of young Catholics who gathered for prayer, Bible study, and lectures. They also learned the arts of resistance – for example, how to survive an interrogation. They established resistance networks across the Slovak region. When the communist dictatorship installed itself in 1948, Father Kolakovic’s network was ready. It became the backbone of the underground church, which was the chief source of Slovak anticommunist resistance.

Today we await a new Father Tomislav Kolakovic – a visionary who can read the signs of the times, and who builds the ways of life, and the social networks, capable of resisting the coming evil.

My friends, one way to define hope is the marriage of MEMORY with DESIRE. If we can remember what we once had, and desire to have it again, we have something to hope for. There is no better place than Rome to ponder the cultural memory of our common civilization. From St. Benedict’s cave in Subiaco, to Wojtyla’s hidden theater under occupation, to the underground samizdat room in Bratislava – these are all part of our cultural memory. Let these memories shape our desires – for God, for truth, for liberty, and for home — and may they give birth to the joy of resistance.

 

The post The Blindness Of National Conservatism Critics appeared first on The American Conservative.

Plague Pushes China To Breaking Point

Read this stunning comment left by “Wyoming Doc,” a physician in Wyoming (whose name I know) whose wife is an immigrant from China:

Has been a while since I last wrote anything. I have had the flu and have been home with my wife for the past several days. It has been fascinating. Our satellite TV provider has a service wherein you can subscribe to the People’s Republic official TV station.

There have now been four occasions where I have witnessed on live Chinese national TV public officials being frog-marched out of press conferences in hand irons. Their crimes? One had his mask on upside down. One did not have a mask on at all. One was stating (translated by my wife) that he had repeatedly been telling Beijing about the problems for weeks – and there was no response. One was answering every question with obvious double-speak (not unlike listening to Nancy Pelosi or Ted Cruz). Shortly into the press conferences, young men from the PLA show up – slapped on the hand irons – and hauled them out and in all 4 cases – it was just stunned silence in the rooms. My wife just casually tells me – “no one will ever see them again.”

It is also clear to me as a physician – listening to the Chinese doctors – and viewing footage from the hospitals and clinics – that this is many orders of magnitude worse than what they are saying. Common sense will tell you that as well – are they really going to torpedo their entire industrial heartland for months – just because 300 people have died? — I think not – I think this is way worse than we can possibly imagine.

My mother-in-law lives in a smaller city – far on the western fringe of China – If Wuhan were Atlanta – she would be in a place like Boise. She had a fever about 8 days ago. Please note – official statistics note that there are 9 people in her province confirmed to have the virus. This belies the fact that she (never known to me to be a liar or fabulist ) has been telling my wife for days that there are hundreds upon hundreds of people all over the sidewalks and streets outside the hospital – and that the hospital is completely filled with patients. And apparently the crematorium has been very busy. Of most grave concern to her – is Beijing nationalized all of their small province’s health care workers and sent them to Shanghai or Beijing – leaving their city of a million with only a handful of doctors. When she had her fever – a nurse looked at her for 10 minutes. They found out she had a runny nose – and because of the runny nose told her she did NOT have the virus. NO TEST WAS EVER DONE – WHY? they simply do not have enough kits – and are having to go by their gut instinct. She was sent back to her own home – and placed in quarantine there – never having been tested. She is unable to leave – and this is being violently enforced in her city. They bring her food 3 times a week. All this to say – any and all numbers coming from China are highly suspect – and basically worthless. And thankfully my mother-in-law is getting much better.

Her younger brother and his young family live in Nanjing. I cannot tell you the grief expressed by my wife the other night – when he called her the last time – and said all international calls have been stopped effective at midnight that day. Nanjing is now under martial law – for the first time since the Japanese occupation before World War II. He told her about the tanks going down the streets and all the main streets being guarded by men with sub-machine guns. All exits out of the city are now being blocked with layers of concrete blocks. Each family has to designate one person who can go outside 2 times a week – to the nearest store for food and supplies. Anyone caught on the streets without appropriate permission – or not wearing a mask is immediately arrested – and placed in quarantine camps themselves. Anyone who thinks this is all being done just because of a “flu” or “a little virus” really needs to have their head examined.

Her father is in Beijing – and has not been heard from in two weeks.

I pray for my wife – all the time. This has been incredibly hard on our family. But we will make it. What I can also tell you – based on my wife’s multiple conversations with friends back home – is that this is really beginning to stir the hearts and minds of the Chinese people. Thoughts about Xi Xinping that would have been never thought to say out loud are being said now – and the whole country seems to be galvanizing around the fact that they have been seriously let down by the Communist Party. I am not sure what will come of that – but this could not have happened at a worse time for Xi – the Hong Kong fiasco – the pork virus disaster – and the trade war with the USA – and now this – the country will soon be at the breaking point.

My other question is for us in the USA. Our supply lines – especially in things like medicine are DEPENDENT now on China. I have been saying for years this is a national security issue. And now their industrial heartland is on its knees. I do not know anything about auto parts and widgets – I do know a lot about medicine. There are many many things (saline bags, cardiac IV meds, antibiotics, blood pressure meds, diabetes meds, I can go on and on) that are only made in China. For the first time since this crisis began – late last week saw the very first issues I am having with my patients not being able to get things. We are promised this will just be the beginning. [emphasis mine — rd] There is no way that we can re-engineer factories quickly to start making things here – it will be at least a year. WHAT ARE WE GOING TO DO? When will the Chinese be able to get back to work – is an open question….. This situation was brought on by globalization and neo-liberal policies. It is truly a national security issue at this point – and I think we are all about to get a big dose of blowback. OUR ELITES ON BOTH SIDES HAVE COMPLETELY FAILED US. THE COUNTRY NEEDS A POLITICAL ENEMA IN THE WORST WAY.

Again – what is sustaining me now – is the memory of my grandfather in times of great stress – walking around his house praying in Greek – the Jesus prayer – Lord Jesus Christ, Son of God, have mercy on me, a sinner.

Plague crippling the world’s second-largest economy, followed by a possible global depression. And all this coming when the United States is more socially atomized than ever, and people’s anger at each other reaches levels not seen since the tumult of the late 1960s. It sounds potentially apocalyptic, and not just because of the potential deaths.

Interesting times. Might this horror bring down the Communist Party of China? If the sickness reaches us and hits us similarly, what might it do to our political system?

Readers outside of China, are you preparing for the possibility of what’s happening in China reaching us? What are you doing? Wyoming Doc, please keep us informed, not only about your family back in China, but what you think we should be doing here to prepare for the days to come. For my readers who pray: please pray for this doctor’s family, and for all the people of China.

UPDATE:

The post Plague Pushes China To Breaking Point appeared first on The American Conservative.

China’s Coronavirus Communism

This is China today:

2/6 #coronavirus

In today’s Wuhan, forced quarantine is becoming a “Martial Law”. Another whole family was forced to go to quarantine center, where no medicine, no doctor, no water, no bathroom close by, no nothing is available. People won’t go no matter how good CCP painted pic.twitter.com/w6iNtoR3Us

— 西行小宝 (@htommy998) February 7, 2020

The New York Times‘s coverage of the coronavirus outbreak has been exceptional, and a reminder that no matter how angry their cultural and editorial coverage makes me, my subscription is worth it. Today, the paper reports that the WHO and the CDC have been offering to help China for weeks, but Beijing, in its totalitarian pride, has refused. Excerpts:

Current and former public health officials and diplomats, speaking anonymously for fear of upsetting diplomatic relations, said they believe the reluctance comes from China’s top leaders, who do not want the world to think they need outside help.

In 2003, China was badly stung by criticism of its response to SARS, another coronavirus epidemic; it has also been embroiled in a trade war with the United States for more than a year.

Some experts also say that outsiders could discover aspects of the outbreak that are embarrassing to China: for example, the country has not revealed how many of its doctors and nurses have died fighting the disease.

But China does need help, experts argue.

In private phone calls and texts, some Chinese colleagues have indicated that they are overwhelmed and would welcome not just extra hands, but specialized expertise in a couple of fields.

More:

The two fields in which China appears to need outside help, experts said, are molecular virology and epidemiology.

The first involves sequencing the virus’s genome and manipulating it to refine diagnostic tests, treatments and vaccine candidates.

The second involves figuring out basic questions like who gets infected and who does not, how long the incubation period is, why some victims die, how many other people each victim infects and how commonly hospital outbreaks are occurring.

“This isn’t rocket science, it’s basic stuff — but it’s been five weeks and we still don’t know the answers,” one expert said.

So not only are more Chinese people getting sick and dying because their Emperor is too arrogant to ask for help, but the entire world is more endangered by this thing. Read the whole story. May God help those poor Chinese people, at the mercy of both this disease and an incompetent government that asserts the right to control everyone’s life, but which cannot cope with this epidemiological crisis.

To be fair to the Chinese authorities, in that clip above, it is possible that all the people being hauled out of their homes have coronavirus. The government announced earlier in the week that it was doing a house to house search for the infected, and would remove them to quarantine centers. Let us assume for the sake of charity that that’s exactly what is happening here: the forced removal of the infected. But think about what that looks like to the infected (if indeed these people are): being dragged from the comfort and safety of your home to a center where you cannot be cared for because the system is overwhelmed. Why not leave those people at home, where they might at least have a better chance of survival?

I know this blog has readers who have family and friends in China. What are you hearing from them?

UPDATE:

#CoronaVirus

Another Leaked Video of Chinese authorities WELDING SHUT whole apartment buildings with residents inside. What if there’s a fire?

Note: Videos of people being welded in…Not a single video of them being cut back out…or delivering Food/Water/Meds after… pic.twitter.com/2BldGbK13Q

— Terrence Daniels (Captain Planet) (@Terrence_STR) February 8, 2020

UPDATE.2: Reader RJames:

If this goes worldwide and has a fairly high mortality rate, then globalization and mass immigration will be over. Populations everywhere will be demanding that borders shut down and a ton of manufacturing will repatriate back to their home countries.

There will also be a LOT of hostility towards China. The CCP is going to be blamed no matter what they do going forward. If you think the Hong Kong protests were bad, you ain’t seen nothing yet. Imagine SE Asian countries ejecting Chinese companies or Taiwan declaring Independence. There is already a lot of hostility to China in places like Vietnam or the Philippines. Imagine if they have a massive health disaster because of this. World wars have started over far less.

UPDATE.3: Reader Secular Misanthropist:

By their own admission the CCP was incompetent and callus enough to starve 15 million of their own citizens during the great famine. But the actual number is higher and likely 45 million. There’s also that little event in 1989 they keep trying to flush down the memory hole. So mass killing of their citizens is nothing new to the CCP.

Heck if you really want to ruin your faith in humanity Google “Chinese organ market” or “treatment of the Wiegers”.

But SARS and the coronavirus demonstrate an Achilles heel of the CCP. Officials lower down in the chain have an incentive to suppress information to maintain appearances. When citizens attempt to blow the whistle they are detained (e.g. Li Wenliang) for spreading rumors about an illness. This desire to keep up appearances, control information, and punish people will eventually let a crisis like this one escalate out of control because they’ll always be a few steps behind it.

Moreover those quarantine centers are worse than leaving people at home. Inevitably some of those people may be sick, but don’t have coronavirus, but now you’re detaining them with people who do, so they’ll likely get infected. The lack of supplies and sanitation could also let other illnesses spread. Once the population sees cooperation with the authorities as a death sentence, they’re likely to stop cooperating, which won’t help matters.

tl;dr The rulers of China are really bad people. It is a stain on our society that we’re so willing to do business with them.

China has a total surveillance state. The Chinese Communist Party has boasted that the extraordinary use of electronic data-gathering, plus artificial intelligence, allows them to see problems (= things that threaten their rule) far in advance, and deal with them before they get out of hand. But the coronavirus catastrophe just goes to show that the total control environment has not only not worked, it has positively made things worse, even just from the point of view of maintaining the party’s control of society.

The post China’s Coronavirus Communism appeared first on The American Conservative.

James Carville Reads Dems The Riot Act

I really like James Carville. He’s crazy, but he’s my kind of crazy. He’s had me to speak at his LSU class a couple of times. He’s not at all fake about his Democratic populism. In this interview with Vox, he rips into how crackpot his own party has become, and how they’re throwing this election away to Trump. Carville is really profane, because he’s really angry. This opening statement sets the tone for the interview:

Look, the turnout in the Iowa caucus was below what we expected, what we wanted. Trump’s approval rating is probably as high as it’s been. This is very bad. And now it appears the party can’t even count votes. What the hell am I supposed to think?

I’ll just say it this way: The fate of the world depends on the Democrats getting their shit together and winning in November. We have to beat Trump. And so far, I don’t like what I see. And a lot of people I talk to feel the same way.

He goes on:

We have candidates on the debate stage talking about open borders and decriminalizing illegal immigration. They’re talking about doing away with nuclear energy and fracking. You’ve got Bernie Sanders talking about letting criminals and terrorists vote from jail cells. It doesn’t matter what you think about any of that, or if there are good arguments — talking about that is not how you win a national election. It’s not how you become a majoritarian party.

For f-ck’s sake, we’ve got Trump at Davos talking about cutting Medicare and no one in the party has the sense to plaster a picture of him up there sucking up to the global elites, talking about cutting taxes for them while he’s talking about cutting Medicare back home. Jesus, this is so obvious and so easy and I don’t see any of the candidates taking advantage of it.

The Republicans have destroyed their party and turned it into a personality cult, but if anyone thinks they can’t win, they’re out of their damn minds.

I especially loved this comment about the “cultural disconnect” between the party’s elites and the rest of the country:

I want to give you an example of the problem here. A few weeks ago Binyamin Appelbaum, an economics writer for the New York Times, posted a snarky tweet about how LSU cancelled classes for the National Championship game. And then he said, do the “Warren/Sanders free public college proposals include LSU, or would it only apply to actual schools?”

You know how f-cking patronizing that is to people in the South or in the middle of the country? First, LSU has an unusually high graduation rate, but that’s not the point. It’s the goddamn smugness. This is from a guy who lives in New York and serves on the Times editorial board and there’s not a single person he knows that doesn’t pat him on the back for that kind of tweet. He’s so f-cking smart.

Appelbaum doesn’t speak for the Democratic Party, but he does represent the urbanist mindset. We can’t win the Senate by looking down at people. The Democratic Party has to drive a narrative that doesn’t give off vapors that we’re smarter than everyone or culturally arrogant.

Trust me, you’re going to want to read the whole thing. 

You might recall my long essay in reaction to that repulsive Appelbaum comment (“Coach O. vs the Acela Gradgrind”). Appelbaum actually lives in DC, but he does write for the editorial page of the NYT, and he graduated from Penn, an Ivy League school. That pissy East Coast, media-elite condescension towards the rest of the country is exactly what people hate about the Democratic Party and the culture around it (which includes the liberal media). The Louisiana governor, John Bel Edwards, a Democrat, canceled his own inaugural ball because of the game. Almost everybody in Louisiana was all in for the Tigers. It brought the whole state together. And then here comes an Ivy League graduate who lives in DC and writes editorials for The New York Times, taking a dump on us. Carville is right: it’s the g.d. smugness.

If you watch Carville’s caucus-night blistering of his own party on MSNBC, he talks about the “goofiness” that the Democratic candidates are talking about instead of the things that matter in people’s lives. He never specifies what that goofiness is, but the way he goes on to talk about how Elizabeth Warren has lost the plot suggests that this is the kind of thing he means. Here’s Warren on the campaign trail the other day talking about how she would allow a transgendered high school student interview candidates for Secretary of Education, and give the trans kid the power to decide if the candidate passes muster:

Carville didn’t say what the “goofiness” is, but Bill Maher did:

Now, Obama said people just don’t want crazy stuff. Is this not crazy stuff? Is she running for president of Berkeley? …

I always worry when this stuff happens. I would say there is only two teams now. Everything that happens on the left goes into the “blue bin.” You’re the party of this bullshit. You might be asked about this. Elizabeth Warren. What if she’s the candidate? What do you think… letting a high school student, forget the transgender part, a high school student have veto power over the cabinet?

Not just Warren, either. Here’s the rightmost candidate this cycle:

Let’s be clear: Transgender equality is the civil rights issue of our time. There is no room for compromise when it comes to basic human rights.

— Joe Biden (Text Join to 30330) (@JoeBiden) January 25, 2020

Yep, jack those middle schoolers up on cross-sex hormones, and if you say boo about it, you’re a bigot. That’s the Democratic Party for you.

Charlie Camosy, a Fordham professor who is solidly on the left, but is also pro-life, wrote this week in the NYPost that he had finally had enough, and has quit the Democratic Party. He had been a board member of Democrats For Life. Excerpt:

The straw that broke this camel’s back was Pete Buttigieg’s extremism. Here was a mainstream Democratic candidate suggesting, at one point, that abortion is OK up to the point the baby draws her first breath.

When I heard that, I realized we were fighting a losing battle.

If the party was willing to go all-in on the most volatile issue of our time with a position held by only 13 percent of the population, it was time to take no for an answer.

Many find it difficult to understand how a single issue could be so motivating for so many millions of people. If that’s you, put abortion out of your mind for the moment and consider the following thought experiment.

Suppose that hundreds of thousands of children are being killed each year in horrific ways. Often they are killed because they have Down syndrome. Sometimes, it is because their grandparents thought their parents were too young and irresponsible to have a child. Very often, it is because an abusive partner demands that the child be killed on threat of violence.

And then suppose a political party claimed this killing was a ­social good. Just another kind of health care. Something to shout about with pride.

This party, it should go without saying, would be unsupportable.

Read it all. Camosy didn’t become a Republican. He’s now voting third party.

Open borders. Partial-birth abortion. Transgenderism as the civil rights issue of our time. Identity politics über alles. That’s your Democratic Party in 2020.  It shouldn’t be that hard to make Donald Trump out to be the one out of touch with ordinary American life. But this crew is doing it!

 

The post James Carville Reads Dems The Riot Act appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Pope Francis Threat

In Rome this past week, I had lots of conversations with informed Catholics. It’s fair to say my interlocutors were all on the orthodox (that is, theologically conservative) side of things, and that most of them were Italian. Every single one was deeply concerned — I mean profoundly concerned — about the present and future of the Catholic Church. I’d say the gamut ran from apocalyptic to “this is going to be like the Arian crisis — grave and long-lasting — so we had better prepare for a fight that lasts generations.” Nobody I talked to saw this as anything other than a crisis that strikes at the very heart of what it means to be a Catholic. For what that’s worth.

One thing that’s on the lips of insiders: that in the next few weeks, the Vatican will finally release the findings of its investigation of Cardinal McCarrick —  but whatever they say, nobody will believe it, even if it’s the gospel truth, because the institutional Church has shot its credibility on sex abuse.

I read on the flight back yesterday the Catholic scholar Daniel Mahoney’s cover story in the new edition of National Review. It is such an eloquent and thorough summation of these conversations that I thought I would rather quote it at length than try to dredge up the details from my talks. I offer these excerpts to you as an exceptionally precise insight into what smart Catholic conservatives in Rome and from around Europe are thinking:

Political correctness — and hostility to the West as the West — pervades a good deal of what this papacy says and does. This is a papacy that has been largely silent about the decimation of ancient Christian communities in the Arab and Islamic Middle East. The Koran, Pope Francis insists, is incompatible with “every form of violence.” This is false, and everyone knows it. Where Bishop Sánchez Sorondo sees social justice and Catholic social teaching at work in China, others, as Robert Royal has noted, see intensified persecution of Catholics and other religious believers, environmental damage that is unprecedented in the East or West, a cruel forced-abortion policy, Orwellian surveillance of dissidents and of every expression of independence in civil society, and the rounding up in concentration camps of over 1 million Muslim Uighurs in the northwest. As Royal, president of the Faith & Reason Institute and editor of The Catholic Thing, aptly observes, the Vatican’s misjudgments are all too commonplace: “The Vatican currently pursues a steady line of anti-Western criticism, against the alleged xenophobia, rapacious economies, and environmental ‘sins’ of both Europe and North America.”

Royal refers to these juvenile ideological clichés, and predictable policies, as manifestations of “simplistic progressivism.” This is a Vatican that conflates the truth of Christ with a “religion of humanity” that has become a substitute for a religion that affirms transcendence. Sober political thinking is not much in evidence, nor even a modicum of realism and moderation in human affairs. Love and charity have been hopelessly politicized, confused with a sentimentality that excuses every excess carried out in the name of a perfected “humanity.” When one sides with an atheistic and totalitarian regime that endangers the children of God, one has entered into morally and theologically troubled territory, indeed.

The point Mahoney keeps making in the essay is not that Francis favors this or that left-wing cause that conservatives dislike. It’s that Francis is operating far from the theological tradition of the Catholic Church. Yes, it’s the conclusions that the pope draws, but it’s also how the pope draws them. More:

On matters of war and peace, and immigration and the integrity of borders, Francis has been guided by the same humanitarian moralism that has informed his “frenzied activism” on other fronts. In a 2018 book of interviews with the left-wing French sociologist Dominique Wolton, Francis lightly dismisses the rich Catholic tradition of ethical and prudential reflection on matters of war and peace. In the tone of a person with no political responsibilities, and no sense of what they might be, he declares that there is no such thing as a just war. If he means that no war is simply or absolutely just, he is reiterating age-old Christian wisdom about the impact of original sin even on decent political communities attempting to defend the civilized patrimony of humankind. But this pope, abandoning equitable or balanced judgment, declares that only with peace do you “win everything.” He overlooks the fact that “peace” can also be a vehicle of mendacity, oppression, injustice, violence, and genocide, as that proffered by totalitarian regimes. As Vladimir Solovyov argued in his “Short Tale of the Anti-Christ” (1900), there can be such a thing as an “evil peace” and a good or legitimate war (and vice versa, of course). Francis’s conception in no way resembles the “tranquility of order” so richly articulated in Book 19 of St. Augustine’s City of God. If only he would display more deference to the rich theological and philosophical wisdom of the past.

One more clip:

By becoming shrill, dogmatic, and moralistic practitioners of a politically correct religion of humanity, the Church follows the path of perdition. The political philosopher Leo Strauss, speaking in 1964 at the University of Detroit, a Jesuit institution, said that the Roman Catholic Church was the last remaining spiritual body or institution to truly appreciate all the pitfalls of a modern project that openly and self-consciously rejected natural right in the classical and Christian senses of the term. Strauss made that remark at the very moment when important elements within the Church were succumbing to modernity at its least wise, least sober, least admirable. This is what the political philosopher Eric Voegelin so aptly called “modernity without restraint.”

For generations to come, the Catholic Church will bear the shame of its capitulation before a totalitarian regime in Beijing, a regime that demands loyalty to state power and Communist ideology before fidelity to the saving grace of Christ. An atheistic state now essentially controls all episcopal appointments in China. The sacrifices of the underground Church, whose adherents have remained faithful to Rome since 1949, are apparently of no major concern to Vatican secretary of state Cardinal Pietro Parolin and Pope Francis. And one should not underestimate the ideological sympathies for Chinese tyranny that predominate in some circles around the Argentine pope. The same mistakes, but even worse, that drove the Vatican’s policy of barely concealed appeasement of Eastern European Communist regimes (the so-called Ostpolitik of the 1960s and 1970s) are being made again, with no evidence of lessons learned. As Bishop Schneider points out, the great Hungarian cardinal Jozsef Mindszenty, who adamantly opposed the Vatican’s policies toward his country’s Communist regime and was summarily dismissed by Pope Paul VI, has now been declared worthy of veneration for his “heroic Christian virtues” in witnessing to the faith and in fighting Communist totalitarianism. Can no one in Rome connect the dots and see that history is repeating itself?

This, too, is another way that the witness of Catholics who suffered under the communist yoke can guide their co-religionists in how to respond to whatever this current malignancy is.

Please, read the whole thing. 

And I commend to you Prof. Mahoney’s recent book, The Idol Of Our Age, a series of reflective essays on the difference between Christianity and what he calls “the religion of humanity.” The spiritual warfare happening now at the summit of the Catholic Church is going to be decisive for the future of the world. All of us — Catholic and otherwise — had better pay attention.

 

The post The Pope Francis Threat appeared first on The American Conservative.

It’s Never Sunny In Wokeadelphia

What racism+sexism looks like in the classroom:

English male student with a smug grin telling me he hadn’t read the prescribed book because “he gave it 60%, wasn’t feeling it, and read the ‘better’ book.”

The book in question?

A Hundred Years of Solitude by Garcia Marquez!

— Sunny Singh (@sunnysingh_n6) February 4, 2020

A lazy, entitled bum of a college student? Whoever heard of such a thing! Look, I’m always on the side of a teacher having to deal with an academic layabout, but holy cow, you have to read the whole Sunny Singh thread to observe her total woke meltdown. Sunny Singh,  a British university, is one fragile lady — but as usual with the woke, she has learned how to weaponize her fragility. Here are excerpts:

Strap in, everybody — Dr. Singh has been triggered! Here comes female trouble! More:

Shaking? Because of a lazy undergraduate who, on evidence of his behavior, doesn’t belong in a university classroom, not because of his sex or color, but because he doesn’t have what it takes to learn? Here’s a thought: maybe the student’s words are not a judgment on Dr. Singh’s competence or worth, but rather an expression of his own self-centeredness (i.e., that he shouldn’t have to do anything that he doesn’t want to do, or read anything he doesn’t want to read)? If so, then he has met his perfect match in Dr. Singh, who cannot interpret anything except through the self-aggrandizing lens of identity politics. Let’s join her again, mid-quiver:

Remembering this. One day we will talk about the price WoC like me have pay for this ‘inclusive curriculum’ which is so great for the institution.

And how there are awards and rewards for that terrible personal cost https://t.co/X9NmNmWubG https://t.co/ddDx1DXs3A

— Sunny Singh (@sunnysingh_n6) February 4, 2020

Let me make sure you have this right: the university has mandated an “inclusive” curriculum, but because teachers like Sunny Singh have to risk encountering in the classroom a lazy student who doesn’t want to read the assigned text, Sunny Singh is a martyr? It gets worse — or better, depending on how you look at it:

Think of how many students were introduced to those books in this class, and learned true and beautiful things from this encounter with the texts. They’re all invisible to Sunny Singh, for whom the entire thing was ruined because of one lazy student’s completely ordinary reaction. Sunny is having a public meltdown over her contamination. Seriously, this is like a pious Muslim learning that the mystery meat she just ate in Mecca was a pork chop.

More:

Now blasting Immortal Technique in my office and thinking what to say to @MsEntropy’s Critical Theory & the Endless War on Terror class and its Virtual Panel Discussion on Racializing Religion & The Domestic War(s).

And reminding myself that I am actually a f*cking good teacher! pic.twitter.com/l1Dr3ZzgmI

— Sunny Singh (@sunnysingh_n6) February 4, 2020

Is she a good teacher? I dunno, but it seems to me that even an average teacher would not be so thrown by an encounter with a lazy student. And that a good teacher would make an attempt to awaken the lazy student to the wonders of literature, which to which his own slothfulness is blinding him, but that he may overcome with effort. If Virgil appearing to Dante in the selva oscura, and meeting with resistance from the putative pilgrim, had had the heart of Sunny Singh, he would have thrown himself on the ground and had a hissy fit. Instead, when the vice that halted the pilgrim Dante was not slothfulness, but cowardice, Virgil replied (trans. Anthony Esolen):

“If I have understood your words aright,”

replied the shade of that greathearted man,

“your spirit has been bruised by cowardice,

Which many a time so weighs a mean’s heart down

it turns him from a glorious enterprise —

as shadows food the horse that shies away.

That you may slip this worry and go free,

I’ll tell you why I came and what I heard

when first I pitied you your misery.”

Do you see what Virgil does here? He responds to the sinner Dante with pity in his ignorance — an ignorance that immiserates Dante. Virgil tells him a story about how he, Virgil, came to be present as Dante’s liberator from ignorance and vice. Three heavenly graces — the Madonna, St. Lucia, and Beatrice — called him to be an emissary of grace to the pilgrim. Virgil concludes:

“What is it, then? Why stand here, why delay?

Why let such cowardice come take your heart?

Why are you not afire and bold and free,

 

Seeing that three such ladies blessed in Heaven

care for your healing from their court above,

and what I tell you holds forth so much good?”

Isn’t that marvelous? Rather than hate on Dante in his vice and ignorance, Virgil responds with compassion, and convinces Dante that his hesitance to go on this journey is a sign of his mental slavery, and that he is being offered a way out thanks to the fact that good people love him, and care what happens to him.

How do you suppose that slothful young man would have responded had his professor, Dr. Singh, reacted that way? We don’t know. But I guarantee that shrieking and leaving the classroom and having a very public Twitter meltdown will convince no one that Dr. Singh cares about them, that she has any life-saving wisdom, or the slightest authority to proclaim the truths found in these books to students. The student failed that day, it is true — but the greater failure was the teacher’s.

As it happened, the porcelain professor did not resign:

Her “safety”? All because a kid didn’t do his homework. The greatest danger to Sunny Singh’s safety is Sunny Singh, who, on evidence presented here, is at all times two tics away from a gran mal seizure.

She’s reaching the end of her woke journey:

And finally, the magnificent conclusion, when the pilgrim Sunny Singh achieves the beatific vision within the Social Justice religion:

Except as Zora Neale Hurston said: “If you are silent about your pain, they’ll kill you and say you enjoyed it.”

So. NO! I will not be silent.

I will not be gagged.

I will not be killed and have been declared as enjoying my own destruction.

— Sunny Singh (@sunnysingh_n6) February 4, 2020

I remind you that what triggered this entire tweetstorm that culminated in an actual grown woman professor having a shrieking public meltdown and imagining herself as a martyr (“killed”) was a student saying he didn’t do his reading assignment because he didn’t get into the book.

Here’s a link to the whole thread. Could you imagine being in her classroom? Could you imagine how frightening it would be to have such a person holding authority over your educational future? How free is anybody in that classroom to dissent from the professor’s point of view, either validly or not, when the professor construes everything as a world-historical clash of good and evil?

Sunny Singh models how to achieve and maintain power in the current academic hothouse — proclaim one’s own victimhood, accuse anyone you don’t like of racism, sexism, and so forth, and compel everyone else (in her case, a white man!) to fall all over themselves to calm you down. But she does not model virtue, strength, or resilience. With this pathetic display, she showed that she is a weakling and a bully. If you want to learn something about literature, avoid Dr. Singh’s class, is the lesson here. She’s a laughingstock.

Any academic institution constructed on a foundation that privileges people like Sunny Singh is going to fall, and deserve to fall, because it is decadent. If the university were healthy, it would tell its Sunny Singhs to get hold of themselves, and to get back in there and teach the damn class. If the kid doesn’t want to do the reading, and he won’t be persuaded that it is to his benefit, then flunk him, and move on. He doesn’t deserve to be at the university anyway, if that’s his attitude. But like I said, Sunny Singh and that anonymous doofus have a lot in common, in that they see the education process as self-centered and therapeutic.

Is this the end result of critical theory, “social justice,” and that sort of thing? To turn people into woke tyrants who are incapable of confronting anything that bothers them? Sure looks like it. Notice how it all began: with Dr. Singh turning what is pretty clearly a case of bog-standard student laziness into “racism” and “sexism.” This is a totalitarian mindset: one that renders all of life political (in this case, identity politics). A system that privileges people like Sunny Singh is not a healthy system, and it will eventually die — but not before wreaking a lot of destruction.

Ask yourself: are the students in that class more likely to believe that reading literature, especially from “diverse” authors, is a valuable endeavor after witnessing their professor’s tantrum? Or are they more likely to think that studying this stuff is likely to make you a crazy, woke bully? Whatever else you might say about it, Prof. Singh destroyed her authority with her totally unprofessional behavior.

If you are masochistically inclined to this sort of thing, here is a link to a 2014 panel discussion on What Intersectionality Means To You. The link takes you to the beginning of Dr. Singh’s remarks.

The post It’s Never Sunny In Wokeadelphia appeared first on The American Conservative.