Rod Dreher's Blog, page 175

Donald Trump Eats, Prays, Hates

I was traveling all day back from Rome, and missed President Trump’s disgusting performance at the National Prayer Breakfast. Well, I’m home now, and … Michael Gerson is right. Excerpts:

First, the president again displayed a remarkable ability to corrupt, distort and discredit every institution he touches. The prayer breakfast was intended to foster personal connections across party differences. Trump turned it into a performative platform to express his rage and pride — the negation of a Christian ethic. Democrats have every right and reason to avoid this politicized event next year. And religious people of every background should no longer give credence to this parody of a prayer meeting.

And:

If this is what the National Prayer Breakfast has become, it has ceased to be religious, ceased to be useful and ceased to be necessary.

Read it all. 

Trump is a small, ugly, godless and graceless man. This is not news — but don’t you start with the whiny “but you’re still going to vote for him” stuff again. Maybe I will, but that’s because I would rather have a president who is all those things, but who in the end does what he can to protect the lives of the unborn than a president who is personally decent, but whose policies and judicial appointments permit that slaughter. But that is no excuse for what Trump said, and the disgraceful way he behaved towards the Democrats present in the room, towards everyone in that room, and, I mean it, towards Almighty God.

There’s no reason for anyone with the fear of God and the barest minimum of self-respect to go to sit among a bunch of pious waffle-nibblers and listen to the president insult people and aggrandize himself. The organizers of that event owe the others present a public apology.

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Tories Turn Chicken

The Polish-born British MP Daniel Kawczynski spoke at this week’s National Conservatism conference. He’s a Tory and a Brexiteer, and talked about the importance of sovereignty.

Today we learned that his own party, the Conservatives, have forced him to apologize for appearing at the event. Excerpt:

“Daniel Kawczynski has been formally warned that his attendance at this event was not acceptable, particularly in light of the views of some of those in attendance, which we utterly condemn, and that he is expected to hold himself to higher standards,” a Conservative Party spokesperson told Jewish News.

“Daniel has accepted this and apologised,” according to the spokesperson.

The event drew headlines in the UK this week, with the Conservative peer Lord Eric Pickles warning the MP had “let fellow Conservatives down.”

Last week, the Guardian did a hit piece on Kawczynski’s planned appearance. In response, Kawczynski wrote in The Spectator about why he was going to the conference. Excerpt:

Orban and Salvini are not to everyone’s tastes, of course. And I don’t agree with each and every one of their policies. But I am not Hungarian or Italian and both leaders have been elected on huge popular mandates in their countries. They represent serious ideas and concerns, some of which are shared by people in Britain. They have every right to speak at a conference on the subject of national sovereignty, which they have pledged to defend and which accounts for their popularity with voters. Clearly, offence archeologists have done a thorough job in finding historic remarks from some of the participants that jar with the liberal world view. But it is only common sense to talk with parties and politicians that are either leading their respective countries, or will perhaps take power in the next few years. It would be foolish not to do so.

Perhaps those criticising the event should take a more inquisitive approach rather than simply attacking its existence and maligning elected politicians from other countries who are due to speak. If so, they might discover why the vast majority of Europeans feel more loyalty to their own countries than the abstract idea of a federal European super-state.

During the conference, I was standing in the lobby of the hotel talking to some folks when a British friend also at the conference came over quickly to warn that a Guardian journalist was prowling the lobby trying to provoke people into saying loony right-wing things. He had hovered nearby and overheard her approaching others.

A British reader forwarded me a link to BBC radio’s report on Kawczynski’s speech, but I couldn’t access the link from my laptop. The reader included this letter of complaint about it to the BBC:

Sarah Montague on the World at One reported that  Daniel Kawczynski , MP,  spoke along alongside ‘far-right individuals’ at the National Conservatism Conference.  She interviewed one guest, Lord Mann, whose main contention seemed to be that the conference was a bastion of ‘right wing anti-Semitism’.  This is of course a complete slur, as reference to the event’s programme will attest (https://nationalconservatism.org/natcon-rome-2020/wp-content/uploads/sites/3/2020/02/NC-Conference-Program_8.5×5.5_v7-1.pdf).

BBC 4 made no attempt  to include anyone with another viewpoint, such as any of the  many conference speakers (such as Yoran Hazony,  an Israeli Jew) or attendees .

Really, this is the sort of distortion and twisted nonsense we’d expect from the Guardian, but is becoming more and more the party line at the BBC as well.  (The BBC would do better to enquire why the ‘Conservative’ Party has the chutzpah to call itself conservative, given their policies, which are anything but.)  Do you really wonder why we resent the License Fee, when all we get in return is your left-wing dishonest broadcasting?  Shame again on the BBC.

On a different platform, the BBC reported:

Labour’s Andrew Gwynne said the prime minister must clarify whether the MP was given permission by Tory whips to go to the event.

“It’s disgraceful that just one week after Holocaust Memorial Day Daniel Kawczynski has shared a platform with anti-Semites, Islamophobes and homophobes,” he said.

“He should be immediately suspended from the Conservative Party.”

Leading Jewish groups, such as the Board of British Deputies and the Jewish Labour Movement, has also called on him to be disciplined.

Anti-Semites? The man who organized the conference, and who leads the National Conservatism movement, is an Orthodox Jew, the political theorist Yoram Hazony! Islamophobes and homophobes? I didn’t hear every remark at the conference but the only time I heard Islam brought up was when Marion Maréchal talked about Islamic radicalization in France, and migration. And it is a perfectly legitimate issue! But this is how the Left rolls — just throw these smears out there to see what sticks. I spoke to someone there who is under police protection because of smears like this. Everyone in any liberal democracy ought to be defending this person, but rather, this person has to worry about every time they leave the house, if they will come back at night.

As for “homophobes,” judging by this story from the gay UK press, they’re talking about Orban, who is against same-sex marriage, Salvini, who has criticized same, and Ryszard Legutko, a distinguished Polish academic, practicing Catholic, and member of the European Parliament, because ditto. I talked to a Catholic who lamented that none of the speakers were really talking about God, or family issues. The word “homophobe” is used to smear and silence anybody who has the slightest objection to maximal LGBT demands.

And you know what? It works! The Tory Party, fresh off an astounding general election victory, has chosen to humiliate their on MP instead of tell the liars of Labour and the British establishment to stuff it. Daniel Kawczynski was correct to say that you don’t have to approve of everything Viktor Orban says or does, or Matteo Salvini, to recognize that these are popular political leaders — Orban is the longtime elected prime minister of Hungary! — who speak for a hell of a lot of people, and who deserve to be taken seriously.

By the way, Matteo Salvini also bailed out at the last minute. I don’t know why, but the feeling among the Italians I talked to is that after his party’s recent loss in Emilia-Romagna, he has been spooked, and didn’t want to attract negative media.

You would think from this criticism that the hall at the Rome hotel had been a mini Nuremberg rally, instead of what it was: an intellectually rich discussion of the meaning of national sovereignty, much of it in context of the continuity of politics of the Reagan era. I’ve posted a video of Kawczynski’s speech below. It was typical of the discourse we heard throughout the day.

I am telling you, conservatives had better grow a spine, and grow one fast. These smears, these guilt-by-association attacks, are never, ever going to end. Leaders have to learn not to care. This is entirely about making people ashamed of the things they believe, and the things they love. I fully agree that there has to be a cutoff point beyond which decent conservative and populist people will not go — I mean, there must be people and groups that are too extreme, and shouldn’t be legitimized. But the Guardian, the BBC, and the others draw that line at the elected prime minister of Hungary, a pensive philosopher who represents Poland in the European Parliament, and the leader of the biggest political party in Italy, for pity’s sake!

It’s like the Tory Party is Chick-fil-A: on top of the world, but still wetting their collective pants in the face of media and establishment wokescolds. Are we or are we not free people? Since when do Tories allow the Guardian and the recently-shellacked Labour Party to tell them with whom they can and cannot speak? There is indeed Tory shame over all this, and it doesn’t belong to Daniel Kawczynski.

The fear that people on the Right have of being spoken ill of by people who hate them anyway, and will always hate them — it’s so, so potent. As this episode shows.

Here’s Kawczynski’s speech, if you’re interested:

UPDATE: Calvin Robinson says this Tory behavior reminds him of some other recent Tory disgrace: the way the Tories threw Sir Roger Scruton under the bus when the leftist New Statesman accused him of making bigoted remarks. Only the hard work of Douglas Murray and others uncovered the sham accusations. Excerpt:

Calls for Scruton’s head on social media led to a knee-jerk reaction from the government, with Conservative minister James Brokenshire announcing Scruton’s resignation.

Brokenshire later apologised and re-instated Sir Roger after a full, in-context recording of Sir Roger’s interview emerged.

“We in Britain are entering a dangerous social condition in which the direct expression of opinions that conflict – or merely seem to conflict – with a narrow set of orthodoxies is instantly punished by a band of self-appointed vigilantes,” the philosopher remarked at the time — but he did not get to enjoy his vindication for long, passing away from cancer only a short time after his name was cleared and having spent a considerable amount of his final months in turmoil.

This is just sickening. The Tories learned nothing from their Scruton shame.

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DNC Sandbagging Bernie?

This just in from the head of the Democratic National Committee:

Enough is enough. In light of the problems that have emerged in the implementation of the delegate selection plan and in order to assure public confidence in the results, I am calling on the Iowa Democratic Party to immediately begin a recanvass.

— Tom Perez (@TomPerez) February 6, 2020

Funny, the timing of that, just as Bernie Sanders’s votes are starting to overtake Pete Buttigieg’s, with three percent of the votes left to be counted:

Was having a drink last night with an American political observer, a fellow conservative who came to Rome for the national conservatism conference. He said he thinks Bernie will be the Democratic nominee, and probably the president. Why? I asked. He made a case that boiled down to Bernie having the fire behind him, as Trump did in 2016 in the GOP field. If I were a Democrat voter even remotely interested in Sanders, that tweet by Tom Perez would make me want to crawl over glass to vote for him. The thing is, it really is true that Iowa has been a complete disaster (the NYT has found a shocking number of them). I can’t blame Perez, but surely he has the sense to understand that given the DNC’s role in 2016 of trying to sabotage Bernie to help Hillary, Sanders supporters have every reason to distrust Perez.

Me, I like to see insurgent Bernie stick it to the Democratic establishment (that, for me, was the only enjoyable thing about Trump’s primary campaign). But Tucker Carlson reminds us that Bernie really is far out there. Excerpt:

Sanders is running on a premise that you might recognize, actually, if you voted for Donald Trump in 2016. The system is rotten and corrupt, elect me, and I will fight for you. Except in this case, with Bernie, there’s some evidence that he will also tear down a lot of it — maybe all of it.

So far, Sanders has promised to use executive orders to open the borders, just in case you didn’t think the country was changing fast enough already.

Sanders wants to ban hydraulic fracking, which would shutter America’s most productive economic sector and make us once again dependent on Middle Eastern theocracies. Sanders promises it will be fine, though, because of the Green New Deal, which, not incidentally, will give him total control of a huge portion of the American economy. So there’s that.

And then he says he would nationalize our health care system and make private insurance illegal. He would hike the top tax income bracket, he’d impose a wealth levy on those who he thinks have too much, and that’s just for starters.

Bernie’s also for the Equality Act, which would write gay and trans rights into federal civil rights laws, and for restriction-free abortion. But his platform — see here — has a lot of appealing stuff in it. His social views and his open borders stance are deal breakers for me, though on those issues, he’s the same as the other Democrats.

Anyway, what do you Sanders voters, or potential Sanders voters, in the readership of this blog think about what Tom Perez is up to today? How are you feeling about the party? Probably about like how Trumpy Republican voters were thinking at this time back in 2016, eh?

Any of you conservative voters thinking of voting for Bernie? If so, why?

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The Chick-fil-A Of Swiss Chocolate

Yesterday’s woke cause: force conservative Christian bakers to bake gay wedding cakes.

Today’s woke cause: drive conservative Christian chocolate makers out of business.

This is a thing that just happened:

Swiss Air Lines has dropped chocolate manufacturer Läderach over its owner’s affiliation with a pro-life, pro-family Christian organization.

For more than 10 years, Läderach had supplied the airline with small boxes of chocolates that were given to some passengers as a token of appreciation.

Following months of negative headlines, Swiss Air Lines decided to cut ties with the chocolatier that recently has expanded into North America, running stores in both New York City and Toronto. Sweets made by Läderach will be phased out by April 2020, the airline announced.

According to an article published by Swiss magazine “Beobachter,” the airline has a significant number of homosexuals among its employees.

Jürg Läderach, owner of the chocolate manufacturer, is the president of “christianity for today” (cft), an evangelical organization based in Switzerland. CEO Johannes Läderach also serves on the board of cft.

Here’s a link to a Swiss media story (in German) about the Läderach patriarch’s activism. The family are conservative pro-life, pro-family Evangelicals. Switzerland has a progressive LGBT culture — e.g., gay sex has been legal since 1942, gay couples are legally recognized by the state, homosexuality is widely accepted — but same-sex marriage is not legal. Switzerland’s abortion laws are fairly conservative, permitting it in the first three months of pregnancy, with certain requirements. The point is, conservative Evangelicals are outliers in Swiss culture.

What’s more, the Läderachs have never been accused of anti-gay discrimination in the workplace, and they have said that they’re strongly opposed to it.

This is all about LGBT and pro-choice activists trying to destroy a family’s business because the family holds political opinions and religious beliefs that the activists do not like. Destroy the business, or force them to stay out of public life with their stinking Christian views.

I told you when Chick-fil-A capitulated to these tyrants that it was a bellwether: when a company that has managed to succeed massively, even in the face of a demonization campaign from activists, ends up surrendering anyway, that shows activists that their attempts to stigmatize conservative Christians by going after their livelihoods works. Läderach chocolate is some of the very best in Switzerland — and that’s really saying something. I hope they can weather this storm. The point is, left-wing activists are bullies.

I heard in Rome yesterday some very solid information about a devastating legislative move coming against Christian colleges in a particular state, over LGBT rights. I can’t write about the story here — I’m hoping to be able to soon — but you had better get ready for a major national constitutional showdown over religious liberty. It will end up in court, no doubt. This is why it is very, very important to have on the federal bench — at SCOTUS and everywhere — judges who have an expansive definition of the First Amendment.

Assuming what I was told is coming actually happens, and assuming that the Christian colleges prevail in a lawsuit, on constitutional grounds, the social pressure on those colleges will be overwhelming. Are Christians preparing themselves, and their children, for this kind of mass hatred? For being faithful to the truth, despite the mob — including the mob at the state legislature — coming for you?

Republican politicians almost never talk about religious liberty, not in a substantive way. From what I can tell, a lot of pastors bypass it too. Believe me, the hatred is building. Guess which social justice warrior said this:

… activism, without which virtue is powerless. Activism is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of social justice, applied to the most pressing needs of society.

It was Maximilien Robespierre, who actually said these words, in defense of the Terror, the campaign under which the Jacobins slaughtered all the Bad People Who Opposed The Revolution:

… terror, without which virtue is powerless. Terror is nothing more than speedy, severe and inflexible justice; it is thus an emanation of virtue; it is less a principle in itself, than a consequence of the general principle of democracy, applied to the most pressing needs of the fatherland.

This is the mentality of the Social Justice Warriors! And no major corporate leaders, no institutional leaders, almost no cultural leaders, and virtually no political leaders, have the guts to stand up to them.

There will either be a hard backlash, or we are going to have to build some kind of an underground. Either way, there can be no business as usual. The Left won’t have it. Hannah Arendt points out that the more that the political pushes its way into everyday life, politicizing everything, the closer we move to totalitarianism. I don’t want to live in a society where the Läderachs would be punished for their pro-life, pro-family views, and I don’t want to live in a world in which the Läderachs would be made to suffer in the marketplace for their pro-choice, pro-LGBT views. If we don’t have a strong reassertion of the importance of private life, and how it must be made safe from politics, we are going to end up having some sort of civil war. People will not tolerate this forever. Will they?

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Prada Meets The Pink Police State

Nobody feels sorry for fashionistas, but pay attention to this: it’s scary as hell. From the NYT:

In December 2018, Chinyere Ezie, a civil rights lawyer, posted a picture on Twitter that seemed to encapsulate a year’s worth of racial and cultural faux pas from major fashion brands.

It showed the window of the Prada shop in downtown New York filled with Pradamalia figurines that resembled monkeys in blackface. “I don’t make a lot of public posts, but right now I’m shaking with anger,” Ms. Ezie, who works at the Center for Constitutional Rights, wrote on Facebook.

Social media, especially the Twitterati and the fashion industry watchdog Diet Prada — soon to be furious over a Gucci blackface sweater and already outraged over a Dolce & Gabbana video that caricatured Chinese culture — took up the cause. Charges of racism flew.

In short order, Prada had done away with the offending objects, apologized and vociferously declared its intention to focus on diversity.

Not everyone was satisfied.

No, of course not. An apology is never enough. We must discipline and punish — and shake down. The New York City Commission on Human Rights has been proctologically probing Prada, searching for signs of ideological incorrectness. More:

Prada denied any discrimination but has committed to internal re-education, engaging in financial and employment outreach with minority communities, and submitting to external monitoring of its progress for the next two years.

And Prada is not the only brand under the commission’s microscope. It has also been negotiating with Gucci post-blackface incident, and Christian Dior, for its Sauvage campaign, which perpetrated Native American stereotypes. Together these cases represent new territory for city government, which has never focused so specifically on the images and products fashion brands disseminate.

The move has rattled many in the industry, where traditionally such value judgments are left to the consumer, and brands will often do almost anything to avoid tarnishing their halo or upsetting the market.

It gets worse:

The commission agreement, which was seen by The New York Times, requires Prada to provide sensitivity training, including “racial equity training,” for all New York employees within 120 days of signing the agreement — as well as for executives in Milan since the commission argued that decisions made in Italy have repercussions in New York.

In other words, Miuccia Prada as well as Patrizio Bertelli, her husband and the Prada chief executive, and Mr. Mazzi will all go through training. The general counsel of Prada will report back to the commission on the executives’ compliance.

Read the whole thing.

This is an absolutely extraordinary intrusion of state bureaucracy into micromanaging the way a company is run, to ensure that a very particular view of ideological correctness is instituted there. Prada is a global company, but a local bureaucracy in a single city is forcing this on the corporation. Prada is Italian. How on earth is an Italian company supposed to be aware of the constantly-changing standards in the United States on what constitutes racial incorrectness? Look at those trinkets. Most Americans would have recognized them as potentially problematic, but should Italians be aware? OK, make them aware, let them apologize — but why does making a faux pas require the involvement of the government, and it taking over part of the company’s management, to re-educate it in politically correct standards.

That’s happening to Prada in New York. What about the Human Rights Commissions of other cities? What if they apply different, stricter standards? It’s a nightmare. It gives tyrannical powers over freedom of expression to unelected, unaccountable bureaucrats. Why on earth do the American people stand for this?

Hey Republican members of Congress: campaign this fall on passing a law to forbid this kind of thing. Defend the First Amendment! No company is going to stand up to it, because they don’t want to be shamed by activists who will accuse them of defending bigotry. The GOP has been way too timid on the First Amendment front, probably for the same reason. Somebody is going to have to stand up to these bullies.

Ragazzi, I’m flying back from Rome today, so comments-approving will be non-existent till I’m back in ‘Murka. I am currently experimenting with just how much cheese and dried pasta I can bring back without breaking the straps on my carry-on bag. My kids prefer me bringing real Italian pasta home to chocolate.

 

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Among The National Conservatives

I thought I would report a lot of big political ideas from the big National Conservatism conference in Rome today. But not what we’re at the end of the day, that’s not what sticks out in my mind.

There were some big ideas there. I really liked the speech that Marion Maréchal gave, though my European (especially French) conservative friends here were cooler on it than I was. This is because the sort of integral conservative points she made are fairly normal in continental Catholic conservative circles, though still pretty radical by American standards. For example, she talked about the importance of protecting the environment, and agriculture, and human dignity by opposing transhumanism, etc. She said all this at her CPAC speech last year, I was reminded, so it didn’t make as big a splash with those who were already familiar with these ideas. Still, I thought she was marvelous. Maybe it’s because this is the only time I’ve heard an actual conservative politician advocate the kinds of traditionalist things that I talked about in my 2006 book Crunchy Cons.

Viktor Orban was great, as usual, and about a thousand times smarter and shrewder than anybody else. The difference between the actually existing Orban and the Orban presented in the Western media is really remarkable. Douglas Murray is as lovely a speaker as he is a writer. He’s a gentle man, so much so that you would never guess how completely brave he is. He really is one of the most courageous men in British public life, but to spend time with him, you think he’s just this kind, friendly guy.

That was a sign for me about the meaning of this conference. For me, by far the most interesting part of the day was what I learned from conversations among people attending this meeting. I met men and women from all over Europe. Everybody had a story. I met Mattias Karlsson, a leading politician in the Swedish Democrats party — the so-called “far right.” I didn’t know who I was talking to at first when we met at the bar. He told me he was from Sweden, and a politician. One reason he got involved in politics was because he was sick and tired of hearing stories about women in his life being raped by immigrants — and this being denied by official Swedish culture, because the facts were politically incorrect. When he sat on a panel at the conference, Karlsson spoke briefly about how he loved “the beauty of old, diverse institutions, for me, that is Europe.” And: “Without pride, we cannot restore anything.” He was talking about simple love of Swedish things, the things that Swedes have built over the centuries. He was talking about a plain love of Home, and a desire to defend it.

Here’s the thing: there was nothing angry or cruel about Mattias Karlsson and the things he said. It was normal. This is how the Left is today: they pathologize and demonize normal things like loving your own home, and the ways of your people. Before I knew who Mattias Karlsson was, I thought, he sounds like the kind of decent guys I grew up with.

I met a lot of people like that today. In fact, I wish people had talked more about this kind of thing than about sovereignty, which was by far the dominant topic in all the panels and speeches. After all these private conversations, I thought about how weird it is that all these people — Italians, Croats, Swedes, Germans, English, and so on — have been deemed as dangerous far-right weirdos by the media, often simply because they love their homes, and do not understand why they must hate themselves and their cultural inheritance to prove their virtue.

I heard stories today that would shake most of you up. I can’t give details, because they were said in confidence, but look, I can tell you that I spoke to people who are living with, or who have lived with, astonishing persecution from the Left in their home countries. One young man told a story about how he intervened in a particular case to tell a foreign person that what they were doing in that moment was against the rules of the place where they were. It turns out that the foreigner, an ethnic minority, was the son of a wealthy, powerful dignitary back home, and accused the young man (white) of racism. The white man cleared his name, but not after undergoing two investigations, including one by the local police, on a hate crimes accusation. This, simply for saying, “I’m sorry sir, but you can’t do that here.”

This really resonated with me. It reminded me of stories I heard from people who had lived through communism. They had talked about how civil society was not possible, because you lived in total fear of other people. You never knew who you could trust, and who might report you to the police on the basis of a single comment.

Someone who wasn’t here, but whose story totally fit in with these narratives, is this Finnish politician:

The Finnish Police conducting two separate criminal investigations against me. I am accused of criminal agitation against a minority group, primarily for quoting the Bible in a Tweet last summer, and for a 16-year old pamphlet. https://t.co/gTJlcfuDho

— Päivi Räsänen (@PaiviRasanen) February 4, 2020

This is persecution, straight up. A man I spoke with this evening told a story about how the tax authorities in his country moved against his political organization based on information that a leftist sympathizer within the government leaked. The man’s organization prevailed in court, but their defense cost them three times what they won in damages. These kinds of things are happening all over.

Today a British friend at the conference whispered to me, as a warning, “There’s a Guardian reporter going around trying to get people to say outrageously right-wing things.” I saw the reporter behind him. I know better than to speak to a Guardian reporter, but I appreciated the heads-up. Here’s the insane story that the Guardian printed about the conference today. I heard everything this MEP said, and it was perfectly normal. This is a vicious case of left-wing smearing by association. Marion Maréchal’s grandfather is Jean-Marie Le Pen! Daniel Kawczynski is appearing under the same roof as Viktor Orban, who is a Bad Person! I mean, honestly, that’s all these nitwits have. When I tell you that you cannot trust a thing that the Western media say about the “far right,” I’m talking from personal experience. The Left operates on shaming people. We know this. There is real power in refusing to be shamed. People stood up and cheered for Viktor Orban today, and I have to think that is in part because he does not care what the respectable European establishment thinks. He just keeps going.

Walking back to my hotel from today’s events, I was thinking about the meaning of loyalty. That is the overall impression I got from today: that the people in that hotel ballroom were a fairly diverse lot, and some of them were contradictory, some were eccentric, and some were maybe even sort of a mess. But I tell you, it was a coalition of the normal. A Brit told me that he was standing in a big crowd in London on Brexit night, amid a throng singing, “God Save The Queen” and “Rule, Britannia!”, and how great it was to feel that it was okay to love his country, and to be proud of it.

Why is this wrong?

It’s not wrong. It’s not wrong at all. I’m leaving Rome proud to know these people and their stories. I am sure that somewhere in that crowd today, there were unsavory people. But all the people I talked to were just more or less ordinary people who realized that there was nothing wrong with them at all, no matter what the establishments in their own countries say. Yes, there were big ideas talked about on the stage today, but for me, the sense of solidarity gained from meeting and talking with people face to face, and hearing, in one form or another, “Oh, it happened to you too, did it?” — that is priceless.

I gave the keynote address, which I’ve pasted in below. I’ve got to tell you something neat that happened as I stood in the wings waiting to be introduced. A Croatian-American came over and said hi, reminding me that we had met at a Notre Dame conference a couple of years earlier. He knew that I was going to talk about what we have to learn from people who had lived under communism. He said that his father had escaped communist Yugoslavia with the help of a Catholic priest. He started talking about this priest, who his family knew and loved until the old priest died, and I thought, “Surely he doesn’t mean Father Kolakovic.”

The man said, “The priest’s name was Father Tomislav Poglajen, but he changed his name to Kolakovic.”

I told the man that I knew all about him, and that I dedicate my forthcoming book to Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the man who made the Slovak Catholic resistance possible. “I’m about to give a speech where I talk about him!” I said.

Two minutes later, I walked up onto the stage to give the speech below. I should tell you that the Croatian man put me in touch via e-mail with his 92 year old dad, who lives in America, and the father and I will be talking next week about this hidden hero of the anti-communist resistance.

That seemed providential. Here’s my speech. It seems sketchy to me, but I was only given 20 minutes to talk. I was happy to give notice to James Poulos’s Pink Police State coinage, which is exactly right:

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.

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Globalist Propaganda 101

You have to watch this. It’s by a niche pro-EU party from Northern Ireland, but it is a pure distillation of the globalist spirit, and one of the most sinister things I’ve seen in a while. It was retweeted yesterday by Guy Verhofstadt, a leading EU parliamentarian.

What a remarkable film. First, I’m struck by the fact that the Alliance Party portrays a nation’s attempt to assert sovereignty over its borders as real evil. (I mean, I know that’s what they believe, but it’s still striking to see it illustrated like this.) The film indicates that the glorious future must be multicultural, or else. The Myth of Progress — the idea that failure to dissolve the nation and its people is a retreat on the Grand March of History. Weirdest of all is the repeated deployment of gay images in the short movie, as if Brexit were somehow a violation of gay rights. Maybe you UK readers know something I don’t, but gay rights is widely accepted in Britain, certainly by Boris Johnson. I’m open to correction, but it seems to me that the Alliance Party is simply trying to pile everything it considers Evil onto the Brexit movement.

In any case, this clip certainly shows you who the enemy is, and what they believe. This clip makes clear that at bottom, this is a culture war.

Alliance Party’s big gay European future

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Sunday With St. Benedict

I returned a short time ago from an astonishing journey to Subiaco, to the monastery founded by St. Benedict, around the cave in which he lived as a hermit circa 500, praying and fasting and discerning God’s call. It was in this monastery that the saint wrote his Rule, and from which he founded the 13 monasteries under the Rule in his lifetime (he died in 547).

My Italian friends — a couple I know here in Rome, and their two children — took me to Subiaco today. It is about an hour’s drive from Rome, though when you get to the monastery, it feels like you have gone back in time, to somewhere very remote — which it was in the saint’s day. After going down to Rome from his birthplace in Norcia to finish his education, Benedict was so appalled by the decadence in the city — recall that the Western half of the Roman Empire officially collapsed in 476, just before Benedict’s birth, when the last Western emperor was deposed by the barbarians. Benedict left the city and went to live in a cave on the side of a mountain. He lived as a hermit for three years, praying and fasting and listening for the Lord’s voice to tell him what to do. In this time, he was fed by a monk named Romanus, who lowered food to him in a basket.

After he began his ministry, a monastic community grew up around his cave. Benedict lived in that monastery for 20 years. That’s where he wrote his Rule. The 12 monasteries he founded in the area around Rome, including the great one at Monte Cassino, where he and his sister St. Scholastica are buried, are daughter houses of this small monastic enclave clinging to the sheer side of a mountain. I love this statue of Benedict in a back courtyard of the monastery. It shows the saint with his hand outstretched to the mountain massing just feet away, with this message carved onto the pedestal: “Stop, cliff: do not harm my children.”

A close-up of his face:

I know the feeling, don’t you?

I could not capture the vertiginous vividness of the monastery’s location with my iPhone camera, but maybe these can give you a hint. Here is a shot of the terraced monastic gardens:

Another:

From the courtyard where the statue above is:

Notice the goats on the steps far below — this is rural Italy, after all!

The frescoes on the monastery walls mostly date from the 12th to the 14th centuries, but there is this incredible one of the Virgin Mary with the Christ child, and two unidentified saints, that was painted in the 8th century. Both the image and the painting style are Byzantine. Historians say this testifies to the fact that monks from the Eastern church (which, remember, was united to the West then) lived at this monastery. This fresco is in the “Shepherd’s Cave,” connected by a staircase to the part of the complex where Benedict’s cave is. Tradition has it that this is where Benedict first preached to the local shepherds who discovered him living in the hermitage:

The frescoes are dazzling. Here are a couple of seraphim in one of the older chapels:

With symbol of St. Mark on the right

I don’t know who this saint is, but what’s most interesting to me is the graffiti, which create a palimpsest effect. The carvings are centuries old. Can you imagine that people from far into the past could not resist the urge to deface the holy image, simply to mark it with their names, as a sign that they had been there?

 

St. Francis of Assisi visited this monastery in 1223. This fresco image of him was almost certainly painted from life. It does not say “Saint,” nor does it feature him with a halo, or show his stigmata. In other words, this is probably what St. Francis looked like. Notice the eyes, with one bigger than the other, just like the famous 6th century Christ Pantocrator icon at St. Catherine’s Monastery on Mount Sinai. In that icon, the left side (the viewer’s right) is interpreted at representing Christ’s humanity, and the right side his divinity. See this side by side comparison to see how different they are. The asymmetrical portrait of Francis here suggests that the fresco painter was drawing attention the same thing in the future saint (not, obviously, that he is divine, but that in him we can see an image of Christ).

The medievals did not mess around with death. Here is St. Macarius the hermit, telling three carefreeyoung folks about what’s ahead:

The name of the monastery is “Sacre Speco” — Holy Cave — and here is the cave itself. There is a 17th century statue of young Benedict and the basket inside which his food came to him. You can’t really see the dimensions of the cave in this photo, and I wish the statues weren’t there. Still, it is hard to express the power of standing there in the cave where this simple Christian lived and prayed for three years, before he emerged to change the Western world forever:

 

If you know anything about St. Benedict, even if it’s just by reading The Benedict Option, you know that in many respects, the future of Western civilization was decided in that cave, in the dialogue between the young man Benedict and the Holy Spirit. Inside the stony earth, a symbol of the depleted spiritual energies of the dead Empire, a new spiritual seed gathered strength, and germinated. The Rule that Benedict wrote when he emerged from the cave, and the monasteries he founded, in turn grew quickly, spreading their vines across barbarian-ruled Europe. Thousands of men and women entered Benedictine orders in the early medieval period. They preached the Gospel, they converted peoples, they taught them how to pray, they instructed them on how to cultivate crops, and how to make things — knowledge that had been lost in Rome’s devastating collapse. And they began to teach children. Slowly, over the decades and centuries, the Benedictine monastics — foremost among Churchmen — laid the foundation for the rebirth of civilization in the West.

The rebirth began when Benedict of Nursia emerged from that cave in the early years of the 6th century, and brought to the world what he had been given in the darkness. It is fitting that Francis of Assisi, a spiritual revolutionary of the next era in the Western Church’s life, made pilgrimage to Benedict’s holy cave, and prayed there. Think of this passage from G.K. Chesterton’s life of St. Francis:

In a better sense than the antithesis commonly conveys, it is true to say that what St. Benedict had stored St. Francis scattered; but in the world of spiritual things what had been stored into the barns like grain was scattered over the world as seed.  The servants of God who had been a besieged garrison became a marching army; the ways of the world were filled as with thunder with the trampling of their feet and far ahead of that ever swelling host went a man singing; as simply he had sung that morning in the winter woods, where he walked alone.

Chesterton’s lines are beautiful, but don’t get the idea that Benedict “stored,” in the sense that he hoarded. Rather, in the way of life he taught and embodied in his monks, Benedict stored spiritual knowledge and deepened practices that allowed Christian to inhabit those truths in a disciplined way. Francis was more literally evangelical than Benedict; that was his calling and his charism. But Francis received what his predecessor in the faith had done as much or more than anybody to preserve for him.

Today, in the life of Western Christianity, and of Christianity the world over, we desperately need greater attention to storing. I am reminded of this passage from The Benedict Option, in which Marco Sermarini reflects on the troubles of this world, and what good men and women are called to do:

He shrugged. “I don’t know what’s going to happen next, but in the meantime, we have to fight for the good,” he said. “The possibility of saving the good things in the world is only this: a possibility. We have to take the chances we have to set a rock and to keep this rock steady.”

We walked back to the jeep, climbed in, and drove on.

“Nothing we make here will be eternal, but we have to build them as if they will be eternal,” Marco continued. “That’s what God wants. If you promise yourself to a woman for a lifetime, that is a way of making the eternal present here in time.”

We have to go forward in confidence that the little things we do might, in time, grow into mighty works, he said. It is all up to God. All we can do is our very best to serve Him.

Sometimes Marco lies in bed at night, worrying that his efforts, and the efforts of his little Christian community, won’t amount to much in the face of so much opposition. He is anxious that the current will be too strong to resist and will carry them over the falls as well.

“I know from the olive trees that some years we will have a big harvest, and other years we will take few,” he said. “The monks, when they brought agriculture to this place, they taught our ancestors that there are times when we have to save seed. That’s why I think we have to walk on this road of Saint Benedict, in this Benedict Option. This is a season for saving the seed. If we don’t save the seed now, we won’t have a harvest in the years to come.”

Though it is perched on the lip of a cliff, almost hovering over a gorge with an unseen river rushing by, the Sacre Speco monastery is a place of almost overwhelming peace. Petrarch, who visited it, called the monastery the “threshold of Paradise,” and it’s not hard to see why. It really is one of those liminal, “thin” places, where spiritual realities seem closer than in the everyday. It is also a sign of hope: a reminder that if we abandon ourselves entirely to divine grace, a world-changing power can emerge from the humblest places. From a modest town in a forgotten outpost of the Roman Empire. From a mountainside hole high above a deep furrow in the wild forest. You never know. But you may hope.

Go to Subiaco, if you can. It is a great, great treasure. Every time I come to Italy, and every time I come to Europe, I find myself filled to bursting with gratitude for what has been preserved here for us all. We have to teach ourselves to cherish it, and protect it, and pass it on to future generations.

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The Savagery Of The Tribe

The story of the pastor in the Uber was so important for me to hear, especially because I’ve been thinking all week about a couple of heavy things about the storm gathering around us.

I am on my way to Rome, where I will be speaking at next week’s National Conservatism conference. The topic will be the theme of my forthcoming book: the coming totalitarianism, and the lessons that we must learn today from the experiences of those who resisted Soviet bloc communism. Here at the end of an extraordinary week on that front, I am especially eager to meet people at this conference – especially the British writer Douglas Murray, whose work has been so enlightening (I quote from his most recent book, The Madness of Crowds in the manuscript of my own book.)

Why do I say this was an extraordinary week? Well, let’s go to Murray, who asks, “Will no one resist the new totalitarianism?” He writes about the fate of Alastair Stewart, a veteran, and much beloved, English broadcaster who was sacked this week after four decades of service. Stewart’s firing offense was quoting Shakespeare at a hostile Twitter follower, who took it as racist. The tweeted-at is a black Briton, who interpreted this passage from the Bard, cited by Stewart, as a racial attack:

Actually that is not the specific tweet Stewart sent to the black man, Martin Shapland. It is one he sent to a white man months ago, an environmentalist with whom he was arguing.

In his column today, Andrew Sullivan gives context and explains the meaning of the Shakespeare lines:

In the aftermath of the fuss, Stewart has been widely hailed by all his colleagues as a model figure, an adored gentleman-mentor to many nonwhite journalists. News anchors broke into tears announcing his sudden banishment from the TV. And Shapland? His Twitter feed gives you a sense of where he’s coming from. See if you can spot a theme here: “Fucking white privilege.” “Typical white guy”; “Very white. Very male. Very pale. Very rich?” “Is this contributor white?” “The White People are at it again.” And what’s interesting to me is that Shapland feels utterly secure that, as a black man, he is entitled to use broad, generalizing insults of another race, and indeed should be celebrated for doing so. (The other time Stewart quoted this Shakespeare passage was with a tweeter who was white.)

The great truth about today’s version of anti-racism is that it’s racist. Marinate people in race consciousness; teach them to see racism everywhere; reward them for calling out, Stasi-like, their fellow citizens for thought-crimes; punish the “racist” pour decourager les autres; and repeat the ideological cleansing process. (The same is true of left feminism: tweets announcing hatred of all men are actually celebrated, or dismissed as irony.) Set up a system which rewards this kind of group hatred, and human nature will do the rest.

More:

And maybe it’s a good moment to see where we are. A man quotes Shakespeare comparing “man, proud man” with “an angry ape.” Any literate person can see that Shakespeare is not talking about race at all; he’s talking (rather presciently) about human beings’ deeper, more primal natures that can obscure our rational thought. But Shapland instantly thought he was being attacked for being black. The distortion and poisoning of the mind here is quite something to behold. And mourn.

In his piece, Douglas Murray reflects on Solzhenitsyn’s analysis of why more people in the Soviet Union didn’t speak out when the terror began. Solzhenitsyn said that the people who stood by and watched, and even some of the people who did the arresting, thought that the evil would never come for them — or if it did, their friends would stand up for them, the law would eventually vindicate them, they might survive it, and rebuild their lives. This was a fatal mistake. Here’s Murray:

In the same way, when a nationally famous figure is accused of the great crime of the age, they rarely believe that the people for whom they have worked for for decades — the people they gave up their weekends for, their spare evenings, the times they could have been with their family for — would drop them in a matter of hours for a crime which cannot be explained and whose nature is wholly subjective. For that would mean everybody in the world would be able to take out anybody else, if they had sufficient desire to do so. And surely that world would be unworkable.

Well it would be, and it is. But it is possible not only because the victims do not quell and shake and scream enough but because we – the public – allow them to disappear one by one. We do not slash the virtual tires of those who take them away. We do not pick up whatever cudgels we have to hand to beat back their accusers. We just sit, as the anonymous lists and the unprovable complaints pile up and up, simply hoping all the time that the dishonest players and anonymous accusers will never come for us.

But they will.

They came this week for Jeanine Cummins, a novelist who thought her own personal leftist views, and her desire to write a socially conscious novel that would help Americans be more caring about the plight of immigrants from Latin America — would win her acclaim. Robby Soave details the hysterical witch-burning that the publishing world went through this week. It ended with Cummins’s publisher canceling her book tour because of violent threats. Soave:

That said, it’s certainly the case that American Dirt has received tons of negative coverage—not from the sort of Trump-supporting anti-immigrant people who might be expected to object to the story’s ideology, but from liberals who think Cummins is engaged in cultural appropriation. Cummins is white—though she has claimed a Puerto Rican grandmother—and stands accused of writing about peoples and cultures to which she does not belong.

“The asymmetry of Cummins’s identity (she’s white and not an immigrant) and story (a Mexican woman’s flight to the United States with her son) has led to charges of racial and cultural appropriation and publishing-industry whitewashing,” notes The Atlantic‘s Randy Boyagoda. “Making matters worse, the novel is a commercial success: It won a seven-figure advance and was optioned for a film adaptation amid broader industry buzz, and it’s an Oprah Book Club selection….This is fundamentally a fight about an industry; it’s about how book publishers do business, and with whom.”

While there are certainly inequities in the world of publishing, it seems unfair to fault the book itself for this. More persuasive are criticisms of Cummins’ writing quality, though this line of attack blurs with the others.

The aesthetic quality of Cummins’s novel is beside the point. This is a case of weaponized resentment making a Girardian scapegoat of a writer. Think about what happened: a novelist had her book tour canceled out of fear for her safety, because left-wingers savaged her for writing a book intended to be sympathetic to Latino immigrants.

A novelist cannot go into a bookstore in America because of a reasonable fear of violence. This is where we are in America today.

Earlier in the week, I praised liberal journalist George Packer’s speech about the danger to writers from the current politicized atmosphere, but I faulted him for not naming the guilty: leftists. Packer did the same thing last fall, in a much-discussed account of how wokeness has eviscerated his kid’s New York public school — but he restrained himself from seriously calling out the villains. Why not? Is he afraid? Or is he unable to recognize that his own side is the most guilty in these matters? Does he think that his own liberalism, his talent, his friends, and his good intentions, are going to save him when the progressive mob comes for him?

Maybe he does. But look at Jeanine Cummins, and look at Alastair Stewart. The only fact that matters in the mob action to professionally destroy them destruction is that they are white, and their accusers are people of color.

As we know, the operating principle of our society is V.I. Lenin’s “who, whom” – that is, the meaning of any political act (and all acts are political acts) depends on who benefits, and who suffers. If the correct people (revolutionary classes) benefit, and the oppressor classes suffer, then the act is good; if not, not.

What an incredible thing. This is really happening, and it’s not coming from Trump World, as bad as it can be, but from the intellectuals, and those who hold a near-monopoly on cultural power.

In his Friday column, Andrew Sullivan talks about liberal Ezra Klein’s new book about political polarization, and the new one by Christopher Caldwell about the roots of the current crisis of polarization. He has positive and negative things to say about both, but concludes on a very pessimistic — and entirely warranted — note. Excerpts:

But how do we get out of this trap? That’s where the depression sinks in. Neither Caldwell nor Klein see a way back to a common weal and a common good. Ezra offers some technical corrections — ending the Electoral College, the filibuster, and winner-takes-all voting. And they might help, although their potential unintended consequences should be carefully considered. Then he recommends meditation to control our own primal instincts — a role that Christianity traditionally held. (I don’t disagree with Ezra on the benefits of meditation, but it’s hardly a game-changer in America in 2020.) Caldwell proposes something far more drastic: a repeal of the 1964 Civil Rights Act. Yes, you read that right. The proposal’s perversity matches its impossibility — and it’s buried in one sentence on the penultimate page of the book.

Of course that is not going to happen, whether it should or should not. And note here that Caldwell’s point is not that civil rights are a bad thing, or that segregation did not need to be smashed. That is not not not his point. His point is that the way the US attacked segregation set us on this path of balkanization and tribalism, and there seems to be no way out. Sullivan writes.

I have a smidgen more optimism. I see in the long-delayed backlash to the social-justice movement an inkling of a new respect for individual and creative freedom and for the old idea of toleration rather than conformity. I see in the economic and educational success of women since the 1970s a possible cease-fire in the culture wars over sex. I see most homosexuals content to live out our lives without engaging in an eternal Kulturkampf against the cis and the straight. Race? Alas, I see no way forward but a revival of Christianity, of its view of human beings as “neither Jew nor Gentile, neither slave nor free, nor is there male and female, for you are all one in Christ Jesus.” This means such a transcendent view of human equality that it does not require equality of outcomes to see equal dignity and worth.

Yes, I’m hoping for a miracle. But at this point, what else have we got?

This passage brought to mind W.H. Auden’s shocking experience in a Manhattan theater in the 1930s. From The New Criterion‘s essay about Auden’s faith:

In 1939, Auden attended a screening of a film documenting the Nazi’s conquest of Poland at which he observed that “quite ordinary, supposedly harmless Germans in the audience were shouting ‘Kill the Poles.’” “I wondered then why I reacted as I did against this denial of every humanistic value. The answer brought me back to the church.”

Only Christianity, Auden believed, had the power to resist this tribal savagery. It was true then, it is true now. As we will learn. I have spent the past year talking to men and women, Christians, whose faith carried them through totalitarian times. We need to hear their stories. With each passing day, I realize that even more.

The post The Savagery Of The Tribe appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Pastor Who Took Me Somewhere Good

I’m about to get on a plane, but I wanted to share a postcard from American life that meant something to me. Y’all know that I live online, and the things that I write about almost always has to do with things that I’ve learned online. I am aware that I bring news to readers that they might not see anywhere else, and I try to highlight threats and suggest how we might deal with them. Lately, as regular readers know, I have been writing a lot about Social Justice Warriors and the way they use identity politics to make everybody suspicious of and hostile to people not like themselves. I’ve been reading the mathematician James Lindsay’s devastating Twitter explanations of how critical theory and “social justice” work. For example:

Correct. Critical Social Justice requires seeing people as representatives of identity groups and “constantly” taking stock of positionality (one’s group’s standing against systemic power). That’s how intersectionality plays into my tweet. It *exists* to evaluate positionality. https://t.co/lD7cdrmCyG

— James Lindsay, white dingus (@ConceptualJames) January 31, 2020

Let me tell you about the Pastor.

I’m in the middle of a flight journey to Rome. I ordered an Uber from my home in Baton Rouge to the airport. The man who picked me up was a cheerful black man in late middle age. It turns out that he is a pastor. We started the ride talking about the neighborhood, and how the 2016 flood in Baton Rouge drove up housing costs. I told him a story about how my wife and I had the bad luck to need a house at a time when the 2016 flood had driven home prices through the roof.

That prompted him to launch into a very funny story about how through his shrewdness, he helped his wife make good money off some New Orleans property that she and her late husband had owned, but that was ruined by Katrina, and that some unscrupulous carpetbaggers from the North who were trying to buy up at well below its worth.

The information in the story could have been conveyed in about two minutes, but the pastor stretched it out to take up most of the drive to the airport. He had me roaring with laughter in the back seat as he talked about how he played those speculators — and how much it delighted his wife. I realized quickly that this wasn’t really a story about a simple country pastor who triumphed over big-city slicks, but a story about how a man proved himself in the eyes of his beloved. The pastor’s wife suddenly saw him not only as the man she loved, but also as her protector.

This was a big thing. He said that when they first met, she was a widow. After they fell in love and talked about marrying, he had to confess to her that he had no money in his pocket, and that he was worried that she would think that he only wanted to use her. She wasn’t rich by any means, but she had a job, and her late husband had left her with something. More than the pastor had, anyway.

He told me the story of how they met. It was in church, of course. It wasn’t his own church, but his cousin’s. It sounds like he preaching there that weekend. He said that he was standing near the pulpit, looking at the choir. “The Lord said to me, ‘Look, there is your wife,'” said the pastor. “I thought, ‘Lord, there’s six women there who don’t have husbands. Which one?'”

The Lord didn’t say, but when one particular woman — the one who had really caught his eye — came forward after services to meet him, he knew when he took her hand in introduction that there was something special about this widow.

Later, the pastor had to have surgery, and was facing a long recovery. He had no one to care for him. The woman told the rehab nurses that she would take him in.

“We hadn’t so much as kissed!” he said. “And there she was, taking me into her home to care for me when I couldn’t care for myself.”

This went on for months. The pastor finally healed, and told her that he thought it was time for him to be getting back to his own home.

“You are home,” she responded. And that’s how they started courting.

They married. He was so grateful for how she had cared for him, and how she had decided to marry him even though he was poor. He looked for an opportunity to serve her — and then it came, when these two “mafia-looking dudes” drove up to their front door, looking for the owner of the distressed property in New Orleans.

The pastor’s wife let him handle the negotiations. When she found out how much he had been able to sell the property for, she started hollering. “I wish I’d had some earplugs!” he said, laughing. “Brother, let me tell you that I still have brownie points in the cabinet that I haven’t used!”

As we approached the airport, we started talking about how God works in our lives, and how grace is all around us, if we only open our eyes to it. At curbside, he helped me unload my bags, and said, “You tell that pilot don’t be making any unplanned stops on that flight, because he got a child of God on that plane.” We shook hands. I promised to pray for him in Rome, and asked him to pray for me. He laughed and said he surely would.

And that was that. I was glowing inside, all the way to the gate. I think it was the most important thing to happen to me all day, maybe all week. We did not have a theological conversation at all. The pastor just told a couple of stories from his life. But God was all over it.

This is real life. I tell you, I have got to spend less time on the Internet, and more time in the real world. Don’t get me wrong: because of what I do for a living, I can see threats to that pastor’s way of life that he can’t see at all. My job is to make them clear. But I tell you, that pastor knows not a thing about his passenger this morning, but I can say with confidence that he sees threats to my way of life that are invisible to me.

I’m in the Atlanta airport now, waiting for my connecting flight. I saw that James Lindsay tweet I quote above, and thought about the conversation between that black man and my white self, two middle-aged guys from south Louisiana who shared stories, and who ended up promising prayer for each other. What kind of poison would these critical theory types inject into that humane exchange? How would they try to make us suspicious of each other, and lead us to doubt the reality of that twenty minutes of simple brotherhood, mediated by grace?

It really is true: the only way through this toxic fog is to commit ourselves to seeing each other as individuals. All of us have some good inside us, and some bad. We are all the inheritors of the virtues and vices of our ancestors, and of the society around us. What we choose to do with that inheritance is the drama of our lives. When the devils come to try to steal from us, if we’re walking in the right path, we may yet triumph. When we are broke and lonely, the Lord may place in the choir a stranger whose love will change our lives.

You never know. But you have to be open to grace.

None of this negates the bad, depressing news that is part of our everyday lives. It would be a false sentimentality to say that a moment like the pastor and I had this morning made all the serious evils of this world — racism, economic exploitation, fear, political hatred, and so on — somehow okay. That’s not how it works. But it does remind us that we are not political manifestoes, or blank screens upon which others can legitimately project their own fears, anxieties, and hatreds, but rather human beings: men and women who share suffering, but also share love, and laughter, and the joy of life.

That conversation between the pastor and me will never make the newspaper. But there was good news in it, which is why I’m telling you. I expected a quiet ride to the airport, which would allow me to write some e-mails. Instead, I received an unmerited blessing. Maybe you will too today. I hope so. But you have to be willing to open yourself to it. The challenge to me is to realize that I’m not going to have the opportunity to receive blessings like that if I spend so much time in books and online, and not in the real world. This is a lesson I have had to learn all my life, and will keep learning until the day I die, looks like. But that fact too is part of the pilgrimage, part of the journey of our lives.

UPDATE: Oh, and speaking of grace, drop everything you’re doing and read Tara Isabella Burton’s breathtaking piece about the Virgin Mary and her own traumatic life. I am speechless. The divine broke through in her life in a catastrophic (but good!) way, first through seeing Will Arbery’s Heroes Of The Fourth Turning. Grace, all is grace!

UPDATE.2: Something I forgot to say in the first part: I really needed to hear what that pastor had to say, and what Tara Isabella Burton had to say, too. It’s not in an “oh, that’s nice, what an inspirational lift” kind of way. I mean it in the sense of: we live immersed in transcendence, and other people, other lives, are the means through which the transcendence — God — reaches us. The longer I live, the more I come to know the truth of that coffee-mug cliché: “Be kind, for everyone you meet is fighting a great battle.”

UPDATE.3: Look at this poem, “Micha-el,” by Jane Greer. It’s white-hot, and savagely beautiful. Excerpt:

Mercy is what you’ll get—His wide-armed mercy—

But you won’t like it.

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