Rod Dreher's Blog, page 176

Actually, Anglican Dog Devours Man

“Anglican Man Bites Dog” I titled the post the other day. Its subject: a guidance from Church of England bishops saying that sex should be reserved to one man and one woman, who are married. Will wonders never cease?! one thought. The Church of England bishops restating orthodox Christian doctrine!

Alas, wonders cease. It was too good to be true. From The Guardian:

The archbishops of Canterbury and York have apologised over a statement issued by Church of England bishops last week which declared that only married heterosexuals should have sex.

Justin Welby and John Sentamu said they took responsibility for releasing the statement which “jeopardised trust”. They added: “We are very sorry and recognise the division and hurt this has caused.”

The archbishops’ statement did not retract the substance of the “pastoral guidance” issued by the bishops, but implied it should not have been issued while the C of E is in the midst of a review of its teaching on sexuality and marriage.

The guidance said “sexual relationships outside heterosexual marriage are regarded as falling short of God’s purpose for human beings”, and that people in gay or straight civil partnerships should be sexually abstinent.

This is an apology that will satisfy no one. They apologized for the timing of the statement, but everybody knows that the statement’s opponent objected to the substance of it. And traditionalists surely understand that this is a white flag. If basic Christian doctrine weren’t at risk, there would have been no need to apologize for the statement at all.

A British reader writes:

It truly beggars belief. They’d have known before releasing the guidance the storm it would kick up, so they were surely prepared for the response. And yet such is the pressure on them that they still feel the need to apologise for releasing a document which simply reaffirmed what is already the church’s official teaching. Nothing is ever enough.

The C of E is constantly “in dialogue” with different LGBT groups within the church about this, but it all just proves a point you’ve made elsewhere: “entering into dialogue” is simply code from liberals for “discussing the terms on which conservatives will surrender”.

Welby and Sentamu say they’ve jeopardised trust – but whose trust are they really jeopardising here? It’s that of the faithful, conservative parishioners and ministers who, if they’re to have any future in the C of E, will need the protection of the Archbishops to continue holding to traditional Christian teaching on sexuality. The LGBT wing of the C of E doesn’t need trust, they just need patience — because the leadership will crack eventually. It might not come in Welby’s time, but it will come.

Of course it will. How confident are you Catholic readers that the Roman Catholic Church’s bishops will hold the line? I would have said, “Fairly confident” — until Pope Francis. Remember, Francis appointed the pro-LGBT Blase Cupich to be cardinal archbishop of Chicago, and pro-gay Cardinal Joseph “Nighty-Night, Baby” Tobin to run the Archdiocese of Newark.

The late historian Robert Conquest’s Second (of three) Law of Politics is:

Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing.

It is said that he gave the Church of England as an example of this law. All churches that are not explicitly committed to upholding Biblical tradition on sexuality (of all kinds) will eventually cave. A lack of explicit commitment to Christian orthodoxy now signals surrender just around the corner. Whatever churchmen tell you, whatever churchmen tell themselves, this is an iron law.

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Happy (?) Brexit Day

Happy Brexit Day to our British friends. This is the final speech as a European Parliamentarian of Nigel Farage, one of the most consequential politicians of our time. He’s the main reason for Brexit. This is marvelous:

Well, I think it’s marvelous because Brexit makes a lot of sense to me, and most (but not all) of my British friends support it. However, I know a lot of Britons are very unhappy today. Let me throw the thread open, with a special invitation to British and British-born readers: tell us what your thoughts are on Brexit Day.

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Trans: Get Out Of Jail Free Card

Infuriating doesn’t even begin to describe it:

The Iowa Attorney General’s Office is no longer seeking the commitment of a former Midwest Christian Services student convicted of myriad sex crimes because the individual now identifies as a woman.

Court records show the state dismissed the application on Jan. 9. Attorney general spokesman Lynn Hicks wouldn’t comment on the reason for the dismissal other than to say “an offender’s hormone levels are an important part of substantiating an offender’s likelihood of recidivism.”

In November, the Storm Lake Times reported that Joseph Matthew Smith, a 23-year-old convicted of molesting a fellow MCS student in 2014, was “undergoing medical treatment that is needed prior to (Smith) potentially undergoing gender reassignment surgery.”

The Blaze reports:

The shows Smith was convicted of second-degree sexual abuse against a female victim in 2012 and lascivious acts with a child against a male victim in 2014. The registry does not give the victim’s ages; they are listed as children under the age of 13.

Becoming trans erases a multitude of crimes, it appears. Back to the Des Moines Register:

A preliminary report prepared by the state’s expert, Dr. Jeffrey Davis, says Smith molested as many as 15 victims, ranging from ages 1 to 13, before being sentenced to prison in December 2015.

The report found the likelihood of re-offending within five years of release exceeded 20% because victims were of both genders, and because Smith was under age 25 and never had a long-term relationship.

“Mr. Smith has not had an intimate relationship,” the report says. “His sexual encounters appear to have primarily involved molestation, including his own molestation by multiple perpetrators, or his victimization of others.”

The report says Smith was molested repeatedly as a child in Louisiana, starting at age 7.

The report recommended Smith be confined at the Cherokee Civil Commitment Unit for Sex Offenders (CCUSO) in Cherokee for an indefinite period. But it was premised upon Smith having the sex drive of a man.

Read it all. This guy was going to go to prison for what he was convicted of doing —  molesting two kids — but now that he’s a she, it’s all good.

When will the backlash begin? When will this culture return to sanity on these matters? Because both are overdue.

UPDATE: In other insane trans news out of Iowa today:

Warren says that she will have a "young trans person" interview her future Secretary of Education and only hire this future secretary if the young trans person approves.

This in reference to a question about sex education/LGBTQ history in public schools. pic.twitter.com/txyt6OI6FX

— Mary Margaret Olohan (@MaryMargOlohan) January 30, 2020

UPDATE.2: Wow, a reader points out that a male-to-female trans person with a huge YouTube following is denouncing this thing in Iowa. I watched enough of the clip to hear a call to the LGBT community to speak out against it. “This cannot be a thing that happens,” says Blaire White. Good!

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Woke Capitalists Abandon Children Of The Poor

Sometimes there is a story that perfectly symbolizes the morality of our time. The Orlando Sentinel, on a crusade to eliminate evil, published a piece calling out major “gay friendly” corporate donors for giving to a scholarship program meant to help children of the poor go to private schools. The problem is, some of those kids were using the money in the form of vouchers to go to Christian schools that, in the view of the Sentinel, were homophobic.

Southern Glazer’s Wine and Spirits touts “an inclusive and diverse culture” welcoming to LGBTQ employees. It is also Florida’s largest contributor to a state-backed scholarship fund that funneled more than $105 million to private campuses with anti-gay policies during the last school year.

The beverage distributor has kicked in more than $600 million over the past decade to the Florida Tax Credit Scholarship Program, which pays for children from low-income families to attend private schools. Corporations like Southern Glazer’s receive dollar-for-dollar write-offs on their state tax bills when they contribute to the scholarship program.

Hundreds of companies have diverted their tax dollars to the program. Many of these companies publicly support the LGBTQ community, vowing to make employment decisions without regard to sexual orientation or sponsoring events like Orlando’s Come out with Pride festivities.

You see, it cannot be the case that these corporate donors both support LGBT rights and want to do something good for poor children who want out of the dysfunctional public schools. More:

Schools with anti-gay policies make up a small percentage of the 2,000 participating campuses, Step Up For Students said in that statement, and parents choose the best campus for their children.

The Sentinel reviewed documents of more than 1,000 private religious schools that take state scholarships and found 156 have policies that say gay and transgender students can be denied enrollment or expelled or that explain the school opposes their sexual orientation or gender identity on religious grounds.

Well, since that story appeared, cowardly corporate donors are fleeing the program. The Orlando Sentinel did a follow-up story about how big givers are withdrawing support until and unless the state kicks Christian schools out of the program.

We know that in the hierarchy of wokeness, LGBTs are far more important than poor children, even black and brown poor children, and even special needs children. The antidiscrimination mania leaves no place — none — in the public square for church institutions that do not 100 percent embrace the LGBT agenda. If you are a Christian school or college that depends on corporate or state funds for survival, you had better start weaning yourself from that source of income right now. This, by the way, is the meaning of the Chick-fil-A capitulation last fall: if not even the fabulously successful, Christian-run Chick-fil-A will stand up to LGBT activists in support of worthy charitable causes, nobody will.

To be clear, private companies are entitled to do whatever they want with their charitable donations. It is worth knowing, however, that among the most powerful enemies of Florida’s poor black and brown Christian children are major banks and corporations. And, for that matter, special needs students. Here, from the web page of the Step Up For Students program, which is under fire, is a description of where the scholarship money goes:

As the Sentinel reports, only a small number of the schools in the program have traditional Christian policies regarding sexual orientation and gender identity. Nobody cares that LGBT kids can be equally served under this program, and that 85 percent of the schools participating in it have no negative policy about LGBT. Nobody stops to ask if those schools are the only ones, or the best ones, in the neighborhoods of those needy kids. They are BIGOT ACADEMIES, and must be cast out.

Let me be clear: If there were a school in this program that would not accept Christian kids for whatever reason (e.g, it was an Islamic school, or it was a school like the Harvey Milk Academy, which exists to provide a gay-affirming curriculum and learning environment for LGBT kids). Give the money to parents, and let them make the call. The needs of these children and their families are more important than ideological purity. We live in a pluralistic country, after all.

That’s not how the Orlando Sentinel sees it. That’s not how woke corporate America sees it. And that’s not how LGBT activists — including the billionaires who fund anti-discrimination campaigns — see it. The public square must be purged of Christians who refused to be harmonized into the new order. This is what privilege means in 2020 America.

Let’s have a quick look at the kind of people the Florida media and Florida corporations are abandoning, because they don’t want to have anything to do with the small minority of religious schools that are run by the icky kind of Christian. (To be clear, I don’t know if either of the kids below attend one of the controversial schools — but that’s not the point. The corporate donors are leaving all these kids behind.)

Here’s the story of a Florida teen with Asperger’s, who was suffering in her normal school. Through this program, her mom was able to put her in a private school that helped her to flourish:

Here’s one, in Spanish, about a Hispanic autistic boy who was able to get into a school that helped him with his special needs:

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Actually, There Is A Christian Case For Trump

Pete Wehner’s new piece in The Atlantic is misleadingly titled, “There Is No Christian Case For Trump.”That’s not actually what Wehner is saying. Instead he devotes his essay to dismantling a case for Trump put forward by the eminent conservative Evangelical scholar Wayne Grudem. And in that particular task, Wehner does a great job.

I was drawn into the piece because I do believe that there is a Christian case for voting for Donald Trump, and I expected to disagree with Wehner. As it turns out, I still believe there is a Christian case for voting for Trump, but I agree with Wehner that the one put forth by some of Trump’s most staunch Evangelical supporters is not it.

In my view, the Christian case for voting Trump is apophatic — a term used in theology to describe God by saying what He is not. I believe Trump is a cunning man of low character and low competence, and I don’t believe he is a Christian in any meaningful sense. But here is what he is not: a supporter of laws that allow us to exterminate the unborn with no conditions; an enemy of religious liberty; a promoter of laws that would write transgenderism into civil rights law; a person who considers traditionalist Christians to be what’s wrong with America.

(I would say also that whatever his flaws, he’s against the ideology of Social Justice, but that is not a specifically Christian concern.)

His Democratic opponents are all those things that he is not. Let me put it to you like this: if we were having a national election in 1860, and your choice was between a Trump figure who opposed slavery, and who appointed anti-slavery judges, or a Democratic opponent who was far less corrupt, and far more clubbable than the vulgar Trump figure, would you still say that there was no Christian case for the Trump figure? Most serious pro-lifers regard abortion as on the same moral level as slavery. In my case, in 2008, I was so angry at George W. Bush and the GOP over Iraq and the financial crisis that I wanted to vote for Obama. Besides, I wanted to be able to say that I voted for the first black president. But because of abortion, I could not bring myself to do it, as a matter of principle.

So, the practical case for voting Trump is going to be enough for many Christians. If I end up voting for him, it will be precisely because of that, most of all on the issues of abortion and religious liberty. For that reason, I believe that the policies that bad man Trump will pursue if re-elected will be more in the interest of the common good than what the Democrats would do. Not just my own tribe’s good, but the common good.

I hadn’t thought much about this until I read Wehner’s piece, but all the Christian friends I have who are say they will likely vote for Trump are doing so out of resignation: because as bad as he is, the alternative is worse. Almost all of them are Catholics, but I have a few Evangelicals who feel that way. The only Christian friends I have who are enthusiastically voting for Trump are some of my Evangelical pals. Though I am likely to vote with them on Election Day, it’s from a very different point of view. Like Wehner, I truly don’t understand why they see Trump as truly good, as opposed to the best we can hope for in this fallen world. Wehner takes a stab at answering that:

But it isn’t enough to simply remove the tension; they need to justify their decision.

It isn’t enough for many of Trump’s evangelical supporters to say that, by their lights, he is advancing policies that promote the common good even as he is acting in unethical ways that deeply trouble them. In that difficult trade-off, they could admit, they have decided that the former should take priority over the latter. Instead, they have created a cartoonish image of the president, pretending that his character flaws are trivial and inconsequential, while his policy achievements put him near the top rank of American presidents.

What’s most interesting to me in all this is the psychology at play. From what I can tell, in many cases Trump’s most devoted evangelical supporters are blind to what they’re doing, so in a sense they’re not acting cynically or in bad faith, even as they are distorting reality.

I have observed firsthand that if you point out facts that run counter to their narrative, some significant number of the president’s supporters will eventually respond with indignation, feeling they have been wounded, disrespected, or unheard. The stronger the empirical case against what they believe, the more emotional energy they bring to their response. Underlying this is a deep sense of fear and the belief that they are facing an existential threat and, therefore, can’t concede any ground, lest they strengthen those they consider to be their enemies. This broader phenomenon I’m describing is not true of all Trump supporters, of course, and it is hardly confined to Trump supporters. But I would say that in our time, it is most pronounced among them.

I have noticed the same thing. You see in the comments section here, when I criticize Trump, some version of, “We get it, it’s always ‘Orange Man Bad’ for you, you jerk.” By now I’ve gotten so used to that kind of thing that I can’t take it seriously, except as a strategy of denial by the one who says it. My answer is, “Yeah, Orange Man is bad, but the Democrats are worse, because even though they are well-behaved and presentable and nice to strangers, they support policies that make America worse in consequential ways, and in effect render the bad things about Donald Trump meaningfully less so. If I vote Trump, it won’t be because my heart is in it; it will be because my head is.

It might give you some useful perspective to know that unlike Pete Wehner, I believe the Republic is fatally decadent, and that the decline has been overseen, indeed managed, by respectable elites of both parties, as well as all major American institutions, including the news media and academia. I believe that over the next two decades, barring a political black swan, it will become clear that the GOP-appointed federal judiciary will be the last line of defense for key First Amendment freedoms, including religious liberty. So I am much less moved by protestations that OMG Trump is bad! than I would normally have been. I believe that we are in much worse shape than my friend Pete Wehner believes. Unlike the unironic MAGA folks, I don’t believe that Trump will improve things. At most he can slow down the decline so that more principled and competent actors can build out from what he accomplished. It is entirely possible that Trump accelerates the decline. I am completely confident, though, that to continue to trust the country to the usual Republicans and the usual Democrats would mean nothing good. If Bernie Sanders were a pro-life social conservative, I would strongly consider voting for him, even though I don’t like his economics.

Anyway, I find myself caught between strict moralists of the Left who say “you admit Trump is bad, so how can you possibly consider voting for him?!” and strict moralists of the Right who anxiously deny Trump’s badness, and attribute criticism of Trump to irrational hatred of him. That’s an interesting place in which to be. European readers, tell me: is this just an American thing, this felt psychological need to apply morals so strictly to voting?

One last thing: a reader in the comments section the other day speculated that when the Democrats gain the White House again, conservative Christians are going to be subjected to a “Second Reconstruction.” He’s referring to the punitive regime forced upon the South after its defeat in the Civil War. I think that’s a pretty smart construction, actually. Whether they were all-in on MAGA, or reluctant Trump voters as I’ve described above, or even if they were conservative Christians who voted against Trump — all of us are going to be in the same category in the eyes of the Reconstructors. You watch.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

I tend to share this view, but I will admit in recent months that seeing local politics at work, I am far more convinced that the Democrats are a much bigger threat than I had formerly seen them.

I am not talking about Nancy Pelosi. I am not even talking about AOC or Ilhan Omar. I dislike their ideology, but the federal gvt works slowly and without haste.

I am more referring to local, woke Democrats in positions like D.A., city council, etc. in cities. The ideology they are pursuing, of completely ignoring any quality of life related criminal behavior and deconstructing muncipal competence brick by brick, is horrifying. Decriminalization of theft, of open drug crime, vehicle break ins, public urination, etc. is turning our cities, and increasingly exurban towns, into absolute hell holes. These doofuses are bringing the medieval plague back to Los Angeles, where I recently visited my fiancee’s family. The stuff I saw there was shocking, and really sobering. It made me remember why I identify as a centre-right person to begin with, and why despite being a bit more on the Tucker Carlson side of view on markets, I will have no time for woke municipal governance.

This is not about religious liberty, where I broadly come down on Rod’s side. This is about actual physical threats to safety and human existence, let alone human flourishing, from ideologues with a dangerous and suicidal view of governance, with a worldview that sees justice as a commodifiable and discrete good that transcends law and good governance.

I do not want the federal government to be staffed by people who give aid and comfort to the mini-experiments being run in Oakland, Seattle, San Francisco, and increasingly, Denver, and who would want to replicate that on a nationwide basis. I don’t fear the federal Democrats to the same extent as the local ones, but I fail to see the meaningful difference in their worldviews.

A good point. It appears that Wokeness is taking over the Democrats as Trumpness took over the GOP.

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A Short Course In Social Justice™

You likely last read about James Lindsay in this space when I praised his fantastic essay on “Postmodern Religion and the Faith of Social Justice.” I cannot recommend it strongly enough. Between Lindsay’s essay, and Yuri Slezkine’s work explaining how Bolshevism was an apocalyptic millenarian cult, I came to understand the profound connection between totalitarian communism and the ideology of “social justice.”

Back in 2018, he and his colleagues Peter Boghossian and Helen Pluckrose carried out the famous Grievance Studies hoax, for which they deserve medals. They do not mess around with this garbage.

Lindsay just put up a truly great Twitter thread explaining how social justice works. I’m going to quote the whole thing here, and exhort you to follow him on Twitter. The man is brave as hell, and sees right through this sham:

An analogy to help you understand how contemporary Social Justice Theory’s critical methods work.

If you’ve ever made a mistake like this: 2+3=6, where you accidentally multiplied instead of adding, or could imagine doing so, you’ll understand this one.

— James Lindsay, pompous shit (@ConceptualJames) January 30, 2020

Like really. pic.twitter.com/0KgfhsSRPc

— James Lindsay, pompous shit (@ConceptualJames) January 30, 2020

And, by the bye, if, in the “end,” you arrange just to pay what you owe, plus any fines, you’ll be allowed to do so and then told that you only did so to position yourself as a good, law-abiding taxpayer and to cover for your broader criminality, which still must be investigated.

— James Lindsay, pompous shit (@ConceptualJames) January 30, 2020

Follow James Lindsay here. 

Do I really need to say it? This is exactly how communism worked. The redefinition of language. The guilt by group membership. The insistence that you have done something wrong, and you will be interrogated without mercy until you admit your guilt. All of it. We are creating that here.

I sent the first draft of my forthcoming book about all this to a close writer friend, seeking her feedback. After the first chapter, she wrote me these encouraging words: “Rod, this is a very important book. It is even more on-target than The Benedict Option. It nails it. It brings into focus something all of us were sensing but couldn’t put words to.”

Well, I hope the book is as significant as she says, and that it can help spark a real resistance movement. If it turns out to be a hit, please know that James Lindsay was an inspiration for me. He’s a fairly militant atheist who may not be entirely pleased that a conservative Christian admires his courage and his work, but it’s true.

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The Malign Power Of Fragility

A couple of interesting comments from readers, on the “Pete Buttigieg, HR Director” thread:

redstategal1: As someone who hires young people regularly (and have done so for 30 years), I am amazed at how “fragile” they have become in the last 5-7 years. They are completely undependable, because they might be having an anxiety attack, or they feel like committing suicide that day, or unless everyone agrees with them on everything, they can’t work and they feel honor-bound to quit. I honestly don’t know how they will survive the decades ahead of them. I honestly don’t know how they will be able to marry and raise children. Maybe stoking fragility should have been included in “The Screwtape Letters” as a major devilish strategic ploy.

To which “Marie In Vermont” replied:

My youngest son, a millennial, started a successful company which is internet based. He’s got about 3 dozen employees at this time and is resigned to hiring millennials and the younger cohort (GenZ?) because they have the computer skills that older employees lack. All my kids were homeschooled and we did not buy a computer until the last one graduated high school, so their childhood was traditional in the sense that they learned skills, social and otherwise, unmediated by electronics.

This son has an ulcer from dealing with his very nice, but often clueless, employees. He’ll call me to tell me – again and again – how they can’t seem to show up for work on time, they can’t carry on a face-to-face conversation, cannot do anything that they haven’t been explicitly told to do, don’t notice when something’s gone wrong and even when they do they don’t think independently enough to come up with a solution. This is not hopeful. When I compare these kind of kids to my no-nonsense, you do what needs to be done whether you want to or not-grandparents, I wonder how we fell so far in just a few generations.

These are anecdotes, of course, but I’d like to know what the experiences of others have been in this regard. How widespread is this fragility across the younger generations? People who are so emotionally fragile, and who cannot manage their own lives without someone telling them every move to make, are people who will be eager to submit to a strong authority that caters to their emotional needs in exchange for obedience. This is the Pink Police State that James Poulos has been telling us about. 

I really do think that infamous 2015 encounter on the Yale campus between Prof. Nicholas Christakis and a crowd of students (mostly people of color) will be remembered by history as a symbolic turning point. If you watch the lengthy clip, you will see a liberal professor meeting his antagonists with a willingness to listen to their complaints, and to engage them in reasoned dialogue. But he will not agree with them that he is a bad person because he has hurt their feelings — and this drives some of the undergraduates into hysterics. There is sobbing, and shaking among some of the women. They curse the Yale professor. One of the young men gets into Christakis’s face, threateningly. Mind you, these young people were undergraduates at Yale University, and therefore among the most privileged people to walk the planet. I don’t believe that their fragility was performative and cynical. I believe that they truly were emotionally undone by the fact that this professor would not say the words they wanted to hear, and persisted in his disagreement with them.

As we know, a number of professors at Yale joined the woke mob. Erika Christakis, his wife and an accomplished scholar in her own right, left the university. He remained, but the administration in most respects capitulated, and promised to devote tens of millions of dollars to the “diversity” cause. What was so extraordinary about it was the collapse of university authority. What Nicholas Christakis did on the campus that day was a thing of courage and beauty: meeting hostile passion with dialogue, patience, and reason. This is what civilization is about! And Yale hung him out to dry.

Displaying fragility is the key to power. Rene Girard wrote that the admirable concern for victims, the gift of Hebrew and Christian religion, has in our time become a “process of spiritual demagoguery and rhetorical overkill [that] has transformed the concern for victims into a totalitarian command and a permanent inquisition.”

This is serious stuff. Unless you have had to deal personally with the middle class and upper middle class people who administer the institutions of our society, you have no idea how powerful this weaponized fragility is. Girard, a Stanford scholar, understood this well.

The thing is, the Fragility Regime is itself fragile, don’t you think? It controls the institutions, but it has never faced serious, sustained resistance. That resistance will come inevitably in the form of economic collapse or some other form of catastrophic strain on the system. The fragile will not know what to do. Those leaders who hired on the basis of the ideology that valorized fragility will have created institutions that cannot perform under duress. As we saw with the Soviet bloc, when a system creates incentives to advance oneself by embracing ideology and lying about reality (to others, and to oneself), then it sets itself up for a crash.

That is the inevitable fate of the Fragile Regime. But as we know, there is a lot of ruin in a nation. The Soviet Union was able to destroy a lot of people, their material wealth, and their ways of life, before it went down — and the 1990s there were a grim, grim time. We should absolutely not want things to get that bad here. Isn’t it at least possible that the Fragile Regime governing our institutions is weaker than it seems? They depend on the fear of opposition to get what they want. Had Yale stood up for the Christakises, and told those kids either to go back to class or go home, and enforced its decision, it would have worked. But that’s not what happened.

What if it started to happen? What if people stopped being intimidated by the Fragile, and by the institutional leaders who ratify and enforce Fragility? What would that look like?

I was talking this afternoon by phone to a conservative Protestant friend, who agreed that so much progressive change has been accepted by congregations because conservative people were afraid to be called “divisive” or “mean.” Isn’t this true across our society? I don’t know Yale, but I am confident that there were more than a few students on that campus who saw what the mob was doing to the Christakises, and who hated it, but who were too intimidated to say anything about it. They probably knew that in the professional circles within which they hoped to have careers, you must never, ever question the sacred Victim.

What happens when they aren’t frightened any more? What happens when they cannot be intimidated by emotional displays that intend to shame people into submission?

The Fragile Regime can be broken. We haven’t figured out quite how to do it yet, but we had better do it before they get much further.

An alternative scenario: this morning I was listening to a podcast about the Balkan Wars of the 1990s. A journalist who covered that conflict talked about how unnerving it was to arrive there as an outsider, and to see how people from the same village who had lived in peace just the day before (so to speak) were now literally at each other’s throats. It shook him up to see how easy it was to stoke evil in the hearts of people, and to make them hate others on the basis of religious and ethnic difference. What the identity politics of the Fragile Regime is doing is laying the groundwork for a Balkan-style conflict here. They are making this society fragile — and if, God forbid, those conflicts break out, they are going to use that emergency as an excuse to seize totalitarian powers.

Listen to what the people who fled communism are telling us. They have seen how this works.

Anyway, tell me: if you are a Millennial or Generation Z person, what are you seeing among your peers? If you are an older person, are you encountering this fragility among the young? You’d be amazed how many college professors I’ve met over the past few years who tell me that something seriously changed in students, around about the year 2014.

UPDATE: Some interesting comments in the thread below. Here’s one:

In my experience as a 20-year old former Christian, I have seen many examples of this herd-like mentality. I encountered it almost as a spirit upon them– a mass movement that made me understand exactly how inquisitions work. I first noticed it in the eighth grade when I was on the debate team. Gay marriage was a big issue back then, and being a Christian in an Evangelical family, I was against. When I said this, one of the girls heard me, and began running around, announcing my views to everyone else. Soon, she had gotten the entire debate team of ~15 people to gang up on me. For the rest of the season, I was ostracized and mocked by these people. I quit, and never joined again.

In high school, it was even worse. I knew by then to keep my mouth shut about Christianity and homosexuality, but I still wanted to at least be known for free speech. My English teacher wanted us to give presentations comparing various modern-day political movements to the Salem Witch trials. She was a pussy-hat wearing feminist who had previously gone on rants about Trump, and strongly implied that we should compare Trump’s racism and sexism to the witch hunts. I and my partner, however, would not be cowed. We instead gave a presentation on the University of Missouri protestors, and compared their treatment of the hapless administrators to the Salem Witch Trials. Our presentation took 8 minutes, but the teacher held up class for 40 minutes afterwards questioning our presentation and having the most leftist students in the class tear our presentation apart. Students in the class were comparing her treatment of us to the Salem trials by the end of it all.

Eventually, I lost all my friends, when they found out the truth about my Christian beliefs. They kicked me out, literally claiming that they needed a “welcoming environment.” Granted, they later came back for awhile, but they constantly made fun of my Christianity. It was clear that they thought of me as the immoral one, even as some of them watched illegal porn and constantly made jokes about rape and perverse sexuality.

The church never lifted a finger to help me. My parents didn’t listen to a word I said until it was obvious that I had lost everything. I never wanted my mother to throw me a party for my high school graduation, because I knew no one would come. She threw one anyway. I was right. One time, I had just been trying to explain for fifteen minutes to my father that I had lost all my friends. He abruptly changed the topic and mentioned if I had been applying to internships lately. This utter blindness is what cost them and conservatives more broadly all moral authority in my eyes.

Let me emphasize this: these people (Millenials/GenZ) are incapable of producing anything of value. You notice the fragility, but a better way of putting it is that they have been autistified. In other words, they were socialized by screens; almost no one in my 20-man group of high school board game guy friends had ever had a girlfriend. Over and over, you will ask about different life experiences, and the answer is that society sent them to the screens.

1. Why don’t young men and women desire each other? Because porn desensitizes men’s sex drive, so they don’t care for real girls, and social media turbo-charges women’s hypergamous desires so they don’t care for real guys. A larger percentage of them are sedentary and fat, meaning that less of them compare to what they see on the Internet.

2. Why are they fragile? Physically, because they are unfamiliar with the meatspace, and mentally, because they can easily isolate themselves in echo chambers online. It also doesn’t help that they were raised by fad-crazed educators who have been busy taking the edges and blood out of education for decades.

3. Why don’t they have any individual incentive? Because every waking second of their lives, they have been connected to other people’s thoughts on the internet, rather than thinking for themselves.

Finally, you mention the Balkanization of America. Hardly anyone of my age really believes in America– not as a nation, not as an ideal, and certainly not as a place that’s better than everywhere else! When I was in ROTC, I once drove with a major in the National Guard. All of a sudden, he got this funny, kind of dreamy look on his face. He said “I know we’ve sworn to defend the Constitution and all, but does anyone really believe in that anymore?” I want you now to think about those debate kids I mentioned earlier. Think about those board game guys who laughed me out of the room. These are the people at the receiving end of the leftist propaganda campaigns. What do you think they believe about the Constitution? Do you think they value it, or will they remember their 1619 Project history education and see Washington and Jefferson as slaveholding white nationalists?

Here’s another, from Luke Bailey:

I’ll speak as a millennial who spent five years teaching Gen Z. Since you provided anecdotes, you’ll forgive me if I do the same.

I’ve seen members of my generation latch onto a number of depressingly unhelpful traits and habits, most of which are well covered on this blog. A constant desire to defer to allied authority, engendered by helicopter parenting and typified by college woke mobs. A lack of original thinking, perhaps derived from growing up in a social media environment that spoon-feeds them endorphin drips with easily accessed and navigable apps. When authority does prove burdensome and contradicts the strongly held but ill earned sense of individualism and justice seeking, the correct response is less and less to obey and respectfully voice concerns, but rather to outright rebel.

Finally, I am constantly, unendingly, amazed by the inability of others in my generational cohort to show up to work on time. It is such a basic feature of being an adult, and yet they cannot do it. Perhaps everything in their childhood was curated for them without personal initiative.

That being said,

I think Gen Z is going to be okay.

In fact, I love Gen Z. Those little screwballs are hilarious.

The sanctimony and entitlement of the millennial is simply not present in Gen Z- this has been my personal experience, and I don’t know exactly why it is. I imagine it has much to do with the evolution of internet culture.

The internet has turned Gen Z into the biggest group of cynics imaginable. Their patron saint is Diogenes, their dear leader a frog in a MAGA hat. Everything is a joke- that is, everything online, which might as well be everything because that’s where the little wackos spend all of their time (not just the nerds- another departure from the millennials).

I find Gen Z to be critical of any all-encompassing ideology, which makes sense. They’re receiving and processing thousands of contradictory messages every day, and their response is to turn everything into a joke. They have memes that go six levels of translation deep, they speak a language incomprehensible to anyone who took a week long sabbatical from the information highway as the very language itself can mutate hourly. These little guys are creating their own hieroglyphic code every day, in which the brush is the Discord app and apathy the theme. Of course, it also must also bring the lols. Always bring the lols.

I worry about Gen Z spiritually, as their cynicism can prove a certain inoculation to any all-encompassing truth. However, they are far less likely than my generation to believe in grand plans, master ideologies, and anyone with the temerity to insist that they know something. They jive their heads to the most profane hiphop before transitioning to a Ben Shapiro or Louder with Crowder vid, without any understanding or care that this is a cultural contradiction. They find the trans movement hilarious, as evidenced by stats shared in the last year by Andrew Sullivan. They dislike the halo-polishing sanctimony of the Social Justice Left and find it great fodder for the never ending technocratic loop that is their daily existence. And, of course, while they are cheuferred around and micromanaged like the millennial, that’s not their real life- their real life is on a rectangle they’re holding in the back of the car.

I have no idea what’s going to happen when this band of merrymaking, piratical edgelords reach the corporate world or start truly shaping the culture. It might be apocalyptic. However, unlike the blue-faced exhortations of the millennials, it certainly wont be boring.

Muzan-e writes:

I may be the anomaly here: a very large proportion of our most reliable and hardworking employees are either millennials or adjacent teenagers.

It may be because the work weeds out the more fragile kids — it’s difficult, fast-paced, demanding and performed in a challenging environment. It may be because of the nature of the positions — the food industry is rough, and few people make a career out of it.

It may also be because of these kids’ circumstances: almost all of them are either supporting themselves while studying, saving money for future study, or supporting families — either very young or an extended network of elders. They’re working for us because they feel a responsibility or understand that their ambition must be financed.

But generally, when compared to our 30-50yr old employees, they’re phenomenal. They want the extra hours, often as many as they can get. They’ll take the busiest hours. Often they want us to work with their schedules (as does almost everyone), but they’re seldom showing up late and they’re often trying to stay overtime. I do want to add that during the past six or so years, we’ve received two complaints of sexual harassment — inflicted each time on a younger employee by an older staff member(s); both cases were so obvious and egregious that we fired the accused within the week. They weren’t the complaints of fragile children, hyper-sensitive to perceived (and non-existent) offenses.

If it was legal to do so, we would hire exclusively from the pool of 18-20something second-generation and reservation kids. They’re quick learners, they seldom slack, they like to get the job done right, every time, and they are never rude to customers. The worst problem we have from them is their insatiable desire for more hours. Contrast that to the 30-40yr old folks that we have on our crew, and you quickly see that almost every employee that we’ve fired during the last decade+ comes from that group, and likewise most of the non-serious complaints, no-shows, shift-switching and tardiness.

But look, these aren’t Yale kids. They know that they’ll never be Yale kids. They were generally born to poverty, and their ambition is to either earn their way out of it, give their extended families a better life, or enable their children to live in a state that’s better than subsistence. They know that complaining won’t accomplish that for them. That the most they can do is raise the dollar-value of every hour that they work.

Here’s one from YoungAmConReader:

cannot do anything that they haven’t been explicitly told to do, don’t notice when something’s gone wrong and even when they do they don’t think independently enough to come up with a solution.

Young millennial here, this is a real problem. It really comes from a total fear around being incorrect, even for a minute. You need to understand where many of my peers come from, they grew up in a constant supervision environment, then they went to college and we’re graded on the ability to correctly answer multiple choice questions and/or write in a manner that would meet the page length requirements.

By the time they enter the workforce many of us have learned that not being wrong is more important than getting something right. It leads to pointless meetings where nobody can say anything of substance. Instead they talk vaguely and ask each other softball questions in the hopes that it will be reciprocated. Even asking some of my peers to walk me through their data so I can understand better is seen as “aggressive”, as if I’m supposed to nod along cluelessly.

And for the last time, being able to interface with a mobile app does NOT make my generation “good” with technology, anymore than driving a car is an indicator of being skilled with machines. Some of my co-workers can’t even use a PivotTable or index-match in Excel, let alone using VBA or R.

MoreFisher writes:

My company employs people who exhibit professionalism, patience, resiliency and resourcefulness in the service of a demanding and petulant public.

We are not unique in this. However, due to geography and the observed inexorable collapse of the local workforce, we are certain that our company will close within 15 years, when the present staff has aged out.

We don’t know how we will make a living at that time. We can’t do what we do without good staff. Which we know we won’t have, soon.

So:

– We feel tremendous pressure to make hay while the sun is shining (i.e. while the remnants of the last generation of employable people are still happily coming to work).

– This puts a great deal of strain on our customer relations. We need to earn today’s supper and tomorrow’s and the next day’s, all today. Most days, we still price our services based on what our customers are accustomed to, or think they can afford. We will pay dearly for this some day soon.

– We live in inordinate fear of losing staff. We pay generously and are very flexible and understanding with employees’ needs, as a matter of principle and habit. We can’t address our problem by raising wages or taking other mechanical steps. Any good employee leaving is seen as a disaster, because we know they can’t be replaced.

– Smart entrepreneurs (i.e. not me) are acting rationally in the face of the workforce crisis, and either (i) selling their companies or (ii) transforming their companies to run on a skeleton crew with algorithms doing the rest.

It is sad. We are successful entrepreneurs and proud employers of good people. Our company would appear to any outsider to be thriving. But we know we have terminal cancer.

I could go on for days about the whys. Fragility culture is one major factor. We’ve hired smart, accomplished people who have lost their minds at the slightest obstacle. They never recover. If they stick around long enough they become vindictive and destructive. These are young, allegedly vibrant people, apparently ready to take on the world when they interview. And they are utterly unemployable.

I graduated university in 2004 and even I find I’m lost in dealing with this new breed. Supposedly I’m a Millennial by chronology. But my thriving and successful business is damned to failure in the intermediate future, and as a consequence, I feel that I’m nearing the end of my useful life as a professional.

I’ll figure something out when the time comes, but it sure is a hell of a thing.

Denver, who works in IT:

Something has changed in how people function. The anecdotes about having to provide the minutest level of instruction are entirely true. I find employees often cannot finish a checklist and almost lack the ability to organize and perform a task on their own, particularly in the millennial and gen-z categories. Don’t even begin on critical thinking or responding to something that they have not been specifically trained on with at least a three session minimum.

It’s a lack of desire. It’s a lack of pride in their work. It’s almost the attitude that the job should be there no matter what, and so once the job is procured, there is no need to go any further. I used to blame this on a lack of desire to learn, but I’ve now observed entirely intelligent men and women who seek to learn tons, yet somehow can’t apply any of it.

That said, this segues to a book by David Epstein called Range. He talks about how our educational system is entirely built around the premise of specialization. He writes about outside learning, which spans across disciplines, ultimately doing better. We lack this in the education system, and I think this is a huge reason for the cultural passivity. It’s been drilled and drilled. I also think the types of media we consume induce further passivity. Even social media is quite passive, as you are often reading and responding to the comments of others.

Jonah R., who always has something interesting to say:

I’ve asked people in my life variations of this question, because I’ve been curious to know if I’m seeing what I think I’m seeing.

My neighbor here in our high-stress Midatlantic suburb teaches at a public high school. He tells me that the kids who burst into tears regularly are the ones whose whole lives are devoted to academic achievement and college prep. He says a large subset of them are afraid to make mistakes, and they cry at the drop of a hat. By contrast, he says you almost never see this behavior from, as he puts it, “the kids who hang out in front of the gas station trying to convince a grownup to buy them a Juul.”

Another neighbor who works in digital journalism also tells me that he’s had 25 year olds from elite college start crying because he lightly copy-edited their work.

A lawyer friend tells me she’s stopped bringing in interns from her alma mater because they dawdle, they don’t show up on time, and they seem surprised that they’re expected to be extra-careful with work that affects people’s lives, businesses, and freedom. She says they’re discombobulated when you try to goad them to meet deadlines.

Is there any way to quantify this fragility? I don’t know. But it’s revealing, I think, that every time I hear one of these stories, it always involves a certain kind of bred-for-college kid from a high-pressure, status-minded family who aspires to an influential job in a field like media, politics, law, or academia.

As I mentioned in a comment on another post, this is why I’m nervous about the future: because in 20 years, these kids, whether they’re truly fragile or are faking fragility to get ahead, will be running our institutions. They will have gotten there through a culture of passive-aggressiveness, gaslighting, and manipulation, and that’s going to infect our universities, businesses, and social institutions in ways I can’t imagine will be healthy.

There are more, but you need to go into the comments yourself.

UPDATE.2: Sit down and read this letter I just received:

As an old white man (68 year old attorney and veteran of hundreds of courtroom squabbles about victimhood)) and the father of two adult children, I would like to offer a resounding nod toward your observations about victimhood, fragility and power.

First… a few thoughts about the deployment of victimhood/fragility (I link the terms because they are first cousins) as a weapon to gain power or take it from others. Long before the year 2014, women seeking to destroy their husbands in contested family law matters discovered the formula for winning such battles. It is as old as the tactics deployed by the Greeks to invade the city of Troy. We all know it. It is to appear to be that which you are not. In other words, appear weak, small, vulnerable, sweet and friendly: then when you have your opponent eating from your hand, draw your sword and strike for the vitals. Sounds cold…cunning and cruel…It is. And it is a metaphor for the politics of victimhood. Most so-called victims are quite capable of fending for themselves when it becomes necessary. They simply don’t want to work that hard. In post-modern western cities, it is much easier for a victim and her attorney to simply tell the judge (who is often a member of the same “victimized” group) the story about the time the 250 lb husband-father came home a little tipsy and wanted to” fool around..” which in the eyes of the female judge sounds a lot like “sexual assault.” Having been in that courtroom more than once, as advocate for both actors, I will simply note that the poor father doesn’t stand a chance. It has been that way since I began practicing law 35 years ago. Victimhood has become the legal weapon of choice. It is a badge of honor. It is worn the way my father wore his WWII medals and in todays culture, victimhood doesn’t even require any documentation. It needs only inference or mere allegation. Just watch reruns of the Kavanaugh hearings if you doubt my words.

Second, my adult children, who were raised in affluence, and educated among the elite, are poster-children for victimhood as claim to fame and raison d’être. Victimhood is their identity. If uniforms with victimhood logos were available from Amazon, they would wear the same victim outfit every day. The secular private schools they attended reinforced their victimhood skills, giving them passing grades even though they had not mastered the material, certificates for showing up, and a belief system built on a foundation of personal pleasure and fulfillment. After observing victimhood at work in my profession and my family for over thirty years,(that’s a whole generation) I can confidently say it is not an identity that leads to a successful rewarding life; or a great nation. I do not recommend it. It is like a cancer that thrives on the cells of our self-reliance.

Thirdly, only leaders who are unsure of their own capabilities, those who seek leadership because of the trappings of power, intentionally surround themselves with victims. Thus, politicians, academics, corporate executives and religious leaders who lack a clear vision for their teams, often surround themselves with sycophants who have made their way in the world by riding the coat-tails of the latest charlatan spouting the right psychological jargon. Conversely, leaders who are driven to lead as a way to serve other people, often choose to surround themselves with others who challenge their views of the world and who are comfortable speaking out and up… This, I fear, is what we have in America today…leaders who are more comfortable with sycophants and followers who will do anything to avoid risk. This is generalization of course. But it sure does seem like we have lost our ability to speak up and out, clearly and succinctly, with important questions for our leaders and with recommendations for how we can find our way back home.

There’s nothing new here. You understand it very well. The only news is that I have lived long enough to attest to the results you predict. An entire generation has used victimhood and fragility as a way to get ahead in the material world. The results are what we have today. One final point…there really are victims in the world. They understand that victimhood is not a flattering outfit.

If you decide to use this, please block out my name. I do love my kids. Fragility has not helped them at all.

UPDATE.3: This is deep:

Fragile is a difficult concept for me. Respectfully, my generation is not fragile. Fragile is akin to glass – weak, delicate, and transparent. I realize this is semantics, but i’d like to make important distinctions that I see among young people that you are earnestly concerned about. (I mean that genuinely, I wouldn’t bother reading this blog if I thought you were a hack).

To be brief, the people I encounter on a daily basis at my college are in many ways the opposite of fragile glass. They are opaque, formless clay. Young people are desperate in a society without REAL support. The posted comments both describe dealing with young people in the workplace, something I hear a lot about throughout my day. I think it is a fair assessment that millennials and Gen Z can be characterized as fragile in the workforce, but that’s the outlier. The workplace is an Achilles heel because it pins down a generation who have staked their entire existence on being unpinnable. They no longer believe in upper-ward economic mobility. Mobility is entirely social and status driven- being rich or even middle class has been relegated to a fringe benefit of your social status (I go to state college in the Midwest, so that limits my point of view to a degree.) The average state college attendee I know NEVER talks about owning a home or having children except as a far-off dream that seems to grow a little farther every day. Can you blame them? The recession, the death of the home and the family, the opioid crisis, the endless wars, climate change, the decline of religion, the upheaval caused by an era of unprecedented technological change, student debt, the list goes on and on.

Childhood for your average white Midwestern kid comes in two flavors nowadays: Your parent (parents if your lucky) either outsourced all the emotional labor a parent should owe a child to corporations and public entities in order to make YOU, a CHILD, into a better PRODUCT. (I don’t know a ton of people like this because the best products go to the Ivies or whatever high value brand they can get into).

Enter door number two: your childhood was spent anxiously watching your parent pick from a menu of options to comfortably kill themselves and abandon you to the wolves on the altar of personal success. Maybe it was drugs, maybe it was financial ruin (that was my case), maybe they were workaholics, maybe they just didn’t like the way you looked. These kids are going to spend the rest of their lives chasing the soul that left their body hoping to break clean from the past and start fresh or spend it filling their own emptiness with as much porn and pills as they can stomach until they wake up as a different person.

You’re hitting all the right notes here in this piece and I am of the same mind regarding their submission to authority for emotional needs. But I’d like to elaborate on WHICH emotional need. These kids are looking for SECURITY. Those silent kids you mention, some of whom are appalled by the histrionics of rich Ivy snobs cooing for their silver spoons but stand idly anyways, are the real concern here. An entire generation of people are deciding that morals are currency in uncertain times.

This is getting a bit lengthy (though if your interested I’d elaborate on my experiences) so I will close with this. The internet has made people very good liars, none more so than people under 35. How did those fragile kids get jobs their social and emotional states should have disqualified them from? It’s easy, they lied. Sure, they maybe had the right knowledge but they also knew how perform well enough to get through a hiring process because it suited their needs. This might not seem related to violence until you consider the relationship between violence and dishonesty. To me, it stands to reason that the violence your referring to does not come out of the blue, it comes when many individuals and groups make a snap decision that their security depends on their acquiescence to a moral wrong.

UPDATE.4: Are you reading these amazing comments? Here’s another:

I’m in a terminal degree program in the humanities at a top private research university, and am

currently enrolled in courses as well as teaching undergraduates. So I’m from the tailend of the millenials, and my students are the eldest of the gen-Zers.

There are a lot of fragile people, though not a majority, and given the circumstances I don’t blame them.

While I don’t think it’s fair to say the entire crop of kids coming through and out of college now are as a whole more fragile than previous generations, there is a sizeable fragile minority. We shouldn’t generalize about fragility when most of the stories about these sorts of things come from a small number of universities, not to mention that about 30% of people my age won’t even go to college. Bosses complaining about their workers are about as reliable as workers complaining about their bosses, or landlords and renters, students and teachers, etc. If the youngins really were so gosh darn awful, they wouldn’t get hired. Nevertheless, there are, especially at top universities, a great number of fragile people.

I have plenty of friends from college or graduate school who have various diagnosed mental issues, who see counselors, who would describe themselves as fragile, and who are able to get along mostly fine in everyday life, but will occasionally, take a mental health day or spend the whole day depressed in bed or something similar. My students likewise will openly email me to say such and such has made them nervous, or they missed class because they couldn’t get out of bed, or their medication is changing so they may have issues. Still, this is only representative of less than a quarter of my students and peers, with varying degrees of severity.

The main cause of this is simply that today’s elite students experience much more stress than those in the past, and this stress makes them more fragile. Here are a few stressors that are entirely normal for a student today.

1) He has a crippling amount of student debt, which every guidance counselor, parent, teacher, etc. encouraged him to acquire.

2) He has few or no close, long-term friends. His high school friends scattered to various colleges when they graduated, and now leaving college, most of his college friends will also scatter to various cities looking for jobs. Twice in four years he will have to entirely restart his social life in a new city, and this will likely happen a few more times in the unstable, early phases of his career.

3) He spent his high school years continuously worried about getting into a good college and working hard to make sure he did. All his parents and teachers encouraged him in this. All his time was crammed full and master scheduled to ensure he got into a good college, but now he is in college or beyond with no clear direction.

4) He spent and spends too much time looking at screens, rather than interacting with people or nature or doing anything else. His parents always bought him the newest technology, and at school the use of computers and screens were always promoted.

5) He thinks the world around him is falling apart. Be he on the right, left, far-right, far-left, green party, libertarian, white nationalist, communist, the experts are certain that everything is falling apart, and that in his lifetime, he will see the death of democracy, billions of climate refugees, the failure of the American Experiment, etc. These are things orders of magnitude worse than the fear of cuts to social security among older Americans.

6) He has no meaning in life beyond satisfying his own desires.

People can put up with some of these. However when a sizeable number of young people have these problems hanging over their heads, it’s no surprise so many are fragile, or more accurately, broken. It’s key that these problems happen to the nice, rule-following students who did what everyone told them. These are not young rebels getting caught up with drugs and ruining their lives. These are kids doing what mom and dad and the teacher and the news and the media said was best, only to find that it’s awful. Young people are told to work as hard as possible to get into the best school, and to take on any debt to go there, and then to uproot their lives again for the best job or program after graduating. This is the typical approach for students who make it to an elite school for better or worse. The praise and blame for it lie squarely with this generation’s parents.

There has long been an undercurrent of mental instability in the young intellectual elite (see The Sound and the Fury) as it has always taken a great deal of sacrifice to become part of that elite. There is a financial cost to attend school, a toll from work itself, a humiliation in being surrounded by people smarter than you, a loneliness to leaving home. As we increase the amount of work required to attend a good college while at the same time encouraging more people to do so, we place greater burdens on young people and more and more of them become fragile.

If society wanted less fragile young people, society should have given us more than miserable, meaningless work and the best toys money can buy. All the prophecies of Larkin are coming true, and it will be a long time before things are set right again, if ever.

And look at this one, from reader Northland:

The diversity of responses seems to suggest it’s hard to paint a complete portrait of late Millennials and Gen Z. But let me give it a shot.

Some of us are doing quite terribly.

Some of us are *on paper* doing quite well, making it into the selective colleges, building the resumes, aiming for the high-powered jobs that will propel us into (or, in most cases, keep us within) the top 10% of the country economically and socially. But internally in this category there’s a lot of anxiety about achievement and a real emptiness of life beyond the boundaries of academic and professional activities. The feeling of anxiety increases as those jobs that would put us in the top 10% take us to cities where rent and cost of living is high, and there is little immediate hope of achieving the idyllic, bourgeois, suburban life that deep in the recesses of our minds we all really want.

The rest of us, lost in the middle, are cognizant of how poorly most of those around us are doing. We’re not chasing the top 10% life. We’re also not wallowing in the pits of mental illness, substance addiction, sexual/gender dysphoria, etc. We actually see a vision of adulthood, of maturity, and we’re consciously working, albeit haltingly and tentatively, towards a level of financial independence, perhaps marriage, and eventually the idyllic, bourgeois life. We’re not too visible, though, because most of us have eschewed social media by this point, having adopted it in our early teens but eventually realized how soul-sucking it can be.

The members of all three groups tend to cluster around their fellow members. For those struggling, they tend to attract fellow strugglers, constitute a reciprocal feedback loop which heighten their collective difficulties, and feelings of inadequacy and inability, even more. For those gunning to win the meritocracy, they surround themselves with the others playing the same game, and share in their latent displeasure at the ultimate banality of their quest to reach the top, barely masked by the pleasures of dinners at ritzy restaurants or enough savings for a weekend getaway to some Instagramable locale.

The middle group also tends to cluster, if anything to reinforce to ourselves just how ridiculous the rest of our generation has become. I come home from college periodically on breaks, and I always meet up with two guys I went to high school with. We were decently good friends in high school solely because we played sports together, but socially we were in different classes in high school. I was bookish, a homebody, who ate lunch with the band/choir/theatre kids, and they were athletic “jocks” who were popular and hung out with the “cool kids”, as it were. The only reason we’re still friends, now almost three years out from high school, is because the crowds we ran with in high school have both disintegrated, leaving us to bond over the fact that we survived. Most of the band/choir/theatre kids that I used to be friends with have gotten into drugs and alcohol, gender dysphoria, mental illness, etc. Most of the “popular” kids those two used to hang out with are either barely making it through their state schools as business/engineering majors, binge-drinking every weekend and refusing to grow up, or have dropped out and are maybe taking community college classes somewhere.

Every time the three of us get together, we commiserate over who’s dropped out where, who’s gotten into hard drugs, who got a DUI, who went trans. And we implicitly remind ourselves that we’re going to be alright simply by being average, showing up to work on time, going to classes, getting the Bs and Cs, putting away our phones sometimes, actually talking to girls and asking them on dates. We occasionally talk about after college, settling down in the flyover state we grew up in, accepting the lower salaries and slower pace of life that will come with it, buying a house, having kids, taking them to church because our parents did the same for us.

We actually talk about these little things, stuff that was commonsense a decade ago, but somehow got lost in the static somewhere in the 2010s.

And I have a feeling we and the rest of the people like us in our late millennial/Gen Z cohort will be alright. I can’t say the same for the other two groups.

There are more good ones — dive in below.

The post The Malign Power Of Fragility appeared first on The American Conservative.

Universities Vs. Liberal Democracy

A Christian in the University of Toronto community forwarded to me this e-mail, which went out to them all:

Date: January 29, 2020

To: University of Toronto Faculty, Staff, & Librarians

From:

Karima Hashmani, Executive Director, Equity, Diversity & Inclusion, HR & Equity

Erin Jackson, Chief Human Resources Officer (CHRO), HR & Equity

Re: Remembrance and Action against Faith-Based Discrimination

This week, the University of Toronto joins communities across Canada to observe the International Holocaust Remembrance Day on January 27 and the Day of Remembrance and Action against Islamophobia on January 29.

On the 75th anniversary of the liberation of the Nazi Concentration and Extermination Camp of Auschwitz-Birkenau, we remember the more than six million Jewish men, women and children brutally murdered by the Nazi regime and its collaborators in the Shoah. We also honour the countless Romani, LGBTQ2 individuals, persons with disabilities and political dissidents who were killed as well as those who stood against the horrors of the Nazi atrocities.

On the third anniversary of the 2017 Quebec City Mosque Shooting, we reflect and remember this tragic event in Canada where six Muslims died and nineteen were injured after evening prayers at the Islamic Cultural Centre of Quebec City due to violence, Islamophobia, and racism.

Today is an opportunity for our community to reflect and consciously consider how we can continue to address and eliminate the many factors that perpetuate racism, anti-Semitism and Islamophobia and other faith-based discrimination that continues to occur around the world today. We have a shared responsibility to dismantle stereotypes, acknowledge bias and challenge discrimination.

At the University of Toronto, our Anti-Racism & Cultural Diversity Office, Equity, Diversity and Inclusion offices at the University of Toronto Scarborough and University of Toronto Mississauga, Multi-Faith Centre, and Community Safety Office, in partnership with stakeholders across the tri-campuses, are key drivers of ongoing initiatives that address faith-based discrimination and racism, and its intersectional manifestations. These offices all provide support, services and education to our community.

Let us continue to work together to advance positive and safe environments for our diverse community at the University of Toronto. We encourage you to take the time to observe these days of remembrance and be reminded that there are a variety of safety and equity support resources available to all members of the University of Toronto should you require assistance.

The reader adds:

The cause is laudable. We should remember, and never repeat, crimes against people of faiths.

I encourage you to read the email the administration sent and note who they include and who they exclude. One religion, in particular, does not merit inclusion. Christians. It’s outrageous. LGBTQ2 people died in Holocaust. They are mentioned in the release. Christians are not, however. Catholic saints, like Maximilian Kolbe, apparently weren’t subject to the Nazi’s cruelty.

More outrageous is the failure to mention the mass murder of Christians across the world right now. It’s a near genocide of Christians in the Middle East. It’s real and it’s happening in real time. No mention.

We need to ask why an institution like the University of Toronto is afraid to mention Christians in a release like this one. Is this because they feel that Christians are responsible for perpetrating crimes against other religions? Is Christianity “too white”?

That’s a good question. Having worked around these social justice types, my guess is that it never crossed their minds. To that sort of person, Christians are only ever persecutors, never the persecuted. And all those black, brown, and Asian Christians running around the world is a little Jerry Falwell just dying to get out.

I don’t have the newest numbers, but according to Pew, in 2010, 61 percent of the world’s Christians lived in the Global South (read: they’re not white people). Alas for the Western liberals, many Christians of Africa and the Middle East are being horribly persecuted by Muslims. From Crux:

According to a new Pew Research Center report, there are already more Christians in Africa than any other continent. By 2060, six of the top ten countries with the largest Christian populations will be in Africa, up from three in 2015.

But as Christianity grows in Africa, so does the persecution of Christians.

“Christians are increasingly seen as a threat to Muslim-dominated lands and governments,” said Dede Laugesen, the executive director of Save the Persecuted Christians, a U.S. charity.

“Mass territories of uninhabited, ungoverned regions provide easy cover for Islamic terror group activities. Combined with extreme poverty, joblessness and well-established routes for illegal arms dealing and the illicit slave trade, resource-rich African countries north of the equator provide fertile ground for Islamic State fighters fleeing the Middle East and looking for new territories to dominate,” he told Crux.

The fact that there is mass persecution of Christians by Muslims violates the rules of intersectionality. The fact that most of the world’s persecuted Christians are non-white people who are not being persecuted by white people, but by other non-white people, also violates the rules of intersectionality. Therefore, this fact does not exist.

How many students, faculty, and staff at the University of Toronto are aware of the mass persecutions of Christians going on in the world today? How many of them are aware that most of the world’s Christians are nonwhite? Does it  occur to the people who run the diversity initiatives on that campus that these are important facts? Do the diversity officials at that college even see Christians, of all colors?

I could be wrong about this, but my guess is that there’s a kind of Law of Merited Impossibility at work here: “Christians are not being persecuted for their faith, and if they were, they would deserve it.”

It is not a surprise to me that Christians were left off of this mailing from the University of Toronto, because their exclusion — whether deliberate or accidental — is a sign of the Social Justice Warrior mindset that dominates human resources and diversity bureaucracies. This mindset is Leninist: it is entirely about gaining power, and regards the accumulation of power to be a zero-sum matter, with the Good extolled and the Evil vanquished. As long as there is Evil anywhere in the world, the Good cannot be free.

Working on this coming book of mine has been a profoundly eye-opening experience, teaching me about the mindset of revolutionary communists, and seeing overwhelming parallels with the way SJWs see the world. It is fundamentally a religious viewpoint, even if God doesn’t have anything to do with it. That is, it operates as a moral system based on a kind of identity-politics metaphysics.

Diversity, equity, inclusivity — all are ideals based in a humane liberalism, at least in theory. What they truly stand for is dispossession of the people power-holders in this system regard as deplorable oppressors.

Every week I hear, either by e-mail or in person, from people in this blog’s readership who work in academia, who testify to how it has poisoned the university. Universities have become ground zero for the revolution that is bringing soft totalitarianism to America. You think that’s a wild accusation? You should spend some time reading the history of the Russian Revolution. Back in the 1880s, the revolutionaries couldn’t get the time of day from the masses, or anybody else. But they kept working at it, and as social conditions changed — e.g., the tsarist government’s incompetence mounted, masses of peasants moved into the cities — they found a hearing. Crucially, they won over the adult children of many in the middle classes, who learned about the revolutionary ideals in college. Historian Yuri Slezkine recounts the words of a tsarist general who complained that his own adult children were heavily involved in sedition. Slezkine said the fact that Russian parents, despite their political sympathies, would not act against their children, was a major factor in the revolution’s success.

I wonder if populist voters and the politicians they elect will ever attempt to make universities pay for being engines of social revolution, bigotry, and dispossession. Here’s a highly provocative essay by Arthur Milikh, writing in National Affairs, calling for the prevention of “suicide by higher education.” 

His argument is that it is time for the state to act to reform American universities, which have become destructive of the common good. He begins:

America’s universities have been progressivism’s most important asset, its crown jewel. For over half a century, they have served as the left’s R&D headquarters and the intellectual origin or dissemination point for the political and moral transformation of the nation, especially through the sexual revolution and the identity-politics revolution. Universities have trained the new elites who have taken society’s helm and now set its tone through the other institutions thoroughly dominated by the left: the mainstream press, mass entertainment, Fortune 500s, and tech companies. Universities have also brought to rural and suburban America these moral revolutions, converting generations of young people to their cause. Universities are arguably the most important institution in modern democracy — no other institution has such power to determine the fate of democracy, for good or ill.

Universities were meant be the one fixed place in democratic society insulated from the ceaseless motion of democratic life, with its petty passions, consumption, and moral and intellectual fashions. They were meant to serve as the guardian of the mind and its greatest fruits. In previous eras, segments of society (especially the clergy and the aristocracy) were devoted to protecting learning and a tradition of books. But democracy does not support such classes, and it was originally hoped that the universities would assume this role. Regrettably, they are no longer animated by their original purpose of serving republican self-government or the freedom of the mind. As such, they must be treated as political entities.

 

More:

In their confusion about or open rebellion against these ends [of serving the common good], America’s universities too often create students in the opposite vein: ideologues with technical skills, despisers of tradition without insight (not to mention wisdom), or scientists without perspective. These problems are hardly new and have been the centerpiece of the conservative critique of higher education for more than half a century. What is new, however, is the thoroughness of the corruption, the impossibility at this point of changing course through conventional means, and the extent of the pernicious effects of these institutions on the nation as a whole.

Here’s is the heart of it, from my point of view — the radical, illiberal source of the corruption:

The contemporary manifestation of commitment is called “identity,” and it is expressed especially through race and sexuality. Identity, as it is broadly understood today, is an unfalsifiable, self-created opinion of oneself or one’s group that others must recognize, accommodate, and celebrate. Identity has become sacred, placed beyond questioning or criticism. But the sacredness of identity applies only to allegedly oppressed or marginalized groups. These are allowed to possess an identity, while the alleged oppressors must not only be denied an identity but must perpetually atone for the oppression stemming from it. Herbert Marcuse’s goal of getting universities to teach that “history was the development of oppression” has not only succeeded — it is now publicly financed.

These doctrines stand in stark contrast to natural rights, the foundational teaching of America. Natural rights mean that human beings belong to a common humanity, not to an identity group. As such, all human beings have the same rights, which can be grasped rationally. Since all human beings possess rights, a political common good is possible, as is mutual understanding and rational persuasion. Deep commitments, to the contrary, imply real conflict.

A generation after Bloom’s writing, identity fanaticism, having first gained institutional support in the universities, and now in the Democratic Party, has turned to demanding conformity and punishing dissenters. The next logical outgrowth of identity politics is suppression of free speech, as speech is the expression of a free, questioning mind. An example of this fanaticism is captured in a letter written by Williams College students to faculty members who supported the adoption of the University of Chicago statement in defense of free speech on campuses. For these students, enforcing the freedom of speech is merely a reflection of “white fragility” and “discursive violence,” and is thus primarily supported by “white faculty,” the oppressor group. This letter reflects beliefs widely held by faculty and students across the nation’s universities. If universities once understood their purpose as seeking intellectual clarity, now rational questioning of identity theories is itself an act of violence.

One of the effects of ingesting this poison:

Moreover, asserting that human happiness is gained through non-rational identity creation — rather than self-exploration, attachment to one’s nation, family, or romantic love — creates no wisdom for life, let alone philosophic wisdom, and leaves many young adherents confused and unhappy. Future citizens, statesmen, and free minds cannot emerge from such teachings. For instance, neither love nor families form as a result of teachings about a global patriarchal conspiracy against women. What forms instead is a war between the sexes, an ethic of using and being used, which, in turn, fails to form the virtues of character that are the groundwork from which love grows. Having destroyed any sense of belonging to a just order, what remains is anger and vengeance, the satisfaction of which determines one’s self-respect. Students are often left to understand that there is no nation, love, or even gender — only open self-creation and, ironically, dogmatic conformity to this doctrine.

Read it all. There’s a lot more to the essay than I’ve quoted here. It’s one of the most important things I’ve read in a long time. We really have reached the point where we have to consider Milikh’s claim: “No society should be expected to subsidize its own corrosion.”

I have to tell you, working on that book radicalized me. You longtime readers know that I’ve been complaining about and documenting for years the harms Social Justice Warriors wreak on campuses — and throughout American institutions. I still wouldn’t have gone so far as to take Milikh’s argument seriously … until I started to see the world through the eyes of people who had lived through the destruction of their own societies by the same kind of radicals, in an earlier time. As Solzhenitsyn warned us, it really could happen here.

Go back and watch this emotional woke mob at Yale rolling over Prof. Nicholas Christakis, who tries bravely to be the voice of liberal rationality, and tell me that something big isn’t happening here. The Yale administration eventually caved to the mob.

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Pete Buttigieg, Head Of HR

When Mitt Romney ran for president, there was a joke going around that you shouldn’t vote for him, because he reminds you of your boss. Well, if Pete Buttigieg (D-McKinsey) doesn’t remind you of your firm’s head of HR, you might not work for a Woke Capitalist, lucky guy. From the NYT:

In early December, more than 100 members of Pete Buttigieg’s presidential campaign staff gathered at the South Bend City Church a mile from headquarters for a mandatory half-day retreat about diversity and inclusion. Less than two months remained before the start of voting, a time when most campaigns are focused full-time on politics.

Buttigieg advisers say the retreat was part of an ongoing effort to foster a progressive culture that empowered employees of color. For some of these staff members, however, the workplace itself was a problem, and working for a candidate with so little support from black and Hispanic voters had become demoralizing.

In interviews, current and former staff members of color said they believed that senior Buttigieg officials didn’t listen to their concerns and ideas about the campaign. One said there was a daily “emotional weight” on people of color who felt they were employed in order to help the campaign meet its ambitious diversity targets. Some Hispanic employees said managers asked them to translate text even if they didn’t speak Spanish, making them feel disrespected.

You are running a national presidential campaign in which you are an underdog. Voting is bearing down on you like a freight train. Naturally you want to stop to hold a diversity retreat because some folks on a high-stress presidential campaign assumed that workers with Spanish last names spoke Spanish.

More:

A follow-up meeting nearly two weeks after the retreat — organized by staff members and attended by about 70 people — became emotional, according to two people who were present. Some employees of color spoke about feeling disrespected by white colleagues. Others said they felt stressed from having to answer questions from friends and family members about working for a candidate struggling with minority voters, the two people said.

A second meeting, on Jan. 2, featured lengthy discussions of the importance of diversity in hiring and sometimes tearful descriptions of the difficulty of recruiting people of color to the staff, according to a recording of the session that was provided to The New York Times.

It’s a blizzard of snowflakery! You want to know what politically-motivated stress is? Explaining to your Reagan-loving, politically inflexible Southern dad that you were in charge of Louisiana School Students for Mondale. A couple of years later, coming home from LSU and telling the same man, “Daddy, I’m a socialist.”

I survived. What is it with these people? If you can’t handle it when your friends and family want to know why you favor a particular political candidate, maybe you’re too fragile to work on that candidate’s national political campaign. As to the “feeling disrespected by white colleagues,” I wouldn’t want to pre-judge whether they actually were disrespected — if so, then shame on the whites who did the disrespecting — but it seems to me that a political campaign behind a bourgeois gay liberal Democrat is rather unlikely to draw anti-black bigots. It’s almost like the woke atmosphere within the campaign encourages fragility.

The campaign was rocked by this hysterical, slanderous essay in The Root, a black online publication, calling Buttigieg guilty of “negligent homicide” for having incorrect attitudes towards black poverty. The author bills himself as a “world-renowned wypipologist” (white-people-ologist). Now, when a world-renowned wypipologist puts you in his sights, you must take defensive action straightaway. The Buttigieg campaign did the McKinsey-est thing ever: distributed a questionnaire exclusively to people of color, asking them to list the microagressions they’ve experienced on the campaign:

Hands up for how many people — of any race whatsoever — could tick off most of the boxes on the left? It’s called being a human being in a workplace. On the right-hand column, well, that’s simply an invitation to fragility, and a guarantee that the workspace is going to turn a completely neurotic eggshell factory.

One more thing. The campaign, being properly woke, set diversity hiring goals. But they’re hard to meet because for whatever reasons, people of color aren’t drawn to Team Pete. Rather than accepting that and moving on, they freak out over the inegalitarianism of it all:

Alexis Gonzaludo, a member of the fund-raising department, told colleagues that “my stomach is in knots” as she talked about the difficulty of attracting diverse candidates. She said she had become dismayed when she looked in the campaign’s hiring database and “it’s just like, a bunch of white dudes.”

“It’s been a shock, but not a surprise — really hard to find diverse candidates,” Ms. Gonzaludo said. “I feel a lot of pressure to, like, just hire someone.”

Again, I remind you: Buttigieg is a relative long shot to win the Democratic nomination. The Democratic caucuses and primaries are about to start. The campaign needs to field as many dedicated workers as possible, immediately. But because of the standards of middle-class wokeness, they’re somewhat paralyzed internally. The “white dudes” who believe in Buttigieg and want to work for him are just too wypipo, and it’s giving a diversity-hirer fits.

Read the whole story. Buttigieg represents everything you hate about what consultants like McKinsey have done to the workplace. I have worked for employers who listened to McKinsey, where Buttigieg worked. Believe me, seeing McKinsey people in the building made people know two things: our company was spending big money that could be going to employee raises on advice from these suits, and that that expensive advice was going to make our workplace more bureaucratic and worse.

UPDATE: Reader Mr_Squires:

I wrote a few pieces for The Root before they took a hard turn to the left. They claim to be a publication targeted to black people but they spend an inordinate amount of time and energy talking about white people. In fact, they have an entire series of articles (over 200 at my last count) with the tag “White People”, including a classic from the writer you referenced entitled “The 5 Types of Becky”. It’s predictable, boring, and useless writing but it seems to have a wide audience, which saddens me. The woke talk a good game but there is no one in the political sphere that believes in the superiority of white words, beliefs, and behaviors–and, conversely, the inadequacy of black agency–than hard Left progressives. These are the people that will list every disparity between black and white (e.g., employment, education, health) as reasons why we can’t progress but won’t say a single word about the state of marriage and family in the black community. They simultaneously believe that whites are oppressors and the source of all black problems yet look to whites to create new systems and institutions to solve these problems because black people have no power. It’s a self-defeating ideology that breeds paternalism and condescension from woke whites, not true equality for blacks.

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The Politics Of Shame

 

This clip has been making the rounds:

CNN guests use fake southern accents to mock Trump supporters as illiterate hicks; Don Lemon laughs until he cries https://t.co/kTa3YETwqd pic.twitter.com/T4u47K8OF6

— Disrn (@DisrnNews) January 28, 2020

Rick Wilson is from north Florida — born in Tampa, lives in Tallahassee — so he counts as a Southerner. You can hear it in his accent. As a Southerner, I’m not too worked up over this. I can take a joke. The funniest people you will ever hear making fun of Southerners is other Southerners, among ourselves.

As someone who does not want the left to gain any more power than they have now, I’m thrilled by this, however. It is exactly what you want your opponents to do if you are a populist: make fun of your supporters as a bunch of drooling rustics.

In the US, traditional Southern culture is a shame-honor culture. Millions more people have now seen that clip on social media than saw it on CNN. When Southern white people who voted Trump see it, they know that they are being mocked as Southerners. There is not a single person who voted for Trump, or who is considering voting for him in 2020, who will watch Rick Wilson, Don Lemon, and Wajahat Ali making fun of them like that, and think, “Well, I guess I better vote for the Democrat so these CNN people won’t poke fun at me.”

But there are a lot of them who will crawl over glass to hit that trio of turdulent smirkers where it hurts the most: in the Oval Office.

Seriously, I get the temptation to make fun of people you hate — we all do it — but on national TV? When you devoutly believe that the populist president is ruining the country, you make fun not of their vices, but their ignorance and lack of education? The thing is, had Rick Wilson or the others put on a black or Hispanic dialect, and uttered some lines in the voice of a stupid black or Hispanic guy, they’d all be jobless today. We know that. But it’s okay to punch down to poor white Southern people.

Guess what: poor white Southern people, and their “allies,” to use the woke concept, understand this quite well. Here’s Christopher Caldwell in his new book The Age of Entitlement:

There are, however, great problems with shame as a means of governing. For one thing, opposition does not disappear but only becomes unspeakable, making the public even less knowable to its rulers. For another, shame as a government weapon works only on people capable of feeling shame. It thus purges high-minded people from the opposition and ensures that, when the now-mysterious public does throw up an opposition, it will be led by shameless people and take a shameless form.

What Wilson et alia were trying to do is to denigrate the kind of people who believe that ignorance of the world is a virtue. I get that. Ignorance is not a virtue, and certainly not in our leaders. What Secretary Pompeo did with the NPR journalist was truly embarrassing. But the worst way to emphasize that is to point at people and say, “Get a load of this snaggletoothed pack of idiot crackers!”

I can’t remember who said this, but I seem to recall that it was in the context of Christian evangelism, but the phrase comes to mind, “You can’t convert people unless you love them first.” That’s true for evangelism, but politics is a bit different. You don’t have to convert people into believing you’re good; you only have to convince them that your opponent is worse. You do that by creating and stoking hatred. This is why, whether liberal or conservative, negative ads work better than positive ones, no matter what people say. This is Trump’s secret. He understands that people like Wilson, Lemon, and Ali hate him and look down on him. A lot of people who vote for Trump may not love, or even like, the man, but they suspect that the people who hate him also hate them, at least behind closed doors. But sometimes, as on CNN, it comes out in the open, confirming all their suspicions.

Like I said, it seems to me to be a really stupid way to win an election against a populist. But what do I know, I’m not a professional Republican political consultant.

UPDATE: Or, to put it as succinctly as possible:

CNN Airs Free Commercial For Trump Campaignhttps://t.co/ZcH8ppr9Z1

— The Babylon Bee (@TheBabylonBee) January 28, 2020

UPDATE.2: Aaaaaand … there it is, on the GOP’s YouTube channel. That did not take long:

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