Rod Dreher's Blog, page 179

Spanish Left Vs. Parents

A reader in Spain writes:

Spain now has a far left coalition comprised of the socialist party, PSOE, and communist party, Podemos (along with Catalan and Basque separatists). PSOE used to be considered social democratic like you’d find across Europe, but under this administration they are going well to the left.

They’ve been in office less than a week and are going after all the SJW issues such as gender or language (yes, even in Spanish they are changing words to better reflect gender), etc.

Check out this article on how they are now attacking parents constitutional right to choose education. That’s some real totalitarian stuff there. They are trying to eliminate the right of parents in Murcia to be informed and/or maintain the right to opt out of extra curricular activities that don’t pertain to the core curriculum (maths, sciences, language etc). These extra activities generally focus on gender, sexuality, etc. Vox [a populist political party — RD] passed a “parental pin” last year that further protected this parental right, but now the authoritarians are going after it, literally saying it’s the state that chooses how to educate their kids, not parents. Just one example, but there are so many over the last week.

I ran the article through Google Translate. It says, in part (emphases in the original):

The “parental pin” is an initiative promoted by Vox and that has allowed the Murcia coalition government formed by PP and Citizens to unlock the 2020 budgets. This is a request for express authorization from the parents of a student, so that the student can participate in activities organized by the school, when they have content that affects moral, sexual or conscience issues. These activities are framed within the school schedule — that is, they are mandatory. Therefore, those who defend the pin say that parents have the right to be informed and to be able to show their reasoned disagreement.

The Education minister is quoted in the story as saying, “We cannot think that children belong to parents.”

There you have it. This is totalitarian progressivism, right there: claiming the right to take children from their parents and educate them in left-wing ideology, especially on sex and gender. A year ago, I told you about what the far left is doing in the province of Navarra: forcing gender ideology onto students. Here’s the ideology that the Navarra government wants to force on all schools, even Catholic schools:

To make visible the diversity of bodies, all of them sexed and valued. Reflection on images of different sexual persons in masculine and/or feminine, different ages, cultures, functional diversity … Recognition of child sexuality from birth by decriminalizing the recognition and experience of this sexuality at school and in the family (sexual vigilance, erotic games, etc.).

I have not the slightest doubt that if the Left could do all this here in the US, they would. I don’t know, maybe it’s already happening in New York and California.

Don’t be naive about this stuff. The radical left has always hated the traditional family. Reading histories of the Bolshevik revolution, it’s stunning how berserk these people were about how intolerable the family was. They get this from Marx, of course. A reader sent this piece from Commune, a slick new communist magazine: “Six Steps To Abolish The Family.” Excerpts:

3. BUILD COMMUNES.

As new communist production begins in factories and farms, family abolition can take root in permanent communes of collective social reproduction. Each commune could be home to around two hundred people. The protest kitchen becomes a permanent canteen where everyone in the area cooks and eats their meals. The medic’s tent becomes a center for all regular medical care. The assembly square becomes a meeting space for democratic administration of the commune. Bad drumming circles become places where people record music or make art. Childcare areas become crèches where children can learn and grow together over years. Private groups of bedrooms are still available for people that want to form intimate family-like units or live with their kids, but most of life takes place in shared collective space. The old, atomized single-family homes dependent on constant car use and individual consumption are ended. On this basis, humanity can collectively address climate change.

And:

5. RAISE CHILDREN OF THE COMMUNE.

Through the commune, offer a better world for children.

As neighbor and friend, in a world where the nuclear family no longer disposes of the lives of children, everyone is called upon to creatively and collectively intervene into abusive parental relationships. Through the commune, a parent or child not dependent on the family can opt-out of a messed-up dynamic when it isn’t working, knowing everyone will be cared for. No one is bound together violently any longer. New forms of gender freedom and human flourishing not available in the limited, truncated form of the nuclear family become possible. If you’ve reached this step, you have succeeded in abolishing the family. You have freed queer love and feminist care to create a basis for human flourishing.

You laugh, but those people are deadly serious. And in Spain, people who are not far from them ideologically are in power.

Keep in mind that the Vox party, the one arguing that Spanish parents should have a say in whether or not their kids are indoctrinated with gender ideology in school, is routinely denounced by Western media as “far right.” This is one example of why you can’t trust media reporting on the European Right.

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Out With The Olds

This is not a Babylon Bee article, I swear. A church in Cottage Grove, Minn., has gone slap crazy:

A prayer for survival rose from the back of the church last Sunday.

“I pray for this church, getting through this age-discrimination thing,” said William Gackstetter, as the gray-haired heads around him nodded in agreement.

Gackstetter and other members of the Grove United Methodist Church in Cottage Grove are upset enough that their church is closing in June. What makes it worse is that their church is reopening in November — pretty much without them.

The church wants to attract more young families. The present members, most of them over 60 years old, will be invited to worship somewhere else. A memo recommends that they stay away for two years, then consult the pastor about reapplying.

Officials say the church needs a reset, and reopening the church is the best way to appeal to younger people.

But the older church members say they see that as an insult.

“This is totally wrong,” said Gackstetter’s wife, Cheryl. “They are discriminating against us because of our age.”

After the plan was explained by a visiting pastor on Jan. 5, she said, “I called him a hypocrite. I said, ‘You are kicking us out of our church.’ ”

That little congregation is dying. They have only 25 people on Sunday. Something has to happen. The plan is to kick out the olds. Because they’re dragging everybody down, ad because Jesus wants them to

“Jesus said we are called to reach new people,” said Wetterstrom.

He said that Methodists’ regional Annual Conference is paying $250,000 to restart the church. They have hired a specialist in starting new churches — Jeremy Peters.

Peters, 30, has moved to Cottage Grove with his wife and two children. He is working with community groups, laying the groundwork for the relaunch, probably in November.

“It’s a new thing with a new mission for a new target,” said Peters, “and a new culture.”

Read it all.

Look, if the Methodist conference considered asking the black people in the church to leave, because they were scaring away new people, would that proposal have gotten out of the conference room? Of course not. But old people — hey, no problem. They’re getting in the way of progress. Their walkers are in the way of people getting out to the coffee bar in the lobby, I guess.

I don’t get it. Honestly, I don’t. I totally get telling people to stay away because they are unrepentant sinners. But being old is not a sin. Is it?

UPDATE: A reader posts an interesting comment:

As a theological conservative in a liberal mainline denomination, I would suggest that there is probably a lot more to this story than what is presented in the article. and I would not assume that it is a case of godless liberal bureaucrats vs. poor, faithful elderly parishioners.

There are a lot – a LOT – of seriously declining mainline congregations out there, and for most of these congregations there is only a limited time left before the work and expense of keeping the doors open become too much for the few people left. In almost every situation, the small band of elderly parishioners have no desire, motivation or idea how to grow their congregation, and are typically fully on board with their denomination’s liberal drift. They will refuse to change anything, but expect the minister to magically bring in a bunch of new folk who will bring with them invisible children, contribute large amounts to the church, but be content with having no say in how it is run. These folk will retain a death grip on the church governance.

I am in a mainline denomination and I see this ALL THE TIME. Most liberal denominational leaders are happy to let the congregation die out, then sell the building. Truth be told, most of these aging dying congregations are quite liberal and so the liberal leadership won’t challenge them. Most liberal leaders have no clue how to plant or grow a new church. Occasionally there are people (usually more orthodox/conservative) who are interested in renewing the church, but they are powerless to do anything because the elderly, liberal parishioners hold a death grip on power in the parish.

That leaves only two options to revitalize a church. One is to plant a new congregation in an existing parish (i.e., leave the dying congregation in place and plant a completely new congregation to use the same building). Two is to close the parish down, albeit earlier than you would have (but probably only +/- 5 years earlier than it would have closed anyway), let the building sit vacant for half a year and then plant a new congregation.

There are pros and cons to both models. In the first model, the aging existing congregation is typically very needy to their pastors, and they will often work to sabotage the plant. Furthermore, the aging congregation is typically liberal, while you need a conservative to successfully plant a new congregation. In the second model, the con is very obvious as described in this article — the optics are bad as a church is shut down a bit early. My strong suspicion is that anyone from the old congregation who is willing to be constructive in contributing to a new church plant would be very welcome to take part.

One last point — consider the wider issue of the dying older mainline denominations (e.g. Episcopal Church) vs. the young upstart conservative offshoot denominations (e.g. ACNA). The dying old denomination maintained a death grip on the denomination and refused to change. The folks interested in growing an orthodox church had to leave and start their congregations from scratch. It’s kind of the same dynamics.

This is really interesting. Thanks for it. I hadn’t thought that left-right ideology had anything to do with this Minnesota situation. Based on what has been reported, it looks like that congregation couldn’t survive, and probably needs to wind down. I can’t blame the Methodist conference for wanting to do something different to revive that parish. But man, to tell old people to go away and only come back if they have permission — that is just awful.

The post Out With The Olds appeared first on The American Conservative.

Hating So Love Can Win

Yesterday my priest preached a good sermon on homosexuality, and sexuality in general. I mention this because I observed recently in this space that I had only once in my 26 years of practicing either Catholicism or Orthodoxy heard a sermon that mentioned sexuality. (Aside from the two or three I heard from an old priest in Fort Lauderdale who thundered prophetically against “homophobia”.)

Yesterday, my priest managed to give a substantive sermon that was understandable to adults without scandalizing children in the congregation — not an easy thing to do. He said that marriage between one man and one woman, and their rightly ordered sexual love, is an icon of the Holy Trinity. We cannot lose that truth if we are to know and to love God as God commands. He also talked about sexual disorder among heterosexuals — pornography, even lust between husband and wife — and how all of it must be repented of by Christians. Finally, he spoke of the duty of showing mercy to our fellow sinners, as we ourselves would want to be shown mercy. He reiterated, though, that if we lose sight of the truths of what God tells us in His Word about sex and sexuality, we will lose something vital to our task in this life of conforming our lives to Christ’s.

This was what happened to me, as I’ve written about before. In my twenties, I found the countercultural teachings of Christianity regarding sex to be exactly what I needed to pull me out of the trap I had laid for myself. Liberal Christians who told me that my sin wasn’t really sin were no help at all. Sexual permissiveness is the prosperity gospel of progressive Christians. Nadia Bolz-Weber and Creflo Dollar are working against the Gospel in equal measure.

It is a very difficult topic for pastors to cover, for obvious reasons. I’m grateful that my pastor chose to talk about it. The silence of pastors, priests, and religious leaders around the topic gives the impression that it’s not important. The position my priest took on the issue is Orthodox, but as we all know, highly unpopular in this culture.

I am certain that many, many Christians have no real idea how much hatred there is in America for any Christian who dissents from the progressive line on LGBT. Whitefield Academy of Louisville, Kentucky, is a private Christian school affiliated with a Southern Baptist church. It recently expelled a 15-year-old girl for putting on her Instagram a photo of herself wearing a rainbow sweater, behind a rainbow birthday cake. At first glance, this looked like paranoia. What kind of Christian school would kick a kid out simply for appearing in a social media image with a rainbow cake?

There was more to the story. It turns out that the school had been dealing with a long list of behavioral problems with this girl, including, I’ve been told by several sources now, unwanted sexual aggression (e.g., a parent of a female student at the school told me the expelled girl hit on his own daughter, making her very uncomfortable). And as I wrote here, Kayla, the 15-year-old, outed herself last year on her Instagram account, and had been posting images of herself and an apparent girlfriend. In one of them, she talks about sharing the girl’s bed. These were violations of the school’s ethics code, which the girl and her mother signed. The school’s administration and the girl’s mother met in October to talk about her behavior. It appears that the school gave her one last chance … but Kayla and her mom couldn’t resist trolling the school with a rainbow cake.

These details have not been in the mainstream media reporting, which decontextualized the cake photo. I only found out the truth about all this from a couple of sources who are not in the school’s administration, but who are close to the situation. They have been watching with frustration as the school has been smeared nationally by half-truths Kayla’s mother peddled to the media, which ate it up.

The Kentucky school is Whitefield Academy, named for George Whitefield, an early Evangelical. There are other, non-related schools named after George Whitefield. Over the weekend, I heard that Whitefield academies in other places have been receiving hate mail and abusive phone calls from people who mistake them for the Kentucky school. A source with access to the hate mail that the Kentucky school has received shared a representative sampling with me.

Nobody shows love and tolerance like Loving and Tolerant Progressives. This charming missive contains an image of Jesus Christ sodomizing himself:

Regarding admission information for Whitefield Academy, I wanted to start this email with an innocuous line so that you would open it and look at this image because you are a prolapsed anus of a person. Kentucky is a backwards 3rd world country being carried towards civilization by the rest of the US.

Eat sh*t and die.

This one, from a Mr. John D. in suburban Buffalo, anticipates the suppression of conservative Christians within society:

What ignorant individuals you are, expelling a young woman due to her sexual orientation (your perceived interpretation of a photograph)? I look forward to hearing how this impacts the future of your school. So thankful that our society is intolerant of ignorance like this.

I predict the school is shut down within two years. I can’t wait to read of it in the paper or hear it on the national news.

Oh and I’m a married (30 years) father of two children (currently in college) who have been taught that views like yours must be eliminated from our society. They are the future of our country, you are the past. They and their peers will shut you down, it’s just a question of how long it will take.

Can you hear me laughing?

This sage, Tyler K., knows what’s up:

Shame on you. You’re what’s wrong with Christianity. These actions embolden secularism. In this lifetime we will see religion dwindle to the addled brain ramblings of the ignorant until it only exists in history books as a cautionary tale.

Your privilege is showing.

An excitable person named Angelina writes with exhortation in mind:

SHAME ON ALL OF YOU! You and your school is a joke and God himself would be ashamed of your actions for judging a child based on a rainbow cake. WHAT IS WRONG WITH YOU? THIS IS A CHILD! I would really love to know how a rainbow cake goes against your school policies. Clearly you show that you hateful against gays and LGBTQ and this will be exposed. I will be blasting your school all over social media and to the news. REALITY CHECK…..there are gays in your school and there are transgenders in your school. Oh you think because you are not aware that it won’t come to your school….WRONG!! Open your eyes to the world we live in. SHAME SHAME SHAME ON YOU who call yourselves children of God but are out here judging a child!! GOD says to love everyone, not discriminate and that is exactly what you are doing. Ya’ll make me sick and I can’t wait for God to judge you at heaves gate!

Stephen C. wonders whether the kid might be a future Nobelist:

You should be ashamed of your institution and your boss. What sort of educator expels a young girl over a RAINBOW BIRTHDAY CAKE?!?!

This girl could be an important thinker in this world and you’ve just casted her out. You are the same as the educators who expelled Einstein for “going against the grain”.

Are you all so blind and filled with hate to think that LGBT has a monopoly over the “rainbow”?? Does that mean that little girls who like rainbows and unicorns also are lesbians and not WORTHY of your joke of a school.

News flash! No one cares if people are gay anymore! The world has moved on, so should you, bigots.

Aubrey, who Knows Better, lays into these troglodytes:

Shame on all of you.

Sincerely,

A loving, caring, faithful, RATIONAL and SANE Christian

Tim has some advice for the school administration:

I find it unfortunate I need to waste my important time in the day to reach out to the individuals responsible for expelling a young female for, well I’m not sure, enjoying a rainbow? I mean unless you put it upon yourselves to assume more from a simple post, which even if she were to consider herself part of the LGBT community, so what.

Please do what is best for the interest of the children at your school and step down. You have proven that you don’t belong in developing the youth of our nations. This is a disgusting act of bigotry by people who have shown when in a position of power, the don’t know how to use it without abusing their role. The lack of intelligence in this decision is baffling, especially considering your supposed to be educators.

Do the right thing and step down from your positions.

Brent shares his conviction that Baptists in Louisville are just about on the same level as Muslim tribesmen who commit mass murder:

It must be a heavy burden carrying around so much hate. As a parent to a teenage girl, I am certain that any sane, caring person would never do such a thing to a 15 year old girl.

You people are little better than the Taliban.

One day I am confident you will come to the realization that you have done a terrible deed (although this is likely only one of many). Until then you can continue to relish in the hateful burden you have put on yourselves.

Dustin R. is farklempt:

As a dedicated educator of this wonderful country, it is absolutely disgusting to hear that a student was expelled because of “lifestyle choices.” Call yourself a Christian, but a Christian you are not. Christ would have not approved of this whatsoever as he sat with the criminals, drunks, and prostitutes. Regardless of the religious aspect, your job as an educator is to help students reach their absolute academic and professional potential in which you are failing to do so. To expel a student over a shirt, a cake, and even sexual orientation is not a character of an educator in any sense. You and your staff are not educators. I refuse to let all of my hard work be ruined by your reputation.

Furthermore, what you have showed this country is that if you are different than others, then you have no place at your academy. This is why private religious schools are nothing but brainwashing academies for the mindless. This girl will go onto amazing things in her life and be more of a human and a Christian than you will ever be.

Marlene G. says they’re serving the devil:

According to Whitefield Academy’s parent/student handbook, the school seeks to work in tandem with children’s families to “mold students to be Christ-like.”

Isn’t it ironic that YOUR behavior isn’t Christ like? Didn’t Christ accept and love ALL people?

This is what is wrong with you and your school – you are going about Christianity and teaching morals all the wrong way. Maybe, if you truly do want to end up in heaven, you will start loving and accepting the people that Jesus loves instead of being mean and judgmental. Walk in someone else’s shoes for a time instead of being mean and Satan-like to 15-year old girls.

Mark T. hates Kentucky:

Talk about snowflakes?? You’re apparently scared of your shadow.

Congratulations on your contribution to these impressive KY statistics:

Health Care #44

Education #38

Economy #33

Someone has a multi colored cake, and a sweater with some stripes and you’re so insecure that you chose to expel them?? Ever thought of re-instituting the inquisitions? Of course I’m sure you take an equal stance with racism and swastikas right? Or maybe it’s how you get your power trip, intimidating and bullying little girls? OR are you a eunuch without the courage to stand up to some donor who called on phone demanding action?

Maybe you thought the press would do you good? Maybe even get an best bully of the year award from #MoscowMitch?

Maybe you hit your head and thought the year was 1920 instead of 2020.

Get a life, goodness knows your kind of insecure evil isn’t going to see a comfortable afterlife. And just in case you’ve ever ‘actually’ asked the questions WWJD? You ‘might’ even be able to look yourself in the mirror and admit that this ISN’T what he would do.

You’ve just provided the case study on statistically why the younger generation is fleeing the church.

Mark [deleted]

ps – God doesn’t like BIGOTS either.

Francine, a professional counselor, demands that the administrators at this Baptist school pay attention to the gangs and the drugs that no doubt infest their campus:

I read the article regarding the 15-year old girl who wore a rainbow shirt on her OWN time to celebrate her birthday party. WHO ARE YOU to dictate what she can and cannot wear on her own time? You should be ashamed of yourself! Shouldn’t you be more worried about REAL inappropriate behaviors ON the school campus such as sexual abuse, gangs, drugs, and bullying? Those are the REAL issues you should concern yourself with. To expel a student for wearing a rainbow shirt? REALLY? I hope the parents sue you for all that you are worth! BIGOTRY AT ITS FINEST!

Martin B. has a potty mouth:

Jesus hates you with every fiber of his being and he was not the son of God because there is no God and you are all wasting your time on this earth with that bullsh*t.

Go f*ck yourselves, oh, whoops, isn’t that against your religion, f*cking?

Happy C. is all “bless your heart”:

Matthew 7:1….perhaps you all should go back and read it. In case, your limited knowledge of things prohibits you from doing so, it states: “Judge not lest ye be judged” .

To expel a student from your campus because of an article of clothing is the most sexist, toxic masculinity, discriminatory thing I’ve seen in a while. A teenage girl being raised in a decent home and you have the never to judge her? Such a complete disgrace that is. In a time when the climate of America is to tear everyone down, for you to feel that you are entitled to do the same is a terrible act of aggression towards that young lady.

Instead of hating you, I’ll pray for your soul. The way your actions are speaking louder than words on this matter, you will clearly need it.

Michael B. is unclear on the concept:

I am a 63 year old Christian man…………and you are a pathetic excuse for a human being. You might just want to have a little re-read of your bible. I hope your despicable little school dies the horrible death that it deserves.

One more:

What’s the point of actually expelling a teenage student for her own beliefs? I’m also going to add the fact you guys stated that you guys approve of what ethic and beliefs your teachers and students have but show off in the end that it was pure bullsh*t?

F*ck you biased a*s snowflake boomer crybaby b*tches. I hope karma gets to ya’ll soon.

Most of us have VPNs and fake emails so do not try and pull any shit off after this.

And so on.

I am reminded of something an Evangelical college professor told me about the students at his institution. He said that they are all products of church youth groups who present Christianity as entirely about relationship. Consequently, they believe that niceness is next to godliness. When they encounter people who say that Christianity is mean, they have no idea how to respond.

If you, Christian reader, are not preparing yourself right now to be hated, and to be okay with that, you’re going to be flattened by what’s coming. Seriously.

By the way, Al Mohler took up the Whitefield Academy case on his podcast today. He says that this case offers “a huge lesson for all of us.”

Mohler says that many Christian schools are not prepared, either from an administrative or public relations stance, to deal with cases like this. Mohler: “If you begin at any point to operate on anything other than the most explicit statement of Biblical beliefs … then you’re in big trouble.”

If you are an administrator at a Christian school, and your school does not have explicit language in its policies stating what it believes on sexuality and what it requires of students and their parents, I strongly urge you to check out the sample documents on this schools page on the Alliance Defending Freedom site, and waste no time at all adopting them as official school policy. You will need them. About the public relations problem, you had better work it out in advance how your school will respond if a case like this comes up. The bottom line, though, is that the media will generally have no interest in being fair, and you will draw onto yourself an incredible amount of hatred from the Very Online mob. Better to get it sorted how to deal with that now, before the national spotlight strikes you.

UPDATE: I am told that there have been over 1,000 e-mails received by Whitefield Academy, and hundreds of nasty phone calls. Over 12,000 Facebook and social media posts. My source says that the school’s headmaster received the worst of it. Some of these missives expressed the wish that he would die.

Today I’m working on one of the final chapters in my next book, about the coming soft totalitarianism. The spark for the book came from a man who phoned me after Memories Pizza was mobbed by haters in the spring of 2015. The small town Indiana pizza parlor was run by Evangelical Christians, who told a TV reporter (when she asked) that no, they wouldn’t cater a gay wedding. The story went viral, and people from all over the country threatened violence against them. The man who called me said his elderly mother, who in her youth was jailed for six years as a political prisoner in communist Czechoslovakia, told him that this was exactly the kind of thing that happened in her home country when communists took over: the mob scapegoating ideological dissidents.

And here we are.

The post Hating So Love Can Win appeared first on The American Conservative.

Stephen King Vs. Totalitarian Kitsch

Did you see that the Social Justice Warriors tried to cancel Stephen King last week? It was over these two tweets he sent out after the Oscar nominations were announced, and he failed to join the ritual gnashing of teeth over the claim that an insufficient number of minorities were nominated:

Biiiiiiiiiiii-goooooooot! they shrieked. The writer Roxane Gay, for example:

But they got nowhere, because as Justin Lee writes, Stephen King is too big to be cancelled. More:

Anyone who knows anything about Stephen King, especially his Twitter presence, knows he is a rather conventional liberal, a faithful Democrat, and a veritable geyser of anti-Trump and anti-GOP venom. One might expect he’d be given the benefit of the doubt. But King’s progressivism is not totalizing. He believes in equality of opportunity rather than in equity of outcome, at least in the realm of art. And this is radically at odds with the regnant progressive understanding of what art is for.

Roxane Gay could lob her criticism even after King had clarified his position because her worldview prioritizes art’s utility as an instrument of power. This progressive orthodoxy descends from a venerable tradition at least as old as Marx. If one believes that art is a purely immanent phenomenon, that it does not offer a gateway into the transcendent, then it is perfectly rational to prioritize identity and political expedience. (It is possible, of course, that I’ve misjudged Gay’s worldview; perhaps she does allow for genuine metaphysical transcendence in art. But her criticism of King is tenable only within a presumed metaphysic of immanence.) If a work of art is merely immanent, then it is only an expression of the material conditions in which it was produced, and thus reifies the power of whatever regime administers those conditions. To hold that “diversity and quality are synonymous” is to argue that a different regime be installed, one controlled by “the diverse” and implementing their political agenda. It is refreshing that progressives so readily recognize the power of art to order collective experience; too often Americans dismiss the arts as mere divertissement. But such instrumentalism is, at the last, a very low view of art.

Read it all.  Lee goes on to praise King for standing firm behind an older, classical view of art that sees particular works of art as gateways into universal, transcendent experience. It’s a great short essay, and an important one.

You see this in the world of opinion journalism, or at least I did when I was involved more intimately with that world. Some editors held the view that “diversity is a component of quality” — I remember that phrase. This was how they advocated publishing second-rate op-ed pieces from women and writers of color without feeling that they were compromising quality. It’s just not true, though. Talent doesn’t distribute itself according to a quota scheme. If “diversity” is a component of quality, it must be true that the lack of diversity — which is to say whiteness and/or maleness — diminishes the quality of the work. Do we really want to say that? Yes, I think some of these progressives do.

Roxane Gay’s criticism, as Lee avers, is a good example of the totalitarianism of identity-politics progressivism. This contretemps with Stephen King reveals the dangers within that worldview to art and artistic freedom. Roxane Gay, it would seem, would endorse a vision of art that produces what the novelist Milan Kundera called “totalitarian kitsch”:

In the realm of totalitarian kitsch, all answers are given in advance, and preclude any questions. It follows, then, that the true opponent of totalitarian kitsch is the person who asks questions.

Three cheers for Stephen King, liberal Democrat and true opponent of totalitarian kitsch.

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Meghan Didn’t Do Military

Well, Megxit is over. The Queen has settled with them, so it’s out the door with the Windsor-Markles. A reader who wishes to be known as “an American in Blighty” sends in this fascinating observation about Megxit. It’s not like anything I’ve read anywhere else:

I’m no fan of Meghan and not really a huge fan of anyone in the Royal family aside from the Queen and Prince Philip. I admire their dedication to service and the country and the “stickability” they’ve shown despite the many downsides of life as a Royal. But no one could have prepared Meghan for what she was really doing when she joined the Royals. It’s not the protocol, the media scrutiny, the “this “or the “that” which are all a mainstay of a Royal’s life. I’m sure Meghan could have conquered all of that with the usual American “can do” approach to life. Hey — she probably was a cheerleader in high school and can feign enthusiasm with the best of them. So I doubt she felt challenged by the pomp and circumstance.

But there was one important thing that Meghan could never have been made to understand before she joined the Merry Band. She won’t even quite understand or be able to articulate it now—and I doubt it even occurred to the Royals to help her understand what I’m about to say.

The fact is that Meghan didn’t just join the Royal Family — she joined a small military unit. Of course she knew and could see with her own eyes the military people surrounding her — her own husband, in fact. But does she even really know that her life became — and remains—governed by — military regimentation, and order and process?

Why would she? She’s never been in the Army or the “Forces”. She didn’t attend a British public school and join the CCF (Combined Cadet Corps—and believe me the CCF isn’t the beloved “Jr. ROTC” that some Americans may be familiar with); she wasn’t at a British Uni where the OTC (Officer Training Corps) bar was the best booze deal in town and the best place to hook up with a young officer cadet. She doesn’t even have any experience with the US Military to help her to understand military life in the UK. Whether she knows it or not, Meghan is in the military for all intents and purposes! Her every move is facilitated by military style planning and planners using military processes (even if euphemistically renamed) and everyone around her is serving or has served (including all of her closest in-laws!).

Despite this defense of Meghan — she was doomed from the start I believe — I still believe that she has been rotten to her father who, through no fault of his own, has been thrust into the tabloids and the banal world of celebrity without warning. I don’t respect her because of this. Most American celebs (most Americans for that matter) have “cousins in the closet” — weird and no-count relatives are ubiquitous in the US and don’t merit a mention in the US tabloids for the most part. I assume that Meghan’s paltry “Suits” involvement didn’t trigger scrutiny of her wider family way back pre-Harry? I don’t fault Thomas Markle for having (innocently?) tried to set the record straight in 2017 before his daughter married. His invitation to the tabloids for a photo shoot to demonstrate that he was a normal Joe and not the hermit and misanthrope the press made him out to be — was sadly endearing.

And then, to add insult to injury, poor Harry had the timidity in a 2017 interview to say that Meghan had fit right in to the ol’ Royal family at Christmas — he thought she’d “finally found the family she never had….” How very thoughtless and insulting to her real family. Little did he really seem to know what was to come later on this front…

If I’m not a Meghan fan, I suppose I am a Thomas Markle fan. You’ve got to admire his giving the finger to “respectability” and to those who believe they possess it. As for the current lawsuit, I don’t think the Brits “get” People agazine. It is the poorer yet seriously aspirational cousin to the delightful “Hello!” magazine that is the mainstay of UK hair salons. That Meghan chose People to air her dirty laundry — to make her case against her Dad and to have her friends do it for her — is pretty low behaviour for a Royal.

It was a genuine American celeb approach to family contretemps, and it smacks of daytime TV slap downs (what was that show that always results in an onstage fisticuffs?). Her resort to using a People magazine hand grenade is really regrettable. And it has been Thomas Markle’s response to Meghan’s People “thrust” that has brought about the current unseemly lawsuit. Thomas chose to counter Meghan’s aspersions of his character by giving the press a copy of Meghan’s 2017 letter to him. His hand was forced — in order demonstrate his good faith and to counter the celeb trash talking circuit his best choice was to publish Meghan’s letter. Oh woe is he.

I still think Meghan deserves a defence, however. I believe it is hard for many Brits to fully understand and almost unimaginable to all Americans that the Royal Family is not just Royal, it is, in equal measure, a military unit. The Royal family is more defined by its military nature than its Royal nature. Every primary member of the family has served including the Queen. They are all still “serving” — and sacrificing — as Megxit continues. Everything they do, every step they make, every breath they take is literally aligned with a military plan, planned by serving and formerly serving military who look after almost every aspect of the Royals’ lives.

This is not a bad thing — in fact it is out of necessity that the Royals operate on a military format. The Queen is the head of the Armed Forces, and the Royal Family could not do what it does at the scale and with the breadth and detail of involvement unless and with the necessary security it requires but for its management as/like a military unit.

Imagine this—Meghan may have read everything there is to read about royalty, British history, the “military”, protocol; she may have taken classes on etiquette and she seemed to wear just the right hats and the correct British designers (and looked fabulous doing so). But there is nothing and no one who could prepare her for what she actually joined—not the Royal Family—but a highly organised and spotlessly run small military unit. Take a large measure of Army, add a huge dram of Royal Navy (the senior service) mix in a smattering of Royal Air Force; stir in the Combined Cadet Corps and jigger of Sandhurst just for fun; shake it all up with a few operational tours in the Falklands, Iraq, Afghanistan and elsewhere, and there you have it—the Royal Household. The Queen, Prince Philip, Princess Anne, Prince Charles, etc, have all served or are serving currently as “Colonels of the Regiment” (Army) or in similar positions in all of the military branches.

They are surrounded by retired and serving military who run their diaries, their meetings, their security and so on and so forth. They are, out of necessity, tradition, temperament, selflessness, and sense of duty a well-oiled military (dare I add “fighting”) machine. The Queen is the Commander in Chief. They have managed themselves and been managed like this for years—and know nothing else.

The loser in all of this mess will be, of course, Harry. While Meghan will now be free from the banality of military regimentation imposed on a civilian life, Harry will miss this tether—its certainty and its familiarity. It is his operating system. He is the one who will find life in Canada or the US, or wherever—absolutely shambolic. What is normal and merely slightly disorganised to everyone else will seem like utter chaos to poor ol’ Harry. He will not find the order and certainty and discipline that have been a staple of his entire life. He will go through withdrawal.

He might not even realise what is bothering at him at first as he slips away from HMS Royal Family. There won’t be the familiar operations plan and someone always, yes always, looking at the contingency plans—the “branches and sequels” of what might happen if Plan A goes awry (and Plan A always goes off-piste). This has been the software running in the background of Harry’s life. And not just in the background—he is himself TRAINED to operate and rely upon a military planning format. His life and the lives of those serving with him were dependent on this shared training and understanding. The only difference is that those he’s served with were/are able to escape the regimentation when they left military life. This military order and regimentation is simply NOT the way Americans (or civilians from any walk of life for that matter) operate. Meghan probably couldn’t stomach the unceasing regimentation (sometime for regimentation’s sake!).

When Meghan came on the scene, she didn’t have a chance. Who can blame her for getting passive-aggressive on the Royals? What any normal American or civilian would simply regard as a slight change of plan (“I’m cold today…don’t think I’ll go out for a run after all!”) results, in this military setting, into serious “second and third order consequences”. That is to say, in a life where everything is planned (including via those pesky little “branches and sequels” mentioned earlier) there are no simple “normal” changes of plan. The smallest seemingly inconsequential change messes A LOT of people about. And I doubt Meghan’s into doing that to anyone. Once Meghan realised just how much planning and time everything takes, even something as simple as a little “run,” and how much pain one small change causes–you can’t blame her if she came to feel more and more constrained.

And she didn’t even have the benefit of knowing just what the military planning and processes surrounding her really demanded, or why. She’s not a trained military officer, and the banality of some of it must have been incredibly weird. Surreal. But that sort of life is so much a part of the day-to-day existence that the Royals thrive in that it must not be transparent to them that it is death to everyone else. They can’t see themselves and it must be impossible for them to realise that no one else operates in this fashion (aside from an actual military HQ). And they can’t even escape or retire—that’s their penance. But oops…there it is! Now Harry has done so. And Meghan?

Meghan has now left the Army that she didn’t even know she was joining. I think they should give her a bloody medal for doing her two-plus years and let her go in peace!

Interesting. Now that they are no longer Royals, I wonder if people will be as interested in the Windsor-Markles. They will be at first, because they’re such a curiosity. But over time, will the glamour fade?

The post Meghan Didn’t Do Military appeared first on The American Conservative.

Rome Conference On National Conservatism

European readers, I have some good news. This morning I was added to the speakers’ list for this fantastic conference coming up next month in Rome. My TAC Big Cheese Boss Johnny Burtka will be there too:

“God, Honor, Country: President Ronald Reagan, Pope John Paul II, and the Freedom of Nations—A National Conservatism Conference”

Today, everyone knows that Europe is at a crossroads. The rise of nationalism in Europe and America, and throughout the democratic world, is seen by many as a threat to the post-War liberal order. But others regard the renewed emphasis on patriotism and the freedom of nations as a continuation of the best political traditions of the last century. So is the new national conservatism a menace or is it—on the contrary—a virtue?

This international conference in Rome will seek to answer this question. It is John Paul II’s centennial year, and we will begin by revisiting the historic alliance between an American President and a Polish Pope that defeated Communism and succeeded in re-establishing national independence, self-determination, and religious freedom in Eastern Europe after 1989.

The conference will then shift its focus 40 years forward, to our own day, examining the fate of the national independence, self-determination, and religious freedom under the rule of the European Union. In particular, we will ask: Is the freedom of nations that was promised a generation ago still desirable in our time? And if it is, what must be done to achieve it?

Joining us to discuss these pressing questions will be Amb. Anna Maria Anders, Christopher DeMuth, Rod Dreher, Amb. Callista Gingrich, Yoram Hazony, Ryszard Legutko, Marion Maréchal, Giorgia Meloni, Douglas Murray, Prime Minister Viktor Orban, John O’Sullivan, Matteo Salvini, and many more.

The conference will also mark the publication of Yoram Hazony’s award-winning Le virtù del nazionalismo in Italy.

The conference will be sponsored by the Bow Group (UK), Center for European Renewal (Netherlands), Danube Institute (Hungary), Edmund Burke Foundation (US), Herzl Institute (Israel), International Reagan Thatcher Society (US), and Nazione Futura (Italy).

I will be giving a talk about my forthcoming book (September) about the lessons for us today, regarding resisting the rising soft totalitarianism, from the anti-communist resistance.

Everyone is invited. Buy your ticket here. Look at that line-up — this is going to be a fantastic conference. What is National Conservatism? Check out this YouTube speech Yoram Hazony gave at last year’s first Nat Con conference in Washington.

I will be booking my flight in the next day or so. I recall that some Roman readers of The Benedict Option had written me in the past to ask if I would be willing to come to Rome to give a talk about it. I had several requests, but I can’t find them all now. Well, I will be in Rome very soon, so if you will get in touch with me (rod — at — amconmag — dot — com), and we can work something out, I will be willing to stay in Rome for two or three days after the conference to come address you. Also, I have never been to Montecassino or Subiaco, two sites significant in the life of St. Benedict, my patron, so maybe I can work that in. Plans are fluid, so write me!

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Rainbow Cake Girl: The True Story

You might have heard about Whitefield Academy, the private Christian school in Louisville, Kentucky, that expelled Kayla Kenney, a  15-year-old student, for posting on social media a photo of herself with a rainbow cake. On the surface, it looked ridiculous: this priggish Christian school kicking a teenager out for merely having a rainbow cake for her birthday.

The story has gone viral in the national media. The Washington Post, for example, reported:

[Kayla’s mother Kimberly] Alford said she is aware that the rainbow-striped flag is a symbol of the LGBTQ community, but emphasized that her daughter’s matching rainbow cake and sweater were simply a coincidental aesthetic and not intended to mean anything more. The expulsion was first covered this week by local news outlets, including the Courier-Journal.

“Rainbows don’t mean you’re a certain gender or certain sex or sexuality,” Alford told The Washington Post, adding that she provided the school a receipt from the bakery listing the cake’s design as “assorted colors.” “I’m not saying she’s this or that — she’s just Kayla to me. … I ordered the cake, she didn’t.”

But that explanation was apparently insufficient for Whitefield Academy, a pre-K-12 school that is affiliated with the local Highview Baptist Church. A request to speak directly with the school’s headmaster was not returned Tuesday afternoon, but in an emailed statement to The Post, the academy decried “inaccurate media reports” suggesting Kayla was expelled solely because of a Facebook post.

“In fact, she has unfortunately violated our student code of conduct numerous times over the past two years,” the school said in the statement. “In the fall, we met with the student to give her a final chance to begin to adhere to our code of conduct. Unfortunately, she did not live up to the agreement, and therefore, has been expelled.”

“Simply a coincidental aesthetic and not intended to mean anything more.” That is almost certainly a flat-out lie, and I’m going to show you why below.

First, here’s the letter the school sent announcing her expulsion:

To the Parents of Kayla Kenney,

We are sorry to inform you that due to a continued breach of our school policies and expectations, Kayla is being dismissed from Whitefield Academy, effective today, January 6, 2020. Please see the attached letter which serves as the official notice.

The WA Administration has been made aware of a recent picture, posted on social media, which demonstrates a posture of morality and cultural acceptance contrary to that of Whitefield Academy’s beliefs (see the attached picture). Per our in-person meeting on October 17, 2019, we made it clear that any further promotion, celebration, or any other actions and attitudes that are counter to Whitefield’s philosophy would not be tolerated. As a result, we regret to inform you that Kayla is being dismissed from the school, effective immediately.

Please contact the High School Secretary Lori Fryling with any questions regarding Kayla’s records and transcripts.

Thank you,

B. A. Jacobson, Ed.D, Ed.S

Head of School

And here is the official statement by the school:

“Inaccurate media reports are circling stating that the student in question was expelled from our school solely for a social media post. In fact, she has unfortunately violated our student code of conduct numerous times over the past two years. In the fall, we met with the student to give her a final chance to begin to adhere to our code of conduct. Unfortunately, she did not live up to the agreement, and therefore, has been expelled.

“Whitefield Academy is a Christian-based school with a 43-year history of educating students in a learning environment informed by our shared Christian values. All parents who enroll their children in our private school know up front that we ask the students to adhere to a lifestyle informed by our Christian beliefs. There are numerous school options in our community for students who do not wish to attend a Christian-based school, and we wish our former student all the best as she finds a learning environment that is right for her.

“Whitefield Academy is accredited by ACSI/AdvancEd and a member of the Non Public School Commission of Kentucky, and therefore we meet all Kentucky regulations and laws. Our code of conduct is on par with other private Christian schools in our area. It is unfortunate that one of the student’s parents chose to post internal family matters on social media, and we hope our former student is not adversely affected by what her parents chose to make public about her situation.”

The Today Show reports:

Alford doesn’t deny that Kenney has had disciplinary issues, noting that her child cut lunch and was caught with a vape. But she insists Kenney has been on the right track since they had a sit-down meeting with administration in October.

“Kayla is no angel. But she was really trying to clean up her behavior. Her grades went up and she’s been doing so well,” Alford told TODAY Parents. “I want justice for my daughter. This is not how God treats people.”

Well. I have talked to two people who are close to the situation, who give a different picture from the one in the mainstream media. The account they give is not what Kimberly Alford and the mainstream media want you to believe. It seems to me that this is a situation much like the Covington Catholic smear campaign one year ago — when the media read what it wanted to read into a story involving a conservative Christian school, and slandered them in the name of progressive values.

My understanding is that the school cannot give a full accounting of this case because of confidentiality issues involving a student. I did not talk to anybody on the faculty or with the administration of the school. But I was able to verify that my sources have been deeply involved with this school, and believe that it is being sandbagged by the media.

When Alford says her daughter “is no angel,” and confirms that she has had “disciplinary issues,” she’s understating matters. My understanding is that Kayla Kenney had a long, specific list of repeated infractions — bullying, disrespecting teachers, vaping in school (as Alford acknowledges), and so forth. Part of what she has allegedly done is promoting LGBT consciousness in the school, including aggression on that front. I’m trying to be delicate here, but I can tell you that she has transgressed against other students on this front, to promote bisexuality. For example, she allegedly drew rainbows and wrote slogans like “bi pride” on other kids’ papers, and gave at least two different girls the impression that she was sexually harassing them. Kayla has been presenting herself as gay on her Instagram account:

Here is Kayla, on the right, dressed as a male to take a female to another school’s dance. She posted this on her Instagram account:

This one — from October 16, 2019 — could hardly be more clear:

Another one from last year — mind you, this is months before her expulsion:

December 30, 2019:

Throwing her Bible in the dryer:

 

Kayla Kenney put all of this into the public domain while attending this conservative Christian school. Whitefield is connected to a local Southern Baptist Church. Parents who send their kids to this school have to sign an agreement before their child can enter — and the child has to sign it too. A parent within the school community sent me a copy of the agreement. Excerpt:

Kayla Kenney and her mother would have had to have signed this agreement to support the school’s standards. Furthermore, here is an excerpt from the school handbook, sent by the same parent:

I am told that the disciplinary meeting the school administration had last October with Kimberly Alford included a specific warning that Kayla had better knock off promoting LGBT. A parent who believes his kid’s school is being trashed unfairly told me:

The picture that the media is having a firestorm over was a clear warning to mom and daughter. They willfully chose to promote something. They’re playing dumb, but we know exactly what they were trying to convey.

They obviously do. Kayla Kenney was openly advertising her lesbianism, or at least her bisexuality, and even claiming to have gone to bed with a female. Kimberly Alford told TODAY that her daughter “was really trying to clean up her behavior.” Bull. Kayla and her mother were plainly trolling Whitefield’s administration with that rainbow cake. As the school administrators have publicly said, the cake photo was the last straw after a long string of disciplinary issues with this kid.

Kimberly Alford has been playing the media, and the media have been eating it up, because it confirms their biases (“Ha ha, look at those crazy conservative Christians, freaking out over a rainbow cake!”). If the media want to criticize a conservative Christian school for not affirming a gay or bisexual student, that’s fair. But what the media have been doing here — painting Kayla Kenney as an innocent unfairly punished by a wicked Christian school — is a lie. 

Another source, a member of the Louisville community intimately familiar with the school and the church with which it is affiliated, e-mailed me:

The mishandling of this story from all quarters of the mainstream media is all the more evidence for why Christians are not only suspicious of the media, but increasingly view the industry as corrupt down to the bone. In a so-called effort of protecting an innocent victim against a religious bully, these outlets demonstrate themselves to be the worst form of bullies: Arrogant, ignorant, and on the wrong side of truth and decency.

Andrew T. Walker tweets:

(The Washington Post‘s story was below that, in his tweets.)

Again, it is perfectly fair to write a story about how a private Christian school dismisses a student because of her active lesbianism. But those aren’t the stories that have been written. What we have seen so far is a narrative in which an innocent child has been unjustly identified by school authorities as gay because of the coincidence of her rainbow birthday cake. In fact, that kid has been promoting herself and her lesbianism for some time on Instagram, despite being warned by the school that doing so was incompatible with her status as a student in that school.

Kimberly Alford needs to come clean about what’s really happening here. Neither her nor her daughter are innocents in all this. The context of Kayla’s expulsion — her two years of seriously bad behavior, plus her sexual acting-out on Instagram — meaningfully changes the story. Alford should give the school permission to release its records on her daughter’s behavioral problems. People would likely see that this school has been struggling with this kid for a long time, and had finally just had enough — especially when the school’s administration realized that Kayla’s own mother was actively trying to undermine the school, in violation of the agreement both she and Kayla signed.

And yes, this is why people hate the media.

UPDATE: I have a screenshot of a now-deleted Facebook post from Kayla Kenney’s father Mark in which he outs his daughter in a profane rant against the school and church. I say “outs” his daughter, meaning that he confirms what she did on Instagram: announced that she’s gay. He’s defending her. I’m not going to post the screenshot, because it’s got foul language, but it further undermines the idea that the rainbows in the photo were just random. This kid and her mom were, in my opinion, clearly trying to provoke the school.

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A Briton Explains Megxit

A British reader left this excellent comment:

Thank you for continuing to report on the developments within our country. I thought I’d write and communicate to your American readers just why MM, and now Harry, are disliked. I’m not going to include everything, just an overview,

It started when it became public knowledge they were dating. In contrast to the claim the she wanted privacy Meghan would put ‘little hints’ on her blog and Instagram account to show she was seeing someone. She then complained to Harry she was getting targeted by the press in Canada. Yes, the Canada that is now a haven and with the absolutely not racist Trudeau who not only dressed up in black face, but recently completed a tour in India dressed repeatedly in costumes.

After Harry released a statement telling the media to leave his girlfriend alone and calling them racist – yes, that quick – she then went on the cover of Vanity Fair to talk about their relationship. This drew my attention and actually set the pattern which was to follow. She didn’t want privacy, she wanted attention that she could control.

I’m just going to break off here a minute and add that the press has significantly changed since Princess Diana’s day. Following the Livingston Enquiry strict regulations have been laid out for them. Yet even more significant is this; people who are framing this as a racist, particularly right wing, British press can’t answer me this. Why do you suppose this racist press ignored Rotheram for so long? Surely this would have been the ideal opportunity to get their KKK on? Yet when the story finally broke the journalist actually apologised for breaking it. There were no public demonstrations, no revenge attacks. We’re that racist.

Back to the main point.

Following Meghan and Harry’s marriage we watched as she spent her entire time pushing Harry out of the way so she could be introduced to people first. We have an odd system, and I don’t blame people who mock it. Yet if you’re going to accept a title and people curtsying to you, it seems self serving to then demand equality on your own behalf. He is the queens representative, she is only meant to be his companion and escort, yet I’ve never seen footage where she didn’t push ahead to greet people first. This includes other royal family members from other countries. She actually elbowed him in the ribs once to get there quicker.

On their honeymoon she first assisted in representing the queen and spoke about the abortion referendum. This is a woman who boasted about her time in diplomacy, and her university education, but seemed to think that the rule « don’t talk about politics » didn’t apply to abortion. She commented on Ireland’s abortion referendum, telling people at a reception how fantastic it was. This was just prior to pressure being placed on Northern Ireland to follow suit and was, as you can imagine, a monumental mistake.

I put any concern I had aside, as did others.

Then the issue with her father continued to raise its head. We were shocked when he had photos taken for money and the ensuing kerfuffle happened. However it was a storm in a tea cup. We were more shocked when it became evident that there was still no contact between the two. I think it was around this time that the Sussex Royal Instagram account started, with its regularly use of quotes and attention seeking behaviour. It repeatedly referred to the need to ‘be kind’ to one another and ‘have compassion’, yet it was evident that her father had been ignored.

It’s true he did interviews saying he was distraught about this; however it has been made clear that he was never paid for these and prior to the actual wedding, in all the time they were dating, he hadn’t uttered a peep.

It was at that time her friends released the information about the letter. It painted Thomas Markle in a very bad light and her as a victim, heartbroken by his action. It is his releasing the letter to clarify the situation that is the basis of her suing the press.

The vast majority of people were left with the question – why, when he was quiet for three months and he’d had the letter for six months, would she allow her friends to go to the American press about it at that time?

Then the pregnancy happened. The only time MM wore pregnancy clothes proper was on the morning of Eugenie’s wedding. She had only the top buttons of her coat done up, on a warm day, in an obvious attempt to draw attention to her non-existent bump. It was later reported that she’d ‘let people know’ at the reception. Whether that is true or not the day after the wedding it was anounced, taking the attention away from Eugenie. The day before the wedding and every day after she never wore anything that resembled that coat or pregnancy wear again.

By this time her need to push Harry out of the way, her constant staring at every camera (she finds the lens every. Single. Time.) and the coat incident had us all thinking ‘she’s a bit vain isn’t she?’ Raised eyebrow.

The reason why her touching her bump was pointed out in the press so much more than Kate is because it never stopped. She would cup it, rub it, frame it – immediately from the announcement onwards. She’s happy being pregnancy, that’s sweet, no?

It was the middle of winter and the woman who complains about the British weather wore tight fitting clothes and had her coat open all the time. Every picture. Or so we thought. In actual fact she just opened her coat when the press were around. There is a video clip of them going to reveal a plaque. The person organising it tries to get Harry to go on the side where the press is and attempts to escort MM on the other side. She ignores him, walking away, telling Harry to go the other side and she directs herself to the press. The press she hates. As the plaque’s revealed she desperately scrambles to open her coat so once again the bump is seen.

She claps a couple of times, fumbles with her coat tie, claps a couple of times more, fumbles again. It’s comical. And repugnant to be quite frank.

The deal with the royal family is we have them because they neutralise one of the dangers of power. When those with the power also have the glory it’s a heady and dangerous combination. In the British system the royals have the glory, parliament has the power. So royalty, despite being bowed to, is meant to draw attention to others and not be boastful. Yet her behaviour throughout continually drew attention to herself.

She did this not only with her open coat, but the flicking of it as well. I can provide you with youtube clip after YouTube clip showing her doing this. As the cameras click she looks around the room with a fixed grin, revelling in the attention, ignoring whoever is talking to her and flicking her coat back so that a good shot of the bump may be had by all.

As the Instagram account continued it started to highlight not just British charities, but American ones too. This is in spite of America being a far wealthier country and them receiving British taxes. I wouldn’t have minded, but as the months went on it became apparent very quickly that our island didn’t hold her interest at all, and she had her sites set on being there.

Additionally she would highlight issues, and then all her friends business was involved in the solutions. From mental and spiritual retreats worth thousands of pounds, that those actually needing help could never afford, to her friends fashion brands.

Then the baby shower. Since the times of Marie Antoinette, and reinforced by the Russian revolution, the royals have been increasingly careful to not be so ostentatious with their wealth. Sure, at state dinners they look like they fell into a pot of glitter, but the rest of the time they remain relatively low key.

Katherine has done this really well, and it’s one of the reasons she’s liked. I remember one of the early headlines for her was asking if she’d borrowed her mum’s coat. She regularly wore high street and reword her clothes often. In the first year, excluding her wedding dress and her £50,000 engagement dress, she out spent every other European royal woman, including the queens. By four times the amount.

As reports came through of the baby shower, with MM parading behind security barriers through dozens of paparazzi and obviously loving it, we saw the merchandising. Trolleys of goodie bags, unwrapped gifts with brand names exposed and Meghan in sunglasses coming in and out of the excruciatingly expensive hotel.

The thing is that there are strict rules on what a royal can accept, they are a part of the political system after all. Yet it was obvious that thousands of dollars were passing hands for the attention that her name now brought.

It was also evident that MM had alerted the press as to her whereabouts.

Oh, and she’d got there by private jet. Despite her and Harry continually lecturing about the environment.

When she returned her friends spoke out in response to the criticism she’d received. The British public were rebuked from the echelons of hollywood society for daring to point out that this isn’t the way it’s done. Diana was invoked. The press had killed Harry’s mother (not William’s apparently) and now they were going to end up killing his wife. Effectively they were already attempting to shut up any criticism and therefore limiting our press’ capacity to hold those with enormous power and privilege to any standard.

After the bizarre pregnancy and the ostentatious baby shower came the birth. The Sussexes released a statement. They wanted the birth to be private and no announcement would be made for a few weeks after the birth. On the morning she gave birth the timing of the announcement was hours out and coincidentally coincided with America’s time period. As have every single significant announcement since.

It shortly became apparent afterwards that MM, having supposedly shut down her social media accounts and blog following the announcement of the engagement, had actually arranged for the license of it to be continued and – significantly – a new domain to be registered. The Tig was now waiting to be resurrected with the additional Tig Tot. Can you start to see why we were all raising our collective eyebrows.

Then, following the backlash of the birth came Wimbledon. Even now as I write this the audacity of the woman, and the subsequent slandering of our nation as racist, rather than acknowledging that maybe she’d done something to contribute to this situation, makes me furious.

She cleared four rows of Wimbledon so that she and her friends wouldn’t have to sit near the peasants and then she sent her royal protection officers around asking people to not take pictures.

She’s been to Wimbledon several times before – she knows the drill. She knows too that royalty never behave like that there – or anywhere for that matter.

The only people she was recorded as allowing to take her photo was a family dressed in, you guessed it, the flag of America. The humanitarian deemed that us serfs, the ones that paid the bills but dared to question her behaviour, couldn’t sit near her vicinity.

After that storm came the repeated use of private jets. The refusal to go and spend some of the summer with her majesty in Scotland as all royals do, on the pretext that Archie was too young to fly. Whilst they were meant to be visiting her majesty MM flew again for the weekend to watch her friend Serena Williams play tennis. She sat in the stands with the other people and gave a cutesie wave. How insulting after Wimbledon.

Added to that Serena was playing the Canadian girl and not only did the Vice President of the commonwealth trust, the position she holds, sit in Serena’s box, but she didn’t even acknowledge the Canadian player. This is the same Commonwealth and same Canada that she now seed as so superior to us awful and racist Brits.

In response to the private jets there was a tsunami of celebrities again berating the British people for being racist, for killing Princess Diana who the world and all Americans loved (I don’t know how Americans can have heard of Princess Diana a by the way. It can’t possibly be through the blood thirsty press, nor could they have worshipped her through those blood stained photos).

Harry then launched travelyst, complaining about the criticism he’d received for use of private jets, lying about how frequently he used them and complaining about tourist ‘traffic jams’ in places he loved to visit. Those peasants again. Get them away from us.

I wondered at the time, and now it’s self evident: he got paid for that launch too.

Then came the Lion King premier. Prince Harry, the Captain General of the Royal Marines, turned down an invitation to attend the 20th anniversary of the Deal bombings. An invitation that was extended 11 months before hand and that he rejected six weeks before.

Instead he attended the premiere with his wife in return for 3 million for their foundation. The foundation registered in, you guessed it, America. The foundation whose money which is now recognised as providing the finances to sue the British press.

Additionally whilst there Harry hit up the head of Disney for a job for his wife. She’s meant to give the money to charity. We’ll see how much they get.

Whilst at the premiere she was heard to say in response to someone’s statement of how difficult she is having it from those nasty British she said “they don’t make it easy”.

Us. The ones who paid for the wedding. Her clothing budget which ran way in excess of any other European royal. Her house renovations to her specification. Yep. We’re bastards. We even want to sit and watch a match in Wimbledon after we’ve waited in line since five in the morning. We’re such a**holes. And don’t mention the travel clogging up Harry’s favourite spots.

Then the South African tour. In which Harry hinted that he’d love to spend time there, but the problems were too big to fix. Where he told a small child that sometimes the troubles of the world made him so desperate he couldn’t get out of bed in the morning. When Meghan was interviewed, she acknowledged her husbands distress and then told the interviewer how she kept telling Harry (beneficial for his mental health) that it wasn’t enough to survive, they had to thrive.

As they toured Meghan once again became political, as she had with the Vogue cover and other times, and brought Me Too biscuits. The irony that this feminist was hiring Sunshine Sachs, who had as a client Harvey Weinstein and whom the humanitarians were paying from their foundation didn’t strike them.

On the final day Harry released a scathing attack on the press. He acknowledge that the reporting on the tour was all positive, but then continued to berate all the press, not just selective outlets, all of them and anounced how they would be suing. On the last day of the tour. Nevertheless they weren’t going to announce at that time what had been so awful, oh no, that could wait.

Of course that’s all anyone talked about, not the work being done in South Africa. And then as Catherine and William started their delicate tour in Pakistan they released details of what they were suing the press for.

As time continued it was announced that the Sussexes would take an extended leave. They refused to spend any of the holiday season with her majesty and didn’t return when Philip was ill. But it emerged that as they were away countless domain names, a website as well as business contacts were being cultivated. All in the name of their titles.

Additional trademarks were created in the Sussex Royal brand for everything from t-shirts to coffee mugs.

However there were no paparazzi. Towards the end of their holiday they actually leaked their own location and had a co worker of Ben Mulroney, their friend, pretend that the Sussexes had taken their picture.

When they returned they announced they were visiting Canadian House to thank them for their ‘warm welcome’ (read, those cold British bastards). The next day she was spotted on a visit to a British theatre as part of her job as a patron. The ‘papparazi’ photos that documented the visit were distributed by an agency known to work with celebrities in taking candid, ahem, shots. She had her hands splayed on her legs with clearly no wedding rings on.

That night, at midnight – coinciding with the American market again, they announced they were stepping back. However they were still going to be royal, oh yes. They were going to have all their security paid by the tax payers, they were going to forgo 5% of their income (how noble), but still receive financial assistance as they worked towards becoming independent. This from a couple with nearly 40 million. The humanitarians.

The rest you know; except perhaps their latest post on Instagram. It includes a Stone Roses song with the line ‘Id like to leave the country for a month of sundays’. Oh and Meghan’s out and about smiling at the paparazzi and letting, through her friends, everyone know that living the life of a royal was ‘soul crushing’ and now ‘she’s free to do what she wants’.

By the way. I don’t think her behaviour is because she’s American, or because of her race. This is all on her.

As for him. I’m going to leave it there before I get in trouble.

I appreciate the thoroughness of this account. I would like to ask British readers: does this account sound plausible to you?

The post A Briton Explains Megxit appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Commissars In STEM

In doing reporting for my forthcoming book about the coming soft totalitarianism, I interviewed a Soviet-born physician now working in the US. He told me about the entirely ideological constraints doctors today face (at least within his medical institution) regarding health care for the gender dysphoric. He said that today, physicians are under order to give trans patients whatever they want, even if, in the physician’s judgment, it is not in the best interest of the dysphoric patient. For example, if they want to be on cross-sex hormones, the doctor is obliged to prescribe them, no questions asked. This physician told me that everyone has to be very, very careful not even to air a contrary opinion, for fear of being reprimanded for bigotry.

This cannot last forever, he said, any more than the Soviet Union could have lasted forever. Structures built on lies eventually fall down. You can’t make something fundamentally flawed stand up on the power of belief alone. But a lot of people are going to be hurt, and hurt badly, before people admit their mistake.

Not long ago I heard from a friend who works in a STEM field. He is an emigre from a communist country, and one of those people who says that something totalitarian is on its way. To protect his privacy, I’m not going to give you the details of the story he told me. It has to do with being present for a job interview at his firm in which a particular candidate — a white guy — did extremely well. My friend said this man was easily the best candidate they interviewed, in a field where it is difficult to hire for that particular specialty. But later, a super-woke colleague on the interview team crossed him out, because the wokester had a feeling that the guy might be a bigot — this, because of the way he cast his eyes across the room when he sat down for the interview.

Completely absurd, but of course no one will challenge this woke person, who belongs to an official Victim demographic. So this applicant, a man who, in the professional judgment of my friend, proved that he deserved the job, will not receive an offer, based on an entirely subjective whim by a progressive. That man will never know why he didn’t receive an offer. Meanwhile, the division of the firm for which my friend works will have to make do with someone of lesser quality in this high-tech field, who passes this woke nitwit’s diversity test.

This is another reminder that science, technology, and engineering are not immune to this ideological insanity. Jerry Coyne is an evolutionary biologist who has been extremely nasty over the years in his spite towards religious believers. He is not a conservative in any way. But a couple of weeks ago, he wrote a piece on his blog denouncing the diversity and inclusion loyalty oaths that Berkeley imposes on applicants for life science jobs. Coyne shows, citing material from the university, that this is nothing but a political loyalty test designed to weed out dissidents, no matter how excellent their scholarship and laboratory work. Excerpt:

It’s clear from the document that diversity was regarded at least as important as scholarship in these hires, though having a cutoff for diversity from the outset indicates that it was actually the most important criterion for a search to proceed further. No matter how good your scholarship, if you didn’t pass the diversity cutoff (a score of 11 in the second search), you were toast. Here are some statements from the document:

In its first year, the Initiative to Advance Faculty Diversity, Equity and Inclusion in the Life Sciences made a strong impact on our campus and was a successful catalyst for positive change. It has been a high profile “proof of concept” that changing faculty search practices can result in successful recruitment of candidates that are both excellent researchers and committed advocates for advancing diversity, equity and inclusion (DE&I) through their research, teaching, and/or service.

. . .The Initiative established a group of allies across campus who are valuable resources for support and encouragement, and above all are committed to changing the status quo. With support from the campus leadership, the Life Sciences are now at a cultural and procedural tipping point in advancing faculty diversity, equity and inclusion.

. . . Ultimately, the “cluster search” was one of the most successful interventions of the initiative. It will result in an increase in faculty committed to advancing faculty diversity, equity and inclusion on the campus

Coyne continues:

I find this process chilling in its commitment to a specific form of social engineering. While I favor affirmative action (many readers here don’t), I think it should be enacted not through eliminating candidates because of insufficient diversity statements, but through departmental initiatives to identify and hire good minority candidates.  You might respond that, well, this is one kind of such initiative. But these hires involve initiatives meant to assure that every person hired is committed to diversity in precise accord with the ranking system. In other words, it enforces not just diversity, which I favor, but ideology, which I don’t. Further, only race and gender were involved here as aspects of “diversity”—not things like class, political viewpoint, background independent of race and sex, and so on.

Nobody should ever be automatically eliminated because their “diversity score” is below 11. If you do that, you will eliminate all those who are good scholars but don’t have a track record in promoting racial and gender diversity, even though they may have been involved in other valued social activities that don’t affect diversity (I’ve mentioned writing about your field for the public and giving talks to high school students to educate and interest them in your field).

But make no mistake about it: the Berkeley Diversity Mavens have won. By hiring large numbers of deans and administrators whose job is to promote initiatives like the above, colleges like Berkeley have guaranteed that this kind of process will only get more onerous and more invidious. After all, those people have to keep ratcheting up the process to keep their jobs going.  In reality, their goal should be to ultimately make their own jobs obsolete.

Read it all.

Yale’s Nicholas Christakis — a man who knows something about the tyranny of diversity mobs — comments:

Reading such accounts makes me think @Maratosflier is right: an industry will emerge to help applicants write the right statements. Universities will hire consultants to teach PhD students what to say and how to say it. How does any of this help the cause of social justice? 2/

— Nicholas A. Christakis (@NAChristakis) January 2, 2020

Christakis, enemy of the (Yale) people

These people are commissars — political officers assigned to politicize institutions and groups that should operate independent of politics. This is how they use identity politics to divide, demoralize, and ultimately destroy. Spending this past year reading about how Stalinism corrupted Soviet science makes it crystal clear what is happening here among us, today. My STEM source, who was trained under a communist regime, and who escaped it, writes, “The darkness is setting. I do not mean to be poetic. I feel it with every pore of my body.”

One more thing: almost every day I hear a new account from a reader about the oppressive progressive political atmosphere in their workplace. It’s not just in colleges. It’s in corporations, it’s in hospitals, it’s in law offices, it’s in churches — it’s everywhere, and spreading. It’s certainly in the newsrooms, which is why so few journalists actually notice what’s happening, much less see a problem with it. Just today I heard from an accomplished professional who explained the situation they’re going through, and asked me not to say anything about it, because that is how scary the situation is. The person just wanted to say, yes, this is happening, and it’s happening with remarkable speed, and don’t let anybody gaslight you otherwise. Had a friendly argument today with someone who said all this stuff I bang on about on this blog sounds overblown. The only meaningful thing I could say is, “You should see my e-mail.” You can’t imagine how bad it is until it happens to you, or you see it with your own eyes, in your workplace, or to people you know.

People are afraid, and they are right to be afraid. We are talking about folks genuinely and legitimately afraid of losing their jobs, and their careers, because they might have crossed a left-wing political line. Michael Brendan Dougherty tweeted:

We could go the other way. I don’t know a single writer or artist who isn’t mindful of what an outrage storm can do to them financially and psychological and so finely calibrates what they say in light of this. https://t.co/VC72Gcl8Rz

— Michael Brendan Dougherty (@michaelbd) January 15, 2020

True, and further, I don’t know any white-collar professional who isn’t mindful of this. If I did, I would warn them. If you have someone in your life who grew up under communism, ask them what they think about the atmosphere in this country around these issues. Give them permission to be honest. I don’t know what it’s going to take to break the hold of this ideological madness on American life. Most people seem to hate it, but nobody is willing to be the first one to stop applauding Stalin.

UPDATE: Just after I hit “publish,” I checked my e-mail. A campus minister wrote:

The universities have become mirrors of the NKVD under Stalin, paralyzed by mutual hatred & distrust, where no one knows what word might be deemed a fatal lapse of etiquette. Grad students (especially Teaching Assistants) tell me they live in terror of some student’s taking offense at some verbal slip and ending, not their job, but their career.

UPDATE.2: A reader named “Wyoming Doc” — he is exactly that; I know his real name — comments:

For most of my adult life, I was a physician in medical education with a very large practice on the side. For most of my career life of decades now, I was on the faculty of one of the premier medical schools in this country. One by one over time, the old grey haired professors were dispatched. The teachers these kids need the most were taken out – because they refused to use correct pronouns, refused to acknowledge things related to transgender issues that are just patently absurd (things like disputing that “males” have periods), etc, etc, These faculty members were NOT endocrinologists – OB GYN or anything that had to do with trans issues – but out on their academic ass they went – banished from the clinics never to see a student again. A complete tragedy.

I am a primary care provider. My time to face the firing squad occurred because of the following story:

A patient who was a distraught mother of a teenage boy came to me to discuss the fact that her son at age 14 was being pressured by his school counselors to have gender transition surgery – asap which would have been at age 17 in that state. In the interim, they were trying to get him on hormone blockers and finasteride until the surgery could be done. She was absolutely distraught – and the dad was so upset that he could not even face his son – much less come to talk to me. She simply asked me what I thought . I have known this child all his life. I have known of his struggles with being on the autism spectrum and I have known all his myriad struggles throughout his life. I replied that I thought this would be a horrible tragedy to proceed with this until he was much older and make the decisions for himself as an adult. I told her that this plan was a setup for a lifetime of tragedy. I have unfortunately seen this tragedy unfold too many times in the past 10 years. It is my job and my sworn oath to do the correct thing – no matter what – I have yet to see a single person who has had a good outcome from the entire gender transition process. I have seen and known of suicides, and even worse – intense chronic unending pain in the groin area after these procedures – and I told her this – along with the fact that we have not a clue what strangling the hormones in a 14 year old body does to them – but none of it is good.

The mother went to the child psychiatrist pushing this treatment – and stopped it. The psychiatrist found out what had happened and immediately sent my name to the “diversity committee”. I was called before them – and things like bigotry, transphobia and poor judgement on my part were talked about openly – I was convicted before I could say a word. I could instantly tell that my career as I had known it was over.

I and my wife made the gut-wrenching decision to leave the big city and take our young children to the far away flyover country – we are 150 miles from the nearest interstate highway. I was absolutely horrified at first – but IT HAS BEEN THE BEST THING EVER FOR US – it has been a gift from God. He truly does work in mysterious ways. The kids are thriving – and free of drag queen story hour, video games, and the like. We live in a place that reminds me of the America that I grew up in. I just do not know how long this will last even here.

Thank you for everything you do – and giving people like myself at least some ability to tell their stories.

Also, a professor on a hiring search committee in a humanities department at a large university (I know the prof’s real name too, but have removed it as a condition for publishing this comment) writes to say:

There’s a lot of encouragement (at some places, outright pressure) to hire “diverse” candidates. But what I’ve seen happen is that the white male candidates are excelling more in terms of the quality and quantity of publications, and women candidates are not keeping up.

Why? Here’s my theory.

The white male candidates know that they will not be treated fairly, that a very good, but not better, woman or minority will get the job over them, since the departments that hire such folks are lavished with praise and perks by the administration.  These white males realize that they have to be twice as good to beat their female and minority competition. But this, ironically, makes it difficult for people like me–who support diversity but not at the expense of excellence–to support the female or minority candidate, since the gap between them and the white male is so obvious that it becomes a matter of conscience.

I think women candidates know subconsciously that they don’t have to try as hard. So, the irony is that some departments end up getting “less diversity” because the emphasis on diversity provides a perverse incentive for some candidates to double up and others (the preferred) to coast.

The post The Commissars In STEM appeared first on The American Conservative.

Ted Parker, An Unsung LSU Hero

As you regular readers know, I have been in full flush with my LSU boosterism this past week (for example), and my Louisiana patriotism (see here), but honesty bids me say that the reader who sent this (and who has given me permission to publish it anonymously) is right:

I was a freshman at the University of Texas when the Longhorns won the national championship in 1969. It was a perfectly exhilarating experience to mix with thousands of other students celebrating in Austin. I have no idea if they cancelled classes the next day; in any case, I rather doubt I was in any condition to attend. My interest in football has since waned, but I can understand the passion for sports.

Having said that, it is a bit demoralizing to see LSU glorify its $28M locker room, and $4M dollar coach, while the state legislature guts the budget for the school as a whole. Yes, I know, all those football funds are raised privately, and donors can do as they wish. And there are reputedly overall benefits to the university, what might be called trickle-down academics. But in the end, I think the fundamental purpose of a university is to educate, not entertain. Apparently, the Louisiana legislature does not agree.

So why does a Texan care? I am not an LSU alum. But for the past twenty years it has been my pleasure to support two programs at LSU: the rare book collections at Hill Memorial Library, and the South American field work of the Museum of Natural Science. My interest is in research related to natural history; the Museum is an exemplary institution, one of the best anywhere. The library’s collection of early natural history books is excellent, and it is a lovely place to study. To be clear, I am not some sort of mega-donor; but even at the modest level of my contributions, I find myself at a loss to explain to anyone why I should donate to an institution that slashes the budgets of libraries and labs needed by aspiring students, while energetically raising millions to provide football players with a locker room more sybaritic than Spartan. There are smaller schools, with less glorious teams, that could use a bit of attention. Should I move my support? I’m not trying to be a jerk; as I said, by the standards of football donors, my gifts are small beer. But I’m asking an honest question.

This e-mail stood out to me because my older son is an LSU sophomore, and his student job this past academic year is in the Museum of Natural Science (he wants to be a historian of science). His specific assignment has been to scan and catalogue the notes and papers of the late Ted Parker, who was one of the greatest American ornithologists ever. I had never heard of the man, yet he is partly responsible for having made LSU’s ornithology department one of the nation’s best. He has been described as the greatest field ornithologist the world has ever seen. He died in a plane crash in the Peruvian jungle in 1993, along with several other biologists. Colleagues said that the knowledge the perished on that mountainside in that crash will likely take several decades to recover from.

I was a student at LSU when Ted Parker was there. I had never heard of him. Not much of a surprise — I was a journalism major, with minors in philosophy and political science — but how I wish I had known that a scientist of his caliber was working right there on our campus. I still wouldn’t have heard of him, if not for my son Matt telling me about how absorbing his work is, going through Parker’s papers and making digital records of them. Matt is still doing that work, and it is really exciting to him. He’s working for one of my undergraduate friends, Dr. Robb Brumfield, who was so inspired by Ted Parker, his professor back in the 1980s, that he decided to become an ornithologist himself.

By putting his hands on Ted Parker’s papers — a huge task that he has been laboring at for months now — son Matt is learning firsthand about what a great scientist does, and what he can contribute to the world of knowledge. He even went in over the Christmas break to work on the project. Matt isn’t going to be a scientist, but if he becomes a historian of science (his dream is to work in a museum), Ted Parker will have inspired yet another young man to devote his life to science. What Ted Parker accomplished for the world of ornithology is staggering — and he did it right there at LSU. Everybody in Louisiana knows the name of Ed Orgeron and Joe Burrow, and that is a glorious thing! But how many of us know the name of Ted Parker? My correspondent said that the LSU ornithology department is as great in its field as the LSU Tigers are in theirs.

It is an honest-to-God tragedy that Ted Parker is a stranger to Louisiana, and the men and women at LSU standing on the shoulders of that giant are having to labor under such difficult material conditions. As the reader points out, this is not the fault of the LSU Athletics Department. This is the fault of the Louisiana legislature, and, in turn, of the people of Louisiana — people like me, who are thrilled by the victories of the football team, but who don’t say a word when the legislature brings the budgetary hammer down on the academic side (e.g., after many years of budget cuts, LSU is near the bottom in state funding per student, compared to peer institutions).

We have every reason to be proud of the LSU Fighting Tigers — and we are! My family is planning to go to the parade for the team on Saturday. But we also have every reason to be proud of the academic departments — but we aren’t, not really. At least that’s not where we put our money. Maybe the phenomenal success of the football team this year will inspire the legislature, and the people of the state, as well as LSU’s vast alumni network around the country, to rectify that injustice. Here’s a link to donate to LSU in various ways — but please, pass up the Tiger Athletic Foundation. They’ve got plenty of money, and heaven knows they’ve earned it. But there are professors, staffers, and students who have also earned it, and who need our support.

Inspired by this reader, and full of gratitude for what my son Matt is learning at LSU’s Museum of Natural Science, as well as for the joy that Coach Ed Orgeron and his team have brought to me and my family this year, on Wednesday night I gave $300 to the Ted Parker Memorial Fund at the LSU Museum of Natural Science. I’ve never given anything to LSU as an alumnus; my charitable giving has gone to other places over the years. But now is a good time to start. Maybe for you too, my fellow alumni — and anybody who cares about the LSU Tigers, and who knows deep down that they should give something back to the school that made it all possible? It doesn’t have to be to the Ted Parker Fund — there are many academic departments that need — really need — whatever you can give. If this reader from Texas, who isn’t even an LSU alumnus, can recognize how important the academic and scientific work LSU does is to the wider world, so should we who once knew LSU as our home, or who hold it in our hearts.

I bet Coach O., as a true son of the Bayou State, would agree — and so would this recent graduate below, who thanks to LSU, looked up and saw the stars. There are some young future scientists, historians, and scholars on that campus who can’t play football, but who deserve the same opportunity to excel:

Joe Burrow, in glory

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