Rod Dreher's Blog, page 186

Black Humor And Bishops

Some of the Catholic folks I follow on Twitter are excited because the conservative Anglican (breakaway from the Church of England) bishop Gavin Ashenden has announced his conversion to Catholicism. From Catholic News Agency’s report:

Ashenden wrote in the Catholic Herald that “I watched as Anglicanism suffered a collapse of inner integrity as it swallowed wholesale secular society’s descent into a post-Christian culture.”

“I came to realise (too long after both Newman and Chesterton had already explained why) that only the Catholic Church, with the weight of the Magisterium, had the ecclesial integrity, theological maturity and spiritual potency to defend the Faith, renew society and save souls in the fullness of faith,” he said.

May God help him. I mean that sincerely. I am sure the Catholics will have received a very fine and courageous Christian man. The orthodox Catholics will certainly need men (and women) like him in their ongoing struggle against an episcopacy and a papacy that seems determined to take the whole thing along the same doomed path that the Church of England has followed.

But then, we all need people like Gavin Ashenden in our churches. I need to be more like Gavin Ashenden. Forgive me, but I find it hard to be a church enthusiast these days. Please don’t misunderstand me: I believe in the church (and, the Church), do not at all hold with those Christians who think they can go solo, et cetera. Lately I have been following a devotion to two holy priests, St. Alexey Mechev and his son, St. Sergey, the latter of whom was martyred by the Bolsheviks. What I’ve been asking them to do — sometimes with tears in my eyes — is to pray for me, so that I can walk the straight path with something more impelling at my back than duty. When I lost my ability to believe as a Catholic, I told friends that I never imagined that I would have more to suffer from the Catholic Church than for the Catholic Church.

I suppose a spiritually mature response would have been, “but in suffering from the Church, you are suffering for the Church, which is Christ’s Body.” Maybe. A body that attacks itself is cancerous. I couldn’t live with it. As longtime readers know, I became Orthodox, and am so grateful to God for rescuing me for Himself in the Orthodox barque. I live Orthodox, and by God’s grace I will die Orthodox. The wound I received in losing my Catholicism — and in foolishly involving myself in the Metropolitan Jonah mess in the OCA, in which neither I nor anybody, least of all certain bishops, came off looking good — was that I would henceforth be unable to stride confidently with the pilgrim flock, of any kind. I limp behind, and always will. Maybe that’s good, because if they go off a cliff, I’ll see it happening, and can alter course. Want to protect your spiritual health? Don’t get involved with bishops any more than you have to. That’s what I have learned. I wish I weren’t so cynical, but by God, I have come by it honestly.

They say a liberal is the kind of person who loves people but hates individuals, and conservative is precisely the opposite. Well, then I’m a conservative. And that’s the kind of conservative I am in my attitude toward bishops of mine or any other church. A long time ago, not too long after I had become Catholic, I became friends with a very conservative, very funny parish priest who used to joke about how much distance he wished to keep between himself and bishops. Once he made a gift to me (or did I to him?) of Stinking Bishop cheese (seriously, it’s a thing). I used to think his lines about bishops were a charming … well, not affectation, but I didn’t take him all that seriously. But he was serious, though he disguised his seriousness with humor. And in time, I would learn that he had been all too right.

I write this with an icon of two bishop-martyrs of the Bolshevik yoke, St. Tikhon of Moscow and St. Hilarion Troitsky — whose feast day, in fact, is today. In Moscow last month, I prostrated myself at the tomb of St. Hilarion, and asked for his prayers. I know there are holy bishops, and I thank God for them. Don’t misread me here. I am aware, though, from my recent reading in the history of the Russian Revolution, that the evil that overtook Russia, and savaged the Church, came about in part because there were not enough St. Tikhons and St. Hilarions among the hierarchy. At dinner one night with a faithful Russian Orthodox layman, I said naively, “How could anybody have believed what the Bolsheviks were offering?” He went back in history to the 17th century, and recounted for his American guest a history that included a lot of Church corruption and persecution of the peasantry, in alliance with the state. This layman and his wife are not remotely anticlerical, but neither are they clericalists.

Last week, Bishop James Conley of Lincoln, Nebraska, took a medical leave of absence to deal with mental health issues, including, he disclosed, a diagnosis of depression. May God give him strength. Bishop Conley has been struggling with revelations of sexual abuse and corruption in his own diocese since this blog broke news in the summer of 2018, in an essay by former Lincoln diocese priest Peter Mitchell, about the late Monsignor Leonard Kalin (d. 2008), the longtime vocations director there. That piece brought forth a number of revelations about sex abuse, and allegations of protective clerical homosexual networks in the diocese.

All this happened before Conley’s tenure, during the days when orthodox Catholics all around the US looked to Lincoln as a bastion of healthy Catholic orthodoxy. But Conley did not cover himself in glory with his handling of the crisis when it showed up on his doorstep. We know that the Nebraska Attorney General’s office is investigating abuse in the Lincoln diocese. We also know that in March, Bishop Conley commissioned an independent investigation of Monsignor Kalin’s history in the diocese. What is the status of that investigation? Does Bishop Conley have the report? If so, why hasn’t he released it? If not, when can the public expect it? Does the report have anything to do with his depression?

One thinks of Benedict XVI, confronted with overwhelming evidence of corruption, sexual and otherwise, in the Curia, and realizing that he lacked the inner strength to combat it. So he resigned. Based on everything I know about Bishop Conley and his past, I have every reason to believe that he is a good and honorable man, as is Pope Benedict (who I also believe is quite holy, even a saint). But goodness, honor, and even sanctity are not enough to cast this particular demon out of the Church, it seems.

A reader sends in this angry, funny essay from The American Mind, written by a conservative Catholic mother under the pseudonym “Peachy Keenan.” Peachy is not happy with the bishops of her church. At all. Here’s how it begins:

Wait, you mean you didn’t hear about the recent gathering (or as they say, “General Assembly”—LOL, OK boomer) of the United States Catholic Conference of Bishops? Their annual meeting was held in Baltimore in November; Baltimore, you may recall, was recently newsworthy for being particularly rat-infested.

So many rats that no one paid much attention to a few hundred bishops scurrying around.

She goes on to connect “Crisis 1” (the abuse scandal) with “Crisis 2” (the abandonment of Catholicism by the young). The bishops at their conference did not do enough for Peachy:

But instead of rooting out the deviants who continue to pirouette through seminaries and rectories, they focus on installing the Francis political agenda and tap dance around the elephant behind the altar.

What we the parishioners want to see is action. I want to see a Zeal Team 6 made up of armed Carthusian monks and highly trained Belgian Malinois with headcams strapped to their snouts storming sacristies and chasing down degenerates until there’s not one of them left in a frock.

This would pretty much take care of Crisis #1.

Instead, the doughy dotards have decided they need…

Better websites. Some good tweets. You know, for kids!

She lays into media-savvy and orthodox Bishop Robert Barron, whom she seems to acknowledge really is one of the brightest lights in the American church, but whose ministry is not nearly enough to re-float the sinking US church, according to Peachy. The problem is not one needing better packaging for what’s on offer; the problem is that the Church is led by a bunch of management-focused mediocrities who cannot man up enough to deal with pederasts and deviants infesting the institution. She writes:

You want to save the church? Make sure not a single U.S. Bishop ever, ever, ever shows his face in public again. In fact, abolish the General Assembly. Hide, run, leave, quit. All of you. Today, if possible.

Because Bishop Barron can’t save you now.

Read it all. It’s an essay that contains the phrase “the pillowy manboobed bosom of the Church.” Whoever Peachy is, she’s being funny about this stuff to hide her deep rage over the betrayal. I hear in her voice the voice of my priest friend long ago. I hear the voice of firefighters, cops, doctors, nurses, journalists, and others who make the gruesomeness of their job easier to bear with black humor.

St. Hilarion Troitsky, Archbishop of Vereiya, pray for us wayfaring sinners.

The post Black Humor And Bishops appeared first on The American Conservative.

Internet Porn & Civilization

Not quite sure why, but suddenly there’s a burst of really good, if painful to read, writing about pornography. A reader sent me this story by a woman who posed as an 11-year-old girl online in an effort to trap pedophiles. I know this stuff is awful to read, but it’s important to know what’s out there. It’s worse than you think. The woman and the team with which she was working create “Bailey,” 11, and launch her into the world on Instagram. Excerpts:

I upload the photo to Instagram — a generic, innocuous selfie of Bailey with an ear-to-ear smile — and caption it.

v excitedd to see my friends this weekend at carly’s party! Ilysm!! followed by a string of emojis and a #friends hashtag

The photo publishes on Instagram and we wait quietly for something on the big screen to change.

This part never takes long. It’s always unnervingly fast.

At the beginning of the week, on the very first night as Bailey, two new messages came in under a minute after publishing a photo. We sat mouths agape as the numbers pinged up on the screen — 2, 3, 7, 15 messages from adult men over the course of two hours. Half of them could be charged with transfer of obscene content to a minor. That night, I had taken a breather and sat with my head in my hands.

Nine months of this, and we still continue to be stunned by the breadth of cruelty and perversion we see. I imagine this trend will continue tonight.

More:

“Incoming,” Avery says, and we all look up at the TV. The Instagram notifications show that Bailey has three new requests for conversation.

“Hi! I was just wondering how long you’ve been a model for?”

“lol! im not a model,” I type quickly, hitting send.

“No!” he types, full of false incredulity. “You’re lying! If not, you should be a model. You’re so PRETTY.”

@ XXXastrolifer appears to be in his early 40s, but tells Bailey he’s 19. When she tells him she’s only 11, he doesn’t flinch.

The next message is from another man who greets Bailey harmlessly enough.

“Hi! How are you doing tonight?”

“Hi im good hbu”

“I’m doing alright, thank you. You are a very beautiful girl.”

I hear Josh next to me mutter. “Like clockwork.”

“Wow, thank u!”

“It’s true. I love your pictures on here. Does your mom and dad let you have a boyfriend yet?”

Bailey says no, but also, it’s not something they talk about a lot. I poll the parents in the room. They agree. Getting a boyfriend isn’t top of mind for an 11-year-old.

“Maybe I can be your Instagram bf if you would like? Up to you.”

I pause to respond to @ XXXastrolifer. The conversation ends like most of them do — in under five minutes, he sends Bailey a video to show himself masturbating.

“Do you like that? Have you seen one of those before?”

I turn my attention back to @ XXXthisguy66, the would-be Instagram boyfriend. In a matter of minutes, it escalates from “An Instagram boyfriend means we can chat with each other, send selfies back and forth, and just be there for each other” to “Since we are together, are you ready to send sexy pics to each other?”

She’s 11, and doesn’t quite know what he means. He sends a photo of his erect penis, requests a photo of her shirtless, and assures her that he can teach her how to proceed.

Read it all. But be warned: the language is explicit.

This is the kind of person I am: I would as soon see these men beaten on the public square to within an inch of their lives as I would look at them. I sent a link to that story last night to a US Senator I know, and asked him to read it. He responded and said he would. We have to get something going.

A lot of you have sent me Pascal-Emanuel Gobry’s long American Greatness piece about the science of what pornography does to the human brain. It really is as good as they say. Here’s how it begins:

They say the first step is admitting you have a problem. I think many readers of this article will respond with outrage, and many will see it says things they already knew to be true—and I think these two groups will largely overlap. The most powerful obstacle to confronting a destructive addiction is denial, and collectively we are in denial about pornography.

Since it seems somehow relevant, let me state at the outset that I am French. Every fiber of my Latin, Catholic body recoils at puritanism of any sort, especially the bizarre, Anglo-Puritan kind so prevalent in America. I believe eroticism is one of God’s greatest gifts to humankind, prudishness a bizarre aberration, and not so long ago, hyperbolic warnings about the perils of pornography, whether from my Evangelical Christian or progressive feminist friends, had me rolling my eyes.

Not anymore. I have become deadly serious. A few years ago, a friend—unsurprisingly, a female friend—mentioned that there was strong medical evidence for the proposition that online pornography is a lot more dangerous than most people suspect. Since I was skeptical, I looked into it. I became intrigued and kept following the evolving science, as well as online testimonies, off and on. It didn’t take me long to understand that my friend is right. In fact, the more I delved into the subject, the more alarmed I became.

The main point of the article is that whatever you think about the morality of pornography is beside the point. PEG is talking about the science of what it does to the body. Prior to reading this piece, I had only a slight idea what it did to one. I bet it’s true for you too. I’ll summarize the piece, but please do read it, because he talks about the scientific findings in-depth, and includes lots of citations and links. According to PEG, what science tells us now is that:

Pornography is truly addictive, in the same sense that drugs are addictive. It activates the same pleasure centers in the brain as certain addictive drugs. Of course pornography has a moral dimension, but it is at bottom a physiological problem.
Using online pornography rewires the brain. It literally does. This has been measured repeatedly by scientists. “And since online pornography is a sexual stimulus to begin with, we are all predisposed, and it takes much less rewiring for consumption to cause addiction.”
Evolutionarily speaking, we are not created to handle what Internet porn offers us: constant, on-demand access to a new sexual partner (which is how the brain processes seeing new and different sexual partners on film, even if not in real life). The scientific reasons why are fascinating, if terrifying.

Here’s one of PEG’s claims that I have to quote:

Porn is a sexual stimulus, but it is not sex. Notoriously, heroin addicts eventually lose interest in sex: this is because their brains are rewired so that their sex reward system is reprogrammed to seek out heroin rather than sex. In the same way, as we consume more and more porn, which we must since it is addictive and we need more to get the same kick, our brain is rewired so that what triggers the reward system that is supposed to be linked to sex is no longer linked to sex—to a human in the flesh, to touching, to kissing, to caressing—but to porn.

Which is why we are witnessing a phenomenon which, as best as anyone can tell, is totally unprecedented in all of human history: an epidemic of chronic erectile dysfunction (ED) among men under 40. The evidence is earth-shattering: since the Kinsey report in the 1940s, studies have found roughly the same, stable rates of chronic ED: less than 1 percent among men younger than 30, less than 3 percent in men aged 30-45.

As of this writing, at least ten studies published since 2010 report a tremendous rise in ED. Rates of ED among men under 40 ranged from 14 percent to 37 percent, and rates of low libido from 16 percent to 37 percent. No variable related to youthful ED has meaningfully changed since then, except for one: the advent of on-demand video porn in 2006. It’s worth repeating: we went from less than 1 percent of erectile dysfunction in young men to 14 to 37 percent, an increase of several orders of magnitude.

Scientists know that young people are having a lot less sex these days. We have not seen a religious revival or some swing back to traditional values that would explain that. It’s overwhelmingly likely that they aren’t having sex because young men don’t desire it anymore. They’re satisfied to masturbate while watching porn. More to the point: they can only be satisfied by masturbating while watching porn. 

Here’s the most frightening part of it: the brain of a porn addict requires greater and greater novelty to recreate the same level of stimulation. PEG talks about the rise of Kink, a massively popular website that uploads fetish videos on one of 78 channels:

Kink’s rise from niche to marquee just happens to coincide with the arrival of Tube sites in 2006, which are uniquely effective at triggering the Coolidge Effect and turning porn addicts into novelty-seeking machines. It’s important to note that, while an attraction to what you might call “light kink”—fluffy pink handcuffs, a rhinestone-bedazzled blindfold, that sort of thing—has been hovering around in our popular culture for decades, and therefore some version of this has been part of pornography for ages, Kink is the real article. It’s not just acting. Women are caned and whipped until they are bruised and red. Not only are the sex acts themselves extreme (you name it, it’s there), but scenes are scripted around the psychological and symbolic, not just physical, degradation of the woman. Fifty Shades of Grey is to Kink as a Hitchcock movie is to a snuff film.

When the films have a storyline, it can usually be summed up with one word: rape. Or two words: brutal rape. It’s one thing to be aroused by a sadomasochistic scene where the sub (as the term of art goes) is shown visibly enjoying the treatment; it’s quite another to be aroused by watching a woman scream in agony and despair as she is held down and violently raped.

One series of Kink videos is based on the following concept: the pornstar is alone in a room with several men; the director explains to her (and we watch) that if she can leave the room, she gets cash; for each article of clothing she still has on at the end of the scene, she gets cash; for each sex act that one of the men gets to perform on her, he gets cash and she loses money. One has to grant them a devilish kind of cleverness: it lets them enact an actual violent rape with legal impunity. The woman really resists; the men really force themselves brutally on her. Of course, she “consented” to the whole thing, which, somehow, makes it legal.

Kink is a revealing example because of its particular focus on degradation, and its sudden, inexplicable, overnight jump from a little-known niche site to one of the most popular media brands of any kind on the planet, right after Tube sites appeared. But the key phenomenon is that virtually all pornography, very much including the “vanilla stuff,” has grown more extreme, and specifically more violent, and specifically more misogynistic and degrading towards women. Oh, nonviolent pornography still exists, if you can find it. What used to be mainstream is now niche, and vice versa.

This is the world into which we are sending our daughters. PEG says that dark sexual fantasies have always existed within the minds of men, but with the advent of Internet porn, “something has changed, seriously, dramatically, and seemingly overnight.” Put simply, countless men (and women) are being reconstructed by their porn habits to crave sexually what most people have found disgusting and taboo.

PEG talks about how extreme porn — which, again, is not a niche thing, but mainstream now — can rewire the brain to make people want what they would not have wanted otherwise. For example:

But perhaps it’s turning at least some men into something else. Andrea Long Chu is the name of an American transgender writer, who writes with admirable honesty about her gender transition and experience. For example, Chu braved criticism from trans activists by writing in a New York Times essay about the links between her gender transition and chronic depression, and denying that her transition operation will make her happy. In a paper at an academic conference at Columbia, Chu asked: “Did sissy porn make me trans?” Sissy porn is a genre—again, once extremely obscure and inexplicably, suddenly growing into the mainstream—where men dressed like women perform sex acts with men in stereotypically submissive, female roles. Sissy porn is closely related to the genre known as “forced feminization,” which is pretty much just what it sounds like. In a recent book, Chu essentially answers her own question: “Yes.”

It is also dramatically affecting male-female relationships. PEG writes, “I can scarcely imagine what it must be like to be a teenage girl when close to 100 percent (as we might safely assume) of the potential relationship pool is porn-addicted.”

And, as PEG writes, with the “herbivore” phenomenon in Japan, it is not at all hyperbolic to conclude that our pornography addiction is leading to civilizational collapse. You think he’s overstating it? Read the whole thing. I’m serious — read it. There’s no moralizing in the piece. It’s all about measurable scientific effects — and when he speculates beyond the science, he’s clear to say that that’s what he’s doing.

From the conclusion:

Perhaps it sounds hyperbolic. But what we do know is that large numbers of our civilization are hooked on a drug that has profound effects on the brain, which we mostly don’t understand, except that everything we understand is negative and alarming. And we are just ten years into the process. If we don’t act, pretty soon the next generation will be a generation that largely got hooked on this brain-eating drug as children, whose brains are uniquely vulnerable. It seems perfectly reasonable and consistent with the evidence as we have it to be deeply alarmed. Indeed, what seems supremely irrational is our bizarre complacency about something which, at some level, we all know to be happening.

I urge you readers to read the PEG article carefully. Send it to your friends. Send it to your pastor. Send it to the principal of your kids’ school. It needs to be widely distributed. I’m going to print it out and have each of my three kids — two boys, 20 and 15, and a girl, 13 — read it, and talk about it with their mother and me.

This is important. The most important thing you’ll read this month. It could hardly be more important.

UPDATE: Comment from Matt in VA (who, as newcomers here may not know, if a married gay man with a three year old adopted daughter):

Part of threading the needle in regards to the “porn debate” or whatever you want to call it, is that it’s important that people understand that internet porn is extremely dangerous societally speaking and we are entering unprecedented territory with it but that this does NOT mean that men are forming rape gangs and teen pregnancy is gonna skyrocket and every single woman is going to be forced into some kind of BDMS slavery torture situation. The effects of internet porn are much more likely to manifest themselves in a Japan style culture. P.E. Gobry’s article is correct in that (I have my quibbles with it; it relies too much on “studies” when everybody gets more aware with each passing day that a very large percentage of the “studies” and “social science” that our society produces is garbage/fraudulent/won’t replicate; but he is very much right about the problem itself and how huge it is.)

Porn is certainly not the only reason for this, and I would not even say it is the single biggest reason, but men and women are increasingly alienated from each other in our society and the survival of the society itself is threatened by massive levels of estrangement, frustration, and disconnect. There has always been a battle of the sexes but in a healthy culture with, for example, a relatively healthy “institution” of marriage, there is something strong bringing the two sides together, at least in many individual cases spread out across the population. Internet porn, because of how abundant and inexhaustible it is and the way it desensitizes and causes ever-more-extreme imagery to be required in order to produce the same effect, is very dangerous for men’s sex drives and sex lives and definitely threatens their ability to fully connect sexually with women *especially* in the context of a long term monogamous relationship (it’s not clear to me that this is true *for* women but it’s definitely true for men).

The nature of the extremely visual and promiscuous male sex drive means that most women cannot hope to compete (in the sexual realm) with a Tube site bursting at the seams with extreme pornographic imagery. This doesn’t have to be true for everybody or to affect everybody — even if it only affects a sizeable minority of people it can have society-wide effects. This doesn’t mean that “men get everything they want, and women are victims,” though. Unless you think that a man doing the relationship equivalent of drinking himself to death is a “win” for that man.

The problem is very large and tackling with it/dealing with it will be an absolutely epic and fraught-with-peril effort because

A) Most of the people with power and money in our society (old people) do not even understand that the problem exists at all (we live in a gerontocracy, look at the top 4 people most likely to be elected president in 2020, they are all septuagenarians)

B) The right wing still has a 1950s/1980s mindset in which “porn” is a peepshow (which at least gets the young man out of the house!) or a still photograph of a naked woman

C) The center/moderates have a dead-eyed and dead-souled Stephen Pinker vulgar materialist mindset that believes if high-speed internet is cheaper and more plentiful and teenage pregnancies are going down, we must be living in the Best of All Possible Worlds because the numbers on the graphs look good

D) The left wing thinks “kink” is good and in fact one of the best things in the world because the left wing is increasingly a bunch of F*** You Dad spoiled-brat upper middle class 20 and 30 somethings living in coastal cities and still being subsided by their corporate lawyer parents

E) The widespread obliteration of local community, tradition, embedded “thick” culture, dating and courtship rituals, life scripts that emphasize family formation, etc. in favor of corporate serfdom/”entrepreneurial”/girlboss “feminist” values (pushed by both the corporate Right and the corporate Left) means that people under the age of about 30 or so, especially men, know in their bones that they are utterly alone, in terms of navigating their sexual (and romantic) natures. The only place huge, huge numbers of young men can go to talk about the actual lived reality of their experience as sexual (and romantic) human beings is anon online message boards — they have been ABANDONED by their own society. (By the way, this is a piece of the How We Got Trump puzzle.) It has always been the case, even if we don’t know it or understand it, that men are *hugely* hurt by the abandonment of strong guiding institutions and norms where sex and relationships are concerned, in exactly the same way men have been hugely hurt by the abandonment of localist *economic* practices, laws, and policies (“it won’t matter if we outsource all our industry or flood the labor pool with immigrants, Everybody’s Better Off!”). In both the economic and sexual realms, men have been completely thrown to the wolves, abandoned to “compete” (or opt out) in a global marketplace, so to speak. You market-worshipping conservatives are not going to like the outcome. I hear you already — you’re going to say “Matt, you say we’re going to have pathologies like Japan, but Japan is highly isolationist with almost zero immigration, you’re contradicting yourself!” But no. Here’s the common link: both in Japan and in the USA there is this disgusting and soul-destroying worship of The Middle-Class *Job* and The Big Corporation. *That* is the common link. Sure, it may manifest itself in Japan in one way, and in the USA in another very different way, in terms of stuff like immigration/globalization. But the common link is the deference to the giant corporation/the bourgeois “career”/the Human Resources metric, as the great God of the society. This is why–and I don’t like doing this, I don’t like the pronouncing of oneself as being X, but– I am, if I am anything, a romantic. We need to discover that great and ancient art which the great civilizations have always possessed and always valued — *seduction.* That is the spirit we need, and the entire ruling class and elite class and the people who run basically every institution in our society are the enemy of what is needed for our collective cultural soul at this time.

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The Left’s Dilemma: Keith Or Beyoncé

Did y’all see this?

Last week, Seattle and King County leaders hired transgender stripper Beyoncé Black St. James to perform at their annual conference on solving homelessness.

Here’s how they’re using taxpayer money: pic.twitter.com/J0lCKVVfgO

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) December 15, 2019

More:

 

Careful clicking the video; there’s no nudity, but it’s kind of NSFW. If you want to watch it on YouTube, here you go.

The Seattle Times wrote about this disgusting display:

The director of King County’s coordinating agency for homelessness is on paid leave following a dancer’s strip show at the agency’s annual conference on Monday.

Performer Beyoncé Black St. James danced topless in a sheer bodysuit, gave lap dances and kissed attendees, according to a staffer at a local housing nonprofit who attended the conference in South Seattle.

Kira Zylstra, organizer of the conference at South Seattle College, has been placed on leave as of Thursday, according to Denise Rothleutner, chief of staff for the King County Department of Community and Human Services.

Zylstra is paid $123,000 per year for her job, which she’s failing at. King County and Seattle have voted to abandon her agency as ineffective.

Here’s the ad for the conference Zylstra’s agency hosted. The wokeness, it burns:

 

If “decolonization” means an obese tranny stripper runs out and flops and jiggles and annoys while you’re trying to eat your rubber chicken, then I say, “Up with colonialism!”

This is just one more thing that we have to put up with in the Woke Republic, where there are no lines that cannot and must not be crossed to defeat what they consider to be bigotry.

Or do we? Here’s a fantastic essay in UnHerd, the British conservative online magazine, by a gay writer named Graeme Archer, who explains why Labour lost, and why Labour will never, ever understand it. Excerpts:

The Labour Party (not “The Left”) is history. Even when Blair reduced the Conservatives to their heartlands in the 1990s, the party still had heartlands. Labour, in 2019, doesn’t. It’s a collective noun for student Marxists, trades union hard-men, and spiteful anti-Semites. That’s not a political party: it’s a pathogen. A pathogen with nowhere to replicate.

More:

Phillips is only one example of this category error made by so many Labour MPs, this conflation of the needs of human beings with their own desire for power. All that bleating in the concession speeches of defeated Labour candidates about their “real fear” for the ill, the old, the unemployed in their seats — the very voters who had just rejected them. As though no-one who isn’t Labour could either care or devise a politics to help the troubled souls in our midst. They have no idea why they lost.

I do. He’s called Keith, and he’s my husband. He’s never been political — once or twice in the distant past, when we lived in Hackney, I dragged him out leafletting with me. He loathed it, and told me to stop asking. He’s a working-class Plymothian, an electrician, but with a capable brain and a heart every bit as large as Jess Phillips’s.

And:

Labour treated Keith – and the millions like him – like a fool, Jess, like your property, to be told what to think and how to speak and how to vote. How to feel shame for his instinct for Leave. He saw your Twitterfeed, and Hugh’s, and Richard Osman’s, and that of every smug ex-footballer with a gig pushing junk food to children, so he understands that you think he’s either ignorant, or wicked, for not being Labour.

The result? Keith hates your party, Jess, at a much more visceral (and therefore irrevocable) level than the intellectual dislike I feel for socialism in general. You – and all those sleb out-riders – might feel better for the constant display of Tory-hatred you share on social media. One of the many mistakes you make about men like Keith is to confuse the fact that he’d never dream of mentioning his feelings about the Labour Party in public, with the idea that somehow those feelings don’t exist, that they can’t have consequences.

Read the whole thing. 

Now, obviously — obviously! — there are limits to how this could be translated to the American context. For one, gay rights are much more widely accepted in the UK than in the US, even among Tories. The argument there is primarily over transgenderism, which is not the same thing as homosexuality (though politically, they are usually conflated). My point is that there is no Religious Right in Britain, and for better or worse, the Tory Party is quite gay-friendly, in a way that the GOP just isn’t. Trump himself has not been anti-gay — in fact, he launched a campaign to decriminalize homosexuality worldwide — though he has taken a definite policy line against transgender rights. My sense is that Trump is probably where most Americans are: for gay rights, but troubled by transgenderism. According to Gallup, unlike the president, a strong majority of Americans favor allowing transgender soldiers to serve in the military, but most people aren’t cool with progressive policies on bathrooms. I would be interested to see polling measuring the intensity of how voters feel about trans issues. My guess is that conservative voters who feel intensely about the issue are going to significantly outnumber progressive voters who do.

Second, Boris Johnson is a vastly more likeable person than Donald Trump. He has a real sense of humor, which the US president conspicuously lacks. That will take you far.

Having conceded that, is there a lesson for the Republicans to learn from the Graeme Archer piece? Surely there are a lot of people in this country who are invisible to the media, and who don’t want the country to be run by the kind of people who write for and edit The New York Times, NPR, the Washington Post, Vox and The Atlantic, right? We’ve all heard by now that Boris Johnson hit the sweet spot by moving left on economics and right on culture (again, in the UK, that doesn’t mean Religious Right; it means nationalism). Could Trump do that too? Could the Republicans?

Leaving aside the policy details, what I’m getting at is this, from Archer’s piece:

… [Keith the gay electrician] understands that you think he’s either ignorant, or wicked, for not being Labour.

The result? Keith hates your party, Jess, at a much more visceral (and therefore irrevocable) level than the intellectual dislike I feel for socialism in general.

A lot of people who don’t like Trump really hate being treated by the media, by many Democrats, and by liberal spokespeople as if they’re ignorant, or wicked, or bigoted, because they aren’t Woke. The New York Times earlier this year undertook a big project with the goal of rewriting American history around the claim that the whole point of America was … slavery. Remember this from the leaked transcript of a Times internal meeting with executive editor Dean Baquet?:

I just feel like racism is in everything. And therefore should be systemically worked into all stories in the paper! And get this — Baquet didn’t challenge this. This is par for the course for our media today. I’m not going to go into a long list here; I talk about this a fair amount on this blog anyway. The point is, you don’t have to love Donald Trump to get sick and tired of being told by these people that to prove yourself a decent person, you have to hate yourself, hate the country, hate your traditions, hate your dad, hate your sons (especially the unborn ones), hate your religion, hate your pronouns, hate your people, hate the cops, hate what was just fine five minutes ago, hate your happiness, hate your penis, and hate your life — and oh, you also have to vote Democratic. Otherwise, you’re a HATER!

All the Democrats would have to do to get rid of Donald Trump is just be normal. They can’t do it. Just cannot do it. Even old Uncle Joe, the most normal of them, if he steps out of line, the wokesters whip him back into shape. Bernie doesn’t really care about that stuff, not like he cares about economics, but let’s not kid ourselves: under any Democratic president, the woke will be in charge, and will not compromise on any of it.

I don’t think Donald Trump is anywhere close to normal. He’s a freak, in his way. But then, in the way he lives, Jeremy Corbyn is far closer to the average Briton than the toff Boris Johnson, graduate of Eton and Oxford. But who did the working class trust more with their futures? The Old Etonian. Why do you suppose that is?

Unlike Keith with Labour, I can’t say that I hate the Democrats, and I certainly don’t love the Republicans. But I know that the kind of people running movement liberalism really do think people like me are a problem to be solved. Don’t tell me it’s not true. I read their papers and magazines. I listen to their newscasts. I hear every day, in my e-mail and on this blog, from people who are having to live with their oppressive spitefulness in the workplace, or who are scared to death for their kids because of the gender ideology revolution in their schools.

Just last week I heard from a reader who told me about a beloved local civic institution being destroyed entirely for reasons of woke cultural politics. I can’t write about that now, but I might later. People are afraid to talk about it because they’re scared of being tarred as bigots if they stand up for the thing that they love, which is probably a goner anyway. Can you imagine being afraid to defend a civic institution — again, I’m sorry I can’t say more, but trust me, this is the kind of thing that was totally unproblematic five years ago — because the act of doing so would compel you to have to explain why you don’t hate “the marginalized,” and doing so would probably get you on a blacklist in your profession? If I am able to tell this story — if I can get people to talk — you’ll understand what I mean.

I don’t know these people, but given the part of the country their institution is in, and given the nature of the institution, I would be very surprised if any of them voted for Trump in 2016. Now that this is happening, I’d be surprised if half of them don’t end up voting for him.

That’s stupid, right? The President of the United States can’t stop local institutions from being shut down by wokesters. That’s like expecting the Pope to intervene to protect the parish across town from closing. But that is entirely beside the point. I know conservative Christians who absolutely positively won’t vote for Donald Trump because of the immigrant children at the border issue, which is a direct Trump policy. The symbolism of that is so powerful to them that it overrides any other concern. I don’t share that particular feeling, but I completely understand how people come to regard these issues as condensed symbols of something far greater.

How many people in that room in Seattle felt offended or otherwise troubled by the transgender stripper, but wouldn’t dare say so out of fear of being set upon for being insufficiently woke? I wouldn’t guess that many social work types in Seattle would be tempted to vote Republican under any circumstance, but who knows? Would you have thought a working-class gay man in England would vote for Boris Johnson’s Tory Party over Labour? He did, because he hates Labour. He hates Labour because Labour hated him — an actual labourer! — first.

The point is, ordinary people are feeling besieged in concrete ways all the time, and nobody talks about it openly, because the kind of people who lead the Democratic Party and its activist allies would happily seen them stigmatized and professionally destroyed. This is not a supposition. We see it happening around us. Last week, a Republican normie friend told me that he didn’t vote Trump in 2016, but having seen how far left the Democrats have gone on the culture since 2016, he’s going to vote Trump without any regret — in spite of the fact that our president is not terribly competent, and of low character.

Another conservative friend who is fairly well known in his field texted this morning to say that he had been approached by a journalist whose name he didn’t recognize, asking for an interview for a book he’s writing. My friend thought it sounded like a set-up, and asked me what I thought. I hadn’t heard of the journalist either, but when I googled him, I found that yep, it almost certainly was a set-up. What’s interesting to me about this is that my friend, whose conservatism is known, has had to become so watchful about this kind of thing in his liberal-dominated profession that he cannot simply take a phone call from a journalist and speak his mind. He saw what that young left-wing journalist jackass did to Sir Roger Scruton. 

I know that this conservative friend is no fan of Donald Trump. I don’t know how he’s going to vote in 2020. But I would bet my next paycheck that he’s going to go Trump, not because he loves, or even likes, Trump, but because he genuinely fears the cultural Left in power. As I said, he works in an elite professional field in which they dominate. He knows what these elites think, and how they think. He’s scared of them. He’s right to be.

“Decolonizing Our Collective Work, with Beyoncé Black St. James.” Not that any of our media would dare to push the Democratic candidates in even the slightest adversarial way on this stuff, but I would love to see them put on the spot. These people will not allow themselves to have any enemies to the intersectional left. It’s going to cost them, you watch. They care more about the Beyoncés of the world than they do the Keiths.

(Read below the photo for an update.)

Beyoncé Black St. James, a trans stripper earning her taxpayer-funded paycheck in Seattle

UPDATE: From a piece on the woke brokeness of Labour, written by Toby Young:

Not that they have much love for [Boris Johnson]. A friend of mine was standing as the Conservative candidate in Newcastle upon Tyne North, where the Labour incumbent won a 10,000 majority two years ago, and I knocked on a few doors for him last week. Every person I spoke to said they were going to vote Tory. In some cases, it was because they wanted to “get Brexit done,” which has been the Conservatives’ endlessly repeated campaign slogan over the past six weeks, but in others it was because of their visceral dislike for Labour’s leader.

“Most people I know who used to be staunch Labour are now saying no way Jeremy Corbyn,” said Steve Hurt, an engineer. “It’s not our party any more. Same label, different bottle.”

More:

Plenty of better writers than me—Douglas Murray, John Gray—have debunked the notion that the only reason low-income voters embrace right-wing politics is because they’re drunk on a cocktail of ethno-nationalism and false hope (with Rupert Murdoch and Vladimir Putin taking turns as mixologists). It surely has more to do with the Left’s sneering contempt for the “deplorables” in the flyover states as they shuttle back and forth between their walled, cosmopolitan strongholds. As Corbyn’s policy platform in Britain’s election showed, left-wing parties now have little to offer indigenous, working class people outside the big cities—and their activists often add insult to injury by describing these left-behind voters as “privileged” because they’re white or cis-gendered or whatever. So long as parties like Labour pander to their middle-class, identitarian activists and ignore the interests of the genuinely disadvantaged, they’ll continue to rack up loss after loss. Get woke, go broke.

Corbyn was horrible in ways that it’s hard to see a good analogue for among the Democratic presidential candidates. I mean, the guy wouldn’t even sing “God Save The Queen” at a memorial service. Still, an elderly Vermont socialist who talks like Jackie Mason? A hectoring Harvard lady law professor who is so woke it’s like she safety-pinned her eyelids to her eyebrows? I dunno, man.

The post The Left’s Dilemma: Keith Or Beyoncé appeared first on The American Conservative.

Parents, Smartphones, And Porn

When this blog had the previous commenting format, Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa used to comment here. She either quit commenting, or didn’t make the transition to Disqus. I was surprised to see her byline pop up in the Dallas Morning News, and grateful for what she wrote, though it’s terrible that she had to write it. Her piece exposes the ugly truth that massive numbers of parents refuse to see, because it would force them to have to be parents to their children, not enablers. It also exposes the libertarian lie that this is a problem that the market can solve. Excerpts:

On a recent Sunday afternoon, my daughter and I were driving to the grocery store when she said from the back seat, “I’m having this weird feeling. It’s like I feel guilty, but I haven’t done anything wrong.”

We were passing a Catholic Church when she said this, so I jokingly told her I could drop her off for confession. She reminded me we’re not Catholic. Then I told her how her sister used to write me notes when she had something weighing on her.

I’d find them under my pillow, or in my makeup bag. Often light little burdens she wanted to lay down. As she got older they got a bit heavier, but so far nothing too serious.

In glittery red ink, the same she used for her Christmas list, her words sank my heart. At a friend’s birthday party, they were playing on the little girl’s phone. The girl handed it to my daughter and said, “Boys are disgusting.” My daughter clicked on a male classmate’s Snapchat story to find a video of him and a few other boys from her class laughing as they watched rape porn. She said the woman was bound up, saying “no” as a masked man approached her.

Her letter went on to describe a group of boys in her sixth grade class frequently joking about assaulting the girls in the parking lot. She said if any of the girls aren’t sitting with their legs closed, the boys will ask if they want to get pregnant. And if the girls’ legs are crossed, boys from this group often walk by and say, “Spread ‘em.”

They are in sixth grade. No 11-year-old should have to deal with, or even know, about things like this.

More:

Our children are growing up in a very different world than the one we knew as kids. Gone are the days of your grandfather’s Playboy. Today, children have access to explicit, violent and degrading sexual material in the palm of their hands at all times.

This is where many kids get their sex education. This is where they’re learning that consent doesn’t matter, and that actually, the lack thereof is big business.

Her letter ended with the most heartbreaking line: “and this is why I HATE SCHOOL.”

Schools today not only tolerate phones in the classroom, many encourage them. I know this because I won’t let my children have smartphones, and they complain that their teachers frequently ask them to download apps to complete their schoolwork.

Read it all. Pass it around.

Schools should stop enabling this right now!

Still, school administrators can’t do what parents should be doing. Even schools that forbid smartphones at school, and that don’t have policies that require smartphone use to do homework, can’t have any effect on whether or not kids have smartphones when they’re off campus. A few years back, I gave a talk in Dallas at a conservative Christian school in which I mentioned the role smartphones play in exposing children to hardcore porn. After my talk, some parents came to me and told me that they knew other conservative Christian parents who gave their elementary school age children smartphones with Internet connections. They didn’t want their kids to be outsiders among their peers, and were living with the cognitive dissonance because it was easier to live in denial than to say no to their children.

This has to stop. This has to stop right now. I don’t know what legislators can do to regulate the porn industry, but something, anything, is better than what we have now.

Parents can’t abdicate their own responsibilities here. Take the smartphone away from your children. Convince other parents of your children’s peers to do the same thing. This has to be a collective action if it’s going to have any hope of working.

It is true that as kids get older, having a phone to stay in touch with parents is useful, and maybe even a necessity under certain circumstances. In my family, we gave our teenagers dumb phones, without Internet access. It works well in that it allows the kids to call us to tell us when they’re ready to be picked up from events. Even so, just this past weekend my 15 year old son brought me his dumb phone, and showed me how porn merchants have been spamming his number with texts containing links to hardcore. Fortunately, without Internet access, the links are effectively dead on his phone, but he wanted me to know what’s happening.

This is evil. It is straight-up evil. If he had a smartphone, he would be getting these links unsolicited, and we would have to depend on his conscience and strength of character to not click on them. That is way, way too much to expect of a teenage boy. When I was his age, back in the Stone Age 1980s, all of us hormone-besotted boys that age were eager to get our hands on Playboys and Penthouses. Inevitably, some kid would get his hands on his dad’s stash of dirty magazines, and we would look at them. But it was hard to do, and didn’t happen often — and when it did, the porn in those magazines was nothing compared to the hardcore, live-action filth ubiquitous today.

To my readers who are parents: Destiny Herndon-De La Rosa makes it brutally clear what’s going on, and what’s at stake. This is on you. This is on us. There is no excuse. Even if your children don’t have smartphones, they still have to live in this sewer culture that porn is creating. Girls should not have to endure this harassment. Boys should not behave this way. The indifference of adults — parents above all, but also teachers, principals, and other gatekeepers — makes us all complicit in the degradation and bondage of our children to pornography.

Why do we do this to our children? Why? Answer me, Mom and Dad.

UPDATE: Comment by reader J. May:

I have two Christian men I meet with regularly so we can keep each other accountable with lust issues. We read books on the topic together, too. One has experienced quite a bit of victory in his battle with porn but for the other, it has remained a particularly pernicious problem.

This one is a bit younger, in his mid-twenties, and he was part of the first generation to come of age with smartphones. It was in 5th grade that a cohort of boys at his school exposed him to porn and shamed him to be part of what they were doing (I think some, if not all, were from Christian families). This started an intense addiction that he has had the hardest time kicking. He has been besought with shame and frustration.

The worst part of all this is that I see it in other younger men all the time. Their views on sex have been so distorted by porn that they create weird sexual expectations for women and never know they are missing out on the glory of relational, committed and meaningful sexual unions. To them, sex is a drug and, like all drugs, it remains an itch that clamors for continual scratching all while not delivering on any sort of real fulfillment other than being free of the itching sensation for a few moments.

Thankfully, the other man in our group was freed from 30 years of porn addiction early on in the process and has remained so. As a new believer, he didn’t even know that it was possible to be free and just assumed every guy was in the same boat. The resultant joy and confidence in this man’s life is greatly encouraging to watch.

If anyone wants resources on getting free from this stuff, I can highly recommend the Christian book Every Man’s Battle (a huge part of my journey of freedom from lust addiction) and also The Conquer Series course. That was started by Dr. Ted Roberts. You can hear his powerful story with starting it here: https://jesustransforms.org/episodes/10-from-hard-beginnings-to-training-conquerers-dr-ted-roberts-shares-his-powerful-life-story.

UPDATE.2: A reader e-mails:

I found a website that might be helpful to your viewers who want to take concrete actions to protect their home and their kids devices.  This is in no way an endorsement but just a useful tool I found that is easier than me trying to explain step by step how to do it for my fellow fathers.

First is:
https://protectyoungeyes.com/parental-controls-every-digital-device/

This shows you in easy picture heavy steps how to setup parental controls for almost every brand of device out there.
Second, Protect your home internet.  The way I’m doing it now is via Open DNS:
https://www.opendns.com/home-internet-security/

They have step by step instructions for most popular routers.  This will block most porn at the internet access point level.  Its not difficult to bypass of course for a tech savvy kid but you’re making it harder and your preventing accidental exposure.

The post Parents, Smartphones, And Porn appeared first on The American Conservative.

What Should I Call My New Book?

One of the great things about this blog over the years has been the help I’ve received from readers on the books I’ve written. The Little Way of Ruthie Leming started as blog posts here. So did How Dante Can Save Your Life, and of course The Benedict Option. I need your help on the book I’m working on now.

As you will recall, it’s a book about the emergence of what I call “soft totalitarianism” in our culture. A few years back, I began hearing from people who had grown up under communism in the Soviet Union and the Soviet bloc, and who now live in the West. They told me that they’re starting to see certain things that they had endured in the past beginning to manifest here. It starts with the culture of political correctness, but it’s going beyond that. As I began looking into it, I discovered that our own liberal culture — by “liberal,” I don’t mean simply left of center — has begun to reproduce effects that communist states achieved in the past. It’s uncanny, but most of us don’t see it because, I think, we have been conditioned to think of “totalitarianism” as something imposed by a police state. In fact, it is coming to us through institutions like big business (“Woke Capitalism”), colleges and schools, and technology. I’ve spent much of this year traveling throughout former communist countries, interviewing people about it, and believe me, the things I’m going to report in this book will shock people out of complacency.

The aim of the book is first to help us identify the totalitarian nature of certain practices that have become commonplace today, and to offer insight and advice on how to resist it.

I’m struggling to come up with a title. Normally I’m pretty good about this, but most of the titles I have come up with fall flat, somehow. The subtitle will be something like: How To Resist The Coming Soft Totalitarianism. But I need a snappy title. The best I’ve been able to come up with is a line from Solzhenitsyn, the title of his final message to the Soviet people before he was forced into exile: Live Not By Lies. Somehow, I think I can do better than that.

What do you think? Please give me some suggestions in the comments. If I use your suggestion, I will give you credit in the acknowledgements.

The post What Should I Call My New Book? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Pronouns Are No Joking Matter

The Washington Post publishes an op-ed from a woman — apparently a bona fide vajayjay-haver — griping about her pro-o-o-o-o-nouns, and how people are making fun of pronoun Nazis. Here’s the headline of the Kat Jercich piece, which is about the slowest, fattest pitch over Uncle Chuckie’s home plate that ever was thrown:

Soon as I read that, I thought, “At some point, this dame is going to say the snickerers are accessories to murder.” And sure enough!:

It’s not appropriate for people who aren’t in danger of being fired, evicted or even murdered for their gender identity to decide that pronouns are a joking matter.

The entire column is a load of sanctimonious left-wing crap. For example:

In a society that frequently equates appearance with gender identity, it can be comforting for those who identify differently to push back against those assumptions, and it’s affirming to know that others are at least making an effort to do the same. Which is why it’s increasingly common, especially in spaces trying to demonstrate LGBTQ friendliness, to have people declare their pronouns upon introduction or in their email signatures: My name is Kat, I live in Chicago, and I use she or they pronouns. (As the writer Ada Powers recently pointed out on Twitter, this dual pronoun use can be a way for some non-binary people to express the complexities of their gender identity in different contexts and social settings.)

This practice has been routine in some activist spaces for more than a decade, but it’s moving into more mainstream arenas as well. Avinash Chak reported for the BBC in 2015 that “sharing one’s pronouns and asking for others’ pronouns when making introductions is a growing trend in US colleges.” Chak noted that the University of Vermont, “which has led this movement,” began asking students to self-report their pronouns in 2009. In job settings, too, more companies have made stating one’s pronouns a regular part of introductions. The employee analytics platform Culture Amp, which says it works with more than 2,500 organizations, advises workplaces to encourage employees to share pronouns in icebreakers; an NPR article recently did the same. Uber’s internal employee profile pages list their users’ pronouns.

If college student activists, NPR, and an HR website all agree that the world should do something, that’s a pretty good sign that people should do the opposite — or at least make fun of it. These wokesters force us all to walk on eggshells, constantly, for fear of being denounced or even fired for not accommodating their psychological wiggishness. True story: at one high school where a friend of mine’s kid went a couple of years ago, there was a biological female who considered herself “genderfluid,” and who would get mad at others if they called her by the wrong pronoun. She changed pronouns irregularly, and expected everybody to somehow know whether she was male or female or neuter that day. And the school accommodated this insanity!

This is a guide from the LGBTQ+ Center at the University of Wisconsin-Madison:

“Xemself”? Somebody demands that you say that to them, and you laugh, they deserve it. The Alphabet People Center at UWM has more suggestions:

What’s funny about this is the knots people twist themselves up into to avoid having to deal with the givenness of their bodies, and of the world — and, in turn, how spiteful they are towards people who don’t take their boutique problems as seriously as they themselves do.

Q: How many gender activists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: That’s not funny!

We can’t joke about this pronoun business because as far as activists and their media backers are concerned, we can’t question any of it at all. To do so is to be a bigot. A few days ago, Jo Swinson, the head of Britain’s super-woke Liberal Democratic Party, was asked serious, hard questions about gender and public policy during the closing days of the election campaign. The Lib Dems’ campaign platform called for writing some trans demands into low. Ella Whelan, a columnist for Spiked, writes about what happened:

In short, the Lib Dems have marked themselves out as the party that will heed the demands of extreme trans activists by reshaping laws, norms and truth itself.

This has all caused quite a stir. But it was a frosty exchange on the Today programme yesterday that really revealed just how extraordinary the Lib Dem view on gender has become. Swinson was asked if she believes that biological sex exists – that is, in the words of presenter Justin Webb, that ‘there are men and women, males and females’, and a ‘vanishingly small number of people who are indeterminate because of chromosomal abnormalities’.

Humbly repeating several times that she was ‘not a scientist’, Swinson insisted that things are not ‘as binary as is often presented’. She compared the discrimination against trans women – by which she means they are currently not legally allowed to become women through simple self-ID – to the treatment of gay people in the past. When pushed on the problem that automatic self-ID would compromise women-only spaces, including women’s refuges, Swinson said that individuals should be judged on a case-by-case basis.

More:

Thanks to historic fights for equality, it is now widely accepted that it is wrong to mistreat someone on the basis of how they talk, dress, who they sleep with or what they call themselves. We should continue to argue for everyone’s right to be who they want to be.

But this does not mean denying biology and smearing all opposing views as ‘bigoted’. Trans women are not automatically inclined to violence, as some of the more alarmist, so-called ‘TERFs’ might argue. However, removing medical and legal distinctions between the sexes does raise serious questions about the protection of sex-segregated spaces. Many commentators scoff at discussions of toilets or changing rooms as right-wing alarmism. But there are many women who are capable of being sympathetic to trans people while also wanting to maintain women-only spaces and opposing the idea of ‘gender neutrality’ in schools. They understand that sometimes gender and sex are important distinctions.

The debate around gender recognition has turned toxic. Disagree with someone like Swinson and you’ll be accused of conspiring in the demonisation of a vulnerable community. Thankfully, though, the Lib Dems’ views on gender are entirely unrepresentative of the public at large. Most people have a balanced take on these issues – it’s the mad platitudes from people like Swinson that make discussions of gender and freedom more difficult.

Look, it is wrong to bully people who suffer from gender dysphoria. It is wrong to bully people period. But activists and their allies construe any and all opposition to their theories and practices as bullying and bigotry. This is madness, and if we can’t laugh at the rigid extremes that they’re trying to impose on society — if we can’t make fun of any kind of their bullying of the rest of us — then that tells you something about what these woke totalitarians have in store for the rest of us. Sometimes, humor is the best way to resist something dangerous. I think we can all agree that Nazism is in most cases not a joking matter, but a world in which Mel Brooks’s hysterical satirical number “Springtime For Hitler,” from The Producers, is verboten is not a world that any of us should want to live in.

It is hilarious that the leader of a national political party cannot explain the difference between males and females, and says that to pose the question itself is bigoted. And it is also hilarious that her political party was wiped out in the election, and that she herself lost her seat in Parliament.

Beneath the laughter, though this is not a joke — but not in the way Jercich, the Post op-ed contributor, thinks.  A reader posted this on a comments thread of this blog yesterday:

My 16-year-old daughter insists she’s “non-binary” and my 11-year-old daughter just announced she’s “gender fluid”. They’ve been raised in a stable, loving, Christian home. My older daughter has a small group of school friends and about half of them (the girls) have announced they’re boys, use male names and have boy haircuts and clothes. Some even wear chest binders, which my daughter says she really wants. Last month she announced that her friend Nathan “got his period today”. I hadn’t met Nathan yet and foolishly assumed he was a boy. Everything I’ve experienced about this topic lines up with what Lisa Littman (of Brown University) wrote about with regard to rapid-onset gender dysphoria, yet transgender activists had a tantrum when her paper was published and tried to shut it down. I need that information! A lot of us parents ARE talking about it because because suddenly transgenderism has become rampant among our kids, who up to puberty didn’t show any signs whatsoever. The kids aren’t necessarily the problem because every generation goes through silly fads; it’s the so-called adults who are pushing this so hard. I’m so angry; I feel like a lone voice in the wilderness insisting on biological reality.

The fanaticism of adults like Kat Jercich is driving radical changes in society, changes that destroy the lives of real people, and real families. And perhaps paradoxically, this is no joking matter. If the US news media want to be journalists, not advocates, then they ought to be asking politicians hard questions about these topics, and stop allowing the militancy of progressive activists define our discourse.

The Washington Post has a fresh op-ed up from an autism activist who denounces critics of the 16-year-old climate activist Greta Thunberg, who is on the autism spectrum, as — surprise! — bigots. Excerpts:

Even when autistic people are honored, like Thunberg was when she was named Time’s Person of the Year, we are immediately discredited as children, reinforcing the ideas that children and autistic people alike have no agency and our work is illegitimate.

Nope. People call Greta Thunberg a child not because she’s autistic, but because she’s 16 years old. More:

In my own work, I’ve witnessed denial of young autistic transgender people’s legitimacy from smarmy detractors who insist that they cannot possibly be both transgender and autistic because we have fallen victim to transgender adults with nefarious agendas who exploit our presumed susceptibility to manipulation.

Attacks on Thunberg that rely on claims that she is to be pitied and saved from adults may seem motivated by benevolent concern. But they only reinforce the ableist and ageist idea that children and autistic people lack agency and cannot exercise their own autonomy, which is wrong.

The attacks on Thunberg are also clearly gendered, as powerful women throughout history have been accused of existing only as pawns for men controlling them, and constantly face dismissal and delegitimization because of their righteous anger.

Oh, come off it. This is special pleading. It would certainly be cruel to mock Thunberg because of her autism, but Thunberg’s parents have chosen to allow her to take the world stage to advocate for her cause. She uses extreme rhetoric (e.g., in a co-bylined column a couple of weeks ago, she wrote “Colonial, racist, and patriarchal systems of oppression have created and fueled [the climate crisis]. We need to dismantle them all.”) But nobody can legitimately criticize any of this, according to the Post contributor, because doing so makes you bigoted against autistic people and women.

No, actually, it doesn’t. And it’s important not to allow ourselves to be intimidated by these manipulative activists. If telling a joke is a way of resisting this fanaticism, then by all means tell the joke. Laughter is subversive, and some things need to be subverted.

 

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He Revealeth The Deep And Secret Things

Terrence Malick is a difficult filmmaker. I mean, he is a maker of difficult films. They are thematically deep, narratively dense and disjointed, and pictorially gorgeous. When he’s at the top of his game, as in The Tree Of Life, it’s like watching religious icons come to life. I would say his To The Wonder is the same kind of movie. But when he’s missing the mark, as in his recent Knight Of Cups, it feels like an obscurantist mess.

Malick is a Catholic an Episcopalian, and a profoundly philosophical and theological filmmaker. Read this analysis of To The Wonder to get a sense of what he’s up to. The reason Mont-Saint-Michel is on the cover of The Benedict Option is because of how Malick uses the abbey in that movie: as a symbol of God’s eternal presence in time, calling us back to Himself — and, secondarily, about how we have to establish temporal, material boundaries for the experience of Love (love of God, love of others), or we will lose it. Back in 2013, when To The Wonder came out, Damon Linker wrote a good piece about it. Linker laments the inability of contemporary film critics to see beyond the surface of Malick’s movies. In this excerpt, he’s talking about a Catholic priest, played by Javier Bardem, who serves the poor and the broken, but who feels very far from the experience of God:

That so many reviewers have either ignored Father Quintana’s role in the film, or seen his struggles as an uninteresting subplot unrelated to the movie’s exploration of romantic and sexual love, is perhaps the most stunning critical oversight of all. Just as Neil holds himself back, refusing to give in to all that love demands, Father Quintana often fails to detect the presence of God all around him and sometimes withholds himself from the most troubled and troubling people to whom he’s called to minister (including prisoners and drug addicts).

Yet unlike Neil, who ends up alone, Father Quintana achieves a spiritual epiphany during a sequence toward the end of the movie that is unlike any I have ever encountered in film, and one I have not seen referenced in a single mainstream review. As the priest comforts a succession of suffering people — the old, the anguished, the crippled, the sick, and the dying — he recites a devotion of St. Patrick: “Christ be with me. Christ before me. Christ behind me. Christ in me. Christ beneath me. Christ above me. Christ on my right. Christ on my left. Christ in the heart.” The sequence reaches its climax with the recitation of a prayer by Cardinal Newman (one that was also prayed daily by Mother Teresa’s Sisters of the Missionaries of Charity): “Flood our souls with your spirit and life so completely that our lives may only be a reflection of yours. Shine through us. Show us how to seek you. We were made to see you.”

Humanity was made for God. And he is present all around us — in the transfiguring, wondrous joy of romantic love, in self-giving sacrifice, in our suffering and the suffering of others, in the charity we offer to those in pain, in the resplendent beauty of the natural world — if only we open our eyes to see him. That, it seems, is Terrence Malick’s scandalous message.

Here is that sequence. Tell me, where would you ever see something like this in a modern movie?:

It has been six years since I saw To The Wonder, and not a week goes by when I don’t think about it. I’m serious. So often I feel like Father Quintana: knowing God is there, but for whatever reason, feeling exiled from His presence. Other times I feel like the Olga Kurylenko character: feeling God everywhere, but lacking the discipline to bound the experience of Him with practices that will remind me of His reality when I’m not feeling it.

Truly, it’s a great, great movie. But it’s not an easy movie. This is art. It demands a lot from you. I can understand why the critics didn’t get it. Malick’s head is deep into a Christian philosophical and theological framework. Most ordinary Christians too have lost the ability to read this filmic icon.

For example, the Ben Affleck and Olga Kurylenko characters fall deeply in love when they visit Mont Saint Michel, and are shown in the inner garden of the monastic cloister. Medieval monks regarded those enclosed gardens as a representation of the Garden of Eden (and, in turn, the Virgin Mary’s womb): the place where man had an unmediated, direct experience of God. Later, Affleck proposes marriage to Kurylenko in the Luxembourg Gardens in the heart of Paris — also an enclosed garden. Malick uses this symbolism to say something about the nature of the love that his protagonists experience at that point in their lives. Then, Affleck moves his new wife and daughter (from Kurylenko’s previous marriage) to Oklahoma, where everything is flat and wide-open. In this new physical space, their love will be tested.

See what I mean? Because Malick is a real artist, he doesn’t bludgeon you with the symbolism. But a film critic who didn’t understand anything about Christianity, and a Christian whose idea of Christianity is shallow, emotional, and moralistic, will be puzzled by what they see.

All that came to mind last night when I read the review of A Hidden Life, the new Malick movie, in The New York Times. The film is a mediation on the life of Franz Jägerstätter, a simple Austrian Catholic who was imprisoned, tortured, and murdered by the Nazis for refusing to serve Hitler (Benedict XVI beatified him). The Times’s lead critic A.O. Scott admires the movie aesthetically, but he confesses that the behavior of Jägerstätter is a mystery to him:

The mystery — and the possible lesson for the present — dwells in the question of Franz’s motive. Why, of all the people in St. Radegund, was he alone willing to defy fascism, to see through its appeal to the core of its immorality? His fellow burghers, including the mayor, are not depicted as monstrous. On the contrary, they are normal representatives of their time and place. Franz, whose father was killed in World War I, who works the land with a steady hand, a loyal wife and three fair-haired children, seems like both an ideal target of Nazi propaganda and an embodiment of the Aryan ideal. How did he see through the ideology so completely?

The answer has to do with his goodness, a quality the movie sometimes reduces to — or expresses in terms of — his good looks. Diehl and Pachner are both charismatic, but their performances amount mainly to a series of radiant poses and anguished faces. Franz is not an activist; he isn’t connected to any organized resistance to Hitler, and he expresses his opposition in the most general moral terms. Nazism itself is depicted a bit abstractly, a matter of symbols and attitudes and stock images rather than specifically mobilized hatreds. When the mayor rants about impure races, either he or the screenplay is too decorous to mention Jews.

And this, I suppose, is my own argument with this earnest, gorgeous, at times frustrating film. Or perhaps a confession of my intellectual biases, which at least sometimes give priority to historical and political insight over matters of art and spirit. Franz Jägerstätter’s defiance of evil is moving and inspiring, and I wish I understood it better.

This is so revealing! “Their performances amount mainly to a series of radiant poses and anguished faces.” But is this not how Christian iconography works, and how painting works? Scott wants this to be a straightforward film narrative, but that’s apparently not what Malick does here (nor is it what he does in To The Wonder). The composition of the images carries more of the meaning in Malick’s movies than it does in conventional movies. I understand why this frustrates and alienates many viewers — sometimes his movies have that effect on me — but it’s what makes him such a purely cinematic director. Have you ever seen Tarkovsky’s movie Andrei Rublev? It will try your patience if you’re expecting a standard movie narrative, but if you surrender to it, and open yourself to the meaning that Tarkovsky is conveying primarily through images and composition, as distinct from the usual narrative, the radical depth of the story Tarkovsky tells invites you in.

Anyway, Scott seems especially frustrated that Malick here is not telling a familiar Holocaust story. The Christian core of the film seems completely hidden from the critic — who, admirably, admits that he just doesn’t get it. My friend Alan Jacobs, who has seen A Hidden Life, told me that it’s a masterpiece. Last night, I sent him a link to Scott’s review, and told him that I suspect this movie will also suffer, in the eyes of critics, from an ignorance of Christian theology. Jacobs wrote a response to the Scott review here. Excerpt:

Dietrich Bonhoeffer — who died nearly two years after Franz Jägerstätter, at the hands of the same regime and for the same cause — famously wrote, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” How is it that some answer that call, even when the death demanded is in no sense metaphorical? This is something that, I think, cannot be explained, though perhaps it can be portrayed. And that is what A Hidden Life seeks to do.

Yes! These are profound mysteries. The Catholic (and even more, the Orthodox) imagination embraces the fact that life is essentially mysterious — that in the end, it cannot be fully understood by reason, but it can be grasped, and appropriated into one’s own life, through other faculties. Read Jacobs’s piece, especially the end, where he talks about why what appears from the outside to be a tragic ending is in face a pre-figuring of eternal life, and joy forever. This. Is. Christianity. 

Look, this week I finished a chapter of my forthcoming book about the lessons for Christians and others living today, from the life and experience of those who lived under, and resisted, communism in Russia and Europe. This chapter focuses on the Bendas, a Catholic family in Prague. Vaclav and Kamila Benda, both professors, were the only Christians in the leadership of Charter 77, the main dissident group in Prague (Vaclav Havel was a leader of the group). Vaclav Benda served four years in jail — 1979 to 1983 — as a political prisoner. Kamila was at home raising their six children, under a totalitarian dictatorship. I write in the upcoming book:

Today, the children and grandchildren of Dr. Benda have the letters he sent to their mother from prison. They are a written testimony of how the political prisoner’s rock-solid faith helped him endure captivity. These letters are a catechism for his descendants, made vivid because they came from the pen not of a plaster saint, but a flesh-and-blood hero: the family patriarch.

“In one of his letters, he tells us about how being in prison gave him new insights into the Gospels,” says [son] Patrik. “He talks about how Jesus said in his Passion, ‘Not my will, but Thy will be done, Father.’ My dad’s letter shows how he believed that he was giving testimony by suffering persecution. This helped us all to understand the example of the Lord.”

“Dad believed that even though things were bad, and he was suffering, and that he didn’t see positive consequences from his actions, that there is a good God who will eventually win the battle,” adds Marketa, one of the Benda daughters. “God will eventually win, even though I may not see it in my life. So my suffering is not meaningless, because I am part of a greater battle that will be victorious in the end. That is what our father showed us by his life.”

“But father believed that the Communists would fall, and that he would live to see it happen,” says Patrik.

“That’s true,” says Kamila. “But he also had the conviction that to destroy the Communist regime was his mission in life. He was always talking with God and asking what is the right way. He always struggled to see the right values, and to live up to them.”

“This is something very important about my father,” says Marketa. “He believed that is was accountable before God, not before people. It didn’t matter to him when other people didn’t understand why he did the things he did. He acted in the sight of God. And you know, the Bible gave him strength, because it is full of stories of the prophets and others going beyond the border of what was comprehensible or understandable to people, for the sake of obeying the Lord.”

You see? Vaclav Benda believed that ultimately, good would triumph. Most of his fellow resisters did not expect communism to end in their lifetimes, though. That was all beside the point. For Vaclav Benda, and for the wife and children he left behind, the point was to remain faithful to God, come what may. The imprisoned professor and his Catholic family at home knew that their father was doing the only thing a faithful Christian can do, and that because of his fidelity, even if it cost him his own life, he would become an heir to the everlasting Kingdom in the next life. This is why his sacrifice had meaning in their eyes, and in his own eyes.

At one point during his imprisonment, the communists offered to release Dr. Benda if he would agree to leave Czechoslovakia with his wife and children, and never return. He thought about doing it. Who would have blamed him? He would get out of jail, the trial of his family — impoverished, fatherless, and socially marginalized — would be over, and his kids would enjoy a future of liberty and relative material prosperity in the West. Had he taken the deal, nobody could have blamed him. From my forthcoming book:

Kamila once received a letter from her husband in prison, in which he said that the government was talking about the possibility of setting him free early if he agreed to emigrate with his family to the West.

“I wrote back to tell him no, that he would be better off staying in prison to fight for what we believe is true,” she tells me.

Think of it: this woman was raising six children alone, in a communist totalitarian state. But she affirmed by her own willingness to sacrifice – and to sacrifice a materially more comfortable and politically free life for her children – for the greater good.

Which is to say, for God.

Of course the Bendas hoped that their family’s sacrifice would bring about political change. But that was not the main reason they gave themselves over to it. They did it because — well, watch the trailer for A Hidden Life below. Franz Jägerstätter’s basic reason was also theirs: the totalitarian state demanded a sacrifice that a true servant of Christ could not make. Somebody ought to make a movie of that family’s incredible story.

Alan Jacobs and I were texting this morning. I quote from that exchange with his permission. That’s me in blue:

Yes. The eyes of secular film critics aren’t the only ones blinded by modernity and its passions.

Below, the trailer for A Hidden Life. I am agonizing that it is not playing anywhere near me this weekend. It might be playing near you. If so, and you are interested in the subject matter, please go see it, and come back to tell us what you think:

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The Cascina San Benedetto Vision

I hear from some of you readers that you are weary of all the bad news on this blog, and would like some good news about what Christians and others are doing to resist this culture of decline. Well, here you go. I received the following letter, with lots of photos, from my Catholic friend Giovanni Zennaro, in Italy. He and his wife Alice, their little children (four of them — baby Zelia was born a couple of weeks ago), and a group of other young Catholic families are building the Benedict Option in a concrete way: the Cascina San Benedetto (St. Benedict House). Read on:

Dear Rod,

Only a few months ago, in late June 2019, I gave you an interview to present the project I’ve been working with my wife and some friends for over the past two years – to create a place of fraternal life for families inspired by the monastic life of St. Benedict, as it is better explained in our Manifesto on www.cascinasanbenedetto.it. A few days later Costanza Miriano – a well known Catholic blogger – published the same interview in Italian.

The effect of this interview has been enormous, and many people from Italy and the United States have asked us how they can participate in our project. Someone from the US told us he was waiting to be able to sell the house and then eventually move to Italy and could join us together with his whole family — now the house is in the process of being sold. Many families from various cities in Italy have visited us at our house in the countryside outside Milan – some of them are really interested in joining us and creating together the “monastery of families” we dream of. We also have met even some bishops and cardinals. A number of priests have come to celebrate Mass at our home for these community gatherings.

All this is beautiful, but it is not enough. We are realizing that it is not our good will alone that can maintain an experience of this kind. Organizing a Sunday gathering, with lunch in community, Mass and vespers… this is a beautiful thing, but the quotidian life is different. We want liturgical prayer to mark the rhythm of our ordinary days too. Young families, with young children and very demanding jobs, cannot do this – not alone, at any rate.

For this reason we are seriously considering living close to a Benedictine monastic community, specifically the one in Norcia – St. Benedict’s hometown – who have warmly supported this idea. Norcia is a very remote place, isolated from big cities and still suffering very much from the 2016 earthquake, and life there would be very difficult in many respects. But there we would see every day the example of people who choose in life to do one thing: Quaerere Deum. [Search For God — RD] Every day we could participate in the monastic liturgical prayer. The reality of a living monastery would be the main instrument for education in the faith: both for us and for our children.

We are giving ourselves a (rather short, actually) time to weigh the two hypotheses: whether to establish the community of families here outside Milan or near the monks in Norcia. Here are some pictures of what I experienced in recent weeks with our families and our (old and new) friends, both in Norcia – where we recently rented a house as a base camp for some trial periods – and at our home in the Brianza area, near Milan.

As you know, in Norcia the monks are building a new monastery after the earthquake. It is wonderful every time we return to Norcia, a few months after the previous time, to see each time a new bit of the monastery has been added.

The liturgy is a very beautiful thing to live for us and for our children. Contrary to what one might think, the children are very good at church when there is some solemnity to the celebration: Gregorian chant and the use of incense attract them, and the monks then explain to them that in these signs there God is, and also our search for Him.

Our house is located specifically in Legogne, a small mountain hamlet 15 minutes from the ancient town of Norcia. Less than 10 people live there presently, but it’s a beautiful place and we dream of reviving it with the presence of a small group of families and other lay people interested in joining us.

As soon as we arrived, the people of Legogne gave us the key to an ancient church dedicated to Santa Maria Assunta. The church has not been used for many years but could be the place where the community prays daily in the morning and evening, when we do not go down to the monastery.

During the days spent in Legogne, the monks came to visit us, to visit the church, and to bless our home.

 

A few days after returning to our house back here near Milan, in the place we started calling “Cascina San Benedetto”, we hosted a gathering of some of the families and friends of the project: a few of them had come to visit us in Norcia during the previous weeks, and for others it was the opportunity to know how the journey had gone thus far.

After the Angelus prayer, lunch together, and a time for Confession, Don Giorgio – the priest who was with us – used our bedroom as a sacristy and place to bless some new sacred vestments and prepare himself for the celebration of the Holy Mass, which we accompanied with some Gregorian chant.

The day after, some of us did a one-day pilgrimage in Loreto, to pray at the house of the Virgin Mary, entrusting our path to her, asking to be enlightened as to our next steps.

This is what we are currently living, as a strange group of lay Catholics looking for a life more shaped by prayer and the example of contemplative life. We are praying to understand in the coming months where should be the place for us to begin this kind of life in a more permanent way. I would like to ask you and your readers to do the same.

In Christ,

Giovanni

Readers, isn’t that amazing?! These young families — orthodox Catholic Millennials in Italy — are not just talking about the Benedict Option, they are building it. Read more about the St. Benedict House project at its English-language website (an Italian version is also there).

What can you do to help these visionary young Catholic families?

First, you can pray for them, and their success, and divine guidance.
Second, you can go to Italy to visit them, and find out more about their mission, and how you and your family and friends might participate in it. Write to Giovanni at mail – at – cascinasanbenedetto – dot – it to arrange a visit.
Finally, you can give them the financial support they need to launch successfully. Note well that they ideally want to move to a town close to Norcia, so they can be close to the Benedictine monastery in St. Benedict’s birthplace. Many rural regions of Italy are depopulating, and the Norcia area is no exception — especially since the great earthquake of 2016. The investment of human capital, and spiritual capital, that these young Christian families want to make in this forgotten region of empire is worth a financial investment, for you readers who sympathize with them, and have the money to support their mission. There’s a donate link on the Cascina San Benedetto website. 

Sure, I’m biased, because these are my friends. But I didn’t get to be friends with them until after The Benedict Option book came out, they read it, and felt inspired by its vision. We need to help each other, across borders, across oceans, and across ecclesial lines. Not everybody can give them something, nor can everybody go to Italy to visit them. But everybody can pray for them — and I know they would appreciate it. These are devout young people who are willing to sacrifice material prosperity to build strong Christian families in a post-Christian world. It’s so courageous and admirable. If they succeed, then there will be lessons not only for their fellow Catholics, but also for we Christians who are not Catholic, but who are united with them in prayer in trying to build something solid and lasting and countercultural for ourselves, our children, and our grandchildren, in a world that no longer values what — and Who — we love.

Here’s a selfie I took with Giovanni and his cherubic son Pietro in 2018, when I first visited his family, and met the core members of what would become Cascina San Benedetto:

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Why Boris Won — And How The GOP Might

Gang, I am behind on writing my book, so please forgive me for not responding to all your e-mails. I just can’t right now. I just saw Andrew Sullivan’s long analysis of the UK election results, though, and I want to commend it to you as the best thing you are likely to read on the meaning — for Britain, and for America — of the Tory landslide. Excerpts:

The British people, after giving [Jeremy Corbyn] the benefit of the doubt in 2017, turned on him. On his expansive, super-ambitious plan for massive investment in infrastructure and public services, they just didn’t believe the math. On his rancid long history of sympathizing with terrorists, they feared what he might do to the security services. On his anti-Semitism, they righteously humiliated the old codger.

More:

The Liberal Democrats collapsed for two core reasons. They epitomized the London liberal elites. A key promise was simply: We will revoke Brexit altogether, you dumbass voters. No second referendum, just a parliamentary program to nullify the referendum of 2016. Hard to think of a more elitist project than that. Then they embraced wokeness. In the last week of the campaign, their leader, Jo Swinson, got caught in long discussions about what she believes a woman is. She didn’t just lose the election, she lost her own seat. It is clearer and clearer to me that the wholesale adoption of critical race, gender, and queer theory on the left makes normal people wonder what on earth they’re talking about and which dictionary they are using. The white working classes are privileged? A woman can have a penis? In the end, the dogma is so crazy, and the language so bizarre, these natural left voters decided to listen to someone who does actually speak their language, even if in an absurdly plummy accent.

On Boris:

Then the real gamble: Instead of sticking to getting Brexit done in Parliament, he called an early election to give himself a clear mandate for it. By fighting on the genius and simple slogan “Get Brexit Done,” he exposed the deep divides on the left, unified the right, and knocked his opponents for six (if you will forgive a cricket metaphor). But just as important, he moved the party sharply left on austerity, spending on public services, tax cuts for the working poor, and a higher minimum wage. He outflanked the far right on Brexit and shamelessly echoed the left on economic policy.

This is Trumpism without Trump. A conservative future without an ineffective and polarizing nutjob at the heart of it. Johnson now has a mandate to enact this new Tory alignment, and he will be far more competent than Trump at it. Unlike Trump, he will stop E.U. mass migration, and pass a new immigration system, based on the Australian model. Unlike Trump, he will focus tax cuts on the working poor, not the decadent rich.

On implications for American politics:

What does this remarkable result mean for the U.S.? Here are some thoughts: Many will dismiss any lessons are applicable. They’ll say Britain is a very different place, Brexit is a unique issue, and Corbyn was exceptionally unpopular. There’s truth in all that. But take each point. Britain actually is very much like the U.S. right now. It too has become divided between liberal urban elites and everyone else, between nationalists and internationalists, between big cities and everywhere else, between those favoring a crackdown on new immigration and those who revel in open borders with 28 other countries. The polarization, tribalism, legislative gridlock: It’s uncanny how similar the places feel these days. And there’s a historical pattern in which Britain echoes the U.S. in political shifts: Thatcher and Reagan, George H.W. Bush and John Major, Blair and Clinton, Obama and Cameron, Brexit and Trump. I guess you can say this time it’s different. I suspect not.

And is Brexit that unique? Brexit was fueled by fears of mass immigration, globalized trade, cultural fragmentation, demographic shifts, and liberal overreach. So no, it’s by no means unique. It’s very much the same movement of left-behind people expressing their views on the same issues, who, tragically, put their trust in Trump. What we’ve seen is how tenacious a voting bloc that now is, which is why Trumpism is here to stay. If we could only get rid of the human cancer at the heart of it.

My fear is that the continuing presence of Trump will greatly diminish the possibility of a Trumpism-Without-Trump politics to coalesce among senior Republicans. If Trump wins a second term, it will be time for the GOP Congressional leadership to go against their own Establishment instincts, and give leadership roles to figures like Sen. Josh Hawley and the changing Sen. Marco Rubio, to allow them to lead this directionless president in ways his better instincts tell him to go, instead of in the direction of his worst instincts, and in the direction that the party’s donors want.

More Sully, spot on:

The political sweet spot in the next few years will be a combination of left economics and a celebration of the nation-state. Trump has bollixed it up, of course. He ran on Johnson’s platform but gave almost all his tax cuts to the extremely wealthy, while Johnson will cut taxes on the poor. Trump talks a big game on immigration but has been unable to get any real change in the system out of Congress. Johnson now has a big majority to pass a new immigration bill, with Parliament in his control, which makes the task much easier. Trump is flamingly incompetent and unable to understand his constitutional role. Boris will assemble a competent team, with Michael Gove as his CEO, and Dom Cummings as strategist.

If Johnson succeeds, he’ll have unveiled a new formula for the Western right: Make no apologies for your own country and culture; toughen immigration laws; increase public spending on the poor and on those who are “just about managing”; increase taxes on the very rich and redistribute to the poor; focus on manufacturing and new housing; ignore the woke; and fight climate change as the Tories are (or risk losing a generation of support).

Read it all. There’s much more. And think about it.

A reader of this blog, an American academic, told me this morning that his Facebook feed is full of agonized comments from UK academic colleagues, saying that they want to leave Britain, how could idiots like the Tory supporters be allowed to vote, etc. The reader said, “It never occurs to them to step back and think about why so many people hate and fear them.”

Along these lines, I was having lunch today with a local friend, a theologically and socially conservative Christian, a white guy who, like me, tends to vote Democratic in local elections — we talked about how we’d both voted for John Bel Edwards in the recent Louisiana governor’s race — and who can’t stand Donald Trump. We were talking about the British results, and how the pollsters missed the margin of the coming Tory blowout. My friend said (I paraphrase):

“Can you blame people for not answering pollsters’ questions? Everybody is told all the time that the things they believe, and the things they worry about, are backwards and bigoted. They have learned to keep it to themselves. It’s the same thing here. I hate Donald Trump, but I’m probably going to end up voting for him, because at least he doesn’t hate my sons. I want a good future for every child — black, Latino, white, all of them — but the Left thinks my sons are what’s wrong with the world. I would not admit this to a pollster, but yeah, I’m probably going to vote for Trump, and I’m not happy about it, but I feel like the Democrats these days don’t give me any choice but to vote defensively.”

Totally agree with this.

I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again: I have no idea why the Republicans are so damned silent on wokeness, including the transgender madness. No doubt about it, the American people have accepted gay marriage and gay rights, broadly. But the Left will not accept this victory in the culture war. They cannot help bouncing the rubble, and driving people farther than they are willing to go, or that they should have to go. It’s the elites — and not just academic elites. Every week I get at least two e-mails from readers sending me examples of transgender wokeness taking over their professions — especially big business. People hate this pronoun crap, but nobody dares to speak out against it, because they are afraid of being doxxed, cancelled, or at least marginalized in the workplace. Surely there is a big common-sense vote to be energized here. Boris Johnson is not a cultural conservative in any meaningful sense that I can see, but he’s not that lunatic Jo Swinson, and he’s not like these militant cultural Jacobins of the left-liberal elites that despise as bigots anyone and everyone who doesn’t affirm their rancid orthodoxies, and who want to persecute all dissenters. For example:

The gay left hates and wants to persecute orthodox Christians, however much good they do. And they’ve taken over the movement. https://t.co/5gQrz4LFrt via @nbcnews

— Andrew Sullivan (@sullydish) December 5, 2019

Boris (and Sully) style Toryism is better than nothing, isn’t it? As a general rule, in this emerging post-Christian social and political order, we conservative Christians had better not let the unachievable perfect be the enemy of the common-sense good enough.

UPDATE: A friend just texted to point out that Philip Blond saw all of this coming a decade ago. He sure did! Read Blond’s 2009 “Rise of the Red Tories” essay. Excerpt:

Taken together, such policies will help conservatives create a transformative red Tory manifesto. They would build a new economic and capital base that decentralises power and extends wealth and also makes a final break with the logic of monopoly and debt-financed capitalism. In doing so, Cameron can finally bring together the Tory tradition of Disraeli’s reform of capitalism with his own entirely justified desire to be a “social radical.” It would render the left superfluous and redefine Marx as just another dispossessor of the poor. Moreover it would recover the insights of 19th-century conservatives like Cobbett, Ruskin and Carlyle, ally them with Tawney and the distributism of Chesterton, Belloc and Skelton—all of who knew that, without something to trade, one cannot enter a market. Making markets truly free prevents corporate domination, but also extends ownership, prosperity and innovation across the whole of society. The task of recapitalising the poor is, therefore, the task of making the market work for the many, not the few. David Cameron doesn’t need to do any of this to win the next election. But, to be a great prime minister, he does.

Cameron didn’t do it. Maybe it couldn’t have been done back then. Times have changed. If I were Sen. Hawley, Sen. Rubio, or any GOP leader thinking like they seem to be thinking, I’d talk to Philip Blond.

UPDATE.2: Lo and behold, Philip Blond has written a First Things piece analyzing yesterday’s election results. Excerpts:

Two things together euthanized Labour support among the British working class: Jeremy Corbyn and Brexit. The Labour leader deeply offended the honor of the British working class. Here was a man who despised his own country, a man who couldn’t find anything good in our island story. Here was a man who consorted with Britain’s enemies, with terrorists, with Islamicists. Here was a man who fostered a metropolitan culture of self-hate, repudiation, and woke, upper-middle-class anti-Semitism. In addition, this was a man who sought control of the state so that he and his cadre could control and re-write the common norms of thought, belief, and behavior.

Compounding and concentrating all the above was the great postliberal political phenomenon which was and is Brexit. In the eyes of those who voted to leave, it was a vote against all that liberalism has wrought and all that liberalism has brought: a world of rampant social, economic, and cultural insecurity. A world where common values and societal cohesion are threatened by mass immigration and the possible import of hostile beliefs and values. A world where Britain’s rulers favor outsiders over insiders. A world where their values and lives are repudiated and laughed at by a graduate class that has in essence decided they need replacing, or at least coercing, by the language forms and sexual ideologies of the upper enlightened classes.

More:

Those who voted Conservatism for the first time yesterday do not want and will rightly reject any supply-side Thatcherite nonsense. For they know that under those auspices they will be abandoned once more to insecurity and deprivation. They have explicit demands on culture, on society, and on economics that cannot be met by liberalism.

Read it all. Blond says that the Tory Party are almost all economic liberals (= free market globalists), so they will have to all be traitors to what they believe if they are going to serve the interests and desires of the people whose support gave them such a mandate. I think this has a lot to do with why Trump has been such a disappointment: the GOP are all economic liberals, and while Trump has populist instincts on trade, and has been admirably tough with China, he did, in fact, hand the rich a big fat tax cut.

UPDATE.3: Holy crap on a crapstick! “Titiana McGrath” is a satirical account, but what she’s commenting on really happened:

I genuinely don’t understand how Jeremy Corbyn could have lost.

He announced his pronouns and everything. pic.twitter.com/sPu4NNF487

— Titania McGrath (@TitaniaMcGrath) December 13, 2019

The post Why Boris Won — And How The GOP Might appeared first on The American Conservative.

Boris Crushes Corbyn In Landslide

What a spectacular night for Boris Johnson and the Conservative Party! In the most important general election in modern British history, exit polling shows that Team Boris beat hapless Jeremy Corbyn and the Labour Party with astounding decisiveness. It’s the worst showing for Labour since the Second World War — and an unambiguous message from the British electorate that it wants Brexit done.

It’s simply breathtaking to watch so many constituencies in the North, the Midlands, and Wales that had been Labour since forever, going Tory. I’ve been watching the BBC’s live broadcast online all night, and the journalists and party people are staggered by it. One screwfaced Labour activist, Jon Lansman, said on the air tonight that the proposals of the party were actually successful. “Our policies did work,” he said. “They just didn’t work enough.”

Right.

Look at this, from the Financial Times‘s polling analyst:

a) They’re much closer to Tories than Labour on culture today

b) Brexit has activated the culture axis and suppressed the econ axis

c) They don’t like Corbyn

— John Burn-Murdoch (@jburnmurdoch) December 13, 2019

Watching the coverage for the past few hours, it has been very, very clear that this is mostly about people hating Corbyn and his far-left clique in charge of the party. One woman a BBC reporter spoke to on the street in London said that she has always voted Labour, and expects to vote Labour again in the future, but this time, she could not take the risk of voting for someone as radical as Corbyn. As I write this, I’m watching a shell-shocked Labour candidate who won re-election, but just barely, telling Andrew Neil that this is a total catastrophe for her party, and that it’s both down to Brexit and the distrust their own voters had for the Corbyn leadership.

Look at this pitiful statement by one of Corbyn’s inner circle:

Umm … you can’t fight for the many, luv, because the many voted Conservative, and most of you lot are out of a job.

So, what does this mean for Americans? At least since the Reagan-Thatcher era, British and American politics have traveled in roughly parallel paths. This has to be good news for the Republicans tonight, less than a year away from a presidential election, right?

Well, probably, but I want to be careful not to overinterpret it. A few thoughts.

Are there any Democratic presidential candidates as radical and as unpopular as Corbyn? Corbyn’s socialism is so far left that he makes Bernie Sanders’s socialism look quite tame. I do think that given the fact that Sanders is a real socialist, the Republicans will have a fairly easy chance painting him as too risky. But Bernie, crusty as he is, has a more likable personality than Corbyn. Elizabeth Warren might be easier for the Republicans to slot into the Corbyn role, both for her policies and her fussy librarian affect. Buttigieg and Biden seem more normal and likable, and harder to depict as far-left (by US standards), though the Democratic primary process really is pushing them all significantly farther to the left. One more thing: Boris is actually fairly likable, but Donald Trump isn’t. For what that’s worth.
A Conservative Party figure tonight said the new Boris Johnson coalition is made up of “Shire Tories” (rural Conservative voters) and the working class. I’m guessing for Trump, this would roughly mean the South and the working-class whites of the North, especially the Rust Belt. I don’t know UK politics well enough to discern if race is an issue there as it is in US politics. Is there any strong racial reason people of color in the UK would have to vote against the Tories? Non-whites are a much bigger part of the US electorate (38 percent) than the UK electorate (18 percent). This makes race a much bigger factor in US races, and a reason why the lessons from the UK for the 2020 US election may be limited.
The Tories are culturally closer to the working classes than Labour are. There’s no doubt that this is true for the Trump Republicans and the white working class — but our working class is more racially diverse. I think the Republicans in 2020 could do well to hammer away at how lunatic the Democrats are on sex and gender matters. The US is a much more tolerant and accepting country today than it has been, but I think a lot of people are still sick and tired of having Drag Queen Story Hour, genderfluidity, child drag queens, and Pride Year, and obsessing over “whiteness,” and cancel culture, up in their faces all the time. They just are afraid to say it.
I’m hearing that many in the UK media are so immersed in leftist politics and culture that they didn’t see this coming. I’m very confident that the same thing is true of the US media. I read the Times, which reports on transgender and gay topics as frequently as L’Osservatore Romano reports on new trends in clerical fashions. And I listen to NPR every time I get in the car, until I turn it off because I’m hearing yet another sob story about immigration … and I never hear a story about people like me, and people like those I know. We are invisible to these folks. The NYT, and the Washington Post, and NPR — they’re all run by and for urban liberals. Last Sunday, WNYC’s On The Media show brought on a lefty writer and blogger to explain “the rise of illiberalism among the conservative intelligentsia.” I’m sure he did fine, but truly, were there no conservatives capable of doing this?  We are all invisible to them, except as hate figures. Anyway,  look, these NYT clowns are just daring me to vote for Trump:

I’ll update this with more substantive analysis tomorrow, after the patterns start to come in. Goodnight from Lord Buckethead and all our friends at Election Central.

Lord Buckethead of the Monster Raving Loony Party is in the house! What superb people the British are. pic.twitter.com/ZUDHFfZpfp

— Rod Dreher (@roddreher) December 13, 2019

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