Rod Dreher's Blog, page 192

Fighting Russian Social Justice Warriors

Here’s a terrific essay by Gary Saul Morson on the moral significance of Russian literature, and in particular, of Alexander Solzhenitsyn’s writing. Excerpts:

Why is it, Solzhenitsyn asks, that Macbeth, Iago, and other Shakespearean evildoers stopped short at a dozen corpses, while Lenin and Stalin did in millions? The answer is that Macbeth and Iago “had no ideology.” Ideology makes the killer and torturer an agent of good, “so that he won’t hear reproaches and curses but will receive praise and honors.” Ideology never achieved such power and scale before the twentieth century.

Anyone can succumb to ideology. All it takes is a sense of one’s own moral superiority for being on the right side; a theory that purports to explain everything; and—this is crucial—a principled refusal to see things from the point of view of one’s opponents or victims, lest one be tainted by their evil viewpoint.

If we remember that totalitarians and terrorists think of themselves as warriors for justice, we can appreciate how good people can join them. [Emphasis mine — RD] Lev Kopelev, the model for Solzhenitsyn’s character Rubin, describes how, as a young man, he went to the countryside to help enforce the collectivization of agriculture. Bolshevik policy included the enforced starvation of several million peasants, and Kopelev describes how he was able to take morsels of food “from women and children with distended bellies, turning blue, still breathing but with vacant, lifeless eyes,” in the ardent conviction that he was building socialism. Other memoirs of this period also describe how a loyal communist at last awoke to what he (or she) did. In this way, the Soviet experience inspired a rebirth of conversion literature, and Solzhenitsyn’s Gulag, which details his own change from Bolshevik to Christian, is a prime example.

More:

Each conversion memoir reports that change was immensely hard. For one thing, as Arthur Koestler’s novel Darkness at Noon (1941) correctly divined, the Party was one’s purpose in life and constituted one’s whole family. Challenging it was as unthinkable as simultaneously renouncing one’s education and all one’s friends and relatives. For another, one was taught that Marxist theory was a hard science, and so rejecting it was like denying evolution. This science had purportedly proven that human sacrifice was as inevitable to saving humanity as surgical cutting is to an operation. To build communism for innumerable future generations of perfect people, the sacrifice of the relatively few, imperfect homunculi of the present was a small price to pay. For that matter, compared to the infinite future, every one alive would be a trivial number. In any case, as it was often phrased, the deaths were caused not by us but by History.

What is more, the people killed were class enemies, which meant that even if they had not committed counter-revolutionary crimes, they were potential criminals. Vasily Grossman, the first significant writer to report the Holocaust when he saw it unfolding on Nazi-occupied Soviet territory, was not unique in pointing out that the exact equivalent of the Nazi category of “race” was the Soviet category of “class.” Social class, like race, was inherited, not chosen, and could not be changed. In the newspaper Red Terror, Feliks Dzerzhinsky, the founder of the secret police, explained in 1918:

We are not fighting against single individuals. We are exterminating the bourgeoisie as a class. It is not necessary during the interrogation to look for evidence proving that the accused opposed the Soviets by word or action. The first question which you should ask him is what class does he belong to, what is his origin, his education and his profession. These are the questions which will determine the fate of the accused. Such is the sense and the essence of red terror.

Or, as one of Grossman’s characters observes, “the concept of innocence is a holdover from the Middle Ages.”

Morson has a brutal section in which he talks about the stone-cold evil of Bolshevik ethics. Here’s one more passage:

Thinking novelistically, Solzhenitsyn asks: how well does morality without God pass the test of Soviet experience? Every camp prisoner sooner or later faced a choice: whether or not to resolve to survive at any price. Do you take the food or shoes of a weaker prisoner? “This is the great fork of camp life. From this point the roads go to the right and to the left. . . . If you go to the right—you lose your life; and if you go to the left—you lose your conscience.” Memoirist after memoirist, including atheists like Evgeniya Ginzburg, report that those who denied anything beyond the material world were the first to choose survival. They may have insisted that high moral ideals do not require belief in God, but when it came down to it, morals grounded in nothing but one’s own conviction and reasoning, however cogent, proved woefully inadequate under experiential, rather than logical, pressure. In Shalamov’s Kolyma Tales—I regard these stories, which first became known in the late 1960s, as the greatest since Chekhov—a narrator observes: “The intellectual becomes a coward, and his own brain provides a ‘justification’ of his own actions. He can persuade himself of anything” as needed.

Among Gulag memoirists, even the atheists acknowledge that the only people who did not succumb morally were the believers. Which religion they professed did not seem to matter. Ginzburg describes how a group of semi-literate believers refused to go out to work on Easter Sunday. In the Siberian cold, they were made to stand barefoot on an ice-covered pond, where they continued to chant their prayers. Later that night, the rest of us argued about the believers’ behavior. “Was this fanaticism, or fortitude in defense of the rights of conscience? Were we to admire or regard them as mad? And, most troubling of all, should we have had the courage to act as they did?” The recognition that they would not would often transform people into believers.

Read the whole thing. It appears in New Criterion; I’m so grateful to that little magazine for publishing Morson that I’m going to buy a subscription.

I’m telling you, we have so much to learn from people who lived through godless, remorseless, utopia in power. As Morson recounts, the experience of the gulag made a religious believer out of Solzhenitsyn, such that in The Gulag Archipelago, the great man thanked prison “for being in my life.” We have to hope and pray that something like that doesn’t come to us here. But if it’s going to be stopped, it’s not going to be stopped on its own. A Catholic woman said to me the other day that a few years ago, in Boston, she and her husband were at a Latin mass, and the priest, in his homily, said days of persecution were coming. She told me, “We thought he was far out back then, but now, I can see what he was talking about.”

I was thinking as I was writing this post how we are going to help our kids form the kind of consciences that will be able to bear witness to the truth, in whatever form — soft or hard — that persecution takes. Just now, this e-mail came in from my friend Christopher Roberts, a Catholic theologian and deacon, and president of Martin Saints Classical High School, an independent Catholic school in suburban Philadelphia. With his permission, I post this excerpt of the message he sent to the parents in the school community today. The emphases below are in the original, but I would even more strongly emphasize the importance of not being sentimentalists about what’s happening today in our culture:

But there was another strand in the scriptures at Mass today, this one perhaps more squarely challenging to those of us who are adults, older folks like me and most of the people reading this email. Today’s other reading reminded us of our responsibilities.

This other reading was from the book of Maccabees. There we met Eleazar, a 90 year old Jew of great dignity, being held captive by the Seleucid empire. They torture him, trying to force him to eat pork. He resists, in large part because he did not want young people to think he had gone over to an alien religion.

Think of it: at 90 years old, he still has a mission in life. He knows that he is an elder, that the young are watching him, that the witness he gives and the things he does will shape the faith of the next generation.

Friends, as adult Catholics in this day and age, we need to hold fast like Eleazar. We need to make sure that we’re building a community of faith that can witness to young people about fidelity, even when it costs us, even when the rulers and culture of our day become more and more hostile to the faith.

Make no mistake: the beauty of Jesus is real, and his love will win. But at the same time, our culture is changing, and we cannot be sentimental about it. That is why we adults need to come together to build communities like Martin Saints, schools that are committed to fidelity, schools that are dogged and determined to shine the light of Christ in the darkness.

And as with Eleazar and Zacchaeus, if we’re honest, real fidelity is going to cost us something. When Zacchaeus came down from that tree, he changed his life, and shared his wealth with the poor.

So the question is: as with Eleazar, what is our responsibility to young people today? As with Zacchaeus, how should our encounter with Christ change us and guide us?

Perhaps you heard on the news this week about the new and diabolical television commercial by Sprite, or Chik-fil-A buckling to criticism of their Christian values. These are small things in a way – we’re not going to panic about a soda commercial with drag queens, or a fried chicken chain being cowardly about LGBT issues. 

But at the same time, we’ve got to be sober and alert. These are real indications of a changing and unfriendly culture. This is how the media tries to shape our children and their imaginations. This is how the background culture slowly tries to change what passes for normal and moral.

Friends, this is why we have Martin Saints. We need to build a community where young people encounter the beauty of Christ, in contrast to the propaganda for darkness that is vying for their attention.

We need to be as steadfast as Eleazar, laboring and sacrificing to pass the faith to the next generation. We need to seek the eyes of Christ like Zacchaeus, and it’s our job to cultivate this longing in our students and children.

Chris didn’t ask me to do this, but if you’re a Catholic who wants to direct your tithe to a Catholic organization that preaches and teaches the faith, full up, Martin Saints welcomes donations. There may well be a school like Martin Saints in your area. Please consider donating, or getting involved. At Sequitur Classical Academy, our little classical Christian school in Baton Rouge, we welcome the involvement of people in the community who don’t just want to sit back and watch things fall apart, but who want to form a generation capable of redeeming the time.

The post Fighting Russian Social Justice Warriors appeared first on The American Conservative.

Chick-Fil-A & Thomas More

An Evangelical reader in Texas (well, he used to be an Evangelical; now all I know for sure is that he’s a theologically conservative Protestant) writes:

Everything you said about Chick Fil A is exactly correct. The example of a powerful allegedly Christian business with tremendous revenue bending the knee and taking orders from LGBT activists . . . it’s just a devastating message to everyone else out there. It emboldens the persecutors of Christianity and weakens the resolve of ordinary people. As silly as it may sound, I feel like I have been stabbed in the back. I had friends texting me yesterday over this and everyone felt betrayed and a little sick. It is not because we thought Chick Fil A was holy or anything.

They were just a company minding their own business, doing the corporate Christian thing by making good food, expecting a lot of their employees, and giving money to good Christian organizations. We shouldn’t expect much from business corporations claiming some sort of connection to Christianity, but Chick Fil A did all you could really expect. And then they started getting bullied. And despite the fact that it was just words from people who weren’t their customers, despite the fact that their “activist” critics made themselves look deranged with their absurd theatrics, and despite the fact that CFA had a loyal customer base (does any company have the sort of fanatical brand loyalty that Chick Fil A had?) who stood by them, and despite the fact that they were in no financial danger at all, they rolled over.

Given that at bottom this is about what sort of marriage Christians recognize as legitimate, I cannot help but to compare Chick Fil A to Thomas More–and the comparison isn’t very favorable. Both quietly supported efforts to keep a marriage (or type of marriage) from being recognized that they thought was invalid. Both saw their cause lose. Both quietly accepted defeat and went about their business and did not try and stir up trouble. Yet neither was left alone, but compelled to publicly affirm the marriage. More was locked up. There are some great portrayals of Thomas More (A Man For All Seasons) and even Jeremy Northam’s performance in The Tudors. Northam’s version of More’s response to the Henry’s demand that he sign it is excellent. He protests that by remaining silent, he is in effect consenting to the public. “I do no harm, I say no harm, I think no harm and if that not be enough to keep a man alive, I long not to live.” Of course Henry was not satisfied with silent consent, he insisted upon on public and explicit affirmation.

There are differences of course. Chick Fil A is an organization, not a man. (In fact they are a multibillion dollar empire.) But More was locked up in prison and he refused to give an inch even in the face of death. A bunch of underemployed losers with nothing better to do than nurse imaginary grievances wrote nasty things on social media and Chick Fil A folded like a cheap suit.

Note two things: they have not yet publicly affirmed gay marriage, yet they have surrendered their conscience already by trying to appease the bullies. What this means is that there is blood in the water and the LGBT activists are not going to quit until Chick Fil A explicitly affirms the LGBT stance. CFA should have rather responded in More’s words: We do no harm, we say no harm, we think no harm and if that not be enough to keep a company in business, we long not to be.

The reader followed with this related e-mail:

I think that as powerful a witness to Christ that Evangelicals may have appeared to be in recent decades, they are on the verge of collapse. This expression of Christianity is coming apart in two major deviant streams based on class divisions. Working class Evangelicals are increasingly embracing something along the lines of the Prosperity Gospel (Joel Osteen is a good example) while middle class Evangelicals are running headlong into Moralistic Therapeutic Deism–a prosperity Gospel of psychological satisfaction for the materially comfortable. It saddens me to see Christianity reduced to little more than projection of class anxieties, but I suppose the temptation is always to make church into our own image.

As Evangelicals increasingly go to college (following general trends) and increasingly find themselves in the professional class, their faithfulness will wither. Atlanta, Nashville, Charlotte, Fort Worth, Oklahoma City–Evangelicals are finding work as professionals in the South and are entering the professional class. They are woefully unprepared and they will certainly adopt the values of the professional class. Just watch. Watch for the coming schism in the SBC and note which churches give in to the culture: it will be the urbane sophisticated churches near the cities experiencing economic growth.

Chick Fil A’s capitulation shows that the rot is in an advanced stage. As Saruman said to Gandalf, “The hour is later than you think.” I would warn you about two developments that seem benign but are in fact cancerous: the professional education many Evangelical women are getting in college, and the Enneagram.

If you don’t know about the Enneagram, consult your local Evangelical seller of essential oils/pyramid scheme woman under 40. The enneagram is supposedly a spiritual tool to help you understand your own sin, but it is bad news. What I see is young women getting more excited about their Enneagram number than Jesus. They go around in public extolling the benefits of the Enneagram, preaching the Gospel of the Enneagram. I have yet to put my finger on it, but it feeds this idea that everything is about me and my subjective fulfillment.

As to professional education, many good-hearted Evangelical women looking to serve are pursuing professional degrees such as Education, Childhood Development, Social Work, etc and as anyone who has read their MacIntyre knows, this is not value-neutral technique but applied ideology. This “expertise” is rotting churches because it embodies the evaluative outlook of liberal autonomy, not Christianity.

Thoughts? I don’t know enough about Evangelicalism to judge the accuracy of this reader’s criticism. I invite Evangelical readers to weigh in.

About Chick-fil-A, I know you liberals are laughing at us, drawing comparisons between Thomas More and a chicken shack. But you don’t understand the role that Chick-fil-A has played in our cultural imaginations. It is not just a symbol, but a condensed symbol, which this blog’s reader Raskolnik defined like this:

Back in the 60’s, the sociologist Mary Douglas came up with the idea of a “condensed symbol.” The idea is that certain practices or ideas can become a kind of shorthand for a whole worldview. She used the example of fasting on Fridays, which the Bog Irish (generally lowerclass Irish Catholics living in England) persisted in doing, despite the fact that their better-educated, generally-upperclass clergy kept telling them to give to the poor or do something else that better fit with secular humanist mores instead. Her point was that the Bog Irish kept fasting, not due to obdurate traditionalism, or some misplaced faith in the “magical” effectiveness of the practice, but because it functioned as a “condensed symbol”: fasting on Fridays was a shorthand way of signifying connection to the past, to one’s identity as Irish, as well as to a less secularized (or completely non-secular) vision of what religious practice was all about. It acquired an outsized importance because it connected systems of meaning.

For many religious and cultural conservatives, supporting Chick-fil-A worked in this way because the fast-food restaurant embodied resistance to progressive bullies, not only by not abandoning its charities, but by continuing to succeed by cheerfully providing good food and good service. Chick-fil-A was not what its enemies claimed it was — and neither, thought many of us, are we. The Salvation Army isn’t “anti-LGBT,” no matter what the progressives say. Chick-fil-A’s presence in the public retail square, and its raging success, was a symbol of defiance — defiance of bullies, and defiance of the toxic narrative they assert about Christians.

And now, it’s all gone. Chick-fil-A’s corporate management threw it all away. They will now discover that there is nothing they can do to placate LGBT activists. They are going to be shaken down until their teeth rattle. Good. They’ve brought it on themselves.

 

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Bill Barr’s Blindness — And Our Own

Last month, when Attorney General Bill Barr gave a speech at Notre Dame about religious liberty, I praised him for his take on the importance of religion to our Constitutional order, and for pointing fingers at those carrying out the “organized destruction” of religion’s place in the public square. I stand by that praise. But in his column today, taking on that speech, and a more recent one Barr delivered to the Federalist Society, about law and the presidency, Ross Douthat says the Attorney General is guilty of propping up Zombie Reaganism. Douthat writes:

What Barr’s speeches presuppose, basically, is … What if everything you believed before Trump, you can still believe today?

In the Notre Dame speech, this reassurance manifests itself in a restatement of the assumptions that have guided organized religious conservatism since the 1960s: that the chief threat to religious faith comes from secularizing elites; that the great moral debates of our time pit Christian rigorists on the right against moral relativists on the left; that religious conservatives and limited-government conservatives can be natural allies because the welfare state is an ersatz religious institution that crowds out private charity and churches.

Douthat goes on to say that Barr’s diagnosis is correct, but limited in important ways. He goes on:

But there’s no attempt in the speech to address the recent trends that complicate religious conservatism’s ’70s-era vision — even though those trends helped make Barr’s boss the president of the United States.

For instance, there’s no mention of the extent to which conservative lawyers already won a series of battles against the harder sort of secularism — even liberal jurisprudence today is less strictly secularist than in the ’70s — and it didn’t matter much to the cultural erosion of their faith.

There’s no mention of how much of that erosion has happened under administrations friendly to conservative Christianity, and therefore probably reflects internal weakness, division and scandal more than pressure from outside. [Emphasis mine — RD]

There’s no reckoning with the tension between the G.O.P.’s religious and libertarian wings, the clear support of many religious conservatives for the welfare state that official conservatism decries — or the extent to which Trump won the Republican nomination by running against the familiar critique of big government that Barr recycles in his speech.

That’s really true, and I wish I had caught that when I first wrote about Barr’s speech. After all, I wrote a book based in large part on the fact that the culture has changed so much that it’s simply not plausible to believe that if only we elect the right politicians, we can re-Christianize the public square. The dog that did not bark was the Christian churches in the fight to preserve traditional marriage. In France — secular France! — almost a million people turned out in Paris to protest (unsuccessfully) the proposed pro-LGBT changes in the law. In America, nothing. In 1993, hundreds of thousands of gay folks turned out on the Mall in Washington, DC, to demand pro-LGBT laws. I was there covering the story. They cared enough to demonstrate; we conservative Christians did not. We thought having the right opinions, and voting Republican, and donating to conservative Christian PACs, would be enough.

Meanwhile, we lost the culture. Don’t get me wrong, AG Barr’s diagnosis is correct, as far as it goes. There really are elites doing their best to demonize Christian belief. But if that’s the only diagnosis from the Right of our dire condition, it isn’t enough. As Douthat points out later in his piece, after he issues a similar, even stronger, critique of Barr’s speech on law and the imperial presidency, this rhetoric is the kind of thing that soothes conservative audiences — but doesn’t actually describe the world into which conservatives find themselves thrown in 2019.

Douthat points to Damon Linker’s critique of Barr’s Federalist Society speech, which Linker sees as a harbinger of future right-wing authoritarianism. Douthat is not quite buying it:

The other, which I’m drawn to by my own obsession with decadence, would emphasize futility instead. A conservatism that constantly reconverts itself to the worldview of the Reagan era isn’t poised to claim sweeping, authoritarian power, in the service of religious revolution or any other cause. It’s poised for repetition, gridlock and failure — ever-imagining itself seizing the initiative, but really letting itself be carried backward, a boat against the current, into the world of Bill Barr’s youth and past.

Douthat is consciously referring to the final line of The Great Gatsby:

Gatsby believed in the green light, the orgastic future that year by year recedes before us. It eluded us then, but that’s no matter—tomorrow we will run faster, stretch out our arms farther. . . . And one fine morning——

So we beat on, boats against the current, borne back ceaselessly into the past.

Douthat is saying that Barr’s two speeches are a form of willed optimism, of an old Reaganaut trying to convince himself and his listeners that it’s still 1980, and the Reagan-era verities still hold. Like Douthat, I am inclined to think of this in terms of decadence — decadence not in the vulgar understanding of the term (e.g., licentiousness), but decadence in the sense of having no new ideas, and being compelled therefore to repeat old ones for lack of anything useful to say. Anyway, read the whole thing. 

This is a problem on the Right, for sure. I think of the conservative Christians I know who are still captive to a more or less Reaganite view of the world, and who think that sending their kids to a Christian school, and attending a conservative Christian church, is sufficient to hold the line. They really do think that the line between good and evil is drawn between institutions and political parties.

I often return to this 1999 PBS Frontline episode, The Lost Children Of Rockdale County. My wife and I watched it when it was first aired, 20 years ago. Our firstborn child was not even one month old. It shocked us deeply. It made us vow that we would do everything we possibly could not to be parents like the Rockdale County moms and dads in this show. Here’s a transcript of the program, and here’s a link to a YouTube version.

The show takes an outbreak of syphilis among high schoolers in this upscale, politically conservative Atlanta suburb, and uses it to take a closer look at their lives. What they found, along with state health investigators, was a sexual free-for-all culture, abetted by the unwillingness of parents to pay close attention. From the transcript:

NARRATOR: There were lots of parties back then, anywhere that adults weren’t around. The kids would meet in empty homes all over Conyers, sometimes even in rented motel rooms. Kevin did not take part in their activities, but he knew about them.

KEVIN: There was a lot of sex going on then. Like, one girl would come in the group and she’d be passed around, or one guy would go in the girls’ group and get passed around.

INTERVIEWER: Passed around?

KEVIN: Yeah, they’d just- one guy would do it with her one night. The next night somebody else has her. The next night somebody else has her.

INTERVIEWER: Was this a game?

KEVIN: Pretty much.

NICOLE: There was a lot of sex then, about 16 years old- a lot of sex. We would fight. There was about four of the guys that drove BMWs and had everything, and those were- all the girls wanted to be with those guys, so we would all fight over them or do whatever. And then you’d have sex with them, so you’d be, like, “Yeah, I had sex with your man last night,” da, da, da, do. And that’s- I think that’s how the syphilis came about. It was everybody just having sex with everybody.

D.J.: Actually, I mean, it was a social thing, but it was more of an underground railroad thing. Everybody was secretively having sex with everybody, and everybody knew it. The teenagers knew it. But the parents never knew.

Prof. CLAIRE STERK: A lot of the adolescents had parents who worked, were at home alone, had parents who put in 40, 60, 80-hour work weeks and were doing that to insure that all the resources that they wanted to give to their children were available.

BETH ROSS, Dir. Counseling, Rockdale County Schools: The activities they were involved in, whether it would be sexual or otherwise, the majority of their behavior was taking place between right after school and right before parents came home from work, like between 3:00 and 7:00, and some of it late at night then, after midnight, after the parents would go to sleep.

NICOLE: Most of my friends’ parents were not the kind of parents that really cared. They cared what went on, but if it interfered with their lives they didn’t really- wouldn’t- they didn’t want to bother with it.

About halfway through the film, there’s a town meeting with the parents to discuss the crisis:

Dr. KATHLEEN TOOMEY: What was so extraordinary to me is these parents started looking for externally who to blame. “This has caused this,” “T.V. has caused that,” “External groups have caused this.” But few of them – none of them that I can recall – ever looked to themselves. And the minister turned to me and said, “They don’t see. It’s them. It’s the parents. They have done this. The kids don’t talk to them.”

What was extraordinary to me, a year after this outbreak, was here was a community in total denial about what happened.

NARRATOR: In the end, the syphilis outbreak had come and gone, leaving barely a ripple behind. But some believe that the community, by regarding the outbreak as an anomaly, had missed a larger point about all its kids.

CLAIRE STERK: I would say it’s very sad because there are so many lessons we could have learned from this. And part of me feels that we’re not picking up on all those lessons and still leave adolescents hanging there, forcing them to take care of themselves when we know that they’re not always able to do that.

WES BONNER, Pastor: They’re coming from middle class homes, upper middle class homes. They have so many things, you know, every convenience. They all have a cell phone, a pager, you know, anything that they need. But what they’re looking for is, you know, “Where’s the road? Where’s the path? I don’t see that. You know, everything’s so spread out. I don’t know, you know, where to go.”

The children of Rockdale County are now parents. I wonder how they’re raising their kids? I wonder what narrative they tell themselves about life in America, to allow themselves to sleep at night? I wonder if they’re #MAGA nostalgists, or if they’re Silicon Valley Soixante-Huitards who believe that if we just tear down more barriers, then we will finally reach utopia.

Everybody in America is a nostalgist. Because we are a decadent society.

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Why Chick-fil-A’s Surrender Matters

Sometimes a delicious chicken sandwich is just a delicious chicken sandwich. But in the case of Chick-fil-A’s capitulation to the progressive left, it matters precisely because whether it wanted to be or not, the fast-food giant became a massive culture war symbol.

I can well imagine that its corporate leadership just wanted to be done with all the hassle, and stick with selling grub, like all other fast food chains. Who can blame them? Chick-fil-A didn’t invite these years of disgusting, lying smears … but it handled them with grace, and kept on standing by its principles. People who patronized Chick-fil-A knew that the allegations were baseless, and that hating Chick-fil-A was a left-wing cult thing to do. Remember this crackpot New Yorker article from 2018, in which the writer freaked out about Chick-fil-A coming to New York City? Excerpt:

Defenders of Chick-fil-A point out that the company donates thousands of pounds of food to New York Common Pantry, and that its expansion creates jobs. The more fatalistic will add that hypocrisy is baked, or fried, into every consumer experience—that unbridled corporate power makes it impossible to bring your wallet in line with your morals. Still, there’s something especially distasteful about Chick-fil-A, which has sought to portray itself as better than other fast food: cleaner, gentler, and more ethical, with its poultry slightly healthier than the mystery meat of burgers. Its politics, its décor, and its commercial-evangelical messaging are inflected with this suburban piety.

Ewwww, suburban piety! That writer, Dan Piepenbring, lives in Brooklyn, according to the New Yorker. His piece was the epitome of a certain kind of puritanical preciousness we’ve come to expect from progressives. The fact that Chick-fil-A withstood this kind of garbage, and kept right on supporting its charities, brought the company a lot of admiration from pious suburbanites.

My wife and kids love Chick-fil-A, but I don’t go to it that often, because I’m not big on fried chicken. Still, it has been one of my favorite brands, in large part because it has succeeded smashingly — it is now the third-largest fast food retailer in the US — despite being the object of so much progressive hatred. Chick-fil-A showed that you could be faithful to traditional Christian values, and despite the scorn of the hateful Left, still succeed economically. The kind of people who write for The New Yorker might despise you, but the marketplace rewarded you for the good chicken and waffle fries you provided, and didn’t buy the smear that you are a hateful company.

For a lot of us, Chick-fil-A’s quiet, cheerful resistance was a model of how to hold on to your Christian values, in spite of progressive spite, and still succeed. Quality work and a good product will always win out, even over left-wing prejudice. It was possible to look at Chick-fil-A and draw that conclusion … until today.

It is no doubt true that Chick-fil-A’s stance, however unfairly characterized by LGBT activists and their allies, was hurting its ability to expand into the European market, and into more liberal markets in the US. But good grief, how much money does Chick-fil-A need to make, anyway? Last year, it took almost four KFC stores to make as much money as a single Chick-fil-A outlet.  If Chick-fil-A was suffering from a decline in business because of its corporate charitable giving, their move could be understandable. But this is a fabulously successful chain!

Only the company’s top decision-makers know why they did what they did, but I would bet money that this was not about markets, but about its executive leadership class getting tired of them and their spouses being stink-eyed by fellow rich and upper middle class peers at social gatherings. One of the most absurd shibboleths of American life is that business executives only care about the bottom line, and ultimately make decisions based only on profit and loss. In fact, these decisions are often driven by a sense of idealism. It might be mistaken idealism, but it’s still idealism. All of us want to be liked and admired by our peers. It’s only human. Never, ever underestimate how much it matters to elites to be thought well of by their own social class. Their social class now reveres LGBTs; this requires it to despise Christians and others whose beliefs, for whatever reason, fail the progressive purity test.

This is not news. Almost every day I hear from readers — in academia, in the corporate world, even in churches — who talk about the growing sense of menace in their workplaces from political correctness. More and more people are coming to understand that the Law of Merited Impossibility (“It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it”) really does describe an actual dynamic in American life when it comes to LGBT issues. For many conservative Christians, Chick-fil-A’s refusal to kowtow to the woke commissars was an inspiration. It was a small thing, maybe, but at least there was some major corporation that didn’t allow itself to be pushed around by these bullies.

And now that’s gone. The progressives took the biggest culture-war scalp of all today. Chick-fil-A is a privately held company, so it wasn’t facing a stockholder rebellion. It is growing extremely fast, and doing very well, even in a time when Americans have come to favor gay marriage and gay rights. If Chick-fil-A really had been guilty of the hatefulness its accusers claimed, it would not have seen its business decline as LGBT rights became more popular. In fact, it has seen nothing but growth.

But by abandoning the Salvation Army and other charities, Chick-fil-A’s corporate leadership signaled that it accepts the Left’s critique. The company is trying to dodge this charge, saying that it is merely refocusing its charitable giving priorities, to focus on education, fighting hunger, and fighting homelessness. The Salvation Army doesn’t have anything to do with education, but you will find no more effective and valiant fighters of hunger and homelessness than the faithful of the Salvation Army.

But those good men and women are not good enough for Chick-fil-A now. Chick-fil-A is embarrassed by them. If Chick-fil-A’s executives think they’re going to get a fair shake from progressives now, well, they’re going to learn otherwise — and they’re going to deserve what they get. Chick-fil-A is going to have to start paying de facto reparations to LGBT organizations in order to buy goodwill. They’ll do it, too, because they have already demonstrated that they can be pushed around.

Symbolically, this is a big deal for those who hold to what Christianity, Judaism, and Islam traditionally teach about homosexuality and related phenomena. It sends the signal that resistance is futile. If even Chick-fil-A — the company that takes its Christian values so seriously that it closes on Sunday, and despite that revenue loss, was still able to become the third-biggest fast food franchise in America — if even Chick-fil-A capitulates to the illiberal demands of LGBT activists, then what chance do you have in professional life, you and your religion, despised by power elites?

Progressives and LGBT activists have every reason to gloat today. By making Chick-fil-A surrender, they have demonstrated their power — and their illiberalism. If you think compromise is possible with these progressives, you are lying to yourself. They will not be happy until you and everyone like you are driven to the margins of public life — and even then, that won’t be enough for some of them. Understand that the real currency here is not money; it’s middle-class respectability. That will be denied to Christians who remain faithful to Biblical teachings on sex and sexuality. You had better get that learned right now, Christian. You aren’t going to be able to hide. You might be able to make a good living in your field — Chick-fil-A certainly has been — but you will always be an outsider.

Can you live with that? You had better be able to. As I wrote in The Benedict Option:

In the end, it comes down to what believers are willing to suffer for the faith. Are we ready to have our social capital devalued and lose professional status, including the possibility of accumulating wealth? Are we prepared to relocate to places far from the wealth and power of the cities of the empire, in search of a more religiously free way of life? It’s going to come to that for more and more of us. The time of testing is at hand.

“A lot of Christians see no difference between being faithfully Christian and being professionally and socially ambitious,” says a religious liberty activist. “That is ending.”

… A young Christian who dreams of being a lawyer or doctor might have to abandon that hope and enter a career in which she makes far less money than a lawyer or doctor would. An aspiring Christian academic might have to be happy with the smaller salary and lower prestige of teaching at a classical Christian high school.

A Christian family might be forced to sell or close a business rather than submit to state dictates. The Stormans family of Washington state faced this decision after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a state law requiring its pharmacy to sell pills the family considers abortifacient. Depending on the ultimate outcome of her legal fight, florist Barronelle Stutzman, who declined for conscience reasons to arrange flowers for a gay wedding, faces the same choice.

When that price needs to be paid, Benedict Option Christians should be ready to support one another economically—through offering jobs, patronizing businesses, professional networking, and so forth. This will not be a cure-all; the conversion of the public square into a politicized zone will be too far-reaching for orthodox Christian networks to employ or otherwise financially support all their economic refugees. But we will be able to help some.

Given how much Americans have come to rely on middle-class comfort, freedom, and stability, Christians will be sorely tempted to say or do anything asked of us to hold on to what we have. That is the way of spiritual death. When the Roman proconsul told Polycarp he would burn him at the stake if he didn’t worship the emperor, the elderly second-century bishop retorted that the proconsul threatened temporary fire, which was nothing compared with the fire of judgment that awaited the ungodly.

If Polycarp was willing to lose his life rather than deny his faith, how can we Christians today be unwilling to lose our jobs if put to the test? If Barronelle Stutzman is prepared to lose her business as the cost of Christian discipleship, how can we do anything less?

We will be able to choose courageously and correctly in the moment of trial only if we have prepared ourselves in every possible way. …

Sometimes a chicken sandwich is just a chicken sandwich. This is not one of those times.

The post Why Chick-fil-A’s Surrender Matters appeared first on The American Conservative.

Concerned Parents — Or Crypto-Kluckers?

The New York Times never misses a chance to demonize the standard hate figures in the progressive hierarchy. When I saw this headline the other day, I knew that the story would write itself:

Here is an excerpt:

There is a trick to getting to the front of the lines that clog sidewalks outside New York City’s top public high schools each fall.

Parents who pay $200 for a newsletter compiled by a local admissions consultant know that they should arrive hours ahead of the scheduled start time for school tours.

On a recent Tuesday, there were about a hundred mostly white parents queued up at 2:30 p.m. in the spitting rain outside of Beacon High School, some toting snacks and even a few folding chairs for the long wait. The doors of the highly selective, extremely popular school would not open for another two hours for the tour.

Parents and students who arrived at the actual start time were in for a surprise. The line of several thousand people had wrapped around itself, stretching for three midtown Manhattan blocks.

Tens of thousands of eligible families were not there at all.

Many New Yorkers cannot leave work in the middle of the afternoon, and some students surely did not know that the open house — or even the school — existed in the first place.

All of this is true, and important. But leave it to the Times to racialize it — somehow, white people are cheating! — when it fact this is mostly a story about class. But not just class: it’s also about culture. And, to backtrack a little bit on my stance, there is a racial element to it, though not, I would say, what the progressive headline writers at that newspaper think.

Reading the piece, I was reminded of a column I read a decade or so ago by Jim Schutze, the paleo-liberal city columnist for the Dallas Observer. Schutze couldn’t stand my right-wing self when I wrote for The Dallas Morning News, and he is not above taking cheap shots. But he’s a really good columnist on most days, even when I disagree with him (or was a good columnist; I quit following him after I moved away from Dallas in 2010, though I see that he’s still writing for the Observer; presumably he still has his powers intact).

Schutze wrote an Observer column back in the day, one that half an hour of searching online did not turn up, that struck me as the kind of truth that only a white liberal with skin in the game could have told. Schutze wrote a lot about the public school system in Dallas, which his children (or child; I don’t know if he had multiple) attended. After his youngest graduated and went to college, he felt free (he said) to write this particular column.

In it, if my memory is accurate, he said that even though white kids were a relatively small minority in Dallas County public schools, they had more power as an interest group than their numbers indicated. Why? Because white parents had a habit of showing up at meetings to advocate for their kids. Black and Hispanic parents, not so much. I couldn’t find that particular Schutze column (if one of you readers can, send it to me, and I’ll post it), but I did find this one that makes some of the same points in this 2008 piece about Dallas schools:

If Obama can be president, is it OK for white people to be assholes again?

And, of course, I don’t mean it exactly the way it sounds. I’m worried about the Dallas school system. What I really mean is that it may be time for upwardly mobile middle-class and working-class people of all ethnicities in the city to step forward and fight the good fight for old-fashioned academic elitism again.

More:

What Dallas needs is a lot of very demanding parents, people who are smart enough and mean enough to push past the bureaucracy, people whose interests are less compromised by money than the construction interests, with thick enough skins to be able to stand each other. And I know you will know what I mean when I say that, of all those qualities, the last one will be the most difficult to come by.

White people have to be jerks. Black people have to be jerks. Latinos have to be jerks. Everybody has to be able to get mad at everybody. And everybody has to get over it and join together to fight for educational excellence.

In the column that I can’t find, I seem to recall that he was much more blunt about squeaky wheels getting the grease. His argument, quite a sensible one, is that black and Hispanic parents need to start behaving more like white parents, regarding making educating their kids a priority, and staying on top of school officials.

Back to that Times story from last week:

“You only get one chance to figure out four years of your kid’s education,” said Alisa Kriegel, who joined Beacon’s line early after reading Ms. Stein’s newsletter. She waited with three other white mothers who met at their children’s TriBeCa middle school.

The four women had created an informal admissions support group, complete with a shared Google calendar, a robust group text and the promise of company on long waits to tour schools. “We’ve been going through hell,” Ms. Kriegel said.

“The Department of Education should be doing what Elissa Stein is doing, for free,” said Jill Taddeo, who was part of Ms. Kriegel’s crew.

OK, maybe so. But why aren’t other parents doing it for themselves? Parents who are willing to spend the time and effort (even more important than money) figuring out the system and advocating for their kids, will almost always see their kids get ahead of others. This is just the way the world works. You can’t be passive and expect the same results, and then assume that somehow, someone has gamed the system against you.

Don’t get me wrong: sometimes, systems are gamed against certain classes of people. But it bothers me when these parents who went out there to stand in a long line simply to take a tour of this selective public school — and there would be no penalty to applicants whose parents didn’t take the tour! —  are held out for shaming in the Times simply because they’re white. There was no reason at all for the Times to insert race into this story — but if it’s going to do that, then why not do a story on the way people in different ethnic cultures regard sacrificing for education? If the Times believes that there are not culturally specific habits related to education, they’re dreaming. I’ve talked to teachers, both black and white, in predominantly black (and black and Hispanic) school systems, and all of them have talked in depth about how little support they get from the parents of their minority students.

One older black woman who taught in an all-black public high school — mostly serving poor and working class black kids — told me that she took retirement because she got sick and tired of dealing with kids who wouldn’t do their homework, and parents who would only show up to meetings when they wanted to complain about teachers being unfair to their precious snowflake. I have been told more than a few stories like this, and not just about black kids.

As one of the commenters on the Times story wrote:

I am fascinated that those that see discrimination as the underlying problem in schools (and other parts of society) so easily dismiss the success of Asian immigrants. Asians start with dramatic disadvantages to the local Black population. Similarly to the Latino population, the majority start without an understanding of American culture and English is a second language. The Chinese woman in China town who speaks no English, can’t drive and lacks a high school diploma is far worse off that then [sic] a person born in the states. Yet, their success is dismissed and the system is called broken. Instead of changing the system, identify the success behaviors exhibited in successful communities and reinforce these characteristics. Today, everyone is a victim and all success or failure is the result of some other person. We need to rebalance the system so that personal responsibility is of equal weight to making the system more fair

In The Benedict Option, I wrote:

If you want to know how critical education is to cultural and religious survival, ask Jews. Rabbi Mark Gottlieb says, “Jews committed to traditional life put schooling above almost anything. There are families that will do just about anything short of bankrupting themselves to give their children an Orthodox Jewish education.” Christians have not been nearly as alert to the importance of education, and it’s time to change that.

Why look down on people of any religious or ethnic background who prioritize education, and are willing to sacrifice for their kids’ education? Why not see what they’re doing right, and work to make those practices more common in all ethnic and religious communities?

The post Concerned Parents — Or Crypto-Kluckers? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Chick-fil-A Surrenders To LGBT Bullies

This is a sad day. Even though Chick-fil-A is hugely profitable, it still capitulated to progressive bullies:

On Monday, Chick-fil-A announced it was making a major change to perhaps the most controversial part of the company: its charitable-giving arm.

In a press release, the company said it would “deepen its giving to a smaller number of organizations working exclusively in the areas of education, homelessness and hunger.” A Chick-fil-A representative confirmed that the company would no longer donate to the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army, two organizations that have been criticized by LGBTQ advocates.

“We made multiyear commitments to both organizations, and we fulfilled those obligations in 2018. Moving forward you will see that the Chick-fil-A Foundation will support the three specific initiatives of homelessness, hunger and education,” the representative said in a statement to Business Insider.

Chick-fil-A had previously worked with the groups to fund specific programs — such as summer camps — that work directly with underprivileged children.

I despise the LGBT bullies, but I’m not letting Chick-fil-A’s leadership off the hook. Here’s what cowards Chick-fil-A’s leadership are. In the same story, we read that Chick-fil-A stopped donations to some Christian-oriented charities in 2012, after it came under fire from LGBT activists:

However, the company continued its relationships with the Fellowship of Christian Athletes and the Salvation Army.

Rodney Bullard, the head of the Chick-fil-A Foundation, defended the donations in an interview with Business Insider earlier this year, saying they were “relevant and impactful in the community.”

“For us, that’s a much higher calling than any political or cultural war that’s being waged,” Bullard said.

Chick-fil-A has expanded significantly in recent years. By the end of 2018, Chick-fil-A was the third-largest chain in the US by sales, growing revenue by 16.7% in 2018 to reach nearly $10.5 billion, according to Nation’s Restaurant News. Only McDonald’s and Starbucks brought in more money in the US last year, and with vastly more restaurants.

So, let me get this straight: Chick-fil-A has managed to become the third-biggest fast-food chain in the US, despite earning so much progressive hatred for honoring what its leadership once claimed was fidelity to “a much higher calling.” But now, in 2019, as it sits near the summit of business success, Chick-fil-A suddenly finds that it can no longer afford to follow that “higher calling,” and is cutting the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes off.

I love Chick-fil-A, but it’s going to be a while before I go there again. This is nothing but gutless surrender.

And it’s a lesson to all of us. The LGBT lobby, and their progressive allies, will never, ever leave you alone. Never. You watch: within five years, Chick-fil-A will be embracing woke advertising campaigns. Just this morning, I was looking across the breakfast table at my kids’ cereal box, saw this rainbow, and wondered why Honey Nut Cheerios had gone gay.

Then I thought, “Wow, Pride has been so successful that I thought simply having a rainbow meant endorsing LGBT.” But then, I looked closer. See the lower right hand side? It’s the logo for the LGBT rights lobby Human Rights Campaign. It’s one of three charities to which General Mills encourages donations via Snapchat. Think about it: a charity to feed the hungry, a charity to care for abused animals, and a political organization fighting for gay rights. One of these things is not like the other. And hey, looking at this rainbow-bright cereal box, is there any doubt as to which charity General Mills prefers its Cheerios-eater donations to go?

Speaking of Woke Capitalism, you surely saw this Sprite commercial from Argentina, yes? You need to watch it:

A reader writes:

… the new Sprite ad – beyond amazingly evil. I could not believe what I saw, the Coca-Cola company has always seemed such an iconic part of American life, and now this, not that I’m surprised but the perversion in that ad was beyond the pale. When I opposed gay-marriage this wouldn’t have even have been a something I could have imagined for my worst opponents, and here it is a reality. It does everything but express the sexual abuse of children.

Then the news today on Drudge that Chik-fil-a will now abandon any charities that are perceived as ant-LGBT+, well, finally money talks, and as someone once said, you cannot serve two masters.

Ah, but that’s the amazing thing — money did not talk in the Chick-fil-A capitulation. Chick-fil-A’s business is booming! There’s something else going on here.

The reader adds (I’ve edited slightly to make it harder to identify him):

On a personal note, three students were nearly in my arms this last week, in tears, these middle schoolers I teach, are as lost and tossed as any adolescent in history, but there is such pain in our adults having their go at finding “happiness” at the expense of the children in their care. Children who are without Christ and without hope, and who are so hungry for the gospel and our schools are a place where that hunger is trying to be satisfied but the perversion in the Sprite ad and by the hatred that is growing for anything that is of God.

Yet, I see my children beginning to turn and question what they see in the world around them, and some parents are beginning to see it too.

I’ve decided to start a youth group in my church, which is mostly old people, but we do have a few families. The hardest thing to pierce in the hearts of these parents is their addiction to easy answers (Praise music, fun, sports, mission trips), nostalgia for the youth movement of the 1970-90’s that bore no real fruit, and their addiction to “activities”. We are talking a Benedict Option approach mixing the formation of the [small group seminar] and just reading the Bible and talking frankly about walking with Christ.

There is something moving in this world, profound evil is at work, but I do feel that something is stirring in the young, from their pain, their hurt, and their frustration at the adult world. Just pray that God uses it for good.

I’m so glad that reader identified the barrier of the “easy answers” culture that keeps so many Christian parents blind to the realities of the challenges facing us. I think that is the main obstacle to getting American Christians to take the Benedict Option seriously: because it says flat-out that there are no easy answers, and that in fact what we have all been doing for the past 30 years doesn’t work. That if we keep doing it, it’s guaranteed disaster.

I get lots of letters — I can’t even answer them all, so please forgive me if you’ve written, but I haven’t responded. I heard last week from a Catholic mom who told me that she and her husband put their kids into their local classical Christian school, which is non-denominational, because they saw more authentically Catholic content in that school’s curriculum than in the Catholic school where their kids had been going. She told me too that she was so discouraged by the culture within the diocesan school, in which parents behaved as if all they had to do was to send their kids to a Catholic school and keep writing that tuition check, and they had done their part.

She said that the student culture within that Catholic school was no different than you would see anywhere else. It was just as vulgar, sex-oriented, and smartphone-centered as at any other school. She and her husband asked themselves what kind of Catholic kids they could expect if they trusted their children to this factory. So, she said, they did the hard thing, and pulled them out of the diocesan schools, and put them into their local classical Christian school. She said they have been happy.

Think about that: these parents pulled their children out of a Catholic school, and put them into a non-denominational Christian school, for Catholic reasons. These are the times we live in. As someone whose kids are educated at a classical Christian school, and whose wife teaches there, let me be the first to say that there are no panaceas. But it’s possible to do better by our kids. The thing is, we’ve got to try. Look at what is arrayed against them — especially by popular and commercial culture. When not even a company as rich and powerful as Chick-fil-A finds the backbone to stand up to the beast, and to stick by its friends in the Salvation Army and the Fellowship of Christian Athletes — you know we are tiny Davids facing a mammoth Goliath.

But what else is there? Are you going to submit to these people? Are you going to let Woke Capitalists defeat you? If not, then you had better prepare to be a rebel.

Anyway, shame on you, Chick-fil-A. You had no reason to capitulate. You have successfully resisted the mob for years, and built a booming business in spite of it! But capitulate you did. I am reminded of the late Australian poet Les Murray’s lines against demonstrations. Murray was bullied badly in school, and never forgot it. Here, he’s not focusing on a specific cause; he’s just saying that he will not join any demonstration, at all, because having been the victim of a mob, he radically distrusts it:

Whatever class is your screen

I’m from several lower,

To your rigged fashions, I’m pariah.

Nothing a mob does is clean,

not at first, not when slowed to a media,

not when police. The first demos I saw,

before placards, were against me,

alone, for two years, with chants,

every day, with half-conciliatory

needling in between, and aloof

moral cowardice holding skirts away.

I learned your world order then.

Chick-fil-A’s surrender today reveals the true order of this world, and who holds the power in it, and who are the pariahs.

UPDATE:

I’m hearing from a friend who questions the narrative. Maybe CFA is just changing its giving priorities, and is not capitulating to progressive activists. I suppose that’s possible, but how is it that CFA abandons two of the charities that have been the exact targets of LGBT activists, without that being the reason? Assuming for the sake of argument that progressive activism had nothing to do with CFA’s move, the company would have to know that this move would be read widely as giving in to activists’ demands.

Besides, it seems clear from this story, featuring comments from CFA’s CEO Tim Tassopoulos, that the company is doing this for LGBT-related reasons:

The new giving structure moves away from the multiyear commitments Chick-fil-A had with the Salvation Army and the FCA and focuses on annual grants, which Tassopoulos said will be reviewed and assessed each year. Future partners could include faith-based and non-faith-based charities, but the company said none of the organizations have anti-LGBT positions. While the philanthropic shift is an acknowledgment that past giving has hurt the company’s brand, it hasn’t negatively impacted sales.

Chick-fil-A surpassed $1B in sales in 2001 and eclipsed the $5B mark in 2013, the year following Cathy’s statement on gay marriage. The chicken chain became the third-largest U.S. fast-food chain this year with $10.5B in sales, according to Nation’s Restaurant News data. Only McDonald’s and Starbucks bring in more revenue among fast-food chains. But after years of “taking it on the chin,” as a Chick-fil-A executive told Bisnow, the latest round of headlines was impossible to ignore. This time, it was impeding the company’s growth.

The San Antonio City Council was voting on an airport concessions contract in March when ThinkProgress reported that Chick-fil-A was still donating to anti-LGBT groups. The Chick-fil-A Foundation had donated $1.8M in 2017 to the Salvation Army, the FCA and the Paul Anderson Youth Home. A San Antonio city councilor brought up the article at the council meeting, and councilors voted in favor of the concessions contract — as long as a planned Chick-fil-A was dropped from the deal. The story had ripple effects. Delaware North, the concessions handler for Buffalo Niagara International Airport, also decided in March not to move ahead with plans for a Chick-fil-A at that airport, and officials in San Jose, California, announced they would not renew the chain’s lease at the airport when it runs out in 2026.

There was more. Just how much money does Chick-fil-A need to make to justify selling out its principles? Now we know.

This is how LGBT activists and allies roll — right over any opposition.

UPDATE.2: Reader Redbrick:

Most Christians are not blind….they are afraid….even afraid to admit they are afraid.

Respectability is the calling card of modern upper middle class life.

Tearing down civil war veterans statues or teaching kids about transgender sex changes would have been unthinkable 10 years ago. But now the Media/Academic complex has made it mainstream….to oppose it is to be a bigot/hater/bad-thinker……..so normal people give in. And they give in quick!

I went to Baylor. If i started posting Facebook stores about how the LGBT movement was becoming totalitarian most of the girls I knew in college would block me or unfriend me in a second.

And these are church going late 20s-early 30s women. Even my wife does not like me to complain about it.

You just can’t buy that kind of uniform political re-education. It’s amazing how quickly the elites can move the middle class to a complete new paradigm at nearly lightning speed.

p.s. They are now doing transsexual makeup tutorials at a small high school north of Houston around the Conroe area.

lol I mean you have to respect the Blitzkrieg style terror of it all. From an abomination to celebrated at an EAST TEXAS small town high school in no time flat. The rest of us are sitting around like the French soldiers at the Maginot line in June 1940 saying “what the heck just happened?” while the Germans are celebrating in Paris.

Wait, what? Trans makeup tutorials in Conroe? Sure enough, it’s true:

A Texas school district has come under fire for allowing a drag queen to teach makeup to a high school cosmetology class.

Though school administrators communicated the event, several parents were concerned that the event happened in the first place, according to local reports. The man, who dresses as a woman, goes by the name of Lynn Adonis-Deveaux, though his real name is unknown.

“I’ve got a problem when somebody with a false name enters a school and has advertised himself as an adult exotic dancer for men…Nobody would be allowed in a school under those circumstances,” said Conroe ISD trustee Dale Inman.

But teachers within the surrounding school district believe that parents shouldn’t have as loud of a voice when it comes to these issues.

In a post on Facebook, Willis ISD teacher Anthony Lane said, “I believe that raising a child is the responsibility of the community, and that parents should not have the final say. Let’s be honest, some of you don’t know what is best for your kids. I have learned a ton about what is best for [my son] Ethan from his teachers, not the other way around.

“Parents believe they should be able to storm the school in the name of political and religious beliefs if something happens in the school that they are morally opposed to. They forget that we make a promise to prepare their children to live in a diverse world. We are not required to protect the misguided, bigoted views of their parents.”

Emphasis mine.

The post Chick-fil-A Surrenders To LGBT Bullies appeared first on The American Conservative.

Boomers Partied — Xers Got The Hangover

Some friends of mine are going through a very hard time right now. A close relative, a college student, recently took LSD, perhaps with a few of his buddies (this is unclear), and, in a psychedelic fugue, jumped out of the window of a high-rise apartment. Somehow he survived the fall, but he has been in a coma for three weeks or so, and there is no telling if he will survive, and if he does, if he will ever be normal again.

This gave me strong second thoughts about a post I did earlier this year, after reading Michael Pollan’s latest book, in which I speculated about whether there is a Christian approach to psychedelic drugs. I still believe that this is a valid question, but I doubt now whether it is a prudent question, outside of strongly limited medical (and medically supervised) uses. That is to say, given what happened to that kid, I am thinking that the taboos against recreational use of psychedelics ought to be maintained, or strengthened.

Similarly, this past weekend I watched a great 2015 Russian movie called Leviathan. Set in a remote seaside village contemporary Russia, it’s the story of a Job figure. It is astonishing to see how the Russians in this film drink copious amounts of vodka as part of ordinary social life. But it’s not an exaggeration. A reader recommended not long ago this incredible nonfiction book, The Last Man In Russia — only $3.99 on Kindle now — which is a sort of biography of the late Orthodox priest Dmitry Dudko. Father Dmitry (who came to a very bad end, alas) dedicated much of his ministry to fighting chronic alcoholism, which he believed was destroying the Russian nation. The stories and statistics journalist Oliver Bullough discusses in his book really are staggering. “Between 1940 and 1980,” he writes, “Russian consumption of all alcoholic drinks increased eightfold.” Think about that. Russians were already known as heavy drinkers. Communism drove a nation without hope to drink itself to death.

I bring that up here not because I believe there is a strict equivalence between booze and LSD. There’s not — nobody drinks a beer or a glass of wine and loses his mind and jumps out a window. I bring it up because there is a tendency among some to glamorize heavy drinking — think of the nostalgia for the Rat Pack, and of Mad Men. In my generation, binge drinking wasn’t unusual; it was just a college Saturday night. Just yesterday my son and I were talking about Donald Trump, and how he doesn’t drink alcohol because he watched his brother die of alcoholism. I have a friend whose Mad Men-era parents threw fabulous parties, but whose alcoholism deeply hurt him and his siblings. As children, they had to clean up the empty empty liquor bottles and ashtrays from their parents’ boozy socializing, and try to find food for themselves. As he put it to me, everybody else knew his parents as fun-loving party people. “They had the parties, but we” — meaning him and his siblings — “got the hangover.”

Here’s a punch-in-the-gut essay in the Washington Post by a journalist named Mike Wise, who grew up in the 1960s as the child of two druggies, and who is sick to death of 1960s nostalgia, and pop culture’s new interest in psychedelics. He writes:

But what if you weren’t merely a child of the Sixties but just … a child? What if you couldn’t trust anyone to be your caregiver under 30? And what if, over time, you grew so sick and tired of hearing about how great it all had been that you just wanted to tell everyone to stop the revisionist history and shut the hell up?

More:

One afternoon, some 50 years ago, those lyrics [The Moody Blues’ “Nights In White Satin”] were accompanied by the siren of an ambulance, pulling up behind our faded, blue Buick station wagon in the driveway. Strangers in white uniforms stormed into my parents’ bedroom, where they pumped my mother’s stomach to rid her of whatever drugs she had overdosed on.

My father told me to take my 4-year-old sister into my room down the hall to amuse her, play a game, do anything to pretend Mom wasn’t OD’ing and needed to be revived.

I was almost 6.

I am 55 now, and even now I keep hearing these homespun yarns about 500,000 people gathering in Upstate New York on a dairy farm in August of 1969 for something so much grander and more majestic than just a rock festival.

But the “Woodstock” album still takes me to the same unsafe, dimly lit corner bedroom on Dogaway Drive, where it’s just me and my sister still terrified we will be all alone tomorrow.

And:

Virginia was the “good” babysitter. She had Coke-bottle glasses, made authentic tamales from her native Mexico and was the only woman beyond our grandmother and our aunt we felt safe with at that age. One night when my father came by her house to pick us up, Virginia asked Dad if he had hit my mother.

Feigning sleep on the couch the ways kids do, I still hear my father’s words — even though I would not understand them until years later.

“I only hit her once, slapping her in the bathroom,” he said. “I did it after she asked what it would be like if we gave the kids a little LSD.”

Whether he lied so he wouldn’t come across as a wife-beater or whether my mother’s nervous breakdown prevented her from being parental, I don’t know. All I knew was that Mom and Dad took drugs and the ambulance came to our house so Mom wouldn’t die.

Read it all. Wise is especially hard on LSD.

What kind of pain are indulgent parents today, living out their utopian fantasies of sexual experimentation, tearing down gender, and normalizing pot and acid, inflicting on their children? We will find out. You’d have thought that the failures of the Sixties would have taught us a lesson we would never forget, but the Boomers who became the custodians of historical memories of that era were nostalgists.

I wonder if anybody is going to be nostalgic for the era of 150 genders, and destroying the human personality to liberate it. As crazy as the Sixties druggies were, they weren’t that crazy.

As a chaser, here’s a link to Joan Didion’s seminal 1967 essay about hippie culture in San Francisco, “Slouching Towards Bethlehem.” Here’s how it opens:

The center was not holding. It was a country of bankruptcy notices and public-auction announcements and commonplace reports of casual killings and misplaced children and abandoned homes and vandals who misspelled even the four-letter words they scrawled. It was a country in which families routinely disappeared, trailing bad checks and repossession papers. Adolescents drifted from city to torn city, sloughing off both the past and the future as snakes shed their skins, children who were never taught and would never now learn the games that had held the society together. People were missing. Children were missing. Parents were missing. Those who were left behind filed desultory missing-persons reports, then moved on themselves.

It was not a country in open revolution. It was not a country under enemy siege. It was the United States of America in the year 1967, and the market was steady and the GNP high, and a great many articulate people seemed to have a sense of high social purpose, and it might have been a year of brave hopes and national promise, but it was not, and more and more people had the uneasy apprehension that it was not. All that seemed clear was that at some point we had aborted ourselves and butchered the job, and because nothing else seemed so relevant I decided to go to San Francisco. San Francisco was where the social hemorrhaging was showing up. San Francisco was where the missing children were gathering and calling themselves “hippies.” When I first went to San Francisco, I did not even know what I wanted to find out, and so I just stayed around awhile and made a few friends.

A sign on Haight Street, San Francisco:

Last Easter Day

My Christopher Robin wandered away.

He called April 10th

But he hasn’t called since

He said he was coming home

But he hasn’t shown.

If you see him on Haight

Please tell him not to wait

I need him now

I don’t care how

If he needs the bread

I’ll send it ahead.

If there’s hope

Please write me a note

If he’s still there

Tell him how much I care

Where he’s at I need to know

For I really love him so!

Deeply,

Marla

I am looking for somebody called Deadeye (all single names in this story are fictitious; full names are real), and I hear he is on the Street this afternoon doing a little business, so I keep an eye out for him and pretend to read the signs in the Psychedelic Shop on Haight Street when a kid, 16, 17, comes in and sits on the floor beside me.

“What are you looking for?” he says.

I say nothing much.

“I been out of my mind for three days,” he says. He tells me he’s been shooting crystal, which I pretty much know because he does not bother to keep his sleeves rolled down over the needle tracks. He came up from Los Angeles some number of weeks ago, he doesn’t remember what number, and now he’ll take off for New York, if he can find a ride. I show him a sign on the wall offering a ride to Chicago. He wonders where Chicago is. I ask where he comes from. “Here,” he says. I mean before here. “San Jose. Chula Vista, I dunno,” he says. “My mother’s in Chula Vista.”

A few days later I see him in Golden Gate Park. I ask if he has found a ride to New York. “I hear New York’s a bummer,” he says.

 

 

 

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Trump Loses Louisiana

Looks like big turnout in the cities pushed Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards to re-election over Republican Eddie Rispone, despite the fact that Donald Trump visited the state three times to campaign for Rispone. Here’s how the vote shook out by parish, according to The Lens NOLA:

You see that the population centers — New Orleans, Baton Rouge, and Shreveport — broke for Edwards. I bet we’ll find out that black voter turnout was very strong. I’m already seeing reports that urban turnout today was much higher than in the open primary.

I voted straight-ticket Republican, except for governor, where I did as I did four years ago, and voted for John Bel Edwards. Edwards is a veteran legislator who is pro-life (he signed the Heartbeat Bill earlier this year) and pro-gun rights. He’s got a record, and he’s got a platform. Rispone is a successful Baton Rouge businessman who has never held office, and, notably, if you check his website, he doesn’t have a platform. He ran entirely on personality: being a conservative Christian Republican businessman endorsed by Donald Trump.

And it wasn’t enough. Not even in red Louisiana, where the legislature is massively Republican.

Again, we will have to wait for the data to come in to know why Edwards won. I believe that the well-publicized Trump rallies certainly gigged the pro-Rispone vote, but in my case, they really turned me off. This especially, from a couple of days ago:

I’m sick of that crap. Just sick of it. Had JBE not been demonstrably pro-life, I might have sucked it up and gone with Rispone. But the fact that on the most important state issue for social conservatives like me, he’s on the right side — that made a decisive difference. Even so, had I voted for Rispone, it would have been in spite of Trump. Spend some time watching his braggart jackassery at the rallies. You’ll see.

He didn’t much talk about Rispone at his rallies. It was all about himself. From The Baton Rouge Advocate:

During his three 90-minute rallies, Trump spent most of the time attacking U.S. House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and House Intelligence Committee Chairman Adam Schiff, who heads the impeachment inquiry, and cataloging what he’s done while president.

What any of that has to do with governing the state of Louisiana is hard to see. Rispone and Trump also tried to tar Edwards with the left-wing “radical” label, which is just stupid. Whatever else JBE is, he’s not a left-wing radical. But that’s all Rispone had — that, and Trump.

The last time the GOP held both the governor’s mansion and the legislature, things did not go well for my state. These past four years — Democratic governor, Republican legislature — have been better. Note well: Rispone did not have a platform. He’s just a rich businessman who thought it was enough to make conservative noises, and associate himself with Donald Trump. Louisiana is not rich enough or stable enough to endure a pass-the-biscuits-Pappy governor who takes orders from his rich funder. Lane Grigsby, a wealthy Baton Rougean who gives generously to GOP politicians, bragged last month to a journalist, “I’m the kingmaker. I talk from the throne.”

Thing is, Grigsby was not just talking nonsense. Had Rispone won, given his political inexperience, Grigsby would have been the real power in the state.

So look, here’s a wild theory that’s totally plausible to me:

The final margin is likely to be very close. A Dem strategist I just spoke with credits LSU’s win vs. Alabama for voters’ satisfaction w/ direction of state & Edwards’s razor-thin victory. #LAGOV

— Dave Wasserman (@Redistrict) November 17, 2019

The LSU Tigers are undefeated this year, and the No. 1 team in the nation. It’s hard to overstate the good feeling here because of that, especially last weekend’s win over the Crimson Tide, our archenemy. If we had the chance to acclaim Coach Ed Orgeron dictator by divine right, we would. With things going well generally in the state, and with the Tigers doing better this year than they have since at least 2007, the last time LSU won a national championship, and on track to be the first undefeated team in Tigers history since the legendary 1958 squad. I know this won’t make sense to non-Southerners, but in a very close race like tonight’s gubernatorial contest, stuff like this matters.

The big national headline, though, is that Donald Trump couldn’t even beat the only Democratic governor in the Deep South, in a state that is heavily Republican. Don’t get cocky, national Democrats. Gov. Edwards, a pro-life Catholic, is not a liberal Democrat; had he been, he would have lost. Had he vetoed the heartbeat bill, he would have gone down. Louisiana is still a conservative state that’s going to vote for Trump in 2020. That said, given all the effort Trump spent trying to recapture the governor’s mansion in Louisiana for the GOP, his failure is meaningful.

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Beijing’s Uighur Policy: ‘Show No Mercy’

Here’s an incredible story from The New York Times, detailing, via leaked documents, particulars of the Chinese government’s ruthless persecution of Uighur Muslims. Excerpts:

Even as the government presented its efforts in Xinjiang to the public as benevolent and unexceptional, it discussed and organized a ruthless and extraordinary campaign in these internal communications. Senior party leaders are recorded ordering drastic and urgent action against extremist violence, including the mass detentions, and discussing the consequences with cool detachment.

Children saw their parents taken away, students wondered who would pay their tuition and crops could not be planted or harvested for lack of manpower, the reports noted. Yet officials were directed to tell people who complained to be grateful for the Communist Party’s help and stay quiet.

The leaked papers offer a striking picture of how the hidden machinery of the Chinese state carried out the country’s most far-reaching internment campaign since the Mao era. The key disclosures in the documents include:

•President Xi Jinping, the party chief, laid the groundwork for the crackdown in a series of speeches delivered in private to officials during and after a visit to Xinjiang in April 2014, just weeks after Uighur militants stabbed more than 150 people at a train station, killing 31. Mr. Xi called for an all-out “struggle against terrorism, infiltration and separatism” using the “organs of dictatorship,” and showing “absolutely no mercy.”

More:

The guide recommended increasingly firm replies telling the students that their relatives had been “infected” by the “virus” of Islamic radicalism and must be quarantined and cured. Even grandparents and family members who seemed too old to carry out violence could not be spared, officials were directed to say.

“If they don’t undergo study and training, they’ll never thoroughly and fully understand the dangers of religious extremism,” one answer said, citing the civil war in Syria and the rise of the Islamic State. “No matter what age, anyone who has been infected by religious extremism must undergo study.”

Students should be grateful that the authorities had taken their relatives away, the document said.

“Treasure this chance for free education that the party and government has provided to thoroughly eradicate erroneous thinking, and also learn Chinese and job skills,” one answer said. “This offers a great foundation for a happy life for your family.”

The authorities appear to be using a scoring system to determine who can be released from the camps: The document instructed officials to tell the students that their behavior could hurt their relatives’ scores, and to assess the daily behavior of the students and record their attendance at training sessions, meetings and other activities.

In the documents — which the Times says was leaked by an unnamed member of China’s leadership who is upset over the harshness of the crackdown — local authorities are instructed to tell students who ask if their imprisoned relatives had committed a crime, that no, they hadn’t, but their “thinking” had been “infected.”

The Times points out that Xi Jinping’s crackdown didn’t come from nowhere. It was catalyzed by violent, deadly attacks by Islamic militants in Xinjiang. But, says the Times, the attacks never came close to challenging Communist Party control of the region. Xi is using a sledgehammer to exterminate a gnat. No one could plausibly object to Beijing’s desire to protect the country from Islamic extremism, but its offensive is destroying any aspect of Muslim belief, practice, and culture there.

“Round up all those who need to be rounded up,” came the order. More:

The party had previously used the phrase — “ying shou jin shou” in Chinese — when demanding that officials be vigilant and comprehensive in collecting taxes or measuring harvests. Now it was being applied to humans in directives that ordered, with no mention of judicial procedures, the detention of anyone who displayed “symptoms” of religious radicalism or antigovernment views.

The authorities laid out dozens of such signs, including common behavior among devout Uighurs such as wearing long beards, giving up smoking or drinking, studying Arabic and praying outside mosques.

The story tells of a top Communist Party official in Xinjiang who was sacked by Beijing for being insufficiently merciless on the Uighurs:

But Mr. Wang’s greatest political sin was not revealed to the public. Instead, the authorities hid it in the internal report.

“He refused,” it said, “to round up everyone who should be rounded up.”

Read it all. 

Here’s a primer on the Uighur persecution from the BBC. Excerpt:

One Uighur man who was released from detention in 2015 (no-one appears to be freed these days) told us of a punishing schedule inside.

Ablet Tursun Tohti said those detained would be woken before dawn and would be forced to learn laws, and sing a song entitled Without the Communist Party, there can be no new China.

The BBC’s Newsnight programme also interviewed former prisoners who were able to leave for other countries. Here is what one of them, Omir, said:

“They wouldn’t let me sleep, they would hang me up for hours and would beat me. They had thick wooden and rubber batons, whips made from twisted wire, needles to pierce the skin, pliers for pulling out the nails. All these tools were displayed on the table in front of me, ready to use at any time. And I could hear other people screaming as well.”

The Soviets and their allies in Central Europe did similar things to Christians in their day. Don’t forget that. This is how Communists are. This is what Communism is.

Do you know that Beijing is disinterring bodies in Uighur cemeteries, and bulldozing the graveyards, so Uighurs will have no way to come remember their dead? Did you know that China has been formally accused of harvesting organs from Uighur prisoners and selling them?

Why is this not the biggest story in the world now? Why are the Muslim countries — the Arab ones, as well as Iran, Turkey, Pakistan, Indonesia — so silent about it? Is it because of that sweet, sweet Beijing cash? Or do they just not care? There was lots of agonizing in the West, and in the Western media, over Europe’s not taking in enough Syrian refugees, but aside from Jordan, how many Arab countries took any in? Concern over the treatment of Muslims only really seems to matter to Muslim governments when it can be used as a cudgel to bash the West.

Again, no one can plausibly begrudge Beijing its desire to stop Islamic extremism. But the Chinese Communists are eradicating an ancient culture and a religion from the face of the earth in Xinjiang province. And the world just stands by watching, because China is rich and powerful enough to get away with it.

UPDATE: In the comments, a reader points out that it’s not true that Muslim countries (other than Jordan) have not taken in refugees. I knew that Turkey had taken in most of them, and but unintentionally neglected to acknowledge that in my original post. I did not realize that other Islamic countries had taken in so many. I appreciate the correction. Here’s what the reader posted:

UAE: 100k estimated

Iraq: 252,983 (registered)

Egypt: 131,433 (registered), up to 500k estimated

Yemen: 100k estimated

Qatar: 55k

If you include non arab muslim majority countries:

Turkey: 3,614,108 (registered)

Lebanon: 929.624 (registered), 2.2 million estimated

excluding Germany that has 770k estimated and Sweden that has over 100k

most western countries has less than 50k and many less than 20k

Iran and Saudi’s lack of Syrian refugees is shameful, but for the most part the region is taking far more Syrians than the west is, especially considering the relative wealth of many of these countries to Europe. (It is worth noting Iran already has 1 to 2 million Afghan refugees.)

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Roger Scruton In His Glory

Last night in #Prague: tribute to Sir @Roger_Scruton for his support of Czechoslovak dissent before 1989. Awarded Medal of the Czech Senate. Under auspices of @ecrgroup, sponsored by @AlexandrVondra, Veronika @vrecionova, @EvzenTosenovsky + me. Very emotive + moving. pic.twitter.com/nQRm7XzDeQ

— Jan Zahradil (@ZahradilJan) November 16, 2019

Sir Roger has cancer, as you will recall. There was this tweet in response:

No words, only tears — and mad respect.

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