Rod Dreher's Blog, page 207

‘Vote For The Crook. It’s Important’

One of the more annoying aspects of right-wing discourse in the age of Trump is how many Trump partisans meet any criticism of their man with a sheep-like accusation of “Trump Derangement Syndrome” or “Orange Man Bad.” It’s the right-wing equivalent of Social Justice Warriors shrieking “Bigot!” whenever some speaks ill of a favored ethnic or sexual minority.

I think Trump is crooked, without question. Do I know for sure that he violated any laws? No. By “crooked,” I mean that he is not a man who cares about the law, either the legal code or the moral law. I think Bill Clinton was crooked too, by the way. I’m talking about the fundamental orientation of the man toward the law. Donald Trump is a disgrace.

But it still might be important to vote for him. Let me explain.

In Britain today, the Labour Party, in its annual conference, committed itself to extending voting rights to all foreign nationals living in the UK. That, and to open the borders for “free movement.” (I wrote about it here.) That means that if Labour takes power, it will effectively dissolve Britain as a nation.

Now, you may think that Tory PM Boris Johnson is a boob. But if you are any kind of British patriot, you have to do whatever it takes to keep Labour from taking power and dissolving the nation. That might mean a Liberal Democratic vote in the next general election, but it certainly means voting in whatever way stands the best chance of keeping Jeremy Corbyn out of No. 10 — even if it means voting for Boris Johnson.

This is an example of the principle of Vote For The Crook: It’s Important. To be clear, I don’t think Boris Johnson is a crook, but he is an example of a deeply flawed politician for whom one must vote to forestall a much worse fate than being governed by him.

This is something we Louisiana voters know from our 1991 governor’s race. It pitted former Gov. Edwin W. Edwards, who was legendarily crooked, against former and unrepentant Ku Klux Klan leader David Duke. The entire GOP leadership denounced Duke. Lots of people, conservatives included, put this sticker on their car (I did too):

It was funny, but the point was a serious one: Edwin Edwards (who eventually went to prison in the late 1990s for bribery) was plainly a crook, but his crookedness was less harmful to the state than a Duke governorship would be. The bumper sticker was an emblem of despair over the state of Louisiana’s politics. It’s hard to express strongly enough how much both conservatives and good-government liberals despised Edwin Edwards. He was, and remains, a clever man, but also a symbol of good ol’ boy Louisiana political corruption. To find oneself in a position to have to vote for EWE because that was the only way to keep a Klucker out of the governor’s mansion was revolting. I can remember to this day standing in the voting booth and pulling the lever for Edwards — something I never, ever imagined doing.

But it was important. Edwards won in a landslide. Even people who hated the man knew they had to put the interests of the common good over their personal revulsion.

As regular readers know, I did not vote in the 2016 presidential race (it didn’t matter; my state was heavily pro-Trump), but if I end up voting for Trump in 2020, it’ll be a VFTC:II thing.

It’s easy to see how Trump is analogous to EWE (though unlike Trump, EWE was quite competent). But how can the 2020 Democratic presidential candidates possibly be analogized in any way to David Duke?

In 1991, Duke’s political positions were mostly boilerplate Reagan conservatism. Had an ordinary Republican espoused them, it would have been no big deal. He probably would have won. But everybody knew that Duke was no ordinary Republican. He had been the most visible face of the Ku Klux Klan, and was remarkably polished. I’ve you’ve never seen him on television, check out this NBC News report on his political rise. He looked and sounded like a mainstream politician.

Nobody was fooled by the makeover. Duke’s supporters knew who he really was, and that’s why they backed him. (I know this because I argued with some of them.) Regular Republicans knew that supporting Duke would have meant mainstreaming a truly hateful figure, that voting for him would have meant much more than voting for a politician who professed a particular policy platform.

With EWE, you knew that you would get a corrupt Democrat. With David Duke, you knew that you would get somebody who reset the rules in a fundamental, and fundamentally bad, way. Of course this is why NeverTrump Republicans voted for Hillary. I was not a Never Trumper, and would not have voted for Hillary, period. But I respected Republicans who did out of principle. Trump really and truly was a threat to the system they valued. In some ways, that was what I liked about him — that he would blow things up. But I also was worried that given his character, he would also blow up some norms that needed to be preserved. Both things happened.

Anyway, the point is that it is conceivable that an electorate could be faced with a choice in which the crook (or the fool) is preferable to his opponent. We had that in Louisiana in 1991. We will face that again in 2020, with whoever the Democrats nominate to meet Trump.

There are a variety of reasons why conservatives might conclude that it’s important to vote for the crook in 2020. Here are mine.

Let’s start with this:

Joe Biden – Male convicts that identify as female will be housed with women.

“In prison the determination should be that your sexual identity is defined by what you say it is not what in fact the prison says it is.” pic.twitter.com/587Hn9ssvf

— TrumpSoldier (@DaveNYviii) September 21, 2019

https://platform.twitter.com/widgets.js

All the Democrats are very far to the left on LGBT issues. From The Advocate magazine, here’s a guide to where all the leading Democrats at the LGBT debate stand. They all support the Equality Act (as does Bernie Sanders), which, as I wrote here, would make it federal law for transgendered people to gain access to same-sex spaces. It’s a federal “Wax My Balls, Bigot” Act. Seriously, it is. We will not see the media talk much about how radical the Equality Act is, but voters should understand that this is what every one of the Democratic presidential candidates supports: female erasure. In fact, the Equality Act passed the Democratic House.

The Democratic Party is not just a party of gay rights. It is a party of radical transgender rights. It is a party that supports redefining the meaning of male and female in law. I can live with a crook in the White House before I can live with someone who would change the law in this way.

It is unavoidably the case that the expansion of LGBT rights comes at the cost of religious liberty for those believers and religious institutions that hold to traditional Christian, Jewish, and Islamic teaching on homosexuality (and, I suppose, transgenderism). In the years to come, we are going to see the tax-exempt status of “anti-LGBT” religious institutions challenged. We have already seen religious adoption agencies forced out of that ministry because they will not conform to the new mandate. The next decade or two is going to bring a concerted assault on religious liberty at every level except the right to worship. And the Democratic Party is on the wrong side of this issue.

Is Donald Trump a solid Christian? No, I don’t believe he is. Is he a morally upstanding man? Don’t make me laugh. But here’s the thing: Donald Trump does not hate people like me. The Democratic Party does, and will work to roll back my religious liberties, which are the most precious thing to me. Social and religious conservatives are going to have to depend for protection on federal judges who have strong First Amendment views regarding religious liberty in the years and decades to come. Those judges will not come from a Democratic president. They will come from a Republican president who has the ethics of a Corleone, without the style.

And let’s consider abortion. Here’s a report on courtroom testimony at a recent hearing regarding two undercover pro-life journalists who caught Planned Parenthood staffers and others on video saying grotesque things about their work. From the report about the court hearings:

Dr. Forrest Smith is on of the longest-practicing abortionists in the United States. He has performed anywhere from 30,000 to 50,000 abortions throughout his career, over the course of 50 years. Smith testified to the ways abortions performed at Planned Parenthood facilities put women at risk and were modified to result in live births.

Smith reviewed video footage presented at a Planned Parenthood conference, and testified that the methods demonstrated in the video would cause a “tumultuous labor” that would result in “fetal expulsion,” in which “the fetus comes out without any assistance from the abortion doctor, no instrumentation.”

Smith also testified that Planned Parenthood abortionists’ methods and drugs used allowed them to extract more intact organs, and that video evidence showed they used different standards in determining the death of a fetus.

Smith explained that just because an umbilical cord is clamped or the limbs are torn off, does not mean the fetus is dead. He said one Planned Parenthood abortionist who previously testified, Doe 9, “is having live births although she doesn’t know.” Doe 9 was relying on “lack of pulsation of the fetal cord” and “that’s not fetal demise,” he said.

The Democratic Party and all its presidential candidates are 100 percent in favor of abortion extremism. They support this kind of thing. Donald Trump, noted crook, does not. I think what he said to the Ukrainian president is probably an appalling abuse of power. But Donald Trump does not favor laws that allow for the extermination of unborn children and the harvesting of their body parts, including beating hearts.

What about immigration? Am I happy with the way Trump has handled the immigration issue? No. But unlike Elizabeth Warren, his likely 2020 rival, he is not for open borders. Biden has been evasive on his immigration stance, but I have every confidence that he will move to the far left. And so forth.

The Democrats are also on board with race-and-gender wokeness, which unfairly stigmatizes whites and males. Whatever his many flaws, Donald Trump doesn’t think people like me are bad because we are white and/or male.

Abortion. LGBT. Religious Liberty. Immigration. On all of these issues, the Democrats are truly terrible, from a socially conservative point of view. Donald Trump is not. That’s not a trivial difference. These are fundamental questions about life, liberty, and the future of our country.

Look, I can understand why some people who aren’t liberal nevertheless refuse to vote for Trump, because they believe that his crookedness is too great a threat to the Republic. I respect that. Honestly, I do. I go back and forth about this a lot in my own mind. But for many conservatives, what the Democrats stand for is epically awful, and what a Democratic president in these radicalizing times will mean is a game changer that’s in the same category as a 1991 vote for David Duke would have been in Louisiana.

A lot can happen between now and Election Day 2020, but come next fall, it might be vital to take a deep breath (and a slug of Early Times), and … to vote for the crook, because it’s important. It’s not necessary to pretend that Orange Man Good to justify a vote for him, either.

UPDATE: Let me put it like this. Donald Trump represents serious moral disorder. The Democratic Party and its standard-bearers also represent moral disorder, but of a much more serious kind. That’s the difference.

Remember Nina Burleigh? She’s the journalist who, back during the Clinton impeachment proceedings, said that she would fellate Clinton herself to thank him for preserving abortion rights. At the time, conservatives (including me) cited that as an example of how corrupt liberals were. Just look at that so-called feminist, carrying water for that dirtbag Bill Clinton! we said. Where are her morals now?

In retrospect, Burleigh was right. She understood that protecting what she, as a feminist, considers to be a primary good (abortion rights) required having to defend a president that she no doubt believed to have behaved wrongly towards Monica Lewinsky. Preserving abortion rights was a much more important feminist goal than holding Bill Clinton to account for his exploitation of Lewinsky and his betrayal of his wife.

Yeah, it was gross. But from a pro-choice feminist point of view, it was defensible. Trump has turned a lot of us into Nina Burleigh Conservatives. I am quite confident that if the next Democratic president is every bit as sleazy as Donald Trump is, that most Democrats would stand by him too, if the alternative is a setback in abortion rights, and other things that matter greatly to them.

To repeat: there are degrees of moral disorder. This corrupt world puts religious and social conservatives in a position now of having to defend some more primary moral goods by having to surrender secondary moral goods.

UPDATE.2: I’m struggling with this. I’m going to think out loud here for a minute.

I was just thinking about the people with whom I interacted when I was writing about the Catholic abuse scandal, back in the years 2002-06. The ones who really did believe that protecting the greater mission of the Catholic Church required turning a blind eye to gross corruption in the priesthood and episcopacy. I’ve always believed that that was a grave mistake, because the only power the Catholic Church has in the modern era is moral. Or to put it another way: the Catholic Church has no power these days; it has authority. If people come to believe that the Church’s leaders are morally bankrupt, then they (the leaders) will lose everything.

To what extent is it like that with politics, do you think? Presidents can exercise power even if they have reduced moral authority, because the Constitution grants them those powers. The president might be a dirtbag, but by the authority of his office, he can make things happen.

When Richard Nixon’s deeds came to light, he had to go, because we were still a country that connected moral and political authority. The Clinton ordeal really was a watershed. If he had a sense of shame, he would have resigned. But he toughed it out, and his political supporters stuck by him. So did most American voters. The pollster Whit Ayres said on NPR today that even though Donald Trump is unpopular, most Americans do not at this point support impeachment. He said that the GOP made a big mistake in the 1990s, thinking that when the American people had all the facts about Bill Clinton’s behavior, that they would support impeachment. They were wrong about that, and paid a price. Ayres says the numbers for Trump and impeachment today are where they were for Bill Clinton — something the Democrats should worry about.

The Bill Clinton impeachment debacle revealed that Americans had a high tolerance for misconduct in the Oval Office. Something had changed since 1974. Bill Clinton lied under oath. It was no longer thought to be disqualifying if a president lied under oath. America had moved on. You could call it progress, if you like. We had become a more cosmopolitan country, one with more sophisticated morals. Or you could call it decadence. Whatever it was, it was new. The new thing was not personally corrupt politicians; it was that we the people were now able to accept personal corruption in our presidents.

Again, we can accept it in political leaders but not in religious leaders, because the authority of religious leaders is almost wholly moral. I say “almost,” because true-believing members of traditional churches (e.g., Catholics, Orthodox, Anglicans) believe in the Augustinian principle of ex opere operato — which means, basically, that the religious authority works through the office, not the character of the man who holds the office. This is a very, very important principle, because it guarantees the faithful that the sacraments they receive from the hands of a corrupt bishop or priest are trustworthy, even if he is not.

Still, in our time, if churchmen are to have any authority beyond the minimal ability to offer the sacraments, they have to be perceived as men of high moral character. For better or worse, gone are the days when people respected the bishop because he was the bishop. That would have happened even if the abuse scandal had never occurred, simply because it is in the leveling nature of our culture today. But heaven knows the abuse scandal accelerated the decomposition of clerical authority.

A voter can say “President ____ may be corrupt, but he pursues policies I favor, whereas the opposition would pursue policies I consider harmful. Therefore, I’ll just clench my jaw and keep supporting President ___.” But it is much more difficult for a religious believer to say that about corrupt bishops. Their personal corruption eviscerates their moral authority, which is almost the only authority they have. You might not want your daughter to work for either Bill Clinton or Donald Trump, but you might be happy to have either man fighting for your political views in the public square. But nobody is going to want their son to work in any capacity for a Cardinal McCarrick figure.

Anyway, I’m belaboring the point. What concerns me is how far we can go in accepting moral corruption in our presidents without the office itself losing its legitimacy. Jonathan V. Last has a short but unsettling reflection on the possibility of impeaching Trump. He points out that nobody knows what impeaching Trump will bring. Trump has managed to destabilize the presidency in a time of peace and prosperity, says Last; imagine what would happen if one of America’s adversaries decided to test us in this unstable moment. More:

But there is a price to be paid for destabilizing the status quo—even when the net effect is positive. That price increases geometrically when you destabilize everything—both the good and the bad—all at once. Because that is not mere “destabilization.” It’s chaos.

In any stable system—no matter how sub-optimal it may be—there is a price for creating chaos.

We are about to start getting a look at the bill.

I would argue that the more significant destabilization took place when the Bush administration, and the entire American national security establishment, led this nation into a disastrous war of choice in Iraq under false pretenses. I would argue that the more significant destabilization occurred when the financial crash of 2008 happened … and few if any elites paid a price for it. Donald Trump didn’t do those things. Those things arguably created Donald Trump.

However, as Last points out, you can say the non-traditional (to speak as neutrally as possible) things Donald Trump has done as president are on balance for the good, because the status quo was harmful, but you also have to concede that even a corrupt status quo established order. People who think chaos is preferable to order have never lived in real chaos.

Our political system is not a religious system. People can just walk away from church if they lose faith in its leadership. You can’t just walk away from the United States of America. You may despise everything about the system, but if you violate its laws, you’re going to jail.

But.

The constitutional system of the United States of America is not made of stone. It is something that will stand as long as the people who live in this country believe in it. What happens when we arrive at a point where each half of the country believes that the political views and candidates of the other half are illegitimate?

What happens when the next war presents itself? Who will go to war behind a commander in chief that they despise? Not just dislike, but despise? At some point, a president who doesn’t have moral authority becomes a danger to the nation, because he delegitimizes its political institutions. Once that starts, how does it end?

 

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Labour Votes To Dissolve Britain

This is gibbering insanity … but it is now the official policy of the Labour Party:

Labour will give all foreign nationals living in the UK the right to vote in general elections after its annual conference approved the major policy change.

A motion passed by delegates at the gathering in Brighton will see the party adopt a promise to “extend equal rights to vote to all UK residents” if it wins power.

The change, which was first revealed by The Independent on Sunday, could have a major impact on future elections and any fresh Brexit referendum.

It was passed as part of a motion that also promised a Labour government would “campaign for free movement” and scrap restrictions on immigrants’ access to the NHS.

Currently only British, Irish and Commonwealth citizens are allowed to vote in general elections, while other foreign nationals living in Britain can vote only in local elections and European elections.

Labour will now campaign on a platform of extending the right to vote in general elections to anyone with residency rights in the UK, regardless of their nationality.

Think of it! Foreigners living in Britain would have the right to vote for members of Parliament, which is to say, for who governs Great Britain. And Labour will open the borders. The British people will lose sovereignty in their own country.

This is not a right-wing conspiracy theory. This is now the official policy of the Labour Party.

I don’t care how inept Boris Johnson may be, if you are a British patriot, you’d have to be crazy not to vote for him, or for whoever stands the best chance of keeping Labour out of power. This is an existential question. The future of the nation hangs on keeping Jeremy Corbyn out of No. 10.

UPDATE: A reader:

The Labour Party didn’t come to this conclusion from nowhere, if you ran a poll on this question it wouldn’t be shocking if nearly 50% of eligible voters supported a proposal like this.

And this WILL happen eventually, it’s going to be even more popular with the young. Those boomers that we all love to hate were the only reason the Brexit vote was successful.

People my age don’t believe in nation’s, they don’t believe in borders, and looking at the polls you showed in an earlier article, they don’t even believe in themselves.

My generation (raised by boomers) has been purely Disney-fied. If I asked a random collection of my friends more than half would say it’s racist to prevent a foreigner from voting in our election, after all they live here too.

In a quest for pure inclusion my generation will ensure the creation of a void, which will be filled by unsavory men from all sides.

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Where’s Rod Dreher Gonna Be?

Some information about my public appearances, not counting my lingering around Swagat, the best Indian restaurant in the known universe (meaning south Louisiana):

On SATURDAY SEPTEMBER 28, join me and other distinguished guests at St. Paul’s parish in Brockton, Mass. (Boston area), for its annual Festival Of Faith. I’ll be speaking at the traditionalist Anglican parish about the Benedict Option, and will hear responses from these gentlemen:

Please register for the conference here. It’s this coming Saturday, so hurry!

Next weekend, on SATURDAY OCTOBER 5, I will be at the Orthodox (OCA) cathedral in Miami, in dialogue about the Ben Op with Father Joseph Lucas. Event lasts from 10:30 am till 3pm; tickets are $10, with guests 18 and under free. Get your ticket here. 

What is this far-seeing, inspirational speaker looking at in the distance? That plate of vaca frita he’s going to eat at Versailles in Calle Ocho while he’s in town. Haven’t had that in that classic Calle Ocho haunt since I lived in south Florida in the mid-1990s.

From OCTOBER 10-12, Self will be at the Touchstone Conference 2019, in suburban Chicago, with a bunch of really smart people:

You have to come to this. You really do. Here’s how you get your tickets. 

Don’t delay!

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Rudy Giuliani, Our Secretary Of State

The official transcript of the phone call between President Trump and Ukraine’s President Zelensky is out now. Here’s the link. And here’s the key part:

Here’s what I think, on first read:

1. It’s deeply cringeworthy to read the Ukrainian president’s sucking-up to Trump. He’s practically begging to be Trump’s prison bride. On the other hand, he surely knows that flattery is the best way to get Trump to give you what you want. He’s lying back and thinking of Ukraine England.

2. Trump did pressure the Ukrainian president for a favor that would help him (Trump) against a domestic political opponent.

3. The way Trump did it — the language he used, and the context — is not going to move many, if any, Trump supporters away from their position. Trump may be an idiot (only an idiot pulls something like this), but he’s not stupid; he spoke in an indirect way that clearly conveyed his meaning, but that doesn’t sound like the rhetorical equivalent of a smoking gun. For people who were looking for the slightest shred of plausible deniability, this transcript gives it to them. It’s paper-thin, but I think it’s there. (To be clear, I don’t buy it personally, but I’m trying to think about how this is going to play politically.)

4. Interestingly, back in May, in comments to The New York Times, bigmouth Rudy Giuliani, Trump’s personal lawyer, said that he was going to Kiev to lobby for an opening of an investigation into the Bidens. From the story:

Mr. Giuliani’s plans create the remarkable scene of a lawyer for the president of the United States pressing a foreign government to pursue investigations that Mr. Trump’s allies hope could help him in his re-election campaign. And it comes after Mr. Trump spent more than half of his term facing questions about whether his 2016 campaign conspired with a foreign power.

“We’re not meddling in an election, we’re meddling in an investigation, which we have a right to do,” Mr. Giuliani said in an interview on Thursday when asked about the parallel to the special counsel’s inquiry.

“There’s nothing illegal about it,” he said. “Somebody could say it’s improper. And this isn’t foreign policy — I’m asking them to do an investigation that they’re doing already and that other people are telling them to stop. And I’m going to give them reasons why they shouldn’t stop it because that information will be very, very helpful to my client, and may turn out to be helpful to my government.”

Giuliani told the Times that Trump “basically knows what I’m doing, sure, as his lawyer.”

Think about how … irregular that is: the personal lawyer of the US president plans a trip to a foreign country, on the authority of the US president, to lobby that country’s new leadership to open an investigation that would have direct political impact on the 2020 US presidential election.

5. This is a serious, serious problem. Trump basically turned this portfolio over to his personal lawyer, and shoved aside US officials who have responsibility for planning and executing US foreign policy. From the Washington Post:

President Trump’s attempt to pressure the leader of Ukraine followed a months-long fight inside the administration that sidelined national security officials and empowered political loyalists — including the president’s personal lawyer, Rudolph W. Giuliani — to exploit the U.S. relationship with Kiev, current and former U.S. officials said.

The sequence, which began early this year, involved the abrupt removal of the U.S. ambassador to Ukraine, the circumvention of senior officials on the National Security Council, and the suspension of hundreds of millions of dollars of aid administered by the Defense and State departments — all as key officials from these agencies struggled to piece together Giuliani’s activities from news reports.

Several officials described tense meetings on Ukraine among national security officials at the White House leading up to the president’s phone call on July 25, sessions that led some participants to fear that Trump and those close to him appeared prepared to use U.S. leverage with the new leader of Ukraine for Trump’s political gain.

 

Giuliani cancelled the trip after the report, but he still met with a Ukrainian government representative in Madrid. The Post story goes on to say that Giuliani got the US Ambassador to Ukraine, a career State Department officer, sacked because he thought she was politically unreliable vis-a-vis Trump’s personal needs. The hijacking of the foreign policy process by the president’s personal lawyer, particularly involving a country that’s at the center of US-Russia tensions, caused problems within the establishment:

Then-national security adviser John Bolton was outraged by the outsourcing of a relationship with a country struggling to survive Russian aggression, officials said. But by then his standing with Trump was strained, and neither he nor his senior aides could get straight answers about Giuliani’s agenda or authority, officials said. Bolton declined to comment.

“We had the same visibility as anybody else — watching Giuliani on television,” a former senior official said. Officials at the U.S. Embassy in Kiev were similarly deprived of information, even as they faced questions from Ukrainians about whether Giuliani was a designated representative.

“The embassy didn’t know what to do with the outreach,” said Sen. Chris Murphy (D-Conn.), who traveled to Ukraine this month.

One more quote from the Post‘s Trump story:

“Rudy — he did all of this,” one U.S. official said. “This s—show that we’re in — it’s him injecting himself into the process.”

This is truly insane. The president is the captain of the ship of state. He’s allowing his buddy to take the wheel, and decide that it might be fun to sail to Jamaica, despite the fact that all the passengers are expecting to go to England. What I mean is this: whether or not Trump offered a quid pro quo to the Ukrainian president over the Biden investigation, it is becoming clear that he subverted the normal national security and foreign policy process for the sake of personal advantage, by making his personal lawyer a de facto US envoy.

If Trump gets away with this, it sets a terrible precedent. It is corrupt, anti-democratic, and dangerous for America. Trump is the Commander in Chief of the US military. A C-in-C who believes that he has no responsibility to follow the proper chain of command, and can use his power, and the mechanism of US government, to pursue his personal political vendettas — is that really what America is now? Is that the kind of America you want?

What Trump did in that phone call may or may not be legal. But what he did by outsourcing US foreign policy to his personal lawyer, and putting the screws to a foreign leader to act in a way that would help his 2020 re-election campaign, is radically destabilizing of the presidency, and the US government at its uppermost level.

I can live with President Pence. I don’t know that I can live with this.

UPDATE: Reader TOS:

The President should not demand foreign powers investigate his political rivals.

The President should not demand the Attorney General investigate his political rivals.

The President should not demand the Attorney General work with his personal lawyer and a foreign power to investigate his political rivals.

That’s the ballgame, folks. We’re done here.

I agree. I would also add that the President should not treat his private lawyer as an agent of the state.

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Life Without Meaning

A new CATO Institute survey looks into the views of Americans on economic questions. It contains a section on the kind of people who say they find meaning in their lives. These graphs tell the story:

Seems like being an atheist left-wing narcissist is not good for finding meaning in life.

It’s interesting to see that black Americans are by far and away more likely than any other ethnic group to strongly believe that their lives have meaning. This, despite the fact that they experience the most poverty, on average, of all the groups. Why is this, do you think? Religion? Family? And why do so few Latinos feel this way?

It strikes me as worrying that only a minority of Americans strongly believe that their lives have meaning and purpose. I suppose I’m not surprised, but it is worrying nonetheless. On the age demographic question, you might say that the young haven’t lived long enough to discover a strong sense of meaning and purpose. They are still finding their way. I wonder, though, if today’s young will ever find it in significant numbers, given that broader society denies that there is ultimate meaning and purpose in life. Saying that meaning and purpose is to be found in satisfying your individual desires is the same thing as saying it doesn’t exist at all. In The Benedict Option, I quoted this 2011 finding from sociologist Christian Smith, about Americans aged 18 to 23:

An astonishing 61 percent of the emerging adults had no moral problem at all with materialism and consumerism. An added 30 percent expressed some qualms but figured it was not worth worrying about. In this view, say Smith and his team, “all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”

Human beings cannot long live without meaning. As Douglas Murray writes in the introduction to his new book, The Madness of Crowds: Gender, Race, and Identity, the “great crowd derangement” of our time — he’s talking mostly about identity politics — is coming about because of a shared lack of meaning:

Even the origin of this condition [the “great crowd derangement”] is rarely acknowledged. This is the simple fact that we have been living through a period of more than a quarter of a century in which all our grand narratives have collapsed. One by one the narratives we had were refuted, became unpopular to defend or impossible to sustain. The explanations for our existence that used to be provided by religion went first, falling away from the nineteenth century onwards. The over the last century the secular hopes held out by all political ideologies began to follow in religion’s wake. In the latter part of the twentieth century we entered the postmodern era. An era which defined itself, and was defined, by its suspicion towards all grand narratives. However, as all schoolchildren learn, nature abhors a vacuum, and into the postmodern vacuum new ideas began to creep, with the intention of providing explanations and meanings of their own.

It was inevitable that some pitch would be made for the deserted ground. People in wealthy Western democracies today could not simply remain the first people in recorded history to have absolutely no explanation for what we are doing here, and no story to give life purpose. Whatever else they lacked, the grand narratives of the past at least gave life meaning. The question of what exactly we are meant to do now — other than get rich where we can and have whatever fun is on offer — was going to have to be answered by something.

That “something” is identity politics, which seek “to embed a new metaphysics into our societies: a new religion, if you will.”

We are now at the beginning of the post-Christian Wars of Religion. This will become clearer very soon, I’m afraid, especially as the older generations, whose sense of meaning was fixed by the old narratives, die off, and leave the field to those who were raised in the ruins of what was once a coherent and cohesive civilization.

 

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Trump Blackmailing Ukraine?

As ever with any Trump corruption story, we should wait to know more before drawing any firm conclusions. But this morning’s headline looks very bad:

President Trump personally ordered his staff to freeze more than $391 million in aid to Ukraine in the days before he pressed the new Ukrainian president to investigate the Democrats’ leading presidential candidate, two senior administration officials said Monday.

Mr. Trump issued his directive to Mick Mulvaney, the acting White House chief of staff, who conveyed it through the budget office to the Pentagon and the State Department, which were told only that the administration was looking at whether the spending was necessary, the officials said.

Note the sources: two senior administration officials. The aid was military aid, which the country needed to protect itself against Russia’s proxy fighters. This wasn’t just aid to build community centers; this was aid to buy weapons needed to protect a country at war.

If this is true, then the President of the United States took aid away vulnerable, strategically important country, and indicated to the new leader of that country that if he wanted that money back, it would be in his interest to open an investigation of POTUS’s domestic political rival.

If Trump did this, and if he is not held accountable for it, what’s to stop him from using US foreign policy to compel the governments of other dependent nations to act in the interests of the Trump Organization? Seriously, if Trump will operationalize US foreign policy to serve his domestic political interests, what’s to stop him from doing it to serve his personal business interests?

Ross Douthat makes a case that maybe Trump wants to be impeached, because he relishes the fight. More:

Second, Trump is happy to pit his overt abuses of power against the soft corruption of his foes. This is an aspect of Trumpism that the president’s critics find particularly infuriating — the way he attacks his rivals for being corrupt swamp creatures while being so much more nakedly compromised himself. But whether the subject is the Clinton Foundation’s influence-peddling or now the Biden family’s variation on that theme, Trump has always sold himself as the candidate of a more honest form of graft — presenting his open cynicism as preferable to carefully legal self-dealing, exquisitely laundered self-enrichment, the spirit of “hey, it’s totally normal for the vice president’s son to get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars by the Ukrainians or the Chinese so long as every disclosure form gets filled out and his dad doesn’t talk to him about the business.”

In fact this sort of elite seaminess is bad, but what Trump offers isn’t preferable: Hypocrisy is better than naked vice, soft corruption is better than the more open sort, and what the president appears to have done in leaning on the Ukrainian government is much worse than Hunter Biden’s overseas arrangements. But no one should be surprised that some voters in our age of mistrust and fragmentation and despair prefer the honest graft — some in Trump’s base, and also some in the ranks of the alienated and aggrieved middle, the peculiar Obama-Trump constituency.

Indeed, history is replete with “boss”-style politicians who got away with corruption because they were seen as the rough, effective alternative to a smug, hypocritical elite. Trump’s crucial political weakness is that unlike those bosses, he hasn’t delivered that much to many of his voters. But that may make him all the more eager to return to the politics of comparative corruption, to have the argument again about whether he’s more ethically challenged than the swamp. He may not win it, but at least he’s playing a part that he knows well.

That’s going to be the main Republican pushback against Trump impeachment over Ukraine: that the Biden family is guilty of a more socially acceptable form of it. But I agree with Douthat: as skeezy as drunkard failson Hunter Biden is, what Trump is said to have done is much worse.

Think about what this does to America’s reputation in the world. If Trump did what he appears to have done, other nations now have to be afraid that taking American aid makes them vulnerable to being pushed around by a corrupt American president, who will use it to force those nations to work for his domestic political goals. I have no problem with America expecting recipients of our foreign aid to give us something in return for our generosity. But that “something” ought to be in the interests of America, not of the American president.

This is a bright red line, it seems to me. Again: if Trump did this, and if he gets away with it, what kind of serious damage will that do to America’s credibility with other nations? And what is going to prevent Trump from using his power as head of the most powerful state on earth to bully other nations into undermining his domestic political opponents?

If — again, if — the allegations are verified, then the Republicans — both Washington lawmakers and voters — are going to have to decide if they are loyal to a man, or to the country and its interests. All who support Trump, whether eagerly or reluctantly, know that they have to overlook sleazy behavior. The question is, how much are they — well, we, because as much as I cannot stand Trump, I genuinely fear the Democrats in power — anyway, the question is how much are we willing to overlook before we say, “That’s enough. You’ve gone too far”?

Let the White House release the transcript of the phone call Trump had with the new Ukrainian president. Depending on what’s in it, I am leaning towards opening an impeachment inquiry. That’s not to say that the president should be impeached. But based on what we already know to be true, this is the most serious violation of norms (at least!) that he has yet done. This is not about what Trump might have done in the 2016 election, regarding Russia; this is what he allegedly has done and might yet do to involve foreign powers to affect the 2020 election.

This is a big deal. Right now, we know that Trump spoke to the Ukrainian president about investigating Biden. Trump has said so himself. And to repeat, this morning, two unnamed senior administration officials said that the president withheld nearly $400 million in military aid to Ukraine in advance of that phone call. Trump’s case that he did nothing wrong lies on his repeated statements yesterday that he had not explicitly offered Ukraine President Zelensky a quid pro quo. That’s pretty weak.

We need to see that transcript. And we need to be confident that it is a truthful and accurate account of what was said between Trump and Zelensky.

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‘I’ll Shoot You’ Update

You might have seen the post I did over the weekend (“‘I Will Shoot You!’ I Said”) in which I talked about the crisis on my block involving a large mentally ill man whose abusive treatment of his mother has occasioned at least ten visits by the sheriff’s office over the past few months. On Saturday afternoon, I sheltered her in my garage as he stood in the street screaming at her and cursing her. I had to threaten him with gun violence if he stepped onto my property in an effort to get to his mother. The deputies arrived and took him to jail.

Well, bad news. I had reached out to my city council member (who happens to live in this neighborhood) asking for help. He researched the problem, and directed me to the city-parish coroner’s office, which handles cases of people who are mentally ill and a danger to themselves and others. I drove out to the office to file a request for “protective custody” — that is, asking the city-parish to take the mentally ill man into its immediate care, as he is a danger to himself or others. As someone who had witnessed his threatening behavior, I have legal standing to do this.

When I got there and saw the form, I knew it was hopeless. I didn’t have vital information on the man (e.g., his date of birth, his Social Security number). Besides, the fact that he is already in custody — I assume he’s still in jail — means that protective custody is useless.

I talked with office staffers about the situation. “The mental health situation in Louisiana is really bad,” said one, meaning that there is little assistance for the mentally ill and their caregivers.

There is a shortage of beds in treatment facilities, and almost anything available to him is only short-term care. I asked if the regional state mental hospital is still open. Yes, they said, but there’s a severe shortage of space there.

The man’s mother told me on Saturday, “I’m the only thing between him and homelessness.” It sounds like she’s right.

From the information I gathered today, here’s what’s likely to happen: eventually, the man is going to be released from jail, or from any treatment facility that will have him. I don’t think he can come home; according to the deputy on Saturday, a judge forbade him from living there after he came before the court on charges of assaulting his mother earlier this summer. The mother told the deputy that she was not aware of this restriction. I’m not sure that she was being honest, but in any case, she’s aware now, and so are we. If I see him there again, I’m calling the cops.

But where can he go? That’s just it: there’s nowhere. He needs to be in a facility where he can be compelled to take the medication that keeps him stable. He only has problems when he’s off his meds. He doesn’t want to be on them at home, and a 60-year-old woman cannot force a 6’5″ man in his twenties to take pills he does not want to take.

This is how we get homeless people.

What a disgrace. That woman is suffering terribly. There are things she could be doing to resolve the situation that she’s not doing — this, based on things she told me (I won’t go into them in this space) — but mostly, she has no good options. And she’s heartbroken. She told us what a good person he was when he was younger, before the bipolar disorder, which runs in their family, struck. I told her on Saturday that the pot he smokes is not helping things. I said, “You let him smoke pot.” She replied, “I don’t let him do anything” — meaning that she has no control over him.

I don’t accept that. She could threaten to call the police on him for using drugs (he offered to sell drugs to a neighbor) — but if she made good on that threat, her mentally ill son would go to jail.

My primary job is to protect my family from this guy. Still, I cannot stand to see that poor woman suffer like this. It’s why I invited her to take sanctuary in my garage, and put myself between her and her deranged son. I told her after the cops took him away that she is not required to endure that kind of abuse from him as his mother. That he is going to end up killing her if she continues like this. Putting myself in her position, though, there’s a lot I would suffer from one of my mentally ill children if the only option was them going to live under a bridge.

What a cruel society we are. Between deinstitutionalization (a progressive cause) and underfunding mental health treatment, we leave people like this woman and her mentally ill son with nothing. And we leave this neighborhood with no protection either from his rages. I am afraid that the end of this story is going to be the mother severely injured or dead, and the son going to prison for the rest of his life, or the son shot dead by police in an attempt to protect the mom should their arguments spill out into the street again.

 

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Greta Thunberg Freaks Out

At the UN today, Greta Thunberg was two tics away from a gran mal seizure:

We’ve stolen her dreams? No, I think this poor girl’s parents have stolen her dreams. She’s right: she should be in school on the other side of the ocean — and should be receiving treatment for her anxiety disorder. Her suffering is on her mother, an opera singer, and her father, a stage actor.

If she keeps going like this, she’s going to grow up to be Sister Theodora, a spiritual child of the late Brother Theodore:

Sorry for being a smart aleck, but I have nothing against Thunberg. What I despise is the way this media culture of ours makes youths into gods. What makes Thunberg’s case particularly galling is when you learn about what this poor kid suffers from:

Thunberg began suffering from depression as a child, by her own admission, in part because she learned about climate change at age eight. She was later diagnosed with autism and obsessive compulsive disorder and gradually became despondent as she obsessed over her fear of climate change. She developed mutism and an eating disorder so severe that she once went two months without food, and she stopped going to school. Her only sibling, a sister named Beata, also suffers from Asperger’s and OCD, as well as ADHD.

She’s like a character in an Ingmar Bergman film. She reminds me of the Max von Sydow character in Bergman’s Winter Light, the seaman Jonas, who comes to the pastor with his terror that the Chinese will soon have the atomic bomb. Jonas is desperate for hope. The pastor has lost his faith, and tells Jonas that if God doesn’t exist, that makes suffering comprehensible. Jonas leaves — and (offscreen) blows his brains out. The key point in their exchange happens at around the 42:00 mark of this, the entire film.

The Thunberg girl is like Jonas. Her parents are like the faithless pastor. The child is autistic and has OCD. She’s terrified of what’s happening in the world. Her parents’ responsibility was not to turn her into a global activist, but to reassure her, to calm her, to let her know that she is safe and is loved.

As a parent myself, I realize how much my mom and dad shielded me from when I was a child. The world was a more dangerous place than I ever realized. But they gave me a childhood by protecting me from that knowledge, which came soon enough, as it must.

As much as I hate this whole Helen Lovejoy “won’t somebody please think of the children?” activism strategy, the thing is, I don’t think Thunberg is quite wrong about the global climate situation. What is unsettling, though, is to see her torment, and to hear her rigid militancy. She’s a fanatic, and doesn’t seem to grasp that the failure to solve this crisis is not a matter of callous leaders conspiring to steal little Greta’s childhood (a hysterical and manipulative charge, though heaven knows this kid is sincere). There’s the matter of people having the right to decide how they will be governed. In France, when Emmanuel Macron passed a new gas tax as a global warming measure, he sparked the Yellow Vests revolt, and had to back down. If Greta Thunberg wants to fight global warming, she ought to be fighting to prevent mass migration to Europe. And so forth.

In a report this morning, NPR quoted a climate researcher, Angel Hsu, praising communism for delivering results:

[NPR]: But Hsu says there’s a kind of silver lining. The Chinese government has been investing a lot in renewable energy, like solar and hydropower and electric public transit, and appears to be planning more. And because it’s not a democracy, the leaders who make climate promises can’t be voted out of office.

HSU: And I think what’s really encouraging about China is, when the leadership is committed to something, they can really follow through.

Watch Greta Thunberg. I have no doubt that she would be over the moon if the world were ruled by an authoritarian state unaccountable to the people.

Here’s the really unsettling part: what if the damage from global warming in decades to come becomes so grave that the only way for any nation to survive is through an authoritarian government?

UPDATE: Getting dragged on text by a very conservative friend who believes in global warming. Says that it’s really happening, that the climate is going to dwarf every other political issue by the end of our lifetimes. He says Greta is “right to be pissed,” and I shouldn’t be wound up about a “snotty teenager” saying it if it’s true. He cites the new study showing that North America has lost 29 percent of its birds since 1970.

I take his point, but let me say simply that I deeply hate the way this post-1960s culture fetishizes youth and enlists them in political activism. I would feel the same way about Greta Thunberg if she were a pro-life activist ranting about how her childhood was stolen by having to think about all the unborn children murdered by abortionists.

My friend said his “populist heart” cheers when he hears elites catching the kind of hell Thunberg gave world leaders today. The thing is, though, there is almost certainly not a country in the world where majorities could be persuaded to vote in the kind of measures that would make a serious difference in carbon emissions. This is not a matter of non-responsive elites failing to do the will of the people. The people say they’re concerned about global warming, but very few people are willing to accept a serious reduction in their own lifestyles over it. Not First World peoples accustomed to taking certain comforts (e.g, air conditioning) and liberties (such as those granted by cars) for granted, and not Third World peoples who endure grinding poverty, and who are now, for the first time in history, seeing the possibility of escaping it, as so many in China have done these last 30 years.

It’s perhaps the greatest tragedy in world history. But at this stage, I don’t see how we avoid it. Anyway, I think it’s a fair point to say that if I accept that this catastrophe is happening — and I do — that it’s not terribly logical to get my back up so high over a too-emphatic teenager’s freakout.

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Trump: A Banana Republican

This new piece in The New Yorker sums up what we know, and don’t yet know, about the Trump-Ukraine story. Excerpts:

On July 25th, Donald Trump and Volodymyr Zelensky, Ukraine’s newly elected President, talked by telephone. Afterward, the Ukrainian side released a summary of the conversation that seemed anodyne but, in hindsight, is telling: “Donald Trump is convinced that the new Ukrainian government will be able to quickly improve image of Ukraine, complete investigation of corruption cases, which inhibited the interaction between Ukraine and the USA.” Last week, we learned what those unnamed corruption cases are likely to be. Democrats are investigating whether Trump withheld American military aid to Ukraine in order to pressure Zelensky to dig up what Trump hoped would be damaging information about his top Democratic challenger, Joe Biden. The alleged threats by Trump, which are believed to be the focus of an unusual whistle-blower complaint by a U.S. intelligence official, have reignited calls from some Democrats for Trump’s impeachment.

Trump admitted over the weekend that in a phone conversation with Ukraine’s new president, he raised the question of Ukraine’s launching an investigation of Joe Biden. The New Yorker piece explains why this is an issue:

A decisive sticking point appears to be Trump’s political interest in resurfacing old allegations connected to the business dealings of Hunter Biden, Joe Biden’s son, in Ukraine. In April, 2014, Hunter accepted a lucrative seat on the board of Burisma, one of Ukraine’s largest natural-gas producers, a decision that Hunter said he made without consulting his father. (Biden and Hunter had an informal arrangement that predated Hunter’s work with Burisma and was designed to insulate Biden from questions about his son’s private dealings: Biden wouldn’t ask Hunter about his business activities, and Hunter wouldn’t tell his father about them.)

It was a dodgy arrangement, for sure. But so far, there is no evidence that Hunter Biden’s position affected his vice-president father’s relationship with Ukraine. Of course, Trump wants Ukraine to come up with evidence, or at least to open an official investigation into the matter. Just the existence of the investigation would be enough to hurt Joe Biden if he becomes the Democratic nominee for president.

To be clear: it’s not just speculation that Trump pressured the new Ukraine president to do this. Trump admitted it himself. The Ukrainian leadership is in a terrible position:

That is an unwelcome, and potentially dangerous, scenario for any Ukrainian President, given the degree to which Ukraine relies on American diplomatic, economic, and military assistance. It is not just the hundreds of millions of dollars in annual aid that Kiev depends on but also American loan guarantees, economic sanctions against Russia, and diplomatic involvement in negotiating an end to the war in the Donbass. With that conflict continuing to boil, American military training and weaponry remains vital to Ukraine’s military.

With a hostile Russia on its border, Ukraine can’t afford to alienate Trump. Trump knows this. It would be unconscionable for an American president to pressure a vulnerable country to do his dirty work regarding a domestic US presidential campaign, but then again, we know that Donald Trump has no conscience. I mean that as neutrally as possible. He is demonstrably amoral. He does what he wants to do, bound by nothing.

I see that some Republicans — e.g., Lindsey Graham — are calling for an investigation into Joe Biden’s supposed dealings with Ukraine. And to be fair, it’s not the case that Biden is completely in the clear on the matter, given the behavior of his drunkard son:

Biden bragged in 2018 that, as vice president, he threatened to withhold $1 billion in U.S. loan guarantees if Ukraine did not fire its top prosecutor Viktor Shokin. Trump lawyer Rudy Giuliani alleged for months that Biden wanted Shokin fired because Shokin reportedly undertook an anti-corruption investigation into Ukrainian oligarch Mykola Zlochevsky, the owner of Burisma Holdings, which employed Joe Biden’s lobbyist son Hunter as a board member starting in 2014, reportedly paying him $50,000 a month. The Biden camp countered that Shokin was widely seen by the U.S. and Europe — and inside Ukraine — as ineffective, corrupt, and a hindrance to Ukraine’s progress. Ukraine’s parliament removed Shokin in 2016.

Erick Erickson is correct to say that the Biden-Ukraine situation is more complicated than many people think. Hunter Biden — drunk, drug addict, and all-around hot mess — seems like a grifter who has tried to benefit from his father’s political power. That doesn’t make Joe Biden guilty of anything, but the Hunter affair muddies the waters significantly.

Whatever the truth in the Biden-Ukraine matter, are we conservatives really prepared to sign off on an American president using the threat of withholding US aid to another country to strongarm that country’s leadership into doing dirty work against that president’s domestic political opponents? Think about what a future Democratic president could do with this precedent.

I’m not going to say at this point that impeachment proceedings should begin. We have to know what, exactly, is in the whistleblower memo. Besides, I agree with Erick Erickson here:

Let me confess something that bothers me — I don’t trust the media to get the Trump-Ukraine story right. But I also don’t trust conservative media outlets to do anything other than provide spin.

— Erick Erickson (@EWErickson) September 23, 2019

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I do wish, though, that Republican Senators would act like they care more about the rule of law and their responsibility to protect basic American institutions than they do about protecting the exposed flank of Donald Trump.

But then, as Lindsey Graham reminded us in that unforgettable Kavanaugh hearing discourse, the Democrats will stop at nothing to get what they want. There is a reason why many conservatives who cannot stand Donald Trump saw the Kavanaugh hearings, and were reminded of what the alternative is.

Washington is such a sewer. I guess it always was, and we happen to live in a time when the veil has been lifted. It’s dangerous, though, when the virtues don’t mean anything, and it’s all openly about power, and nothing but. Today Trump showed up at the UN, and said, in this presser, “What Biden did is a disgrace. What his son did is a disgrace.” It’s genius — immoral genius, but genius. He’s fomenting, and taking advantage of, confusion, including the fact that nobody really knows who to trust. Do you trust the mainstream media to get this story right? I don’t. Do you trust the conservative media to do so? I don’t. But this really is a huge story: if it’s true, the President of the United States tried to strongarm the government of another country to help him out in a domestic political contest by investigating a rival. That’s a banana republic move.

UPDATE: David French explains why it’s important to stay focused on what Trump actually did in the Ukraine controversy — we don’t have all the details yet — and not get caught up in spinning for the president. Excerpt:

It’s urgent that Congress discover the truth of the matter, and the reason is plain: a president simply must not use the awesome power of his office to coerce or pressure a foreign government to investigate a domestic rival. The gravity of the sin is magnified when that rival is in a desperate, dependent position — in this case, locked in armed conflict with a vastly militarily superior foe. A Trump request would have been improper even if the call represented a conversation between equals, but it was not a conversation between equals.

Those words do not mean that Joe and Hunter Biden’s conduct in Ukraine was proper. The Bidens should answer questions about that conduct. And of course Trump can tweet about their conflicts of interest every hour of every day, if he chose. But there is a vast difference between campaigning for office by calling attention to your potential rival’s known controversies and utilizing the official duties and powers of the presidency to push for foreign investigations. How easy would it be for a nation desperate for American aid to make a “finding” of wrongdoing that assists the very man who controls the receipt of vital military aid?

This is true, and urgently so. Ukraine is in a desperate position, and cannot afford to alienate the American president. Based on what we already know to be true, Trump had no business bringing this up with the new president of Ukraine. That doesn’t mean it’s an impeachable offense (we would have to know more before making that determination), but this is a bright red line for a US president to cross. It doesn’t become any less severe if we discover that Joe and Hunter Biden engaged in dodgy behavior either. The Bidens’ fooling around with Ukraine is certainly fair game for Trump. But we cannot have a situation in which a US president more or less blackmails a foreign government dependent on US aid to involve itself in punishing that president’s domestic political rivals.

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Demons & The Porosity Of Consciousness

Sparked by my “Devils Of Manhattan” post last week, we’ve had some discussion here, theological and otherwise, about the phenomenology of demonic possession. The most interesting part of that discussion, at least to me, has to do with the mechanism of possession — that is, how evil spirits come to lodge in a person’s body.

Here is a story about that sort of thing that challenges both materialists and Christians. It’s the testimony of Kira Salak, an award-winning travel writer who told her account in two stories published in National Geographic Adventure. I’ve written about them both here before, but I’m going to re-up them in light of the interest in the topic.

In the first story, Salak writes in NGA, in 2006, about climbing Libya’s so-called “Ghost Mountain” — a peak deep in Libya’s interior, as part of a reporting trip to retract the steps of Hugh Clapperton, a Scottish explorer of the early 19th century. She is strictly warned by the local tribesmen not to go near the mountain, because there are demons there. As a cosmopolitan Westerner, she ignores this. More:

We rendezvous with the Tuareg man who is supposed to guide us for the next few days. But after Magdy explains our plans, he says, “To hell with you,” and walks off. This becomes the usual reaction whenever we approach any Tuareg about guiding us, and all because I want to visit to the “Devil’s Hill.” Kaff Jinoon. It’s a curious series of eroded sandstone peaks jutting from the dunes north of Ghat. Unique not only for its two obelisk-like spires, or horns, it’s also believed to be Grand Central Station for genies—spirits—from thousands of miles around. And not just any spirits, but those most wicked and base. The spirits of torturers and murderers. The spirits of those wrongly slain. Lost and sickened souls, attracted to the vortex that is Kaff Jinoon.

Clapperton and his companion Dr. Walter Oudney camped near the mountain, to the terror and vexation of their Tuareg guides who believed that small, red-bearded devils lived on it and caused mischief to all who passed, while spirits taking on the appearance old men materialized out of the night to terrify lone travelers. It was considered akin to suicide to go anywhere near the dreaded mountain. Wrote Clapperton, “[My guide] Hatita said he would not go up it for all the dollars in the world.” And it’s the same story now in Ghat, no Tuareg willing to travel with us to the mountain, no matter how much we’ll pay. They all have their own stories. There were the French tourists a few years back. They drove out to the mountain, thinking it’d be a good joke to climb it, but as soon as they got out of their car they were attacked by swarms of wasps. Libyan authorities found the group wandering along the road, unable to get in their vehicle, their faces covered with stings. And this, I’m told, was minor. Much worse has occurred. Like the Libyan soldier at a checkpoint near the mountain who saw something so awful, so terrifying, that he went into shock and couldn’t walk for a year. To this day, he is unable to speak of what he saw. And then there is the man who swore by Allah that he saw an entire army division march around the base of the mountain one night—a ghost army, that disappeared before his very eyes.

Jinoon and its vicinity has been considered a stomping ground for evil genies for centuries. Intrepid Arab traveler Ibn Battuta first wrote about this desert in the 14th century, describing it as a place “haunted by demons; if the [traveler] be alone, they make sport of him and disorder his mind, so that he loses his way and perishes.” Western explorers journeying in the Fezzan regarded such tales with derision, determined to see the mountain and to try to climb it. In 1822, Dr. Oudney made the first recorded attempt, reaching the mountain’s 4,500-foot-high saddle and returning without incident. “The Doctor has got a high reputation for courage for his visit to Jinoon,” Clapperton wrote about his friend’s successful climb, “and every newcomer is sure to ask him about it.” Later explorers were less successful. British adventurer John Richardson attempted the climb in 1853, getting lost on the descent and wandering in the desert, near-death, for two days. Robust German explorer Heinrich Barth had an almost identical experience in 1857. I am determined to see the place. I want to climb the mountain. we decide to go there unguided.

Nothing happens to Salak and her two companions on the mountain.

Or so she thinks. Later, in a National Geographic Adventure article about ayahuasca healing in Peru, under the influence of the drug, and under the guidance of a shaman, Salak learned that she became possessed on that mountain. More:

And then there is me, who a year ago came to Peru on a lark to take the “sacred spirit medicine,” ayahuasca, and get worked over by shamans. Little suspecting that I’d emerge from it feeling as if a waterlogged wool coat had been removed from my shoulders—literally feeling the burden of depression lifted—and thinking that there must be something to this crazy shamanism after all. The best therapeutic tools of Western psychology showed me only the tip of the iceberg; somehow, shamanism reached to the core.

And so I am back again.

I’ve told no one this time—especially not my family. I grew up among fundamentalist atheists who taught me that we’re all alone in the universe, the fleeting dramas of our lives culminating in a final, ignoble end: death. Nothing beyond that. It was not a prescription for happiness, yet, for the first couple decades of my life, I became prideful and arrogant about my atheism, believing that I was one of the rare few who had the courage to face life without the “crutches” of religion or, worse, such outrageous notions as shamanism. But for all of my overweening rationality, my world remained a dark, forbidding placebeyond my ability to control. And my mortality gaped at me mercilessly.

Lisa shakes me from my reveries, asking why I’ve come back to take another tour with the shamans.

“I’ve got some more work to do,” I say. Hers is a complicated question to answer. And especially personal. Lord knows I didn’t have to come back. I could have been content with the results of my last visit: no more morbid desires to die. Waking up one morning in a hut in the sultry jungles of Peru, desiring only to live.

Still, even after those victories I knew there were some stubborn enemies hiding out in my psyche: Fear and Shame. They were taking potshots at my newfound joy, ambushing my successes. How do you describe what it’s like to want love from another but to be terrified of it at the same time? To want good things to happen to you, while some disjointed part of you believes that you don’t deserve them? To look in a mirror and see only imperfections? This was the meat and potatoes of my several years of therapy. Expensive therapy. Who did what—when—why. The constant excavations of memory. The sleuth-work. Patching together theory after theory. Rational-emotive behavioral therapy. Gestalt therapy. Humanistic therapy. Biofeedback. Positive affirmations. I am a beautiful person. I deserve the best in life.

Then, there’s the impatience. Thirty-three years old already, for chrissakes. And in all that time, after all that therapy, only one thing worked on my depression—an ayahuasca “cleansing” with Amazonian shamans.

Hamilton is her shaman. She ingests the drug. Then:

“You’re seeing with your third eye,” one of the apprentices explains. Also known in Eastern spiritual traditions as the sixth chakra, the third eye supposedly allows for connection with other dimensions. And what if I am actually seeing two worlds at once? It seems too incredible, and I close my eyes to limit the confusion. Fantastical worlds glide by, composed of ever-shifting geometrical forms and textures. Colors seem to be the nature of these views; a dazzling and dizzying display of every conceivable hue blending and parting in kaleidoscopic brilliance. But then the colors vanish all at once as if a curtain has been pulled down. Blackness. Everywhere.

Dark creatures sail by. Tangles of long, hissing serpents. Dragons spitting fire. Screaming, humanlike forms. For a bunch of hallucinations, they seem terrifyingly real. An average ayahuasca ceremony lasts about four to five hours. But in ayahuasca space—where time, linear thought, and the rules of three-dimensional reality no longer apply—four to five hours of sheer darkness and terror can feel like a lifetime. My heartbeat soars; it’s hard to breathe. But I have done this before. I remind myself that what I’m experiencing now is my fear taking symbolic form through the ayahuasca. Fear that I have lived with my entire life and that needs to be released.

Hamilton explains it this way: Everyone has an energetic body run by an inextinguishable life force. In Eastern traditions, this force, known as chi or prana, is manipulated through such things as acupuncture or yoga to run smoothly and prevent the buildup of the negative energies that cause bodily disease, mental illness, and even death. To Amazonian shamans, however, these negative energies are actual spirit entities that attach themselves to the body and cause mischief. In everyone, Hamilton asserts, there is a loving “higher self,” but whenever unpleasant thoughts enter a person’s mind—anger, fear, sorrow—it’s because a dark spirit is hooked to the body and is temporarily commandeering the person’s mind. In some cases, he adds, particularly evil spirits from the lowest hell of the “astral realms” take over a person permanently—known as full-blown demonic possession—creating a psychopathic mind that seeks only to harm others.

I work on controlling my breathing. But such thick darkness. Clouds of bats and demonlike faces. Black lightning. Black walls materializing before me no matter which way I turn. Closer and closer, the darkness surrounding me, trapping me. I can barely breathe.

“Hamilton!” I belt out. “Help me!”

“On my way, Kira,” he says calmly. “Hang in there. Don’t give in to the fear.”

That’s the trick: Don’t give in to it. But it’s much easier said than done. I must tell it that I’m stronger. I must tell it that it has no effect upon me. But it does. I’m terrified. The darkness presses against me; it wants to annihilate me.

Hamilton is standing over me now, rattling his chakapa, singing his spirit songs. Inexplicably, as he does this, the darkness backs offand is sent spiraling away. But more of it comes in a seemingly endless stream. I see dark, raging faces. My body begins to contort; it feels as if little balls are ripping through my flesh, bursting from my skin. The pain is excruciating. I writhe on the mattress, screaming. Hamilton calls over one of his helpers—a local woman named Rosa—with directions to hold me down.

“Tell the spirits to leave you with ease,” Hamilton says to me.

“They won’t!” I yell out. And now they appear to be escaping en mass from my throat. I hear myself making otherworldly squealing and hissing sounds. Such high-pitched screeches that surely no human could ever make. All the while there is me, like a kind of witness, watching and listening in horror, feeling utterly helpless to stop it. All I know is that one after another, demonic-looking forms seem to be pulled from my body. I’ve read nothing about this sort of experience happening when taking ayahuasca. And now I see an image of a mountain in Libya—a supposedly haunted mountain that I climbed a year and a half ago, despite strong warnings from locals. A voice tells me that whatever is now leaving my body attached itself to me in that place.

Haunted mountains. Demonic hitchhikers. Whowould believe this? Yet on and on it goes. The screaming, the wailing. My body shakes wildly; I see a great serpent emerging from my body, with designs on Hamilton. He shakes his chakapa at it, singing loudly, and after what seems like an infinite battle of wills, the creature leaves me. I grab the vomit bucket and puke for several minutes. Though my stomach has been empty for over eight hours, a flood of solid particles comes out of me.

The visions fade. My body stops shaking. Hamilton takes his seat again, and Rosa releases her grip on me. I examine the vomit bucket with a flashlight: Black specks the size of dimes litter orange-colored foam. The shamans believe that what we vomit out during a ceremony is the physical manifestation of dark energy and toxins being purged from the body. The more that comes out, the better.

“Good work, Kira,” Hamilton says to me from across the room.

My entire body hurts. My head throbs. I can hear the others in the room, whispering to each other. I had barely been conscious of their experiences, they had seemed so quiet by comparison.

“Is Kira OK?” Christy asks Hamilton.

“She just had a little exorcism,” Hamilton explains with relish. “She’s fine.”

Read the whole thing.Here’s a short CBS News profile of Salak, which includes footage of her climbing the mountain in Libya.

There are lots of challenging things in Salak’s account, and I confess that as a Christian, I don’t know what to do with them.

For example, the claim that evil spirits can attach themselves to a person who visits a place where they are known to congregate. As we learn in the second account, Salak had a traumatic childhood in which she felt abandonment. Apparently, the evil spirits on the mountain attached themselves to her through this break in her psyche.

This makes sense to me. On the “Devils In Manhattan” thread, some readers objected to the claim that Emma’s possession came about in part because of her grandfather’s involvement with Freemasonry and the occult — in other words, it was a family curse. Where is the justice in that? (readers said). I understand the objection, and agree that it seems unjust. But the idea that a traveler can go to the top of an allegedly cursed mountain and come down possessed, at least partially, by evil spirits who reside there also seems unjust. Yet, if Salak’s story is to be believed, it happened.

Spiritual realities can’t be denied because they don’t make sense to our sense of justice. I’m thinking right now of something a New Orleans woman said at a dinner party back in the late 1980s. She was sitting right next to me, and I’ve never forgotten it. This was a group of sophisticated, secular New Orleanians. The woman at my right told a story about a house she and her family once lived in, on Esplanade Avenue. It had been built before the Civil War, and had a slave cabin in the back of the property. Her father renovated the slave cabin, and rented it out.

A young artist — a painter — took the cabin. He began to complain of an evil presence in the cabin. They didn’t take him all that seriously. Hey, it’s New Orleans. But he began to change. They observed that he became more and more disturbed and anti-social. Eventually, the police had to get involved. The young man was taken away and institutionalized. He had lost his mind. When the woman’s father went into his quarters, he found a series of paintings the young man had done, starting when he moved into the cabin. They were visual evidence of his slow possession, or at least madness. As the canvases progressed, they became darker, more violent, and more chaotic. And then he was taken to an insane asylum.

I believe that what the dinner guest said happened at her childhood home is possible. I believe that what Kira Salak said happened is possible. And I believe that what my friend Emma, the one with the Masonic grandfather, says happened is possible. Why? Because I believe that the individual’s psyche is more porous than we like to think. More precisely, I believe that the boundary between our selves (mind + body) is more porous than we like to think. This concept offends our sense of mind/body integrity, but that’s our problem, not reality’s.

In spiritual matters, I feel that people who reject even the possibility that things like a grandfather heavily involved with the occult could bring a curse onto subsequent generations of his family, or that climbing a mountain said to be the dwelling place of evil spirits, or moving into a haunted slave cabin — that people who reject the possibility that these things increase the possibility that evil spirits can possess an innocent person are like people who refuse to believe that guerrillas are a threat because guerrilla tactics violate the settled rules of war.

Another example, this one very difficult for me: There is very little Christian about Kira Salak’s account of exorcism and deliverance. There is the duality of good and evil, the presence of a fatherly entity Salak calls God, and the presence of evil spirits … but that’s it. Jesus Christ does not show up in this account. The shamans who help her testify to multiple levels of reality, and the ability to travel between them — not a Christian concept. In her drug-induced vision, Salak claimed to have met people she was in her past lives, and would be in her future lives.

I find it impossible to reconcile this with what I believe, as a Christian, to be true. This puts me in the same position as the people I criticized above. Am I not rejecting reported data because it conflicts with my prior convictions? Or are my prior convictions a solid epistemic basis with which to evaluate the claims of Salak about what happened to her (and therefore, are her experiences to be judged as hallucinations, imaginative projections of an inner state, or demonic deceptions)? How to account for her testimony that Hamilton was able to experience the same things she experienced — that the boundary between her perception and his was transgressed, and in some sense he was able to “travel” with her into noncorporeal realms?

I welcome serious commentary on all this from you readers, believers and non-believers alike. If you’re just going to take potshots, save yourself the trouble. But if you can advance our understanding of these phenomena, from a materialist, Christian, or other religious tradition, by all means comment.

UPDATE: Another instance of the porosity of consciousness invaded by a demonic force comes from this testimony by the bestselling novelist Hilary Mantel, a fierce hater of the Catholic Church, who writes about the time a malign force entered her as a child. This passage is from Mantel’s memoir, but is quoted by the writer Patricia Snow in a First Things piece:

[The spot] is, let us say, some fifty yards away, among coarse grass, weeds and bracken. I can’t see anything, not exactly see: except the faintest movement, a ripple, a disturbance of the air. I can sense a spiral, like flies; but it is not flies. There is nothing to see. There is nothing to smell. There is nothing to hear. But its motion, its insolent shift, makes my stomach heave. . . . It is as high as a child of two. Its depth is a foot, fifteen inches. The air stirs around it, invisibly. I am cold, and rinsed by nausea. I cannot move. I am shaking. . . . I beg it, stay away, stay away. Within the space of a thought it is inside me, and has set up a sick resonance within my bones and in all the cavities of my body.

By Mantel’s own account, things had grown spiritually very dark for her as a child when her mother took a lover, and moved him into the same house with Hilary’s father. This is the context in which this invasion took place. As Snow writes, continuing to quote Mantel, the novelist blames God for not protecting her. Here is Mantel:

[God] didn’t help me in the secret garden, and I think he couldn’t anyway; I think that whatever I saw that day was more powerful than any bewhiskered prayer-book God, simpering in a white robe: his holy palms held apart, as if He were sizing up a plank. Why didn’t he try though? He could have done something. He could have showed willing. I wanted him to manifest, and own me, take charge. But he never turned up, in the secret garden; the old bugger never got out of bed.

Mantel seems to accept that some alien force that she can’t describe took up residence inside her on that day. She has hated God ever since. The point I would like to draw out here is that if she is telling the truth, then some evil spirit entered her against her will.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes to send me some of the recent work by Kira Salak, along with a request that I remove the links to her earlier stories. On evidence of this recent work, Salak has become seriously deranged and paranoid. She’s raving now about Jesus, the Apocalypse, and pot. She was once one of the best travel writers in the world; the stories I linked to are from that period of her life. I think it better to leave the links in this post, given that those stories appeared in a respected magazine, and were written before her mental collapse … but to warn you that she really has lost her mind. Whether her visit to the cursed mountain, and her use of ayahuasca, had anything to do with that, I obviously can’t say. What a tragic, tragic situation.

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