Rod Dreher's Blog, page 220

Setback In Chesterton Sainthood Cause

Tonight at the opening session of the American G.K. Chesterton Society conference, president Dale Ahlquist read to the crowd a letter from the Catholic Bishop of Northampton (Chesterton’s diocese), giving his decision about the cause to beatify the English writer.

It’s not going to happen. The bishop said in his letter that there is no local cult of Chesterton veneration, which is the usual thing for a new saint, and therefore a problem for GKC. Second, the bishop found no sustained evidence for heroic sanctity in Chesterton’s character. And third, the bishop was concerned about allegations that GKC was anti-Semitic.

(I may have gotten some details wrong; I was sitting near the back, and couldn’t hear well. I’ll correct the report if I did.)

So that’s where it stops for now. Dale Ahlquist left the door open for continuing the push, perhaps with a new bishop who may be more friendly to GKC.

This will be a great disappointment to lovers and admirers of Chesterton. I doubt there was a single person in the room tonight here in Kansas City who doesn’t believe that GKC is a saint. Here’s an interview Crux did with Dale Ahlquist earlier this year, in which Dale talked about how GKC was a saint.

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Wokeness Pushed Scientist Rightward

A reader writes (I’ve slightly changed this to obscure his identity):

I’m a scientist in a mathematically-oriented field. I’d always been basically center-left politically, and remained so when I took my current position. Several years ago, a few of my colleagues were excited about being on Twitter, so I joined as well, and had a good time there although in hindsight I was pretty addicted. Over the next couple of years, swayed by the culture of academic Twitter, I drifted further towards the left. In my estimation the ‘woke’ belief system started to get really popular in 2014.

I was basically okay with the woke developments, but I would get annoyed when they attacked some of my heroes. For example, at that time, Richard Dawkins and Sam Harris were among them, but their stridency against Islam meant that I had to be careful admitting that I was a fan. If I ever retweeted one of them, I’d have to be prepared to defend them or at least their right to their views.

Then a few incidents occurred where I noticed many senior colleagues publicly shaming folks with glee. The one that sticks out in my mind the most was the British biochemist Tim Hunt, who came under fire for supposedly sexist remarks. I distinctly remember a senior figure in my faculty calling him a rude word that I won’t repeat, and when the science broadcaster Brian Cox opined that Tim Hunt, a Nobel laureate, was actually a decent guy and maybe we should cut him some slack, another colleague’s response was that white men should STFU.

This upset me so much that I couldn’t stop thinking about it for months. I confided in a centrist friend that it was disturbing me and she recommended I read The Righteous Mind by Jonathan Haidt, which I did. I thought I was edgy because Haidt is a centrist. By the end of the book, I decided I was, too, and thought that was edgy.

Fast forward a few years and a lot of reading, and I’m basically a conservative now, though probably a moderate one. I’ve also learned through experience that we do not remotely base our opinions on objective facts as much as we feel like we do. I have quit Twitter and when I occasionally take a look at it, I quickly remember why. I think that website has done a lot of damage. At work I keep my head down. I sometimes think of how I operate now as something like the academic equivalent of the Benedict Option. I work hard at my projects and try to do a good job teaching, and keep in touch with a few colleagues whose input I find most valuable.

I have tuned out of mainstream academic culture and have little interest in climbing the institutional ladder anymore because I want to avoid encountering the people who thought Sam Harris was too out there and that white men should shut up. I stopped attending a conference series I previously liked because the registration form now asks for your ethnicity and sexual orientation.

I’ve also started to notice how much the university has an implicit institutionalized left-wing worldview. This afternoon I walked down my corridor, and for fun I counted the number of posters and signs that were about a left cause or assumed a left viewpoint. I found 16 such posters in that one minute walk. On the way to class today I saw a display on the history of Computer Science and someone had posted photos of some women on it. Presumably the original display needed ideological correction.

Another fun game is to count the number of woke emails or items in newsletters that get distributed internally. It’s quite high — at least a few per day. While each thing in isolation is fairly trivial, there is a definite woke spirit and it is in the sciences as well as everyone else. For the moment I’m still happy enough with the positives of my job to put up with it. We’ll see what happens in the future

Jonathan Haidt is a founder of Heterodox Academy, a non-partisan, non-profit organization for academics of the left, right, and center, who want to protect the right to free speech and free inquiry within academia. Maybe this scientist who wrote me should get involved.

UPDATE: A reader named Valcour comments:

T

his is pretty much par for the course, even at a state flagship university in a conservative southern state. I now have faculty colleagues–mostly junior–who insist that every interview list must include women and people of color, even if they are not highly-ranked candidates on their merits. No women or POC in the top 15-20 candidates based on standard scholarly criteria? No problem–let’s move Candidate #17 up to the top three candidates and drop one of candidates deserving of an interview based on merit. It is blatant gender and racial discrimination, and its practice goes without critical comment. I regularly hear people being insulted and their views dismissed merely because they are white, male, or both. Discussions of topics representing legitimate scholarly inquiry are deemed inappropriate by favored groups, and as result discussions of the topics are shut down.

What this scientist describes occurs every day on college campuses around the country–even those in conservative states. Most of my colleagues are to the left, and most of my best friends in my department are liberals, but they are (for the most part) tolerant of different viewpoints and accepting of those with whom they disagree. It is the new breed of junior faculty member and new administrators who are intolerant, setting aside legitimate scholarly standards in order to prioritize wokeness and fetishize diversity.

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Carleton’s Title IX Star Chamber

You have to read this Robby Soave piece about a male student at Carleton College. The guy and a female student got roaring drunk, and had sex. Later, she claimed she was raped. From Soave’s report:

County prosecutors also filed criminal charges against John, but these were eventually dropped. The Carleton proceedings were adjudicated under the auspices of Title IX, the gender equality statute that looms large in campus sexual misconduct trials thanks to aggressive guidance from the Obama-era Education Department. John’s lawsuit argues that he had no shot at a fair hearing, since the entire matter was handled by just two administrators: one who produced a report based on the evidence she had gathered, and another who passed judgment.

John was found responsible, and he was given five days to appeal the verdict to the Community Board on Sexual Misconduct. He did so. Prior to the hearing, he was finally allowed to review the administration’s report on the dispute, which contained the Title IX officer’s characterization of interviews with witnesses but not the transcripts of the actual interviews. John was also concerned that key text messages, which portrayed him in a favorable light, were not included in the report.

At the actual hearing, John was told that he could not introduce questions to be asked of Jane, who was questioned separately. He was also told that “witnesses would not be necessary at the hearing, as he would not be allowed to present any.” Unsurprisingly, the committee confirmed that he was responsible for sexual misconduct. After it suspended him, John appealed the decision—as did Jane, who considered it too lenient.

Get this — the dean of students was so offended that John appealed that she had him expelled from the college. Now he has filed a lawsuit. Read Soave’s entire report.

Why won’t Republicans try to reform Title IX? Or are they hoping that the courts will take care of it for them, by awarding big judgments to students like John?

What if this happened to you, or your son, or brother? If either of my sons, or my daughter, were to behave as these two are said to have behaved, I would be ashamed of them … but I would also recognize that this is ordinary college student behavior. If my daughter covered her shame by accusing her male partner of rape, I would be disgusted.

To be clear, it is possible that John raped this woman. What’s at issue here is whether or not he got a fair chance to defend himself. It seems that he did not — that the deck was stacked in the woman’s favor. Why? What privileges her point of view? Soave says that county prosecutors filed sexual assault charges against John, but dropped them. The kid was expelled from college by this star chamber Title IX process. I hope he wins a massive judgment against the school.

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Vladimir Grigorenko, Artist For God

Iconographer Vladimir Grigorenko

That’s my friend Vladimir Grigorenko, a professional iconographer. Here’s his website. He and his wife Olga, and their daughter Katya, stayed with us for a couple of days this week on their way back home to the Dallas area after exhibiting at an Orthodox conference in Florida. He had with him some of his icons, which I asked him to show us. Above he’s pictured with a large icon he did of the Virgin Mary and the Christ child. On the shelf behind him, you can see an icon of Christ Pantokrator (the Ruler Of All) I commissioned from him back in 2005, when we first met.

I’m crazy about his work. Julie and I bought a small icon of St. Basil the Great from him this week. I told him I wanted to post something on the blog showcasing his work, in case readers want to order or commission an icon from him, or if an Orthodox (or even Catholic) parish would like to commission some liturgical art from him. He modestly said no, don’t worry about it, but I say no, people should know what an extraordinary artist he is, and that they can have his art as part of their devotional lives.

This guy, let me tell you something about him. Some years back, he called me to say that Time magazine had called him. Before he called them back, he wanted to know what they might possibly want from him. It was November. I told him that my guess is that they were going to name Vladimir Putin as Man Of The Year, and they wanted to commission a cover from him.

“Impossible!” he said. He explained that iconography is holy art, not to be used for profane purposes, like making an image of a politician.

I was still fairly new to Orthodoxy, and didn’t quite get it. “But this would make your career internationally,” I said.

Didn’t matter to Vladimir. Holy things are for the holy. This wasn’t about Putin himself; he would have rejected any iconographic commission for someone not a saint or a Biblical figure. It’s a matter of integrity.

Here is a video of him talking about his work at an Orthodox parish in North South Carolina. Watch, listen, admire:

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See more of Vladimir Grigorenko’s iconography, and get in touch with him about commissioning work from him, at his website.

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Canceling Mario Lopez

Mario Lopez, the affable TV actor and incoming host of “Access Hollywood,” told Candace Owens back in June what he thinks about transgender parenting:

“A lot of weird trends come out of Hollywood and one of the weirder ones, for me, is this new trend where celebrities are coming out — and I know Charlize Theron did this a few weeks ago — is saying that their child is picking their gender. And this is strange to me, and they say, ‘Oh, I looked at my child and my child was swimming in a bathtub and looked up and said, “Mommy, I’m a boy’” and that’s weird …

Owens added that her experience as a nanny has convinced her that children don’t always mean what they say, explaining “I am trying to understand this new Hollywood mentality where they just think their children now have the mental authority.”

“I am trying to understand it myself, and please don’t lump me into that whole [group],” Lopez responded. “I’m kind of blown away too. Look, I’m never one to tell anyone how to parent their kids obviously and I think if you come from a place of love, you really can’t go wrong but at the same time, my God, if you’re 3 years old and you’re saying you’re feeling a certain way or you think you’re a boy or a girl or whatever the case may be, I just think it’s dangerous as a parent to make this determination then, well, OK, then you’re going to a boy or a girl, whatever the case may be … It’s sort of alarming and my gosh, I just think about the repercussions later on.”

He added, “When you’re a kid … you don’t know anything about sexuality yet. You’re just a kid.”

After Owens said that parents who support their children in this way are narcissists showing off their tolerance, Lopez responded, “I think parents need to allow their kids to be kids but at the same time, you gotta be the adult in the situation. Pause with that and — I think the formative years is when you start having those discussions and really start making these declarations,” he said, adding air quotes.

Common sense, right? Wrong! Mario Lopez quickly apologized for his thoughtcrime:

“The comments I made were ignorant and insensitive, and I now have a deeper understanding of how hurtful they were,” the “Saved by the Bell” alum said Wednesday in a statement obtained by Fox News. “I have been and always will be an ardent supporter of the LGBTQ community, and I am going to use this opportunity to better educate myself. Moving forward I will be more informed and thoughtful.”

Now it’s considered potentially career-killing simply to say that three-year-olds shouldn’t be allowed to make life-altering decisions about their sex. Note that he didn’t say that transgenderism was bad. Lopez simply said that three year old kids are in no position to make this call on their own, and that parents should recognize that.

For this ordinary, commonsense opinion, Mario Lopez has been compelled to apologize. You watch: that will be the end of his Hollywood career.

And there are still people who don’t think the LGBT movement has become totalitarian.

(Readers, I’ll be traveling all morning to the Chesterton Conference in Kansas City. Will check in with you from there. Please be patient.)

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Marianne Williamson: Holy Fool

Russian Orthodoxy treasures the yurodivy, or “holy fool,” an ascetic who behaves in ways that seem insane to normal people, but who, in so doing, reveal Christian truth. The New Age guru and Democratic presidential candidate Marianne Williamson is not a holy fool according to the usual definition, but I can’t help thinking that to some extent, she’s playing that role. We all love to laugh at her, because she is something of a kook … but she’s onto something important about us.

In last night’s Democratic debate, Williamson spoke of the “dark psychic force” of “collectivized hatred” that Donald Trump draws up and exploits. Here’s the clip:

I know: ha ha, what a ding-dong! But she’s not wrong, except in that she pins this entirely on Trump. David French says that yes, it’s obvious that Trump stokes and weaponizes this stuff. But in pointing out that the other side does too, French — an original Never Trumper — is not trying to whatabout the discussion. He writes:

At the risk of incurring Williamson’s wrath by getting a tad wonky, there is a nerd term for Williamson’s psychic force. It’s called negative polarization, it’s rampant, and it’s used to rationalize and justify all manner of excesses and outrages. Essentially, negative polarization means that individuals are drawn to their political party or faction primarily out of a spirit of opposition. They hate the other side more than they love their own.

As I’ve written many times before, the evidence of that hate is everywhere — especially in America’s most politically engaged citizens. A recent study documented some rather alarming statistics. For example, “42 percent of the people in each party view the opposition as ‘downright evil.’” A stunning 20 percent of Democrats and 16 percent of Republicans believe “we’d be better off as a country if large numbers of the opposing party in the public today just died.” And if the opposing party wins the 2020 election, 18 percent of Democrats and 13 percent of Republicans “feel violence would be justified.” A More in Common survey found that 86 percent of Republicans think Democrats are brainwashed, 84 percent think they’re hateful, and 71 percent think they’re racist. The Democrats were even more disdainful of Republicans — 88 percent think Republicans are brainwashed, 87 percent think they’re hateful, and 89 percent think they’re racist.

Each side has its own narrative — pointing to real incidents and real bigotry — that justifies its increasing disdain. And don’t think for a moment that this is a phenomenon that started with Trump. Pew Research Center data from 2014 shows an astonishing rise in polarization even before Trump. Republicans and Democrats not only grew further apart ideologically, they hated each other more. The percentage of Americans holding a “very unfavorable” view of their political opponents more than doubled between 1994 and 2014, on both sides.

The Left (so far) has not produced a national politician as capable of embodying and mobilizing negative polarization as well as Trump has. But it will. It does so very, very well in other areas. I don’t think there’s much value in arguing over which side is more guilty of it than the other. But here’s a very important point made by the black scholar Glenn C. Loury today, who laments the Democratic Party’s embrace of the racist Al Sharpton. Loury reminds his readers that Sharpton is unquestionably an unrepentant anti-white, anti-Semitic hater who has led racially charged, violent mobs. Why would the Democrats suck up to a devil like Sharpton (presidential candidates Joe Biden, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren all tweeted favorably about Sharpton when Trump attacked him last week)? Loury writes that Barack Obama brought Sharpton in from the fringes:

In short order, Mr. Sharpton became a political kingmaker. In 2011, he got his own show on MSNBC. Between 2009 and 2014 he’d visited the White House 61 times. All of this has left the Democrats joined at the hip with an exemplar of failed black leadership.

The second reason Democrats have rushed to Mr. Sharpton’s defense is South Carolina. Given the critical importance of that state’s early primary election, and the crucial role the black vote is sure to play in that contest, Democrats running for president have had to kiss Mr. Sharpton’s ring — and cover his derrière.

The third, and most powerful, reason is that Mr. Sharpton now has the right enemy: Donald Trump. Democrats seem unable to do two things at once: condemn Mr. Trump and refuse to defend ideas and people that are not worthy of being defended. Instead, anything he criticizes, however plausible that criticism, becomes something they feel compelled to rally behind.

This is a losing strategy. Progressives have been bluffing on the race issue for years now: downplaying black-on-black urban violence, ignoring the polarizing effects of racial identity politics, maintaining a code of silence on the collapse of the black family and more. Mr. Trump knows it.

Read it all.

There is a certain satisfaction in watching Trump, who is as shameless as Sharpton is, put the Democrats in the position of embracing Sharpton, because they refuse to see any enemies at all to the Left — even a racist grifter like Sharpton.

But let’s not fool ourselves: Trump, like Sharpton and his identity-politics-besotted enablers in the Democratic Party and the left-wing establishments, are trafficking in “dark psychic forces.” For years in this space, I have warned that leftist identity politics are summoning demons. So is Donald Trump. People like to say that it’s too bad Tom Wolfe has died, and isn’t around to chronicle the identity-politics insanity of 2019 America, but it’s becoming clearer that what’s going on isn’t really something that satire can deal with appropriately; we need a new Dostoevsky.

I strongly urge you to watch the first 50-minute episode of a six-part 1980s-era British television documentary about the Spanish Civil War. This episode explores the roots of the war, which broke out in 1936, but which started, in effect, in 1931, with the declaration of the Republic. This is what happens when negative polarization consumes a society. At the 33:20 mark, a former Nationalist army officer says that he wasn’t political, but conditions had reached the point where peace was no longer possible — that Spain had reached the point where “we couldn’t stand each other.”

Along these lines, Hannah Arendt tells us that cultivating hatred of others was key to the success of 20th-century totalitarianism. Put that way, it’s a banal observation, but when you read Arendt, you see how totalitarianism — a system in which dissent is impossible — requires unifying people through hatred of the Other. Orwell understood this principle well. In 1984, the totalitarian state keeps everyone in line by stoking their rage at Emmanuel Goldstein, and also external enemies. This is standard operating procedure for totalitarian societies. Last night, an immigrant from the former Soviet Union told me:

The policy of Soviet government was that America was our enemy, our deadly enemy, and that capitalists and Westerners in general hate us. While we are a very peace-loving country and we want nothing but world peace, Westerners hate us so much that we have no choice but to hate them too.

There you have it. How far are we from that? While we are a very peace-loving party, and we want nothing but peace and justice, the Other Side hates us so much that we have no choice but to hate them too.

Dark psychic force? You’d have to be a fool not to see it. And you’d have to be completely self-deceived to think that only one side has a monopoly on it. I get extremely nasty comments all the time here on this blog — comments that none of you ever see, because I spike them. There is no difference at all in the vitriol from extremists of the left and the right. I believe the capacity for this kind of hatred exists within every human heart. What we are losing is the sense that it is a destructive passion to be resisted.

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APSA’s ‘Diverse, All-Woman Team’

Wokeness blinds. A political scientist e-mails:

I wanted to draw your attention to the new editorial board of the American Political Science Review, the premier journal in my discipline. (You can find the announcement here.) In its oblivious self-contradiction, the announcement reads like Newspeak:

In entrusting the editorship of the association’s flagship journal to our diverse and all-woman team, the Council is demonstrating its commitment to promoting a wider range of voices and scholarship in the journal and the discipline.

Outsiders often lump political science in with the rest of the lost causes (sociology, anthropology, the humanities…), but until recently our discipline tended to privilege science over ideology. Inconvenient research struggled to get published, of course, but the top journals (usually) refused to compromise scientific rigor to publish fashionable dreck. It was a leftie discipline, but at least a methodologically sophisticated leftie discipline. In fact, within my memory, deconstructionist feminist scholarship was relegated to third-tier journals because it refused to approach its questions with anything like the scientific method (science being, of course, the tool of the patriarchy).

Now, I feel like I am watching a slow-motion coup. Over the past few years, I’ve witnessed several better-qualified males passed over for jobs in favor of obviously less-qualified females. It has gotten to the point where, at conferences, I even hear liberal women worrying about the hurdles their male friends in grad school face on the job market, especially as they see those friends growing bitter and depressed. Journals that were once criticized for their methodological monotony (if it wasn’t an advanced piece of data analysis, its odds of publication were slim) are now, suddenly, being taken over by the race-and-gender brigade eager for “poststructural methods such as deconstruction.”

To be fair to the APSR, there are some highly qualified women on the new board, women who do good work. Yet the total exclusion of men is galling and dispiriting. I don’t understand how this kind of sexism can go hand-in-hand with such vicious sanctimony.

I thank God I have a job at a terrific university where this nonsense has not (yet) taken hold. But it is dispiriting to me to watch it begin to tear down one of the last disciplines that had resisted this disease–the more so because political science has traditionally sheltered students who want to study the humanities without the joylessness that now consumes those fields. If we fall, as well, where else are the non-STEM majors going to go?

“Diversity and inclusivity” are what Social Justice Warriors appeal to when they are seeking to justify imposing a race, gender, and sexuality-based monoculture that explicitly excludes heterosexual white males.

This could last a long time. Last night, I interviewed my houseguests, two old friends who grew up in the Soviet Union. They told me that in their youth (the 1970s and 1980s), nobody believed in Communist ideology anymore. But it also didn’t occur to most people to resist it. People just assumed that it was a fact of life, and if you wanted to have a decent life, you had to accept it, though you knew it was all a lie. They told me that it’s hard for Americans to understand that very few Soviets had the knowledge that things were bad for them. If you lived in a big city, you might have some way to learn about the outside world, and maybe you would know something about dissidents. But the name “Solzhenitsyn” was widely reviled, because of the success of propaganda. And, crucially, most Soviet citizens outside the big cities were living in complete ignorance of the lies.

It’s a mentality that works within a system dedicated to rewarding lies — as long as the system can preserve itself from reality. People who think that “common sense” will eventually catch up with the ideologues are often self-deluded about how resilient ideology is.

As the professor whose letter I quote above points out, even some professional political scientists can’t see the blatant Orwellian contradiction of boasting of a “diverse, all-woman” team. The diversity ideology is all over the academic professions. And not just academia: Heather Mac Donald’s book The Diversity Delusion is well documented. “Diversity” is not about diversity at all; it’s about imposing ideology, even if it costs. It’s an ideology that is increasingly accepted among the professional classes. I once argued with a very smart manager about the cost to the quality of the company’s product by promoting less qualified and less capable people on the basis of their gender or ethnicity. The manager replied that “diversity” (meaning the gender, ethnicity, or sexual orientation of an employee) is a component of quality. This person truly believed it.

One of my former Soviet interview subjects last night said:

When we came to America in the year 2000, we had started to think critically about the situation [in the former USSR] only a few years earlier. Some of the people who came here from the former Soviet Union in our generation, if they have good jobs with the government or within the system, they apply the same mentality that they had in the Soviet Union: everything is just fine, we need to protect what we have. They would vote for the Democrats, and not talk about it, because it would be divisive.

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Homoerotic Archbishop Vs. St. John Paul II

In 2017, news broke that Italian Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia had commissioned a gay artist to do a mural for the inside of his cathedral. The mural was shockingly homoerotic, and even featured a depiction of the archbishop himself. I wrote about it here.

Pope Francis moved sexy Archbishop Paglia over to be Grand Chancellor of Rome’s John Paul II Institute, described by George Weigel “the hub of several affiliated institutes around the world, was a key instrument for deepening the entire Church’s reception of John Paul’s 1993 encyclical on the reform of the moral life, Veritatis Splendor.” It has now become indisputably clear that Paglia is destroying the institute — this, as a move by senior Vatican progressives to reverse the work of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Weigel:

So these stubborn and, it now seems, ruthless men bided their time. In recent years, they have continued to lose every serious debate on the nature of the moral life, on the morality of conjugal life, on sacramental discipline, and on the ethics of human love; and the more intelligent among them know it, or at least fear that that’s the case. So in a bizarre repetition of the anti-Modernist purge of theological faculties that followed Pius X’s 1907 encyclical Pascendi, they have now abandoned argument and resorted to thuggery and brute force in order to win what they had failed to win by scholarly debate and persuasion.

That unbecoming score-settling is why the senior faculty of the John Paul II Institute was abruptly dismissed last week, and that is why there is absolutely no guarantee that, in the immediate future, the Institute that bears his name will have any resemblance to what John Paul II intended for it. Cardinal Angelo Scola, emeritus archbishop of Milan and a former rector of the Pontifical Lateran University, described what is afoot in Rome these days as “torpedoing” the John Paul II Institute through an academic “purge.” 150 students of the Institute signed a letter saying that the changes underway will destroy the institute’s identity and mission; in the present Roman circumstances, they have about as much chance of being heard as Marshal Mikhail Tukhachevsky had at the Moscow Purge Trials in 1937-38.

That these Stalinistic acts of intellectual brigandage against the theological and pastoral heritage of Pope St. John Paul II are being carried out by Archbishop Vincenzo Paglia – who came to international attention in 2017 for having commissioned a homoerotic fresco in the apse of the cathedral of Terni-Narni-Amelia – is ironic in the extreme. Paglia was simply another ambitious cleric when his work as ecclesiastical advisor to the Sant’Egidio Community drew him to John Paul’s attention. Years of sycophancy followed, during which Paglia would brag about how he had turned the pope around on the subject of murdered Salvador archbishop Oscar Romero by telling John Paul that “Romero was not the Left’s bishop, he was the Church’s bishop.” Paglia’s appointment as Grand Chancellor of the John Paul II Institute – a position for which he had and has no discernible qualifications – was puzzling when it happened two years ago. But now it, too, comes into focus: he is acting precisely like those who manipulated the Synods of 2014, 2015, and 2018, i.e., another cabal of ambitious (and, frankly, not-so-bright) clerics who continually lost arguments and then tried to compensate by brutality and threats.

Read the whole thing.

Gay-enthusiast Archbishop Paglia may be the hatchet man, but the responsibility for this belongs to Pope Francis. It is shocking to realize that most of the work of one of the Catholic Church’s greatest and most consequential popes, St. John Paul II, can be undone in a single papacy. Francis is making the rock (“upon this rock”) look like Silly Putty. (See Josh Harris’s line.)

The times are evil.

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DCCC’s Diversity Hara-Kiri

Big shake up the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee:

A mass exodus of senior leadership at the Democratic Congressional Campaign Committee Monday over a lack of institutional diversity left the party’s campaign arm in disarray and called into question the leadership of chairperson Illinois Rep. Cheri Bustos. Black and Hispanic leaders in House had expressed anger at Bustos’ personnel decisions after being elected to the role came to a head this week in the staff shakeup. “There is not one person of color—black or brown, that I’m aware of — at any position of authority or decision-making in the DCCC,” said Rep. Marcia Fudge (D-Ohio) told Politico last week. “It is shocking, it is shocking, and something needs to be done about it.”

On Sunday, two Hispanic lawmakers described the DCCC as “in complete chaos.” With frustration growing, Bustos ally and DCCC executive director Allison Jaslow resigned Monday morning and was followed out the door by much of the committee’s senior staff, including the deputy executive director, the director of diversity, the political director, the communications director, and a top communications aide. “Today has been a sobering day filled with tough conversations that too often we avoid, but I can say confidently that we are taking the first steps toward putting the DCCC back on path to protect and expand our majority, with a staff that truly reflects the diversity of our Democratic caucus and our party,” Bustos said in a statement issued shortly late Monday night. “Today, I recognize that, at times, I have fallen short in leading these talented individuals. To my colleagues, who I have the upmost respect for, I hear your concerns, and we can and must do better.”

From Politico:

POLITICO reported last week that top lawmakers in the Congressional Black Caucus and Congressional Hispanic Caucus were furious with Bustos, saying she was short-changing minorities by excluding them from her senior staff and failing to live up to promises she made during her campaign for the chairmanship. Bustos surrounded herself with loyalists, eschewing the typical campaign hands that run major party apparatuses.

The conservative reader who tipped me off to this story writes:

Here’s the money quote:

“The internal tumult comes as a distraction from what otherwise has been an encouraging early part of the election cycle for House Democrats,” the Washington Post notes. “The DCCC has reported a record fundraising total for the first half of 2019, and Democratic House campaigns have raised tens of millions more dollars than Republican campaigns have.”

So by all accounts, these people were knocking it out of the park. Record fundraising, which is exactly what they do.

But, they all have to quit because… diversity.

People on my side and yours always say, well, if they are so committed to diversity, why don’t I see people lining up to quit their jobs to make room for minorities.

Well… it’s actually happening!

There’s the reparations. Right there. White people need to quit. Even when they’re breaking performance records. They have to quit.

AND THEY ARE DOING IT.

They sure are, bless their hearts.

In her book The Origins Of Totalitarianism, Hannah Arendt says one sign of a totalitarian system is one that favors loyalty to the movement over competence. One wouldn’t call the DCCC totalitarian, heaven knows, but this is an example of loyalty to an ideological principle over effectiveness. On the Trump side, we have the president planning to nominate a three-term Congressman from Texas, a man who has no intelligence community experience, or significant Washington experience, to be the Director of National Intelligence — this, presumably, because he is loyal to the president — versus the movement, but hey, quality is less important than ideology and personal loyalty, right?

As a conservative, I can only hope that the Democratic primary voters use the same principle in selecting the party’s presidential nominee.

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The Most Soviet Story Ever

I’m going to be scarce today. Old friends from Dallas are visiting. They are immigrants from Ukraine. I’m going to be showing them around St. Francisville. Last night, after jambalaya, we were all drinking a bit and telling stories. Vladimir told a great one about how his father, during Soviet times, solved the family’s toilet problem.

When the family’s toilet bowl cracked, you couldn’t just go to the hardware store and buy a replacement. What hardware store? The government installed that toilet, and it was the government’s responsibility to replace it. But good luck getting on a list to have your toilet replaced. Finally, Vladimir’s father, a senior engineer, cooked up a plan. He had a Communist Party connection in a city called Novokuznetzk, a guy who could get him a new toilet.

Problem: Vladimir’s family lived in Dnipro, Ukraine; Novokuznetzk is on the other side of the USSR, near the Mongolian border — a 17-hour flight.

But the family needed a toilet. So off dad went.

How did he get the toilet home? He lugged it onto the Aeroflot flight, and sat on the toilet all the way back to Dnipro. Though a small man, Vladimir’s dad wrestled the toilet up into their apartment and installed it. There it remains to this day.

A system that makes a man have to fly 17 hours one way to get a new toilet through back channel connections, then ride all the way back home sitting on top of that commode — that’s not a system that works.

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