Rod Dreher's Blog, page 28

Prayer At The Prytania

Hi all, I have been away from the keys most of today out running errands to prepare for my return to Budapest next week. A priest friend sent me this while I was away, and man, it is something else. It’s been a long time since I invoked the Prytania Theater, where Ignatius J. Reilly used to go to see movies, but this Baby Boomer Catholic priest calls for it, and then some. Behold:

While the bishop of Venice (FL) bans ad orientem, he apparently has no problem with a priest in his diocese replacing the Penitential Rite with three “spiritual breaths”.

Source (warning: this is a full boomer Mass): https://t.co/pHIoLxYgcz pic.twitter.com/lANApa4AIs

— Eric Sammons (@EricRSammons) January 26, 2022

And this fuller version:

Highlights, remixed.

(source: Fr “Jerry” Kaywell, Sacred Heart, Punta Gorda, FL, USA: https://t.co/MyhGR7BMoc) pic.twitter.com/vPRPbiAwsb

— Matthew Hazell (@M_P_Hazell) January 26, 2022

Hey, at least he’s not speaking Latin and facing east!

You can hear more from this musically gifted showbiz cleric at the iTunes store:

Seriously, I bet Father Jerry is quite popular with his flock. It is very hard to grasp, though, how the Pope will let the Father Jerrys do these California dreamin’ liturgies, but finds the Tridentine mass intolerable.

The post Prayer At The Prytania appeared first on The American Conservative.

Cold War And Culture War

Here’s a very, very good analysis of the US-Russia standoff over Ukraine, by Richard Hanania. Hanania says that the anti-LGBT media law in Russia is what made the American elites think of Russia as the Great Satan (that they believed Russia engineered Trump’s presidential victory only sealed the deal). People who do not deal professionally with American elites often find it hard to understand why homosexuality and transgenderism mean so much to members of that class. Hanania writes:

I think most people are going to be inherently skeptical of the idea that LGBT and identity politics more generally play such a large role in international affairs. Yet people have less trouble accepting the fact that largely symbolic culture war issues related to race, gender, and sexual orientation drive domestic politics. Foreign policy elites are from the same class that gave us the Great Awokening, and if your model of members of this class involves them being illogical and destructive fanatics on matters of identity (the correct model), you should assume that they take their attitudes with them when thinking about international affairs. Their assumptions, deepest convictions, and construction of reality shape the ways in which we discuss geopolitical issues, which most Americans have no firsthand experience with.

One may ask why Pussy Riot and the Russian gay propaganda law made such a big impression in the United States when other countries like Saudi Arabia have much worse records on human rights. There are some 71 countries right now that ban homosexual relations. Russia didn’t even do that, and there is apparently a gay scene in Moscow that looks a lot like it does anywhere else in Europe.

Russian opposition to LGBT triggers American elites more than anti-gay laws and practices elsewhere because Russia is a white nation that justifies its policies based on an appeal to Christian values. Unlike a country like Hungary, it actually matters for international politics. Remember, we’re talking about the same elite that can only get excited about random attacks on Asians if they can pretend it’s white people who are doing it, and can’t be bothered to care about black people shooting each other every day but will make excuses for those who burn cities down in response to a police officer shooting a criminal in the course of an arrest. Homophobic Muslims or Africans will never inspire all that much righteous fury in these people. The template of “white conservative Christians bad” is fundamental to their worldview, and this leads to not only hostility towards Putin, but also nations like Hungary and Poland, even if the latter are uneasily accepted as friends because they were grandfathered into NATO, the alliance that is of course aimed at Russia.

While populists like Tucker Carlson and Sohrab Ahmari are uninterested in antagonizing Russia, most Republicans in Congress and in the most influential think tanks are still stuck in the 1980s. Democrats will sometimes advocate for a less aggressive stance towards Iran and China, but it has become impossible for them to do so towards Russia, the homophobic white nation that gave us Trump and destroyed our democracy.

If you pay attention, and certainly if you have been reading this blog, you know that the American elites think Hungary is second only to Russia as the Source Of All Evil. But as Hanania points out, Hungary has a much higher rating on the Freedom House democracy scale (69) than does Ukraine (60), whose sovereignty the Blob tells us we must all be prepared to go to the mat to defend against the Satanic Russians.

More Hanania:

Once you understand that American politics is motivated by some combination of interest group lobbying and culture war resentments, the hostility towards Russia begins to make more sense. It really is about the “rules based international order,” but that doesn’t actually mean following the fundamentals of international law like “don’t invade other countries or interfere in their domestic politics.”

If that’s what it was about, one might effectively respond that the US has in recent decades tried to overthrow more countries than everyone else in the world put together. Foreign policy elites ignore anti-interventionists who point out this fact, just as how members of their class ignore those who point out that Hungary arrests fewer people for speech than France does, or that if you really care about “black lives” you should be more concerned about the recent historically unprecedented increase in murder than police shootings, which are statistically rare.

Read it all.

Hanania is right: the culture war is the key to all of this. Yesterday I was interviewed by a couple of journalists who are trying to understand why more and more of us American conservatives are interested in, and sympathetic to, Hungary. The basic reason, I told them, is that Viktor Orban is strongly anti-woke, and unlike our own American politicians of the Right, actually cares about fighting it (and is good at it, too). The reason Tucker Carlson’s week in Budapest was so important last year is that for once American viewers were presented with an alternative view of Hungary, as opposed to the monotonous liberal — both left-liberal and right-liberal — take. In fact, I am certain that most Americans, if they ever visited Hungary, would wonder why the foreign policy and media elites hate the country so much. It’s a normal place that happens to be governed by a right-wing party that views globalism and the European Union with skepticism. And though it is not a religiously observant nation, Hungary remains, for now, culturally conservative relative to western Europe, especially on matters related to homosexuality.

Because it allows for same-sex civil unions, Hungary today is more liberal than most of the US was fifteen years ago — but the transatlantic baizuo class prefers to characterize Hungary as some sort of troglodytic outlier because its parliament passed a law regulating the presentation of LGBT material to minors. This was such a crime against humanity that the Dutch prime minister demanded that Hungary be thrown out of the EU. Now, think about this: Hungary has been a European nation for a thousand years, after King Stephen united the country and received a Catholic baptism. Hungarians have enriched European culture immeasurably over the centuries. But now, national leaders in western Europe want to excommunicate Hungary from the community of European nations because its democratically elected leaders — who are accountable to Hungarian voters — prefer that Hungarian children not be propagandized about sexual desires they consider to be aberrant.

As we know, sexual liberty is the summum bonum of Western liberalism, the absolute telos. Once you grasp that, so much about the judgment of liberals becomes clear. For example, in Ontario, a school board refuses to allow critical discussion about the sexualization of children via school books, on grounds that doing so is “transphobic”. They cannot understand any opposition as rational (even if mistaken); for liberals, it’s always about HATE. The problem with this is it badly skews their judgment of the motives of their opponents. This is a very human fault; many MAGAnauts believe that any criticism of Trump can only ever be made in bad faith, the result of irrational hatred. This emotivist stance keeps them from reading the complexity of the world around them, and understanding their opposition in ways that could allow them to grapple with it (the opposition), and perhaps defeat it. The foolish sexual and racial emotivism of the leadership class of Democrats has taken the party far to the Left of most Americans (even nonwhite ones), and is setting the party up for an election disaster this fall.  Because the media are of the same class, and make the same assumptions, they too have the same blind spots.

For example, you have probably aware from the media coverage that the GOP is trying to shut down voting rights for blacks and other minorities, via supporting laws that require one to show legal identification when one shows up to vote. Do you know how many nonwhite US voters support voter ID requirements? Christopher Caldwell writes:

Minorities do not seem to like the Democrats’ racialized approach any more than whites do. The political scientist Ruy Teixeira, who has written extensively about Hispanic abandonment of Democrats, notes that 84 percent of nonwhites support the photo-ID requirements for voting that the Democrats’ voting-rights reforms would ban.

It should be noted here that the inability of GOP elites to recognize how much Republican voters had come to despise them opened the door for Donald Trump. Note well that those same neocon GOP elites — the ones who helped lead the charge into the Iraq and Afghanistan debacles — are now damning people on the Right who think it’s a bad idea for America to risk military conflict with Russia over Ukraine. As Glenn Greenwald, a man of the Left, writes, the neocons are back to their tried-and-true tactic of denouncing as traitors those who are opposed to the US going to war. Excerpt:

This rhetorical tactic — impugning the patriotism and loyalty of one’s opponents — is now the dominant theme in American liberalism precisely because liberals are now led by neocons. Under this rubric, anyone (on the right or the left) who opposed Hillary Clinton and then Joe Biden during the Trump years was deemed not just wrong but treasonous: a Kremlin agent. That included Bernie Sanders, Jill Stein, WikiLeaks, leftist critics of Democrats, right-wing critics of Democrats, and in general anyone who echoed President Obama’s long-standing view that Russia did not pose a serious threat to the U.S. I cannot count the number of times I have been accused of being a Kremlin agent or asset not by random social media trolls but by prominent Democratic Party and liberal media and political figures for expressing those views.

That is now, by far, the favorite attack against anyone who believes that Ukrainian borders are not important enough to U.S. interests to involve the U.S. in a war. The most vocal media opponent of U.S. involvement in Ukraine has been Fox News’ Tucker Carlson (though, as usual these days, war skepticism is also found on many Fox shows, including Laura Ingraham’s, where I recently appeared to make that case, but almost never on CNN or MSNBC). Carlson, on an almost nightly basis, has posed the question few others in corporate media are willing to ask: why is Ukraine a sufficiently vital interest to the U.S. to risk lives, resources and potentially war with Russia in defense of it?

It’s bizarre, isn’t it? The only national news and opinion shows questioning the case for war are right-wing ones. The liberal shows are all-in for war, or at least for ramping up hostilities between the US and Russia, and they’re bringing (of all people!) the neocons who led us into the Iraq quagmire to cheerlead for conflict!

That same crowd is now calling American conservatives (like me) who are pro-Hungary fascists. In The Bulwark, the Bill Kristol web magazine, a writer says that the kind of conservatives who back Orban today are the same kind that backed Gen. Francisco Franco during the Spanish Civil War of the 1930s. The argument that pro-Franco conservatives back in the day overlooked repressive things about Franco is certainly true, but the author, Joshua Tait, completely overlooks the unhappy fact that the choice facing Spain wasn’t between right-wing nationalist dictatorship (Franco) and liberalism; it was between Franco and Stalin’s lackeys. He also says that Franco was a dictator (which he was), and so is Orban — a judgment so patently ridiculous that it undermines the credibility of his already-shaky argument. You can certainly judge Orban to be a bad man and a bad leader if you like, but the fact is, he has been democratically elected time and time again, and is facing an election this spring that he just might lose. Why is it so difficult for these American critics of Orban to criticize him for what he actually is? As the prominent Orban critic Peter Kreko said at a public appearance I made with him last summer, people outside of Hungary are foolish to describe the Orban government as “fascist.” Kreko has a thousand criticisms of the way Orban and the Fidesz Party run Hungary, but he understands that to characterize them as fascists is simply wrong.

These same neocons, recall, believed that Iraq could be made into a liberal democracy with American help. What makes anybody think their judgment has improved when it comes to Hungary and Russia?

Look, it is possible to think that Russia should not invade Ukraine — that’s my view — while recognizing that Russia is not behaving like some uniquely evil country, and Ukraine is not perfectly innocent (for example, this 2021 report from VICE News showcases a big annual neo-Nazi rock festival in Ukraine). Anatol Lieven, writing in Time, says that Russia has been warning the West on Ukraine for many years. Excerpt:

The point about this history is that the existing crisis with Russia has origins that go far beyond Putin. Russia has a foreign and security blob, just as does the United States, with a set of semi-permanent beliefs about Russian vital interests rooted in national history and culture, which are shared by large parts of the population. These include the exclusion of hostile military alliances from Russia’s neighborhood and the protection of the political position and cultural rights of Russian minorities.

The Yeltsin government protested strongly against the start of NATO expansion in the 1990s and Russia accustomed itself without too much trouble to NATO membership for the former Soviet satellites in Central Europe. But from the very beginning of NATO expansion in the mid-1990s, Russian officials and commentators—including liberal reformists—warned that an offer of NATO membership to Georgia and Ukraine would bring confrontation with the West and an acute danger of war. These warnings were echoed by George Kennan, the original architect of the strategy to contain the USSR and the State Department’s greatest ever Russia expert, as well as by Henry Kissinger and other leading American statesmen.

There is nothing mysterious, extreme, or Putinesque about this Russian attitude. In the first place, Western language about NATO expansion establishing a “Europe whole and free” implies the exclusion of Russia from Europe and from a role in Europe—a matter of deep offence to Russians, and Russian liberals in particular, especially since this Western rhetoric was imbued with the assumption (a racist one, by the way) that the word “European” equates to “civilized.” And that Russia isn’t part of that idea.

Of course not. Because, among other things, Russia has not been queered. As we know from the way leading European powers treat Hungary, affirming LGBT is the ne plus ultra of a civilized country. If neither Russia nor Hungary want a 4,000 percent increase in their teenagers and adolescents applying for cross-sex hormones and surgery to make them transgender — as the UK recorded in 2018 — then it is obviously barbaric. That, and the fact that though neither country is especially observant in their religion, they aren’t ashamed of their Christian histories.

To recap: Hanania is right — this cold war with Russia is an extension of the culture war within American society, waged by elites against the American people. Once you understand that, and once you understand which class the American soldiers who would fight this war if it ever went hot come from, you are in a much better position to grasp the pro-war propaganda in our media.

Watch this. This is the thing:

The World Economic Forum’s Great Narrative Conference: “The good news is the elite across the world trust each other more and more… the bad news is that the majority of people trusted that elite less…” pic.twitter.com/c4I4zlew1p

— James Lindsay, watching narratives crumble (@ConceptualJames) January 21, 2022

The post Cold War And Culture War appeared first on The American Conservative.

You Cannot Hide From Soft Totalitarianism

Last week I traveled to NYC for an interview with Jan Jekielek of The Epoch Times, regarding my book Live Not By Lies. I really enjoyed talking to him, and telling the stories of the anti-communist dissidents of the Soviet bloc, and the lessons they have for us today. Here’s a teaser for the interview:

And here’s a link to the full interview. Thanks, Jan, and the American Thought Leaders team! The word continues to get out that we are not living in normal times, and we cannot afford to be sanguine about the threat to our liberties posed by wokeness in power.

Order Live Not By Lies here to learn more.

The post You Cannot Hide From Soft Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Cultural Liberalism Vs. Cultural Socialism

Here’s a really interesting report by the prominent UK political scientist Eric Kauffman, analyzing wokeness and its future prospects. It starts like this:

Western societies are in the midst of a growing “culture war” between cultural socialism and cultural liberalism. The two sides in this conflict only partly overlap with the country’s partisan political divide: the culture war divides Democrats while largely uniting Republicans and independents. It presents, therefore, a risk for Democrats and an opportunity for Republicans.

In a controversy dominated by anecdotes and headlines, it is vital to systematically gather and analyze survey data on public experiences and attitudes toward culture-war issues. While this has been done for universities, this report—based principally on a new survey conducted on the Qualtrics platform—is the first comprehensive analysis of the wider American experience with, and opinion of, cancel culture, political correctness, and Critical Race Theory.

Cultural liberalism is the belief that individuals and groups should have the freedom to express themselves, should not be compelled to endorse beliefs that they oppose, and should be treated equally by social norms and the law.

Cultural socialism is the idea that public policy should be used to redistribute wealth, power, and self-esteem from the privileged groups in society to disadvantaged groups, especially racial and sexual minorities, and women. This justifies restrictions on the freedom and equal treatment of members of advantaged groups.

For some Democratic voters, a commitment to cultural socialism overrides their historical defense of free speech. Most Republicans disagree with that position. They also oppose what they perceive to be the denigration of white Americans and the nation’s past, which underlie their support for a new politics of civil rights in schools and workplaces.

More:

The main findings include:

A majority of Americans oppose cancel culture, but a significant minority—about a third— support it, backing decisions to fire employees for legal speech that they regard as unacceptable. Cancel culture is thus not only about people being afraid to stand up for their rights; it is rooted in genuine philosophical differences in the population between cultural socialism and cultural liberalism.

The problem of cancel culture is going to get worse, not better. Younger people are substantially more likely to support cultural socialism than older Americans, even when controlling for ideology and party identification. As today’s college graduates enter large organizations, they will mount an increasing challenge to freedom of expression.

Look at this. You’ll recall that Google fired James Damore when he responded to an in-house inquiry about the company’s hiring policies by writing a memo criticizing the assumptions in its diversity plan, and making suggestions for other ways to achieve what the company wanted to achieve.

The survey finds that diversity training has no impact on improving relationships within a workplace, and makes people more afraid:

The survey also finds that all people — even Republicans — who go through diversity training emerge more in favor of cancelling others.

Look at this finding:

Many Republicans are insulated from the culture wars because of where they live and work. Democratic and Republican voters tend to sort into neighborhoods, social groups, and workplaces that reflect their values. This helps protect conservatives and moderates from progressive illiberalism and political discrimination, forces that would cause them to selfcensor. Conservatives (including conservative Democrats) living and working in left-wing environments bear the brunt of progressive illiberalism. Democrats in Republican workplaces also report less freedom to express their views but not nearly as much as Republicans in Democratic-dominated organizations, where fewer than three in 10 Trump voters would tell a coworker how they voted.

Well, sure. Most of this tearing-apart of our society is driven by the aggressive hatred of the ideological left, as the survey shows. Conservatives and moderates naturally don’t want to be around them more than they have to be, because to do so is to put yourself at risk of cancellation or some other form of harassment. The story we get from our leftist-dominated media, though, tells a very different story.

And:

In sum, a divide has emerged between a cultural socialist minority and a culturally liberal majority. Among the youngest voters, cultural socialism arguably has the edge over cultural liberalism, suggesting that cancel culture is likely to worsen in the years to come. Issues of cancel culture and Critical Race Theory now rank at the midpoint in American politics and are a high priority for Republican voters and a mid-ranking issue for independents.

More than a third of all workers are concerned about losing their jobs or reputations to cancel culture. More than seven in 10 people say that political correctness has gone too far and that they self-censor their beliefs in at least some situations. Among employees with college degrees, a majority have experienced diversity training, and taking diversity training is associated with a heightened fear of misspeaking or being fired.

An overwhelming majority of voters of all political stripes oppose certain Critical Race Theory– inspired teaching methods, such as separating children by race into “privileged” and “oppressed.” However, there are large partisan gaps over whether students should be taught that the U.S. is a racist country or whether the curriculum should focus more on race and gender. Public opinion on culture-war issues tends to split the Democratic coalition while uniting Republicans, suggesting that culture-war issues are a risk that the Democrats must manage, while presenting an opportunity for the Republicans.

Read the whole thing to get far more details.

What to make of these findings? I have a few thoughts.

First, we must do away with the thought that wokeness is a passing fad. It’s here to stay, not only for the reasons N.S. Lyons identified the other day, but also because, as Prof. Kaufmann demonstrates, it is popular with a majority of young Americans. You would be foolish to think that they will grow out of it. We have to have a long-term plan to deal with it.

Second, we aren’t going to be able to vote this away, but politics can be useful in fighting it. Because of the demographic shifts, Republicans and moderate Democrats will never have a better opportunity to roll back wokeness and all its pomps and works than they do now. It is imperative that GOP voters push, and push hard, on Republican elected officials to go after cancel culture, CRT, and other forms of wokeness. If they don’t do it now, they never will.

For example:

Embarrassing to whom?

They’re destroying the people you claim to represent and working to permanently shift voting demographics and the only consequence they pay is a few snarky tweets from the “opposition” https://t.co/mJsVGkcoWQ

— Auron MacIntyre (@AuronMacintyre) January 25, 2022

The media will scream bloody murder about the terrible, horrible, no-good Republican bigots, but as Kauffman’s polling shows, most voters — even independents and some Democrats — hate this stuff, and will stand by the GOP.

Third, conservatives, moderates, and cultural liberals (as distinct from cultural socialists), have got to find their voice and use it within institutions to defend liberal values like free speech. If we wait for Republican politicians to rescue us, it’s not likely to happen. Besides, law generally follows culture. Look to the courageous parents in northern Virginia who raised hell about what the educational bureaucracy was doing to their kids. The parents there led this fight; the politicians only followed. This is a battle to defend basic liberties, and basic decencies. If we sit quietly hoping to avoid trouble, we will deserve what we get.

This afternoon I’ve been having conversations with Christian friends all over the country. A couple of these friends — both Evangelicals, from different parts of the country — are particularly downcast about what they see happening in their church circles. They talk about how the leadership class within their denominations and institutions prefer to avoid making hard choices, and think they are protecting the institutions by avoiding controversial stands, and by staying quiet as senior leadership makes mistake after mistake, and satisfies itself with trying to fight yesterday’s battles, which are irrelevant today.

Speaking for myself, I get especially irritated when fellow Christians, especially pastors and other church leaders, refuse to confront the multiple crises we are living through. I know that many of them are hoping that politicians will save us from the anti-Christian woke militants. It’s a foolish bet, in part based on past performance of those Republican politicians, but also because the primary battlefields in this war are the hearts and minds of their congregations. In Hungary, Prime Minister Viktor Orban and his Fidesz Party majority in parliament are doing what they can with the law to fight wokeness, but the young generation of Hungarians are being catechized and discipled through social media. A conservative Hungarian woman told me last summer there that her 19-year-old son and all his friends are being radicalized by TikTok on gender matters. A Polish high school teacher told me that there are no institutions in Poland more influential on the attitudes and beliefs of the young than social media. Unless you expect the state to shut down social media entirely, you are going to have to fight this battle for the hearts and minds of your kids, and (pastors) for the kids in your congregation.

One of my interlocutors today, a veteran Evangelical pastor in a Red State, said, “I am convinced 100 percent that the Benedict Option is the only way out.” What he means is that the faith will only survive in small communities of countercultural Christians who exercise spiritual and moral discipline. In other words, this Red State pastor has arrived at the same conclusion that Father Cassian Folsom, the founding prior of the Benedictine monastery in Norcia, shared with me in 2015 when we met. He told me that in his denomination, they depended for far too long on measuring success by the numbers of people in the pews, and by holding everybody together via shared political views. They have been hollowed out from within.

Of course it is not just Evangelicals. It’s all of us. There is nowhere to hide.

I expect that we will see a big Republican victory nationwide this November, and some respite from the relentless attack of the woke brigades. But as Eric Kauffman’s work clearly shows, this is going to be a battle lasting decades. I strongly urge you readers — traditional Christians and others whose convictions put them on the opposite side of the woke crusaders — to read Live Not By Lies and start setting up Kolakovic groups, and networking with other Christians. As I explain in the book, and as many of you have read on this blog, Father Tomislav Kolakovic was a Catholic priest who saw Soviet domination coming to Slovakia, and he knew that that would mean persecution of religious believers. He spread the word and started groups for prayer, discussion, and action to prepare the local churches for what was coming. He did so in the face of criticism from the Catholic bishops of that country, men who were confident that It Can’t Happen Here. That courageous priest knew otherwise, and kept working. Thank God, because the reason the underground church under Czechoslovak communism was so strong had a lot to do with Father Kolakovic and his disciples.

We Christians and other social and religious conservatives have the gift of time now. Scholars like Eric Kauffman are showing us what is likely coming. A big Republican victory this fall will only slow things down — and that is assuming that the GOP lawmakers actually get off their butts and act boldly against wokeness, as Viktor Orban has in Hungary. So, yes, vote, and get active politically — but by no means let that be the extent of your activism. Prepare your family, your church, and your community for what is to come. The dissidents who survived Soviet communism have so much to teach us.

The post Cultural Liberalism Vs. Cultural Socialism appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Falwells: Victims Of Fundamentalism?

Jerry Falwell Jr. and his minxy wife Becki spoke to Vanity Fair about allegations that the Evangelical empire-builders are closet pervs who enjoyed threesomes with the pool boy. It’s actually kind of sad, the whole thing — a real Preacher’s Kid debacle. Excerpts:

A short while later, the Falwells sat in the kitchen and began to talk about the tumultuous events of the past two years. The wide-ranging conversation was one of many we had over the past eight months. What emerged was an intimate look inside a very public marriage as well as a Shakespearean drama about fathers and sons and the burden of legacy. For the first time, Falwell opened up about his true spiritual beliefs and how they diverge from those of his infamous father, who cofounded the Moral Majority and waged a scorched-earth cultural war for four decades. When I told Falwell that many people thought he, consciously or not, wanted to destroy himself, he considered it for a moment.

“Subconsciously, yeah, I believe that’s true,” he said, nodding. “It’s almost like I didn’t have a choice.” He went on: “Because of my last name, people think I’m a religious person. But I’m not. My goal was to make them realize I was not my dad.”

Jerry Jr. portrays his late mother, Macel, as a hard-shell Baptist who made him and his late father miserable. For example:

Looking back, Jerry said that his father’s peripatetic lifestyle provided a reprieve from an oppressive marriage. “My dad wanted to travel the world as an escape,” Jerry said. He recalled that his mother’s provincial worldview grated on his father. “She wanted to live a small-town preacher’s life. She didn’t let him mess around,” Jerry said. Divorce was out of the question. According to Jerry, his dad found ways to take the edge off at home, even though Macel never allowed alcohol in the house. “Sometimes he would drink a whole bottle of Nyquil. He called it Baptist wine,” he remembered. Jerry grew up to learn that he too could have a private life that didn’t align with his public persona.

Baptist wine? Holy cow.

Jerry Jr. talks about his rebellious youth, and how he became a Christian:

Jerry was at a spiritual crossroads. He didn’t want to be a fundamentalist, but he wasn’t an atheist either. Jerry said he majored in religious studies at Liberty so he could figure out what he really believed. It was during a course on apologetics—the study of defending Christianity to nonbelievers—that Jerry said he was persuaded it was “rational” to believe Jesus was literally the son of God and the miracles of the Bible happened. “I became a true Christian in college,” Jerry told me. Newly confident in his faith, Jerry decided believing in Christ didn’t mean he had to follow the evangelical rules. After all, Jesus was a rule breaker too. “Organized religion says you have to earn your way to heaven. What Jesus said was, ‘You just have to believe,’ ” he said.

Well, that’s mighty convenient.

The Falwells go on to tell a story about how Jerry Jr. was brought in to save Liberty U. from bankruptcy, and having done so, was named by his father as his heir apparent. Jerry Jr. tells Vanity Fair that he’s not a very religious person. OK, fair enough — but then he should not have accepted the presidency of a fundamentalist university. That is stone-cold hypocrisy. They sure did like the money and the prestige that came with the gig, the Falwells did.

On the perv question, Becki admits to having carried on an affair with Pool Boy, but they both adamantly deny Pool Boy’s claims that Jerry Jr. like to watch him roger the First Lady of Liberty U. That seems to contradict this audio recording Pool Boy released of a phone conversation he had with the Falwells, in which Becki complains that Pool Boy (Giancarlo Granda) is hurting her feelings by telling her about all the women he’s hooked up with, and Jerry Jr. mock-chastises him. I guess it will all come out in court. It takes real nerve to have been exposed as complete sexual hypocrites, and to blame fundamentalist Christianity in general and Mama Falwell in particular for all their travails.

The post The Falwells: Victims Of Fundamentalism? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Nuclear Intersectionality & Woke Grift

This is fairly trivial, but it is such an excellent example of how wokeness has conquered the collective brain of the Left that I can’t pass it by. It was flagged on N.S. Lyons’s excellent Substack newsletter, The Upheaval.

It’s a call for grant proposals by the Ploughshares Fund, a major philanthropy funding projects that combat nuclear weapons proliferation, and advance the goals of peace. Nothing wrong with that. But look at what the San Francisco-based philanthropy is after in the 2022 funding cycle:

“Challenging racism and white supremacy in nuclear policies and institutions”? Like, I dunno, the fact that nuclear-armed powers don’t have their missiles pointed at African countries, thus othering them? What about Chinese nukes? Are they problematic? Should we send nuclear weapons to Africa and Latin America for the sake of equity? Are we trying to avoid a future headline: “US-Russia Nuclear Exchange Causes Global Apocalypse; BIPOCs, LGBTQQIA+ Worst Affected”?

More:

 

Wow. You can get up to $75,000 if you can figure out how to extend the woke grift to (checks notes) the nuclear proliferation cause. You don’t even have to have experience in the field! Just be a BIPOC or LGBTQQIA+, and be able to string intersectional jargon together, and these agonized woke philanthropists will open their purse and throw money at you.

In case it isn’t clear to you yet that this is a scam to separate wealthy leftie do-gooders from their money, and redistribute it to wokedom’s Chosen People:

What’s funny about this is that Ploughshares signals that it is not serious about spending its resources to figure out ways to reduce the likelihood of nuclear war, which is says is its reason for being. It is more concerned with appeasing its own woke conscience by buying indulgences with woke constituencies. Are the donors — both individuals and philanthropies — cool with that? Look, Ploughshares can do whatever it wants to with its money, but it means something when the purpose for which the organization exists takes a back seat to advancing woke goals. They would rather throw cash behind a third-rate grant proposal that ticked all the right intersectional boxes than actually advance the work of nuclear non-proliferation.

In this, though, they are no different than Woke Capitalists, who are less interested in their theoretical prime directive — making money by providing top-quality goods and services — than they are in feeling virtuous about themselves. It’s fun and easy to laugh at these ideologues for wasting their money on virtue signaling, but the loss of a sense of mission within companies, institutions, and organizations, all led by people who have gone crazy for ideology, is yet another sign of decadence.

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Woke Adventures In Classics

A reader forwarded this notice of a Zoom lecture last week to me — alas, too late to sign up for it. My guess is that it’s batshit crazy identity politics stuff, but really, who can say for sure, as this notice is written in a language that seems like English, but was really generated by a lit-crit jargon bot. Can you imagine going to grad school in the Classics because you love Greco-Roman literature, and having that love beaten out of you by these ideologues?

 

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The West’s Pavlik Morozovs

Take a look at this:

A Quebec talk show celebrates young children ratting out unvaccinated people to the police pic.twitter.com/mfVnirqkbn

— The Post Millennial (@TPostMillennial) January 19, 2022

Little Quebecois Pavlik Morozovs, these are. Morozov was a Soviet child of the Stalin era who became a national hero (according to the government) by turning in his father to the government for anti-Soviet activities. And now, in a western country, the media are encouraging children to rat out unvaccinated people, and to pressure them until they submit.

In other soft totalitarianism news, a university in Britain has attached trigger warnings to Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four:

As one of the greatest works in Britain’s literary canon, Nineteen Eighty-Four sounds a chilling warning about the dangers of censorship.

Now staff at the University of Northampton have issued a trigger warning for George Orwell’s novel on the grounds that it contains ‘explicit material’ which some students may find ‘offensive and upsetting’.

The advice, revealed following a Freedom of Information request by The Mail on Sunday, has infuriated critics, who say it runs contrary to the themes in the book.

More:

Yet it is one of several literary works which have been flagged up to students at Northampton who are studying a module called Identity Under Construction. They are warned that the module ‘addresses challenging issues related to violence, gender, sexuality, class, race, abuses, sexual abuse, political ideas and offensive language’.

In addition to Orwell’s book, academics identify several works in the module that have the potential to be ‘offensive and upsetting’ including the Samuel Beckett play Endgame, the graphic novel V For Vendetta by Alan Moore and David Lloyd and Jeanette Winterson’s Sexing The Cherry.

It’s happening. More and more of this stuff, every day. And most of us, we just take it, and take it. Why are young people not protesting for their freedom? Why do so many of them actually want to be told what to read, and what to think about what they’re reading?

 

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Ukraine War: ‘This Time It’s Different’

Well, here we go:

President Biden is considering deploying several thousand U.S. troops, as well as warships and aircraft, to NATO allies in the Baltics and Eastern Europe, an expansion of American military involvement amid mounting fears of a Russian incursion into Ukraine, according to administration officials.

The move would signal a major pivot for the Biden administration, which up until recently was taking a restrained stance on Ukraine, out of fear of provoking Russia into invading. But as President Vladimir V. Putin has ramped up his threatening actions toward Ukraine, and talks between American and Russian officials have failed to discourage him, the administration is now moving away from its do-not-provoke strategy.

Today my second son turns 18. My other son is 22. Nothing quite focuses one on the meaning of war like having to face the possibility that one’s flesh and blood might have to fight it. The last time the US faced a major war of choice — Iraq — I had only one son, and he was two years old. I was 100 percent behind that war, because as I have written about many times since then, I was so enraged by 9/11 that I wanted America to lash out at anybody in the Muslim world. I was eager to believe every damn lie the US Government told to convince people like me to support the war.

This time? Where’s the antiwar march — I’ll be there.

What an abstraction war was back then. America had won the Cold War, and spent the 1990s as the world’s only hyperpower. I thought we could do whatever we wanted to do. Make anything happen that suited us. Do you remember that chapter in All Quiet On The Western Front, when the German soldier Paul returned to his hometown on R&R, and goes to the village cafe, where everybody cheers for him and gasses on cheerfully and patriotically? Meanwhile, Paul gets that they will never, ever understand the horrors that he has experienced. Well, at the beginning of the Iraq War in 2003, and up until 2005, I was like those cafe patrons. Years later, talking to an Iraq War veteran friend, I asked him what it was like to have civilians come over to thank him for his service. He said that he knows they’re doing it out of a good heart, but he was sick and tired of hearing it, because they have no idea what soldiers like him have been through. For example, he was sent home for R&R for a couple of weeks, and in his absence, a battalion colleague who took his place was killed by an IED. What does hearing “thank you for your service” in McDonald’s mean when you have to deal with that kind of memory? I asked my friend, a Rush Limbaugh-listening conservative, what he thought about the war now (this was 2011). He simply said, “What a waste.”

In my hometown, there was a Louisiana National Guardsman who saw some combat. When he came home, he refused to go inside a church. He told his wife that he had done things that God would not forgive. He could not tell her what they were. I remember this man as a child. He was younger than I. I can see him now, in my mind’s eye, as a little boy on the baseball field, attending his brother, who played on my team. Our government sent him to Iraq for no good reason, and ordered him to do things that wrecked him inside. Things he wrongly believes that God cannot forgive. This is what war is.

I’m not a pacifist. Sometimes we have to go to war. It is at times a necessary evil. But even if justified — say, Ukrainians defending their country from invasion, it remains evil in its effects. Timothy Patitsas, an Orthodox Christian ethicist, has this to say about war in an interview about war and personal trauma:

DR. PATITSAS: You can’t do ethics of war with your mind in the first place, nor even with your heart, shall we say. Rather, starting with your body, from your duty to protect your loved ones who are forced by circumstance into combat, you must not deny that they return from war wounded through no fault of their own. They have changed, and some of them will struggle terribly in trying to re-enter society. Everything begins there. Putting the intellectual sins first misses the point of everything, because if on paper you can justify a war, then supposedly these intellectual sins aren’t involved and it won’t hurt you. From our eastern Orthodox perspective, just to witness combat is already a terrible burden on the soul. Whereas the mere fact that a particular war can be proved intellectually to be the lesser of two evils—and therefore unavoidable—doesn’t resolve anything. It is still individuals who kill or at least experience those images and passionate feelings, and it is individuals who have to be cleansed, as St. Basil the Great says when he has soldiers who kill in battle refrain from receiving Holy Communion for three years.

RTE: So you are saying that war remains evil, even when justified. Is killing in war then murder?

DR. PATITSAS: Some early Christians called it that, but St. Basil does not agree, and his penance for a soldier is not the same as the penance for a murderer. So, the motives outlined in the West’s just war theory do apply in the East as well when you are distinguishing types of killing according to logical criteria. Killing in war is ethically distinct from murder. However, the fulfillment of the just war criteria is not sufficient to inoculate us from war’s evil; it still hurts us.

I imagine there are plenty of Russian mothers and fathers who worry about what launching a war on their Ukrainian brothers and sisters will do to their sons. I also imagine that it is much more difficult for them to speak out for peace. But what’s our excuse? Are we Americans simply prepared to accept the leadership of the US national security bureaucracy, both Pentagon and civilian, which has led us so poorly these past twenty years? As Col. Andrew Bacevich recently wrote, we Americans have done nothing to hold the officer class responsible for the Afghanistan debacle responsible. Our politicians and senior generals keep praising the military, but none of these cheerleaders are trying to figure out why its leadership has failed so badly in Iraq and Afghanistan, and impose consequences for those failures. This same leadership class — Joe Biden has been in the most elite ranks for the past twenty years — is now stumbling towards military confrontation with Russia. Meanwhile, they are busy waging war on political and religious conservatives in their own ranks. I suppose Job One for Secretary Lloyd Austin and Gen. Mark Milley is to make the Donbass safe for genderqueer furries, or whatever the hell fad they’re following this week.

These are the kind of unaccountable fools who have the power to send our young men and women into a combat zone to risk death for … what? I recall how people like me used to think back in 2002, that fateful year in which the US Government built up for the attack on Iraq. When people like Pat Buchanan said it was folly to expect Iraqis to be able to handle liberal democracy, because they had none of the culture required to sustain liberal democracy, people like me responded with lines like, “So you think that Arabs don’t deserve democracy? Don’t deserve freedom?” It was absurdly disingenuous, and used racial categories to dismiss a vitally important point about the likelihood of US failure in Iraq. And, as it turned out, the Buchananites and other realists were 100 percent correct about that. But it took a decade or so, a trillion dollars, and the cost of thousands of American and Iraqi lives to figure out what was obvious to the realists before the first US soldier landed in Iraq.

These are now the same kind of people who have concluded that the US should send troops to the region to try to intimidate Russia. And if you object, they say that you must hate the Ukrainian people, or hate freedom, or be Putin’s useful idiot. Y’all, this was the same exact strategy they followed twenty years ago to convince us dupes to support this foolish Iraq War plan! But this time, they say, it’s different. I don’t believe it, and I hope you don’t believe it either.

Putin is not a benevolent leader, and Ukraine doesn’t deserve to be invaded and brutalized by Russia (though as Michael Brendan Dougherty pointed out five years ago, and reiterated this morning, the Ukrainian state is not a spotless lamb). Note well that the roots of this crisis include the 2008 statement from President George W. Bush saying that Ukraine and Georgia ought to be invited into NATO. The same moralistic crusader and strategic genius who launched the war of choice on Iraq, and set out to build liberal democracy in Afghanistan, also laid the groundwork for the crisis we face today. There is relatively little popular support in the US for involving ourselves in Russia v. Ukraine hostilities — which should surprise exactly no one, given that our country has been at war for two decades, suffered much, spent much, and accomplished little or nothing. Where are the generals who paid a price for their failures? 

I hope and pray that my sons would have the courage to take up arms in defense of their country. I also hope and pray that they both understand that the civilian and military leadership of the US at this moment in time does not have their best interests at heart, and is not worthy of trust and confidence. The last twenty years cannot be memory-holed, no matter how much the natsec class would like us to.

A friend texted me over the weekend to say that is son, around the same age as my boys, is in the Army, and received notification that he is headed to deployment in a NATO country that borders Ukraine. Unlike twenty years ago, I now have the perspective of having raised two boys into adulthood, and have skin in the game, so to speak, that I did not have when I was in my mid-30s, and spouting off about the importance of projecting US power into the Middle East. We were a hyperpower then. We were less powerful than we thought, and in any case, we no longer are. The troops being moved towards the Ukraine theater are no sons of mine, but they are somebody’s boys, and husbands, brothers, even fathers. My own brother-in-law deployed to Iraq with the Louisiana National Guard, and though he came back, he did not come back unscathed. War is evil. Even just wars, necessary wars — I remind you that I am not a pacifist — introduce evil into the hearts of those who fight them. We should only wage war as a last resort. For America, this is folly.

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Hateful Whitey Binds Her Feet

A source at Princeton University passed to me two documents sent out by the president of Princeton University Ballet (the student-run recreational ballet club), regarding the club’s diversity, equity, and inclusivity initiatives. I quote them both below, in full. The first was written by the club leaders, who in it affirm that “we are all entering this space with a mindset that what we see as perfect is a white standard” and “we aim to decolonize our practice of ballet, even as ballet remains an imperialist, colonialist, and white supremacist art form.” (Gosh, better not tell these woke dingbats about Alicia Alonso, the Cuban prima ballerina, founder of the Ballet Nacional de Cuba, and ardent Castroite.)

The second document is about “Action Plan Guidelines”. I am told that it was not written by the students, but by Princeton alumni who led the “EDI Circuit.” The document was given to all the clubs that participated. The source says, “I don’t think it was mandatory for all the performing arts groups. Still, it was organized by the University’s offices, namely the Office of the Dean of Undergraduate Students, the Office of Diversity and Inclusion, and the Lewis Center for the Arts.”

The text of the documents is below. Understand that Princeton is one of the top universities not only in this country, but in the world. This is how the American elites are being indoctrinated to think about art, race, their country, and themselves. This is not a passing phase. These people will move into the directorship of institutions that will have a major effect on life in this country. They hate ballet. They hate art. They hate beauty. They hate their predecessors in the dance tradition. They hate freedom of thought. They hate white people (including, below, themselves). They hate America, and they hate the West. Above all, they hate. 

And their class runs the country, and likely will for decades to come. Think about that. And look, if you are a Princeton alumni, ask yourself why you give a single farthing to support this Woke Seminary & Klaus Schwab Finishing School.

Here is the first document. All emphases are in the original.

Ballet is rooted in white supremacy and perfectionism. We are all entering this space with a mindset that what we see as perfect is a white standard. Unlearning that will be difficult but rewarding. Before we begin detailing our action plan, we want to acknowledge that our leadership and those who composed this plan are all white.

Firstly we would like to add land acknowledgement to our shows, in addition to historical context in our programs. We rarely shed light on the problematic history of our art form, and want to bring it to the forefront of our performances.

We aim to decolonize our practice of ballet, even as ballet remains an imperialist, colonialist, and white supremacist art form. We realize our distinct freedoms as a college run dance group, which is that we do not report back to any sort of board or funding programs that would restrict our choices. In selecting new members and cultivating our style, we want to centralize artistry instead of technique, in the hopes of maintaining our core purpose as a ballet company but doing away with some of the stringent and exclusive standards that pervade the art form. As this is particularly important during auditions, we will be prefacing audition discussions with a frank recognition and repudiation of our own biases.

Another actionable item is that we want to explicitly prohibit the use of choreography/ story lines of historically problematic works. Ballet is usually seen as an art form rooted in tradition, but we do not need to uphold the problematic work of historically renowned choreographers. Another change we would like to make is for our shows to have less content. In our recent show we prioritized quantity and length over artistry and collaboration. Instead of having 10 pieces with 5 dancers in each, we want to start experimenting with longer pieces and have more collaboration between choreographer and dancer. We want to give ourselves a time frame, but know what we create is right. Having more dancers in the room promotes company comradery and spirit.

In a similar vein, we want to switch our relationship with guest choreographers. Sometimes working with guest choreographers can cause stress and anxiety for the company, because it was so similar to past ballet experiences. Because of this we want to put down some guidelines for when the guests interact with us. We want to restrict the guest from doing their own casting, and have the artistic team choose. We want the guest to be able to teach a ballet class, but not give too many personal corrections, which tend to promote favoritism. In addition we want to diversify the type of choreographers we bring in, white males are given the opportunity to choreograph constantly, and we realize PUB can offer that opportunity to other types of choreographers.

We hope to take steps to ensure that PUB membership, not just leadership, requires a commitment to EDI work. As such, we have decided that participation in service and outreach to local communities will become a requirement of every company member. We partner with an organization that members can sign up to volunteer with, but there are numerous other opportunities for dance service on campus. Even though we cannot change some of the biases and prejudices that exist in ballet off campus, we can dedicate ourselves to combating that exclusivity in our local communities and for the next generation.

PUB can sometimes feel a little removed from the ballet world at large. To stay up to date specifically on EDI work within the larger ballet community, we will be including links to articles, social media accounts, and other resources that we feel deserve amplification and attention as we work on ourselves internally.

We also want to hold ourselves accountable as leaders, and provide platforms for the company to advocate for themselves and for changes. Consensus building is much more difficult in a virtual space, but we will have a running anonymous google form that is linked in every company email we send and emphasize feedback as an essential part of our leadership and decision making strategy.

As a part of our onboarding process for new members and at the start of every semester, we will hold a mandatory EDI goal setting session, so that our action items remain present and relevant, and then we will follow up on those at the end of the semester.

We would also like to open a conversation about body image and take steps to heal and deconstruct the harmful and racialized ideas about body image that many of PUB’s members enter the company with just by virtue of being a ballet dancer. Historically, PUB has been neutral on this issue, and while body neutrality is something some may strive for individually, it is not realistic or helpful for a group of ballet dancers who have internalized damaging ideas about how they should eat and what they should look like. We are hoping to bring someone in from outside the company to train the officers or the company as a whole on how to talk about body image and how to create an environment where we feel comfortable talking about our struggles with body image while also helping to deconstruct our assumptions about it.

Finally, we’d like to hold monthly workshops for people who are not in PUB to enjoy ballet, because there are more ballet dancers on campus than there are in PUB and we don’t want exclusive membership to be one of the only avenues to participate in ballet at Princeton.

There follows a bullet-pointed summary the above. So, these white women believe that ballet is white supremacist, that technique is bigotry, that performing canonical works, or works by great choreographers, is problematic, and that thinking that ballet dancers shouldn’t be fat makes you History’s Greatest Monster. Say what you will about the Soviets, they never screwed with ballet. If your daughter or son has ballet talent, and a love for dance, better not send them to Princeton, or they will have it pressed out of them by these cultural revolutionaries.

Here is the second document from the arts commissariat:

 

EDI Circuit | Action Plan Student Performing Arts Group Questions

Your EDI Circuit Action Plan will serve as a clarifying series of steps and analyses that gives your student arts group a foundation for culture, identity, anti-racist strategy, and a greater accountability structure for EDI. The framing is presented as an extensive series of questions that we believe will best serve your student arts group as you consider your identity/brand, how you are in relationship with prospective members and Princeton at large, and what actionable policies and practices will lead to a reality of collective liberation in pursuit of your artistry. We want this action tool to be a living, breathing resource that can serve as your group’s true north to thinking about how you advocate for healthy culture, racial diversity, and lead critical conversations that help you remain accountable to your membership.

GROUNDING / LOCATING:

Critical Questions

1. What is your relationship to the land and water? Does your student group have a relationship with the history of the land and water on which it resides?

2. What is your group’s mission?

3. What purpose do you serve on campus?

4. What is your group’s ‘brand’?

5. What is your individual and group understanding of Equity, Diversity, and Inclusion (EDI)? Anti-racism?

6. Do you feel your group has established healthy practices to foster trust and psychological safety?

7. How would you describe inclusion?

8. On a scale from 1-5 how equitable is your group today? Anti-racist?

SECTION 1: Understanding a more equitable, antiracist landscape for Princeton’s arts community

Critical Questions

1. What resources are needed to understand EDI/Anti-racism for students/student groups?

2. How does your group structure and support this critical conversation as part of its own governance?

3. Has your group named commitments or actions that will foster greater EDI?

4. What is holding your group back from taking a more proactive approach to racial equity? (What is lost? What is gained?)

5. How do you intend to address these barriers with current and potential group members?

6. What types of coalition building are possible or needed between arts groups on campus?

7. How does competition affect the life of your student ground and the ecosystem of the arts on campus?

8. Do you have a land acknowledgement practice? How are you building your relationality with living Indigenous people? How are the dynamics of settler colonialism present in your group? How might you decolonize?

SECTION 2: Recruitment / Membership Critical Questions

1. Are you privileged or oppressed in the current recruitment model? Are you satisfied with it? Is it racist?

2. What is the value of racial diversity in your membership?

3. What does success look like?

4. Does recruitment end with membership?

5. Is there space for representation, impact, recognition, leadership for all members?

6. What made you join your student group?

7. What are auditionees/applicants attracted to about your student group (brand, mission, members, etc.?)

8. How does your group interpret and discuss reputation?

9. When you think about whom is represented in your student group…how can you shift the expectation from transactional to relationship building? Are you fostering relationships or filling audition slots?

10. How does competition drive your recruitment efforts specifically?

11. How do group casting and discussions influence your process? Are they equitable processes?

12. What actions or practice sustain a healthy and safe environment for members to be fulfilled within the group during their Princeton careers?

13. How would you rate the retention rate of student involvement from a member’s initiation to a member’s graduation?

SECTION 3: Leadership Critical Questions

1. How has your group’s leadership team been onboarded to the culture of your student group?

2. Where is your leadership in terms of EDI work and commitments?

3. How is leadership accountable to the group with respect to EDI, maintaining a welcoming culture, and ensuring that these values are passed down to future leadership?

4. Is there diversity in your leadership currently? Has there been a history of diverse leadership for your group?

5. How is leadership engaging in these critical conversations with other groups or entities at Princeton?

6. How is your leadership selected?

7. What type of structure or hierarchy has your group chosen to organize leadership and decision making (power)?

8. Are dissenting or conflicting opinions welcomed in your group? How are they addressed? How do you address conflict?

9. How would you describe the communication style of your group?

10. What does transparency mean to your group, and what place does it have in your practice / leadership?

SECTION 4: Artistry / Expression / Repertoire / Collaboration Critical Questions

1. What do you enjoy most about your art form?

2. From your perspective, is your art form inherently inclusive?

3. What does a new member need to audition/apply for your student group?

4. Does privilege/access to resources serve as a predictor in the audition/application process?

5. What role does “talent” play in your group? Does it create an environment that leaves room for “potential”?

6. How do you evaluate the artistry of your group? What are the group’s standards?

7. Is there room to innovate in your group artistically? If so, where? 8. What does your group do that is unique to the Princeton arts scene?

9. How does your group give back to the community?

10. What opportunities for learning or professional development are accessible to your group?

SECTION 5: Building the Anti-Racist Plan

Critical Questions

1. Given the above, what would it look like for your group to be explicitly anti-racist? What would it feel like? Consider all aspects of your student group operation and practice.

2. Consider the current landscape of your group as explored above: the physical and social location, artistic genre, recruitment practices, leadership, and relationship to EDI in your student group.

3. What steps need to be taken to build a bridge between (2) and (1)? Your Anti-Racist Plan should outline the steps needed to get from where your group is today, to becoming a group that is, in every aspect, explicitly anti-racist.

4. What is your accountability structure? It is important to be explicit about the “who” of any actionable steps you are taking as a student group.

5. What are the group’s values that you want to communicate to your stakeholders? How do your antiracist policies signal those values?

6. What is your review process and how will you share/publish this plan? Who will be your objective critics of this plan and how can it be updated? Your antiracist action plan is a living document.

No artist or performer who respects herself, her art, and liberty can possibly submit to the commissars’ questions, and live their creative lives under the yoke of the woke. In the near future, young American artists with talent are going to have to go abroad for training, to countries that have protected their cultural legacies by keeping wokeness out.

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