Rod Dreher's Blog, page 30

PragerU Asks: Can Totalitarianism Happen Here?

My PragerU video about Live Not By Lies will launch tonight (January 3) at 7pm Eastern. If you’re reading this after that time, take a look below:

If you’re reading before 7pm Eastern on Monday, then you can watch it now directly on the PragerU site by clicking here. 

If you haven’t yet read the book, I hope you’ll check it out, especially because Amazon is still running its sale on the Kindle version, which you can buy for $4.99 while the sale lasts.

Here is a link to the free, downloadable Live Not By Lies study guide.

The book has sold 150,000 copies in its 15 months on the market — this, without any coverage from the mainstream media. It’s been from podcasts, Christian and conservative radio, but mostly, I think, from word of mouth. People understand that we are in dangerous times, and need to prepare ourselves for resistance.

Dave Jacobson and R.J. Moeller, the documentary team behind No Safe Spaces, are now raising money to turn Live Not By Lies into a documentary. The hope is to get as many of these anti-totalitarian voices from the Soviet bloc on camera while they are still alive. More people will watch a movie than read a book. We want not only to warn people about what appears to be coming, but also give them practical advice for how to prepare themselves, their churches, and their communities. It’s one thing to read their words on the page, but to see the faces and hear the voices of those Christians (and others) who stood up to totalitarianism and prevailed is even more powerful.

If you’re willing and able to help fund the development of the Live Not By Lies documentary in 2022, please contact the producers Dave and RJ at LiveNotByLiesProject – at – gmail – dot – com.

The post PragerU Asks: Can Totalitarianism Happen Here? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Lucille Of The Libs

In 1977, Kenny Rogers became a country music superstar on the strength of his great sad song “Lucille”. If you’ve never heard it, or haven’t heard it in a long time, take a listen. It has lost none of its power over the decades. Here are the lyrics:

In a bar in Toledo
Across from the depot
On a bar stool she took off her ring
I thought I’d get closer
So I walked on over
I sat down and asked her name
When the drinks finally hit her
She said I’m no quitter
But I finally quit livin’ on dreams
I’m hungry for laughter
And here ever after
I’m after whatever the other life brings

In the mirror I saw him
And I closely watched him
I thought how he looked out of place
He came to the woman
Who sat there beside me
He had a strange look on his face
The big hands were calloused
He looked like a mountain
For a minute I thought I was dead
But he started shakin’
His big heart was breakin’
He turned to the woman and said

You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille
With four hungry children
And a crop in the field
I’ve had some bad times
Lived through some sad times
But this time your hurtin’ won’t heal
You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille

After he left us
I ordered more whisky
I thought how she’d made him look small
From the lights of the bar room
To a rented hotel room
We walked without talkin’ at all
She was a beauty
But when she came to me
She must have thought I’d lost my mind
I couldn’t hold her
‘Cause the words that he told her
Kept coming back time after time

You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille
With four hungry children
And a crop in the field
I’ve had some bad times
Lived through some sad times
But this time your hurtin’ won’t heal
You picked a fine time to leave me Lucille

I do hope you’ll listen to the song, though. The lyrics themselves can’t convey the pain in the story they convey.

“Lucille” came to mind after so many years after reading Atlantic senior editor Honor Jones’s account of her self-liberation from the responsibility of husband and family. I have tried writing about this a couple of times, but have stopped because the topic was too emotional for me. I am not surprised to find a person who can do what she did. All of us struggle with demons, and if there’s one thing living long enough teaches you, it’s that you should be hesitant to judge a marriage from the outside. Everything I write below is based on a judgment of Jones’s marriage based only on what she tells us about it. I think, however, that what tears me up about this essay is not so much what she has done — as bad as that is — but that Honor Jones is proud of what she has done, so much so that she wrote about it in the national magazine for which she works. She ought to be ashamed of herself; a healthy society would have shamed her, instead of held her up as virtuous, as the publication of the essay does. As I will explain below, the Jones essay — what it says, and the fact that it was written and published at all — is profoundly emblematic of the moral bankruptcy of our culture.

Here’s how her piece starts:

I had wanted, I thought, soapstone counters and a farmhouse sink. I had wanted an island and a breakfast nook and two narrow, vertical cabinets on either side of the stove; one could be for cutting boards and one could be for baking sheets. I followed a cabinetry company called Plain English on Instagram and screenshotted its pantries, which came in paint colors like Kipper and Boiled Egg. Plain English cost a fortune, but around a corner in the back of its New York showroom you could check out the budget version, called British Standard. But it cost a fortune too. I wished there was a budget British Standard. I wished there was a room behind that room, the cabinets getting flimsier and flimsier until a door opened and let me back into my own shitty American kitchen, just as it was.

My husband talked to the architect; my husband talked to the builder. And I kept paring the plans down, down, making them cheaper, making them simpler. I nixed the island and found a stainless-steel worktable at a restaurant-supply store online for $299. I started fantasizing about replacing the counters with two-by-fours on sawhorses and hanging the pots from nails on the wall. Slowly, I realized, I didn’t want this kitchen. Slowly, I realized, I didn’t want this life.

I didn’t want to renovate. I wanted to get divorced.

It turns out that Honor Jones’s life as a wife and mom was not something out of catalogues. She had a cleaning lady to help her with the house, but it didn’t matter.

Even with Luba’s help, the house was chaos. I could never keep the children and their mess corralled. Toys and books were always underfoot. The crumbs—they were everywhere. I knew I was lucky to have all these crumbs and the house to keep them in. To have Luba to help. Still. If our kitchen became a murder scene, a forensic investigator could have told the story of my days with those crumbs. Three percent blue Play-Doh; 10 percent toast; 87 percent Honey Nut Cheerios dust: This was who I was.

Yes, it is! We have all been there, we who have children. You end up trading in your sporty sedan for a minivan, and the minivan quickly develops a permanent layer of Cheerios dust and crumbs. This is life! Back in 2003, shortly after we moved to Dallas, my wife and I went with a colleague of mine and his wife to the movies to see The Secret Lives Of Dentists, an indie movie about a married-with-kids couple in suburban New York City, both dentists. The husband discovers that his bored wife is cheating on him. Most of the movie is the husband struggling with his anger, and trying to figure out what he should do, given that they have three little children. The climax involves stomach flu hitting the family, apocalyptically. You could tell who in the audience were parents by who was laughing at the upchuck-a-palooza unfolding on screen. My then-childless colleague and his wife sat stone-faced, not understanding why my wife and I were doubled up laughing. This was such a familiar picture of marriage-and-family, hilarious in its awfulness. And yet, the husband (Campbell Scott) was bearing up so heroically, caring for them all, because he loved his family more than he loved himself.

There is nothing obviously attractive about being a parent who is caring for three children suffering from various stages of vomiting and diarrhea. What makes that scene so beautiful from the point of view of a parent who has been there and done that is that Campbell Scott’s faithful sacrifices are an icon of fatherly (and husbandly) devotion. He doesn’t have time to think about himself, and how much all of this — his cuckoldry, the kids’ sickness — sucks. They need him. I have watched my wife be this person hundreds of times. I have been this person hundreds of times. It’s part of the deal. It’s what helps make a family a family.

This is not the way of Honor Jones.

But the crumbs got me down. I sometimes felt that they were a metaphor, that as I got older I was being ground down under the heel of my own life. All I could do was settle into the carpet.

I didn’t have a secret life. But I had a secret dream life—which might have been worse. I loved my husband; it’s not that I didn’t. But I felt that he was standing between me and the world, between me and myself. Everything I experienced—relationships, reality, my understanding of my own identity and desires—were filtered through him before I could access them. The worst part was that it wasn’t remotely his fault; this is probably exactly what I asked him to do when we were 21 and first in love, even if I never said it out loud. To shelter me from the elements; to be caring and broad-shouldered. But now it was like I was always on my tiptoes, trying to see around him. I couldn’t see, but I could imagine. I started imagining other lives. Other homes.

More:

I wanted to be thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy. How much of my life—I mean the architecture of my life, but also its essence, my soul, my mind—had I built around my husband? Who could I be if I wasn’t his wife? Maybe I would microdose. Maybe I would have sex with women. Maybe I would write a book. …

They divorced and moved from Pennsylvania to Brooklyn. Now her little children split time between Mommy’s apartment and Daddy’s apartment. Jones writes:

Maybe I’m deluding myself. Maybe I’m not free of anything and I just want different objects, a different home, maybe someday—admit it—a different man. Maybe I’m starting the same story all over again. “For what?” you’d ask me, and you’d be right.

But I don’t think so. I think I’m making something new.

Read the whole thing. It’s contemptible.

Again, we can never fully know what happened inside that marriage, or inside any marriage. I can only judge in this case on the information Jones provides. What we know from the piece is that she got bored and restless being a wife and mother, and blew up her family for the sake of being free, or rather, “free”. Free to think about the patriarchy, and how horrible it all is, though I do wonder what lessons her poor children will take from this about the glories of the matriarchy.

Listen, your middle-aged correspondent doesn’t have to sit here long and think about the people he knows in his wide circle of friends — both husbands and wives — who are suffering through a painful period in their marriages, but keeping it together. Some of them are doing it for the kids. Others are doing it because they are Christians, and believe that one should only divorce as a last resort. Still others are doing it because they expected to have times like this in marriage, and they have a basic belief that you don’t destroy a family over a crisis that may pass. I won’t say more about these people, because I don’t want to violate any confidences. I can tell you, though, that in no example I’m aware of does infidelity or physical abuse show up (though in all honesty, some of them are enduring some sort of emotional abuse). As I write this, I’m thinking of four people in particular — two men, two women, all Christians — who are carrying heavy crosses, 100 percent because they do not want their children to suffer. In conversation with them over the past few years, I have learned that they see their situation as dying-to-self to preserve a semblance of a stable childhood for their kids.

“You’ve got to get out of there,” I said to one of those friends, who is married to a self-centered jackass. She’s going to wait until their youngest reaches a certain age. Her husband doesn’t physically abuse her; he has simply abandoned her within the marriage, and treats her rudely and coldly. It’s horrible, but as she sees it, endurable for the sake of the children. I admire her immensely, sacrificing her own happiness to provide well for their kids. She is a heroine. True, if she left him, I would 100 percent support her, and certainly not judge her (I know what she’s gone through). But the fact that she shoulders this burden for the sake of the kids is deeply honorable. She is absolutely clear-eyed about her situation, and doesn’t ask for anyone’s pity. She sees her primary duty as giving their kids the best life she can, as long as she can bear the cost to her personal happiness.

Hear me clearly: in no way do I believe a husband or a wife should have to submit to infidelity or physical abuse, or serious and/or prolonged emotional abuse, for the sake of holding a marriage together for the kids. But having raised three kids, two of whom are legal adults, and the youngest of which is 15, and having observed friends raising their kids, I understand now in a way I could not have when I first married almost a quarter-century ago how much sacrifice is part of the deal with marriage and family. Sometimes, marriages fail, and the only realistic and reasonable thing to do is to start over. But if children are involved, there ought to be a high bar. I confess that my reasoning here is motivated in large part by my love for my own children. If I were put to the test like my friends are, there is a hell of a lot of dying to self I would be willing to do out of love for them. The Secret Lives Of Dentists shows a husband and father whose sacrificial caring for his daughters during their sickness mirrors his willingness to absorb pain inflicted by their mother for the sake of sheltering them. Knowing that she was unfaithful, he had grounds for divorce, but being confronted with the vulnerability of his children compels the husband to consider forgiveness.

None of this has a thing to do with Honor Jones and her situation. She was just bored, that’s all. I think of the story I tell in Live Not By Lies, about my Hungarian friend lamenting that she can’t discuss her struggles as a wife and mom with her friends, because so many of them believe that if she’s having any trouble at all, she should get divorced and put her kid in day care. They can’t understand that she really is happy, despite the struggles she and her husband sometimes have, and despite the drudgery of caring for a small child. My friend factored suffering in as part of the deal, because my friend is realistic. The crazy people are those who believe that obligations to spouses and children can honorably be abandoned as soon as one finds oneself anxious or unhappy. In the Orthodox Church, in the marriage service, both the husband and wife are crowned. These crowns have a double meaning: they are both crowns of joy and crowns of martyrdom, in recognition that marriage contains both, and they cannot be separated. If you want the joy, you have to be prepared to accept dying to self. There is deep wisdom in that.

But none of that makes any sense to Honor Jones. By her own account, what drove her to divorce was boredom, and the belief that she was losing herself inside this marriage.

I don’t understand this at all. And here’s the thing: no man would write an essay like this, making public the shameful fact that he abandoned his wife and children because he was bored being domesticated. In fact, the friend I mentioned above? Her husband is an older male version of Honor Jones, though they have not divorced. He thinks he was made for a more thrilling life than domesticity. He believes that Cheerios ground into the minivan carpet and all of that is beneath him. I like to think that even he would have the sense to understand what a shameful thing it would be to publish an essay about his so-called self-liberation from dull domesticity. If he did publish such an essay, the man would be subject to widespread and deserved condemnation from all quarters, as a selfish prick.

But women who do this? No — we have a double standard in their case.

Maybe it goes back to the revolutionary 1879 Ibsen play A Doll’s House. In it, a bourgeois Danish woman suffers a crisis in her marriage, the resolution of which reveals how powerless women were in 19th century Danish society. Nora Helmer, the protagonist, realizes that she was treated like a doll by her late father, and also by her banker husband, Torvald. She tells him in the final scene that she is leaving him and their children to find herself. He reminds her that she is a wife and a mother, and is walking out on those responsibilities. She responds that there must be more to her than that — and leaves for good.

I recall seeing that play for the first time, on Broadway, in Janet McTeer’s much-lauded performance. McTeer made me feel the hopelessness of her Nora, and the injustice visited upon women in that society. And I also pitied Torvald, who is a martinet, yes, but who was fulfilling a stuffy role given him by Danish middle-class society. He is both victimizer (of Nora) and victim of a rigid society that crushed people within it. It was impossible not to sympathize with Nora’s suffering, and her desire to escape a marriage in which she was treated as nothing more than an ornament, a wife, mother, and plaything of her husband. She flees in the middle of the night in search of herself.

And yet — what about the children? That question has been the bone stuck in my throat about this play over the years. We are now coming up on 150 years since the debut of A Doll’s House, and the world Western women live in has changed in revolutionary ways, in part because of works like Ibsen’s. No woman of the professional middle class lives like Nora, or has to live like Nora. Perhaps Honor Jones sees herself as Nora, but she was not oppressed in her marriage: she was simply bored and unfulfilled.

On the evidence provided in her essay, Honor Jones is not Ibsen’s Nora Helmer; she is Kenny Rogers’s Lucille.

As I said, “Lucille” came out in 1977, and became a monster hit. I was ten years old. On the school bus, the driver (my mom) played the radio for us on the afternoon ride home. I recall sitting there in my seat, transfixed by the story of Lucille. I couldn’t wrap my mind around the idea that a mom would leave her four children because she wanted a more fun life. It was not only cruel, but far beyond cruelty: it shattered the right order of the world. Back then, I had only one friend whose parents were divorced, and it frightened me that such a thing could happen.

Now, forty-five years later, I recognize that my own parents did not always have an easy marriage. Both were at fault, though I also recognize that the struggles my parents had were ordinary struggles that all couples have. The stuff they dealt with are the kinds of things that people today, lacking the moral gravitas of previous generations, divorce over now — like Honor Jones has done. But they bore it. I am sure that all the parents of my childhood friends were also struggling too, because that’s what married people do.

Might either one of my parents have found greater happiness by leaving the marriage? Possibly. At various times in their marriage, I can easily imagine that one would have had reason to leave the other. But neither one did. A big part of the gratitude I feel today towards my late father and my aging mother is the sacrifices each made to provide my sister and me with a stable childhood home. I’m sure I will never know the full story of those sacrifices — that generation doesn’t like to talk about such things — but I am confident that the kinds of dying-to-self that both of my parents did was replicated throughout our neighborhood. That was a generation of people who, for all their faults, understood that there were more important things in this world than personal happiness.

Someone like Honor Jones, and what she has done, would have been inconceivable to that generation, or at least those around whom I grew up in the rural South in the 1970s and 1980s. I bet, though, that many of their grandchildren see the world and their obligations to it as Honor Jones does. It’s not just Americans, either; consider the testimony of my Hungarian friend about her generation. As I write this, I am thinking about a heart-shaking conversation I had back in 2013 with professors at a conservative Evangelical college I was visiting. I asked them what their greatest concern was about their students. One said, “That they won’t be able to form stable families.” This puzzled me, because this was a conservative Evangelical school.

I asked the professor why he feared they wouldn’t be able to form stable families. He said, “Because most of them have never seen one.” The other professors around the table nodded in agreement.

What a heavy burden we have placed on our children! We want them to rise in the world, marry, have families of their own, and achieve happiness, but we also deny them the help they need to do so. Dante, in Paradiso Canto V, explains the importance of keeping vows. He tells us (through the voice of Beatrice) that next to existence itself, free will is the greatest gift God gives us. When we freely sacrifice that liberty by yoking ourselves to some other person or cause, through our vows, it is no small thing. The disorder of the world, Dante indicates, comes in large part by the refusal of people to live by their vows freely made.

I am guilty too. I made a vow to live as a Catholic, but violated that vow when I left the Catholic Church. That vowed relationship had dissolved before I chose to leave Catholicism. At the end, the vow was not a fortress wall protecting something precious, but an empty cage. I don’t regret breaking that vow, because it had been rendered meaningless by events having to do with my own weakness, and the weakness of the Church, and besides, the harder I worked to keep that vow by force of will, the further it drove me from Jesus Christ.

But the dissolution of that vow was nevertheless an extremely painful thing, and it should have been! On the other hand, I bore a hell of a lot of pain to honor that vow for as long as I could, but eventually I shattered. I was not proud of abandoning that vow, and grieved over its necessity (because I was by the end well along the path to losing my faith in Christ entirely). Nevertheless, it was just for me to suffer for the sake of the vow, and to suffer after I abandoned it, in part because vows are necessary for the solidity and order of our world. The end of one’s relationship to a religion, of one’s marriage, or any other relationship consecrated through God, is a tearing of the fabric of our society, and even of our world. Children understand that, even if adults rationalize their behavior.

In my writing, I have highlighted the concept of “liquid modernity,” the phrase sociologist Zygmunt Bauman uses to describe our condition. It is one of no fixed structures, institutions, or ways of life. In liquid modernity, everything solid melts into air — even marriages. The person who thrives in liquid modernity is the one who makes no firm commitments, who keeps her options open. Honor Jones is an exemplary liquid modernist. I am sure she received lots of praise for her “brave” essay, from the kind of educated professional class people among whom she has nested. I keep trying to see Jones’s essay from a more empathetic standpoint, but I can’t do it. She writes:

Everything I experienced—relationships, reality, my understanding of my own identity and desires—were filtered through him before I could access them.

Yes! Because he is your husband, and you became one flesh! Nowhere in that essay does she write that her husband mistreated her, or, like Torvald Helmer, made his wife feel small. She even concedes that he behaved towards her as she wanted him to when they first married … but she changed her mind, so screw you, jack, and screw the kids. Honor needs to find herself. If that man’s heart is broken, if those children’s worlds are shattered, too bad. It’s all about the inaptly named Honor, who needed the freedom to think about art and patriarchy.

Once, when I was about 20, I accidentally overheard my parents having a very bitter fight about something. I can’t remember what it was, but I remember hearing my mother, who was overwhelmed by anxiety about my plans to backpack in Europe that summer, saying some extremely cruel things to my dad. The next day, when we were alone in the pickup truck, I told him what I had heard, and told him that if he wanted to divorce, Ruthie and I were both in college, and old enough to handle it. He didn’t even take his eyes off the road. All he said to me were these words: “I made a vow.”

That was the end of the conversation. I did not understand his point of view, because I was young and immature, and I thought that personal happiness was the summum bonum of life. But my father had the greater part of wisdom. He felt honor-bound by the vow he had made, and of course he understood, in a way that I could not at that age (especially coming from a family in which our parents rarely argued in front of us), that couples sometimes have hellacious fights, and that that’s just part of marriage. If my parents had divorced then, or even later in their life together, I would have forgiven them, especially as I grew older, and came to see them as real people, with virtues mixed in with flaws. The fight I overheard that summer of 1987 was no doubt not the worst fight of their lives, nor the last, but it was the first time I had seen this from my parents, which is why it shocked me so profoundly. (It was a real mercy to us kids that they didn’t argue in front of us.)

Please don’t think that I’m saying my parents had an unhappy marriage! I think they had a normal marriage, and that their immature 20-year-old son, who had been taught by post-1960s pop culture that maximizing personal happiness is the greatest good, was the historically abnormal figure. You couldn’t have convinced me of that, though, until I lived marriage and parenthood myself, and came to understand through practical experience how important stability is to children, and how complicated the concept of happiness is. It is certainly possible that one or both of my parents would have found a greater measure of personal happiness had they divorced — and it is also possible that their quest for personal happiness at the cost of breaking their marriage vows would have ended in even greater sorrow, not only for them, but for my sister and me, and our families. We will never know what sacrifices both my mom and my dad made to keep their marriage together through the hard times. What I do know is that their mutual willingness to make those sacrifices gave me and my sister a better life, and foundation for life, than we would have had if either had ended the marriage. My kids are almost all grown now, but I know without a shadow of a doubt that if I had left their mother, a large, dark shadow would have covered any attempt at personal happiness on my part, because I would not have been able to cleanse the stain of the pain I caused those children.

And that’s how it should be. One more time: I am not talking about divorce in cases of abuse, infidelity, or criminality. I’m talking about what Honor Jones did, and variations of that. Over the past twenty years, I have been acquaintances with two different men who walked out on their families because they found happiness in the arms of another woman. Maybe God forgives them, but I can’t, and wouldn’t cross the road to dump a cup of water on either if they were on fire. Such disgraceful men do not belong in the company of honorable men.

It is hard for me to believe that a world in which a woman feels that destroying her marriage and family structure for the sake of her own self-discovery is good or sustainable. Again, just think how you would feel if a man had written this essay, justifying leaving his wife and plunging his children into divorce not because his wife was an adulteress, or cruel, or any bad thing, but simply because he felt bored and stifled by marriage. Here are some fruits of the culture of narcissism, of which Honor Jones is an exemplar:

Burke’s “Little Platoons” no longer have a hold on a majority on Americans.

Today, most American adults are not:

Stably married
Regularly engaged IRL civic life
Regular churchgoers (see below)

Update your worldview accordingly.https://t.co/5CkDA993n4 pic.twitter.com/ZlwDLtHkpu

— Brad Wilcox (@BradWilcoxIFS) January 2, 2022

We in America are running up debts that we demand our children, and their children, pay, so we can live as we like. About abortion, St. Teresa of Calcutta once said:

“It is a poverty to decide that a child must die so that you may live as you wish.”

Along those lines, it is a poverty that a marriage and a family must die so that you may live as you wish. Not “to save you from an abusive situation” or “to sever ties to an adulterous spouse,” or any other serious thing that would make divorce a necessary tragedy. No, only so that you can pursue thinking about art and sex and politics and the patriarchy, and whatever the Other Life brings.

We have learned nothing from the Sixties and Seventies. You know that, right?

The post Lucille Of The Libs appeared first on The American Conservative.

The GOP Learns Nothing About War

Depressing news from Politico:

MEET YOUR FUTURE HOUSE INTEL CHAIR — Minority Leader KEVIN MCCARTHY named Rep. MIKE TURNER (R-Ohio) as new ranking member on the House Intelligence Committee, a prominent national security post that ensures he’ll be the leading contender to replace Rep. ADAM SCHIFF as panel chair if the GOP flips the House. Turner replaces Rep. DEVIN NUNES, who’s leaving to become CEO of Trump Media & Technology Group.

Turner, elected in 2002 after serving as mayor of one of our hometowns (Dayton!), is considered more of a pragmatist than his predecessor. He’s tacked to the center for much of his career, even opposing the GOP’s 2017 Obamacare repeal effort and calling DONALD TRUMP’s attempt to build his border wall via emergency declaration a “dangerous precedent.”

Turner has close military ties: His district includes Wright Patterson Air Force Base, and as a member of the House Armed Services Committee, he’s been a fierce defender of the Pentagon’s budget. He’s a Russia hawk who regularly blasted Trump for being too cozy with Russian President VLADIMIR PUTIN.

For a good sense of who Turner is, watch this recent clip of him going toe-to-toe with TUCKER CARLSON over whether the U.S. should supply Ukraine with intelligence and weapons to repel Russian aggression. When Carlson asked, “Why would we take Ukraine’s side and not Russia’s side? … Who’s got the energy reserves? … I’m totally confused,” Turner responded:

“Ukraine is a democracy. … Russia is an authoritarian regime seeking to impose its will on validly elected democracy. … We’re for democracy. We’re for liberty. We’re not for authoritarian regimes coming in and changing borders by tanks. … We need to make sure we’re on the side of democracy.”

This is so disheartening. The failed George W. Bush crusade for democracy should have discredited these people forever. For them, it is always 1991 or 2003, and America is still fighting to establish Freedom and Democracy as the world order. We don’t need to make sure “we’re on the side of democracy.” We need to make sure that we’re on the side of America’s vital national interests — and that doesn’t include starting a war with Russia over Ukraine, especially not when our own country is falling apart in so many ways.

Here’s the full transcript of Rep. Turner’s clash with Tucker Carlson:

TURNER: Tucker, thank you so much for bringing attention to this issue.

This is one that the mainstream media is not going to be reporting and it’s incredibly important for people to understand what Russia is doing and really the threat to the United States and the threat to the United States allies.

CARLSON: Well, that’s kind of the force of my question. My first one is, I mean, there a lot of military families that watch this show. You’ve called for sending American troops to Ukraine, to the region as you put it.

I wonder if you could explain to them why it is in America’s interest as their kids risk their lives in Ukraine?

TURNER: Sure. Yes, well there’s a couple things which I’m certain you’re aware of, Tucker, that the United States signed with Russia and Ukraine a treaty in Budapest guaranteeing the territorial integrity of Ukraine in exchange for them during the dismantling of the Soviet Union of giving up nuclear weapons of not being a nuclear weapon state.

And in Bucharest NATO Summit, we also agreed with our NATO allies that Ukraine, which is an ally to NATO would receive a pathway to NATO.

Russia sees Ukraine as importantly strategic because it’s also the pipelines to give gas to Europe that they’re trying to bypass with respect to building Nord Stream 2. As you know, Russia has already invaded Ukraine once and taken Crimea, which they’ve militarized and there are likely very advanced nuclear weapons there.

We already have troops in Ukraine. The issue of our letter is to raise the importance so that people understand that we’re about ready to see debacle number two of the Biden administration. You know, we all think of Afghanistan and that’s really coming out of this. China and Russia are going to be more adventuresome as a result of the failures of the administration.

But when you think of Afghanistan, you think of those planes leaving and people running toward those planes, people falling to their death, and as you know, Tucker, if those planes were Russian, no one would — Russian — no one would be running toward them. This is the idea of America, of democracy, of freedom. We pride of our democracy.

CARLSON: But may I just ask really quick, so —

TURNER: And it is certainly one that is an ally of ours.

CARLSON: So the lesson of 20 years in Afghanistan and the tragic and cowardly and counterproductive exit from Afghanistan is that we need more troops in Ukraine? I don’t — so why should the average American care about the territorial integrity of Ukraine, sincerely? [Emphasis mine — RD]

TURNER: Okay, so Ukraine is of strategic import of the Black Sea. Most of the reports that you’ve been — we’re seeing of Russia being aggressive with our ships, aggressive with our planes, are in the area of the Black Sea which is an important area for us and our NATO allies.

Four countries, Romania, Bulgaria, Greece, and Turkey all border it, of which we have reciprocal defense agreements. Now, we’ve not asked anybody to go to war with Russia or to send troops to Russia for Ukraine for the purposes of going to war with Russia, but it is incredibly important that they be providing lethal weapons, that they be providing Intelligence so that Ukraine has an ability to defend itself.

CARLSON: But why is it incredibly important to Americans? I mean, I know from Ukrainian perspective, it’s incredibly important, but why is it important enough to risk American lives to preserve the territorial integrity of Ukraine, when by the way our own territorial integrity has been flagrantly violated by a million foreign nationals coming in over the past 10 months?

TURNER: Sure.

CARLSON: I wonder why the emphasis on Ukraine’s borders and not ours.

TURNER: Well, I think everyone has emphasis on our borders, Tucker, but certainly, I think you would understand —

CARLSON: Have you called for American troops to our borders?

TURNER: That the important — everyone has called for American troops.

CARLSON: Really?

TURNER: That is on our side, Tucker, but I think what you’re missing here is …

CARLSON: I haven’t heard anybody say that.

TURNER: … the fact that because the President has failed in Afghanistan, both Russia and China are looking at threatening their neighbors including Taiwan, including Ukraine, countries that are important to both our allies and to the strategic importance of the areas in which they are.

What we’ve asked for is don’t be Obama. You have to recall, Tucker that when Ukraine was invaded and Crimea fell, Obama sent blankets to President Poroshenko in Ukraine. He came to the House floor joint session of Congress and he begged for lethal weapons to be able to defend his own country against Russia.

He said, I can’t defend my country with blankets. That’s what we’ve said is, make certain that we give them what they need. Give them Intelligence, give them lethal weapons. Give them assistance. Give them guidance because it’s important.

CARLSON: But why would we — why but why would we take Ukraine — but hold on, why would we take Ukraine’s side and not Russia’s side? A sincere question. If you’re looking for the American perspective —

TURNER: We are already on Ukraine’s side.

CARLSON: No, but why? I mean, who’s got the energy reserves? Who is the major player in world affairs? Who is the potential counterbalance against China which is the actual threat? Why would we take Ukraine’s side? Why wouldn’t we have Russia’s side?

I don’t — I’m totally confused.

TURNER: Well, clearly, maybe if you get out a map and you look to see where the Black Sea is and Bulgaria and Romania — Romania where we have our missile defense system.

CARLSON: Right.

TURNER: Greece and Turkey, the entrance to the Black Sea and then from there, you look at what the conflicts have already been in Russia’s areas there. Ukraine is a democracy, Russia is an authoritarian regime that is seeking to impose its will upon a validly elected democracy in Ukraine and we’re on the side of democracy, that’s why people were chasing those planes in Afghanistan and wouldn’t be chasing Russian ones.

We are for democracy, we’re for liberty. We’re not for authoritarian regimes coming in and changing borders by tanks. [Emphasis mine — RD] Russia isn’t showing up on the border with ballot boxes. They are showing up on the border with tanks, and that’s why we need to make certain we’re on the side of democracy and give the aid that’s necessary so we don’t have another Obama sending blankets to a country that’s being invaded.

CARLSON: Yes, I mean, I — yes, I am for democracy in other countries, I guess, but I’m really for America.

TURNER: Sure you are.

CARLSON: And I just think that our interest is in counter-balancing the actual threat, which is China and the only other country with any throw weight that might help us do that is Russia and our continuation of the Cold War has pushed Russia toward China and that does not serve our interest in any way, does it? Or maybe it does in the way that I kind of see it.

TURNER: Okay, so you have to understand this is not a Cold War. This is a Hot War. Russia has already invaded Ukraine and has taken Crimea and annexed it and militarized it. It’s not like we have somehow resolved that.

CARLSON: But how did that affect — wait hold on. So, I’m glad you pointed that out.

TURNER: They have militarized it.

CARLSON: Like so how did that hurt America exactly? So, they came into Crimea. I guess, I’m against that.

TURNER: You are and they militarized it.

CARLSON: But I didn’t notice a detectable decline in American living standards.

TURNER: And brought in advanced weaponry systems.

CARLSON: Okay, but why do I care again?

TURNER: The issue — you care because what Russia is doing is they are rebuilding their area access of denial with Kaliningrad, Crimea, and Syria to fortify what they had when they had the Warsaw Pact countries which many of which now are in NATO and are headed towards NATO, so that we can make certain that liberty and democracy is strengthened.

You should be against, as I’m sure you are, Tucker, any country using tanks to invade another and putting their will on that country and changing that country’s border, that’s what they have done and that’s what they are doing.

CARLSON: Yes, academically I am, but I mean, you know there are a lot of priorities on the map here.

Last question, so you sent this letter to President Biden asking for the commitment of American troops to a foreign country.

TURNER: We did not. And you’ve misread the letter because what it says it actually tells specifically we’re not saying send troops into Ukraine. We said make certain that there is a military presence in the area so we can provide aid to Ukraine in two important areas, Intelligence. If we have troops in the air, we can watch, we know what happens, we know what Russia is doing.

The second is lethal weapons so that Ukraine can defend itself. No one is suggesting —

CARLSON: I got it. Send lawyers, guns and money. I totally got it.

TURNER: And none of the members of Congress suggest that anybody should go to war in Ukraine with Russia. No one, and the letter does not say that either.

CARLSON: Well, I’ll let our — our viewers can pull up the letter on the internet and reach their own conclusions. That’s not the conclusion I reached, but have you —

TURNER: They can go to my website. I’ll put it up. I’ll put it up, Tucker. They can read it there.

CARLSON: Absolutely, but final question, our democracy is undermined when people come from other countries and that devalues the vote of the people who already live here, so that’s an attack on our democracy. A democracy has to have defendable borders.

TURNER: Tucker, I am not —

CARLSON: So where is the American military presence?

TURNER: The Biden administration —

CARLSON: Where are — but where are the Republicans demanding that we send the 101st or whatever it takes to close the border? I’ve never heard anybody say that. They’re all whipped up about Crimea.

TURNER: Hey, Tucker unlike your anti-Trump friend, J.D. Vance, I supported Donald Trump in closing the border including defending him in his impeachment trial, which you yourself reported and that border was being closed on the policies that we had under Donald Trump, which I supported when I supported Donald Trump.

CARLSON: Actually, actually, you wrote a letter to Trump —

TURNER: So, I don’t know why you’re talking to me on the border —

CARLSON: No, no. Whoa, whoa.

TURNER: I’m with you on this, Tucker.

CARLSON: Now, we’re getting factual here, and I don’t want to be mean, but you wrote a letter to Trump in which you said yes, protect the border, but make certain that we don’t in any way take troops or materiel from our foreign commitments and bring them to the border. You said that in your letter and so, I just thought that’s just a different perspective.

TURNER: Donald Trump sent lethal weapons and Intelligence. I said, I’m a senior member of the Armed Services Committee and the Intelligence Committee.

CARLSON: Yes.

TURNER: What I’ve asked for in that letter, Donald Trump did.

CARLSON: Oh yes, No, I’m aware. I thought it was stupid then. I think it’s stupid now.

TURNER: The Obama administration did not and we believe that this administration is likely not to and what I love about the fact that you brought attention to this is because the mainstream media is going to let Russia invade Ukraine without anybody knowing. They’re not going to know —

CARLSON: Right.

TURNER: That the Biden administration had options on the table, things they could have done and they could have done right now which are not sending troops to Ukraine and fight for —

CARLSON: Right, but that’s not quite as pressing as Hondurans invading Texas.

TURNER: And the Biden administration, this is going to be another —

CARLSON: Which is maybe a little more imminent for most of us. That’s my only point. We have an invasion going on right now, a million people bigger than the population of Boston or Denver or Washington, D.C., and we’re all like, oh no, no big deal. That’s a big deal in my view.

TURNER: Tucker, I don’t know who you’re arguing with here because I’m on your side on all of those issues except apparently you need a little education on Ukraine. I’d be glad to send you some stuff on it.

CARLSON: Well, I appreciate it, Congressman. Thank you.

Here’s a link to the letter that Mike Turner and other GOP Congressmen sent to President Biden. Here’s how it starts:

Look, I don’t think Russia should invade Ukraine, and I hope it will not do so. But I cannot for the life of me understand these politicians who think that America ought to risk actual war with Russia over Ukraine. It would be foolish even if we had not depleted ourselves with these catastrophic democracy-promoting wars of choice launched by a Republican president, and supported by the permanent war party in Washington. There is relatively low support among the war-weary American people for US involvement in the Russia-Ukraine conflict. Here are the results from a recent YouGov poll. Excerpt:

Almost half of all Americans oppose war with Russia, and only 27 percent favor it to any degree. Yet the Washington war party rolls on, as if it doesn’t give a damn about the views and interests of the people they govern.

Here’s a great Ukraine piece from National Interest that first ran in 2019, but which the magazine republished earlier this week, because it is still highly relevant. The author is Mark Episkopos. Excerpts:

The impeachment hearings in the House of Representatives have demonstrated  a near-unanimous consensus among Washington experts and politicians regarding Ukraine policy, best expressed in the closing remarks of Rep. Adam Schiff’s (D-Calif.): “We should care about Ukraine. We should care about a country struggling to be free and a Democracy . . . but of course, it’s about more than Ukraine. It’s about us. It’s about our national security. Their fight is our fight. Their defense is our defense. When Russia remakes the map of Europe for the first time since World War II by dint of military force and Ukraine fights back, it is our fight too.”

Former Ambassador to Ukraine Bill Taylor echoed a similar sentiment in a recent New York Times op-ed: “To support Ukraine,” wrote Taylor, “is to support a rules-based international order that enabled major powers in Europe to avoid war for seven decades. It is to support democracy over autocracy. It is to support freedom over unfreedom. Most Americans do.”

The Washington consensus offers what is admittedly a gripping narrative: not only the U.S. government but every American citizen is morally bound to support a fledgling Ukrainian nation locked in a mortal struggle to defend its democracy against foreign invasion.

However, this prevailing view is premised on a grossly misguided understanding of Ukrainian society and political culture—one that jettisons the historical complexity of Ukrainian political identities in favor of a shallow liberal-developmentalist model that forces millions of Ukrainians into a nation-building project that they want no part of.

More:

So much as a cursory glance at Ukraine’s electoral map reveals that NATO and EU accession is not, and has never been, the unanimous goal of “the Ukrainian people.” It is rather a reflection of an exclusionary, western Ukrainian nationalist vision that is widely rejected across the country’s eastern half—that same vision was violently rejected by the people of Donetsk and Luhansk, whose decision to secede from the Ukrainian state in 2014 led to the ongoing war in Donbass. If nothing else, the winding and complex history of Ukrainian identity reveals the exact opposite of Ukraine so fervently portrayed by the media and policy establishment over the past year; far from a “a nation that has broken from its troubled past to embrace European and Western values and that seeks to join European and North Atlantic institutions,” Ukraine is a deeply divided post-Soviet state struggling to stitch together a coherent constitutive story from contradicting imperial legacies.

U.S. intervention in the ongoing Donbass conflict is not, despite appearances, an expression of solidarity with a beleaguered Ukrainian nation united against Russian aggression. Rather, it is an intervention on behalf of some Ukrainians against other Ukrainians; an act of picking winners and losers in Ukraine’s ongoing struggle to sift through the consequences of Euromaidan. Helping one segment of the Ukrainian population to forcefully impose their ethnonational identity on another will contribute neither to a Europe nor to a Ukraine, whole and free. It is a recipe for precisely the kind of escalating civil war and prolonged regional instability and that Washington, Brussels, and the Kremlin have been trying to avert.

Read it all. 

We are playing with fire, and we are going to get burned badly. It is incredibly discouraging that four years of Trump did nothing to discourage the warmongering instinct among GOP elites. Did you notice that Politico characterized Rep. Turner as “a fierce defender of the Pentagon’s budget.” No doubt. Has he ever spoken out against the top-down wokeness the Pentagon brass are forcing on soldiers, sailors, and airmen? Or is he more interested in what the top generals and admirals have to say, as opposed to the troops?

What I don’t understand is Americans — not just Congressmen — who think that we are still a hyperpower with the means and the right to impose our views on everyone else in the world. Even if you really are a triumphalist who stans for US global hegemony, how can you not see that after twenty years of failing to bring liberal democracy to the Middle East and Afghanistan, at immense cost in blood and treasure, it is extremely ill-advised to throw ourselves into a war with Russia in its own backyard?

The prospect of America going this route brings to mine the Tsarist government losing the 1904 Russo-Japanese War. Nicholas II’s hubris, and false sense of Russia’s power, caused the catastrophe, which caused a widespread loss of faith in his government, and sparked the 1905 revolution — a precursor to the totalitarian Bolshevik event of 1917. If Washington — the Democrats and the Republicans — lead America into a stupid war with Russia over Ukraine, at a time of deep domestic discontent (e.g., inflation, drug overdoses), the Establishment will deserve what it gets.

The post The GOP Learns Nothing About War appeared first on The American Conservative.

The ‘Problematic’ E.O. Wilson

I’ve been away from the keys for much of the day, and am just now getting to the entirely justified freak-out over this deplorably stupid article Scientific American published about the great entomologist E.O. Wilson, who died the day after Christmas. The magazine utterly beclowns itself with wokeness. The author is Monica McLemore, an associate professor of nursing at University of California, San Francisco, who takes it upon herself to judge negatively the legacy of one of the greatest scientists of our time, before he may even have been buried. What’s wrong with him? Well, what do you think? Excerpts:

With the death of biologist E. O. Wilson on Sunday, I find myself again reflecting on the complicated legacies of scientists whose works are built on racist ideas and how these ideas came to define our understanding of the world.

After a long clinical career as a registered nurse, I became a laboratory-trained scientist as researchers mapped the first draft of the human genome. It was during this time that I intimately familiarized myself with Wilson’s work and his dangerous ideas on what factors influence human behavior.

His influential text Sociobiology: The New Synthesis contributed to the false dichotomy of nature versus nurture and spawned an entire field of behavioral psychology grounded in the notion that differences among humans could be explained by genetics, inheritance and other biological mechanisms. Finding out that Wilson thought this way was a huge disappointment, because I had enjoyed his novel Anthill, which was published much later and written for the public.

Wilson was hardly alone in his problematic beliefs. His predecessors—mathematician Karl Pearson, anthropologist Francis Galton, Charles Darwin, Gregor Mendel and others—also published works and spoke of theories fraught with racist ideas about distributions of health and illness in populations without any attention to the context in which these distributions occur.

Oh my. Get this:

Second, the application of the scientific method matters: what works for ants and other nonhuman species is not always relevant for health and/or human outcomes. For example, the associations of Black people with poor health outcomes, economic disadvantage and reduced life expectancy can be explained by structural racism, yet Blackness or Black culture is frequently cited as the driver of those health disparities. Ant culture is hierarchal and matriarchal, based on human understandings of gender. And the descriptions and importance of ant societies existing as colonies is a component of Wilson’s work that should have been critiqued. Context matters.

Bad Wilson! His scientific ideas get in the way of the moralistic political crusade to blame whitey for every bad thing!

McLemore wants scientists to hire Grievance Studies majors and allies from related fields to vet scientific research to keep Bad Thoughts from being aired in public:

First, truth and reconciliation are necessary in the scientific record, including attention to citational practices when using or reporting on problematic work. This approach includes thinking critically about where and when to include historically problematic work and the context necessary for readers to understand the limitations of the ideas embedded in it. This will require commitments from journal editors, peer reviewers and the scientific community to invest in retrofitting existing publications with this expertise. They can do so by employing humanities scholars, journalists and other science communicators with the appropriate expertise to evaluate health and life sciences manuscripts submitted for publication.

How does garbage like this get approved at a publication like Scientific American? Wokeness demands the death of clear, rigorous thinking. Prof. McLemore also questions what she calls “white empiricism”; I’m not sure what the connection is there between that and what the Nazis denounced as “Jewish science,” but I guarantee you that no one at woke Scientific American has thought of it — even though they once published an article explaining how pro-Nazi German physicists led the crusade against “Jewish science.” Now Scientific American appears to be leading the crusade against “white science,” and congratulating themselves for their progressive virtue.

 

UPDATE: In related news that I just saw, the State of New York is running low on monoclonal antibodies, and has decided that white people need to go to the back of the line because of “systemic” racism. Seriously! From the official press release:

The woke are dividing us by race, even when it comes to potentially life-saving treatment. Don’t you see what they’re doing? They’re trying to put us at each other’s throats!

 

The post The ‘Problematic’ E.O. Wilson appeared first on The American Conservative.

Chantal Delsol & Christianity’s End

Christopher Caldwell writes about a new book by the French Catholic scholar Chantal Delsol, who says that the West is repaganizing. Excerpts:

Ms. Delsol’s ingenious approach is to examine the civilizational change underway in light of that last one 1,600 years ago. Christians brought what she calls a “normative inversion” to pagan Rome. That is, they prized much that the Romans held in contempt and condemned much that the Romans prized, particularly in matters related to sex and family. Today the Christian overlay on Western cultural life is being removed, revealing a lot of pagan urges that it covered up.

To state Ms. Delsol’s argument crudely, what is happening today is an undoing, but it is also a redoing. We are inverting the normative inversion. We are repaganizing.

Caldwell, summarizing Delsol, says that whatever emerges from the end of Christianity as the West’s religion will not be atheism, but something else.

So if another civilization comes to replace Christianity, it will not be a mere negation, such as atheism or nihilism. It will be a rival civilization with its own logic — or at least its own style of moralizing. It may resemble the present-day iconoclasm that French commentators refer to as le woke.

Christianity produced some hard-core moralizers, but it also contained within it ambivalence, e.g., the teaching about turning the other cheek, and loving one’s neighbor. More:

Ms. Delsol worries that le woke has no such hesitation. Speech codes, elementary school consciousness-raising, corporate public service advertising — in some ways our public order is coming to resemble that of pagan Rome, where religion and morality were separated. Religion was a matter for the household. Morality was determined and imposed by society’s elites, with grim results for freedom of thought. [Emphasis mine — RD]

Whether or not a society is tolerant of rival ideas has less to do with its leaders’ idle ideological positioning and much more to do with their position in a historical cycle. When in A.D. 384 Christians succeeded in removing the pagan Altar of Victory from the Roman Senate, where it had stood for almost four centuries, the pagan statesman Symmachus understood that Rome’s tolerance would henceforth be denied to those who had built it. If we know Symmachus for one sentiment today, it is his condemnation of Christianity’s dogmatic claims to truth as an affront against common sense. “There cannot be only one path toward such a great mystery,” he said.

People find such sentiments inspiring. Regimes usually don’t. A decade later, the Christian emperor Theodosius was banning the Olympics on the grounds that there was too much nudity in them — without any objections from common sense. The conventional wisdom had come around to dogmatism. It still too often does.

Read it all. 

Next, turn to this essay by Prof. Delsol, appearing in The Hungarian Conservative, where she explains her thesis in her own words. In short, Delsol contends that we are living in this century a reversal of the fourth century, when rising Christianity overturned Roman paganism. Now we are indeed repaganizing. Delsol writes:

Christians have long believed, and many still believe, that Christianity could only be replaced by atheism, nihilism, or both. In other words, by negative forms that would sow darkness and chaos. This is a way of believing yourself to be irreplaceable. Péguy wrote in Dialogue of History and the Carnal Soul: ‘That there have been so many peoples and so many souls where Christianity has not bitten, has not reached; so many peoples and so many souls who have lived abandoned, and who are not, who were not worse off, my friend, there, exactly there, unfortunately there is the secret, the hollow of the mystery.’

To believe or make believe that if Christianity collapses, everything collapses with it, is nonsense. The Christian rule is already being replaced—neither by nothingness nor by the storm, but by well-known, more primitive and rustic forms of history. Behind collapsed Christianity come Stoic morals, paganism, and Asiatic spiritualities. Nietzsche had foreseen this evolution when he wrote: ‘European China, with a soft Buddhist-Christian belief and, in practice, an Epicurean savoir-vivre’. At the start of the twenty-first century, the most established and most promising philosophical current is a form of cosmotheism linked to the defence of nature. We can also speak of pantheism or polytheism. Our Western contemporaries no longer believe in a beyond or in a transcendence. The meaning of life must therefore be found in this life itself, and not above it, where there is nothing. The sacred is found here: in the landscapes, in the life of the earth, and in humans themselves. At the turn of the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, we have changed the paradigm by making a new choice in understanding the world. Under cosmotheism, man feels at home in the world, which represents the only reality and which contains both the sacred and the profane. Under monotheism, man feels a stranger in this immanent world and longs for the other world. For the monotheist, this world is only a temporary lodging. For the cosmotheist, it is a home. The postmodern mind is tired of living in a temporary lodging! It needs a home of its own, complete in its meanings. One becomes a cosmotheist again because one wants to reintegrate oneself into this world as a full citizen, and no longer as this ‘domiciled foreigner’, this Christian described by the anonymous author of the ‘Epistle to Diognetus’.

She goes on:

Reduced to the state of silent witnesses, Christians today are doomed to become soldiers in a lost war. Their fights—especially fights on societal issues, since they concern principles and virtues—lead nowhere, and moreover have no chance of success. I am not sure the approach has been a wise one. Christians who protest tirelessly and try to prevent or overturn rogue laws on abortion or assisted reproduction can only be successful by first implementing a spiritual revolution. First convert people to Christianity, to the intrinsic dignity of each embryo, and then you can abolish abortion. Otherwise it would be like trying to impose confession on non- Catholic peoples: terrorist nonsense. Belief and adherence to principles precedes the acceptance of laws.

Far from wanting to conquer the world, from now on, like the Jews, we are going to worry about living and surviving—and that will be enough.

Read it all.

As you know, the author of Live Not By Lies sees the future as very dark for Christians. I agree wholeheartedly with Prof. Delsol, who is a friend: that we Christians are faced with the primary goal of survival — not in the sense of being exterminated (though perhaps that will come), but more in the sense of being assimilated out of meaningful existence. We need to figure out how to stay alive for now, and working towards the “spiritual revolution” that is the only meaningful precursor to re-Christianization.

We have not become post-Christian because we have had bad politics; nor can Christianity be restored by rearranging our political structures and ideas. Take a look at this long review essay by the theologian David Bentley Hart, writing in Commonweal about a new book by German atheist philosopher Peter Sloterdijk. Hart contends that secularization was inevitable. Excerpt:

Resistance to this destiny has always proved fruitless, precisely because it has tended to proceed from within the rationality of the old Christendom. In Catholic culture, for example, since at least the time of the Council of Trent, the struggle against the reality of the old order’s intrinsic fragility has been constant and utterly futile. It has been like an attempt to save a house already swallowed by the sea by adding new locks to its doors. Despite the countless cultural and social riches created by the unstable accommodation between the Gospel and empire—and even though many of those riches could yet perhaps be recovered within a new Christian synthesis—still the Christendom of the past was a fruitful catastrophe and its inevitable terminus was always secularism. And in the fullness of time, this secularism had to become a fully self-conscious metaphysical nihilism.

Liberalism, Hart goes on, has also failed. So what should Christians do?

Certainly, what they should not do is indulge in sickly nostalgias and resentments, or soothe their distempers with infantile restorationist fantasies. History’s immanent critique has exposed too many of the old illusions for what they were, and there can be no innocent return to structures of power whose hypocrisies have been so clearly revealed. There are any number of reasons, for instance, for dismissing the current vogue of right-wing Catholic “integralism”: its imbecile flights of fancy regarding an imperial papacy; its essentially early-modern model of ecclesial absolutism; its devotion to a picture of Christian social and political order that could not be any less “integralist” or any more “extrinsicist” and authoritarian in its mechanisms; the disturbingly palpable element of sadomasochistic reverie in its endorsement of various extreme forms of coercion, subjugation, violence, and exclusion; the total absence of the actual ethos of Christ from its aims; its eerie similarity to a convention of Star Trek enthusiasts gravely discussing strategies for really establishing a United Federation of Planets. But the greatest reason for holding the whole movement in contempt is that it is nothing more than a resentful effort to reenact the very history of failure whose consequences it wants to correct. Secularity was not imposed upon the Christian world by some adventitious hostile force. It simply is the old Christendom in its terminal phase.

One more passage:

The configurations of the old Christian order are irrecoverable now, and in many ways that is for the best. But the possibilities of another, perhaps radically different Christian social vision remain to be explored and cultivated. Chastened by all that has been learned from the failures of the past, disencumbered of both nostalgia and resentment, eager to gather up all the most useful and beautiful and ennobling fragments of the ruined edifice of the old Christendom so as to integrate them into better patterns, Christians might yet be able to imagine an altogether different social and cultural synthesis. Christian thought can always return to the apocalyptic novum of the event of the Gospel in its first beginning and, drawing renewed vigor from that inexhaustible source, imagine new expressions of the love it is supposed to proclaim to the world, and new ways beyond the impasses of the present.

The ultimate result, if Christians can free themselves from the myth of a lost golden age, may be something wilder and stranger than we can at present conceive, at once more primitive and more sophisticated, more anarchic in some ways and more orderly in others. Whether such a thing is possible or not, however, it is necessary to grasp that where we now find ourselves is not a fixed destiny. It becomes one only if we are unwilling to distinguish the opulent but often decadent grandeur of Christendom from the true Christian glory of which it fell so far short. The predicaments of the present are every bit as formidable as Sloterdijk’s diagnosis suggests, and our need for a global sphere of solidarity that can truly shelter the life of the whole is every bit as urgent as he claims. But it is also true that we are not actually fated to live “after God,” or to seek our shelter only in the aftermath of God’s departure. In fact, of all the futures we might imagine, that might prove to be the most impossible of all.

Read it all.

DBH and I are never going to be each other’s dates to the cotillion, but I think he’s right here. I have no hope for any kind of political solution to our severe civilizational crisis, though I do believe that politics are crucial to protecting the institutions and individuals through which and whom renaissance can come. The faith continues to decline rapidly in the West, and I still believe the most reasonable hope for Christians, long term, is developing and embracing thick communal ways of life that can withstand both active persecution and the passive disintegration of our nihilist-hedonist age. This might not work — but what else is there? Look around you: there are many admirable Christians here and there, but Christianity as a movement is flaccid, demoralized, and in most places peripheral to the future of our civilization. What do people outside of our churches see when they regard us? Look at this:

The Midnight Mass broadcast to every home in Ireland on state media has divided opinion.

What are your thoughts? pic.twitter.com/ab00UhV0TL

— Catholic Arena (@CatholicArena) December 28, 2021

And look at this:

First Baptist Dallas congregation cheers Trump, breaks out into ‘USA!’ chant after he speaks https://t.co/BDrDrqX9Ti

— Baptist News Global (@baptist_news) December 21, 2021

And:

Megan Rohrer, the first openly trans bishop to be elected in the ELCA, has been suspended by an LGBTQAI+ advocacy group for allegedly “racist words and actions.” https://t.co/Y2zT9u8Mci @ChurchLead #ELCA #ELM

— ChurchLeaders.com (@ChurchLead) December 23, 2021

I know I cherry-picked a few recent things from Twitter, and that this isn’t quite fair. I know that there’s a lot of good stuff happening in particular congregations, in all denominations. But can any Christian actually say that Christianity in the West is strong, healthy, and confident? Can any of us honestly claim that Christianity matters to the fate of our civilization? The truth is, our future is likely to be determined not by Christians, but by a clash between the anti-Christian woke, who have technology and institutional power on their side, and the militant post-Christian Right, who, like the Nazis, will have no interest at all in Christianity, except as something whose leaders and institutions can be exploited on the path to power.

I hope I’m wrong about this. If we are doomed to be soldiers in a lost war, as Prof. Delsol believes, then let us not surrender, but rather become evangelical guerrillas and monkish subversives living under occupation. Our primary task is to keep the faith alive so that our descendants can revive it, if conditions allow. The truth of Christ doesn’t cease to be true because it is unpopular, but a Roman pagan in the year 390 faced far more challenges living out his faith, and raising his children to be faithful, than a Roman pagan did in the year 290. So it is with us Christians today. The challenge ahead requires hope, but also sobriety and realism. It is more important to recognize the decline that is actually upon us, and to figure out how to live out the faith with wisdom and courage under these radically uncertain conditions, than to lose one’s head in Very Online political fantasies that pretend to be martial, but in the absence of any plan to evangelize and convert unbelievers, are really marshmallow cope.

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Queer As Volk

Major craziness going on right now in a certain niche corner of the Right. Do you know who Jack Murphy is? I barely knew of him until I saw him pass by in the hallway at the National Conservatism conference recently. He’s a striking figure: very tall, bald, with a dramatic beard. Someone explained to me that he is a big figure in the manosphere, and fronts a hypermasculine philosophy that at one point included polygamy. Here is a link to his self-description on his website Jack Murphy Live. Excerpt:

I was wondering why Jack Murphy — real name is John Goldman — turned up at NatCon, but someone told me that he is a Lincoln Fellow at the Claremont Institute. Someone else told me that they thought he had recently turned to Christianity, but weren’t sure. “Is he still a polygamist?” I asked. My interlocutor didn’t know.

Why is Jack Murphy in the news this week? In part because Lyndon McLeod, the far-right mass shooter in Denver who wrote novels under the name “Roman McClay,” was allegedly a member of Murphy’s private brotherhood called

What’s this Liminal Order all about? I suspect we will be finding out soon.

Plus, a week or so ago, Murphy went on a chat show and was asked about an article he once wrote speaking of the pleasures of being a literal cuckold (he wrote about farming his girlfriend out to other men for sex). Jack Murphy did not appreciate the question (don’t click on this at work; he drops several f-bombs):

Exploding on a woman, who is simply reading a super chat is exactly the behavior I would expect from a man who wrote an article about how being a cuck is cool.
Bonus demerits to @ElijahSchaffer for letting that dude scream at her like that. Come on brother, that’s your friend. pic.twitter.com/XAV5Pbvhyu

— TheQuartering (@TheQuartering) December 18, 2021

It turns out that back in 2015, Murphy, who now sells himself and his masculinist advisory services as an extreme chad, wrote a piece extolling the erotic pleasure of being a beta cuck. You can find this online; I’m not going to link to it. Some Redditors got busy digging, and found that Murphy and his girlfriend had acted in a self-made porn broadcast back in 2019 (Murphy admitted this on Twitter today). In the film, there is apparently a sequence in which the super-masculine Murphy impales himself with a plastic phallus, while simultaneously pleasuring himself. This is not a rumor, alas; I stumbled across the image online, and can’t unsee it.

So we now see that a far-right public figure whose entire personality and business model was promoting himself as a villainous straight white male is … rather more ambiguous about his straightness and his masculinity than he would have us know.

The reader who tipped me off to all this says this passage from Theodor Adorno describes Murphy:

 

At the root of their sadism is a lie, and only as liars do they truly become sadists, agents of repression. This lie, however, is nothing other than repressed homosexuality presenting itself as the only approved form of heterosexuality.

Murphy has a history of sadistic writing and messaging. In 2015, he informed his readers that “feminists need rape” to solve the “problem” of man’s “natural tendency towards dominance and women to passivity and submission.” And now there are images going around of his self-sodomization in a porn movie that he and his girlfriend did for money.

A decade ago, Johann Hari, the gay, left-wing British journalist, wrote an essay exploring the connection between homosexual men and fascism. It will be interesting to see how the Jack Murphy story plays out. Looks like one more piece of evidence for the Weimar America thesis.

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The Trans’ Plans

I have a very left-wing friend who works in Democratic politics, but who is anti-woke. He sent me a link to this big new report from a quality liberal consulting firm, laying out what the transgender movement needs to do to advance its goals. Friend told me that the firm that prepared this is top-notch, and that this research must have cost millions. He advised that we will hear Democrats start to use the language and concepts in this report in the months to come.

So what’s in the report? Highlights below.

This is how they see us conservatives:

The right has exploited ignorance about transgender people and our lack of an affirmative, race-forward message to advance anti-trans attacks, further splinter and impugn the left, and sabotage progressives on a broad range of issues. Over the last ten years, Republicans in state legislatures have increasingly turned to anti-transgender rhetoric and legislation as a powerful complement to their arsenal of racist dog whistles used to whip up fear and consolidate power. In 2021, they have refined this strategy in the form of a moral panic over transgender youth, introducing over 100 bills across the country to criminalize medical care for trans youth and bar trans young people from participating in school sports. Recently, they have paired these attacks with fear-mongering about Critical Race Theory, mobilizing their base with a potent mix of racist and transphobic tropes. Progressives cannot ignore these attacks hoping that simply sticking to economic issues alone will save us. Our appeals on any topic will always be filtered through the noise of this unrelenting fear-mongering and scapegoating on the right.

This is the top line:

New research by ASO Communications, Transgender Law Center, and Lake Research Partners finds that we can cultivate resistance to these attacks, build cross-racial solidarity, and advance a shared vision for the future by weaving together our shared values, experiences, and demands across races and genders. This new approach builds on the Race Class Narrative to tell a convincing story of how our opposition uses strategic racism and transphobia to harm us all; and how, by coming together, we can ensure we all have the freedom to be ourselves and support one another. Using a Race Class Gender Narrative, we can mobilize our progressive base (particularly Black, AAPI, and Gen Z audiences), marginalize our opposition, and move persuadables across race.

So they are proposing piggybacking the trans narrative onto existing race and gender narratives. This appears to be a vindication of Christopher Caldwell’s thesis that it becomes impossible to resist, in culture and in law, any rights claim that ties itself to the 1960s Civil Rights Movement.

Let’s go deeper. Here is the précis. Here is what the Left is planning to do and say:

The report goes on to say that male-to-female trans people in women’s sports is a huge turnoff, even for people who are generally pro-trans. It also finds that even pro-trans people believe that gender is rooted in biology. Look:

The report also says that portraying trans people as uniquely oppressed is ineffective. What works is to emphasize points of connection between trans people and other minorities, and how they share a common enemy in cishetero white conservatives. Look:

Finally, to shift people from ignorance or indifference to empathy and advocacy, we must ground our messaging in the values, visions, and desires we share across genders rather than in the unique harms, horrors, and discrimination trans people suffer. While it’s important to acknowledge discrimination in order to combat it, we should not lead with or primarily define trans people by the harms inflicted upon us. When we primed people with a statement about the “crushing weight of discrimination” trans youth face, for example, our base and even activists were less likely to trust trans young people to know what’s best for their own health and well-being than when, in contrast, they were primed with a statement about how we should all be free to express our authentic selves.

Read the whole report. It’s short, and it’s important.

So what do we conservatives do?

First, we have to face that we are against two very powerful arguments in contemporary American life: 1) equality for all self-identified minorities, and 2) the value of “authenticity”. If the trans movement can make these arguments work for them, they win.

What arguments do we have on our side?

First, most people, even pro-trans people, believe that gender is rooted in biology. Second, most people believe that biological males who identify as female do not belong in women’s sports, because it makes competition unfair to women.

What should our messaging response be, then?

My initial thoughts:

We need to do a far better job of explaining why biology matters. We need to explain, over and over, why we cannot simply refute biological truth by force of will. The other day I was talking with a lawyer friend, who was explaining how the gender binary is embedded throughout the law, in ways that most people never think about. He was saying that the trans movement is going to radically affect many legal structures — and nobody talks about it.

We have to start talking about it, in detail. We have to push through the subjective “we just want to live and let live” appeal that the pro-trans report suggests for its side. There is no such thing as “live and let live” when to give trans people what they want, the entire corpus of the law has to be rewritten, based on a biological fallacy — something that most people understand is a biological fallacy! 

Many Americans are living with this cognitive dissonance, not wanting to harm trans people, or make their lives unnecessarily harder, but also believing that the basis for the trans claim is fundamentally false. We have to compel people to see the biological, scientific reality here, and to make clear the danger of making laws and public policies based on a biological lie. But we can’t do it by demonizing trans people.

We also have to refute at every point the claim of trans people to share the narrative of women’s liberation and racial liberation. This means we are going to have to explain why a trans identity is not like being a woman or being a person of color — conditions that are rooted in biological reality. We can use the situation with biological males taking over women’s sports — something that most people already oppose — and say that this is the necessary outcome of accepting the trans narrative. To be specific, if the law agrees with trans people’s concept of gender, then there will be no way to protect women’s sports, or anything else for women.

We ought to emphasize that we don’t wish to persecute trans people, and of course nobody should ever bully trans people. But this madness has to be stopped. We can and we should point out the utter hypocrisy of the new trans “live and let live” approach: that the trans movement and its allies want to force their radical view on everybody else!

We should focus hard on these teacher activists and school systems that are radicalizing our children with gender theory, undermining their own psychological health and hiding it all from parents. We need to also point out that the media are 100 percent down with lying about us, and about transgenderism; we can and should villainize the media, because they truly are the villains here. Look at this propaganda piece from the San Francisco Chronicle, spinning the Spreckels story to make villains of the parents who were being lied to by these activist freaks who infest the educational system, and heroes of these wicked liar teachers. There are no decent parents of any race who are eager for the schools to do this to their kids, and for the media to make the parents out to be the evil ones.

The resistance cannot be a white conservative thing only. We need women and people of color out front on this. We need to build solidarity across race, gender, and political lines — even as the political class of both parties wants nothing to do with us. We have to make it clear to normies what is being done to them and their children. We not only have to fight the media and woke capitalist narrative, but we also have to fight the cowardice of Republican politicians who don’t want to get involved, and even the weakness of squishy religious leaders who prefer to keep their heads in the ground while this wickedness triumphs and steals our children from us.

But now we have the Left’s playbook. This is a fight we can win — but not if we sit on our hands.

 

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More Views From Your Christmas Table

Fortunately we Orthodox celebrate Christmas the old-fashioned way: feasting until Theophany (Epiphany). That means I can show you many more VFYTs you’ve sent in. Let’s get to it:

Los Angeles, California

The reader who sent that in says rack of lamb is his daughter’s favorite. He also sent a shot of the cutest little girl nibbling on a lamb rib. Alas for you, no faces on VFYT.

Tacoma, Washington‘From the mountains of Virginia’

The reader writes:

A very merry and blessed third day of Christmas to you from the mountains of Virginia! Every year we go to midnight Mass and have birthday cake for Jesus afterwards around 2 am. It is our daughter’s favorite tradition.

Mountain Lakes, NJVirginia

The reader writes:

Merry Christmas from Virginia! On the table, we have a ribeye roast (cooked to perfection with the sous vide and the exterior crisped in the oven) served with a red wine sauce, mashed potatoes, asparagus with lemon and butter, and salad with pomegranate, pepitas, feta, and creamy garlic dressing. For dessert, we enjoyed Gramercy Tavern gingerbread cake with warm lemon sauce. So good!

Here’s a super-festive one:

Duluth, Minnesota

The reader writes:

Potato sausage, beets, rice pudding

Yet to come: Swedish meatballs, hardtack, lutefisk, fruit soup

Graham, Texas

This crab-cakey one comes from a reader who spent his last day in Covid isolation:

Baltimore, Maryland

Says the reader:

Goat cheese crusted filets with cream cheese mashed potatoes and grilled asparagus.

New Orleans, Louisiana

The reader writes:

Our Christmas morning tradition – gruyere and shallot potato latkes w/sour cream and caviar. This is the first one – tasted for quality control before friends come over.

Man! I’m getting hungry all over again. One more:

Lansdale, Pennsylvania

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Flip-Flops Of 2021

In her Substack today, Bari Weiss surveys a few different folks to ask them what they changed their mind on this year. There are some good answers. I’ll share a couple:

Balaji Srinivasan says he thought we were headed towards some kind of tyranny, but this year changed his mind. Excerpt:

In the territory governed by this inept bureaucracy, you see power outages, supply chain shortages, rampant flooding, and uncontrolled fires. You see riots, arsons, shootings, stabbings, robberies, and murders. You see digital mobs that become physical mobs. You see a complete loss of trust in institutions from the state to the media. You see anti-capitalism and anti-vaxxism. You see states breaking away from the U.S. federal government, at home and abroad. And you see the End of Power, the Revolt of the Public, the defeat of the military, the inflation of the dollar, and—looming ahead—an American anarchy.

What’s coming isn’t fascism or communism, like the left-wing and right-wing pundits will have you believe, even though they don’t believe it themselves. What’s coming is the exact opposite of that, a world where the civilized concepts of freedom and equity are extrapolated to their decivilizational limit, where you ain’t the boss of me and we are all equal, where all hierarchy is illegitimate and with it all authority, where no one is in charge and everything is in chaos.

Ross Douthat had a glimmer of optimism, but 2021 snuffed it. Excerpt:

At the start of 2021, I believed that for all of our fumbles and disasters, the success of our vaccine efforts meant that the United States was actually going to come out ahead of many of our developed-world peers when it came to handling the pandemic. This seemed especially plausible as winter gave way to spring and our vaccination rates were racing ahead of most European countries, even as our case rates were collapsing.

As the year turns, however, looking at the American death toll I don’t believe this anymore.

Read it all. Nellie Bowles’s bit is the most interesting of all, but I’m going to make you go to the site to read it.

I’m trying to think of anything I changed my mind on this year. The best thing I can come up with is that I went from being vaguely favorable towards the Viktor Orban government to being an enthusiastic backer. It took living in Hungary for three months, and recognizing two things: 1) that Western media coverage of the Orban government is hysterically biased, and 2) that Viktor Orban understands better than most of us in the West what the West is up against.

But that’s not news to readers of this blog.

The parents’ revolt in Loudoun County, Virginia, challenged my general belief that Americans are too demoralized to fight the woke machine — but it did not change my mind. I’ll need more data. Let’s see what happens in 2022, an election year.

How about you? What did you change your mind about in 2021? What data or experience turned you around?

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Proud Groomer Teachers

Call it confidence, or call it arrogance, but there are some young schoolteachers who brag on TikTok about telling the little kids in their class all about transgenderism and gender theory. For example:

Preschool teacher pic.twitter.com/Rp3uSLOnfP

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) December 27, 2021

And this:

This is who you entrust your kids with. She gets her validation from 10 year olds saying the right pronoun pic.twitter.com/EQsaQeD415

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) December 24, 2021

And this:

“I start conversations about gender and sexuality with my students” pic.twitter.com/pp0GWFESKe

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) December 15, 2021

These people aren’t hiding it. They are openly bragging about propagandizing children without parental consent. Putting their faces to it and everything for plaudits from their online tribes.

Why don’t these people ever seem to be outed, and parents demand that they be professionally disciplined, and (preferably) fired? This is exploitative and disgusting. Are parents afraid to take a stand and to say publicly that there is something wrong with presenting this material to children? Do they fear the accusation of bigotry more than they care for their kids?

Yes, I think they are — and that’s why these lunatics keep posting these things. They know that most parents in this country would rather sacrifice their children to these monsters than stand up and say HELL NO, for fear of personal and professional repercussions.

I don’t get it. I don’t get it at all. I’m a bear when it comes to defending my children. If one of these pushy freaks forced their personal choices onto my children in a classroom setting, where they have authority, I would bring down Armageddon on their heads, and on the heads of the school officials who continue to employ their creepy groomer selves.

A friend of mine says this is why he thinks that the transgender cult is going to continue going from strength to strength: because there’s no real fight left in this country, even from the Right.

Get this, from the UK:

Campaigners have accused TikTok of helping children to be ‘brainwashed’ by hosting viral social-media videos that promote changing sex as ‘cool’.

Material posted by transgender influencers on the social networking service – in which they provide advice on transitioning and accessing hormone therapies – has been seen by millions of young viewers.

Some parents are concerned the involvement of TikTok, which became the UK’s most downloaded app last year, is fuelling a ‘social contagion’ of pressure on impressionable youngsters and the rise in teenagers who are identifying as trans.

More than a quarter of British TikTok users are aged between 15 and 25, and children aged between four and 15 who sign up spend an average of 69 minutes on the app each day, according to TikTok’s own data.

Analysis by The Mail on Sunday shows that videos with the hashtag #Trans have been seen more than 26 billion times.

… One popular transgender TikTok influencer, Bella Fitzpatrick, raised £20,000 from followers in less than three months to fund private gender-reassignment surgery.

The 19-year-old has 700,000 followers and explains the process of transitioning, including her experience of bypassing NHS waiting lists.

Another is Alex Consani, 18, who has more than 680,000 followers. She went viral five years ago when, aged 12, Cosmopolitan magazine featured her life as a trans model.

Here’s the bomb:

TikTok signed a partnership earlier this year with Stonewall, the controversial lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender rights charity, to promote this material.

TikTok is owned indirectly by the Chinese government, which this year began restricting LGBT social media material for its own people. Make of this what you will.

UPDATE: In related news, Matt Taibbi today, in a dispatch for his subscribers only, said that the Democrats are going to take a shellacking in 2022 because of the party’s inability to recognize what progressivism is doing to education. He talks about how Chuck Todd had Nikole Hannah-Jones on Meet The Press to talk about how all the nasty white people object to schools teaching her phony 1619 Project. NHJ said that parents shouldn’t have anything to say about what kids are taught, because parents aren’t experts. More:

However, much like the Hillary Clinton quote about “deplorables,” conventional wisdom after the “gaffe” soon hardened around the idea that what McAuliffe said wasn’t wrong at all. In fact, people like Hannah-Jones are now doubling down and applying to education the same formula that Democrats brought with disastrous results to a whole range of other issues in the Trump years, telling voters that they should get over themselves and learn to defer to “experts” and “expertise.”

This was a bad enough error in 2016 when neither Democrats nor traditional Republicans realized how furious the public was with “experts” on Wall Street who designed horrifically unequal bailouts, or “experts” on trade who promised technical retraining that never arrived to make up for NAFTA job josses, or Pentagon “experts” who promised we’d find WMDs in Iraq and be greeted as liberators there, and so on, and so on. Ignoring that drumbeat, and advising Hillary Clinton to run on her 25 years of “experience” as the ultimate Washington insider, won the Democratic Party leaders four years of Donald Trump.

It was at least understandable how national pols could once believe the public valued their “professional” governance on foreign policy, trade, the economy, etc. Many of these matters probably shouldn’t be left to amateurs (although as has been revealed over and over of late, the lofty reputations of experts often turn out to be based mainly upon their fluidity with gibberish occupational jargon), and disaster probably would ensue if your average neophyte was suddenly asked to revamp, say, the laws governing securities clearing.

But parenting? For good reason, there’s no parent anywhere who believes that any “expert” knows what’s better for their kids than they do. Parents of course will rush to seek out a medical expert when a child is sick, or has a learning disability, or is depressed, or mired in a hundred other dilemmas. Even through these inevitable terrifying crises of child rearing, however, all parents are alike in being animated by the absolute certainty — and they’re virtually always right in this — that no one loves their children more than they do, or worries about them more, or agonizes even a fraction as much over how best to shepherd them to adulthood happy and in one piece.

Implying the opposite is a political error of almost mathematically inexpressible enormity.

More:

Historically, both parties have cranked out unsuccessful education reforms, from George Bush’s No Child Left Behind to Barack Obama’s $4.3 billion “Race to the Top” (which EdWeek just quietly noted showed “no positive impact”). Only the current iteration of Democrats, however, is dumb enough to campaign on the idea that parents should step aside and let the same “experts” who’ve spent the last fifty years turning the American education system into a global punchline take full charge of their kids’ upbringing.

The arrogance of this position is breathtaking. There is a debate to be had over whether public education, as New York put it after McAuliffe’s loss, is “a public good in which the citizenry at large is the essential stakeholder, or a publicly provided private benefit for children and their parents.” But the strategy of the educational establishment has been to put off the debate by denouncing as conspiracy theory the very idea that a discussion is even needed.

Worse, the rhetorical stall usually involves this argument that parents lack the moral and intellectual standing to be part of the conversation.

You have to subscribe to read the whole thing, and I think you should. Taibbi is killing it.

There are several “live not by lies” problems here, as I see it.

First, the media are high on their own supply. Far too many of them simply can’t imagine that progressive dogmas are wrong. If we had a press that worked like it is supposed to, there would be investigations going on by local newspapers and TV stations all across the country. Remember how back in 2002, in the wake of the Boston Globe’s Spotlight investigation, local media started looking into whether their own Catholic dioceses had behaved like the Archdiocese of Boston regarding concealing clerical sex abuse? It turned out that it was indeed happening everywhere. Well, how likely do you think it is that some version of the garbage in Loudoun County is happening at the local level elsewhere in the country? I’d say fairly likely — but this is not a story that validates the media’s prior beliefs, so they won’t be looking into it.

Second, with reference to educational reform that doesn’t work being pushed by both parties, there is an inability of middle class people to imagine the lives of people not like themselves. I’ve told the story in this space before about sitting in on an editorial board meeting at The Dallas Morning News during election season. We interviewed Lew Blackburn, an incumbent school board member who had a reputation of being something of a deadhead. He’s a black man who represents a black and Hispanic district. My colleagues asked him perfectly valid questions about the subpar state of Dallas public school kids’ test scores. At some point, Blackburn said that you could only expect so much of these kids, most of whom were poor, and had either only one parent in the home, or two parents with both working long hours. When Blackburn said that, something clicked with me. I recalled my sister, a public school teacher, explaining to me back in 1993 how hard it was to work with students who had zero support at home. She opened my eyes to the fact that this is one effect of the breakdown of the family. Lew Blackburn may or may not have been a deadhead, but he was talking about a sociological reality that no school program devised by experts can fix. But most of us on the editorial board left that meeting angry at him, believing Blackburn was making excuses. I realized that educated middle class people have a weakness for believing that all social problems can be fixed by programs.

Third, and closely related, is a false anthropology: the idea that children are blank slates who can be properly programmed by expertise. Education then becomes a matter of devising the best system to input into the minds of the kids. In fact, education is far more an organic process. Children are living beings, not machines. Education is a matter of cultivating a garden — and that requires recognition that there is natural variation among individual kids. The same strategy doesn’t work equally well with all of them.

Fourth is the lie of racialized egalitarianism: that the only reason for disparities in educational outcomes is racial discrimination. If children require cultivation to be educated, they require a culture. A culture that disparages education, or is at best indifferent to it, will produce kids who do not achieve. My sister and I were both smart kids, but I was a lazy student. If our working-class parents hadn’t imposed high expectations for educational achievement on us, I would not have done as well as I did. Teachers can’t take kids whose parents don’t care, and whose social milieu doesn’t care, and make scholars out of them. This is true no matter what one’s race and income level is. We have become the sort of country that would rather believe the egalitarian lie, and abolish grades and gifted programs for the sake of leveling, than face hard truths about human difference and the effect of culture on capability.

This hit me square in the face when I was in 11th grade, and in my first year at a public boarding school for gifted kids. I had always made As in all my classes, even math. Now I was in a school with kids who were really gifted in math. I could not keep up with them — mostly, I think, because I was lazy, and didn’t like math, but also in part because I didn’t have the natural intelligence to do math at their level. I shut down entirely, and quit going to class. Naturally, I failed, and had to take trigonometry in summer school, with a tutor. I handled that badly — boy, were my parents angry at me! — but I learned that aside from my own laziness, it really is true that even among gifted kids, not everybody is equally gifted. Courses that rewarded verbal skill came easy to me; math and science were not subjects in which I naturally excelled. It would have been unjust to the kids who were gifted in math and science to compel them to slow down and work to the level of a mediocre student like me. I wasn’t actually bad at math, but I needed to be in a slower class in order to flourish.

And you know what? This is fine! “Physics For Poets” is a good idea for a class — as is “Poetry for Physics Students,” in which poetics are taught at a level that math/science geeks can understand. My late father had an engineer’s mind, and often complained about how the class he hated the most in college was poetry. None of it made sense to him. I think he was slightly on the spectrum, and didn’t really get how metaphorical and allusive language works. I have no way of knowing to what extent he was at a cognitive deficit, and to what extent he was, like his son, a horse’s ass when it came to doing work that he didn’t like doing. The point is, though, that he did very well in his STEM classes, but was not capable of keeping up with the better poetry students. This did not make him a lesser human being any more than my own weakness in STEM subjects makes me a lesser human being. But in America, we have a very hard time facing the reality of natural hierarchies of ability. We will destroy good things, like gifted programs, and tell ourselves all kinds of lies, to avoid having to face difficult truths.

I know what’s coming next: somebody is going to start talking about IQ and race, and accuse me of being too sensitive on the subject. I am sensitive on the subject, because I hate the way some people are, acting as if people having lower IQ scores makes them somehow a lesser person. And, more to the point, it could justify racism in the minds of racists. Nevertheless, people who criticize me for discouraging IQ discussions here aren’t wrong to say that I am afraid of those conversations — again, because I fear what racists will do with them, and I also fear that we will surrender to biological determinism, and downplay or even ignore the role of culture in learning. And you know, thinking back to my two years in that gifted school, one of the biggest things that made learning possible there was a classroom culture of silence and attentiveness. Teachers didn’t have to fuss at the class constantly to keep us quiet and paying attention. That made a huge difference.

Anyway, this ties in to the original post about LGBT activist teachers abusing their authority because it shows again what progressive capture of schooling in America is doing to the education. Taibbi might be right, and parental revolt at the ballot box could bring Trump back. But would that change anything?

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