Rod Dreher's Blog, page 31

Holidays In Heck

A few pieces of information I gleaned from conversations over Christmas with out-of-towners. Make of this what you will.

A cousin who lives in the Blue Ridge mountains came down for the first time since Covid struck. He works in a gun dealership. He said that they have been doing a land office business since the George Floyd spasm of violence. He said it might surprise me to know that about 40 percent of their customers are women, and they have also had an unprecedented number of gay men from the posh Atlanta Buckhead neighborhood buying weaponry from them. The stories the salesmen get from people living down in Atlanta are pretty scary, he said. Many people have lost faith in the authorities to protect them.

One of his customers is a woman who relocated to their rural enclave from Chicago with her retiree husband. The Chicago woman told my cousin that the reality on the ground in Chicago, regarding crime, is worse than what the media are reporting. She and her husband were glad to put the city behind them.

I asked my cousin if he detected any sense of “white flight” in his customers. He laughed, and said that’s 100 percent what it is: middle-class and upper-middle class people either escaping black criminal violence in the cities, or arming themselves against it. But nobody can speak openly about any of this, he said, only in whispers and knowing glances.

At church on Christmas Day, we had some Orthodox people who were back in the city for Christmas. I sat with some of them at a table during coffee hour after the liturgy. One of them is a college student who said that he is troubled about the state of the world, and is thinking of going into politics so he can do something about it. At the far end of the table sat a man I judged to be in his late twenties. He told the younger man that he has worked for years in politics, for the GOP, and he would not advise the younger man to follow in his footsteps. He explained that he went into politics right out of college as a College Republican type who was excited about what he could accomplish in politics. Now, though, he is changing his career path, and is about to change his voter registration to Independent.

I told him that I almost always vote GOP, without any enthusiasm, and that I had changed my registration to Independent in 2008, out of disgust with the Bush administration and the party’s failures on the war and economics. I asked him what prompted his disillusionment. He said that the lack of vision among anyone in the party finally wore him down. He said that none of the elected officials and candidates with whom he worked had any substantive vision of the good. Trump stumbled onto some good points, but was too incompetent and flawed to do much with the opportunity history handed him. And, said the young man, Trump managed to accelerate wokeness without fighting it with any effectiveness, leaving conservatives worse off than before.

He concluded by saying that in all his time working in the GOP establishment, he met not one official who wanted power to do anything, other than pass tax cuts. My interlocutor thinks the Democrats and their policies are bad for the country, but they at least want to accomplish things. He used Orwell’s terms in describing our two parties: both parties are essentially one entity, but the GOP is the “Outer Party,” and the Democrats are the “Inner Party.” That is, the Democrats are the ones who determine the direction of the government, while the Republicans exist only to slow down what the Democrats want, and ultimately to ratify it.

The young man said it was disconcerting to be in one’s twenties and working at a high level in a state party, and to discover that one, and one’s young colleagues, had more knowledge and passion for politics than party members who actually hold office. He described most of them as being men and women who enjoy holding power, but who don’t really have any idea what to do with it. He said that he has lost faith in politics, and has decided to use his skills for something else.

We had another young visitor who asked me if I was the guy who wrote The Benedict Option. Yes, I said. We talked for a bit, and I told her about my newer book, Live Not By Lies. When I explained the premise, she told me about a college friend whose parents escaped from Cuba, and who now say all the time that they can’t believe they came to America, and now are living through the rise of the same totalitarian left-wing mentality.

We also had in our church on Christmas an academic whose Slavic accent betrayed Soviet bloc origins. As we talked, I brought up the fall of the USSR on this day thirty years ago. The professor’s family back home in the Warsaw Pact did not celebrate on that day, because they were too afraid that showing joy at the collapse of Communism would land them in prison. I brought up the premise of Live Not By Lies, and asked the professor about it. The academic said that conditions in universities now are punishing, because one doesn’t know what one can say without risking ideological punishment. The atmosphere is stifling and fearful, and one fears to speak the truth. The academic’s spouse overheard us talking, and said, “Just wait till the bridges start falling down. Then we will finally understand what this insanity is costing us.”

UPDATE: Oh yeah, this:

The horror in Waukesha happened over a month ago and yet there is almost zero national coverage of it today. No pieces profiling the victims, nothing on how the community is recovering. Nothing on the motivations of the suspect. It’s like it has been memory-holed.

— Daniel Darling (@dandarling) December 27, 2021

Mass murder of white people carried out by a black man with a public record of race hatred. There is not yet any solid evidence that he drove his car into that predominantly white crowd out of racial motivation — but there is also no evidence whatsoever that our media, which are so vigilant to suss out racial animus when the perpetrator is white, actually want to find out the answer here. So much journalism today is not reporting the news, but managing the narrative.

The post Holidays In Heck appeared first on The American Conservative.

Eric Zemmour’s Christmas

Here is the translation of an astonishing Christmas address the Jewish candidate for French president, Eric Zemmour, gave on the holiday. Can you think of a single American politician capable of giving a speech like this? Can you think of a single American politician of the Right who has the courage to risk the wrath of the media by giving a speech like this at Christmas? The translation is by Malmesburyman:

My dear countrymen, my friends:

Tonight, Christianity celebrates Christmas. But not only Christianity. For one need not be Christian to celebrate Christmas. It suffices to love the West in general, and France in particular.

The night of Christmas Eve begins the celebration of a civilization – ours – that has enlightened human history. A civilization that believes man is absolutely free, whatever his birth, his past, his environment, his path.

In the Christian world, liberty has a divine nature and must be protected as the most precious treasure.

A civilization that believes men are equal in dignity. Everyone, from the prostitute to the king, and all in between – the beggar, the rich man, the widow, the orphan, the soldier, the leper – are children of God and all are equal before him. No race, no class – a holy equality.

A civilization that believes the beautiful is also holy. The civilization of Rembrandt, da Vinci, Bach, Mozart, Beethoven. Paintings, sculptures, works of technical perfection and awesome depth.

The whole world admires Western art. It is impossible not to be overwhelmed by the Pietà of Michelangelo.

A civilization that believes truth is neither theoretical nor relative, but concrete, incarnated, and holy. To deny truth is to deny the Good. The lie is both the day-to-day and the eternal face of evil.

This infinite respect for truth has allowed the enormous rise of philosophy and exact science in the West.

A civilization that believes heaven on earth does not exist and never will. A civilization that refuses to give credence to utopias and projects for a perfect society — Communism, Nazism — that destroyed the 20th century and threaten the 21st with a new and still more troubling face.

A civilization that opposes totalitarianism like day to night. A civilization that believes sweetness, tenderness, and love are superior to all other human conduct.

Knowing how to win in war is good and the Christian world must never refuse to make war when it is attacked. It must win the war, but knowing how to win the peace after victory is harder still.

To this idea, we owe the incomparably peaceful character of Western societies when they are faithful to themselves.
Societies that have committed errors, mistakes, crimes: obviously, for it is built by men and all men are imperfect, egotistical, whether believers or not. But a civilization that must be considered the most evolved, sophisticated, creative, and tolerant the world has ever known.

France owes much to Catholicism, and the world owes much to French Catholicism. The long adventure of Catholicism in France is of an unequaled splendor.

St. Irenaeus of Lyon, Clovis, St. Louis, Joan of Arc, Thomas Aquinas who taught at the Sorbonne, Bossuet, Fénelon, Blaise Pascal, Thérèse of Lisieux, Paul Claudel, and so many others.

The eldest daughter of the Church has borne so many wonderful children, and our 86 cathedrals are the most beautiful of all – of which Victor Hugo made a beloved symbol across five continents.

General de Gaulle, in the greatest confidence, gave regular confession. His faith played a determining role in the destiny of our country. Without the Cross, there would not have been a Cross of Lorraine.

And let us not forget the hundreds of millions of Christians – for it is hundreds of millions – being persecuted throughout the world as we speak.

Censored, threatened, tortured, assassinated: never in its long history has this religion been martyred in such dreadful silence. I solemnly swear that France will make their voice heard on the world stage.

Tonight, Christians celebrate the birth of Jesus. But others – all others – in France can also celebrate Christmas. That is the purpose of Christmas trees, gifts, kisses, and wonderful smiles of children.

My name comes from ancient times, and means “olive tree” in Berber – the tree of peace. Tonight I wish that everyone will find peace – peace in each of us, and peace among us.

Christmas is the opposite of civil war. It is the reconciliation that shines in the night. The humble and moving Nativity, present in so many families, delivers its message through the centuries. The miracle returns every December 24 at midnight.

Dear countrymen, Merry Christmas. Long live the Republic, and above all, long live France.

Here is the video, en français. What a great and glorious thing it would be for a man like that to be elected to lead France!

The post Eric Zemmour’s Christmas appeared first on The American Conservative.

Why Hungary Needs ‘The Benedict Option’

Father Gergely Bakos is a Benedictine monk of the historic Pannonhalma Abbey in Hungary, and is also the translator of The Benedict Option into Hungarian. He sent me the other day an English translation of an interview a Hungarian magazine did with him about the book. Excerpts:

This book, first published in 2017, uses mainly American social examples to outline the process of dying and the possible survival of our Western Christian culture. What direction can it show us here in Central Europe?

Originally written for Americans, it charts a possible trajectory for Christians in post-Christian America. It is not an academic work, but the book of an educated, broad-minded, courageous, and honest journalist. It is not combative, but outspoken, it calls society’s problems by name, and it is novel in its practicality. Few Christians today, I find, know, and dare to confess clearly the joy and power of their faith. One of the great virtues of this book is that it is based on, and radiates from, the experience of that joy and power. It is also a great virtue that the author does not think that anyone who does not think like him is stupid or evil. Moreover, it is a tribute to Rod Dreher’s political acumen and knowledge of human nature that he warned his fellow Christians against placing too much hope in conservative politicians, and his wisdom in doing so has been vindicated by the lessons of the Trump administration. He says that the alliance between political conservatism and Christianity is far from perfect and that politics cannot provide a solution to the crisis connected to Christianity. Many in Hungary do not yet understand Dreher’s political truth.

I really like the fact that Rod Dreher, as an American, has recently been learning and taking inspiration from Czech and Hungarian culture, from the experiences of people who resisted communism.

He recognised that the experience gained here could be relevant in his own country, as the soft dictatorship that is being established in the West today is in many ways similar to the former communist authoritarianism. It is good to be confronted with the fact that we conservative and Christian Hungarians have something to teach the world.

More:

The book advises Christian believers, whose values are being increasingly displaced from North American and European society in today’s ideological “war”, to retreat into their own communities, reaffirm their roots, their faith, and save their religious heritage for a new era. Are you not afraid that this will encourage the reinforcement of some kind of traditionalist, past-living, pompous, theatrical, and legislatively-minded Catholicism?

He has already received similar criticism from a Vatican cardinal, who sees Dreher’s vision of the Church as contradicting Pope Francis‘ vision of the Church as a field hospital for the world, rather than a fortress. Rod Dreher’s response is that only the best-prepared team should be sent to the field hospital. How can the church function well as a field hospital on the front lines of sin, spiritual warfare, and wounding if it does not strengthen its hinterland?

Withdrawal in Rod Dreher’s vision of the future does not mean total closure, running away, or spurious living in the past.

It is no coincidence that I chose as the motto of my epilogue the apt words of the Lutheran-turned-Orthodox theological historian Jaroslav Pelikan: “Traditionalism is the dead faith of the living, and tradition is the living faith of the dead.” As Christians, we cannot avoid tradition, since the term refers to “what is handed down to us”. It is faith that we receive as tradition from previous generations, it is faith that links us to the apostles and even to Jesus Christ himself! There is no other way, no bypass to Jesus.

Did Rod Dreher choose the Rule of St. Benedict as an example and a guide for future Christians, alongside the Bible, because while Scripture is more an example of mission, of outward openness, St. Benedict’s Rule prepares us for an age after the collapse of an empire? It is as if the Rule of St. Benedict gives practical advice on how to be strengthened in small groups, to save our faith for a renewing world, and then offer it to again this new world.

Yes, the author recognised the similarities between our times and the historical Benedictine era some time ago. As early as the 1980s, the Scottish philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre drew a cautious but firm parallel between the fall of the Western Roman Empire and the moral crisis of our world in his work After Virtue, on which Dreher relies.

As a Benedictine monk, I was very impressed by Dreher’s thorough knowledge of Benedictine tradition and practice – he is in contact with a well-established Benedictine community – but he does not want to copy what the monks have done, but as a layman he appreciates it in the context of modern life. His book is a kind of secular reading of the Benedictine way of life. He does not merely select elements from the Benedictine tradition that are applicable, but understands the spirit of the whole and applies it to secular life.I am happy to admit that this book has helped me in my ongoing personal conversion, in taking my own Benedictine journey more seriously.

It is a practical book, then, because Dreher has grasped the sober, one might say down-to-earth, Benedictine lesson that the Christian life is not just a collection of ideals, but a practical life, and that the two can only make sense together. Unfortunately, in America and Europe today, there is too much emphasis on theoretical knowledge, while the kind of practical wisdom of how to do something is being pushed into the background. In countries — including our own — where the majority of citizens do not want to do physical work because they consider it menial, I think this is an important message: for example, physical work is part of our humanity!

One more excerpt:

This reminds me of my childhood when I saw a sign on an old apartment building near my home: ‘Ora et labora’, Pray and work. Is it true that this is one of the mottos of the Benedictines, because it is important to balance prayer and work?

This is a relatively recent 19th century slogan of a Benedictine community, which then spread. In fact, one essential thing was left out: reading the Scriptures. Our Rule of St Benedict could be summed up more as ‘read the Scriptures, pray, work‘. We must listen to God’s word, talk to him, and put into action what we follow as an ideal. The aftermath of the paedophile scandals also proves that the external and internal credibility of the Church is very much influenced by how its members live their lives.

People rightly expect us believers to make a clear commitment to our values, to proclaim them and to live by them. If they do not, that is a big problem. But if we do not know what we stand for, we cannot live by it.

How good it would be to have a Christian village community organized according to Dreher, which would also be a spiritual community! But how would we get along with each other in such a village, when today there are many disagreements even within the spiritual groups? After all, in an online group of like-minded members, we can also fall out.

It is a problem that we do not agree on certain issues within our Catholic communities, even though the Church’s teachings are clear in many cases, and also carry a profound message. They are either not known by all or are overwritten out of individualism. Even if we meet only on Sundays and do not live in the same neighbourhood, this is a source of conflict. The church hierarchy, the clergy, do not communicate well why these teachings are important. And on the part of lay believers, the attitude that “I’ll decide what’s good for me and what’s right” makes consensus difficult. This attitude is incompatible with any communal, institutional practice of religion because it is selfish.

But how can the crystallized wisdom of the Church’s teachings be communicated in such a way that we not only see them as a set of rules, not only obey them, but also inwardly embrace them?

Dreher is right about the problem that we live in our emotions, we make our emotions absolute, and it is difficult to argue against them. If I listen only to my emotions, I do not hear the teaching of the Church, because I act according to what I feel. Also, many people introduce their personal opinions in this way: ‘I feel that…’ You can feel many things, but that doesn’t mean you are right. This is a very common fallacy today, it leads to selfishness and the community of selfish people is going to fall apart. I have also heard from religious people, “God speaks to me in my intuitions.” But if not the Scripture but my selfishness is the measure of what I feel now, then it is a fallacy. Jesus himself, in the Gospel as well as the monastic tradition warn us that we can be tempted to a great deal of evil through our emotions.

“The Benedict Option” touches on sexual culture, which is much more than just our sexuality, because it actually reveals our whole worldview. Dreher writes about how we do not dare to pass on to our children the Church’s teaching on sexual morality.

The result of the sexual revolution is a great indulgence, a great permissiveness in sexuality. This has made our whole society short-sighted, so we don’t talk about its moral, spiritual implications. For example, we are hardly allowed to say that the evil and harmful consequences of divorce are suffered most by innocent children. The blatantly justified cases do not justify the widespread bad practice of divorce. You don’t have to be a Christian to see this great injustice, but unfortunately many Christians are also tolerant towards it. No one likes to listen to unpleasant truths nor takes them seriously, even though we all suffer directly or indirectly because of them.

Read it all. 

Father Gergely is a wonderful man. When I was in Hungary this past summer, I was not able to make it out to Pannonhalma — but when I return in February, you had better believe I’m going to make a trip there a priority. The Abbey of Pannonhalma was founded in the year 996, and was instrumental in spreading Christianity in central Europe. Here is a short documentary about the abbey:

What a blessing it has been to me, presenting The Benedict Option to Christians all over Europe. I was in Nashville not long ago, talking about how much easier it has been to convince European Christians (versus American Christians) of the value of the idea. If you are 40 years old or younger, and still going to church, then you get it. Boy, do you ever get it. This is not the case in the US, where we are still behind the Europeans on the road to de-Christianization — but we are fast catching up.

An American reader of this blog contacted me recently to say that he and his family are moving in large part because of Benedict Option reasons. They are looking for a thicker Christian community in which to raise their kids.

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The Bizarre Mystery Of Christmas

Our priest included in his Christmas homily a quote from the Nativity sermon of St. Gregory Palamas. I was unfamiliar with this homily until our pastor mentioned it. It’s really something. It’s about the birth of Jesus as the antidote to Satanic pride, which brought about the Fall. It’s about the deceit of power. Excerpt:

Now since it was God’s good pleasure to annul the pretext for that pride which brought down His rational creatures, He makes everything like Himself; and because by nature He is equal to Himself and equal in honour, He makes the creation equal to itself by grace and equal in honour. And how was this done? The very Word of God from God emptied Himself in an indescribable way, came down from on high to the lowest state of man’s nature, and indissolubly linked it with Himself, and in humbling Himself and becoming poor like us, He raised on high the things below, or rather, He gathered both things into one, mingling humanity with divinity, and by so doing He taught everyone that humility is the road which leads upwards, setting forth today Himself as an example before men and holy angels alike.

Because of this, the angels now possess steadfastness, having learnt in a practical way from the Master that the way to be exalted and to resemble Him is not arrogance but humility. Because of this, men are easily set right, as they recognize humility as the road by which they are recalled. Because of this, the prince of evil, who is conceit itself, has been put to shame and overthrown, whereas previously he imagined that he could somehow stand and was something, inasmuch as he had enslaved some, and pulled them down with himself, through their desire for something greater, while also hoping to do the same to others through their extreme folly. Now he is seen as a plaything, having been well and truly found out by those he had evilly deceived before. Now that Christ had been born, the devil is trampled down by those who were previously under his feet, who are no longer presumptuous, as the destroyer advised, but identify with the lowly (Romans 12.16), as the Saviour taught through His deeds, and win heavenly exaltation through humility.

That is why God who sits upon the cherubim (Psalm 99.1) is set before us as a babe on earth. He upon whom the six-winged seraphim cannot look, being unable to gaze intently not only at His nature but even at the radiance of His glory, and therefore covering their eyes with their wings (Isaiah 6.2), having become flesh, appears to our senses and can be seen by bodily eyes. He who defines all things and is limited by none is contained in a small, makeshift manger. He who holds the universe and grasps it in the hollow of His hand, is wrapped in narrow swaddling bands and fastened into ordinary clothes. He who possesses the riches of inexhaustible treasures submits Himself voluntarily to such great poverty that He does not even have a place at the inn; and so He enters into a cave at the time of His birth, who was brought forth by God timelessly and impassibly and without beginning. And–how great a wonder!–not only does He who shares the nature of the Father on high put on our fallen nature through His birth, nor is He subject merely to the utter poverty of being born in a wretched cave, but right from the very start, while still in the womb, He accepts the final condemnation of our nature. He who is by nature Lord of all is now ranked with the servants and enrolled with them (Luke 2.1-6), clearly making humble service to others no less honourable than the exercise of lordship, or rather, showing the servants as having greater honour than the earthly ruler at that time, provided of course they understood and obeyed the magnificence of grace. For the man who then seemed to rule the world was not counted with the King of heaven, though all his subjects were, nor was this earthly ruler reckoned then as one of them, but the heavenly Lord was.

Read the entire homily by the saint, a 14th century Orthodox theologian and archbishop.

Consider the radical nature of what happened in Bethlehem! St. Gregory compels us to attend closely to what by now has become commonplace in our imagination. The great mystery and miracle was right in front of me, but St. Gregory helped me to see its meaning in a way I had not thought about in a long time. Kierkegaard called this the “Absolute Paradox”: the scandalous idea that the Creator of the Cosmos would incarnate as a man, and not just a man, but a poor man in the desert. Christianity is so marvelously weird! I feel somehow that I will be spending the next year learning how to re-weird it for people. Think, Christians, about what we believe, and what it means!

Here is the troparion, or short hymn, that we Orthodox sing on Christmas:

Thy Nativity, O Christ our God,
Has shone to the world the light of knowledge;
For by it those who worshipped the stars
Were taught by a star
To worship Thee, the Sun of Righteousness,
And to know Thee, the Dayspring From On High,
O Lord, glory to Thee!

This teaches us that the natural world is not to be worshiped, but that all creation is a sign pointing to the Creator, who is everywhere present, and fills all things.

Merry Christmas, friends!

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View From Your Christmas Table

That’s a lousy selfie of me with a bowl of chicken and sausage gumbo at my Cousin Andy and Cousin Nancy’s house up in Starhill. We had our annual family get-together there for the first time in two years. Lots of people marveling over how big all the kids have gotten since we last got together on Christmas Eve, 2019. That tall man in the background is 6’4″ — and is my older son, Matt.

Here’s another, much better one from a reader:

Washington, DC

Champagne and oysters — sounds like a terrific Christmas Eve!

What are y’all eating? Send pics — no faces! And remember to include the room, not just the food. Send to rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. I’ll update them throughout the next couple of days.

The post View From Your Christmas Table appeared first on The American Conservative.

Modernity, Masculinity, And Trans

Here is an e-mail I received from a reader who is a male-to-female transgendered person. The reader does not insist on anonymity, but I don’t want to run the risk of trolls searching out the soul who was brave enough to write the letter below, and threatening violence. Remember as you respond that one of the rules of this blog’s comments section is that you cannot personally insult someone who comments here. Anyone who speaks rudely or insultingly to my correspondent will get their comment sent to the trash:

I’ve been reading your blog for several months, and I’ve enjoyed both your perspective and your intellectual honesty. I’m writing this email to share some personal perspectives on transsexuality that I’ve not read elsewhere, diverging substantially from both the common left/right positions. I hope you find them interesting.

Having read innumerable takes on transgender issues over the last decade, I’ve come to find the narrative explanations for the modern instance of the phenomenon lacking. On one hand, the left constantly innovates a linguistic matrix of concepts engineered as articles of faith — referentially justifying themselves in relation to other inventions, synthesizing a supporting web for belief contextualization. This style of rhetoric aims to entrench social dialogue in such a thing, keeping it at a safe distance from questions relating to the actual causal source of the phenomena.  The right, by contrast, spends many days futilely trying to attack the most outrageous & ungrounded concepts of the opposition — playing to an already sympathetic audience, but utterly ineffectual at achieving (meaningful) ideological turnover. Or, if more intellectually inclined,  conservatives attempt broad pictures explanations based on moral and spiritual decline… I believe there is some truth to the latter, but a better picture emerges when one looks at things on a more granular level.

 To start, there is much missing in the mainstream conversations of transsexuality, concerning the actual cause. There are a few scientific explanations available, most prominent being Blanchard’s conception of Autogynephilia (the AGP/HSTS model) – and I believe some of the observations of that theory are very real. Yet I also believe that academic sexologists are overly inclined and professionally motivated to posit their area of research as the ‘one true cause’. I think a more fundamental reason has a basis in the very conditions of modern life. All the following applies exclusively to the case of MtF (Male to Female) transsexuality, and I believe the FtM variant has a somewhat different origin, but I won’t speculate on it here

On a very concrete level, there is very little appealing to boys/young men in the modern world. Before they can even make sense of it, boys look around and see parents (or parents of friends) get divorced. Well before we become adults, we grow accustomed to transitory friendships and relationships – a fact that only becomes more real as we face realities of a geographically liquid labor market, forcing several cross-country before we turn 30. The dating market is also brutal, especially for socially awkward boys, or those less virile and masculine. To many boys, the dream of owning a home and land feels antiquated and even impossible – perhaps they witness their own parents brutally struggling with a mortgage, or they grow up around those who have never done anything other than rent.  They are subjected to a cruel form of education (additionally, one highly demeaning to gifted children), and promised that their reward for working diligently for half a decade may be to work in a cubicle at FAANG [Facebook/Apple/Alphabet/Netflix/Google] from 9-5 until they turn 60. In short: the modern version of a man is one fundamentally emasculated and servile.

I think this accounts for much of the current cultural patterns. Masculinity is now so reduced that an increasing portion of boys turn their eyes away from it in disgust. As early as eight years old, I experienced these emotions. Eventually culminating in a deep sense of nihilism that would stay with me for over a decade. Latent to this was an awareness that society was conditioning me to accept a life that was fundamentally meaningless, but I lacked the words and experience to truly identify. By the time I was 11, my sexuality had manifested to the point where I realized it was incompatible with any sort of normal life — the kind that I didn’t want to begin with. Even as I still desired love. A few years later, I learned of the possibility of transition, but found it grotesque and debasing – and turned away from it, with some part of my heart aching for it.

One note: To those like myself, (Modern American) Christianity was never a viable answer. In part, because it doesn’t speak to this anger – and in part, because it has a certain dopey clumsiness to it. Evangelical Christianity always seemed like a haven for televangelical grifters with their grifted base, and Catholicism as a nest of hypocrites led by pedophiles. That was the cultural perception, at least. In the face of what I perceived to be the horrifying reality of modern life; religious faith seemed an ineffectual solution. Alongside this was the perception that Christians were largely domesticated, inoffensive, and tame – despite all leftist protestations to the contrary. Yet a soul that burns with fury does not seek to be placated and resents that which would tame it. I believe this is one reason the post-Christian far right is in ascendancy — they alone have found the words to give voice to this rage of many young men/boys.

For my part, that rage stayed with me until my early 20s, until it consumed itself leaving ashes and an absolute depression in its wake. At which point, the idea of transition — having haunted me for years – no longer disgusted me. It was never about deluding myself into believing that I really was a woman, but rather accepting the nature of the desires I felt and symbolically making them a part of myself and inscribing that truth into my body.

I offer my example partly because I know it well, yet all because I’ve had enough experience in the LGBT world to know that isn’t truly special. I’ve served on diversity committees at a high level in elite academic institutions, supervised multiple LGBT youth groups, participated in online discords, and borne witness to the cultural flows that orient people to transition. Many of these young adults/teenagers are highly intelligent but disgusted by the state of our society for reasons they struggle to put to words. Even as it is the very same that offers them incredible freedom and encourages their explorations in identity. Often enough, they are indoctrinated into the web of cultural leftism, intellectually blocking them from any vantage that might offer higher insight on their natures. Many are shaped to have a disposition to desire gender transition, long before they stumble on the concept.

Men like Orban can patch the decay and delay it a few years – but the root cause is much deeper than things like drag queen story hour, or a salacious children’s book on gender identity. These are symptoms – but the fundamental problem is not a ‘desire to be trans’, but a ‘desire to not be a man’. A boy who enjoys being a boy will never find himself culturally groomed into transitioning, but one conditioned to despise his nature needs only the faintest push. Suppression only goes so far – and until these root causes are addressed with a more desirable and beautiful idea of masculinity, I believe this social process will continue.

Ending on a personal note, I don’t regret my choice to transition, and I wouldn’t do a moment in my life differently. I found the love that I always sought, and that alone redeems my mistakes. But I cannot help but think that many who are transitioning now are inviting great pain upon themselves, and will find no such deliverance. For them, the rest of their lives will be lived in a state of perpetual resentment, haunted by demons they cannot name.

This is really profound stuff, and I thank the reader for writing it. It’s easy to see that in many ways, modernity also teaches women to fear and loathe their femininity. The reader gives me a lot to think about. I don’t want to give a hasty response.

Remember: I will not post your comment if you speak insultingly to or about this reader. 

The post Modernity, Masculinity, And Trans appeared first on The American Conservative.

Why Loudoun County Matters

If you’re not a subscriber to Matt Taibbi’s Substack newsletter, you missed a fantastic deep dive into the controversy over race and schools in Loudoun County, Virginia. Brace yourselves: Taibbi reveals that the national media botched the story, imposing its preferred narrative (“white supremacy”) to describe why voters in that upscale Democratic county voted for Republican Glenn Youngkin in this fall’s gubernatorial race, over Democrat Terry McAuliffe. Turns out it had a lot to do with people of color going off-script to protect their kids. At the beginning of the story, Taibbi is standing at a poll on election night:

“See that?” whispers Raj Patel. “Another Indian who would never vote Republican before just took the Republican ballot.”

A tall, slim, dark-skinned man in a plain tan shirt and tan corduroy pants is indeed standing in the school entrance, examining a sample ballot pulled with two hands close to his face. He’s either nearsighted or really, really interested. Patel, whose father immigrated from India in the late fifties to work for Bechtel, indicates him with a nod and begins talking about the novel experience of standing in the crater of a smoldering national controversy.

“My sister lives in Pennsylvania. She says, ‘I’m watching the news and they’re talking about Loudoun County!’ And I say, ‘Yeah, who’d have believed it?’ You know, that our county was going to be on national news over this issue.” He shakes his head. “You watch. Indian and Chinese immigrants who typically vote Democratic will vote the other way because education for children is their number one issue. It’s why they came here.”

Patel is one of the switchers. He was “pretty liberal” after graduating from UC-Berkeley many years ago, then steadily became more moderate in his views, which did not mean voting for Donald Trump. “Honestly, I voted for Hillary Clinton,” he says, clarifying that he’s for “common sense,” not being “right-wing” or conspiratorial, “none of that garbage.” Eventually, he returns to the subject of education. “When you start messing with schools, that’s when you’ll get typical Democrats to flip.”

Taibbi continues:

For all those twists, the core narrative was simple. A commonplace fight over suburban tax resources ended in radical reforms that primarily impacted one small nonwhite minority whose story mostly never got told, its members perhaps paralyzed by the irony of watching their complaints dismissed as white racism. There’s no way to understand any of the later Loudoun madness, without first knowing the backstory of the group that essentially started the fire by studying too hard.

Here is a fact that I have never read anywhere else in coverage of this story: that some of the strongest protesters against the woke-ification of Loudoun County schools were dark-skinned immigrants from southern Asia who came to America to escape racism, and succeeded professionally:

In another of the innumerable million-pound ironies in the Loudoun mess, many of these immigrants came to America in flight not just fromracism, but from a true white supremacist legacy. Back home, many experienced discrimination from a northern population that looks down upon them, among other things, for having darker skin, a direct echo of India’s colonial past. Mention “blacks” to some, and they might think you’re referring to them, since that’s an operative slur there as well. “If we were racist, why would we have the south?” a parliament member from India’s ruling BJP party said a few years ago. “Why do we live with them? We have black people around us.”

“One of the reasons a lot of these immigrants don’t want to talk about this, is they don’t like to wear their grievances on their sleeve,” says Asra Nomani, veteran journalist and onetime colleague of murdered reporter Daniel Pearl, and now Vice-President of an advocacy group called Parents Defending Education. “These are people who have been looked down upon for having dark skin. A lot of the kids at TJ, for instance, are darker than black Americans. But it’s something they don’t talk about.”

Many Indian families came to Loudoun specifically with the public schools in mind. They were attracted by the idea of winning their children tickets to affluence denied them by a different caste system, via supposedly open competition for spots in places like TJ or the Academies of Loudon.

“My dad came here in 1960 for his PhD, and that’s the story of so many of our families,” says Nomani. “They faced prejudice, and came here wanting to figure out how to advance through the one thing that they know, which is hard work and education.”

Boy, does that ever resonate with me. My parents are white, of course, but they were both born into rural poverty. The only reason my father got out of it was through hard work and education, which became possible for him through the postwar GI Bill. He was murder on my sister and me about our educations, exhorting us with the passion of an immigrant father to study hard and make good grades. My father had his prejudices, but a good one, in my estimation, was the way he judged people on the basis of their willingness to work. He was an old country white dude from the South, but he flipped in a single afternoon on the subject of the presence of Latino immigrants in our parish when he hired a man from Guatemala to do some brush clearing for him, and he saw how hard the man worked. For my dad, a strong work ethic was everything. 

What Taibbi found in Loudoun County was a situation in which Asian kids were blowing everybody else out of the water on the admissions tests to the advanced public high school:

However, the big picture pointed to a more overwhelming dynamic: Asian students not only consistently applied to gifted programs at a higher rate than the other populations, they were also unfailingly overrepresented in terms of acceptance rates. In other words, they were still crushing the testing process relative to all other groups, and showing no sign of letting up, not even having the decency to follow the example of most American immigrant populations by getting dumber with assimilation time.

In the end, the county followed the example of everyone from the University of California to the New York City School system under Bill de Blasio, replacing race-blind admissions and standardized testing with a new, “holistic,” “equity-based” system that would be described in media in a hundred different ways, but never as what it actually is: a mercy rule to stop Asian kids from demolishing the field.

It’s anti-Asian bigotry at work — but that fact screws with the media narrative (“white supremacy”), so it was suppressed.

Taibbi goes back to 2018, to discover the roots of the Loudoun crisis. The local NAACP had for decades been pushing Loudoun, which had a repulsive history of anti-black racism, to use race-blind admissions practices, but had suddenly flipped, and demanded race-aware admissions practices, and to grant admissions to black students even if they wouldn’t have qualified under race-blind policies. Why? EQUITY! Here’s Taibbi:

Burke also spoke. “We are requesting that Loudoun County admit 20% of African American applicants to the Academies of Learning for the 2019-2020 academic school year,” she said. “We are requesting that you appoint an independent team of outside professionals.”

The school administration would soon do just that. It’s hard to look at the document record and conclude anything but that under a blizzard of negative headlines, with leaders like Thomas calling for the heads of people like Superintendent Williams, the school system buckled, tossed a few gym teachers under the bus, and green-lit a full-tilt outside diversity audit as a way to ease political pressures. Some local political figures who initially welcomed what they thought would be a healthy course of “unconscious bias training” to address issues like hiring inequity soon found themselves in shock. Within a few months, the Loudoun schools were transformed into a Boschian hellscape of penthouse-priced equity consultants, who “saw race everywhere” to degrees so far beyond even the most demented Fox News fantasies that the corpse of Roger Ailes almost sat up in surprise.

A teacher I spoke with for this story, not based in Virginia, put it like this:

“Education is dominated by consultants,” she said. “They were former teachers, but they decide they actually want to make money, so they leave and then they start these companies.”

These high-priced consultants have a great gig:

Almanzan and his company preach a diversity training gospel that’s increasingly popular with organizations ranging from Amazon to Goldman, Sachs to the Pentagon. They describe a pervasive, psychologized conception of racism that is so deeply entrenched at both an individual and a societal level that it can never be eradicated, only treated — constantly and by credentialed experts, of course.

One of the ideas they suggested to Loudoun school officials was creating an informant network of students of color who would report to the authorities experiences of racism. In other words, they suggested turning kids into spies on each other, to root out ideological non-conformity.

Taibbi takes us deep into Tom Wolfe territory, with the Loudoun County Public School system producing a cringey “apology video” for past racism. They asked the local NAACP chief to participate, but she indignantly refused to do the “emotional labor” of helping this white-dominated system atone. Later, when the video came out, the same woman denounced LCPS for declining to include her in the video. The school educrats responded by trying to make it illegal for any LCPS employee to criticize the school system’s equity efforts. The activist role of a newly elected school board member, Beth Barts, escalated affairs. Taibbi describes Barts like this:

Imagine asking a person incapable of learning the rules to Candy Land to pilot a 747 in a snowstorm, and you’re close to grasping what it meant to Loudoun to have Barts in elected office while the county tried to navigate a national controversy.

It’s true! The stuff that lunatic tried to get away with beggars belief. But she could count on a sympathetic media to take her side, and report in either a biased way, or outright lie, about what was really happening in Loudoun County. Taibbi continues:

Loudoun was also very much a story about transformational changes on the blue side of American politics. Fifteen or twenty years ago, the Tanner Cross story would have had big-city ACLU lawyers stumbling over one another to come defend the controversial speech of a small-town teacher. In 2021, the ACLU wrote a brief in opposition to Cross. FOIA was another progressive legacy, having been created in response to the persecution of accused communists in the Eisenhower years, while standardized tests had been progressivism’s tool for helping Jews and Catholics break into the Ivy Leagues. What we called “progressives” once were now becoming something else, and the composition of their opposition was as a result also changing.

This saga was about so much more than Critical Race Theory, yet in the coming months of intense national spotlight between June and November, “CRT” became the national media’s sole explanation for everything that happened there. Invocation of the decades-old academic theory, papers like the Post explained, was the “new Trump,” the latest in fake news scammery (Barack Obama, in campaigning for McAuliffe, even described the controversies as “fake outrage”). It was all, the Post said, rightist hokum that had been “weaponized” by a population whose real problem was anxiety over an “influx of families of color,” since the county that was “85 percent White in 2000” was “barely 60 percent White in 2020.” Many outlets made this same point, by the way. Most failed to mention that the bulk of that demographic change came from the 750% rise during that time in the county’s Asian population, whose members of course made up a significant part of the opposition to the school policies. It was impossible to make it through a paragraph of most of these national accounts without hitting a bluntly provable lie.

Again, the point in spending so much time on the other parts of the story is to underscore that whole ranges of people here, of multiple races and political persuasions, would have been angry for a dozen serious reasons even if the term “Critical Race Theory” never came up. The punchline is that as a point of fact, the national press got even this wrong. The “Action Plan to Combat Systemic Racism” did contain heavy doses of CRT, or CRT-inspired thinking, or at least that’s what the plan’s own local advocates believed (Barts and the Antiracist Parents Group constantly referred to the “anti-CRT” enemy, for instance). It was also what many traditionally liberal press outlets initially reported, not that it particularly matters.

The significance of “Critical Race Theory” instead became that the national framing of the Loudoun story around the idea of it as a giant ruse, constructed around an imaginary racist phantasm, became the crowning insult that ended up altering the balance of power in the state. This in turn led to the boffo ending: total humiliation for everyone responsible, but too late to repair the fractured county.

There’s a lot more. Taibbi goes on to explain that the Democratic establishment and the national media are lying to themselves and to everybody else when they describe what happened in Loudoun County as a white supremacist phenomenon. In fact, it involves privileged people — many of them non-white — who normally vote Democratic, but who rebelled against the insane woke policies of the school board, and against the school board’s authoritarian, profoundly un-American attempts to silence opposition. I was not a subscriber to the paid portions of Matt Taibbi’s Substack, but after a friend sent me Taibbi’s four-part report on Loudoun County, I bought a one-year subscription, to fund real journalism like this. I hope you too will subscribe.

The Taibbi dispatches are yet another example of why you cannot trust the mainstream media when it comes to reporting on anything related to culture war topics. Some conservatives like to think that the media intentionally lie about these things. I think this is not true. I believe that most journalists, especially those under 40, genuinely believe their own propaganda. They are like a team of reporters from Fundamentalism Today being sent to New Orleans to cover Mardi Gras. The hypermoralization of journalism in the younger generation of journalists has been a catastrophe. When trying to tell the complex truth of a story causes one to police oneself and one’s colleagues for wrongthink, and to shut down curiosity, then what use is journalism?

Matt Taibbi is no rational person’s idea of a conservative, but he renews my faith in old-school journalism. He — and Bari Weiss, at her Substack, a showcase for independent journalists — show that it really is possible to do good work in this field. You just have to be free of the ideological confines of the institutions. I recall back in 2003, being at a national convention of opinion journalists and editorial writers, my first time there. At the opening reception, I found the other conservatives in the hall; there were about four of us, versus hundreds of liberal colleagues. One of the conservatives, a woman who worked on an editorial page out West, prepared me for what was to come: get ready, she said, to hear a few days of spirited meetings in which everybody will speak as if they were tribunes of truth out to defend the defenseless and take stands for righteousness. In fact, she went on, most everybody here is an off-the-rack liberal who cannot bring themselves to grasp that they might be wrong about anything.

She was spot on, I found out. I later got permission from my boss to quit that professional association, because in my view, it was a sham. So many liberals and progressives accept it as a dogmatic truth that they are on the side of the angels. It blinds them to the messiness of the real world. As we have seen in Loudoun County — and as Taibbi’s reporting highlights — woke ideology prevents Democrats from recognizing how the world is changing around them, and how people whose interests they believe themselves to be advocating for are beginning to see them as hostile to their family’s best interests.

If Republican lawmakers had any guts and vision, they would exploit this anti-woke feeling, and come up with policy proposals to fight it, and to return to old-fashioned American values of rewarding hard work and achievement, and creating a system that does that. But will they? Or are they so embedded in the elite networks, where living by the lies of wokeness is so endemic that no one dares to criticize it for fear of being called a bigot, that they cannot find their voice?

The first non-Trumpy Republican who can come up with a compelling anti-woke message, along with credible anti-woke policy proposals, and attack wokeness as a betrayal of the promises of America, will win the presidency — and do so by winning over a significant number of immigrant voters who have had enough of this nonsense.

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Dinner For Shlimazels

Have you ever been to an expensive restaurant that turned out to be a total rip-off? Well, let me tell you what, no matter how bad your experience was, it wasn’t as bad as what happened to the restaurant blogger Geraldine DeRuiter and her party at Bros, a Michelin-starred foo-foo restaurant in Lecce, Italy. But she got her revenge, penning an epic takedown of the joint. Here’s how it begins:

There is something to be said about a truly disastrous meal, a meal forever indelible in your memory because it’s so uniquely bad, it can only be deemed an achievement. The sort of meal where everyone involved was definitely trying to do something; it’s just not entirely clear what.

I’m not talking about a meal that’s poorly cooked, or a server who might be planning your murder—that sort of thing happens in the fat lump of the bell curve of bad. Instead, I’m talking about the long tail stuff – the sort of meals that make you feel as though the fabric of reality is unraveling. The ones that cause you to reassess the fundamentals of capitalism, and whether or not you’re living in a simulation in which someone failed to properly program this particular restaurant. The ones where you just know somebody’s going to lift a metal dome off a tray and reveal a single blue or red pill.

I’m talking about those meals.

At some point, the only way to regard that sort of experience—without going mad—is as some sort of community improv theater. You sit in the audience, shouting suggestions like, “A restaurant!” and “Eating something that resembles food” and “The exchange of money for goods, and in this instance the goods are a goddamn meal!” All of these suggestion go completely ignored.

That is how I’ve come to regard our dinner at Bros, Lecce’s only Michelin-starred restaurant, as a means of preserving what’s left of my sanity. It wasn’t dinner. It was just dinner theater.

No, scratch that. Because dinner was not involved. I mean—dinner played a role, the same way Godot played a role in Beckett’s eponymous play. The entire evening was about it, and guess what? IT NEVER SHOWED.

Bros is a modernist cuisine place. They served DeRuiter and her friends a 27-course dinner that took hours, and barely featured any food. More:

There is no menu at Bros. Just a blank newspaper with a QR code linking to a video featuring one of the chefs, presumably, against a black background, talking directly into the camera about things entirely unrelated to food. He occasionally used the proper noun of the restaurant as an adverb, the way a Smurf would. This means that you can’t order anything besides the tasting menu, but also that you are at the mercy of the servers to explain to you what the hell is going on.

The servers will not explain to you what the hell is going on.

Rand tries to figure out what part of this dish is edible.

He cannot.

They will not do this in Italian. They will not do this in English. They will not play Pictionary with you on the blank newspaper as a means of communicating what you are eating. On the rare occasion where they did offer an explanation for a dish, it did not help.

“These are made with rancid ricotta,” the server said, a tiny fried cheese ball in front of each of us.

“I’m… I’m sorry, did you say rancid? You mean… fermented? Aged?”

“No. Rancid.”

“Okay,” I said in Italian. “But I think that something might be lost in translation. Because it can’t be-”

“Rancido,” he clarified.

Trust me, my dears, you are going to want to read the whole thing. 

There are no words to describe the alchemy with which DeRuiter has transformed this miserable experience into revenge comedy. Her party spent four and a half hours, and over $200 per person, and walked away hungry, perplexed, and angry.

I found out about this because The New York Times ran a story on how the DeRuiter review went viral, and brought everybody out of the woodwork to complain about what pretentious con artists the restaurant’s chef-owner, Floriano Pellegrino, and his chef wife, Isabella Poti, are. And lo, it seems to be true! Excerpt:

Ms. Potì’s culinary chops and cheek bones (“Isabella has this face,” Mr. Pellegrino noted) have attracted fashion magazines and collaborations with Nike. While she is a polyglot, the chiseled Mr. Pellegrino doesn’t really speak English. But he does say “Hey, bro” to just about everyone, is inked with some questionable Bros-centric tattoos that some would regard as misogynistic and loves the F-word so much that he used it on the boxes of his Christmas panettones.

They have promotional deals with sunglass companies, ice cream bars, their own rugby team and a clothing brand. They have filmed videos for their menus as Adam and Eve, clad only in strategically placed leaves. A video for Bros’ summer 2021 menu came with an epilepsy warning.

“Why are us chefs only chefs?” Mr. Pellegrino said. “If I’m able to do other things, why only cook?”

This pair could have wandered in out of Paolo Sorrentino’s homage to Roman decadence, “The Great Beauty”. Well done, Geraldine DeRuiter! I’m going to bookmark her blog, The Everywhereist.

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Woke Crime Data Blackout

News from the City of Brotherly Love:

Oh look, my congressional representative was carjacked at gunpoint in Philadelphia today.

Just another day in an American city in 2021. https://t.co/Oa58EUFTdt

— Damon Linker (@DamonLinker) December 22, 2021

The story reports:

As of December 6, Philadelphia had recorded 521 homicides for the year, surpassing New York’s 443 and Los Angeles at 352.

This is despite the fact that with a population of 1.5 million, Philly is less than half the size of Los Angeles and one-fifth of New York.

Remember that Philly is blessed to be one of those large American cities with a George Soros DA.

I’ve looked around at several versions of the robbed Congresswoman story, and one thing I can’t find is a physical description of the suspects. I assume in these cases that the suspects are black, and the media are deliberately hiding this fact. I was working in newspapers in the first decade of this century, when there was a push in the industry to stop identifying the race of crime suspects. At least some of the Dallas media embraced it. I remember sitting at my desk when it was reported that there was an armed robbery suspect loose in the Knox-Henderson neighborhood uptown. You would think that it would be of utmost importance to let the public know as much as it could about the physical description of a robber running around with a gun. But not the Dallas media, at least not most of it that afternoon. I finally found a TV station’s report about the situation, and it was the only one that mentioned the race of the suspect: black.

Back then, it was more important to local news editors and producers to keep white people from making negative judgments about black crime suspects than it was to protect them from an armed robber on the loose. I don’t imagine their news judgment has gotten any better, certainly not since the George Floyd killing.

My city, Baton Rouge, is having a record-setting year for homicides. I haven’t seen a detailed breakdown by demographics for 2021, but if it’s like every other year, the killings are almost entirely black-on-black murder, especially involving young black men. We aren’t hearing much about it from local Black Lives Matter enthusiasts, no doubt because black lives only really matter to them when they are taken by police officers. Shondreka James, the mother of one of those homicide victims, expresses the hopelessness of the moment here:

“Things are completely out of hand. No human, no law enforcement, no judge can actually stop this today,” she said.

The violence used to be confined to all-black neighborhoods, but now it is increasingly spilling over into majority white areas that used to be safe. Siegen Lane is in south Baton Rouge, on the opposite side of the city as the majority-black communities, but every couple of weeks there’s a report of gun violence there. One of my mom’s neighbors and her daughter were caught on a Siegen Lane shootout a few weeks back between two cars full of armed young black men.

My subdivision is racially mixed but majority white. Yet we have a property crime problem. If you follow the Next Door list, and watch people’s security camera videos, on those where you can tell the race and sex of the thief, they are invariably black males.

As a society, we never, ever talk about this stuff in public. Our newspapers and TV stations don’t report on it. Nobody runs op-eds about it, because this discourse is not permissible, any more than it is possible in our media to discuss anything to do with LGBT people or Muslims in a negative light. The taboos are very strong, especially in the age of cancel culture.

Now comes news that two major real estate brokerages are scrubbing information about crime rates from their home listings — this, to promote “equity”:

Realtor.com has removed crime data from its website, and Redfin has decided not to add it out of concerns that it could perpetuate racial inequity.

David Doctorow, the CEO of Realtor.com, said in a company update this week that the crime map layer has been removed from all search results on the website “to rethink the safety information we share on Realtor.com and how we can best integrate it as part of a consumer’s home search experience.”

Doctorow said the removal was part of a company effort to “level the playing field” and scrutinize what safety means to buyers and renters so that it can “reimagine how we integrate safety data” on the platform. Realtor.com has been collaborating with fair housing advocates as part of the initiative.

“Reimagine how we integrate safety data” is Orwellian phraseology for “figure out how to bury crime stats to hide the demographic characteristics. More:

“At this time of complexity in real estate, our team has been energized by our purpose to simplify real estate choices, especially for first-time homebuyers,” he wrote. “Yet we keep bumping up against one very old and persistent problem: the ability to afford and own a home can be unjustly limited by one’s race, ethnicity, or other personal characteristics.”

Well, okay, but what does home showings and mortgage offerings have to do with crime rates? Nothing, in fact. Why won’t you tell us how safe the neighborhood is?

Because, according to Redfin, crime data do not tell us anything about the safety of a neighborhood. Seriously, this is what Redfin claims — that you cannot trust data. More:

On the same day that Realtor.com announced that it was removing its crime data, Redfin came out with a full-throated denunciation of crime data being included on real estate websites. Redfin’s chief growth officer Christian Taubman announced that, after consideration, the company would not be adding crime data to its own platform.

Taubman said that Redfin had been weighing whether to add information about crime because one of the metrics that consumers consider when looking for a home to purchase is how safe the area around that home is. The company concluded that available crime data doesn’t accurately answer that question, and “given the long history of redlining and racist housing covenants in the United States there’s too great a risk of this inaccuracy reinforcing racial bias.”

Redfin highlighted the difference between crime and safety and said that through its research, which included surveys, people defined safety in a variety of ways. Taubman said that the available data, namely the Uniform Crime Report from the FBI, pertains to reported crimes and excludes information about crimes that go unreported and crimes that go unsolved. He said that data at a neighborhood level could lead to high inaccuracy.

“The fact that most crimes are missing creates a real possibility that the crimes that show up in the data set skew one way or another,” Taubman wrote. “And the fact that most reported crimes go unsolved means that some of the crimes being reported in fact may not be crimes.”

This is total horsesh*t, of course. Taubman and his woke capitalist colleagues don’t want to report crime rates because they don’t want home buyers of any race putting distance between themselves and predominantly black neighborhoods, because that’s where most of the crime is. They would rather see people buy houses that put themselves and their families in danger of crime than be thought of as perpetuating racial stereotypes about who commits most violent crime — demographic stereotypes that are almost always true. It’s like the Dallas media back in the day: they think the real danger to the common good is not from a black armed robber running around uptown, but from white people making a racial judgment about black men and crime.

The thing is, any home buyer with a lick of sense is going to check out the crime stats in neighborhoods where he is looking to purchase. You’d be a fool not to. Here is the 2020 homicide map for Baton Rouge. If you know the city, you can tell that the majority of these killings happened in predominantly black parts of town:

 

Here is a graphic from Neighborhood Scout, showing where the most crime-ridden neighborhoods are. Again, it’s easy to see that these are the predominantly black parts of our majority-black city:

 

The Baton Rouge Police Department releases annual crime stats, but keeps demographic data out of it. But they do share that data with the FBI. Want to know how the homicide stats broke down demographically in my city in 2020? Look at this FBI graphic:

 

If you look further, you will see that the overwhelming majority of victims and offenders are males, with young people disproportionately represented. If you are going to be murdered in Baton Rouge, you are overwhelmingly likely to be black, and so is your killer (nobody can seriously think that the fifty murderers of unknown race are anything other than disproportionately black).

Look, I understand why this is a painful subject to talk about. But the idea that woke capitalists in the real estate business would rather sell people houses in riskier neighborhoods for crime rather than give them data and let the customer decide what to do with that knowledge infuriates me. In 2005, when we bought our first house, in Dallas, we didn’t have a lot of money, and ended up choosing a house in a mixed-race gentrifying neighborhood. It was what we could afford, and besides, we looked at the crime stats, and though violent crime was a lot closer to our street than we would have liked, we concluded that the risks and the rewards made it worthwhile. No agent back then felt it necessary to hide relevant crime data from us to prevent us from making a decision they might regard as racist.

How long are we all going to have to live by these lies that the overclass imposes on us? Why are we not allowed to talk about these things? Do these patronizing wokesters think that black families are pleased to live in crime-infested neighborhoods? My neighborhood is a plain-jane middle class subdivision, and I am quite sure that the black families who live in this neighborhood were happy to move to one where the streets are safer, even if most people who live here are white. The desire for a safe place to raise one’s children is not limited to people of any race. As a parent, I want to live in the safest place I can afford. Doesn’t everybody with kids want the same thing? In a city, that is my No. 1 priority when considering buying a home. Why should these do-gooder real estate agents withhold basic information like that from ordinary people of whatever race? Why do they get virtue points from hiding ideologically inconvenient truths from the public?

Let me poll the room: does anybody here think that real estate agencies, media outlets, and other gatekeepers withholding this kind of data from consumers makes us a less racist society? Or does it make us more suspicious, because we assume that relevant information is being withheld from us for political reasons?

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Covid, Totalitarianism, & The Machine

The English novelist and essayist Paul Kingsnorth started his Substack newsletter, The Abbey of Misrule, earlier this year. Subscribing to it is one of the best decisions I’ve made in 2021. In his latest reflection on how the global reaction to Covid is ushering us into a dystopian world, Kingsnorth ponders the meaning of the World Economic Forum’s “Great Reset” project. The latest Kingsnorth post is one he characterizes thus:

I want to look at the story the Machine is telling us about these times. I want to look at the world we are being rapidly steered into, as covid-19 becomes a kind of techno-political sandbox: a testing-ground for new ways of being human in an increasingly post-human world.

Kingsnorth dives into the Great Reset by reading the book advocating it authored by Klaus Schwab, head of the WEF (the Davos people). He writes that the book is both boring and sinister, in the sense that the big plans globalists like Schwab have for the world are dull, yet deeply dystopian. Kingsnorth:

The covid event, explains Schwab, has shown that ‘we live in a world in which no-one is really in charge.’ For plenty of us, this might sound like a good thing, but for globalist thinkers like Schwab it is a problem to be solved. ‘There cannot be a lasting recovery without a global strategic framework of governance’, he writes. Nation states and their kindly allies in the ‘global business community’ must unite to ‘build back better’ (you may have heard this somewhere before). What does this mean? It means that there is no going back.

More:

While ‘some of the old habits will certainly return’ after the pandemic ends, writes Schwab, ‘many of the tech behaviours that we were forced to adopt during confinement will through familiarity become more natural.’ Home working, digital monitoring of employees by their companies, Zoom meetings and e-deliveries, not to mention the whole structure of the QR-coded ‘vaccine passport’ system: much of this is likely to remain in the new normal that covid has created. In the reset future, we will reconsider things which once would have been second-nature: things like spending time with our loved ones. Why, asks Schwab, would we endure ‘driving to a distant family gathering for the weekend’ when ‘the WhatsApp family group’ (though admittedly ‘not as fun’) is nevertheless ‘safer, cheaper and greener’? Why indeed?

This is the essence of the Great Reset: the construction of a future which is at once controlled and catatonic, dystopian and dull, monitored and monotonous beyond bearing. A future in which global corporations are free to build the world they have long desired: a borderless, interconnected market technocracy, in which each human individual is a tracked, traced and monitored production and consumption machine – all in the name of public health and safety.

I finished the final edits for Live Not By Lies just as Covid was dawning. In the book, I write about how soft totalitarianism is coming upon us in the guise of both compassion and safety. For example, some progressive New York Times staffers protested that running an op-ed by Sen. Tom Cotton advocating for something that 50 percent of Americans believe in must not be allowed to happen, because it would pub BIPOC Times staffers in danger. This absurdity actually worked. James Bennet lost his job over it. Similarly, our schools must become centers for disseminating transgender propaganda, because if not, PEOPLE WILL DIE!

You see how this works. Well, I could not have anticipated how the safety argument for soft totalitarianism would be advanced by a global pandemic. This is what Kingsnorth is writing about now. He says that Schwab’s writings are red meat for conspiracy theorists, but they aren’t a conspiracy; Schwab advocates for them out in the open, and anyway, he’s not saying anything that hasn’t been advocated by tech giants for years. More:

The confusion, anger and division swirling around us all right now is a result of our confused inability to navigate the techno-coup we are living through, or even to quite understand what is happening.

But the future is off the drawing board now. Take those QR-enabled vaccine passports, which have been rolled out so rapidly all over the world over the last twelve months. They make little sense from a ‘public health’ perspective, since we know that the currently available vaccines don’t prevent transmission of the virus. But they do have the effect of normalising the technologies involved: technologies which were in the pipeline anyway. Digital vaccine passports have been in preparation in the European Union, for instance, since at 2018. In late 2019, months before the pandemic began, trials of ‘digital identity systems’ linked to vaccination status began in Bangladesh. It was hoped that they would demonstrate how to ‘leverage immunization as an opportunity to establish digital identity’ on a worldwide scale.

Again: no outlandish claims are required to make sense of this. It is simply an acceleration of the existing direction of travel. Most of us already carry around in our pockets a portable tracking device, which monitors our geographical location, harvests data on everything from our political views to our shopping preferences, and can be used by the State in extremis to determine who our friends and contacts are. It’s called a smartphone. As covid becomes endemic over the next year or two, and as new variants keep popping up, there will likely be continuing pressure for permanent guarantees of health and safety. Handily, we may be able to use those smartphones, already apped-up with our covid QR codes, as permanent ‘health passports’, which will allow us to access goods and services safely and digitally in the dangerous new world – whilst penalising or excluding anyone who refuses to avail of the recommended public health measures.

Take a look at this cheerful video made to promote the adoption of “digital wallets” — a technology that you carry with you in your smartphone, that keeps all your records in one place, and gives you access to shopping and all kinds of services. Sounds convenient, right? Think about what this means, though — and how adopting this standard makes whoever controls digital wallet technology the lord and master of everybody’s life. This is a way the social credit system can sneak in through the back door.

(Here’s my own conspiracy theory: I don’t believe that there is a national coin shortage; I believe rather than the government declared that there is one at the beginning of Covid to compel us all to use electronic means for our transactions. Maybe they  genuinely did this to slow the spread of Covid, but have you noticed now that you are now accustomed to making all, or nearly all, of your transactions via debit or credit card? They have shifted, and are shifting, our way of buying and selling, to establish a system that makes it harder for those who have run afoul of the Machine to participate in commerce.)

As Kingsnorth warns:

Once we have accepted the premise that deep and ubiquitous levels of surveillance, monitoring and control are a price worth paying for safety – and we seem to have done that already – then almost anything is possible. 

Kingsnorth goes on to say that this is all part of a deeper movement to integrate humanity into a Machine — for example, the global Internet Of Things, which will digitize the body. I don’t know if his essays are subscription-only, but if not, by all means read the whole thing. This is coming, and coming fast. Kingsnorth’s most recent novel, Alexandria, is a dystopian adventure story set in a post-apocalyptic future, but like all good science fiction, it’s about what’s happening right now. Even unbelievers in religion can read the signs of these globalizing, techno-tyrannical times, and can start to prepare their own Benedict Options.

Please subscribe to The Abbey of Misrule. You won’t regret it. As some of you know, Paul converted to Orthodox Christianity back in January. This morning he sent to me a recording of the Romanian Orthodox nuns from the monastery near where he lives, singing “What Child Is This”. It is so pure, so unworldly in its beauty. Listen:

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