Rod Dreher's Blog, page 33

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.

The post Chantal Delsol & Christianity’s End appeared first on The American Conservative.

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

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

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?

The post Flip-Flops Of 2021 appeared first on The American Conservative.

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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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!

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