Rod Dreher's Blog, page 35

‘Forget Afghanistan, On To Ukraine!’

Let me say up front that I think Russia should keep its aggressive designs off of Ukraine. Putin should back down and leave the Ukrainians alone.

Let me also say, even more strongly: But so should NATO!

Back in the 1980s, when the Soviets were trying to establish a foothold in Nicaragua, the US, led by Ronald Reagan, said no, we will not permit that. This is in our own backyard. Soviet missiles placed so close to the US is an intolerable threat — just as we had done in the Cuban missile crisis. Even though Nicaragua was a sovereign nation led by a pro-communist government, it was an intolerable national security risk to allow that country to fall into the Soviet sphere of influence.

It’s the same way with Ukraine. No, actually it’s different. Ukraine is right on Russia’s border. The simile would be more accurate if the Sandinistas had gained control of Mexico, and were inviting the Soviets in. Look:

Again, I hate the way Putin has demonized the Ukraine patriots who want independence, but looking at it through a realist lens, I see no way that any Russian leader can allow Ukraine to become part of NATO. Besides which, unlike Nicaragua, Ukraine is historically an integral part of the Russian nation. It was the birthplace of Russian Christianity: the baptism of Prince Vladimir in 988 at Kiev was the beginning of the faith in the Russian lands. 

Speaking not geographically but culturally, Ukraine is not, to Russia, as Nicaragua or Cuba is to the US. You might say it is closer to New England, or Texas, to the US — but in truth, there are no parallels. Ukraine is at the religious heart of the Russian nation, and has been for over 1,000 years.

This makes the cleavage between Ukraine and Russia a terrible tragedy, a fight between brothers. One can absolutely understand why the people of Ukraine hate the Russians, given what Stalin did to them. Nothing I say here should be taken as defending the way the Russians have historically treated Ukraine, or the way Moscow is treating them now. I hope and pray that this family feud will be healed.

That said, America, and NATO, should not make this worse. I think the best we and the Ukrainians can hope for is the Finlandization of Ukraine. I see no realistic sense in which Russia can allow Ukraine to become part of NATO.

Tucker Carlson last night openly said the US has no business provoking Russia in this conflict. Watch this extraordinary clip. Thank God for his voice!

The Washington War Party, though, is likely bound and determined to make the Donbass safe for Pride parades.

It does not matter whether Vladimir Putin is a bad man or not. America has no business getting involved in provoking a war over Ukraine. It is not our business. Yet the No. 2 Republican on the Senate Armed Services Committee, Mississippi’s Roger Wicker, actually suggested the possibility of using US nuclear weapons to defend an independent nation that has been part of Russia for many centuries, and was part of the Soviet Union until only thirty years ago.

The madness is bipartisan, as Tucker points out. These Washington warmongers are a scourge. I feel very sorry for the Ukrainians, so close to Russia, but it is not America’s role in the world to defend Ukraine, or to provoke Russia. And, after the humiliating loss in Afghanistan, what in the world makes Washington think the American people are eager to pick a fight with Russia?

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Queer Santa As A Condensed Symbol Of Progressivism

A commercial for the Norwegian postal service shows Santa Claus getting a boyfriend:

There is nothing that these cultural revolutionaries will not make serve their revolution. No precious cultural tradition. This is what it means to “queer” everything: to turn it upside down, and to introduce sexual desire into everything. To enchant the world by imbuing everything in it with queerness.

Now the children of Norway have queer Santa. Why? What’s the point of bringing the culture war to children’s Christmas traditions? It’s because they — LGBTs and their straight allies — cannot allow any territory to go uncontested. There can be no neutral ground. All things must be infused with revolutionary order. This is a manifestation of soft totalitarianism. From Live Not By Lies:

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the
totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

Infusing every aspect of life with ideology was a standard aspect of Soviet totalitarianism. Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

The reader who sent this to me says it’s one more reason why he wants to “check out” of this civilization. He wants nothing to do with a civilization that queers Santa Claus, and calls it progress. I get that. What is there to defend? We in the West are ruled by people who hate its traditions, hate its ancestral religion, hate its history, and hate many of the people who live within it. They are infusing their ideology of racial hatred and queerness into everything they can, even, as we have seen, the military. Our kids are bombarded with gender theory in classrooms, trying to alienate them from their bodies, and even from their own parents, whose authority activist teachers are intending to subvert. 

I won’t go into the long list here, because you regular readers have heard it all before. This is just a reminder that the culture war is something the Left wages on all settled traditions, on anything sacred (even “sacred” secular traditions, like Santa). Now, in Berlin, they’ve gone after the Virgin Mary. The model is the European Union’s “special ambassador” to the LGBT community:

From the same issue of the magazine:

 

This is sacrilege. They — the ruling class — hate us. They really hate us. These two queer Christmas things — the Norwegian commercial and the German magazine — appear now in Europe, but you know good and well that Europe only beat us Americans to it.

I wonder for how long moderate and moderately conservative Americans will be “Good Mainline Protestants” of the sort who tolerated every new outrage within their church, saying, “If the liberals here cross one more line, I’m out the door” — but that line keeps getting crossed, and nothing changes? That is, how much longer are people in the middle and on the right — and even faithful Christians on the left — going to keep tolerating things like this, and accepting it either as Progress, or as something that we just have to live with? Where is our self-respect? Where is our sense of right and wrong, of dignity?

We just let these people, these elites who run this regime (= media, education, corporations, the military, government) crap on us over and over, and tell us that in the name of Righteousness we have to accept things like a strong young man claiming to be a woman, beating women’s swimmers in competition, and if we don’t, we are horrible bigots who deserve to be repressed?

How much longer will we tolerate being shat on by elites who tell us that our religion is garbage, and needs to be queered, that our civic traditions are garbage, that the traditional family is garbage, that maleness and femaleness are garbage, that the nation is garbage, and even that people of certain races are garbage?

How are we going to hold America together? How are we going to hold the West together?

Should it be held together? Who wants to risk their lives, or the lives of their children, to defend the kind of country and civilization we are becoming? Y’all want to queer Christmas, be my guest. Y’all serve the false gods of the progressive pantheon. As for me and my house, we will serve the Lord.If that means persecution, well, bring it: I would rather suffer for the Truth than to bend the knee to your lies, provocations, and blasphemies — and I stand with my African, Latino, and Asian brothers and sisters in Christ on this.

Good luck defending this country from its enemies. I hope and pray that none of my children go into the woke Armed Forces, and get sent overseas to fight for this corrupt Empire. Alasdair MacIntyre’s final paragraph of After Virtue inspired The Benedict Option — and is more valid today than it ever was:

“It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages.  Nonetheless certain parallels there are.  A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.  What they set themselves to achieve instead–often not recognizing fully what they were doing–was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.  If my account of our moral condition, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point.  What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.  And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.  This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.  We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another–doubtless very different–St. Benedict.”

The reader who sent me the queer Santa Claus commercial said, in effect, that he is turning aside from the task of shoring up the American imperium and is ceasing to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. Queer Santa wasn’t the trigger, but it is a condensed symbol of so much he despises about what we have become. This man was a refugee from the Big Lie of Soviet communism, which conquered his native land and drove him out. Now, for the second time in his life, he feels like an alien in his own country.

What is a condensed symbol? Reader Raskolnik wrote this about it on this blog years ago:

Back in the 60’s, the sociologist Mary Douglas came up with the idea of a “condensed symbol.” The idea is that certain practices or ideas can become a kind of shorthand for a whole worldview. She used the example of fasting on Fridays, which the Bog Irish (generally lowerclass Irish Catholics living in England) persisted in doing, despite the fact that their better-educated, generally-upperclass clergy kept telling them to give to the poor or do something else that better fit with secular humanist mores instead. Her point was that the Bog Irish kept fasting, not due to obdurate traditionalism, or some misplaced faith in the “magical” effectiveness of the practice, but because it functioned as a “condensed symbol”: fasting on Fridays was a shorthand way of signifying connection to the past, to one’s identity as Irish, as well as to a less secularized (or completely non-secular) vision of what religious practice was all about. It acquired an outsized importance because it connected systems of meaning.

A further explanation:

A condensation symbol is “a name, word, phrase, or maxim which stirs vivid impressions involving the listener’s most basic values and readies the listener for action,” as defined by political scientist Doris Graber. Short words or phrases such as “my country,” “old glory” “American Dream,” “family values,” are all condensation symbols because they conjure a specific image within the listener and carry “intense emotional and effective power.” Often used to further the meaning of a symbol or phrase, the condensation symbol has a semantic meaning, but through long-term use, it has acquired other connotations that further its symbolic meaning. Doris Graber identified three main characteristics of condensation symbols, as they: (1) Have the tendency to evoke rich and vivid images in an audience. (2) Possess the capacity to arouse emotions. (3) Supply instant categorizations and evaluations.

We all know exactly what Queer Santa means: it symbolizes an entire worldview. We know what Trans Virgin Mary means: it symbolizes an entire worldview. It is the worldview of the ruling class throughout the West, one that rejects and even mocks all traditional norms, and seeks to eradicate them from public and private life. My liberal readers are going to roll their eyes and say Dreher’s hair is on fire over a mere TV commercial, and a gay magazine from Berlin. More discerning readers will know that I object to these things as condensed symbols of the entire progressive worldview — a worldview that is hysterically intolerant, and that makes war on social and religious conservatives at every opportunity.

As Viktor Orban said this week about the takeover of government in Germany by the Left: “We now prepare for battle with our eyes wide open.” He is talking about Hungary’s fight with the EU’s dominant left-wing. It is also true for us, in our own conflicts here in America. The fight parents in Virginia waged against the stealth attempts by school officials to infuse the curriculum with Critical Race Theory laid bare one aspect of the battle, and why it must be undertaken with eyes wide open. Parents can no longer take trust in school authorities for granted — and, as Abigail Shrier revealed in her recent reporting, in some places teachers and school officials are actively trying to undermine parental authority over their children, so the kids can be queered.

We have gone so far beyond “tolerance” that the claims and arguments of fifteen, twenty years ago might as well have occurred in the Dark Ages. Nobody wants this culture war, but this war has come to us whether we consent or not.  The other side holds all the institutional power in this country, and it has no intention of tolerating us. Remember this?

What do I have in common with these people? I wonder that more and more with each passing day.

UPDATE: I am about to go into the comments to approve them, and am wondering how many of them will be in the spirit of the Defense of Butthole-Licking, e.g., “Who’s to say that this is really wrong, as long as there’s consent?”

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Orban: Europe’s Post-Merkel Future

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban on what it means to lose Angela Merkel:

We understood her, she understood us. Soviet invasion, communist dictatorship, resistance and people’s movements in 1988-89, victory, freedom, reunification and the founder of the new state, Helmut Kohl, the chancellor.

As prime minister of Hungary in 1998, I had the opportunity to serve in office for a few months at the same time as Chancellor Helmut Kohl, a dear, old friend, a Christian brother and a loyal patron of the peoples of Central Europe.

For years, Merkel and I had to endure together the hardships of being in opposition. First, she became chancellor, then we returned to power five years later. We managed the financial crisis in 2010, we were partners in the fight to keep the European Union together, and together we watched helplessly and without recourse the European tragedy of the outbreak of the Russian-Ukrainian war.

The loyal and disciplined Germans, the rebellious and reckless Hungarians, stood together for a common goal: a Europe in which all nations can feel at home.

And then the rupture, or rather fracture, open fracture of 2015, the migratory invasion. The kind of injury from which the athlete’s movement will no longer be what it once was. He rehabilitates, he tries, he struggles, but more out of honor. He knows, and after a while he admits, he can’t get his old form back.

The migration crisis was a major test in itself. It became a Rubicon because it exposed the deep philosophical, political and emotional differences between us about the concept of nations, about freedom and about the role of Germany.

It revealed that for Hungarians and other Central Europeans, the homeland is essential. The nation is the origin, without patriotism there can be no healthy emotional life. It turns out that Germans are on the other path of European civilization, towards a kind of post-Christian and post-national state.

We Hungarians have understood that the Germans do not consider this a problem. They do not consider this a civilizational disease to be remedied, but a natural, even desirable, and even morally superior outcome. The fabric of European unity was unravelling, and there was no stopping it. Migration, gender, a federalized European Union, the dehumanization of Europe. Restoring European cooperation will require superhuman efforts in the post-secular era.

Did Angela Merkel open the door to trouble? Or, on the contrary, did she try to stand firm, but the pressure from the left pushed her aside? Today we do not yet know the answer to this question. Looking at the new, left-wing German government’s pro-immigration, pro-gender, federalist, pro-German Europe agenda, both answers to the Merkel mystery are possible. Time will tell. My only regret, as a former fellow fighter, is that her life’s work and 16 years as Chancellor have not even given us, her colleagues, the answers. One thing is for sure: the era of ambiguity, stealth politics and drifting has ended with Merkel. We now prepare for battle with our eyes wide open.

“We now prepare for battle with our eyes wide open.” I have praised Viktor Orban for being far more awake, in this sense, to the actual stakes of the battles before us, both in Europe and in the United States, than most US conservative politicians. He understands that we are fighting a battle for the future of our civilization — that is, over whether or not we are going to have a future. This missive from him is further clarification of that fact.

One of my friends who emigrated to the US from the Soviet bloc seeking freedom, and who was a source of mine for Live Not By Lies, told me this week that Europe has entered a decade like the 1930s, and to expect great tumult. He no longer feels safe and secure in America, but said a big and important difference between his adopted home and his native country is that we, thank God, have the Second Amendment.

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‘Ve Haff Vays Of Making You Get Vaxxed’

As you know, I am vaccinated against Covid, and recently got the booster. I am a middle-aged man with immune system problems, so I judged it important to get vaxxed. I think most people should get vaxxed, but I oppose vaccine mandates. My God, what is being done to the unvaxxed in Europe is terrifying. Take a look:

Germany – the jabbed and unjabbed are separated with a fence in a supermarket pic.twitter.com/Igcw060AtV

— chap (@G_P_L_M) November 28, 2021

Later in the thread, some respondents say that this does not look like Germany. This is obviously happening somewhere, though. For example:

Latvia – a fence is protecting the vaccinated from the unvaccinated in a supermarket
Credits: @ARNRCPNB pic.twitter.com/1LGmjiYv5u

— chap (@G_P_L_M) November 29, 2021

Russia – the unvaccinated are fenced off in a supermarket pic.twitter.com/hM5Do715s2

— chap (@G_P_L_M) November 29, 2021

Romania – unvaccinated people cannot access stores selling non-essential goods pic.twitter.com/ybZmnFt6av

— chap (@G_P_L_M) November 29, 2021

Australia – the unjabbed cannot buy non-essential goods pic.twitter.com/4SopkW86B5

— chap (@G_P_L_M) November 30, 2021

Budapest, Hungary – fence around the Christmas market. Unvaccinated (secondary) citizens cannot gain access. pic.twitter.com/uMi240QyKh

— chap (@G_P_L_M) December 5, 2021

Luxembourg – this is the only way to enter the Christmas market without a vaccine passport. pic.twitter.com/mWhVsRtymI

— chap (@G_P_L_M) December 5, 2021

And, of course, China, putting its social credit system mentality to use:

In china if you don’t scan your qr code vaccine passport,you can’t get into hospitals anymore!
And you better follow the orders from authority,otherwise covid guards may beat you to death! pic.twitter.com/hdwSZmoxTq

— Songpinganq (@songpinganq) November 30, 2021

… against children:

VIDEO | China, a few days ago began vaccinations against Covid on children aged 5 to 11 years: I apologize for the strong images, and I add: hands off children! pic.twitter.com/zqM0WmAm99

— Mr. Wolf (@mole_cola) November 29, 2021

I don’t think these governments believe that fences and shopping restrictions directly hinder the spread of Covid. They are trying to make everyday life harder for the unvaxxed, and to turn them into social pariahs, to compel them to conform and get the vaccines.

Don’t you see what’s happening here?! This is also a trial run for the future. You will have seen academics (for example, here), medical authorities (here), and even governments (this summer, the Mayor of Chicago and the city’s public health department) declaring that “racism is a public health issue.” It is not difficult to imagine a future in which the state, in the name of health and hygiene, imposes restrictions on those it determines to be bigots. Does it sound far-fetched? Maybe. But look, if parents angry over what school systems are doing to their kids can be considered potential “domestic terrorists,” the potential is there. Do you really think that the Woke in power would not use public health as an excuse to punish their political opponents?

UPDATE: From Dr. Aaron Kheriaty, who is a psychiatrist and director of the medical ethics program at University of California Irvine medical school. Here is his website:

 

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Italian Lives Matter

Italian reader Giuseppe Scalas says that the murder in NYC of an Italian researcher by a black gang member out on parole has turned the left-wing Milan daily Corriere della Sera against The New York Times. He sent a translation of the Federico Rampini commentary in the Corriere today. Here it is:

The 25-year-old Vincent Pinkney, the killer who cut short Davide Giri’s life, belongs to one of the most ferocious New York gangs. He was a convicted felon, arrested several times for violent crimes, sentenced to a light sentence, released before having served it. He was at large despite being suspected of committing a recent assault.Almost everything is known about the man who savagely assaulted the Italian researcher as he returned to Columbia University after a soccer game. But none of this news is visible in The New York Times. A landmark newspaper for the city and the nation. Yet distracted and reticent about a tragedy that occurred in the heart of Manhattan.Name, surname, age of the murderer are the meager news provided to readers. The news article was confined to the local pages, with little visibility. On the newspaper website, the first version was not followed by any update. Brief testimonials from fellow students, a statement from the rector of Columbia University, make up an evasive and terse article. Zero news about the perpetrator of what could have been a massacre.After stabbing Giri at 10:55 p.m. on Thursday at the corner of Amsterdam Avenue and 123rd Street, a quarter of an hour later Pinkney wounded an Italian tourist, Roberto Malaspina, a short distance away on Morningside Drive; a few minutes more and he attempted to attack a couple in Central Park. Why don’t New York Times readers know anything about Pinkney except his age and last name?The newspaper’s interest, and the investigative vigor put into the field, would have been different if the parties had been reversed. That is, if the victim had been African-American and the murderer a white man; all the more so if that white man had been a member of some organization that preaches and practices violence, for example a right-wing militia. The tragedy would have made the front page, a team of reporters would have been mobilized to investigate the murderer’s background, history, and motivations.Pinkney is an African-American resident of Washington Heights, an area of Harlem. The police recognized him as a member of EBK, which stands for Everybody Killas, a gang whose base of operations is in the borough of Queens. EBK was born from other criminal gangs with which it maintains close relationships: the Bloods, the Crips, the Nightingales. EBK’s range of action extends to California, where a report by the San Joaquin prosecutor’s office describes it as “a gang whose policy is open warfare”. It is financed by drug trafficking; it is involved in a long line of shootings.Pinkney had been arrested 11 times since 2012 for serious crimes. In 2018, he had been sentenced to four years in prison for participating in a vicious pack attack. He was released after two years. To find these news stories, released by law enforcement, you have to go to the sites of some local TV station, or a populist tabloid, the New York Post. The New York Times has chosen a reticence that borders on self-censorship, consistent with the editorial line of recent years. The canons of American journalism have been twisted, particularly during the Donald Trump years when it became a boast in progressive media newsrooms to practice “resistance journalism.” The search for balance or impartiality was considered a weakness: the end justifies the means.With the murder of African American George Floyd by a white officer on May 25, 2020 in Minneapolis, and the revival of the Black Lives Matter anti-racist movement, major newspapers embraced slogans such as “defund the police.” Incidents of looting and violence that occurred under the guise of anti-racism were downplayed. The New York Times has promoted an initiative, The 1619 Project, which rereads the entire American history as a derivation of slavery that would still affect every institution, the entire legal system, culture and school. A purge within the editorial staff removed several reporters who were not aligned with the radicalism of Black Lives Matter.A few dissenting voices remain isolated, such as columnist Bret Stephens, who warned a week ago: in the past, when the American left has been lax on the escalation of crime, it has favored a powerful right-wing uprising. In New York, homicides are up 42% since 2019. The first political reaction has already been there: the election of new Mayor Eric Adams, an African-American who comes from the ranks of the police. The less privileged ethnic groups, the main victims of the escalation of violence, voted for him.“Black lives matter” is a slogan that for Black Lives Matter seems to apply only when the killers are white and racist; the vast majority of violent deaths, among Blacks as well as Hispanics, go unnoticed because the killers belong to the same ethnic group. The Times‘ reticence includes the issue of easy release. The newspaper supports “progressive” prosecutors who also set free dangerous criminals, professionals of violence, who pose a constant threat to the community.In the aftermath of Giri’s death, an editorial from the editors confirmed this line, attacking those prosecutors who do not proceed fast enough to empty prisons. The pain for the absurd death of Giri would not be compensated by a different focus of the press, but this event offers a disturbing look at the “new journalism”, militant and conditioned by its ideological agenda. Even crime reporting bends to this tribal logic.

If you read Italian, read the original. 

The Italians are correct. It matters far, far more to the Times newsroom that a so-called Karen called the police unfairly on a black man in Central Park than that a black ex-con released from prison early in a time of progressive anti-incarceration initiatives savagely murdered a white man at Columbia. When this country takes a hard right turn out of disgust with crime and the ideological lying around race that America’s elites practice and mandate, The New York Times is going to wonder how it happened. I hope they have a big mirror in the newsroom.

And if you want to read actual news about this monster Pinkney, check out the New York Post. 

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Books As Race Bait

Whenever people ask me why I keep subscribing to The New York Times, even though I believe it despises people like me and is working in many ways to make our lives worse, I tell them that one has to know how one’s enemies are thinking. The Times is the parish newsletter of the Cathedral, and as such the thoughts expressed there, whether openly in op-ed pieces or implicitly in its news coverage, pretty much express the views of the American ruling class — or at the very least opinions the ruling class believes are normative. Attention must be paid, because these opinions will sooner or later affect your life.

One of the most interesting aspects of Times-reading is coming across outrageous remarks that indicate how deeply inside the progressive bubble the newspaper is. I say “progressive,” because the Times is no longer a liberal newspaper. No authentically liberal newspaper would publish something like this lunatic racist screed. Here is the headline:

The author, a black woman named Erin Aubry Kaplan, is feeling guilty about putting a My Little Library — a box of books for people to borrow and return — outside her house in a black Los Angelis neighborhood, because … well, let her tell the story:

Prepandemic, Inglewood was gentrifying, another reason I’d been inspired to do the library: I wanted to signal to my longtime neighbors that we had our own ideas about improvement, and could carry them out in our own way. There are organizations that help people build these little libraries, but I did mine independently. I envisioned it as a place for my neighbors to stay connected during the pandemic. The wooden post on which the library sat was a stake in the ground, literally.

The response to the library was slow at first — it was the first in the area, and some people mistook it for a birdhouse, or a mailbox. But I was pleased to soon see people stopping by to browse and take home books.

Then one morning, glancing out my front window, I saw a young white couple stopped at the library. Instantly, I was flooded with emotions — astonishment, and then resentment, and then astonishment at my resentment. It all converged into a silent scream in my head of, Get off my lawn!

Uh oh, there goes the neighborhood. More:

What I resented was not this specific couple. It was their whiteness, and my feelings of helplessness at not knowing how to maintain the integrity of a Black space that I had created. I was seeing up close how fragile that space can be, how its meaning can be changed in my mind, even by people who have no conscious intention to change it. That library was on my lawn, but for that moment it became theirs. I built it and drove it into the ground because I love books and always have. But I suddenly felt that I could not own even this, something that was clearly and intimately mine.

As the couple wandered on, no books in hand, I thought about how fragile my feeling of being settled is. It didn’t matter that I own my house, as many of my neighbors do. Generations of racism, Jim Crow, disinvestment and redlining have meant that we don’t really control our own spaces. In that moment, I had been overwhelmed by a kind of fear, one that’s connected to the historical reality of Black people being run off the land they lived on, expelled by force, high prices or some whim of white people.

Kaplan reflects on the fact that this sounds pretty racist, but then reassures herself that it’s just fine, because reasons. I am quite sure that anybody in the New York Times newsroom who read this and thought, “hang on, that’s racist” knows by now to keep that opinion to themselves if they want to keep their job.

This op-ed is a perfect example of the illiberalism of today’s Left. Kaplan is correct to write in her piece about the old white-supremacist laws that prevented black Americans from controlling their spaces. We overturned those with civil rights legislation, which was built on the idea, in part, that no race in America gets to control a residential space to keep home buyers out on the basis of race. What do you think the “white flight” phenomenon was all about? It was about white people angry that they “don’t really control [their] own spaces,” so they fled to places where they would not have to live around black people. Erin Aubry Kaplan condemns white people who prefer to live in white neighborhoods, and condemns white people who would like to live in her minority neighborhood. You might think, sorry, Erin, you can’t have it both ways, but of course you can, if you are on the Left. Leftists like Erin Aubry Kaplan are the beneficiary of a racist system that puts its thumbs on the scale to benefit racist progressives. Her rationalization of her own objectively racist views makes sense within a system of thought that denies liberal universalism, and that places the line between Good and Evil between races … exactly as the white supremacists of old did.

For a long time, conservatives used to think that by pointing out liberal hypocrisies, we would compel liberals to change. Now, nobody on the Right can possibly have that illusion. The people in power today in our country — not just in political power, but in power within all the important institutions of American life — have absorbed this postliberal Leftist viewpoint, and think of it as normal — just as the ruling class of the 1950s American South did when racism benefited whites who wanted to control their own neighborhoods. If it was wrong then — and I believe it was — then it’s wrong today.

Let me put in a word for Erin Aubry Kaplan, though. Wanting to live around people who look and think like you, and share your culture, is very human. About 15 years ago, the Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam (the Bowling Alone guy) published results of a study he was doing on how diversity affected social capital. What did he discover? This:

After Bowling Alone, Putnam’s next step was to determine why some communities have more social capital than others. To find out, he helped organize a large nationwide survey of social capital indicators that sampled about 30,000 people from a broad array of cities, towns, and rural areas. By collecting demographic information about the individuals and the places they lived, Putnam hoped to gain insight into what makes for a trusting and neighborly community.

When he spoke to my class in 2004, Putnam had started to analyze the survey data, but he had not yet published any findings. He began by telling us about one result he encountered that was thoroughly upsetting to him—the more ethnically diverse a community is, the less social capital it possesses. When a person lives in a diverse community, he trusts everyone less, including those of his own ethnic group. In describing the behavior of people in diverse areas, Putnam told us to imagine turtles hiding in their shells.

Putnam walked us through how he came to his conclusion. At first, it was just a simple correlation. Looking at his list of the most trusting places, Putnam found whole states such as New Hampshire and Montana, rural areas in West Virginia and East Tennessee, and cities such as Bismarck, North Dakota and Fremont, Michigan. Among the least trusting places were the cities of Los Angeles, San Francisco, and Houston. The most trusting places tended to be homogenously white, while the least trusting places were highly diverse.

Putnam told us he had been fairly certain the correlation would go away once other factors were taken into account. But it didn’t. He entered a long list of control variables into regression analyses that predict elements of social capital such as neighborly trust and civic participation. Many factors—especially younger age, less education, and higher poverty and crime rates—seem to damage community relations. But none of these factors could explain the robust, negative relationship between ethnic diversity and social capital. Sounding almost defeated, Putnam told us that ethnic diversity is not merely correlated with certain community problems—it causes them.

When Putnam finally published the study, he fell all over himself trying to qualify its findings to avoid the obvious conclusion. Putnam is a man of the Left, and the foremost authority on social capital. Yet his research indicated that an inverse relationship exists between diversity and social capital — a refutation of the sacred progressive concept of Diversity Is Our Strength. In fact, he found that in terms of neighborhoods and social capital, diversity is our weakness.

This makes sense, not necessarily because we are a racist society, but because it is perfectly natural for people to feel more comfortable around those like themselves. The anxieties people of all races living in mixed-race communities feel about their neighborhood might be irrational, but they are normal. What Erin Aubry Kaplan is expressing is racist, but understandable in terms of human nature. She is black, and feels more comfortable living in a neighborhood where she shares the culture with most of her neighbors. Wouldn’t you?

It’s not just about race. You might be a nice middle-class liberal pleased to be living in an ethnically diverse neighborhood. But let’s say a white redneck family moves into a rental house on your block. Let’s say that all their cars — old, beat-up vehicles — have Trump stickers on them. The pick-up even has a Confederate flag sticker in the back windshield. They put a Trump 2020 sign in their yard during the campaign. They play music a little bit too loud, and sometimes they argue with each other in the driveway, cursing and carrying on. You get the picture. How are you going to feel about their presence? Chances are it’s going to wind you up, because these people don’t fit in — and it’s 100 percent about class and culture. You would prefer to have a nice middle-class liberal family living there, the kind of people who mind their manners, and put in their lawn signs that say BLACK LIVES MATTER and “IN THIS HOUSE WE BELIEVE…”. Progressivism gives you a conceptual vocabulary with which to justify your antagonism to the redneck neighbors. They make you feel “unsafe” in your own neighborhood, with their Trumpy redneckery, and so forth.

It’s bigotry based not on race, but on class. But bigotry it is. You are, like Woody Allen’s Alvy Singer, a bigot, but a bigot for the Left. That’s the kind of bigotry that is acceptable to the ruling class in American life. You can get an op-ed in The New York Times with that bigotry. White people who express the same kind of sentiment risk having their reputations destroyed by the attacks of the kind of power-holders who cheer for the Erin Aubry Kaplans of the world, but who at the same time see white people who reason in the same exact way about their neighborhoods as the scum of the earth who deserve whatever they get.

Imagine that you are that white couple whose interest in her My Little Library so triggered Erin Aubry Kaplan. You are thought by her to be racist for trying to “gentrify” her black neighborhood. But if Erin Aubry Kaplan overheard you talking about how you preferred to live in an all-white neighborhood, she would call you racist too. You can’t win. Progressives like Erin Aubry Kaplan and the people at The New York Times who publish her have no interest in logical consistency or moral fairness. Progressive racism is just social justice, haven’t you heard?

People are tribal by nature. Evolution has made us so; it’s a survival instinct. The reason Bob Putnam found that the more diversity you have in a neighborhood, the less social capital there is that if you live around a bunch of people who don’t look like you and — more importantly — may not share your values, the more wary you have to be of potential threats from them. This does not mean, of course, that people who look like you and share your culture won’t harm you, or that people who don’t look like you and don’t share your culture will harm you. The instinct, though, comes from humanity’s distant past, where failing to develop these prejudices to some extent might have gotten you killed.

Liberalism, then, is something that can only exist in conditions of advanced economic and cultural development. It is contrary to natural human instincts. I was telling someone the other day that at this point in my life, I really don’t want to live outside the American South. Is it because I think there is something wrong with people from the West, the Midwest, the East, etc? Not at all. It’s because of what Little Steven van Zandt said in the chorus of his great song “I Am A Patriot”:

I am a patriot, and I love my country
Because my country is all I know
I want to be with my family, the people who understand me
I’ve got nowhere else to go

Looking at Erin Aubry Kaplan’s column from that angle, I get it. She wants to be with the people who understand her — and in her mind, that means black people. She is permitted to say that out loud, because a black person is permitted to hold that kind of belief in our society without facing condemnation from the ruling class and its institutions. She expects others to affirm, or at least tolerate, her own racist views, while rationalizing her own. Here is an excerpt from a Times column she wrote in 2020:

Racism is a form of convenience, in the sense that it’s designed to make life easier for its beneficiaries. So is white privilege — the phenomenon of not having to think about the costs of oppression, or about Black people at all.

Antiracism requires the opposite: engagement. We are starting to see it in the demands for police reforms, in the growing white rejection of symbols of white oppression like Confederate monuments and flags, even figures of presidents.

But this is all part of Step 1. Being truly antiracist will require white people to be inconvenienced by new policies and practices, legal and social, that affect everything in everyone’s daily lives, from jobs to arts and publishing.

What a convenient ideology! Racism really is a form of convenience, in the sense that it’s designed to make life easier for its beneficiaries. Kaplan’s anti-white racism is a form of convenience designed to protect the ethnic homogeneity of her own neighborhood, which allows her to feel more at home there. But come on, “being truly antiracist” requires black people like Kaplan to be “inconvenienced” by the fact that under civil rights laws, that white couple has as much right to buy a house in her neighborhood as she does to buy a house in a white neighborhood.

What Kaplan — and The New York Times — supports is a double standard that dispossesses white people in the same way that a previous generation of laws and standards dispossessed people of color. And they want us all to call this progress.

You can roll your eyes at the hypocrisy of Erin Aubry Kaplan and The New York Times, but you had better be well aware that this hypocrisy is not seen as hypocritical at all by the ruling class and the Cathedral. In the spaces they control — like university campuses — they execute such racist policies all the time, such as creating racially exclusive student housing, while denying (as they should) whites the opportunity to live in such places. I believe that if progressives (of all races) had their way, they would expand these racist policies, and write protecting them into law. This is why it is important to read The New York Times: to know what the elites who control this society think, and what they are likely to do with their power.

One of the most interesting things about progressives is that they honestly cannot conceive of people objecting in good faith to what they proclaim. If you are a white person working at The New York Times, you probably never encounter white people who object to this kind of progressive racism, or find it problematic in any way. Those that do — like the liberal journalist Donald McNeil — have been driven out. Whites who work in environments under progressive cultural control (such as major corporations) have learned to keep their objections to themselves if they want to keep their jobs.

But they still see it, and they understand that the Left has created, and continues to create, a world set on dispossessing them and their children, in the name of rectifying wrongs of the past, when whites did the same to minorities. Justice, in the old, liberal sense, meant creating a world where this is less likely to happen. But justice in the postliberal left-wing sense means creating a world where the Erin Aubry Kaplans of the world are permitted to think and do racist things, as long as their racism is aimed at white people. And the white people this is typically aimed at are those who don’t know and accept the elite code that’s hammered into the heads of those who aspire to professional life. That is to say, it is aimed at working-class white people.

As J.D. Vance said at NatCon, once you realize that culture war from the Left is really class warfare in a different guise, everything becomes clearer.

The white couple that admired Erin Aubry Kaplan’s My Little Library was probably not working class, but Kaplan resented them anyway. Her late husband was white, but he accepted her anti-white racism. As she wrote in the Times in 2018:

When I married in 2000, I changed my name. I expanded it — kept my name but added my husband’s name, Kaplan, without a hyphen. I wanted my name to reflect a conjoining that was also an evolution, literally one thing following another. This was an experiment, as all marriages are, that felt exciting and open-ended, not least because I’m black and my husband was white.

I wasn’t excited because I thought we’d be some kind of symbol of racial resolution. I was hardly that naïve, and neither was Alan. I am a journalist who had been covering black matters for years at that point, and Alan was a locally famous high school teacher of American history who believed that race and racism had shaped America far more than it was willing to admit. Not surprisingly, he didn’t think changing my name was a great idea. “Black people know you as Erin Aubry,” he said bluntly. “They’ll resent a name so obviously white and Jewish. It’ll get in your way.”

He wasn’t being snide or heroic. One of the many things he’d figured out is that white people showing up in a black space, including the intimate space of a relationship, is seen by many black folks as an incursion, even if they don’t say so. That he understood and was even sympathetic to this view impressed me, but I changed my name anyway. It felt romantic.

In that piece, she talks about how her husband often challenged her thinking on race, and how she benefited from it. How does she know that white couple might not do the same thing for her? Why doesn’t she admit that as unpleasant as it might be for her to see white people moving into the neighborhood, this “inconveniencing” is the price she has to pay to have demolished a racist system that kept black people out of white neighborhoods in the past?

Again, I understand at some level why she feels this way. Erin Aubry Kaplan is as human as the rest of us. But I resent that she (and the people who publish her) would deny that same complicated humanity to white people, and to anyone on the Right.

More broadly, the kind of remedies for “systemic racism” that the Left promotes serve the function of making us all more suspicious of each other, and more tribal. The New York Times is a cheerleader for this kind of racial balkanization. A lot of white people read or hear opinions like Kaplan’s being broadcast in the workplace, in the classroom, and in the media, and know that the fix is in. Out of frustration, they end up voting for people like Donald Trump. You cannot get a liberal or a progressive to understand that, though.

Final point: if Erin Aubry Kaplan had to choose between having Trevor and Kayleigh as neighbors, or my fellow Baton Rougean Boosie Badazz (see below, in this clip filmed in his old Baton Rouge neighborhood), what would she do? How would she justify it?

The post Books As Race Bait appeared first on The American Conservative.

America Hates You. Now Go Fight For Her

I had a great, even inspiring, short trip to Denver late last week. I’ll be writing more about the good news I found there later this week, but a private exchange I just had with a reader prompted me to post this.

I spoke at a fundraiser for a classical Christian school. There was a nice crowd there, and it turned out that some of them had no connection to the school, but just came out because they are fans of Live Not By Lies. I was able to have a few conversations after the speech.

One thing I picked up is that these people — all of whom seemed to be conservative Evangelicals — are hearing the same thing that I am, over and over: that the US military is no longer a place for political, social, and/or religious conservatives. That wokeness is driving people like us out. I mentioned in these conversations that I have been hearing via e-mail and in personal conversations from active-duty or recently retired armed forces members (including officers), all saying the same thing. Many of the Coloradans with whom I spoke said yes, they are hearing the same thing too, and that they are discouraging their kids from considering military service until and unless the military returns to what it was before wokeness conquered the Pentagon.

Granted, the kind of people who reach out to me, or who come hear me speak, are probably not representative of broader conservatism, but trust me, I’m hearing this a lot. How widespread is this view in our country? More and more I am hearing from the kind of people who would have been the last ones in America to look skeptically on the US military and serving the country in its ranks, all saying, “No more.”

Earlier today I was talking with a friend who is an Afghanistan vet. I told him what I had heard from the folks in Colorado, and he said yes, we should not be at all surprised. The messaging that the American people have been getting from the ruling class — including within the military — is that conservatives, and especially conservative Christians, are kulaks. Kulaks were prosperous farmers whom the early Soviet regime regarded as Enemies Of The People, and demonized. My veteran friend said that it is perfectly reasonable for political and religious conservatives to shun the military now, and not just because it is going woke. He said that in the absence of any deeper and broader unifying principle (e.g., shared religion, or a shared sense of nationhood), why should these people be willing to send their sons to die for a regime that holds them, their way of life, and the things they value, in contempt?

He went on to say that the fact that America lost Afghanistan, that we know from the Afghanistan papers that the generals lied to Congress and to the American people for years about what was going on there, and that none of them have been punished or otherwise held accountable for their failure, it also makes sense for potential soldiers to question whether or not they should put their lives behind the leadership of this senior officer class. Our civilian leadership — the President and Congress — has not held the senior military leadership to account for its lies and failures. Why should the American people trust these elites on matters of war? They got so much wrong in Afghanistan, and lied about it for years, and now we are expected to forget all that and consider the possibility of sending our soldiers to fight and die for Ukraine?

My friend said that the leaders of America’s institutions can’t say enough about how much they hate people like him and wants his rights restricted and views suppressed as much as possible. Where is the incentive to fight and possibly die to defend an order that wants people like him crushed? This is the fruit of the divisive culture-war policies that the US government, corporations, media, universities, and other leading institutions have been practicing.

He’s right. Why has it never occurred to the people who make military and national security policy that wokeness is a brilliant strategy to demoralize and weaken America? “Hey bigots, when you can tear yourselves away from your bitter-clinging to God, your disgusting patriarchal ideas about family, your supremacist fear of Critical Race Theory, and your cishetero privilege, put on your uniforms and get ready to deploy to Utopistan to defend democracy!”

I repeat what one active-duty service member told me not long ago, paraphrased: “The Pentagon doesn’t know how to win a real war against America’s enemies, so it’s focusing on winning the culture war against conservatives in the ranks.”

Again, I have no data on this at all. It’s entirely anecdotal. But I have spoken to or received correspondence from active-duty or retired military from nearly all ranks, testifying that something seriously bad is happening.

You’ve probably seen these side-by-side comparisons of recent military recruitment ads for the Chinese, Russian, and American militaries. You don’t have to speak Chinese or Russian to understand what’s being communicated here.

The post America Hates You. Now Go Fight For Her appeared first on The American Conservative.

Into The Upside Down

Yesterday I had a remarkable conversation with a stranger I will call Nicky. He is an Orthodox Christian, an accomplished professional who contacted me through a mutual friend, about a journalistic question. After we finished that discussion, I told him about my new book project, and as he sounded like an intelligent and well-connected believer, asked him for his advice.

He was excited to hear about the book, and said he believes that I am anticipating the next big religious/spiritual leap in American culture. He said that a huge concern he has about it all is that people — especially the young — will begin to turn to psychedelics (LSD, DMT, and so forth) in search of re-enchantment, and numinous experiences. He lives on the West Coast, and is seeing a lot of this already.

Nicky’s view is that most of these people are not hallucinating (in the sense of imagining things that do not exist), but in fact are entering into spiritual realms that are usually closed to humans in our normal state. He told me that the state of research on DMT (the active chemical ingredient in ayahuasca, and a far more powerful hallucinogen than LSD) has actually progressed quite far. Researchers, he said, have discovered that when they put test subjects into the DMT state, they can do it via a DMT drip, which allows them to control the subjects’ experience. To put it plainly, they can send these subjects into this other world, and keep them there to explore. If you are thinking about the Upside Down from Stranger Things, you are thinking like me.

From ‘Scientists Are Trying To Open A Portal To A Parallel Universe’

Nicky’s opinion is that most of these drug users are connecting with actual entities that exist on another plane — and that these entities are demonic, or demon-adjacent. The churches in America, he said, are not remotely ready for what is about to hit them as use of these drugs becomes normative among seekers. Nicky said he hopes my next book will in some way take up this question, if only to warn people away from these drugs. As he put it: “These drugs open up people to experiences and hostile entities that they are in no way capable of handling. It would be like taking somebody from their suburban couch and dropping them off in the middle of the Amazon, and telling them they have to survive.”

I repeated to Nicky my usual claim about psychedelics: that I suspect they really do work to open the doors of perception, in ways that don’t usually happen to people except after long ascetic disciplines. Therefore, they are like people who win the lottery, versus people who become multimillionaires after years of hard work. The lottery winners don’t know how to handle the money, and often ruin their lives.

I thanked Nicky for what he told me. I read Michael Pollan’s book about the return of psychedelics in a therapeutic sense, and have in this space before speculated about what these drugs tell us about spiritual reality. Let me be perfectly clear: I do not not not recommend going down this road for anybody. I think psychonauts remind me of Ulysses from Dante’s Inferno: driven by insatiable curiosity to go beyond where men are supposed to go, and do so risking their doom. Nevertheless, I think that an examination of the current state of knowledge about the psychedelic experience might be useful in helping us to understand spiritual and material reality, and to warn others away from fraudulent and dangerous forms of attempted re-enchantment. For example, I believe God sternly warns His people in Scripture to stay away from divination and the occult arts not because these things are fake (though they might be in individual instances), but because they open doorways that should never be opened.

This morning I looked at this website that catalogs testimonies about DMT experiences. They quote the psychedelics pioneer Terrence McKenna:

“The feeling of doing DMT is as though one had been struck by noetic lightning. The ordinary world is almost instantaneously replaced, not only with a hallucination, but a hallucination whose alien character is its utter alienness. Nothing in this world can prepare one for the impressions that fill your mind when you enter the DMT sensorium.”

Noetic lightning. Hadn’t Nicky said to me that the main problem with these drugs is that they thrown the nous (pron. “noose”) wide open? In Orthodox Christianity, the nous is the term we use for man’s faculty of spiritual perception.

The people who run the site are clearly DMT enthusiasts, but they do publish essays about what you might call “bad trips.” Here is one from 2019, by a man who says he encountered demonic possession in his many DMT experiences. Excerpts:

I smoked DMT at least once a day for a couple of months. While my early experiences were inexplicable and somewhat profound, there was no indication that DMT was anything more than just another psychedelic, albeit an incredibly powerful one. It wasn’t until around the third week that things started to get pretty heavy.

The first interesting thing that happened was when I decided to smoke a rather large amount through an oil burner off my stove. After the first hit, everything started to vibrate at this incredibly high pitch, and I thought to myself “Oh, you’ve really f*cked up this time…” and ran to the garage to be alone. I saw and felt the presence of multiple beings around me, thought “Nope, f*ck this…” and ran to my friend’s room where I fell face first onto her bed. I heard a lot of gibberish being whispered into my ears, and felt a weird sexual energy that made me uncomfortable.

There was a certain sensual quality to the gibberish, which was almost like moaning. Then I closed my eyes and saw what I can only describe as an Egyptian goddess made up of colors I’d never seen before… like, new colors that I can’t even picture in my head. She was literally one of the most beautiful things I’d ever seen, and due to her Egyptian vibe, I started referring to her as “Isis.”

The next day I kept ranting and raving to everyone about my experience. My friend was making fun of me for entertaining the possibility that there was anything more going on than brain chemistry, so I challenged him to smoke some. He was literally talking shit while lifting the pipe up to his mouth, but after he came to, he stood up and started yelling about Egyptian goddesses and things trying to get inside of him. He said there was a female entity at the center of it, and she had this hoard of helpers trying to examine him, but he was somehow able to deny them entry.

From a later trip:

They sat me in a chair, and before I could really get ahold of myself, I see Missy reach for my pipe and start hitting it. She laid back in the grass as I stood up and tried to regain my composure. A few minutes later, she popped up and started screaming “No!” at the top of her lungs, and rambling on very loudly about how “they” performed some kind of surgery on her and left something inside of her. I picked her up and carried her inside to her room because she was so loud the cops were definitely gonna get called.

After calming her down a bit, I left to drive my friend home, but when I returned, I found Missy sitting on her bed crying, rocking back and forth, and muttering “I don’t want this” over and over. I asked her what she didn’t want, and she looked up at me with a big smile and said hi to me, by name. I was like “Uh, hi Missy…” Then she went back to crying and begging for it to be over. She looked pretty miserable, and I guess I was more concerned with her well-being than I was about talking to whatever was inhabiting her body, so I said, “Tell them to suck a dick and come talk to me in person next time (I smoke DMT).”

She then looked up at me and said “Don’t be arrogant. We are much more powerful than you.” So I was like, “Uh… we? What’s your name?” to which she replied “Missy, of course…” with a big smile on her face, “…you’re so curious.” After reprimanding me for being “arrogant,” she went on to say “…but we love you, and we want nothing but the best for you. We think you’re beautiful.”

I don’t know why, but I was still more concerned about Missy’s wellbeing than I was about the conversation I was having, so I kinda blew my chance to have a clear, sober, uninterrupted conversation with an entity/entities from hyperspace. In retrospect, there was so much I wanted to say and so many questions I wanted to ask, but all I did was stroke Missy’s face and tell her it would be over soon.

A couple interesting things to note about the conversation:

It seemed like they were going through her brain like a Rolodex and laughing at the shit they found. For example, they were laughing and asking me to show them what Google was. After showing them how it worked, I asked if they would like to listen to music. I said “How about The Beatles?” and they got all kinds of excited. So yeah, apparently beings from hyperspace don’t know what Google is, but they’re familiar with The Beatles.

My other friend who was there was stroking her back and trying to comfort her when all this was happening, but they didn’t like that very much and started screaming “Why is he touching her!? Tell him to stop touching her! Get her some water!” Maybe they were sensing some creepy vibe coming from him that I wasn’t aware of, but they really didn’t like him touching her.

I got the impression that they really didn’t want me to tell anyone about what happened. At one point in the conversation, she turned to me and said “We’re just gonna pretend that Missy got drunk, right?”

This might just be my brain trying to compartmentalize things or whatever, but after putting her to bed and falling asleep in my room, I had this weird dream where I was naked in this room near a beach with these two humanoid creatures trying to act all sexy, but their proportions were all off, like they had perfect tits and big asses, but their limbs were too long and skinny. All I remember saying is “Yo, y’all are doing it wrong.”

It turns out that those entities had possessed Missy. What he later says happened ought to be enough to drive anybody away from this drug.

Read it all.

The website, DMT Times, has a page speculating on whether or not the entities people encounter on these trips are real, or hallucinations. It says in part:

One question leads to another, and the fire of curiosity burns on. However elusive the answers currently are, what seems clear is that regardless of intellectual capabilities, the majority of DMT users report a profound sense of reality in their entity encounters. DMT is also one of the few substances that facilitates such encounters in the first place, which lends credibility to the idea that is some kind of  ‘gateway’ rather than a substance that simply warps the perception.

It is also not uncommon to hear that people feel they have ‘brought back an entity’ into the current reality. However unpalatable that might sound, it would be very unwise to write off that possibility.

Here is another page on DMT Times talking about these entities. 

I have posted before in this space this link to a personal account about ayahuasca healing by Kira Salak, a travel writer who has published frequently in National Geographic Explorer. She writes about how in an earlier trip deep into the interior desert of Libya, she and her team had been warned by locals not to climb a mountain that was believed to be the home of demons. They laughed at it, and climbed. If the ayahuasca experience in Peru is to be believed, Salak returned with demons attached to her; for Salak, the ayahuasca experience was a kind of exorcism, as well as a healing of her traumatic childhood. Notice this part below. Hamilton and Julio are the shamans directing this experience. Notice how Hamilton steps into her experience:

After three ceremonies, I still feel that I have something big to purge. There is something stubborn in me, refusing to be released. I walk through the jungle and wade into a narrow river, dunking myself in the water. Schools of piranha-size fish, mojaritas, nip harmlessly at my skin, unnerving me. Earlier today I was still scared to look at myself in the mirror, still scared of the self-judgment, the all-too-familiar shame.

I report to the hut for the next ceremony. The others sit or lie in hammocks, waiting silently, fretfully. Their experiences, while nowhere near as intense as mine, have been bad enough in their view. Winston has found the darkness during his visions tedious and unrelenting. Christy actually found herself crying during the last ceremony, which is something she says she doesn’t do. Lisa has found her ceremony experiences “too dark” for her tastes and blames me for creating this.

“It’s her own fear she’s scared of,” Hamilton told me earlier. “It has nothing to do with you.” It’s always that way, he explained. Projection of our own self-contempt. We judge in others what we can’t yet face and accept in ourselves.

We begin the ceremony, drink the ayahuasca. I’m hoping to find myself in some heavenly realms this time, but again, as usual, the darkness. With disappointment, I find myself entering a familiar tunnel of fire, heading down to one of the hell realms. I don’t know where I’m going, or why, when I suddenly glimpse the bottom of the tunnel and leap back in shock: Me, I’m there, but as a little girl. She’s huddled, captive, in a ball of fire before those three thrones of the devil and his sidekicks. As soon as I reach her, she begins wailing, “Don’t leave me! Don’t leave me!” It’s heartbreaking to hear her.

I think this must be a part of me that I lost. Long ago. The shamans believe that whenever a traumatic event happens to us, we lose part of our spirit, that it flees the body to survive the experience. And that unless a person undergoes a shamanic “soul retrieval,” these parts will be forever lost to us. Each one, they say, contains an element of who we truly are; people may lose their sense of humor, their trust of others, their innocence. According to psychotherapist and shamanic healer Sandra Ingerman, author of Soul Retrieval, such problems as addictions, personality disorders, and memory blackouts are all warning signs that a person may have lost key portions of themselves.

“No one will help me!” the little girl wails in my vision. And now she is me—I am wailing. Crying like I have never cried before. I know it as an expression of primordial terror from a time when, as a small child, I felt abandoned, set helpless before the universe. I have never felt such profound fear. How did this happento me? the adult me wonders with fury. And why?

“The darkness was so heavy during your childhood,” a spirit voice says to me, “that your soul splintered beneath the weight.”

I have an awareness of having lost so much of myself. Who will I be when all the parts come home? I feel a hand on my back: Hamilton’s. “I’m here to help you,” he says. Suddenly, the flames trapping the little girl disappear. Everything is covered in a freezing white frost. I shiver from the intense cold.

“Julio and I have frozen the devil,” Hamilton declares. “You can pull the little girl out now.”

So that’s why everything got so cold, I think. But wait a minute—what are Hamilton and Mr. Julio doing in my vision? How can Hamilton see what I’m seeing?

“Pull her out,” Hamilton says to me.

I reach down and take the girl’s hand. When she feels my touch, she stops crying, and I pull her up, out of the tunnel of fire. The darkness departs. We reach realms of bright white light—the first such places my visions have allowed. The heavenly realms.

“Your little girl has to enter your body,” Hamilton says. “Call to her.”

I do. I see her split into several little girls, each looking like me at a different age. One at a time, they appear to enter me, my body jolting backwards for each “soul part,” as Hamilton calls them, that was retrieved.

As soon as they’re done, I see a vision of them. Dazed by the brilliant light of their new world, the girls walk through green grass, under pure white clouds. Flocks of butterflies land on them, smothering them. Flowers bow to them. All the pet cats from my childhood, those beloved creatures who had died over the years, appear suddenly and flock around the little girls to have their bellies rubbed. Here, I discover, is a place that transcends death. It is an unbelievably perfect place in which there is a sense that nothing could ever hurt me.

Back in 2013, I visited a friend in Amsterdam who was dying of cancer. Here I wrote about the sign and symbols that preceded my arrival. We sat in her living room and she told me about an ayahuasca experience she had recently had. Miriam was not a religious believer, but in this experience, she met her late mother, and was comforted by her. Miriam’s mother had died from breast cancer — the same cancer that would take Miriam’s life. After her mother died, she entered a profound crisis that broke up her marriage and caused immense chaos in her life. According to Miriam, the pain and terror that entered her when her mother died went away when she met her mom on the ayahuasca journey. She believed the journey had been healing, and had made her unafraid of death. Six months later, on Christmas Day, she died. A mutual friend who was at her bedside said that Miriam was terrified until the end.

I don’t pretend to know what Miriam experienced with the drug — if she really did meet the soul of her mother, or if it was a demonic counterfeit. I don’t think it is necessary to decide that to believe that whatever potential benefits can come from using DMT, they are not worth the risks of being struck by noetic lightning.

Yet after my conversation with Nicky yesterday, I believe that we are certain to see a big jump in spiritual seekers turning to DMT in search of transcendence and re-enchantment. I believe as a matter of faith that Augustine was right: our hearts are restless until they rest in God. We are created for fellowship with Him. And as spiritual creatures, we crave experiences of the spirit. I have major theological differences with Pentecostal and charismatic Christians, but I am 100 percent on their side in terms of their recognition of the importance of the participatory experience of God in worship. In Orthodox Christianity, I believe we have worked out a good balance. The Orthodox writer Frederica Mathewes-Green told me many years ago that she was at an ecumenical conference once, and observed during the break time that the Calvinists and the Catholics bunched together on one side of the room to talk doctrine, while the Orthodox and the Pentecostals bunched together on the other side to talk about worship.

Yesterday one of you readers put me onto Bernardo Klastrup, a Dutch scientist who believes that quantum physics and neuroscience have invalidated the materialist view of reality. I spent some time on Klastrup’s website last night, and the website of his Essentia Foundation, which promotes the scientific exploration of non-material reality. He doesn’t appear to be any kind of religious believer, which makes him more useful to my own research interests. I ordered one of his books to learn more about his theories, and expect that I will interview him in the Netherlands next year, if he is willing. Klastrup seems to believe that mind — consciousness — is the fundamental state of the cosmos. If he’s right, then what the DMT people are doing and accessing might well be real, not hallucinations.

This is heavy territory. I’ve got a lot of work ahead of me. This book of mine is not at all going to be a mere book about religious tourism (e.g., pilgrimages, visits to holy sites) and miracle stories, though those will absolutely be there. It’s about the collapse of naive realism — the idea that the universe is made up only of inert matter — and a return to the pre-modern Christian model of reality, which as it turns out has been most faithfully preserved in Orthodox Christianity, but which is also available in different, fragmented modes among other confessions. And it will be a stern warning not to go searching for spiritual experiences via drugs or occult techniques — not because they don’t work, but because they often do, to our own destruction.

By the way, if you are interested to know what the Orthodox tradition says about spirituality and noetic reality, a good place to start is Kyriacos Markides’s book The Mountain of Silence. I first read it in 2005, deep in a spiritual crisis that eventually led me to become Orthodox. I thought I understood a lot about Orthodoxy, but I really didn’t. I had no idea that such spiritual depths existed there. Markides, a sociologist of religion, writes in the introduction that he had spent his career studying shamanistic traditions, but had not really thought about the amazing spiritual resources that exist within the religious tradition in which he was raised, Orthodoxy. He writes that young Westerners who are bored with Christianity, and who set off for the East in search of what they believe will be more spiritually vital traditions in Buddhism or Hinduism would be better served by going to the Christian East, where they can find what they are looking for. The book is basically one long series of interviews with a monk of Mount Athos, who explains these things to him. That monk is now Metropolitan Athanasios, a bishop in Cyprus. I am going to reach out to him to see if he will sit for an interview with me for my book.

The post Into The Upside Down appeared first on The American Conservative.

Lot’s Wife And Elite Western Culture

Another day, another act of anti-Christian hatred from progressives:

Let me introduce you the #LGBTQ ambassador of the European Parliament.

How else could the famously tolerant and respectful rainbow community celebrate advent if not with a blasphemous, pointless provocation?

Share this & use #RespectAdvent to call for Simonetti’s resignation. pic.twitter.com/2PFcdVJqvl

— Péter Heltai (@peterheltai) December 2, 2021

You know the drill: They would never do this to Muslims, blah blah blah. It’s true, but irrelevant. They don’t care. They hate Christians, but they fear and revere Muslims because Muslims are the Other, which is to say, Not Christians, and therefore good.

This freak Simonetti is one reason why, if I were a European voter, I would vote populist in part to punish the freaks whom he represents. Enough is enough. The contempt the elites have for normal people and the things that mean a lot to us is infuriating.

But I don’t post this as clickbait. I post this because it intersects with something that has been on my mind since I wrote the “Hiney-Lickers Of Princeton” post earlier this week. In that earlier post, I published images from a handout resident assistants at a Princeton dorm handed out to freshmen, advising them that the university has “Choose Your Own Adventure” safe sex kits it is prepared to deliver upon request:

On the “Butt Stuff” part, Princeton hands out flavored dental dams for students to put on the anuses of their sexual partners so they can lick the buttholes without risking disease or discomfort. I’m sorry to use such crude language, but we have to be clear what we are talking about here. Using clinical language sterilizes the disgusting nature of the acts being discussed.

It was instructive to see the kinds of responses I got from angry people in the comments section. They were usually one or both of these: “You are a prude who hates to see people having fun with sex” and/or “You hate public health”.

I am a 54-year-old man who grew up after the Sexual Revolution, and who spent half of his twenties as a religious unbeliever. I am not unfamiliar with sexual variety. Besides, do you think I’ve never heard of the Marquis de Sade? Good grief.

What I find interesting and alarming is the degree to which we have been conditioned to hate what is good and love what is evil. The fact that one of America’s most prestigious universities (and I am certain Princeton is not alone here) thinks its place is to encourage its students to lick each other’s buttholes safely tells us a lot about where we are as a society. It is one of the most degrading acts imaginable, yet thanks to ubiquitous pornography, it has apparently been normalized, such that for many people, the real shocking and offensive thing is that someone like me would consider it disgusting.

How does a society sink to the point where licking buttholes is considered to be normal and good, such that elite institutions encourage it for people who are part of those institutions? We were not made for behavior like this, which is lower than the animals. Sex was created as good, as an act of loving care, one that sometimes creates new life. These modern people, they drag it through the mud (er, “mud”), and debase it. There is a connection between this kind of debasement, and what you see from the cretin Simonetti, who debases the incarnation of purity itself by making the Holy Virgin a transgender.

It’s satanic, all of it. If we have become the kind of culture that normalizes and valorizes perversion à la Princeton, then God owes Sodom and Gomorrah an apology. If you want to laugh at me for that, I accept your mockery and wear it as a badge of honor. I despise your world of perversion and sacrilege, and do not apologize for it. I remind readers, though, that these are signs of the times, and that what will follow the collapse of this corrupt culture will be painful.

Sex is good, and the body is good, but we are not permitted to do whatever we like with the body. I don’t think you have to be a believing Christian to understand this. The symbolic meaning of putting mouth to the excretory organ is clear to anyone. In today’s world, there is no perversion that the people who run this society won’t call good, and liberatory. We really do live in Sodom and Gomorrah. You may laugh at me for saying so, but in your heart of hearts, if you look at your child, if you have any conscience in you, you will not view it as a matter of indifference the understanding of sex, love, and the body into which your child will grow and mature. Which father or mother looks upon their beautiful baby, and thinks, “I hope she will grow up to use dental dams when she licks a sex partner’s backside”?

What was once forbidden and hidden is now out in the open and celebrated by the most powerful and sophisticated people in our society. If you were a farmer in Sichuan province, or a Bedouin nomad, or a campesino in Latin America, or a goat herder in Africa, and you were told that at the top universities of the most powerful nation on earth, the school provides equipment to allow its students to lick each other’s bungholes for pleasure, what would you think about that society? If you were one of those poor people, and were told that the European Parliament paid as a “special ambassador” a gay man who portrays the Mother of God — even if you didn’t believe in that god — as a bearded transgender, what would you conclude about the foundations of that society?

You would probably think: those people are corrupt, and they are going to fall.

And you would be right.

I am not interested in converting putative bunghole-lickers and their allies to my side. I am interested in helping the morally sane among us recognize that their intuitions of disgust are healthy and normal, and should be leaned into hard. I am also interested in waking up Christian, Muslim, Jewish, and other religious parents to the sick depths to which the commanding heights of our culture have sunk, so that these parents will do their best to protect their children from the propagandists, and to prepare their kids to be faithful and morally sane in this contemporary Gomorrah.

Back in 2013, Conor Friedersdorf wrote a piece for The Atlantic in which he considered the question of whether or not some forms of sex might be morally wrong. Excerpts:

In “What Do You Desire?” Emily Witt travels to San Francisco, attends a shoot for a pornographic video about “women bound, stripped, and punished in public,” reflects on her own unsuccessful search for romantic love, and ponders the implications of a sexual culture where no desire is considered off-limits so long as all participants give their consent. She’d prefer love to sexual novelty. But “what if love fails us?” she asks. “Sexual freedom has now extended to people who never wanted to shake off the old institutions, except to the extent of showing solidarity with friends who did. I have not sought so much choice for myself, and when I found myself with no possibilities except total sexual freedom, I was unhappy. I understood that the San Franciscans’ focus on intention—the pornographers were there by choice—marked the difference between my nihilism and their utopianism. When your life does not conform to an idea, and this failure makes you feel bad, throwing away the idea can make you feel better.”

Her essay is a must-read, with the caveat that it should not be read by anyone who wishes to avoid graphic descriptions of extreme sexual acts. The lengthy descriptions will distress many readers. But the substance of the essay transcends those scenes, as evidenced by the fascinating exchanges it has prompted in the blogosphere. The primary participants (linked in order if you want to follow their thought-provoking conversation as it unfolded) are Rod Dreher, Noah Millman, Alan Jacobs, (Noah Millman and Rod Dreher again) and Pascal-Emmanuel Gobry.

All of them grapple, at least in part, with what our response ought to be to the explicit acts described. Put bluntly, a group of San Franciscans crowded into a basement to watch and participate as a diminutive female porn actress (who consented very specifically to all that followed) is bound with rope, gagged, slapped, mildly electrocuted, and sexually penetrated in most every way. The tenor and intensity of the event can’t be conveyed without reading the full rendering. The object of all that abuse describes it afterward as physically uncomfortable at times, but intensely pleasurable throughout. She departs extremely happy and eager to do it again.

More:

Was the consent of all participants sufficient to make the porn shoot a morally defensible enterprise? Alan Jacobs says no. People like the director and actress “are pursuing, consciously or not, absolute degradation, and are publicly debasing sexuality in the process,” he writes. “They are immensely destructive to themselves and to others; they becloud the image of God in which they were made.” As he sees it, their behavior is uncivilized. If you claim otherwise, he argues, “you have reduced the content of civilization to a single element: consent.”

Rod Dreher agrees. Acknowledging that the Marquis de Sade conceived of humiliating and being humiliated for sexual pleasure long before today’s San Franciscans, he posits that such behavior is becoming more acceptable due to the absence of a strong moral framework to push back against it. “You can have whatever you desire,” he writes. “If you choose hell, then we will call it good, because it is freely chosen, and brings you pleasure.” He worries that “the result is chaos and nihilism” and the idea that “the only way to find transcendence is to yield to one’s desires.” For Dreher, “affirming human dignity, and walling off the most destructive impulses within individual and collective human beings, requires condemning this pornography and perversity.”

Yet America’s secular individualism offers “no firm ground on which to stand to condemn this barbarism,” Dreher continues, and “no basis to call it barbarism.” He marvels that history’s most free, wealthy people “use their liberty to degrade each other and to choose to be degraded.” Why does he care? “I have to live in a world—and, more to the point, raise children in a world—in which perversity like this is available, via the Internet, to more and more people,” he explains. “I have to raise children in a world in which human sexuality and the general idea of human dignity is degraded by pornography. I have to live in a world in which utopians are working very hard to tear down the structures of thought and practice that harnessed humankind’s sexual instincts and directed them in socially up-building ways. I have to raise my kids in a world that says when it comes to sex, there is no right and no wrong, except as defined by consent.”

Read it all. 

Where is the role for love in all this? There is none. It is all about will to power, and will to destruction if it brings one pleasure.

Again, there is a clear connection between the kind of depravity one sees in the sacrilegious Simonetti image, what’s happening at Princeton, and what Emily Witt records in her essay. I do not hesitate to call it demonic. Whether or not you believe in the devil, Satanism is parasitic on Christianity, and on the Good, because it seeks to defile everything Christianity calls holy and good. A couple of years ago a young man came to our church, having recently left a coven of occultists who followed the teachings of Aleister Crowley. He told me that he quit the cult because he knew that to rise in it, one had to participate in ever more degrading sexual acts. He had been molested by a babysitter as a boy, and recalling the lasting trauma of that event, recoiled at what the cult asked him to do … and left.

He said that once outside of it, he looked back on all the people he knew there, and was amazed by how depressed and suicidal they all were. And yet they persisted in it, believing that to choose to degrade themselves and others was an act of sovereign will, and therefore a great good. He also told me that when one reads Crowley’s writings from the old days, and the kind of world he wanted to bring into existence with his “sex magick,” one looks around at America today, and sees that Crowley’s dream has largely been fulfilled.

Don’t you see what the elites of our culture want to turn our children into? What they are doing to our holy things? Do you think this does not matter?

Are we going to be Lot’s wife?

Auden once said:

In our culture, we have all accepted the notion that the right to know is absolute and unlimited. The gossip column is one side of the medal; the cobalt bomb is the other. We are quite prepared to admit that, while food and sex are good in themselves, an uncontrolled pursuit of either is not, but it is difficult for us to believe that intellectual curiosity is a desire like any other, and to recognize that correct knowledge and truth are not identical. To apply a categorical imperative to knowing, so that, instead of asking, “What can I know?” we ask, “What, at this moment, am I meant to know?” — to entertain the possibility that the only knowledge which can be true for us is the knowledge that we can live up to — that seems to all of us crazy and almost immoral.

Apply the same principle to sexual acts. What if we asked ourselves not, “What can I do with my body?” but rather, “What, at this moment, am I meant to do with my body?” — to entertain the possibility that the only sexual behavior which can be good is sexual behavior that fulfills the goal of treating our bodies with love and dignity — that seems to many of us crazy and almost immoral.

I feel confident that there are more people, especially young people, who agree with me than not, but they are afraid to say so. These are young people who despise the world that my generation, and their grandparents’ generation, have created for them, but who don’t know how to resist. Well, guess what: even at Princeton, there is hope. Princeton has The Anscombe Society, which describes itself like this:

The Anscombe Society is a student organization at Princeton University that aims to foster an atmosphere where sex is dignified, respectful, and beautiful; where human relationships are affirming and supportive; where marriage is given pride of place among those relationships; where motherhood and authentic femininity are reverenced; where true masculinity and committed fatherhood are vital to family life; and where no one is objectified, instrumentalized, or demeaned. We hope to provide those students who strive to understand, live, and love their commitment to chastity and ‘traditional’ sexual and familial ethics with the support they need to make their time at Princeton the best it can be. Lastly, we wish to offer these values to the wider Princeton community and promote a culture of charitable dialogue and mutual understanding among all Princetonians.

What good and necessary people. If you are a Princeton student, find them, join them! If you are a student somewhere else, why not start an Anscombe Society? Contact the Princeton Anscombe Society — and please, donate to them. The enemy has lots of money and power. We need to make it possible for searching young people to know that they do not have to surrender to the god of this world, that there is goodness, truth, and light despite the darkness.

Yes, I’m radical about this stuff. You should be too. Open your eyes! Choose today whom you will serve. This is what the world without God looks like. I remind you of where this filth, and “consent” being the sole ethic by which we judge sexual acts, could easily end. From Live Not By Lies:

Regarding transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the sexual revolution. Like the contemporary West, late imperial Russia was also awash in what historian James Billington called “a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.” Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of perversion, and all manner of sensuality was common. And not just among the elites: the laboring masses, alone in the city, with no church to bind their consciences with guilt, or village gossips to shame them, found comfort in sex.

The end of official censorship after the 1905 uprising opened the floodgates to erotic literature, which found renewal in sexual passion. “The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic,” Billington writes, detailing how the figure of Satan became a Romantic hero for artists and musicians. They admired the diabolic willingness to stop at nothing to satisfy one’s desires and to exercise one’s will.

UPDATE: A reader sent this passage from the moral philosopher J. Budziszewski:

[W]hen a man puts the part of himself that represents new life into the cavity of another man that represents decay and expulsion, at the most basic of all possible levels he is saying, “Life, be swallowed in death.” We cannot overwrite such meanings with different ones just because we want to.

Similarly, Princeton and other colleges are encouraging its students to taste death and decay — but as is typical of our age, they want to make it hygienic, and taste like chewing gum. From a Brown University how-to video, dental dams:

Brown University

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European Base Camp 2022

I want your advice on something. Good news: I just signed a deal for my next book. It will be with Sentinel, again (yay!), but this time, it will not be a political or culture-war topic. It will be religious and spiritual. The book does not have a title yet, but here’s what it will be about.

The book will be about how we in the West lost our sense of “enchantment” — that is, the sense that life is holy, and that God is everywhere present — and how we can get it back. The “how we lost it” part is going to be relatively short. This is a topic that has been well covered in the literature over the years, but it is necessary to explain to lay readers what happened and how it happened. Of course I will write about Charles Taylor, but also the “W.E.I.R.D.” theory, and especially Dr. Iain McGilchrist’s work about the brain.

However, most of the book will be focused on “how to get it back.” There will be a technical part, in which I explore the work of the Stanford anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann, who has written about this from a scientific point of view. Mostly, though, I will tell stories. I will travel to holy places where miracles have taken place, and where people pray intensely. My plan is to go to Jerusalem for Orthodox Holy Week next year, and to be present in the Church of the Holy Sepulchre when the Holy Fire appears. I also intend to spend some time on Mount Athos, praying with an interviewing monks. With any luck, I will also get to St. Katherine’s monastery on Sinai.

I am now going to start making a list of places I need to visit, and I need your help. I don’t want this to be religious tourism. I am really interested in pilgrimage sites and places of miracle, in “thin places” where the numinous can be felt. It should go without saying that I am focusing exclusively on Christian religion and spirituality. As of now, I am planning to go to Lourdes, to Rocamadour, and to Mont Saint Michel in France. Also, of course, Chartres. In Ireland, I want to visit and interview Paul Kingsnorth, and if possible, go to Skellig Michael. I am also thinking of going to the new Orthodox monastery in the Hebrides.

I am thinking about walking the Camino de Santiago, or at least part of it. I have been to Fatima before, so probably not there. If I can convince the Archbishop of Turin to let me see the Shroud, then I will go there (the Shroud of Turin is going to be a big part of this project). But where else should I go, given that I have only limited time? What else should I see? I am wide open. Please advise.

This book is for at least (but not exclusively) three kinds of people:

Lukewarm Christians who need to be reminded that we live in a world suffused by the spirit of God, and by spirit, period;People like François, the protagonist in Houellebecq’s Soumission, who makes a pilgrimage to Rocamadour, begins to experience something numinous … then out of fear, convinces himself that it’s not real; I want to speak to people like him, and convince them not to dismiss these promptings of the spirit; andSeekers like I was at 17, on the threshold of the Chartres cathedral; I thought I had Christianity all figured out, and that it was moralistic, middle-class psychology, nothing more. Then I walked into that cathedral, and was overwhelmed by awe. I did not leave a Christian, but I did leave on a search, one that eventually led to my conversion. I want the kind of young person that I once was to read this book and at least go on a search.

I will also interview people who have had numinous encounters with God, in the form of inexplicable (by natural means) miracles, visions, and visitations. There will also be a chapter on the demonic, because that too is real, and testifies to the primacy of the spiritual.

The book’s plan is in its early stages, so I welcome advice. And I need advice on something else, too.

I can see that I will need to rent a flat somewhere in Europe to use as a base for traveling next year. I expect to be in Budapest the first part of 2022 for a few months, doing the heavy lifting on the theoretical side of the book (the Taylor, McGilchrist, Luhrmann, Henrichs, et al.) while it is too cold to travel widely. Plus, I want to write about the election for TAC. After the end of April, though, where should I go? Where should I spend my summer as a base camp from which to travel to holy places in Europe? Also, I want to go to the Orthodox world too, beyond Athos. I expect to visit Romania, at least, but would like to go to Russia, though that might be difficult. My base will need to be in western Europe.

It needs to have good air and rail links. And it needs to have an Orthodox church.

The most reasonable choice seems to me to be Paris. It also happens to be my favorite city, as you know. But it is very expensive. Sentinel was quite generous with me on this project, thanks to the great sales of Live Not By Lies, and I could afford Paris for a few months if necessary. But I am wondering if there is a better choice? I would like somewhere quieter — for example, San Benedetto del Tronto, where my dear friend Marco Sermarini and the Tipi Loschi live — but that would mean it would be harder to get to trains and planes. Still, it is hard to beat Paris. Maybe Madrid or Barcelona? Rome is too far south, alas. Vienna? Munich? You tell me.

What do you think? Do you have advice — advice both on where to set up base camp, and where I should go for my research? Please say so in the comments, or write me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. 

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