Rod Dreher's Blog, page 42

Father McWilliams Guts A Family

Hi all, from DFW airport — been traveling back from California for most of this day. I want to bring to your attention this long piece by J.D. Flynn in The Pillar, an independent Catholic news service. Here’s the editor’s note with which it begins:

Cleveland priest Fr. Robert McWilliams was sentenced to life in prison Tuesday, after the priest pled guilty to federal child trafficking, child abuse, and child exploitation charges.

McWilliams, 41, was ordained a priest in 2017. He was arrested in 2019, and pled guilty to federal charges in July of this year.

At his Nov. 9 sentencing hearing, the mother of four boys preyed upon by McWilliams urged a life sentence.

That mother and her family told The Pillar their story.

Stop right there. Look at those dates. This guy McWilliams was so out-of-control that he started going after kids as soon as he got out of seminary. The mother of one of the victims — all males — sat down with Flynn to talk about what happened. He gives the mom a pseudonym, “Rachel Christopher,” and writes:

Rachel is talking about it, she tells me, because she does love the Church. And she does love her family. And she knows the Lord is calling her to speak.

“I feel that God is calling — I feel like it’s a responsibility and I feel it would be totally wrong for me to do nothing and say nothing. I’m doing this for love of my Church and for other people and love of children and love for other parents. I don’t want this to happen to anyone else— this is for our Church and it’s for Jesus too, because he’s hurting.”

Rachel tells me she also wants to tell her family’s story because she wants the Church to know they’re human beings — real people, real Catholics, with real pain. She says that when someone in your family is abused by a priest, it’s easy for diocesan officials to see you only as potential litigants, ready for a lawsuit. Or to see you as people who just want to harm or embarrass the Church.

That’s not her family, Rachel says. They want to help the Church in very specific ways. They want good to come from what they’ve suffered. Rachel wants to witness, too, to the faithfulness of the Lord.

And that means, Rachel says, she wants to tell me what actually happened. She wants people to hear it.

But first:

“Ok. I just want to do God’s will. Lord Jesus. I just want to do God’s will.”

Litany accomplished, she begins.

I suppose I don’t have to spend much time telling you what happens next. But you should read the whole thing anyway, because the sick head games that this manipulative predator played on his boy victims and their families is mind-boggling. How does someone so disturbed get through the seminary system today, after all we have learned?

I suppose there is no foolproof way, given how devious and intelligent many predators are. But Flynn talked to local Catholics who said they knew something was wrong:

Other Catholics who knew McWilliams saw red flags too.

Several Catholics in Cleveland told me that they had observed McWilliams interact with teens before his ordination, and that his closeness, and familiarity with them seemed inappropriate for an adult.

One Catholic in Rachel’s parish community recalled that McWilliams had several “furry heads” — large, expensive animal faced masks, associated with the furry subculture. Parents were mostly unaware of the alternative culture associated with the masks, and McWilliams encouraged children to wear them. More than once, he posed for pictures with children wearing the mask.

Had he owned the heads during seminary? Had anyone noticed them?

The same Catholic said her family visited McWilliams at the seminary. His behavior was unusual, she said. “He laughed about how much control he had over the other seminarians. Because they were not allowed to go into his room, they were not allowed to touch anything. They knew their place. Even so much as in the tv room, he had a place on the couch. When he walked in, they did not sit in his place. They got up and moved for him.”

A former seminarian, who studied at St. Mary’s for five years with McWilliams, was surprised when he learned about the priest’s arrest, but said in hindsight, he sees things about McWilliams’ years in seminary which give him pause.

“He was very good with technology, and he was very guarded about his personal life. But the one thing that really stuck out to me is that he was very good at sneaking things. So, like, we weren’t allowed to have alcohol in our rooms, but Bobby always had alcohol in his room, and he would invite people in to drink, you know?”

The former seminarian recalled a specific instance when McWilliams explained that he used his cell phone to avoid firewalls placed on internet use at the seminary.

“There was a firewall, and your formation advisor had access to anything that you searched [on your computer]. And I remember Bobby saying to us, waving his phone around, ‘Well, what’s the point of this? If you have [a cell phone], you can do whatever you want.’”

The former seminarian said McWilliams also would tell fellow seminarians that he could offer them guidance or counsel to get over pornography addictions — unusual behavior between seminarians, but one which seminary administrators seemed to approve.

The Pillar asked some detailed questions of the Diocese, which declined to respond.

Here’s something amazing: this woman, Rachel Christopher, is going out of her way to assert her allegiance to the Catholic faith, in spite of it all — but her diocese treats her and her family like kryptonite:

Before an early meeting with Archbishop Nelson Perez, who was Cleveland’s bishop until he was appointed to Philadelphia in January 2020, Rachel said she remembers that the family was given instructions from diocesan attorneys about what topics it was ok to talk with the bishop about.

Rachel thought it would be a pastoral meeting, but, like many conversations she has had with diocesan staffers, she felt like it was just a perfunctory exercise.

“And so you get to the point where you just shut down. You can’t even share from your heart. I remember thinking, like, are we just supposed to go and talk about the weather with him?”

“Everything they say to us, or about this, seems like it goes through legal, legal, legal.”

Her family has no intention to sue, Rachel told me, and she she’s told diocesan officials that. But she says she feels like the diocese has nevertheless held them at arms’ length, possibly afraid of a lawsuit.

“I told [the diocese] I wanted to work with them, to talk about what can be learned and what we learned. They seemed open to that at the time. But then nothing happens. So a meeting is nice, but nice isn’t good enough. Action is important.”

This is a stab in the heart:

“They should be concerned that Joseph [the pseudonym Flynn gives her son, a victim] isn’t going to Church. Like, that’s a tragedy. And that’s where I want to see them. What are they going to do about those souls now?”

“They were hurt through the Church, and now that they’ve left the Church, does the Church care? The primary mission of the Church is the salvation of souls — and do they show that their first concern is people who have been hurt through the Church, and have left the Church — including my son?”

“That’s one of my biggest sorrows right now.”

Please read the whole thing.

It raises some difficult questions. Where is the father in this narrative? Is he absent from the family’s life — and is that what gave the predator priest an in? That’s what I speculated when I read it, and so did a lot of folks, judging by Twitter. DM’ing with J.D. Flynn, he said that’s a misreading of the story. He chose to focus on the mother for narrative reasons, not because the dad is absent.

Another question I have is about Rachel’s fierce proclamations of her unshakable Catholic faith. I kept hearing in her going back over and over to say it the voice of someone desperately trying to convince herself to hold on. Then again, I could well be projecting my own experience onto her; I ran through similar arguments in my head like a drill, trying to hold on to my Catholic belief by force of will. On the other hand, maybe she genuinely has such a strong faith, and is trying to signal to other families that you can get through suffering like this with your faith intact. I just don’t know.

I think about that young man, “Joseph,” who was so cruelly manipulated and blackmailed by that pervert priest. Now, as you’ve read, he doesn’t go to church. I hope and pray that he comes back, eventually, but if he does, it seems like it won’t be through the efforts of the Cleveland diocese. If he remains away from the faith, and marries, and has children, and doesn’t raise them Catholic or Christian — think of the lost souls. All because of Father McWilliams and those who didn’t catch him in time, or care enough about his victims.

Again, though, when I think back on McWilliams’s evil plan, explained by Flynn, I marvel at the inventiveness of evil. Who could even have thought about things like that? I’m not talking about physical sexual acts — I’m talking about the ingeniousness with which he manipulated everyone. I hope McWilliams dies in prison. And may God restore that family, and bless Rachel Christopher for having the courage to speak to a reporter about it. As hideous as all this is, we need to know that it happens, so we can do what we can to stop it, and to figure out how to survive it without losing our faith.

UPDATE: I forgot that The Pillar reported last month allegations from three former Cleveland seminarians that the seminary leadership did not take their protests against a priest who allegedly sexually harassed them, and engaged in grooming behavior. What is going on at that seminary? Is this another one of those lavender mafia things?

A Catholic reader last week sent me a link to a prominent Jesuit’s newsletter — the Nov. 7 issue, in which Father praised a controversial book. Excerpt:

One of the books that’s gotten some attention is “Gender Queer”, a graphic novel memoir about a young person slowly coming to the understanding that they’re non-binary, that is to say they don’t identify as being either male or female but draw elements from both and use different pronouns such as “they/them”.

I had the chance to read “Queer” over the summer. I really liked it. It’s drawn in this very open and cartoonish way that really captures the innocence of author Maia Kobabe. And you end up taking the journey to self-discovery with them. If you’re at all puzzled by the idea of nonbinary people or the use of different pronouns, I recommend it so highly.

At the heart of it the book banning seems to be about “protecting kids” from “dangerous ideas”, aka “I’m afraid that reading “Gender Queer” will make my baby sick in the head.” Which is obviously messed up and also sad, as really the book is an attempt to help queer kids understand what they’re going through. If you think “nonbinary” is hard for you to understand, try being the 10 or 15 year old person for whom the standard gender categories don’t fit. Where do you turn? Now imagine somebody’s parents trying to keep you (or your child) from resources that could help. It’s pretty messed up.

“Gender Queer” is available on Kindle and also in print. Could be a great Christmas present for someone, and a great way to reject some really bad thinking about society and sexuality.

Mmm-hmm. Here are some pages from “Gender Queer”. I’ve sanitized them a bit for your protection:

What kind of Catholic priest recommends a filthy book like that to teenagers? To be clear, I am NOT implying that the Jesuit who raved about this dirty book is an abuser. Not, not, not! What I do claim is that he has outrageously bad judgment on what’s appropriate sexual material for youth (and worse judgment about Catholic sexual teaching). This, in conjunction with the McWilliams story, makes me wonder, though, to what extent the judgment of the clergy today has been corrupted by the world’s rapidly declining standards on sexuality. I know, I know, there are tens of thousands of priests in this country, and there are a bunch of seminaries, with different internal cultures. I get that. What I wonder is if there may be an atmosphere in some seminaries in which the leadership is — how to put this? — less sensitive than they should be to what is sexually appropriate thoughts and behavior from seminarians and other priests.

Seriously, I cannot imagine a world in which it would be appropriate for a priest to give “Gender Queer” to a minor (or anybody, for that matter). And yet, this Jesuit priest warmly recommends this testimonial to “self-discovery”. How widespread would this recommendation be among the Catholic clergy? I wonder how the leadership at the Cleveland diocesan seminary would respond to “Gender Queer”.

The post Father McWilliams Guts A Family appeared first on The American Conservative.

Free Kyle Rittenhouse!

Have you been following the trial of Kenosha shooter Kyle Rittenhouse? This happened yesterday as Rittenhouse was testifying about events of that night:

J.D. Vance reacts, tweeting that this clip fills him with “indescribable rage”. More:

Watch this — he’s on fire, and he’s right to be.

The prosecution of Rittenhouse is a disgrace. pic.twitter.com/VS2DhcLXn8

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) November 10, 2021

Don’t know if you saw it, but in his testimony, Gage Grosskreutz, who was shot by Rittenhouse but survived, admitted that Rittenhouse didn’t shoot him until he (Grosskreutz) first pointed his gun at Rittenhouse.

We know that the two others Rittenhouse shot that night were Rosenbaum, the convicted criminal who chased him and tried to disarm him, and Huber, a protester who lunged at him on the ground, and hit him with a skateboard. Those seem to be clear-cut cases of self-defense, as with the Grosskreutz shooting. But the jury will have its say.

It’s a shame that Rittenhouse is even on trial. True, he was 17, and shouldn’t have been out on the streets that night. But what a sad story: a fatherless boy who wanted so badly to be a good man, to serve his community, to protect good people from bad ones. And this is where he is today. As J.D. Vance explains, tech media refused to let people raise money for Rittenhouse’s defense. They have decided that Rittenhouse is the enemy. This class of people have decided that people like Rittenhouse are the enemy.

I’m sick of it. Where, aside from J.D. Vance, are the Republican politicians who stand up for the Kyle Rittenhouses of the world? The tears of that boy on the witness stand ought to tear your heart out for what has happened to this country, and what the Machine does to someone like that.

The post Free Kyle Rittenhouse! appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Live Not By Lies’ Conference At Pepperdine

Hello from Pepperdine University, where the School of Public Policy is hosting a conference on Live Not By Lies. I’m watching a panel on soft totalitarianism in education. Mari Barke, the president of the Orange County Board of Education, is speaking.

She’s talking about how clearly the educational bureaucracy lies about Critical Race Theory in Schools. She said that it’s encouraging to see voters rising up and throwing out educrats who have allowed wokeness to deform schools.

“You are going to see people running for office who, I believe, really care about the children, running for school boards.” She said that you don’t have to be an expert to do this. “You have to care about not living by lies, but living by truth.”

Then Princeton’s Joshua Katz, a linguist and classicist, spoke. (Read what I wrote over a year ago about his persecution at Princeton.) He said before this crisis, “I was an unmarried agnostic who cared little more about anything but his job. I was a true believer in elite education.”

No more. He said he’s a Christian now who married the love of his life. And he no longer believes in elite education, because of the ideological capture by leftist ideologues. He said that now most linguists in the country won’t talk to him, “and the vast majority of current Princetonians want me fired.” He added that “living by lies has become the elite new normal.”

Katz put a plug in for founding new institutions like the University of Austin, on whose board of advisers he sits. “A few years ago I would have called this a ridiculous idea, but we were in a different place then,” he said.

“We need more than new temples for learning,” he said. He spoke of Vaclav Benda’s “parallel polis,” and the seminars that dissidents like him had in private homes under communism. Katz said he’s been told by students at his wealthy university tell him that their most important educational experiences have not been in classes, but in off-campus seminars, “often at the Witherspoon Institute, which owns a lovely house near campus.”

Katz said that he’s taught a couple of those seminars, and that they are “filled with knowledge, argument, and laughter. There’s nothing clandestine about these seminars, which are advertised, but they are still something of a secret.”

“I promise you this,” he said. “If I leave Princeton, my wife and I will open our home to students” seeking the truth.

Then came Habi Zhang, born in China, who is a public policy doctoral student in Purdue, though she first started studying in America here at Pepperdine. She said her experience in Chinese universities was prison like, with the teaching of all subjects “reduced to naked utility.”

She described contemporary China as having “a culture that has no use for truth, but only money and power.”

When she arrived at Pepperdine, Zhang said, “I felt I had died and gone to heaven.”

But since she arrived in the US, she has been shocked by how Americans are willing to throw away classical liberalism, and replace it with radical ideology. She described Critical Race Theory as fostering “competitive victimhood,” and spoke of how shocking it is to see “the American recreation of the Chinese Cultural revolution on full blast.”

Here is an essay Zhang wrote about the Chinese Cultural Revolution, and how its principles are manifesting themselves in the US. Excerpt:

For years, I have seen social justice warriors across American campuses shut down events they dislike, scream at professors who don’t support their views, or physically attack speakers they hate. I worry that the campus violence reveals a larger issue than the crisis of free speech. My concern has less to do with coddled American students’ intolerance for dissent or offense than that they are used as cannon fodder for the purpose of advancing an agenda—or indeed a revolution. As a student of the Chinese Cultural Revolution, I can hardly overlook the stunning similarity of the rhetoric and practice between BLM protestors who raise their fists and Red Guards who hold high the Little Red Book. To purge the upper echelons of power, Mao set a group of screaming, self-righteous Red Guards in clamorous motion. In the name of overthrowing the Four Olds (Old Ideas, Old Culture, Old Habits, and Old Customs), belligerent Red Guards demanded to assign new names to historical sites, destroyed statues and temples, burned books, and publicly reviled teachers and intellectuals. Once given license to denounce all authority, those young, radical students, some of them no older than fourteen, were emboldened to torture and kill the innocent.

For a decade, the Chinese Cultural Revolution thoroughly wrecked the economy, uprooted traditions, destroyed social trust by turning family members on each other, and worst of all, killed well more than a million people. One can only wonder how far its American replication will go.

Zhang said here at Pepperdine today: “I fled form a hard totalitarianism, Xi Jinping’s China, to land in a relatively soft form of totalitarianism.” She is horrified to find in America that “ideological loyalty a prerequisite for success in institutes of higher learning.”

She said Americans must realize that totalitarianism not only destroys freedom, but “it also destroys everything in humanity that is noble, decent, and ethical.”

In the discussion, Mari Barke said parents had better start paying much closer attention to what their kids are taught in school. She said that she hears from parents all the time expressing fear that their kids will be indoctrinated in college.

“You know what? Kids are being indoctrinated when they aren’t even thinking about college,” she said. “I’ve seen CRT in preschool. it’s really important that parents keep their eyes focused on what’s going on, and keep truth in front of them.”

Habi Zhang said that when she arrived in Indiana, she was so amazed by large homeschooling Catholic families in Indiana where people don’t give their kids cellphones, and where people’s social lives don’t seem driven by technology. She said, “I see true, fully humans in those lovely souls.” She wrote a “love letter” to those families here. Excerpt:

The Perrin neighborhood offers community members a comprehensible, supportive, and therefore loving world in which religious and cultural traditions are preserved and shared beliefs venerated. As a result, when for the past several years many patriotic Americans were fraught with a vague but genuine and pressing thought of “wanting their country back,” the Perrin folk never felt that they had lost their country because they saw in each other every day what America is and what Americans are. And I see in them the Americans I adore and the America I admire—a land of freedom, the home to a group of patriots and friends who are authentic, confident, spirited, joyful, self-respecting and respectful, devout, faithful, kind, generous, and whole-heartedly welcoming to an alien whose nationality and skin color and exotic accent bear no significance because she has one thing in common with them: She deeply appreciates the traditional American way of life. The Perrin folk have thus shown me in a tangible and personal way why America has for centuries attracted immigrants around the world. It never really is about the so-called American dream, at least not primarily; the charm is the fulfilling and delightful communal life that the diverse and vital American communities have offered humans, all of whom have an enduring and profound need for belonging and attachment.

Habi Zhang

The Perrin neighborhood also provides members a public space where social life, rather than the act of consumption, takes place. Consumption is a lonely and dreary activity, propelled by and prevalent in industrialized mass society. It has shaped much of the daily routine of our modern life. There is a feedback loop between consumerism and loneliness that is incessantly haunting the atomized individuals who keep themselves busy by surfing YouTube or shopping Amazon. For the past ten years, I was horrified to see many of my fellow Chinese transform from peons to dedicated consumers with impressive purchasing power who spend their off-work time in shopping malls, wheeling their toddlers around or strolling through stores with their elders. The shopping mall for Chinese is the only public sphere permitted by the state, except “the common good” is merely the goods that the people consume in common.

Rather than the antsy Chinese consumers who often find themselves lost in a fog of commodity choices or the hip Americans who wake up with a stranger in bed after a glittered Friday night, I see in the Perrin public sphere lively, and again earthy, gatherings where a group of neighbors and friends are comfortable and delighted in their settled forms of social life. Here no one is distracted by the “modern life” that is supposed to be inundated with emails, texts, or phone calls; they are effortlessly fully present and engaging each other with full attention. Hence, the precious moments I experienced in the Schaffer family gathering after the Easter Sunday Mass, George’s First Communion celebration, David’s birthday, or Farther Elliot’s ordination were reassuring because they vindicated my philosophical conviction that our deepest emotional needs can be satisfied only in genuine human companionship.

Zhang went on.

“I don’t understand why Americans are surrendering their individual autonomy to the state. Why they are putting raising their kids into the hand of the government? Maybe some of you can help me understand why so few Americans care about liberty.”

When the question came up about engaging students, Zhang said, “I don’t think you can engage wokesters. They are not interested in engagement. They are interested in dominance, period.”

Finally, all three panelists were asked about hope. Zhang she said she is not optimistic about the future here, but “my Christian faith does not allow me to be hopeless.”

Katz said, “I think people will wake up; I just hope I am alive to see it.”

Mari Barke said the victory in Virginia gives her great hope that it’s just the start of a rebellion.

Please check back — I’m going to be blogging each of the panels.

UPDATE: James Poulos (whose new book is Human Forever: The Digital Politics of Spiritual War) is here at the conference, and says that we really have to understand that it’s not going to be enough for people to all start going to church again.

He points out that the government’s vaccine policies are promulgated by agencies that are not democratically accountable.

“What is the actual government at this point? Where does actual sovereignty reside?” he said. “Is it something fundamentally hostile to the American way of life?”

He said why it is acceptable to go out and protest for social justice, but not acceptable to receive communion, or play the clarinet (which California Gov. Gavin Newsom banned on Thanksgiving last year)? He believes there is something more important going on here. Poulos speculates, “It is about changing our form of government without our consent.”

Julia R. Norgaard, a Catholic and the discussion’s moderator, wants to know why so many clergy are afraid of the state, and accepted the state’s designation that churches are non-essential institutions. She said, “For Californians, you know that marijuana shops were deemed essential, but churches were not.”

Poulos later said that he believes that Covid gave certain elites an opportunity to remake America. We are watching the emergence of a social credit system that begins with people having to sign off on woke ideology before being allowed to participate in institutional life. He believes that Covid proved that Americans would accept baseless commands.

Talking about the government being a proponent of soft totalitarianism, Lance Christensen, a Mormon, recalled the Prop 8 fight in the first decade of the 20th century was a perfect example of this in action. Despite Prop 8 forbidding same-sex marriage passing muster with the voters, San Francisco Mayor Gavin Newsom didn’t care, and instituted it anyway.

Christensen worked in California state politics for years, and said that here, they have only two parties: one of cats and one of kneecappers. “The cats don’t like to be told what to do, so the kneecappers always win,” he said. The Right has to figure out what it’s for, and willing to do to defend its values. Norgaard, the moderator, asked Christensen if he worried in light of the new line from rising conservative politicians like J.D. Vance (that the government should be more active to promote conservative views), Christensen said the answer depends on whether liberal democracy is over, or can be saved. He’s not sure, but he said that the only way we are ever going to be able to push back effectively against the institutional power of wokeness is by rooting ourselves firmly in faith.

(I hope to talk to him more about that point after the panel. I would agree with him in two senses: 1) that we have to have a positive vision of the Good for which to fight, and 2) that our faith has to give us the strength to withstand suffering and defeat without collapsing.)

Julia Norgaard asked about the role failure to have faith in institutions plays in bringing about soft totalitarianism.

“I wish I had faith in my government. I wish I had faith in the churches. I wish I had faith in the families; families have been hollowed out,” said Lance Christensen. He went on to say that, “Coming out to forums like this is fun, but the real things that matter is the activism that happens in our neighborhoods and homes.”

Poulos said that what’s wrong with the institutions is that they are not going to survive in a world in which everyone has a smartphone and plugging it into our brains all the time. “We have to accept the fact that we are cyborgs now,” he said.

He added that it is not clear that most people want to live in a world free from digital devices. Poulos: “The thought that institutions built to rule the world, in a liberal international sense, is able to extend control over those devices is being proven out not to be true. Liberal democracy [in not] proving itself capable of controlling these technologies.”

He said the only way liberalism can survive is if it gives up on globalist internationalism. Cultures all around the world are going to have to figure out a way to regain some sense of national control of the Internet. And most important, we are going to need “a spiritual and cultural renaissance.”

(Poulos really has the crowd on his side. I’m eager to read his new book.)

William Voegeli, senior editor of the Claremont Review of Books, points out that wokeness is not popular among the masses, even non-white people. “As California has gotten less white, affirmative action has gotten less popular,” he said. This suggests that even as the “successor ideology” has captured the elites, whenever it is put to a vote, the people reject it.

UPDATE.2: In the third and final panel of the day, panelists are talking about soft totalitarianism and the church. We have Elizabeth Corey from Baylor, the Solzhenitsyn scholar Dan Mahoney of Assumption College , and John Wood Jr., of Braver Angels, an organization that tries to bring left and right together for dialogue.

Before they started talking about church life, the panelists gave short reflections about what they’ve seen so far. Corey says that there are professors like her at Baylor who aren’t on board with the woke program, and they are organized resisters. She says that the most elite institutions may be lost, but there is good work to be done at less elite colleges. Corey says she has a network of sympathetic faculty all over the country, and they trade strategy notes all the time. This is hopeful.

Dan Mahoney said that he believes things are much worse than Elizabeth Corey does, saying that he has seen the same kind of mendacity at smaller colleges.

Turning to the church topic, moderator Pete Peterson, who runs the public policy school at Pepperdine, said he doesn’t think that the American church thinks and talks enough about what happened to Christians and others under Soviet totalitarianism. Mahoney said that it really is true that Americans just don’t know about the gulag — and that leaves us vulnerable. Mahoney said, “We don’t face gulags, but we face an immanent totalitarian logic that could destroy the foundations of our democracy.”

Corey said that she has read and thought about wokeness a lot. At the same time, she thinks we should recognize that wokeness is not the same everywhere, and not at the same strength everywhere. She said that she personally knows the resistance now forming within higher ed circles.

“It is our obligation as Christians to engage with the other side,” she said, with a nod to John Wood. “We do that by engaging the Christian virtues of charity and humility. If we don’t do that, in my view, we are not leading an authentic Christian life.”

Peterson asked John Wood, Jr. to consider that we are in a different situation than we as a country were in Dr. Martin Luther King’s era. Back then, for all our divisions, we shared a sense of cultural unity that simply doesn’t exist today. Wood replied by saying that we have to keep pushing with love to find empathy with each other.

Recalling Habi Zhang’s question that she doesn’t understand why Americans are willing to hand power over to the state, Wood said that there are plenty of examples — especially from the African-American experience — in which the state had to intervene to stop great injustice. Wood went on to talk about how important it is to refuse the temptation not to talk to each other.

“We can’t win without using the power of love and goodwill to lead a transformation in the soul of America,” he said.

Corey, Wood, and Mahoney

Mahoney responded by saying that most of what Wood said is true, but that we have to understand that there really are some people that we can’t talk to. If someone demands that you accept their premises before they will speak to you, then there’s no point. He went on to quote a French priest who was a world authority on Marxist ideology, but who warned anti-communists to be very careful about dialoguing with Communists, for fear that Christians would be disarmed by the Marxist mode of discourse. If I understand the professor correctly, he was saying that if Marxist interlocutors see dialogue as nothing more than an opportunity to conquer an enemy, then the entire exercise is corrupted by bad faith.

Peterson asks the panel to talk about the courage that will be required of Christians who don’t have any chance to dialogue with people who run institutions crushing them, and never have the chance to appeal to them to stop.

“I think the elemental question you’re asking is how you love people who are oppressing you,” Wood said.

Peterson said, “I want to press the point a little further. We are not at a place of equal power. They do have the power to oppress.”

Wood said Dr. King had to deal with this all the time. “The Gospel set a very high standard. … Jesus, in the midst of being crucified, said, ‘Forgive them, Father, for they know not what they do.'”

Wood said that we have to realize that one thing we all share in common is that we all suffer from a history of pain and brokenness, simply by virtue of being human — and that we all share sin.

Mahoney, again, stood on the idea that we can’t forget that there are people who hold to an ideology that keeps us from holding a real dialogue. Still, we can’t forget that they might believe a terrible ideology, but they remain human, which is to say that they are made in the image of God. Keeping that clear is a real spiritual challenge.

Mahoney said there are two errors to be avoided: 1) the radical subjectivization of truth (“my truth”), and 2) the view of the Catholic integralists who believe that we should create a state that produces “a despotic application of the truth”. Our problem today is irrational relativism tied to toxic moralism.

Corey, on what professors should do: “It is our responsibility as academics to say, “That’s not right, and here’s why. I’m going to lay it out and do it civilly, and, I hope, fairly. People don’t have to listen — that’s beyond my control — but we have to say what we believe to be true.”

She went on to say that if we really are committed to truth, we have to be prepared to suffer for it. If we believe Christianity is true, then we must expect that this could happen.

Wood said: “Dr. King said love and power have to go together. Love without power is weak and anemic, and power without love is authoritarian and brutal.”

John Wood is really impressive. Corey and Mahoney are old friends of mine, but I didn’t know of Wood before. But I’m going to be following him now. It strikes me, listening to him that all anti-woke activists should study Dr. King and the civil rights movement, and embrace their tactics. That line of King’s he brought up defines my concern about the way some of us resist wokeness: it is without love, and in fact sees those who love and respect others as weak.

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University Of Unwoke

What terrific news! I knew this was coming, and today it’s official: the University of Austin is here. From Pano Kanelos, its president:

But in these top schools, and in so many others, can we actually claim that the pursuit of truth—once the central purpose of a university—remains the highest virtue? Do we honestly believe that the crucial means to that end—freedom of inquiry and civil discourse—prevail when illiberalism has become a pervasive feature of campus life?

The numbers tell the story as well as any anecdote you’ve read in the headlines or heard within your own circles. Nearly a quarter of American academics in the social sciences or humanities endorse ousting a colleague for having a wrong opinion about hot-button issues such as immigration or gender differences. Over a third of conservative academics and PhD students say they had been threatened with disciplinary action for their views. Four out of five American PhD students are willing to discriminate against right-leaning scholars, according to a report by the Center for the Study of Partisanship and Ideology.

The picture among undergraduates is even bleaker. In Heterodox Academy’s 2020 Campus Expression Survey, 62% of sampled college students agreed that the climate on their campus prevented students from saying things they believe. Nearly 70% of students favor reporting professors if the professor says something students find offensive, according to a Challey Institute for Global Innovation survey. The Foundation for Individual Rights in Education reports at least 491 disinvitation campaigns since 2000. Roughly half were successful.

On our quads, faculty are being treated like thought criminals. Dorian Abbot, a University of Chicago scientist who has objected to aspects of affirmative action, was recently disinvited from delivering a prominent public lecture on planetary climate at MIT. Peter Boghossian, a philosophy professor at Portland State University, finally quit in September after years of harassment by faculty and administrators. Kathleen Stock, a professor at University of Sussex, just resigned after mobs threatened her over her research on sex and gender.

More:

At some future point, historians will study how we arrived at this tragic pass. And perhaps by then we will have reformed our colleges and universities, restoring them as bastions of open inquiry and civil discourse.

But we are done waiting. We are done waiting for the legacy universities to right themselves. And so we are building anew.

I mean that quite literally.

As I write this, I am sitting in my new office (boxes still waiting to be unpacked) in balmy Austin, Texas, where I moved three months ago from my previous post as president of St. John’s College in Annapolis.

I am not alone.

Our project began with a small gathering of those concerned about the state of higher education—Niall Ferguson, Bari Weiss, Heather Heying, Joe Lonsdale, Arthur Brooks, and I—and we have since been joined by many others, including the brave professors mentioned above, Kathleen Stock, Dorian Abbot and Peter Boghossian.

We count among our numbers university presidents: Robert Zimmer, Larry Summers, John Nunes, and Gordon Gee, and leading academics, such as Steven Pinker, Deirdre McCloskey, Leon Kass, Jonathan Haidt,  Glenn Loury, Joshua Katz, Vickie Sullivan, Geoffrey Stone, Bill McClay, and Tyler Cowen.

We are also joined by journalists, artists, philanthropists, researchers, and public intellectuals, including Lex Fridman, Andrew Sullivan, Rob Henderson, Caitlin Flanagan, David Mamet, Ayaan Hirsi Ali, Sohrab Ahmari, Stacy Hock, Jonathan Rauch, and Nadine Strossen.

We are a dedicated crew that grows by the day. Our backgrounds and experiences are diverse; our political views differ. What unites us is a common dismay at the state of modern academia and a recognition that we can no longer wait for the cavalry. And so we must be the cavalry.

It will surely seem retro—perhaps even countercultural—in an era of massive open online courses and distance learning to build an actual school in an actual building with as few screens as possible. But sometimes there is wisdom in things that have endured.

The university as we know it today is an institution that originated in 11th-century Europe. The fact that there have been universities for nearly a thousand years—despite all the extraordinary changes in the nature of knowledge and communications technology in that time—tells us something important.

We believe human beings think and learn better when they gather in dedicated locations, where they are, to some extent, insulated from the quotidian struggle to make ends meet, and where there is no fundamental distinction between those who teach and those who learn, beyond the extent of their knowledge and wisdom.

We believe that the purpose of education is not simply employment, but human flourishing, which includes meaningful employment. We are therefore also reconceiving the relationship between a liberal education and the demands of our dynamic and fluid professional world.

And:

Our rigorous curriculum will be the first designed in partnership not only with great teachers but also society’s great doers—founders of daring ventures, dissidents who have stood up to authoritarianism, pioneers in tech, and the leading lights in engineering and the natural sciences. Our students will be exposed to the deepest wisdom of civilization and learn to encounter works not as dead traditions but as fierce contests of timeless significance that help human beings distinguish between what is true and false, good and bad, beautiful and ugly. Students will come to see such open inquiry as a lifetime activity that demands of them a brave, sometimes discomfiting, search for enduring truths.

This core purpose—the intrepid pursuit of truth—has been at the heart of education since Plato founded his Academy in 387 B.C. Reviving it would produce a resilient (or “antifragile”) cohort with exceptional capacity to think fearlessly, nimbly, and inventively. Such graduates will be the future leaders best prepared to address humanity’s challenges.

Read it all. 

Pano Kanelos was the president of St. John’s College. He left to help found this new university. I cannot express strongly enough how thrilled I am by this! Please, if you are a donor to a college that has gone woke, redirect your donations to the University of Austin. 

Here’s a link to the FAQ page.

At the NatCon event last week, there was some talk in the hallways about how we all know what we are against — wokeness — but what are we for? The University of Austin is a concrete answer. More power to them!

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The Return of ‘San Francisco Democrats’

I just don’t get the Democrats. Liberal talking heads are still ranting and raving about how white supremacy is responsible for Terry McAuliffe’s loss in Virginia last week — this, because of the controversy over Critical Race Theory in Virginia schools. The Left’s reaction to the CRT controversy is a version of the Law of Merited Impossibility. It’s like, We are not teaching Critical Race Theory in the schools, and it’s a good thing we are, you white supremacists! That is, it’s as if you can only recognize the presence of CRT if you are eager to praise it.

The fact that Virginians elected a black Republican lieutenant governor is taken as more evidence that they are white supremacists, because Winsome Sears is not really black. Seriously, this is what talking head Michael Eric Dyson ranted about to Joy Reid:

MSNBC guest on @WinsomeSears:

“There is a black mouth moving but a white idea running on the runway of the tongue of a figure who justifies and legitimates the white supremacist practices.” pic.twitter.com/P3O8ciTveG

— Jewish Deplorable (@TrumpJew2) November 5, 2021

According to CNN’s exit polling, 61 percent of whites voted for Sears, who is black:

They voted for her because they are conservatives, and so is she. It can’t be possible in the mind of the American left that someone could vote not on race, but on political conviction — so they convince themselves that Winsome Sears, a Jamaican immigrant, Christian, US Marine veteran, small business owner, and former homeless shelter manager, is not really black.

What terrible people they are, the Michael Eric Dysons and Joy Reids. But you see why their fanaticism is so unattractive to normal people. They demand that you vote their way, and think their way, or you are a racist — even if you are black! Gosh, I can’t imagine why more people aren’t drawn to a party that embraces this garbage.

Do the Democrats not grasp that ordinary Americans hear what the Left says about “whiteness” as evil? If you tell people that they are wicked by virtue of the color of their skin, you should not be surprised when they don’t vote for you. To be fair, I am not aware of specific Democrats who have done that (though there may be some). But who among the Democrats speaks out clearly and unequivocally against this neoracism? They don’t because they don’t want to antagonize their base, which embraces it. Fine, but don’t be surprised when actual white people hear you loud and clear, and vote for candidates from the party that doesn’t hate them.

Similarly, consider the Democratic Party’s views on crime and punishment. We all saw their reaction to the 2020 race riots and looting. San Francisco is a liberal city that elected a District Attorney, Chesa Boudin, descended from Marxist royalty, who campaigned on a soft on crime theme — “decarceration” and the like. Crime, already bad there, is now out of control in that city now. Look:

I hope “tolerating burglaries” sounds good to you, because this it coming to every American city that doesn’t strenuously oppose it. https://t.co/ciymxe2wi0

— Abigail Shrier (@AbigailShrier) November 7, 2021

Click on the SF Chronicle story. This is not a joke: people in San Francisco really are wondering if their city should become Brazilified. Thomas Chatterton Williams, on the same story:

Speaks to the total insanity of the moment. I mean, really, What to do pic.twitter.com/4hfxheubKE

— Thomas Chatterton Williams (@thomaschattwill) November 6, 2021

More:

Kramerbooks is just off Dupont Circle, in a very nice part of Washington. If this is happening next to Kramer’s, and police just ignore it, then DC is going to hell.

Back to San Francisco. Look at this clip, taken by a tourist. You might be mad that the cable car guy is just eating his sandwich and watching, but would you risk getting shot to intervene?

FISHERMAN’S WHARF SMASH & GRAB
Sophia Massad, a musician from Oklahoma, shared this video w me of a smash-and-grab she witnessed in broad daylight on 11/1 at Hyde/North Point. She said she was in SF for Outside Lands, was shocked and frightened to see this brazen burglary @KPIXtv pic.twitter.com/oW8qq3bXMX

— Betty Yu (@BettyKPIX) November 6, 2021

Another, maybe the same crew:

More footages from the incident happened near #GoldenGateBridge #SF #SanFrancisco. Too bad I wasn’t there, could’ve had a chance at that k that Mayor ⁦@LondonBreed⁩ offers! #BayArea I heard the car was stolen, plate was stolen. Do you recognize these thugs? Chance at ? pic.twitter.com/qxOic0rXOj

— SFGAL (@SFGAL8) October 25, 2021

Here’s a response to the Chronicle story on Twitter — achingly liberal:

Root cause analysis: Why are people stealing? If it is because they can’t earn a living wage, fix that and see what happens.

— Moor (@reedmoor163) November 6, 2021

It’s almost like liberals cannot deal with the human capacity for evil.

Who wants to live in a city run by soft-on-crime liberals like SFO Mayor London Breed, and DA Chesa Boudin? Remember, San Francisco is the city where the lunatic school board couldn’t get the schools back open during Covid, but wasted time and money on a plan (now scrapped) to rename the city’s schools to scrub memory of historical monsters like, um, Abraham Lincoln and Paul Revere.

It is time for the Republican Party to resurrect Jeanne Kirkpatrick’s insult in her 1984 GOP Convention speech, smearing “the San Francisco Democrats.” Kirkpatrick was a hawkish neoconservative Democrat whose speech was about foreign policy. The Democratic convention that year, the one that nominated Walter Mondale, was held in San Francisco, which even then was a symbol of far-left liberal governance. Well, almost 40 years later, “San Francisco Democrats” symbolizes a political party that is so paralyzed by its own crackpot dogmas that it cannot govern, and allows a city to be overrun by actual criminals, and ideologues who take over institutions and ruin them. And remember: the people of San Francisco elected these leaders.

Longtime readers know that I am a conservative, but not a Republican. I quit the party in 2008, angry over the Iraq War and the party’s coddling of Wall Street (to be fair, since the Clinton administration, the Democrats have been Wall Street’s best friends too). The GOP does not impress me, and I have voted Democratic in local elections (e.g., for Louisiana governor). That said, the past four years of the Great Awokening and its effect on the Democratic Party has made it all but impossible to consider voting Democratic. I’m a white male Christian: why should I vote for a party whose most strident voices openly hate me, my family, and my friends? Why should I vote for a party overseeing the march of woke radicals through institutions which they ruin by mainstreaming their insane theories?

Watch at least some of Winsome Sears’ victory speech. It’s proud and hopeful and patriotic. Compare this to the unhinged, bigoted ranting of Michael Eric Dyson, whose views mirror those of the Democratic Party’s elites. Which one has a more appealing story to tell America? More than half the white Virginians who voted for lieutenant governor voted for Winsome Sears — and that victory speech tells you why. The more the Democratic Party doubles down on its anti-white racism and soft-on-crime squish-headedness, the better things look for the GOP. The Sears family lives in Winchester, Virginia. I’ll take Winchester Republicans over San Francisco Democrats any day of the week, and twice on Sunday.

UPDATE: J.D. Vance said the other day, and Batya Ungar-Sargon said on CNN this weekend, that this is class war masquerading as culture war. Ladies and gentlemen, I give you Amy Siskind, with 524,000 Twitter followers, on “these women”:

On that CNN clip about the so-called white suburban women – the narrative is complete bullsh%! College educated white woman voted for McAuliffe by a bigger margin than Biden. Non-college white women gave it to Youngkin- and the reason is simple: racism- they don’t want progress.

— Amy Siskind (@Amy_Siskind) November 7, 2021

I join others in being dismayed and disgusted by these women. I don’t know how to reach non-college educated white women. The women I can connect with and influence are college educated white women. I am open to suggestions of ways of doing so ahead of 2022. Bring it!

— Amy Siskind (@Amy_Siskind) November 7, 2021

Can’t imagine why non-college-educated white women wouldn’t want to vote for a party run by white women like Amy Siskind, who hate them.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

This is all about powerful left-wing women signaling to any professional women who want as much as to co-exist with the right understand that they will be punished for it. Educated women skew left, even hard left. What do you think is going to happen when those educated, privileged white women clash with angry, economically marginalized white men?

UPDATE.3: Reader Jonah R. comments:

I just looked on the NPR website. There’s been only one story about Winsome Sears since the election, and it’s an overview of how black conservatives “walk a fine line.”

She hasn’t been mentioned in the New York Times since the November 3 story “Election losses leave U.S. Democrats reeling.”

She hasn’t been mentioned in the Washington Post since the November 3 story announcing her win.

If she had a “D” after her name, they’d already be cranking out the action figures, T-shirts, and children’s books.

And the truth is, she’s a very interesting, accomplished person. She’s an immigrant, attended a community college, became an electrician, served in the military, attended non-elite colleges, ran a homeless shelter, and owns an appliance and plumbing-repair store. Compared to someone like Kamala Harris, who has spent her entire life in politics and law, Winsome Sears is a breath of fresh air. She reminds me of people I know who have more inborn political savvy than people who live and breathe politics. People like her know how to get things done, and others, especially their foes, gravely underestimate them.

I was in the car over the weekend, listening to NPR. At the top of the newscast, they reported that another barrier had been broken in racial progress. Thanks to Biden, the US Census Bureau now had its first Latinx (yes, NPR uses that stupid fake term that Latinos hate) director. This is what makes headline news at NPR these days: a bureaucrat of the right ethnic background running a government agency. But not Winsome Sears.

 

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Hating White Women As Progressive Virtue

When future historians sort through the ruins of America, columns like this racist, sexist trash from the Daily Beast will be evidence of who killed this country, and how they did it. The author is Wajahat Ali, who devotes an entire unhinged rant to denouncing white women — “Karens”. Excerpts:

As a student of American history and a person of color, I never underestimate the white, hot rage, anxiety, and resentment of a Karen scorned. You might think you’ve won them over with Beyonce, Oprah, chai latte, and henna, but the cult of Karen will always turn on people of color on a dime to uphold oppressive systems that ensure they remain influential and powerful handmaidens of white supremacy.

Don’t believe me? According to an NBC exit poll, 75 percent of white women without college degrees voted for Glenn Youngkin for Governor in Virginia, compared to 56 percent who went for Trump in 2020. They voted for a man whose single campaign message was about stopping the manufactured bogeyman of Critical Race Theory, the latest incarnation of the Southern Strategy, which most of his voters can’t define and isn’t taught in schools, but they are certain it is absolutely terrifying and worth canceling because it’s making their kids hate white people and become transgender.

In some bright news, 62 percent of college-educated white women went for Democrat Terry McAuliffe, up from 58 percent who went for Biden last year. But overall a majority of white women, around 57 percent, went for Youngkin—a remarkable 15-point swing from 2020 when 50 percent went for Biden and 49 percent for Trump.

I’m not surprised.

Good grief. These people are absolutely ineducable. If you are a leftist who believes that Critical Race Theory is a fake controversy, you are completely out of touch with reality. These white women weren’t voting to ensure that they remained “powerful handmaidens of white supremacy.” They were voting to defend their children from fanatical racists like Wajahat Ali and his allies in the education bureaucracy. Democrats who cannot accept this basic truth are going to keep losing.

The world of Wajahat Ali is so perverse that even black and brown people who don’t share his radical ideology are fake black and fake brown people:

Talking about this racism also apparently makes you a racist, as I learned last night on social media from my many adoring GOP-voting fans. They assured me they’re not racist, because they also elected conservative Winsome Sears as the state’s first female, Black lieutenant governor! You might remember her defiant picture posing with a rifle, which is totally normal, and means she’ll be able to shoot the coronavirus and CRT away. Republican Jason Miyares, a son of Cuban immigrants, also won as attorney general, and he provides further cover of color to many of these white women and GOP voters who delude themselves into believing they have “zero racist bones in their body” because they elected two people of color. Of course, no person of color has ever caped for whiteness, embraced racist policies, and echoed racist dog whistles to attain fame, fortune, or political office. Oh, hello, Candace Owens and Larry Elder! Sorry, I didn’t see you, the ghost of Herman Cain!

Back here on Planet Earth, who but a masochistic white liberal would actually vote for candidates who support educational policies that demonize them, their children, and their spouses on the basis of race? Does Wajahat Ali not recognize that these white women he condemns in these columns have white husbands, white fathers, and white sons, who don’t appreciate their women being trashed by the likes of him? For that matter, don’t these loonies understand that many white women rightly regard their votes as defending the white men in their lives from the systemic race hatred that the Wajahat Alis and Terry McAuliffes of the world wish to institute?

To hell with these people. We need to say it louder, and more often. They are poisoning our country with their bigotries. We are better than that. It’s time we stopped being intimidated by them. Yes, they control the media and the culture-forming institutions, but we don’t have to surrender to them. The courageous and tireless Chris Rufo has shown what a single determined activist and his allies can do. We don’t have to live by the lies of the Wajahat Ali ruling class!

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A Prophet Crying In The Valley

You have to see this hilarious garbage from Microsoft:

Woke Capital incarnate. pic.twitter.com/KHlfMzjOt9

— Balaji Srinivasan (@balajis) November 4, 2021

Wes Yang, tweeting part of the same cringey presentation:

This is why no election of a governor or president really matter with regard to these issues https://t.co/LrTJLdBJu3

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) November 4, 2021

Yep. Yang’s remark highlights why culture is paramount regarding the advance and durability of wokeness. If telling everybody what your pronouns, race, hair color, and clothes are before addressing them is what it takes to work in a place like Microsoft, you will have people falling all over themselves to comply. There’s not a political solution to this. It’s certainly dorky, which is not the worst thing in the world, but behind these ridiculous woke rituals there’s a nasty ideology.

These clips bring to mind something I heard out in northern California last weekend, from a longtime tech employee in Silicon Valley (he’s deeply closeted as a Christian conservative): that the tech culture in the Valley is both ideologically monochromatic and utterly confident that it knows best for everybody. What happens in Silicon Valley does not stay there, because the people who run the tech industry have unparalleled reach into our lives.

In his latest Substack newsletter, Paul Kingsnorth writes:

I believe that we are heading fast into the creation of something unique in human history: a global anti-culture, entirely unmoored from reality itself, and at war with it. It is not limited to any particular political or cultural tradition: though it arose in the West, from peculiarities of Western history, it has since become universal. It manifests at present as a hybrid of two of the most successful products of modernity: capitalist economics and leftist politics. The hybrid is not as strange as it might seem: the modern project, whether infused with the theories of ‘left’ or ‘right’, whether presented by Karl Marx or Ayn Rand, is ultimately the project of liberating humanity from the chains of both nature and culture.

In a way, there is – or once was – a kind of nobility in this project, this attempt at breaking the bounds, soaring to the stars. It is the pursuit of cosmopolis which I wrote about here some weeks ago: a utopian attempt to replace religious and ethnic conflict with universal peace and love. But ideal societies have a nasty habit of turning into mirrors of the things they set out to replace. Liberatory ambition can never be sated. Like a dictator marching on Moscow, the Machine doesn’t know when to stop, and now we can see where this project of globalised liberation is leading us: into the world of the nihil, the empire of technique.

While in Orlando this week, I ran into a law student named Isaac Weitzhandler, who is studying at Stanford. He took up the law after first training as a scientist. At the National Conservatism conference, he was handing out copies of a self-published manuscript called Houllebecq In The Valley. He approached me and gave me one, knowing of my admiration for the French novelist. I read it on the way back home yesterday, and wrote this morning to my literary agent and my editor at Sentinel saying that I thought it had serious potential. Let me explain.

Weitzhandler (henceforth, “Isaac,” which is easier to write) has penned a book-length protest against the vapidity of our culture, and in particular the role of science and technology in dehumanizing us. It reads like an urgent cross between Dostoevsky’s Notes From Underground, Live Not By Lies, and How Dante Can Save Your Life. In fact, Isaac sounds like a Houllebecq character, if Houellebecq (pronounced “well-beck”) wrote about people who were mentally and spiritually sound. That is, Isaac recognizes the inhuman emptiness of contemporary culture, as Houllebecq’s characters do, but he is determined to resist it, not surrender to it. An excerpt:

So , what do we do when we find ourselves at home in a place that is evil?

We say no, knowing that the world will put us down, and understanding that it must be so. We know that all seems to be lost but we have something indomitable inside of us that makes it impossible to give up. And we try our best to feel the surges of love in our chests, to know that they come from God, and to decipher His meaning.

Our world is overwhelming and all-encompassing and impossible to stop, and we know that to stand up to it will be to be swept away.

All we can do is what Houellebecq has done, what Solzhenitsyn said was the key to our self-neglected liberation, which is to say and to swear:

I WILL NOT LIVE BY LIES.

The “valley” of the book’s title is Silicon Valley, where Isaac grew up. He was born in 1990, and is very angry — justly! — that the older generation did not preserve the institutions and ways of life that are necessary for the rising generation to have a normal, healthy life. Excerpt:

I didn’t learn until my twenties that Stanford had stopped teaching Western Civilization to all of its students before I was even born.

To even contemplate such a thing makes me weep. Didn’t anyone think of the children who would grow up aimless, wandering and lost?

I was one such child. I grew up in the aftermath; the ruins and destruction were all I ever knew. It took me years to even understand that there was something missing.

What does it mean to grow up in a civilization that has severed its tie with history? How can one be a child in such a world?

Well, in fact, a child is all you can ever be in such a world — and this has something to do with why Isaac’s generation is so amenable to totalitarian politics. From Live Not By Lies:

Forgetting the atrocities of communism is bad enough. What is even more dangerous is the habit of forgetting one’s past. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera drily observes that nobody today will defend gulags, but the world remains full of suckers for the false utopian promises that bring gulags into existence.

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality.

“Children, never look back!,” [cries Kundera’s character Husak], and what he meant was that we must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future. It’s not that forgetting the evils of communism means we are in danger of re-creating precisely that form of totalitarianism. It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general.

Put another way, we not only have to remember totalitarianism to build a resistance to it; we have to remember how to remember, period.

Isaac writes that discovering Houellebecq was finding a writer who describes the world in which he (Isaac) actually lives. That is, Houellebecq made him realize that he, Isaac, the dissident, the stranger to this world, was not insane. “We should all be asking ourselves: Who are we? Why are we here? What are we doing?” he writes. More:

Silicon Valley is a modern nightmare. It is a dystopia. It is an evil force in the world. It is an awesome, terrifying, and brutal machine that has unmade our humanity and reconstructed it in its own image.

In remaking our humanity it has left space only for the most limited ethical considerations. It is something that must be stopped, even though it has created a world in which it is increasingly impossible to say so.

What is needed is not to discuss how the Valley can be more “ethical,” or to talk about how it can be better “regulated,” but to say no to the whole thing, the entire project.

Michel Houellebecq says no to the world. In that, I join him.

One thing I love about this book is the directness and passion of the author’s voice. He writes prophetically without being a scold — not an easy thing to do. Isaac trained as a biomedical researcher, and says in the book that it’s an open secret in the field that scientists can’t reproduce results in a wide variety of fields. The scientism we live by is unwarranted, he says, but we keep living out this lie because we find it useful. It keeps the money flowing, and satisfies the public that Science Is In Command. Isaac is not at all anti-science, but says that the contemporary scientific field has grown alarmingly indifferent to results, satisfying itself with simply keeping the whole machinery rumbling along. Isaac says that it functions as “a money procurement and jobs program for themselves and for future generations of people like them.”

Isaac says that Houellebecq’s message to young people is that they live in a society that sells them an idea of what the good life is, but which makes it impossible to realize the good life. That is to say, the idea itself — the Design Your Life ideal — makes achieving a truly good life impossible. He explains the culture of the “personal statement,” in which institutional gatekeepers (e.g., college admissions personnel) as seventeen-year-olds to write a testimonial to their bespoke view of the world. But most people, especially teenagers, lack the experience or even the capacity to come up with something daring and original — nor should they have to. More:

For Houellebecq, most people do not have the capacity to make conscious choices about right and wrong in all or even most areas of their lives; they need norms to make for them a path of least resistance.

Stripped down to its essence, the goal of modern liberalism is to help each individual break free of all these norms. What I encountered as a student was the embodiment of this goal in our educational institutions.

In America, the personal statement is the opposite of a path of least resistance. It tells every young person: no matter how much you feel that there is a well-trodden path that is attractive to you, you must not follow it. You must take the path of most resistance, which is being a trail-blazer and making your own new path.

Isaac reflects on the bitter irony that his people, the Jews, endured centuries upon centuries of persecution and hardship. Some of them arrived in America, a place where they could finally live in peace. Now they have been assimilating themselves out of existence:

The crisis of intermarriage for American Jews  has been well-documented. Centuries of forced expulsion, violence, rape, mass murder, and genocide did not so seriously threaten the continued existence of the Jewish people as modernity and secularism do today.

… For millennia, nothing has been more important to us than the survival of our people. Now we live in a country that leads us to throw it all away. And for what?

More:

The people who built this system will cling onto it with everything they have because they don’t have anything else. How can I tell my cousins and aunts and uncles that everything they imbue with such importance — SATs and colleges and organic chemistry and all the rest — that it’s all worthless, that it’s worse than worthless, that it’s evil?

How is this what we believe in? Is there really nothing more around which to orient our lives? This abyss is what American have given us. And yet we can’t stop saying how great it is, and participating in all of its sacred rituals.

In this is an echo, from Live Not By Lies, of what the Budapest teacher Tamas Salyi told me: that free-market liberal democracy has done more to erase from the memory of the post-communist generation the substance of what it means to be Hungarian. What the slaves to the Soviets could not do, consumer capitalism has done.

Isaac’s writing about how hard it is to live out what all healthy civilizations expect of their young — marriage and family — is particularly wrenching. For example:

If you do manage to find someone with whom you want to start a family, you get no support from your society’s institutions: you’re on your own. If you fail, there are again no guiderails or safety nets: either one of you can leave, any time, with no consequences. Things just didn’t work out, that’s all.

Supposedly, we live in a culture that doesn’t prefer any specific individual or family arrangement, and instead leaves everyone free to choose. Really, we live in a culture that is against the family. Marriage as a norm is dead: you can still do it, but the one thing that you can’t do is proclaim your belief in its goodness.

Isaac says that Houellebecq’s idea of love as dependence on another — of sex as the union of two souls, and new life as the natural and blessed fruit of that union — is alien to Silicon Valley culture. More:

Houellebecq says that someone of my generation cannot feel his kind of love, or even understand it, and that if we could feel something like it, it would make us feel “uncomfortable, as if it were something ridiculous and a little shameful, like stigmata in ancient times.”

That’s not how I feel. I don’t know if I can feel his kind of love but I think I do, even if I can’t understand it. And it doesn’t make me feel uncomfortable. No, reading his description fills me with a terrible longing for a world which I fear I will never know. That there were once truths and laws about love and family and sex that were unbreakable and more important than all of us — I can understand the idea but I don’t think I will ever feel it to be true. And I will never be able to make it true, even in my own little corner of the world, no matter how hard I try. Because even if I do manage to build my own little island, the violent sea will still be against us, and the best we will be able to do will be to hang on for dear life.

Isaac Weitzhandler is thundering in the desert here:

It’s monstrous what we’ve done; we’ve thrown away everything, all of it, and now people grow up in isolation and live lives of quiet desperation; at best they are able to construct a family for a few years, but still, the maxim of our world remains that we are born alone, live alone, and die alone.

… How can we call this by sterile names like increasing social atomization and fraying societal fabric? We should call it the destruction of love and happiness and the destruction of society too, because that’s what it is. How can it be that I have to strain so mightily just to say that this even exists? That it is so hard to say that saying it brings me to the point of insanity?

Later in the book, Isaac speculates as to why the DYL (Design Your Life) philosophy is winning. Excerpt:

It is selfish. The primary input is a want, and the method is built around just giving people what they already want. There is no moral imperative, no “should”; there is no interrogating the want, much less trying to change it; DYL just takes what we already wants as a given and tries to fulfill those wants. This is selfishness.

It is individualistic. There is no shared aspect of DYL: it offers no blueprint for a shared life with anyone — not even in marriage or family and certainly not in society in general. It is a kind of shared selfish dreaming, but instead of knowing that “the dream is teaching the dreamers how to live,” it tells us all to just keep dreaming.

Is is scientific. It seems technical and certain; it looks scientific because it has charts and quantities and arrows and flowcharts. It feels proven and valid to people. (Is this how people once felt about the Bible?) It is koumbaya and scientific at the same time: it is a new religion.

It destroys. It asks people to push beyond their limits and to make themselves uncomfortable, to go outside of their comfort zones. We are teaching ourselves to accept this in every context because we are against the very existence of moral imperatives (interdicts, as Rieff would call them). This is an instantiation of destroying: it is a way of reprogramming our minds.

It is all form, no substance. It uses positive-thinking slogans for something that is very insidious; it reformulates something bad with positive words so that you can’t criticize it. And by only talking about form, it seeks to give people control over their lives, but as long as they don’t know how to even begin to consider the substance, they are swept away.

We need to remind ourselves now: For the big questions, there may or may not always be answers, but there is certainly a lot of asking and thinking and reading and writing. Now, we deny all of this. DYL rejects the bigger questions, rejects any larger meaning or suffering or shared morality. It doesn’t even deny them explicitly; it simply assumes that they do not exist and fulfills its own prophecy by programming them out of existence in people’s minds.

It denies people’s suffering even as it also engenders it. And at the same time, it denies the beauty and profundity of mystery and what we don’t understand. It is destruction: it is anti-culture.

He is talking about soft totalitarianism. He is talking about the kind of totalitarianism that is described by Mustapha Mond, the. World Controller for Europe in Huxley’s Brave New World, praised as “Christianity without tears.”

One more passage:

To live here feels impossible — there is simply no help at all, for anyone, in anything. It is a brutal country full of shiny things to distract its people from the loneliness and suffering that it engenders. We are surrounded by sex and drugs and junk food and pornography and money and consumption. To say it sounds tired because we don’t even bother to denounce it anymore; it appears to us as normal, natural.

Nowadays LeBron James can say that the most important work of his life is becoming a billionaire and we all admire him for this, as if it is deeply moral. At least before we had some shame; we had retained enough of the remnants of a moral structure to know that we were supposed to be ashamed about just wanting to consume. But we’ve lost that now; there is no more second degree.

It’s a country where we’ve broken the chain. What else can we do? What can be done? How should we live? What is good and bad? What is right and wrong?

No one is there to tell me or anyone else. And it feels SHAMEFUL to even ask. We are ashamed of the idea that there might be things that we should and should not do, because all we want to believe is that we’re good and we should do whatever we want. This is the argument that gay marriage crystallized: if we want it, then it must be good.

We have eroded every possible moral structure that could stand up to that argument until they were all gone, and then a new barbarism swept through the gates.

Houllebecq In The Valley is an exhilarating read. Towards the end, Isaac quotes this from Houellebecq’s Serotonin:

God takes care of us; he thinks of us every minute, and he gives us instructions that are sometimes very precise. Those surges of love that flow into our chests and take our breath away — those illuminations, those ecstasies, inexplicable if we consider our biological nature, our status as simple primates — are extremely clear signs.

Isaac adds:

What happens after the coping doesn’t work?

Houellebecq has a definitive answer and a tentative one. The definitive answer is that we fight. The tentative answer is that we find God.

This is near to where the book ends. I hope and I pray that Isaac Weitzhandler finds a publisher for this extraordinary book, which is a scalding antidote to the Microsoft woke capitalism nonsense, and the worldview that produces such trivial crap as those videos with which I led this post. Isaac’s book is not ready for market yet — he needs to add to it, and for me, the thing that he needs to add most of all is an exploration of the God answer. If Isaac finds the right publisher and the right editor, this very good first draft could become a powerful, even viral, short book — a statement of generational rebellion, and a prophetic declaration of hope. What a blessing it was to run into this young man in the hallway of the Hilton in Orlando, and to receive his manuscript. If you are a publisher or an agent who would like to be in touch with Isaac, and to get a copy of the Houellebecq In The Valley manuscript, write me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com, and put ISAAC in all caps in the subject line.

UPDATE: A reminder: I am only offering to put you in touch with Isaac if you are a publisher or an agent. I am trying to help him get literary representation, and/or a publisher. Thanks.

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The Baizuocracy At War

That’s an official US Marine Corps graphic, celebrating LGBT pride. Here’s a clip from the Talent Management 2030 document the Marine Corps commandant just released, talking about how they’re going to change the way they deal with personnel. Diversity, Inclusion, and Equity has come to the USMC:

The reader who sent it to me is a veteran. He said this document (he sent the entire USMC paper) could have been taken from any generic multinational corporation. He adds:

My comment is that the priority should be to put together a skilled, cohesive and highly trained military force that can be exceedingly lethal when necessary. The line that diversity provides us a competitive warfighting advantage over our adversaries is entirely absurd.

The beauty of the military I grew up in was the oneness of the soldiers, airmen and sailors and singular commitment to the mission whatever that may be. When that uniform went on, there was no differences or diversity. In times of battle, the cohesion and commitment to each soldier to his brother is what gets them through.

The baizuocracy (my term for institutionalized wokeness, based on the Chinese slur word for “white leftists”), whether in the military or corporate America, loves to proclaim the dogma that Diversity Is Our Strength. Maybe it is, in some ways, depending on the context. But that’s not how they mean it. They mean it in a dogmatic way. I was once part of a work team that was temporary demoralized by this lie, until the employee who was hired under a diversity initiative, but who could not do the work (forcing the rest of us on the team to take on extra duties to compensate for this incompetent person), moved on. But the senior military brass who promulgate these policies will be well set to go to work for a Woke Capitalist firm once they leave the armed forces.

James Hasson has written that President Obama introduced wokeness to the US military. Excerpt:

Radical changes imposed on our military by progressives, begun in earnest during the Obama administration, are negatively impacting our combat readiness and jeopardizing the lives of our men and women in uniform and, ultimately, our national security.  In Stand Down:  How Social Justice Warriors Are Sabotaging America’s Military, author James Hasson elucidates how Barack Obama fundamentally changed military culture to make our nation less secure. Hasson, a former Army captain, Army Ranger School graduate, and Afghanistan veteran, argues that military readiness was sacrificed for identity politics and progressive rhetoric. He lists examples such as policies that established “safe spaces,” prohibited “micro-aggressions,” denigrated “hyper-masculine” traits, implemented unwise “green” standards and injected “social justice” guidelines in military operations.

In his revealing book, Captain Hasson describes how Obama’s military appointees, mainly progressive ideologues lacking military experience and hailing from academic, political, and the private sectors, were placed in charge of seasoned combat generals with decades of combat experience.  The priorities, experience, and philosophies of the officers and appointees couldn’t have been more disparate.

Many senior military staff members suffered in silence at Obama’s attempt to use the military as a “laboratory for progressive social engineering,” according to Hasson.  Exemplifying this shift was the naming of Navy ships after Leftist political heroes. Socialist labor-activist Cesar Chavez and slain gay-rights advocate Harvey Milk — who left the Navy for being gay — were among those who Ray Mabus, Obama’s secretary of the Navy, announced would have ships named after them.  This practice flew in the face of the hallowed Navy tradition of naming ships after presidents and war heroes.

Obama, who, Hasson says, took pride in his lack of military knowledge and experience, made widespread changes to personnel policy, budgetary expenditures and resource allocations that harmed readiness, training and troop safety.  Obama’s transgender policy of “mixed genitalia in the bathrooms,” took precedence over established military culture.  Soldiers were judged by the gender they wished to be rather than their biological sex.  Obama essentially used the military to lead social change in American society rather than preserving time-honored traditions that emphasized troop cohesiveness and readiness.

Where does that leave the rest of us? Well, there was this exciting news this week:

Royal Marines have forced US troops to surrender just days into a training exercise after eliminating almost the entire unit.

The British commandos “dominated” US forces during a training exercise in California, using a new battle structure.

The Telegraph understands the US forces asked for a “reset” half way into the five-day war fighting exercise, having suffered significant simulated casualties.

At one point in the battle, the commandos’ “kill board”, an intelligence assessment of the level of damage inflicted upon enemy equipment and units, had a tick against almost every American asset, indicating it had been deemed destroyed or rendered inoperable.

… The Royal Marines’ success was achieved by targeting the US headquarters and valuable equipment, paralysing counter-attacks from the Americans.

The USMC denies the story. I don’t believe them. A friend who is in a position to understand what happened says that the Royal Marines won by targeting the USMC’s command and control capabilities. This is a repeat of that last US-China wargame, in which China beat us quickly because it disable the US’s cloud capability. My source says that this is what happens when lower-level leadership are too afraid to take independent actions, because they are afraid what will happen to them if they do. This is why the Red Army collapsed so quickly in Operation Barbarossa, the German invasion. Stalin’s purges had earlier cashiered competent commanders and replaced them with politically loyal yes-men. Friend says that aside from wokeness, the US military leadership culture has been conditioned to lie — witness the Afghanistan Papers, which revealed that senior US military officials knew for years that the Afghan war was unwinnable, but hid this from the public. 

Who has been punished for this? Now we are supposed to believe that the Royal Marines didn’t kick the collective ass of the diverse, equitable, and inclusive US Marine Corps, on the say-so of the USMC?

As I mentioned in this space earlier this week, a frustrated and demoralized active-duty armed forces member told me in a face to face conversation the other day that the military leadership is more interested in winning the culture war over unwoke personnel than in winning actual wars against foreign adversaries. Seems to me like the Senate Armed Forces Committee should want to know what wokeness and corruption in the military leadership is doing to our war-fighting capabilities. Or does nobody in command care anymore? At the NatCon conference this week in Orlando, an active-duty service member stood and said that they didn’t really know what they were fighting for anymore.

When we lose a major war. And we will. 90% of the American public will be stunned. Heartbroken and stunned.

But all the signs are there. War game after war game. Naval embarrassment after Naval embarrassment. Our military is painted rust. Complete leadership rot at the top. https://t.co/rGLijCQgpD

— Jesse Kelly (@JesseKellyDC) November 3, 2021

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Don’t Tread On Thomas Sowell

Who’s guarding my Birra Nursia? The Golem of Prague had to call in reinforcements: Dr. Thomas Sowell.

I was given the Sowell figurine at the NatCon convention, by the folks at HeroesOfLiberty.com, who have produced a series of children’s books about people like Dr. Sowell, Justice Amy Coney Barrett, President Ronald Reagan, and others. They also made figurines to accompany them.

The Sowell book is beautiful. Look:

You’ll be able to order the Sowell storybook, the Barrett one, and all of them, in just a few days, via the Heroes of Liberty website. Girls in liberal families have the late Ruth Bader Ginsburg to admire, so parents of girls in conservative families ought to buy the Amy Coney Barrett storybook and figurine for their little ones. And, of course, you can always order Birra Nursia right here in America! For the Golem of Prague, well…

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The Shame Of The Nebraska Catholic Church

Today the Attorney General of Nebraska released a report on his three-year investigation of sexual abuse in the Catholic Church of his state. This probe was sparked in part by the courageous 2018 testimony on this blog of Peter Mitchell, a former priest of the Diocese of Lincoln. I am so grateful to Peter for speaking up, and to the Nebraska Catholics who found the courage to raise their voices in subsequent conversations with me. If you follow the link above, you can download a copy of the report.

I’ve just gone over the report quickly. Here’s what stands out to me.

The most troubling finding from this report is the fact that on numerous occasions, when there was an opportunity to bring justice to the victims, those in authority chose to place the reputation of the church above the protection of the children who placed their spiritual care in the hands of those in church authority. The depth of physical and psychological harm caused by the perpetrators, and the decades of failure by the church to safeguard so
many child victims, is unfathomable. We can only hope that the victims have been able to find some sense of healing from a source higher than our justice system.

There it is, once again: the reputation of the Church mattered more to these men than the protection of children. This is damning.

More:

Perhaps the most concerning finding is that in many cases, church authorities, be it head or associate priests or other diocesan personnel, had knowledge of the abusive behavior of the offenders and did nothing to stop it. Numerous files document instances where high-ranking diocesan officials, up to and including the bishop or archbishop, were aware of the abusive behaviors of a priest but did nothing to remove him from ministry. Often, these offenders would be sent away for “counseling” but soon returned to ministry in situations where they had contact with children. Worse yet, some did not even receive counseling. They were summarily removed from their assignment, only to be immediately reassigned to a parish where more children were victimized.

More:

We also discovered instances where victims reported their abuse to a priest or other diocesan official, but no documentation of the report was found in the official file. Simply put, the dioceses did not create written records every time they were informed of incidents of sexual abuse. Then, when receiving an allegation of clergy abuse years later, that failure to document led the dioceses to claim it had never received a complaint. Past diocesan officials, however, were well aware of the abuse allegations. Also, that failure to document meant that current diocesan officials reviewing the allegation might not have been aware that it was not the first time the individual had been accused of sexual abuse.

They didn’t create records so they could claim that they didn’t know.

Though the AG’s report tries to downplay this fact, as others have done before, we see once again that this is overwhelmingly a crime of homosexual abuse:

And it is overwhelmingly a phenomenon not of pedophilia, but of priests going after sexually mature young males.

For many years, the now-retired Lincoln Bishop Fabian Bruskewitz had a reputation among American Catholics as a staunch and uncompromising upholder of Catholic orthodoxy. I was present in the room in Dallas, in 2002, when he told a group of lay Catholic supporters that his episcopal colleagues were a “hapless bench of bishops.” I thought that meant he believed they were failing to do what was necessary to bring justice to victims. Back then, I was a conservative Catholic and an admirer of Bruskewitz’s. In light of this report, I don’t know what he meant back then. This report shatters his reputation. He should never show his face in public again. For example:

Most recently, Victim #1’s sister contacted the Lincoln Police Department in 2018. The sister disclosed that Victim #1 told her Deonise provided him with alcohol and performed sexual acts upon him over a period of several years. Victim #1 was contacted and refused to give a statement. The sister alleged she reported the abuse to the diocese in 1994, but the diocese did not inform law enforcement. The 1994 report was likely the one referred to in the November 1994 note from the Bishop Bruskewitz. The sister also claimed a family member found love letters from Deonise to Victim #1, which were delivered to a priest in the diocese in 1994. There is no record of these letters in the file.

A. Nature of the abuse/misconduct: Unspecified sexual acts perpetrated on the victim

B. Date of incident: Mid-1980s

C. Reported to diocese: 1994; 1995

D. Gender/age of victim: Male – 11-13 years old

E. Abuse reported to diocese prior to incident described: No

F. Reported to law enforcement: 2018

Disposition: Deonise resigned as head priest of his parish in August 1994 and left the State of Nebraska. His priestly faculties were removed, and he was excommunicated in October 1994. In 2013, the bishop corresponded with Deonise, inquiring whether he desired to be removed from the clerical state. Deonise indicated he wished to remain a priest. The diocese never reported allegations of Deonise’s abuse to law enforcement. Deonise’s current whereabouts is not indicated in the file.

Look at these clerical liars, what they did:

The diocese became aware of Hrdlicka’s victimization of the minors from the camping trip in 1978. The file includes numerous reports which reveal that after the father of Victim #1 met with Monsignor Crowley, Hrdlicka was moved to a new parish. Ironically and unbeknownst to the father of Victim #1, Crowley was himself an abuser of multiple minor boys. The new parish was not informed of Hrdlicka’s molestation of the four victims from the camping trip. More troubling, Hrdlicka was given a state leadership role in a Catholic youth organization. [Emphasis mine — RD] He went on to victimize at least five (and possibly up to nine) other children. Law enforcement in Nebraska was notified about Hrdlicka’s sexual assaults in 2018.

After his 1993 military convictions, the father of Victim #1 reached out to the vicar general of the diocese to inform him about Hrdlicka’s sexual abuse of the four minors in 1978. Later that year, the diocese suspended Hrdlicka from ministry. In 2002, the victims from the 1978 camping trip contacted the diocese about their abuse at the hands of Hrdlicka. They said the national news of the sexual abuse in the Boston Archdiocese in 2002 motivated them to reach out to the diocese. They alleged the diocese never offered an apology for their abuse, nor did it offer any assistance when Hrdlicka’s military conviction became public.

Soon thereafter, the diocese issued a press release announcing the four victims from the camping trip had threatened to sue the diocese for $2 million. In essence, the diocese was accusing the victims of blackmail. The release stated that as of 1992, “there was no record of any complaints against Hrdlicka in the diocese.” While there may have been no written records of Hrdlicka’s abuse, his abusive behavior had been communicated to the highest levels of the diocese in 1978, including Bishop Flavin. There is no indication the victims ever sued the diocese.

Hrdlicka was released from military prison in 1999. He was permanently removed from the clerical state in 2005. Hrdlicka’s present whereabouts is unknown.

There’s a section on Monsignor Leonard Kalin (d. 2008), the longtime vocations director of the Lincoln diocese, and head of the University of Nebraska’s Newman Center. He was nothing but a dirty old man — and the diocese knew it. Excerpt:

It is evident from the accounts of Victim #5 and Victim #6 that church authorities were made aware of Kalin’s sexual advances towards seminarians in 1998. Victim #5 wrote he believed an investigation had been conducted about Kalin’s abuses, and he was surprised to learn the matter had only recently been publicly brought to light. The file summary recounts a 1998 meeting in which Bruskewitz asked Kalin to “list all sexual encounters he has had.” Kalin referred to one encounter which had occurred the previous month. Kalin then listed the names of 50 men he had “showered with in the gym” and had “kissed on the lips in a non-sexual way.” Bruskewitz issued a canonical warning and forbade him to be alone with any man under the age of 40, except for priests and family members. The summary later noted Kalin “does not strictly follow” the bishop’s precept. None of the source documents pertaining to the summary are in the file.

Here’s how pervy Monsignor Jerome Murray (d. 2016) was. This happened in the 1970s:

The file contains a summary of the sexual abuse of Victim #4. He was a student and in a boy scout troop led by Murray. He said Murray would undress completely in the presence of groups of boys. He recounted Murray would masturbate publicly and ask the boys to feel his penis. Victim #4 indicated that Murray would undress some of the boys personally. On one occasion, Murray used a floor mounted electric shoe buffer to masturbate in front of the boys. He claimed Murray’s inappropriate activities were “common knowledge among all of the boys.

The AG’s report said that parents on the Catholic school board had to threaten the diocese with going to the police in order to force the bishop to remove this freak from the schools. Even after all this time, it breaks my brain to contemplate how viciously adversarial bishops and church officials were to parents who wanted priests to stop molesting children.

The late Father John Fiala of the Archdiocese of Omaha was quit a piece of work:

A week after their conversation, the Ralston Police Department found Fiala in a parked car in a city park, with [13-year-old] Victim #3 sitting on Fiala’s lap. Fiala told the police he was teaching Victim #3 how to drive. The father related Fiala had been grooming Victim #3 for a while, and that Fiala “used a sick woman (Victim #3’s mother)” to gain information and access to Victim #3. After the incident in the park, Victim #3’s life began to fall apart. While he does not believe Fiala was responsible for all of Victim #3’s problems, the father believed Fiala added to his son’s decline. The father noted Victim #3 once told him, “That guy [Fiala] ruined my life.” There are no other details about the abuse suffered by Victim #3.

Shortly after the incident in the park, the father of Victim #3, along with the president of the parish council, and a priest met with Archbishop Sheehan to inform him about Fiala’s conduct. Archbishop Sheehan told them Fiala would not be assigned to a position which entailed working with children. Fiala was soon thereafter removed from his parish assignment. His personnel record reveals he had a leave of absence for a year before being assigned as an associate priest in 1989. There is no record of criminal charges being filed after the incident with Victim #3.

The father explained he reached out to the archdiocese again in 2010 after learning about Fiala’s arrest in Texas. In a 2010 correspondence with the chancellor, he stated “there is not a day that goes by that I don’t search for some reasonable explanation as to how my Catholic Church could have allowed such a horrible thing to continue after they knew what was going on.” He added, “How could the [archbishop] look me in the eye and tell me, promise me, that he would take immediate action to remove this man from any position that would put him in contact with children and then just transfer him into some other unsuspecting flock of Catholic children?” Victim #3 subsequently committed suicide.

Fiala’s monstrous deeds continued after he left Omaha:

 In 2008, Fiala was serving at a parish in Rocksprings, Texas. Early that year, Fiala began giving private catechism classes to Victim #4, a 16-year-old boy. In January, under the pretext of taking Victim #4 on an out-of-town trip to visit the boy’s girlfriend, Fiala took him to a hotel and raped him at gunpoint. He told Victim #4 he would hurt him and his family if he told anyone what happened.

He sexually assaulted Victim #4 two more times during 2008. Victim #4 later swallowed a bottle of pills and was admitted to a psychiatric hospital. While at the hospital he told counselors about the sexual assaults. Fiala was arrested and charged with aggravated sexual assault.

While out on bail, Fiala talked to a man to see if he could arrange to have Victim #4 killed. The man contacted the police, who arranged for an undercover officer to meet with Fiala. Fiala’s offer to pay $5,000 to have Victim #4 killed was recorded. Fiala was charged and convicted of solicitation of capital murder in 2012 and sentenced to 60 years in prison. In 2014, he pled guilty to sexual assault of a child and received a sentence of 30 additional years in prison.

There are records indicating that the then-archbishop was aware of the magnitude of Father Fiala’s problems for a long time, and yet kept moving him around.

In a 1988 letter from Archbishop Sheehan to another priest, he recounted the numerous complaints he received about Fiala’s behavior around teenagers. He wrote that Fiala had “a history of doing some very strange things that worry me and also the pastors of the parishes in which he has been sent.” Sheehan continued, writing he believed that Fiala’s “actions indicate such a lack of maturity that it is very difficult to give him a pastoral assignment.”

Here’s something about Father Thomas Sellentin, an Omaha priest who got away with it for decades:

Reports of Sellentin’s sexual abuse date from the late 1960s through the 1990s. In over 35 years as a priest, he had 12 different parish assignments. Ten of these assignments lasted less than four years. The actual number of abuse cases is uncertain, but the file reveals there were close to 40 victims. In our determination, the file supports there were at least 36 victims. The cases fit the same general description of inappropriate touching and rubbing on the legs, buttocks, and genital area. Numerous church officials were aware of Sellentin’s behavior and attraction to pre-teen and teenage boys. [Emphasis mine — RD]

Yes, but who cares about laity? The Church exists for the pleasure of the clergy, right? What else could justify this behavior by church officials? The report says church officials started to learn about Sellentin’s abusive behavior in the late 1960s. And yet, on he went. More:

The file contains clips from numerous newspaper articles revealing the archdiocese knew of Sellentin’s proclivity for sexual abuse of boys. A World Herald article from April 2002 affirms reports of the abuse were made to Archbishop Sheehan in 1970, 1980, and 1985. The article states, “An inability to grasp the criminal nature of pedophilia and its long-term, tragic effects on victims could be one reason [the archbishop] transferred Sellentin from parish to parish even after being told Sellentin was sexually abusing children.”

I am told that during the press conference, the Attorney General became emotional several times.

I reached out this morning to ask Peter Mitchell, the laicized priest whose public statement on this blog in 2018 had a lot to do with prompting the probe, for his reaction. He wrote back:

When will faithful Catholics see through the smoke and mirrors of the institution they desperately want to defend as being “holy”?!?!

Today we have learned that the Diocese of Lincoln knew as early as 1998 that Vocation Director Kalin had over 50 male victims of inappropriate behavior, and yet its 2020 report merely said that Kalin had “on occasion” done inappropriate things. And yet we are expected to believe that the Diocese is committed to transparency.

The AG report tells an awful, sickening story. Nobody could believe that any basically decent human being could do these things to children, let alone priests entrusted with leading them to God. And yet the Diocese protected and enabled them, over and over and over.

The detail on page 49 that a letter of complaint about Monsignor Clarence Crowley was returned without any response from the Lincoln chancery in the early 2000s just says so much about how “wonderful” the Lincoln Diocese was and is.

The myth of the Diocese of Lincoln is completely shattered, despite the many lay people there who still don’t want to believe that it could have happened in “the Shire,” as Bishop Conley used to love to call the Diocese of Lincoln. The Catholic seminary system actually has far more in common with the Mines of Moria – a once beautiful place that is now overrun with demons and darkness.

It’s angering to think of how many young people – including me – were encouraged to go and listen to Monsignor Kalin because he would help them know how to follow Jesus and get to heaven. He was a fraud. Are devout Catholics in Lincoln still able to be in denial about this after reading the AG report? He was not a “saint.” He was a fraud.

It’s sad to think of how many good priests are harmed today by all of this news, because it’s not their fault that the system is so sick and corrupt.

It’s mind-boggling to realize that this pattern is undoubtedly repeated in diocese after diocese across this country. This report reveals the way the system works anywhere a Catholic chancery oversees clergy.

Is there any way to redeem and reform the “Catholic system”? I have yet to hear a reasonable proposal. I’m not talking about the Catechism and the Sacraments, which I fully believe in. I am talking about a system of control, exploitation, and homosexual power that has so intertwined itself with the “Church of Jesus” that it’s now impossible to accept the former without cooperating with the latter. What is a person of faith supposed to do???

This is not a problem that is all “in the past.” This is an ongoing effort to avoid talking or revealing even a small portion of the problem to lay people who still naively think that it couldn’t be as bad as people like me say it is.

I am not sorry that I felt had to blow the whistle on Lincoln in 2018. I only wish that more people would take the time to understand that the magnitude of the problem is far, far greater than what any of us are yet aware of. If today is a small step toward that happening, then some progress is being made. But there is still a long, long way to go.

Stan Schulte is another brave man whose name should be recognized and honored on this day. The priest who molested him was his uncle, Jim Benton, who is in the AG’s report. 

Schulte told me in the 2018 interview (linked in the previous sentence) that the Lincoln diocese was still at the time not being forthcoming with the public about why his uncle was no longer in ministry:

As a frustrated Stan Schulte said of his uncle, “He’s still actively friends with minors on Facebook.” Late Sunday, I captured these screenshots from Father Benton’s Facebook page.

He goes on:

I have been fighting all by myself for the past nine months. These unknowing parents are sitting there, with the children as Facebook friends with my uncle the priest. The diocese has not warned them about him. We have such blind trust for priests. He has access to their children. They don’t even know what’s going on because the diocese has hidden it under ‘health issues.’

One striking aspect of my intensely emotional interview with Stan Schulte, in which he broke down crying several times, is his repeated expression of love for priests, loyalty to the Catholic Church, and even love for the uncle he says molested him.

“I’ve lived my whole life loving my uncle,” Schulte says, sobbing. “I think he’s a good person, no matter how deep this problem goes. He hasn’t had anyone to help him. He just kept being moved from parish to parish.”

“I feel like my uncle is unable to even get support from fellow priests in regards to his problem because they too are left in the dark and are not able to show compassion or much-needed support. This, I am sure, makes him feel isolated and alone as well.”

Schulte continues, “There are a lot of amazing priests I respect and love, and I fear some of them don’t have a voice, knowing how much potential corruption there may be above them.”

Schulte told me then that he came forward in 2018 after reading Peter Mitchell’s piece on this blog. More:

“The thing that drove me to come forward to my family is that I didn’t want my nieces and nephews to suffer this,” he said. “How many other victims in this diocese have become alcoholics? How many have committed suicide? How many have not been able to have normal lives because of what was done to them? We the people of this diocese are the body of Christ. We deserve better.”

“I fear my uncle may have hurt more people,” he says. “How many priests like him are still in a position of power? How many other children are still vulnerable? How many priests who have allegations against them have moved up in the ranks, and stayed quiet to protect each other?”

He is also coming forward for the sake of Lincoln’s priests. “I think some of the most amazing priests in the country are in our diocese. They deserve to have honest, truly transparent leadership within the diocese that they love and serve.”

That said, Schulte feels that to this point, he has been abandoned by Lincoln’s clergy. Last week, he posted this on Facebook:

 

“I think it’s important to say that even having one priest come forward to support you is so important,” Schulte tells me. “I said on Facebook this week that I was a victim as well, and that this [problem] needs to be looked at. A priest put a heart sign on it. I cried for 30 minutes, because this was the first time in a long time that I felt love and support from the Church. I broke down and cried because as a victim, you start to feel like the whole church will hate you if you come forward and mess up the façade of perfection that the Church portrays itself to be.”

I hope today’s AG report brings some measure of piece to Stan Schulte, and all the other victims, and their families.

UPDATE: Just got this from Stan Schulte:

Your decades of inaction speak much louder than your blanket apologies.They have lost our trust and put tens of thousands of innocent children in harms way.If this was the public school system and the principal knew for decades that there were teachers abusing students and covered it up, that principal would be fired immediately. If the Catholic leadership doesn’t step down now, we are naive to think there will ever be any change.In an extreme case like this, I would ask that the state legislature temporarily lift the statute of limitations, as many other states have done. This would allow survivors to be heard and justice to be served.Instead of continuing to put tens of millions of dollars towards more extravagant churches, I think God would much rather have you devote that money to protecting our children and compensating your faithful laity who have been abused due to your gross negligence.

UPDATE.2: A Catholic priest friend e-mails:

Judging motivations is always dicey.  I would, however, be cautious about the claim that offending bishops were trying to protect the Church or the priesthood. I mean, really, think about it.  If you were trying to do either of those things, you might through misjudgment send a guy for “treatment” and then reassign him, but then you would do exactly what was directed for follow up (and that follow up often never happened, as we now know).  And once he reoffended, you’d have to know that treatment and reassignment does not work so you’d stop assigning him.  No, the good of the Church or the priesthood is not the motive.  Something closer is a motive of not wanting to have to actually deal with victims or perpetrators, perhaps a wish to avoid problems, conflicts, and taking responsibility for the results. In short, we’re looking at a self-centered, weak-spirited approach that seeks to minimize problems and make them go away. They were protecting themselves, no one else.Every other excuse is a self-serving fabrication that allows offending bishops to hide from the disorders within themselves that led them to fail to rise up to protect the innocent from violation and to protect the perpetrators from causing further harm to others and themselves.

UPDATE.3: Leon Podles, a Catholic whose book Sacrilege is by far the most searing account of the crisis, comments:

The hardest thing to understand is the willful blindness of popes and bishops to the diabolical harm that was being done when children were molested by priests. John Paul II called the drug addict, incestuous homosexual molester Maciel “an infallible guide to youth” despite being warned about Maciel’s behavior. So much for the reliability of papal judgments!

Why this refusal to face reality? A refusal to face the hard, bitter work of repentance and reform? A clericalism so ingrained that it confuses clerics with God? Or what? Despite having studied this morass of evil for twenty years, I am no closer to understanding.

Reader Alcuin, who attended the University of Nebraska when Monsignor Kalin ruled the Newman Center, comments:

Just went through the report. I met three of the accused priests; attended their parishes. Know the sister of a fourth well. I’ll limit my comments to worst of that crew, Msgr Kalin and the 51 college men/seminarians/priests he made unwelcome advances / molesting actions towards.

Kalin came across in his sermons as pastor of the on-campus student parish as a bitter old man. Many in-coming Catholic students each year attended once or twice and then never again or switched to Old St Mary’s, a lengthy walk south of campus. I figured this was part of the typical ‘college falling away’, rather accelerated by his sour nature.

Yet his vinegar attracted a surprising number of flies. Those who stuck around tended to become very devout; some seemed to spend a lot discretionary time at the Catholic center, studying there evenings before the 10 PM weekday Mass, doing janitorial work, etc. I recall some of my immediately repelled Catholic friends describing the place as ‘cult-like’. Kalin certainly seemed to have a core of devoted students. Some almost fanatical. It was a turn-off.

I assumed his bitterness stemmed from a disappointment with the state of the Church and the nation and the weariness of an old man who longer saw reflected the world he knew in his youth. He was fond of noting the the only place the word ‘convenient’ appeared was St Paul’s instruction to preach when convenient and inconvenient. His Masses were reverent with a fussy adherence to rubrics. I recall him pausing during his distribution of Communion to correct a college student server on proper placement of the Communion paten under the chin of the communicant. Seems farsical today that he was worried about *that* being wrong while himself doing much worse.

While I did not witness any of the untoward items mentioned by e.g. Peter Mitchell (other than some drinking during occasional parties in the social hall – forbidden by university rules), I generally kept myself at arms length from from Kalin’s student parish, so I was rather out of the loop and wouldn’t know the insider details. I picked and choose my moments to drop by, usually because of interest in some young woman or particularly interesting event.

As to the latter, I have to indirectly credit this unhappy priest of public piety and private crimes with having done me a spiritual boon. Some years Kalin would put together an out of town student retreat, invite rather impressive guest priests to run it and quietly fade into the background. These retreats were great precisely because he made himself invisible. Conversations with these guest priests and a couple books they recommended changed my life for the better, down to the present day.

Kalin did evil things; others found him an unlikely benefactor (I knew students who traded promiscuity and drunkeness for Christ because of him.) In my case, a retreat he helped plan sparked a spiritual light in me because he was smart enough not to try to run it himself. I attended because of the ‘big names’ invited – and they delivered.

I’m sure I’ll be misunderstood here, so let me state that I’m not defending Kalin, or trying to weigh his crimes against whatever good he may have done. I’m simply telling my college experience as I lived it.

I should point out to readers that when I call some of these abuse victims “sexually mature,” I’m not commenting on their mental state, but rather on the fact that they have gone through puberty. That’s all. Technically speaking, pedophilia is sexual attraction to pre-pubescent children. It’s all illegal, and horrible, but the distinction is significant.

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