Rod Dreher's Blog, page 44

Soft Totalitarianism’s Legal Brigade

Back in 2015, after the culture war Waterloo that was the Indiana RFRA fight (that was the event in which Woke Capitalism flexed its muscles), an elite law professor who was a closeted Christian reached out to me with some dire predictions about what was coming for faithful Christians. I wrote about his warnings, and dubbed him “Prof. Kingsfield,” after the legendary law professor in The Paper Chase. From that 2015 post:

Like me, what unnerved Prof. Kingsfield is not so much the details of the Indiana law, but the way the overculture treated the law. “When a perfectly decent, pro-gay marriage religious liberty scholar like Doug Laycock, who is one of the best in the country — when what he says is distorted, you know how crazy it is.”

“Alasdair Macintyre is right,” he said. “It’s like a nuclear bomb went off, but in slow motion.” What he meant by this is that our culture has lost the ability to reason together, because too many of us want and believe radically incompatible things.

But only one side has the power. When I asked Kingsfield what most people outside elite legal and academic circles don’t understand about the way elites think, he said “there’s this radical incomprehension of religion.”

“They think religion is all about being happy-clappy and nice, or should be, so they don’t see any legitimate grounds for the clash,” he said. “They make so many errors, but they don’t want to listen.”

To elites in his circles, Kingsfield continued, “at best religion is something consenting adult should do behind closed doors. They don’t really understand that there’s a link between Sister Helen Prejean’s faith and the work she does on the death penalty. There’s a lot of looking down on flyover country, one middle America.

“The sad thing,” he said, “is that the old ways of aspiring to truth, seeing all knowledge as part of learning about the nature of reality, they don’t hold. It’s all about power. They’ve got cultural power, and think they should use it for good, but their idea of good is not anchored in anything. They’ve got a lot of power in courts and in politics and in education. Their job is to challenge people to think critically, but thinking critically means thinking like them. They really do think that they know so much more than anybody did before, and there is no point in listening to anybody else, because they have all the answers, and believe that they are good.”

That came to mind this morning when I read this jaw-dropping Washington Free Beacon story of Yale University persecuting a conservative law student. Excerpts:

Administrators at Yale Law School spent weeks pressuring a student to apologize for a “triggering” email in which he referred to his apartment as a “trap house,” a slang term for a place where people buy drugs. Part of what made the email “triggering,” the administrators told the student, was his membership in a conservative organization.

The second-year law student, a member of both the Native American Law Students Association and the conservative Federalist Society, had invited classmates to an event cohosted by the two groups. “We will be christening our very own (soon to be) world-renowned NALSA Trap House … by throwing a Constitution Day Bash in collaboration with FedSoc,” he wrote in a Sept. 15 email to the Native American listserv. In keeping with the theme, he said, the mixer would serve “American-themed snacks” like “Popeye’s chicken” and “apple pie.”

Here’s the text of the offending e-mail:

“Trap house” is slang for “place to buy drugs,” but it long ago passed over into general discourse. As the WFB noted, the popular dirtbag leftist podcast “Chapo Trap House” has been profiled by leading media without anyone ever raising any objection that the use of the term is racist. But that’s not good enough for some black Yale law students, who filed complaints over it with the university. More:

Just 12 hours after the email went out, the student was summoned to the law school’s Office of Student Affairs, which administrators said had received nine discrimination and harassment complaints about his message.

At a Sept. 16 meeting, which the student recorded and shared with the Washington Free Beacon, associate dean Ellen Cosgrove and diversity director Yaseen Eldik told the student that the word “trap” connotes crack use, hip hop, and blackface. Those “triggering associations,” Eldik said, were “compounded by the fried chicken reference,” which “is often used to undermine arguments that structural and systemic racism has contributed to racial health disparities in the U.S.”

Eldik, a former Obama White House official, went on to say that the student’s membership in the Federalist Society had “triggered” his peers.

“The email’s association with FedSoc was very triggering for students who already feel like FedSoc belongs to political affiliations that are oppressive to certain communities,” Eldik said. “That of course obviously includes the LGBTQIA community and black communities and immigrant communities.”

Got that? Simply being a member of the Federalist Society is to out yourself as either a bigot, or bigot-adjacent, in the eyes of Yale Law School. Yale is considered the top law school in the United States. Yale Law School’s diversity director believes that if a student who identifies as a member of a Sacred Victim class feels offended by something, that that alone is sufficient to establish it as a fact. As the story explains, Yale kept pressuring this student, who is Native American, to apologize — but the student refused. Then Yale said to him, basically, you’ve got a nice legal career ahead of you; it would be a shame if something happened to it. 

This student, who is not named, has a spine: he still refused to live by Yale’s lies.

You’ve got to read the whole thing. This is important. This is hugely important, for the reason Prof. Kingsfield said: institutions like Yale are where the American legal elite are formed. These are the men and women who are going to populate the judiciary. Yet we can see from this story that Yale is a place that privileges minority claims of grievance, however flimsy and thin-skinned, over fundamental liberal rights. This is exactly what I talk about in Live Not By Lies:

Further, these utopian progressives are constantly changing the standards of thought, speech, and behavior. You can never be sure when those in power will come after you as a villain for having said or done something that was perfectly fine the day before. And the consequences for violating the new taboos are extreme, including losing your livelihood and having your reputation ruined forever.

People are becoming instant pariahs for having expressed a politically incorrect opinion, or in some other way provoking a progressive mob, which amplifies its scapegoating through social and conventional media. Under the guise of “diversity,” “inclusivity,” “equity,” and other egalitarian jargon, the Left creates powerful mechanisms for controlling thought and discourse and marginalizes dissenters as evil.

You, reader, might not give a damn what happens to a student at Yale Law. But you had better not be so foolish as to think that what happens at Yale Law has nothing to do with you. Four of the current Supreme Court justices (Alito, Thomas, Sotomayor, Kavanaugh) graduated from Yale. In fact, the only one who didn’t graduate from an Ivy League law school is Amy Coney Barrett (Notre Dame). Look:

“They’ve seen that if you go to Yale, you’re more likely to get a Supreme Court clerkship than if you don’t, and if you get a Supreme Court clerkship, that puts you on the glide path to a federal judgeship,” says Widlanski, who earned his J.D. degree from Columbia Law School.

The Ivy League, Yale foremost, is where the regime trains its best legal minds. And right now, Yale is administered by people who are willing to persecute students who get anywhere to the right of the radical left. Interestingly — but unsurprisingly — the Yale diversity commissar said in writing to the unnamed student that the fact that he is a racial minority means he might not be punished as harshly.

This is not America. I mean, this is what America is becoming, but this is not who we are supposed to be. I always bring up Live Not By Lies in these cases, because I want people to understand that we are not in normal times now, and that the US is governed by a regime — not only the state, but also civil society institutions — that is illiberal to the point of being totalitarian. People don’t see this, because we’re not living under Stalinism 2.0. But what do you call it when the most elite law school in the nation goes after a student on the basis of flimsy accusations by political actors, and pressures him to save his career by apologizing for his ideological offense, even though he maintains correctly that he did nothing wrong?

This is what we’re dealing with. Again, from Live Not By Lies:

For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship.

The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

In the case of this unnamed conservative Yale student, Yaseen Eldik and the Yale administration might as well send down this instruction:

Do not look at the evidence to see whether or not he really is a racist; ask him instead to which professional legal societies he belongs, and what his race is. Those are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Pink Terror.

In my book, I call on people to stand by those persecuted by the Left in power. I hope this law student will come forward, and that an army of his fellow Americans — especially within the legal community — will speak out for him. The Pink Terror has to be stopped. This baizuocratic regime and its commissars have to meet uncompromising resistance.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

By the way, it has not been lost on me this morning that despite his many faults, Donald Trump appointed to the federal judiciary members of the Federalist Society — the kind of jurists that Yale Law school, in its DIE drunkenness, despises. If Trump runs in 2024 and wins, it’s going to have something to do with the fact that ordinary Americans have awakened to the threat to their liberties from the regime, and are willing to choose any port in a storm. It is all but impossible to get any Democrat not named James Carville to understand that, but it’s true. Most ordinary Americans would not find it easy to sympathize with a Yale Law school student, I’d wager, but they can easily be made to understand that they do not want to live in a country in which the judges making decisions that affect their lives have been formed by an elite law school culture that considers them to be the Enemy, simply because of their political beliefs, or the color of their skin. Note to future Republican administrations: look for SCOTUS nominees outside the Ivy League!

One more thing. For Prager U, Ami Horowitz visited Yale Law School and asked students to sign his petition to abolish the US Constitution. He captured students on camera agreeing with him that the Constitution is a white supremacist document. Turns out that 65 percent of those Yale Law students he spoke with signed his petition.

These are future federal judges. Watch:

UPDATE: Aaron Renn’s always-excellent newsletter The Masculinist features today some practical advice for resistance. He points out that conservatives are fools if they expect their acts of resistance to be treated the same as the same acts done by the Left. But he also points out that one’s progressive bona fides will not matter if the Left targets you as a thought criminal:

Those on the left are often blindsided by attacks because they naïvely believe that because they agree with all the right positions and are even working to implement the left agenda, they are the “good guys.”

They too often discover to their chagrin that this is not how it works.

For example, the head of the library system where I live was recently forced out after a black employee said the library was “run like a plantation.”

The woman who was library CEO was a progressive Democrat. In 2005 when she was on the city council, she was the sponsor of the Indianapolis Human Rights Ordinance that banned discrimination against LGBT people (at a time this wasn’t even popular among many Democrats). She rescued a community development corporation that served a black neighborhood after a corruption scandal. She actually closed a library branch in one of the city’s premier white gentrified neighborhoods while investing in minority ones. She even lives in a majority black neighborhood. And her husband recently died of cancer.

None of it mattered. Somebody called her a racist and she was tossed in the trash like yesterday’s newspaper.

There are some lessons to take from this episode.

First, no matter how impeccable your record is, it won’t matter when some opportunist attacks you. Even if you run an organization dedicated explicitly to racial justice, this won’t necessarily protect you from being cancelled.

Second, progressives in these situations often destroy themselves through foolishly apologizing when they’ve done nothing wrong. Sometimes when someone takes offense at something we’ve done, even if we don’t think we intended or even did anything wrong, we reflexively apologize for somehow making the other person upset. We often do this because the other person and our relationship with him is more valuable than being right.

But what works at the individual level doesn’t scale to the institutional level. If you are involved in a public matter like this, an apology is an admission of guilt. It’s just like signing the confession at the police station. I don’t know if I’ve ever seen it improve things. The library CEO apologized for vague and unspecific events, suggesting she didn’t actually do anything objectively wrong. It didn’t help her at all.

Now, if you genuinely have done something materially wrong, then taking responsibility for that is the right thing to do. But publicly apologizing just to assuage someone else’s anger won’t work.  There’s a reason politicians “never apologize, never explain.”

Third, when you are being cancelled, no one will defend you – not your close friends and associates, not mentors or former bosses, not any colleague who can personally attest to your character.

Now, you might get lucky and someone actually will defend you. Conservatives in these situations are more likely to have people publicly support them. But don’t count on it.

Not a single civic leader in Indianapolis publicly defended the library CEO. From that we can deduce that when someone tries to cancel those leaders, no one will defend them either.

If you are the leader of an organization or in any public position, you’d better have your crisis plan ready to go if and when something like this happens. You can’t rely on getting a fair hearing or any support in the face of a cancel mob.

Read it all, and please subscribe to The Masculinist. 

It is very important for every prominent conservative and classically liberal legal personage to speak out loud and unapologetically in defense of this persecuted Yale student, and to raise hell with this Pink Terror regime there.

The post Soft Totalitarianism’s Legal Brigade appeared first on The American Conservative.

What Would US Civil War Look Like?

Whenever I hear Americans speculating about a civil war here, I usually roll my eyes and remind them that it is impossible to resist a force as large and well-equipped as the US military. In this Twitter thread, the Swedish Marxist commenter Malcom Kyeyune says I am wrong, that that’s not how an American civil war in the 21st century would work.

In this follow-up thread, Kyeyune expands his analysis. Excerpts:

I would say that all these backlashes will accelerate determination inside the State, along with its corporate allies, to devise and implement a social credit system, to track the citizenry and to make sure they do as they are told.

Look at this from Kyeyune:

Once you start seeing stuff like this, you actually have a real – if slow moving – crisis on your hands. pic.twitter.com/LJXJhJMgO6

— Anglo Respecter 40K (@Tinkzorg) October 11, 2021

Here is something that happened to me today, that is so incredibly minor I almost didn’t put it here. But I think it reveals something important. Longtime readers will know that I used to not only defend NPR, but used to celebrate it, despite its liberal bias. I really liked public radio. But after Trump’s election, NPR rushed hard to the Left — and became unlistenable. I used to turn it on all the time when I was in the car, but it started making me so mad I would either listen to podcasts or drive in silence. Understand that I have been a fan, and sometimes a donor, of NPR for decades, even though it’s significantly to the Left of my own politics and cultural beliefs. I was not even a Trump fan. Still, the obsession with race, gender ideology, and immigration — all of which was talked about exclusively from a radical-left point of view — was deeply alienating.

Today I was in the car driving back from Jimmy John’s, and I turned on NPR. There was a locally produced news show that had a feature about “pregnant people” and their “fetuses.” I finally got so angry I turned it off. Nothing new about that. But the thought that came into my head this time was that I had been listening to the radio of an occupying power, and I was sick of it. Again, I get that this is an ultra-bourgeois right-wing moment — middle-aged fat conservative rages at NPR in his Honda! — but something had flipped slightly in my usual rantiness. For what I think was the first time, I began to regard these people — the ruling class that runs NPR and all the institutions — as people who despise normal people so much that they are trying to colonize our culture.

Mind you, Live Not By Lies is all about the creeping soft totalitarianism in the US, and in the West broadly, so this isn’t exactly new. What is new, at least for me, is how I associate this kind of thing with a hostile regime. Maybe it’s because I was in Washington last week for the TAC Gala — the first visit to DC in two years — and driving through the nation’s capital in the back of a taxicab, I was struck by the difference within me. I used to feel a sense of pride being in DC. Now it feels hostile, or at least I feel cold towards it. This has never happened with me. I don’t like it, but there it is.

I’m not one of these right-wing anti-government types, not at all. I have no interest — none — in any kind of violent protest. You want to talk non-violence, I’ll be there with you, but violence? No. Just to make that clear. But it is a strange thing for someone like me to confront the growing conviction within myself that we are living not under a government, but within a regime. What is the difference? For me — and I confess this is a bit idiosyncratic — the government is the administrative state and its elected officials, while a regime is the broader ruling class, including corporate and institutional elites from the private sector. “Regime” has in English a whiff of the strongman, of illegitimacy.

So, it’s the little things: I hear on a radio network funded by the government and rich liberals a change of language designed to compel us to think that men can have babies, and immediately I understand that these people, these power-holders, intend to dispossess us in our own country. They want to take away our common-sense understanding of male and female, and of the family, and force their twisted obsessions onto us all — and punish us if we don’t accept it. In the past, I would have just inwardly rolled my eyes at NPR’s political correctness. But now, these ruling-class people and their malignant ideas gain and exercise power that they have no right to do. Who asked any of us whether we should speak of “pregnant people” and “Latinx”?

It’s hard to get people to understand why this is such a big deal, the changing of the language we use to describe reality. Well, here’s something that brings it home. Luke Rosiak of the Daily Wire reported that Scott Smith, a Loudoun County, Virginia, parent who was arrested and convicted for disorderly conduct at a school board meeting, had been there for a shocking reason. I’m not linking to Rosiak’s report, because it’s paywalled, but here’s a Fox News summary of Rosiak’s findings. Excerpt:

Smith’s image went viral among left-wingers as an example of parents run amok, and the National School Boards Association cited his arrest in a letter last week requesting the Department of Justice to provide federal law enforcement to respond to an increase in violence against school officials across the country. Attorney General Merrick Garland later pledged to have the Department of Justice and the FBI investigate harassment of school board members.

Now, Smith says there’s much more to his story, telling The Daily Wire that his behavior at the June 22 meeting stemmed from an incident weeks earlier at his ninth-grade daughter’s school, Stone Bridge High School in Ashburn, in which he said a boy wearing a skirt entered the girls’ bathroom and assaulted his daughter on May 28.

“We can confirm a May 28, 2021 case that involved a thorough 2-month-long investigation that was conducted to determine the facts of the case prior to arrest,” the sheriff’s office told Fox News. “This case is still pending court proceedings. The Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office is not able to provide any documents that pertain to a pending case.” The sheriff’s office confirmed that the case involved sexual assault.

All juvenile records are sealed, but Smith’s attorney Elizabeth Lancaster told The Daily Wire that the boy was subsequently charged with two counts of forcible sodomy, one count of anal sodomy, and one count of forcible fellatio.

In response to a public records request by The Daily Wire, the Loudoun County Sheriff’s Office confirmed that a May 28 report with “Offense: Forcible Sodomy [and] Sexual Battery” at Stone Bridge High School does exist.

The suspect was arrested two months later following an investigation by the sheriff’s office.

Minutes before Smith’s arrest at the June 22 board meeting, Loudoun County Public Schools (LCPS) Superintendent Scott Ziegler declared that “the predator transgender student or person simply does not exist,” and that to his knowledge, “we don’t have any record of assaults occurring in our restrooms,” The Daily Wire reported.

Scott Smith is a father whose daughter was sexually assaulted by a boy in a skirt, in the girls bathroom — and the superintendent apparently lied about it to the public. Why? Because the ruling class believes transgenderism is a sacred cause? Well, guess what: the suspect in the first attack went on allegedly to sexually assault another schoolgirl last week. More:

“It has been so hard to keep my mouth shut and wait this out. It has been the most powerless thing I’ve ever been through,” Scott Smith told The Daily Wire. “I don’t care if he’s homosexual, heterosexual, bisexual, transsexual. He’s a sexual predator.”

Now, don’t misread me here: I do not believe that all, or even most, transgendered people are sexual predators. My complaint here is that the school leadership adopted a policy that inarguably puts female minors at risk of sexual assault, and hid from the public a story about a female-identified male charged with sexually assaulting a ninth-grade girl in the girls bathroom, to which he had been given access by the school system. And they vilified the father who came to speak out for his daughter. The regime is gaslighting us constantly about this woke stuff. When I hear NPR and others in the regime going about about “birthing persons,” “pregnant people,” and “they” as nonbinary single pronouns, I recognize that they are changing the language as a way of compelling everybody to accept their vision. What the Loudoun County school board did to Scott Smith is connected to this. Ordinary people may find a claim that changing language in the media and in ruling-class discourse is a serious threat to be esoteric. But everybody can sympathize with poor Scott Smith, a dad who is just trying to defend his daughter from these ideologues who left her vulnerable to sexual predation, then lied about it for woke reasons.

Here’s Luke Rosiak on Tucker talking about the story he broke:

.@lukerosiak on @TuckerCarlson discussing his bombshell report re: #loudouncounty public schools.#firezieglerpic.twitter.com/hyVzNzTc3L

— Ian Prior (@iandprior) October 13, 2021

We are being lied to constantly by the regime. At some point, you should not be surprised when people either regard it as hostile to them and their interests, or at least not worth respecting. And that is the point where what Malcom Kyeyune forecasts becomes more likely. I spoke the other day to a highly educated man who holds a key job in the tech industry. His wife is a well-respected academic. He told me that they have both resolved to resign their positions if they are compelled to take the vaccine. He told me that there are others at his facility who are prepared to walk out on the same principle. They’ve had it. They don’t trust the authorities anymore.

I wrote here the other day about the vaccine resisters at Oak Ridge National Laboratories. Did you know it’s going on at Los Alamos too? Here’s a media report about the lawsuit the employees filed. I received this e-mail from one of the Los Alamos employees leading the resistance:

My name is Jeff Williams, I am a senior safety analyst at Los Alamos National Labs.This issue at ORNL is not a regional issue – it is a NATIONAL CRISIS. The Biden Admin is CRUSHING the greatest scientific engine in the world – ALL OF DOE labs are being RIPPED APART. Most are small tight knit communities and are being pitted against each other and the lab they support.You cannot simply replace these people. I have been in the business of managing highly technical and dangerous operations in DOE for 31 years – the damage being done is immeasurable and presents a national security crisis behind the veil of COVID SAFETY – TOTAL BULL$#!T –We have formed a large group here at LANL (12, 000 employees – lead nuclear weapons lab) and filed a lawsuit against Triad, which is also Battelle Corp. First hearing is October 14th in State District Court.Please help us elevate the attention of this to the American public – before we do irreversible damage to our world standing and national security posture.Thank you for your attention.Jeff WilliamsLos Alamos New Mexico

As you know, I have been vaccinated, and I think people should be vaccinated. But I do not support these mandates, and I do support these walkouts and lawsuits. What we might be starting to witness — might — is the governed beginning to withdraw consent from the regime.

UPDATE: Here’s a long piece from The New York Times about how anger over schools is driving the Virginia governor’s race.Here’s how it begins:

As a lifelong Republican in her home state of Virginia, Tammy Yoder faithfully casts her ballot for those who want to lower taxes, oppose abortion and back other conservative causes.

But the issue that transformed Ms. Yoder, a stay-at-home mother, from a reliable voter to the kind of person who brings three young children to an evening campaign rally wasn’t her Christian values or her pocketbook.

It was something even more personal, she said: What her children learn in school.

“The past year has revealed a ton to me,” said Ms. Yoder, 41, as she waited in this Northern Virginia exurb for a speech by Glenn Youngkin, the Republican candidate for governor. “The more I’ve listened and paid attention, the more that I see what’s happening in schools and on college campuses. And the stuff I see, I don’t want corrupting my children.”

Here is the “What’s The Matter With Virginia?” graf:

And turning schools into a cultural war zone by railing against equity initiatives, books with sexual content and public health measures avoids tackling issues like budget cuts and the other thornier problems facing American education.

“Public health measures” as the anodyne description for policies that have deeply disrupted public education. “Books with sexual content” as a descriptor of parents who have been reading out loud in these meetings from books in their kids’ school libraries, featuring pornographic descriptions of underage boys having sex with other males, etc. “Railing against equity initiatives,” as if people speaking out against the closing of gifted programs was racist. And to top it all off, the Times writer blames parents for “turning schools into a cultural war zone” — not the educrats who inflicted this stuff on the people who pay for the damn schools!

That graf is a perfect reflection of how the ruling-class Left sees everybody else.

 

The post What Would US Civil War Look Like? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Bisexual Superman: Woke America’s Hero

At this point, they’re just trolling me:

The comic book industry has worked to increase LGBTQ+ representation in recent years, and DC is taking a major step forward in 2021. IGN can exclusively reveal that the current Superman, Jon Kent, is coming out as bisexual in the upcoming Superman: Son of Kal-El #5.

For those not up to date on the current DC line, Jon officially inherited the mantle of Superman from his father following the events of the Future State crossover. While Action Comics explores Clark Kent’s adventures off-world, the recently launched Superman: Son of Kal-El focuses on the 17-year-old Jon as he grapples with the biggest responsibility of his young life. But at least he has someone new to share that life with.

Fans of the series probably won’t be surprised to learn Jon is entering into a relationship with Jay Nakamura, a hacktivist who idolizes Jon’s mother Lois and has already lent his new friend a helping hand. And as this image [above] shows, the two friends will become something more when they share their first kiss in issue #5.

Remember this summer, when Robin (of “Batman” fame) came out as bisexual? 

Who asked for this? Who asked for superheroes to have sex lives, or gay sex lives? What does it mean that the ideological colonization of the superhero genre, the modern mythology of our times, means that transgressive sexual desire is now a definitive characteristic of our pop culture god figures? Like it or not, Superman’s identity has been bound up with America’s for coming up on century. From a 2013 USA Today story about Superman’s 75th anniversary:

“I’m from Kansas. It’s about as American as it gets.”

Superman (Henry Cavill) tells a couple of confrontational soldiers about his Midwestern upbringing — by way of the doomed planet Krypton — in director Zack Snyder’s new Man of Steel (opening wide Friday). He’s also giving moviegoers a little history lesson on the fact that he’s been arguably this country’s most iconic superhero for the past 75 years.

“For me, he’s that perfect mix of Americana,” Snyder says. “I really tried to do The Right Stuff-meets-Norman Rockwell with a strong dose of angst and ‘who am I and where do I belong?’ “

Searching for identity is a very human concept, for sure. But what makes Superman and his alter ego Clark Kent the ultimate American hero is that he has reflected our culture and society, ever since his first appearance in DC Comics’ Action Comics No. 1, cover-dated June 1938. And his crash-landing in a cornfield as a baby and being raised by two Kansas farmers is, in a way, the story of the American immigrant.

In American popular culture, Superman is the ultimate bearer of heroic virtue. Now that virtue includes sexual desire for a man. For better or for worse, that’s what America is in 2021.

With that in mind, you have to read this great N.S. Lyons piece about the most influential person you’ve never heard of: Wang Huning, the intellectual guru behind the last three Chinese presidents, including the mighty Xi Jinping. Lyons says that Wang is behind Xi’s current moralist crackdown. Check this out:

Also in 1988, Wang—having risen with unprecedented speed to become Fudan’s youngest full professor at age 30—won a coveted scholarship (facilitated by the American Political Science Association) to spend six months in the United States as a visiting scholar. Profoundly curious about America, Wang took full advantage, wandering about the country like a sort of latter-day Chinese Alexis de Tocqueville, visiting more than 30 cities and nearly 20 universities.

What he found deeply disturbed him, permanently shifting his view of the West and the consequences of its ideas.

Wang recorded his observations in a memoir that would become his most famous work: the 1991 book America Against America. In it, he marvels at homeless encampments in the streets of Washington DC, out-of-control drug crime in poor black neighborhoods in New York and San Francisco, and corporations that seemed to have fused themselves to and taken over responsibilities of government. Eventually, he concludes that America faces an “unstoppable undercurrent of crisis” produced by its societal contradictions, including between rich and poor, white and black, democratic and oligarchic power, egalitarianism and class privilege, individual rights and collective responsibilities, cultural traditions and the solvent of liquid modernity.

But while Americans can, he says, perceive that they are faced with “intricate social and cultural problems,” they “tend to think of them as scientific and technological problems” to be solved separately. This gets them nowhere, he argues, because their problems are in fact all inextricably interlinked and have the same root cause: a radical, nihilistic individualism at the heart of modern American liberalism.

“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”

Moreover, he says that the “American spirit is facing serious challenges” from new ideational competitors. Reflecting on the universities he visited and quoting approvingly from Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, he notes a growing tension between Enlightenment liberal rationalism and a “younger generation [that] is ignorant of traditional Western values” and actively rejects its cultural inheritance. “If the value system collapses,” he wonders, “how can the social system be sustained?”

Ultimately, he argues, when faced with critical social issues like drug addiction, America’s atomized, deracinated, and dispirited society has found itself with “an insurmountable problem” because it no longer has any coherent conceptual grounds from which to mount any resistance.

Once idealistic about America, at the start of 1989 the young Wang returned to China and, promoted to Dean of Fudan’s International Politics Department, became a leading opponent of liberalization.

Lyons writes that today, when Chinese people look to the United States, they don’t see a beacon of hope, but rather what Wang saw on his visit: a decadent society that appears to lack the means to reverse its own decline. Here’s the thing — and what really makes Lyons’s essay worth reading: China’s rapid wealth gain has brought to it many of the same problems that Wang saw in America:

So while Americans have today given up the old dream of liberalizing China, they should maybe look a little closer. It’s true that China never remotely liberalized—if you consider liberalism to be all about democratic elections, a free press, and respect for human rights. But many political thinkers would argue there is more to a comprehensive definition of modern liberalism than that. Instead, they would identify liberalism’s essential telos as being the liberation of the individual from all limiting ties of place, tradition, religion, associations, and relationships, along with all the material limits of nature, in pursuit of the radical autonomy of the modern “consumer.”

From this perspective, China has been thoroughly liberalized, and the picture of what’s happening to Chinese society begins to look far more like Wang’s nightmare of a liberal culture consumed by nihilistic individualism and commodification.

Lyons reports that Wang has prevailed upon Xi Jinping to crack down on China’s cultural liberalism. Hence:

And it’s why celebrities like Zhao Wei have been disappearing, why Chinese minors have been banned from playing the “spiritual opium” of video games for more than three hours per week, why LGBT groups have been scrubbed from the internet, and why abortion restrictions have been significantly tightened. As one nationalist article promoted across state media explained, if the liberal West’s “tittytainment strategy” is allowed to succeed in causing China’s “young generation lose their toughness and virility then we will fall…just like the Soviet Union did.” The purpose of Xi’s “profound transformation” is to ensure that “the cultural market will no longer be a paradise for sissy stars, and news and public opinion will no longer be in a position of worshipping Western culture.”

“Tittytainment strategy.” Um, wow.

Read it all. 

Some critics in China are likening the new campaign to the return of the Cultural Revolution. Wokeness in America as hegemonic left-wing illiberalism is our own Cultural Revolution. It is surely very, very significant that the two most powerful nations in the world are undergoing opposite top-down cultural revolutions simultaneously.

Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman’s classic work Family And Civilization said that the collapse of the Greek and the Roman empires had to do with the collapse of the social forces that formed families. In the book, Zimmerman said that rampant divorce and homosexuality are not causes of those empires’ collapse, but rather symptoms of the loss of a sense of family as core to civilization’s purpose. When a civilization stops giving birth to its future, and ceases to understand why it’s important to do so, it’s in trouble. This is a global crisis of the industrialized world, the collapse in fertility. It seems that Xi and leaders like Vladimir Putin and Viktor Orban — all three leading countries in demographic crisis — are fighting back in part by banning materials urging queerness on children and minors. It is understandable that they would want to stand against propaganda that advocates the practical collapse of family-formation schemes, and to some extent, I don’t blame them. But reading Lyons’s essay, in light of Zimmerman’s analysis, makes me suspect that these leaders are treating symptoms as the disease.

Intuitively, the question seems to me to be this: Can societies without religion reproduce themselves over the long run? 

 

The post Bisexual Superman: Woke America’s Hero appeared first on The American Conservative.

Shhh…Nobody Talk About Soft Totalitarianism

Given the topic of my book Live Not By Lies, and its popularity, I hear stories from victims of totalitarian wokeness all the time. Most of them I never write about, simply because there isn’t time; I reserve this space to talk about those that seem most significant to me, for whatever reason. It is easy, though, to become so numb to the insanity that one forgets just how malicious and extreme these nutters are. What always seems to bring me back to just how inhuman the woke are is the memory of a dear friend of 40 years — four decades! — who cut me off instantly when she read a letter to the editor in which I supported US Sen. Bill Cassidy’s vote to impeach Donald Trump after 1/6. What enraged her was that in the letter backing Trump’s impeachment, I said that Trump had done some good things in his tenure, but still deserved impeachment. The fact that I said Trump, whose impeachment I favored, had done some good was enough to make me despicable in her eyes — and justified ending the friendship. A friendship that had endured for four decades.

I do not understand people like this. And guess what: they are driving this society now. Don’t take it from me — take it from Freddie de Boer, a trenchant leftist (not liberal!) critic of social justice culture. 

In his latest Substack newsletter, Freddie (I don’t know him, but “de Boer” doesn’t seem right) talks about the interview the NYT’s Ezra Klein did with David Shor, the young socialist data guru who worked for Barack Obama, but who was cancelled in 2020 after he tweeted a link to a study showing that rioting usually hurts Democrats at the polls. You weren’t supposed to say that in 2020, and Shor was driven out of a professional association for presenting facts that contradicted the preferred leftist narrative. Shor rebounded professionally, and talks with Klein about the Democrats’ future.

Klein barely talks about the savage spectacle of a young data analyst’s career nearly being destroyed because he reported a truth that the mob didn’t want to hear. Freddie finds that meaningful:

But I find Klein’s disposing of that story so quickly to be quite odd, as it seems totally germane to the topic of who will determine the future of the Democratic party. What could be more relevant to the conversation than pointing out that one slice of that conversation feels perfectly comfortable attempting to utterly destroy their opponents, and everyone else is too scared to condemn them for it? … I ask: how can you have a discussion about discourse and messaging, Ezra, while studiously ignoring the powerful fear of imminent social and professional destruction that you and most others in your profession live under?

Freddie is a brave and interesting figure. He is a committed socialist, and quite left on all the social issues. But he stands out because he is a realist about what is needed for political success, and he doesn’t measure virtue by the strength of one’s capacity to hate. That alone sets him apart from the left crowd. And he is anti-woke. He writes here a paragraph that I could have done in talking about the reality of soft totalitarianism in our country:

The left-of-center is in a profoundly strange and deeply unhealthy place. In the span of a decade or less a bizarre form of linguistically-radical but substantively-conservative identity neoliberalism descended from decaying humanities departments in elite universities and infected social media like Tumblr and Twitter, through which it conquered the media and entertainment industries, the nonprofit industrial complex, and government entities as wide-ranging as the U.S. Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights and the brass of the Pentagon. That movement now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same. On any given day the most powerful institutions in the world go to great lengths to mollify the social justice movement, to demonstrate fealty, to avoid its wrath. It’s common now for liberals to deny the influence and power of social justice politics, for inscrutable reasons, but if the current level of control over how people talk publicly is insufficient, I can’t imagine what would placate them. Are most of these institutions false friends? Of course. But that, too, is not much of a defense.

Freddie explores the real cost of a political movement in which nobody feels at liberty to criticize what the extremists demand because everybody on the Left is afraid of them. He brings up the disastrous Rolling Stone story about the gang rape at University of Virginia — a phony piece that was totally invented, and was suspicious from the word go. But nobody on the Left questioned it. Why? Says Freddie:

But because they were operating in an environment of omnipresent, existential personal threat, because they knew people might attempt to destroy them if they said the wrong thing, they said this privately. Publicly, they dutifully golf clapped and retweeted the story on Twitter and were good soldiers. And then of course it turned out to be a fraud, its narrative so strange and unrepresentative because it had been entirely invented by a young woman who appeared to have been suffering serious instability. Which meant that it all blew up spectacularly, handing the anti-feminist brigades a talking point they still won’t shut up about. Perhaps if the people at Rolling Stone hadn’t lived under the shadow of professional destruction for violating progressive mores, some of them would have spoken up. Perhaps if prominent online feminists had taken immediate questions about the story’s veracity seriously, they could have engaged in damage control. But no. I remember when that story came out; the sense of danger was palpable. Those are the wages of living under the constant fear of people who want to divest you of your job, your friends, your reputation, and your future: no one feels empowered to speak truth to bullshit.

Read it all — and subscribe.

Freddie de Boer

Yes, we have a similar dynamic on the Right, with few elected Republicans feeling at liberty to speak truth to Trumpist bullshit, when it occurs. I wouldn’t cross the street to vote for Liz Cheney, but I admire her — as I admire Sen. Cassidy — for having the courage to stand up to Trumpist bullshit. Even when I disagree with their stance, I admire most people who are willing to stand up to a mob, especially a mob that’s trying to force people to shut up. I do not deny that we have a similar internal cancel culture problem on the Right, and it doesn’t only have to do with Trump.

The difference is that left-wing cancel culture and its priorities is driving the acts of all the major institutions in American society. Freddie de Boer sees this clearly (“That movement now effectively controls the idea-and-story generating power of our society, outside of explicitly conservative media which exists in a large silo but a silo all the same.)

Did you not watch the great HBO miniseries Chernobyl? The Chernobyl meltdown is what can happen when you live in an information system governed by fear and therefore living by lies, such that vital information about conditions in the real world cannot get through to decision-makers. You might recall the story I picked up in Moscow from a man at whose table I dined. He told me that he knew back in 1980 that the Soviet Union was doomed when, as a recent graduate of film school, he was on the crew setting up lights for the Moscow Olympics opening ceremony broadcast. He and his team were getting the VIP box ready, when Leonid Brezhnev’s advance KGB security team burst in and ordered them to take down certain lights, because they had not been given permission to put them there. The team tried to explain that without those lights, the General Secretary and Politburo members would be in the dark on the broadcast. The KGB told them to shut their mouths and do as they were told. So they did. Here’s the result:

My Moscow host told me that observing this up close and personal, he knew that a system that permitted an international humiliation like this because it had systematically suppressed information that did not support the ruling narrative was doomed.

We’re going to be doomed too, you know. You can’t run a school system, a corporation, a military, or any of it on woke principles. It’s one thing if it’s confined to college campuses. It’s quite another when it is the Pentagon and major corporations.

But let’s recall that it began on college campuses, and what happens there eventually makes its way into broader society. That being the case, in the past few days two stories arrived in my in-box that show how truly advanced this totalitarian madness is.

The first one: the Art Institute of Chicago fired all its volunteer docents for being too white. I am not making this up. Jerry Coyne explains what’s happening:

This is a story that, for obvious reasons, has gotten almost no airplay in Chicago, and none nationally, with no reporting in the major media. So let me tell you about it.

The Art Institute of Chicago (AIC), one of the world’s finest art museums, harbors (or rather, harbored) 122 highly skilled docents, 82 active ones and 40 “school group greeters.” All are volunteers and are all unpaid. Their job is to act as guides to the Museum’s collection of 300,000 works, which they explain to both adults and schoolchildren. I’ve seen them in action at the Museum, and they’re terrific.

Despite the lack of remuneration—they do this to be helpful and because they love art—their training to be docents is extremely rigorous. First, they have to have two training sessions per week for eighteen months, and then “five years of continual research and writing to meet the criteria of 13 museum content areas” (quote from the docents’ letter to the Director of the AIC). On top of that, there’s monthly and biweekly training on new exhibits. Then there are the tours themselves, with a docent giving up to two one-hour tours per day for 18 weeks of the year and a minimum of 24 one-hour tours with adults/families.  Their average length of service: 15 years. There are other requirements listed by the Docents Council in the ChicagoNow column below (first screenshot).

Many of the volunteers—though not all—are older white women, who have the time and resources to devote so much free labor to the Museum. But the demographics of that group weren’t appealing to the AIC, and so, in late September, the AIC fired all of them, saying they’d be replaced by smaller number of hired volunteers who will be paid $25 an hour. That group will surely meet the envisioned diversity goals.

Read it all. The Art Institute of Chicago had highly trained docents who work for free, simply because they love the art. But they were disproportionately white elderly women, so they had to go. Here is a portion of the Chicago Tribune‘s (paywalled) editorial slamming the Art Institute:

Volunteers are out of fashion in progressive circles, where they tend to be dismissed as rich white people with time on their hands, outmoded ways of thinking and walking impediments to equity and inclusion. Meaningful change, it is often said, now demands they be replaced with paid employees. In this case, the clear implication is that such employees will be more amenable to how some of the lefty cultural apparatchiks at this great museum now insist their works be described.

This is an absurdly reductive view of volunteering. The museum docents came from all walks of life and by no means were all of them either white or wealthy. Most of them long have seen themselves as liberals and progressive thinkers, arts lovers who have found their calling later in life and are fully aware of some of the things that have to change in museums. They just thought it would not have to be them.

Many of them likely have stayed up late at night getting themselves up to speed on what the museum expects from them now with its Art and Activism tours. They couldn’t change what they looked like, of course, nor could they knock years off their lives, nor could they reduce the size of their bank accounts, typically the result of careful saving to allow for a fulfilling retirement. Plenty of them took the CTA to the museum.

We think this was a callous move in a cruel time in America. We get the appeal of ripping off the Band-Aid, but the resultant optics, not to mention the human cost of supporters feeling devalued, clearly was not fully considered.

Once again, we see the reality of Hannah Arendt’s observation, in The Origins of Totalitarianism, about the kind of people in Russia and Germany who opened the door for totalitarianism:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

If a major cultural institution like the Art Institute of Chicago will fire highly trained volunteers because they are white, imagine that same mentality applied to curating its exhibits, and the stories those exhibits tell about who we are as a culture. These progressive barbarians are destroying what they have been charged with stewarding. This is happening across our culture. Nobody has yet figured out how to stop it.

The second story is the berserk account of Prof. Bright Sheng at the University of Michigan. Robby Soave tells what happened:

Bright Sheng is a professor of composition at the University of Michigan. He was born in China in 1955; when he was a child, the Red Guards took away his family piano. Nevertheless, he grew up to become a widely celebrated musician: He received a MacArthur “genius” Fellowship in 2001, and has twice been a runner-up for the Pulitzer Prize in music.

His undergraduate students should certainly count themselves lucky to be able to learn from him. Instead, they are demanding the university fire him for rendering the classroom an unsafe space. The administration is looking into the matter, and Sheng has stepped down from teaching the class for the time being. He has apologized profusely for making his students feel wronged, though many have loudly rejected his apology.

What horrible thing did Prof. Sheng do? He screened for a class the 1965 film version of Othello, featuring Laurence Olivier in blackface. From the Michigan Daily’s report:

On Sept. 10, Music, Theatre & Dance freshman Olivia Cook attended her first composition seminar with Sheng. This semester, the course focused on analyzing Shakespeare’s works, and the class began with a screening of the 1965 version of “Othello.” Cook told The Daily she quickly realized something seemed strange, and upon further inspection, noticed the onscreen actor Laurence Olivier was in blackface.

“I was stunned,” Cook said. “In such a school that preaches diversity and making sure that they understand the history of POC (people of color) in America, I was shocked that (Sheng) would show something like this in something that’s supposed to be a safe space.”

The 1965 version of the film has been a topic of controversy since its initial release when The New York Times wrote a 1966 article criticizing Olivier’s use of blackface as well as his stereotypical performance.

According to Cook, the students were given no warning or contextualization prior to the viewing.

Got that? These titty-babies are outraged that a college professor showed them an old movie in which an actor appears in blackface, but did not warn them ahead of time. These are supposed to be adults. Get this — the department sided with the students:

In an email to The Daily, Evan Chambers, professor of composition, wrote about the importance of properly preparing students for possible instances of racism in film.

“To show the film now, especially without substantial framing, content advisory and a focus on its inherent racism is in itself a racist act, regardless of the professor’s intentions,” Chambers wrote. “We need to acknowledge that as a community.”

Five days after Sheng showed the video, on Sept. 15, Gier sent a department-wide email acknowledging the incident and apologizing for what students experienced.

“Professor Sheng’s actions do not align with our School’s commitment to anti-racist action, diversity, equity and inclusion,” Gier said.

Sheng apologized, but even his apology was deemed problematic by the student mob. More:

The blackface incident also elicited response from the graduate students in the program. According to a graduate student, who requested anonymity for fear of retaliation, many of the graduate students started reaching out to the undergraduate community after they heard about the incident.

“It was sort of a protective reaction from the grad students, like ‘what can we do to help the undergraduates? What do they need?’” the graduate student said. “Clearly they’re not going to be in a room with (Sheng) anytime soon.”

The graduate student was also a part of a team who wrote an open letter that was sent to Gier on Sept. 23  addressing Sheng’s actions. The letter — signed by 18 undergraduate composition students, 15 graduate composition students and nine SMTD staff and faculty members — directly discusses Sheng’s formal apology letter.

“Professor Sheng responded to these events by crafting an inflammatory ‘apology’ letter to the department’s students in which he chose to defend himself by listing all of the BIPOC individuals who he has helped or befriended throughout his career,” the letter reads. “The letter implies that it is thanks to him that many of them have achieved success in their careers.”

What kind of warped culture is it that prompts grad students to “reach out” to undergraduates to help them deal with their trauma?! None of these cretins belong in a university. They are collaborating to destroy the career of a great man, and to destroy a university. Poor Sheng continues to abase himself before his persecutors, when what he ought to do is lawyer up and sue them. Read the whole piece. 

My son is starting to look at graduate schools for work in the cultural field. I am encouraging him to look to Europe, and try to find one that can give him what he wants without sabotaging intellectual inquiry via wokeness. He is a registered Democrat, and a fan of Bernie Sanders, but not woke. I cannot stand the thought that he would be entering into a professional field where all his accomplishments and all his talent matter for nothing because he is a white male and unwoke, and therefore the Enemy of the ideologues who run these institutions.

Where is the Michigan state legislature on all this? Both chambers are controlled by the Republican Party. You legislators have a moral and political responsibility to the taxpayers who fund state universities to make sure this idiocy does not happen there. There must be consequences, or it will continue. The poisonous ideological extremism of American universities has spread like a virus, and has conquered the ruling class. We are going to have to fight these people sooner or later. Why not now? You’re not defending conservatism; you are defending basic liberal democratic norms and institutions. And you’re defending the capacity of a university to provide a place for a bona fide artistic genius like Bright Sheng to teach, and for Michigan students to learn from him.

The failure of Republican lawmakers to push back hard against this stuff, and to force these corrupt institutions to pay a real price for their bigotry, makes the further institutionalization of soft totalitarianism inevitable — and sadly, makes the advice in Live Not By Lies more necessary. This is not a game. This is not one of those can-you-believe-those-campus-crazies stories. As Freddie de Boer well understands better than many moderates, these lunatics are running the show now, and setting the standards for what can and cannot be said. Eventually it will all collapse, because reality will reassert itself. But think of the incredible damage to the lives, careers, and welfare of real people that will occur before we are done with this.

What is it going to take to turn the tide? For years, I’ve thought, “Well, the Left has done it now — things are about to change.” But it doesn’t change. They go from strength to strength. What happened to us as a people, that we tolerate this garbage? Do most people really not see how destructive this is, and how letting these monsters get their hands on power, especially in the emerging surveillance state, is going to mean the end of liberty? This is why people like me, who hate Trumpist bullshit, might end up voting for him if he’s the nominee in 2024: because as bad as he is, if he’s the only thing standing between us and the woke mob, then the less bad choice is the choice we have to take.

Watch this 2014 TED talk by Prof. Bright Sheng, about how he dealt with the Cultural Revolution. And now he’s dealing with it again, in the United States.

The post Shhh…Nobody Talk About Soft Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Galli: Elite Evangelicalism’s Slide

In 2020, Mark Galli, a lifelong Evangelical, retired from his post running Christianity Today, and became a Catholic. In this ,elbow-throwing essay on his Substack newsletter, Galli accuses Evangelical mainline elites of selling out to the world. Excerpts:

Elite evangelicalism (represented by CT, IVPress, World Vision, Fuller Seminary, and a host of other establishment organizations) is too often “a form of cultural accommodation dressed as convictional religion.” These evangelicals want to appear respectable to the elite of American culture. This has been a temptation since the emergence of contemporary evangelicalism in the late 1940s, the founding of Christianity Today being one example. Letters between first editor Carl Henry and founder Billy Graham suggest the desire to be in essence an acceptable fundamentalism: Grounded in conservative theology while gaining the respect of secular academics and other cultural leaders.

More:

Indeed, effective evangelism has been one motive, and in some ways it has proved to be an effective strategy. But I don’t know that evangelicals have been sufficiently self-reflective to admit their basic and personal insecurities. It’s just no fun being an outsider to mainstream culture. We all just want to be loved, and if not loved, at least liked and respected. Elite evangelicals are not just savvy evangelists but also a people striving for acceptance.

I saw this often when I was at CT. For the longest time, a thrill went through the office when Christianity Today or evangelicalism in general was mentioned in a positive vein by The New York Times or The Atlantic or other such leading, mainstream publications. The feeling in the air was, “We made it. We’re respected.”  This irritated me, because I naturally believed that CT’s outlook was superior (since it was grounded in the truth of the gospel and not secularism), so I often commented that we had things backward: The New York Times ought to be thrilled when it gets a positive mention in Christianity Today.

This tendency has only gotten worse, as now the mark of a successful evangelical writer is to get published regularly in the Times, Atlantic, and so forth. What’s interesting about such pieces is that (a) such writers make a point that affirms the view of the secular publication (on topics like environmental care, racial injustice, sexual abuse, etc.) and (b) they preach in such pieces that evangelicals should take the same point of view. However, their writing doesn’t reach the masses of evangelicals who take a contrary view and don’t give a damn what The New York Times says. If these writers are really interested in getting those evangelicals to change their minds, the last place they should be is in the mainstream press. Better to try to get such a column published in the most popular Pentecostal outlet, Charisma. Ah, but that would do nothing to enhance the prestige of evangelicals among the culture’s elite.

Evangelical columns in large part merely bolster the reputation of secular outlets, as these publications can now pat themselves on the back and say, “See, even religious people agree with us.” Rarely if ever will you see an evangelical by-line in such outlets that argues to protect life in womb or affirms traditional marriage.

We see an ancient dynamic here: When you seek to win the favor of the powerful, you will likely be used by them to enhance their own status. And along the way, many of your convictions will be sidelined. We’ve seen this happen on the religious right in the political nightmare of the last few years. But it happens on the left just as often.

Read the whole thing.

It’s fascinating to read Galli’s confession that CT intentionally avoided taking “liberal” positions on certain issues, but signaled its real stance by never publishing anything that favored the “fundamentalist” position on those issues — positions that would have embarrassed CT‘s staff in front of the secularists. And then there is this:

Another example was [CT‘s] accommodation to a more radical feminist worldview. Once I wrote a draft of an editorial arguing that traditional traits associated with masculinity (like competition, aggressiveness, etc.) were not intrinsically toxic but needed in every human community (and, yes needed to be moderated!). The reactions of three key staffers (one male and two females) was shock and fear; they assumed I was justifying such things as wife abuse, even though in my draft I twice condemned the phenomenon. I put the editorial aside for the time being because it was not worth the staff dynamics I would have had to navigate at the time, since I sensed their anxiety would be shared by many other staffers. I hadn’t recognized how much fear and suspicion of masculinity pervaded the hallways.

That part jumped out at me, because one theme I have heard consistently from both Evangelical men and Catholic men who convert to Eastern Orthodoxy is that they are sick of the feminization of their former churches. These men haven’t been macho or troglodytic, at least not as far as I could tell. They just hate being told, week in and week out, that traditional masculine characteristics are harmful or otherwise unwanted. Some of them don’t like being led by priests they take to be “soft” men — not necessarily gay, but oriented more towards pastoring in a feminine style.

I can’t explain why Orthodoxy is more accommodating of masculinity, but it is. There is a lot that is “soft” in Orthodox worship, but I think the difference is that the Moralistic Therapeutic Deist attitude that Christianity is supposed to be about niceness and personal happiness is radically alien to Orthodoxy. It’s not that Orthodox spirituality is gloomy, but rather that it is serious and demanding, and doesn’t seek to sanctify secular therapeutic strategies. It’s about healing the soul, all right, but not in the way of the world, and of too many churches.

On Sunday morning at my Orthodox parish, we had four newcomers show up, who had driven in from a long way down the bayou. Two were high school seniors, the other two (a couple) were in college. The three young men said up front that they wanted to convert; I think the girlfriend of one of the guys said she was just along with her boyfriend. All four are Catholics who read themselves to the point where they wanted to come to the liturgy. They told me at coffee hour that they had all been raised Catholic, but were tired of it. I didn’t press for details, but they indicated that the spiritual life at their Catholic parish was empty and conformist.

I introduced them to our pastor, who welcomed them warmly, but gently warned them not to think that we are without our own problems. I’m glad he said that, because it’s important that converts not put their new church up on a pedestal. But I encouraged those young people by telling them that I understood exactly where they were coming from with their frustrations, and that for all the real problems we have in US Orthodoxy, they will find in Orthodoxy a depth that will astound them, challenge them, and ground them. I pointed out how many young people we had at coffee hour. Our little mission is growing because so many young adults are finding their way to it since Covid. I don’t know what Covid had to do with it, but this is something more Orthodox priests are seeing.  In the conversations I’ve had with these newcomers to our parish, nearly all of them are coming out of Evangelicalism, and they want to be in a church that is more traditional and stable — that is, not susceptible to the Zeitgeist.

In his essay, Mark Galli says that:

Evangelical religion has become theologically pluralistic and incoherent; as such, it is too subject to the changing winds of secularism to stand erect in the hurricane of our times.

He is no fan of Douglas Wilson, but he says whatever successor emerges to the dissolving Evangelical mainstream is going to have to have the “intellectual and psychological backbone” like Doug Wilson’s, but not be so “idiosyncratic.” He proposes that the Calvinists of the Gospel Coalition might be the ones to take over.

What about Catholics? Catholic ecclesiology is very different, of course, but it seems clear to me that in the West, there is no future for liberal Catholicism. But what kind of conservative Catholicism will inherit the shrunken institution? I think the Latin Mass movement, which I respect and wish to encourage for Catholics, has the idiosyncratic feature that limits its appeal. My guess is that there won’t be a particular faction, but rather the orthodox Catholics — that is, those who openly affirm the teaching authority of the Roman see, and who are more traditional in their liturgical preferences — will eventually be the only ones left standing by mid-century, and will inherit it by default. This is the way France is going.

As for American Orthodoxy, there’s no doubt at all that it’s going to be dominated by converts. The latest research shows that Orthodoxy is shrinking in America. I welcome correction by readers who understand the numbers better than I do, but based on these findings, and what I have observed in US Orthodoxy over the last 15 years, assimilation into the American middle class is causing the sons and daughters of the old ethnic stalwarts to drift away. The Greeks are by far the most populous of the Orthodox churches in the US, but only 22 percent of their people go to church on Sunday. The second rank of jurisdictions — the OCA, Antiochians, etc. — are much smaller, but we have twice as many people on Sunday. This is the convert effect, I reckon. American Orthodoxy is going to continue to lose more in raw numbers, but the parishes that remain will be more dynamic and committed.

The question for us Orthodox is this: are we too “idiosyncratic,” in the same general way as Latin mass Catholic parishes, and Douglas Wilson’s Kirk, to appeal broadly? Mind you, the word “idiosyncratic” is doing a lot of work there. Latin mass parishes are chiefly set apart by worshiping in an ancient language. Doug Wilson’s Kirk’s idiosyncrasies have more to do with Wilson’s pugilistic character, and the robust authoritarianism within the Kirk’s culture. For us Orthodox — the ones who worship in English — our idiosyncrasy in the US context has to do with our elaborate form of worship, which seems exotic when you first see it. Even if it’s in English, it’s so different from most of US Christianity that some people don’t know what to do with it. And then, once you get used to that, getting used to a demanding way of Christian living (especially fasting periods) can be off-putting.

On the other hand, that is Orthodoxy’s strength. It is different. It is countercultural. And it is deep. For young Christians, and not so young Christians, who are seeking to satisfy a craving in themselves for something old and serious, Orthodoxy is a magnet. As we are seeing.

Any form of Christianity that yields to wokeness is taking poison. Once more, here’s Galli, saying that Christianity Today was a good place for a certain kind of Christian because it didn’t often take positions at odds with the secular mainstream:

Pro-life, of course, would be a great exception, as was the magazine’s stand on the morality of homosexual unions. But as the years have gone by, we’ve seen more CT articles about “how complex” such issues are, and that “there are no easy answers.” And I couldn’t agree more. At the same time, anyone who has studied the decline of mainline Christianity knows that such are the first signs of ethical retreat on an issue. It starts with “no easy answers” and moves to “here’s an exception” to eventual full acceptance. But history is not a one-way street, and this is hardly an iron law. I’m not saying that CT or these other evangelical orgs are racing toward liberalism. I’m only saying that the temptation to be accepted by the larger culture is immense, for reasons both evangelistic and psychological.

This is so good. I hope that American Orthodoxy can resist and rebuff the pressure by certain voices — especially academic ones in the Northeast, where Orthodoxy is dying — within it to liberalize. This is another area, though, where our weirdness helps. An Evangelical friend pointed out to me the other day that taking the step to convert to Orthodoxy is such a leap for your average American Christian that they are already a bit used to doing something radically outside of the mainstream.

Readers, I welcome your take on Galli’s essay in the comments section. But I hope you will also venture a guess as to which people, schools, or factions within your broad religious tradition will inherit the future of your church or tradition. And don’t forget to subscribe to The Galli Report, Mark Galli’s newsletter, for free. 

The post Galli: Elite Evangelicalism’s Slide appeared first on The American Conservative.

Compassion Leads To The Surgeon’s Knife

You would think it would have made national news when two of America’s leading doctors who provide care to transgendered people — both of them transgender as well! — warn that medicine is going too far with younger kids. They did, in an interview with Abigail Shrier, published this week on Bari Weiss’s invaluable Substack newsletter. Excerpt:

For nearly a decade, the vanguard of the transgender-rights movement — doctors, activists, celebrities and transgender influencers  — has defined the boundaries of the new orthodoxy surrounding transgender medical care: What’s true, what’s false, which questions can and cannot be asked.

They said it was perfectly safe to give children as young as nine puberty blockers and insisted that the effects of those blockers were “fully reversible.” They said that it was the job of medical professionals to help minors to transition. They said it was not their job to question the wisdom of transitioning, and that anyone who did — including parents — was probably transphobic. They said that any worries about a social contagion among teen girls was nonsense. And they never said anything about the distinct possibility that blocking puberty, coupled with cross-sex hormones, could inhibit a normal sex life.

Their allies in the media and Hollywood reported stories and created content that reaffirmed this orthodoxy. Anyone who dared disagree or depart from any of its core tenets, including young women who publicly detransitioned, were inevitably smeared as hateful and accused of harming children.

But that new orthodoxy has gone too far, according to two of the most prominent providers in the field of transgender medicine: Dr. Marci Bowers, a world-renowned vaginoplasty specialist who operated on reality-television star Jazz Jennings; and Erica Anderson, a clinical psychologist at the University of California San Francisco’s Child and Adolescent Gender Clinic.

In the course of their careers, both have seen thousands of patients. Both are board members of the World Professional Association for Transgender Health (WPATH), the organization that sets the standards worldwide for transgender medical care. And both are transgender women.

Earlier this month, Anderson told me she submitted a co-authored op-ed to The New York Times warning that many transgender healthcare providers were treating kids recklessly. The Times passed, explaining it was “outside our coverage priorities right now.”

Of course! These two doctors violated progressive orthodoxy. They must be ignored (and this ignoring has continued in the mainstream media, despite Shrier’s reporting this week). What did these doctors say? That the use of puberty blockers is happening way too often, with little or no regard for serious consequences down the line. Shrier writes about the case of Jazz Jennings, whose gender transition was documented and celebrated in a reality television show. Shrier describes how the show framed Jazz’s surgery to remove male genitalia and construct a neovagina. It turns out that because Jazz went on puberty blockers at 11, Jazz’s male genitals looked like an 11-year-old’s. This meant that surgeons didn’t have enough tissue to construct a neovagina … so they took lining from the kid’s stomach. And, because Jazz had not sexually matured, Jazz will probably never be able to have an orgasm. Take a look at this five-minute excerpt from “I Am Jazz,” in which Dr. Bowers and another surgeon meet with Jazz to discuss how the previous surgery went wrong, and the possibility that Jazz will never have normal sexual functioning:

Notice how much uncertainty there was even in the operating room about creating a neovagina for this biological male, Jazz. And notice how, when asked, Jazz’s parents can’t bring themselves to admit that they might have made a mistake. Could you admit it, given that if you had been wrong to submit your child to this kind of radical treatment, you bear the responsibility for wrecking their bodies and taking from them the capacity to experience sexual pleasure and intimacy?

Another excerpt from Shrier’s piece. Remember, Dr. Bowers is Jazz’s surgeon:

Many American gender surgeons augment the tissue for constructing neovaginas with borrowed stomach lining and even a swatch of bowel. Bowers draws the line at the colon. “I never use the colon,” she said. “It’s the last resort. You can get colon cancer. If it’s used sexually, you can get this chronic colitis that has to be treated over time. And it’s just in the discharge and the nasty appearance and it doesn’t smell like vagina.”

The problem for kids whose puberty has been blocked early isn’t just a lack of tissue but of sexual development. Puberty not only stimulates growth of sex organs. It also endows them with erotic potential. “If you’ve never had an orgasm pre-surgery, and then your puberty’s blocked, it’s very difficult to achieve that afterwards,” Bowers said. “I consider that a big problem, actually. It’s kind of an overlooked problem that in our ‘informed consent’ of children undergoing puberty blockers, we’ve in some respects overlooked that a little bit.”

Nor is this a problem that can be corrected surgically. Bowers can build a labia, a vaginal canal and a clitoris, and the results look impressive. But, she said, if the kids are “orgasmically naive” because of puberty blockade, “the clitoris down there might as well be a fingertip and brings them no particular joy and, therefore, they’re not able to be responsive as a lover. And so how does that affect their long-term happiness?”

Jazz Jennings later admitted to suffering from disordered eating, in part as a side effect of trans medications:

 

Not to worry — the “fat acceptance” Left is now campaigning to make it taboo to describe Jazz’s new weight as unhealthy.

pic.twitter.com/Sob4gt0tQP

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) October 8, 2021

More:

Anderson agreed that we’re likely to see more regret among this teenage-girl population. “It is my considered opinion that due to some of the — let’s see, how to say it? what word to choose? — due to some of the, I’ll call it just ‘sloppy,’ sloppy healthcare work, that we’re going to have more young adults who will regret having gone through this process. And that is going to earn me a lot of criticism from some colleagues, but given what I see — and I’m sorry, but it’s my actual experience as a psychologist treating gender variant youth — I’m worried that decisions will be made that will later be regretted by those making them.”

What, exactly, was sloppy about the healthcare work? “Rushing people through the medicalization, as you and others have cautioned, and failure — abject failure — to evaluate the mental health of someone historically in current time, and to prepare them for making such a life-changing decision,” Anderson said.

I asked Bowers about the rise of detransitioners, young women who have come to regret transitioning. Many said they were given a course of testosterone on their first visit to a clinic like Planned Parenthood. “​When you have a female-assigned person and she’s feeling dysphoric, or somebody decides that she’s dysphoric and says your eating disorders are not really eating disorders, this is actually gender dysphoria, and then they see you for one visit, and then they recommend testosterone — red flag!” Bowers said. “Wake up here.”

Read the whole thing. It’s important — and it also helps you understand what monstrous things the Trans-Industrial Complex, including the media, are allowing to be done to children. If you aren’t familiar with Shrier, she is supportive of adults who wish to transition to the opposite sex, but not children. She has written a popular but controversial book, Irreversible Damage, about the trans cult seducing young girls. Again: Shrier is not at all against transgendered people, but is very, very concerned about what this aggressive and intolerant cultural movement is doing to children, by forcing them to make changes to their bodies at too early an age.

So, it would seem to be really important when two of the world’s top carers of transgendered people — both of whom are male-to-female transgenders themselves — sound the alarm that the industry is harming children by being so reckless. Nope. Their warnings are outside the media’s coverage priorities now.

How did we come to this point? In a subscription-only issue of his excellent Substack newsletter, Ben Sixsmith writes:

Keir Starmer, the leader of the Labour Party, has distanced himself from Rosie Duffield, a Labour MP, for saying – and I hope you’re sitting down for this – that only women have a cervix. It “shouldn’t be said,” claimed Starmer, “It is not right.”

A little over a decade ago I was an active, vocal leftist – and a more obnoxious one than most. I was fantastically rude to critics of immigration, Islam, gay marriage et cetera. Yet I do not recall anyone – anyone – talking about transgenderism.

I know they did. There were certainly trans people in progressive spaces, like the author Roz Kaveney. Judith Butler had written Gender Trouble two decades before. But I swear on my last ice cold can of Tyskie that if you had said “only women have a cervix” at a progressive conference it would have been regarded as a banal statement of a biological fact. While I am sure that trans discourse was A Thing in 2010, it did not even nudge the top hundred progressive priorities.

I suspect some people might suggest that the issue has only become so heated because of opposition to the trans rights movement. Even if you think trans men are men and trans women are women, though, I feel it would be fanciful to argue that campaigns for obstructing puberty in children, criminalising language that “misgenders” people, placing biological males in women’s prisons, erasing the word “women” from commentary on female experiences and so on are minor societal adjustments that have been blown out of proportion by Graham Linehan and Julie Bindel.

My interest – here, at least – is in how rapidly society changes. Back in 2008, Barack Obama could not admit to supporting gay marriage. Now, an obscure Democrat somewhere in the ass end of Alabama would cause a firestorm if they admitted to opposing it. A leftist can argue that right-wingers are politically powerful – controlling the British government, for example – but they cannot plausibly maintain that this translates into an effective capacity to bring forth cultural change. Either they are not that powerful, or they are not that right-wing, or both.

He goes on:

What I am suggesting here is that the speed at which ideological standards change is a feature of a sort of unipolar moral space race – an accelerating attempt to redefine the boundaries of what it means to be human, for the sake of the process as well as for the specifics. An attempt to keep history alive by turning inwards, and experimenting on ourselves more than a cold and hostile world beyond our comprehension. This is what makes it both radical and reactionary.

Subscribe and read it all.

Shrier’s and Sixsmith’s writing here exemplify why I associate the transgender craziness — note that I refer not to transgendered people, but to the ideology that propels and protects this cultural movement — with the emergence of a form of totalitarianism.

It matters greatly — greatly — that such an extremely radical phenomenon emerged at lightning speed. A decade ago, if you would have told ordinary people where we would be on this stuff in 2021, you would have been accused of fearmongering. Now, even if you are transgendered and a top medical specialist in transitioning, you put your own career on the line if you defy the official line in the slightest way.

Think about it: there is a movement that is powered by activism, technology, medicine, law, politics, education, and media, that advocates forcing even little children to consider whether or not their gender identification might not be stable, and for those who say they are dysphoric, strongly encourages them to do extreme body modification for the sake of being their “true selves” — operations that will permanently disfigure them, and likely result in them never being able to experience sexual pleasure or intimacy.

Who could possibly want such a thing for their child unless they have truly been convinced that the only thing standing between life and death for the child is the willingness to endure this intervention? What has to happen to convince children and their parents that this kind of thing is not only acceptable, but required?

First you have to create a society in which the self-chosen Self is the highest good. This implies that individual autonomy, especially around sexual matters, is considered to be sacrosanct.

This society further has to believe that sexual identity is not grounded in material (biological, etc) reality, but is entirely subject to human desire, and therefore malleable. It becomes easier, therefore, for masculine women or effeminate men to think of themselves not as, well, masculine WOMEN or effeminate MEN, or same-sex attracted versions of both, but of the opposite sex. It follows that to deny someone’s subjective experience of being the opposite sex is inhumane, cruel, and illiberal.

You also have to have a society that is technologically capable of empowering people to undertake biological manipulation, through drugs and surgery, to manipulate flesh to fit a person’s subjective ideal.

And, crucially, you have to have a society in which those who define that society’s perception of the Real are all in line with the ideology upholding transgenderism — and not only in line, but willing to police dissent and crush it. You will see no celebratory reality shows about detransitioners who are re-discovering their “true selves” — that is outside the media’s (and everybody else’s) coverage priorities right now.

This is what we are dealing with now. A militant ideology based on technological supremacism, philosophical nominamlism, and radical individualism, has taken over all of the institutions in American society. It didn’t come from nowhere, but rather built on suppositions that were already built in to how Americans thought of themselves, and of the Self (and by the way, you cannot find a more comprehensive account of how that happened than Carl Trueman’s must-read recent book). But look: the fact that something so radical went from barely thinkable to unquestionable within a mere decade testifies to how shockingly unstable our society is. As Ben Sixsmith says, this is a kind of space race to redefine what it means to be human. This is the decadent stage of liberalism, an ideology that centers the autonomous self, and sees emancipating the self from all unchosen limits as its ideal.

It is a lie. It is a monstrous lie. It is a lie that in only a few years, has convinced a nation that mutilating its children, making them subject to invasive medical care for the rest of their lives, and robbing them of the possibility of adult sexual fulfillment, is not only necessary, but that refusing it is cruel and ought to be illegal.

Now, let me ask you: if a society can be manipulated into affirming this ideology, what can it not be persuaded to accept and affirm? When people say they are “genderfluid,” they are really talking about how the acid of liquid modernity has invaded the human body. The philosopher of science Michael Hanby has written that the Sexual Revolution is just the Scientific Revolution applied to the human body. Back in 2014, in an essay about same-sex marriage, he said:

Advocates of same-sex marriage feel themselves to be riding the cresting wave of history, and justly so. The force with which an idea has taken hold that is unprecedented in human history and unthinkable until yesterday, the speed at which it is sweeping aside customary norms, legal precedent, and the remnants of traditional morality is nothing short of breathtaking. That it should have achieved this feat thanks largely to sentiment, fashion, and the brute power of a ubiquitous global media, with so little real thought about its profound effect upon human self-understanding or its far-reaching practical implications, is more astonishing still. Though its power seems inexorable, we would do well nevertheless to exercise perhaps the last reserve of real freedom still available to us—the freedom to think about the true meaning of things—lest we be deceived about what this moment portends or caught unawares as it washes over us. For beneath the surface of this rising tide of ‘freedom and equality’ lies something very close to the brave new world of Aldous Huxley’s dystopian imagination.

To appreciate this, we must first understand that the sexual revolution is, at bottom, the technological revolution and its perpetual war against natural limits applied externally to the body and internally to our self-understanding.

More:

Now the state’s presumption to define the family signals its triumph over the family as a natural institution that precedes and transcends it, and so as a consequence we can expect the state to intervene ever more deeply into the family’s life—in education, for instance. But it also makes the state an active agent in bringing the newly designed family about on equal terms with the natural family. This leads inexorably to the state’s promotion of a more extensive regime of ARTs on the one hand, as in the California law requiring insurance companies to pay for IVF treatments for same-sex couples or in the so-called Family Law recently defeated after massive protest in France, and it implies, on the other hand, that pregnancy is merely an ‘elective procedure’ potentially subject to ‘rationing’ simply through bureaucratic adjustments to the schedule of health benefits. Why, after all, should a heterosexual woman be entitled to unlimited prenatal and neonatal benefits—when pregnancy is essentially a choice—while same-sex couples are denied access to the technology necessary to conceive children of their own? We are only just beginning to see this logic take practical effect, but as Nietzsche observed, great deeds take time.

And:

As troubling as this practical consequence is, more worrisome still is the fundamental anthropology—the philosophy of human nature—implicit in it. Of course, the state’s imposition of a philosophy will be largely hidden by the fact that it is never actually stated and by the pretense that it is merely a neutral arbiter of rights, and most proponents of same-sex marriage would probably deny that they hold a philosophy of human nature other than the freedom to love whom one will and equality before the law. We can concede that people support ‘marriage equality’ for what seem to be compassionate and humane reasons. But we’re talking about the objective logic of a position, its presuppositions and its practical implications, not the subjective content of one’s mind or the sincerity of one’s motivations and beliefs. And to declare that there is no difference between conceiving a child through procreation in a marriage and through the technology necessitated by same-sex unions is to say something definitive about what a child and the human being are, even if this goes unrecognized. Indeed it is all the more definitive the more it goes unrecognized.

Underlying the technological conquest of human biology, whether in its gay or feminist form, is a dualism which bi-furcates the person into a meaningless mechanical body made of malleable ‘stuff’ and the affective or technological will that presides over it. The person as an integrated whole falls through the chasm. This is the foundation of the now orthodox distinction between ‘sex’ which is ‘merely biological’ and ‘gender’ which is socially constructed, as well as the increasingly pervasive (and relentlessly promoted) idea that freedom means our self-creation of both. Technological dominance over procreation imposes this bifurcated anthropology upon parents and children alike, and codifying it implicitly makes this anthropology the law of the land.

Hanby concludes:

Thus what seems at first glance to be the latest step in the forward march of freedom turns out, on closer inspection, to be a decisive moment in the triumph of technology over the human being, though these aren’t really the opposites that they appear to be. When freedom is understood as limitless possibility and is elevated to the highest good, it is inevitable that anything that would define us prior to our choosing—even our own bodies—will eventually be regarded as an obstacle to be overcome.

Read it all. Transgenderism does not come up once in this seven-year-old essay, which gives you an idea of how swiftly trans arose and conquered. But everything that made this transgender moment possible is contained in Hanby’s essay. This is the triumph of technology over the human being.

Think about what might be coming next. If a society has been convinced to accept the anthropology that makes transgenderism normative, anything is possible. As Hanby points out, the body becomes an artifact. Hanby warns that “the deep anthropological assumptions inherent in the push for same-sex marriage, in other words, are those of synthetic biology and the new eugenics, which promise to ‘seize control of our own evolution’ through bioengineering.”

I hope I am wrong about this, but I don’t see how this is going to be possible to stop. In theory it could, but when you consider that the ideologues have control of all the institutions, and when you consider that the population has become so demoralized as to accept this radical trans stuff without significant protest, where do you think a resistance powerful enough to overturn it is going to come from?

Nevertheless, we who refuse to live by lies have to resist this big lie. That’s why I wrote Live Not By Lies. Yesterday I filmed a presentation for an upcoming training conference for pastors, to try to convince them that we cannot live as we have been living, and that they had better commit themselves to training their congregations for resistance and resilience. This passage from LNBL tells you what we are up against:

In his 2019 book, We Have Been Harmonized—China’s term for neutralizing citizens as a threat to the social and political order—veteran journalist Kai Strittmatter, who spent years in Beijing reporting for a German daily, reveals the techno-dystopia that modern China has become. He interviews a Chinese teacher who gives his name as “David,” and who despairs of his country’s future.

“People born in the 1980s and afterwards are hopelessly lost,” David says. He continues:

The brainwashing starts in nursery school. It was different for us. They called us a lost generation because schools and colleges were closed back then, and many of us were denied an education. But in reality, we were probably the lucky ones. We fell through the cracks. The brainwashing didn’t get us.

Mao was dead, and everyone was desperate for China to open up, for reform, freedom. The state’s information-control apparatus has demolished the ability of young Chinese to learn facts about their nation’s history in ways that contradict the Communist Party’s narrative. The 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, for example, has been memory-holed. This is something that we will almost certainly not have to endure in the West.

But the condition of the youth in consumerist China is more Huxley than Orwell. As the American media critic Neil Postman once said, Orwell feared a world in which people would be forbidden to read books. Huxley, by contrast, feared a world in which no one would have to ban books, because no one would want to read them in the first place. This, says David, is China today. Even though a great deal of information remains available to students, they don’t care about it.

“My students say they haven’t got time. They’re distracted by a thousand other things,” David tells Strittmatter. “And although I’m only ten years older than them, they don’t understand me. They live in a completely different world. They’ve been perfectly manipulated by their education and the Party’s propaganda: my students devote their lives to consumerism and ignore everything else. They ignore reality; it’s been made easy for them.”

And so, a population that has been wholly propagandized by a totalitarian state, and demoralized by hedonistic consumerism, will hardly be in a position even to imagine opposition to its command-and-control strategies. And even if some dissidents did emerge, the government’s total information system would quickly identify and “harmonize” them before they had the opportunity to act—or even before they had the conscious thought of dissenting.

You see? We are creating a generation that will never have known anything but gender ideology, and for the sake of harmonizing with a society that makes accepting gender ideology a condition of participating in it, will cut off any questioning of gender ideology before it becomes conscious. Thus does “compassion” lead to the surgeon’s knife to slice off the genitals of a minor, and create fake genitals using slices of the excretory system. Thus does “compassion” lead to a softer form of totalitarianism. We have been warned.

The post Compassion Leads To The Surgeon’s Knife appeared first on The American Conservative.

Excellence Out, Envy Equity In

There are people of all races and classes who hate excellence and achievement. They often want to compensate for their own grievance over inadequacy by denying those who are more gifted or talented the opportunity to make the most of their capabilities. This is envy, which is a vice, so they concoct a cover story to disguise their ugliness. In the case of New York City, whose mayor, Bill de Blasio, just announced his intention to end of its gifted school programs, they’re calling it “equity”. From the NYT:

Mayor Bill de Blasio said Friday he planned to overhaul New York City’s gifted and talented education system, a sea change for the nation’s largest public school system that may amount to the mayor’s most significant act in the waning months of his tenure.

The mayor’s action attempts to address what the city has known for decades: Its highly selective gifted and talented program has led to a racially segregated learning environment for thousands of elementary school students citywide. The program will no longer exist for incoming kindergarten students next fall, and within a few years, it will be eliminated completely, the mayor said.

Students who are currently enrolled in gifted classes will become the final cohort in the existing system, which will be replaced by a program that offers accelerated learning to all students in the later years of elementary school.

But Mr. de Blasio, who is term limited, will leave City Hall at the end of December. His almost-certain successor, Eric Adams, will choose what parts of the plan he wants to implement — or whether to put it in place at all.

More:

Barring any major reversal, the gradual elimination of the existing program will remove a major component of what many consider to be the city’s two-tiered education system, in which one relatively small, largely white and Asian American group of students gain access to the highest-performing schools, while many Black and Latino children remain in schools that are struggling.

Gifted and talented programs are in high demand, largely because they help propel students into selective middle and high schools, effectively putting children on a parallel track from their general education peers. Many parents, including Black and Latino parents, have sought out gifted classes as an alternative to the city’s struggling district schools, and have come to rely on them as a way to set their children up for future success.

But other parents and researchers argue that the programs worsen segregation and weaken instruction for children who are not in the gifted track.

New York, which is more reliant on selective admissions than any other large system in America, is home to one of the most racially segregated school systems in the country.

The move represents one of Mr. de Blasio’s most dramatic actions to address that, though it also puts New York more in line with how other cities are approaching their own segregated gifted classes.

About 75 percent of the roughly 16,000 students in gifted elementary school classes in New York are white or Asian American. Those groups make up about 25 percent of the overall school system, which serves roughly 1 million students. For years, those students got into kindergarten gifted programs by taking a standardized test.

The mayor’s earlier push to eliminate the admissions exam for the city’s most elite high schools, including Stuyvesant High School, failed after he announced the plan without first seeking feedback from the many thousands of Asian American parents whose children would be most affected. Those families spent months forcefully pushing back against the plan, and their opposition ultimately helped defeat it in the State Legislature.

The mayor’s other significant action on integration, a plan announced late last year to remove some admissions requirements at competitive middle and high schools, was rolled out without significant public comment.

While changes to admissions to the city’s specialized high schools are subject to legislative approval, Mr. de Blasio has full power over all other schools, including gifted programs.

Look at this graf:

In recent years, a growing number of activists pushing for integration measures have focused on the city’s gifted program, which provides a particularly stark example of how children are often separated by race and class within a diverse school system.

Wait a minute. The school system doesn’t separate students by race and class in those gifted programs. Students are separated on their ability to do advanced work. If admissions testing is blind, but this results in a disproportionate number of Asians and whites, how is that unjust? All these students, of all races, who would have benefited from gifted programs are now going to be denied them because the fact that black and Latino students don’t test in to those programs in proportionally pleasing numbers.

For the sake of satisfying the political goals of the levelers, and protecting the feelings of people envious of those children capable of performing at a higher level, gifted students must be made to suffer. And broader society, which stood to benefit from its more capable students being challenged and educated to the limits of their potential, then going out into the world to create, will now pay a price.

Look for an exodus of Asian and white parents from the city as they move to cities and suburbs that aren’t punishing kids for being good at school.

As longtime readers know, I was in the first class of a residential public high school for gifted and talented kids. It opened in 1983, and made an enormous difference in my life. We had white kids, black kids, and Asian kids. I don’t recall that we had many Latino kids, because in those days, Louisiana didn’t have a significant Latino population. We had rich kids, poor kids, and middle class kids. We had kids from big cities and from small towns. The one nod to any kind of equity was a quota they laid down to make sure there were slots open to gifted kids from each of Louisiana’s 64 parishes. Was this unfair to some kids from more populated parishes? Yes. But I can see why they had to do it: to make sure the new school had a broad base of political support from state lawmakers. I don’t know if the school still has geographical quotas.

I can’t possibly express what a godsend that school was. This was obviously the case academically. I had spent my entire school career to that point being bored in my non-STEM classes, because I was really good at English, history, and the rest. Suddenly, when I went to this school, I was finally challenged in the classroom, and I not only performed at a high level, but I discovered that school could be a real joy.

The part that meant even more to me was that I was freed from an environment in which I was bullied. Smart kids often become targets for bullies. That wasn’t quite the reason the bullies came after me — part of it, but not the whole of it — but I talked to kids. in the new residential school who had had it much worse in their schools. I can well imagine that many of those gifted kids in New York City appreciated gifted programs for this reason too.

But we can’t have nice things, because of envy and identity politics.

Some version of this is happening all over, especially in colleges. Just this morning, walking to my gate at Washington’s Reagan National Airport, I saw a sign advertising George Mason University as Virginia’s “most inclusive” college. If this is true, it can only mean that the school has sacrificed academic standards to pursue Diversity, Equity, and Inclusivity. How could it not? You can either be maximally inclusive — as defined not by equality of opportunity, but equality of outcome — or you can be maximally excellent. But you can’t be both. Most institutions, for whatever reasons, need to find some balance between the two, but it’s hard for me to see what the appeal is of a university that says, basically, “We’ll take anybody.” Which is more or less what “inclusivity” means.

I am not good at math and science, and really suffered in my new school because of my lack. If I had been sent down from that school for underperforming in math and science, it would not have been unjust, and I certainly would not have wanted students who were exceptionally good at math and science to be held back because of my own deficiencies. Why should I? We can’t all be equally gifted in all things. That’s not how human beings are. That’s not how society is. What Bill de Blasio and the DEI levelers are doing is contemptible and unnatural, and it’s not going to do a damn thing to help black and Latino kids who are struggling in school. But you know how these wokesters are: they’ll be satisfied if the people they hate — the ones that make them feel bad simply by existing, and succeeding — are made to suffer. That’s enough for them.

We are destroying this country and what made it great, all because our institutions are administered by an intellectually corrupt elite in the grips of a malignant, semi-Marxist ideology.

Last point: one of the most egalitarian countries on the planet is the Netherlands. I’m not sure how they do it now, but when I was in high school, I learned from my Dutch friends that their country had a rigorous testing system that sorted kids by track as they neared high school age. If you tested into MAVO, that meant you would probably end up in trade school or something like it. HAVO was the next level up. The most elite level was Gymnasium. Everybody got to work at his or her own level. Was this unjust to kids who were late bloomers, or who tested poorly? Yes. But overall, the Dutch found this to be the best of all possible systems. What nobody did was complain that the MAVO kids were not sharing the same classroom as the Gymnasium kids. The Dutch are quite practical, and saw no reason why those kids capable of working at the highest level should be required to share a classroom with kids who could not, because that would mean the entire class would have to be taught to the level of the weakest students.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

As the parent of an academically gifted son and a resident of NYC, this hits close to home.

I don’t have much more to add beyond what you wrote, other than to say the incessant gaslighting and outright lying by propaganda mills like the NYT and NPR is beyond exhausting.

My son is in the advanced placement program at his middle school, which he tested into, but of course they no longer use the terms advanced placement because that supposedly makes kids from the ghetto feel bad about themselves.

Because of the interminable lockdowns and remote learning last year, the curriculum for this year is literally a year behind, on purpose. He volunteered, like many other high performing kids, to take the state exams last year, though they were not required, as they always had been, because of remote learning. Parents still haven’t been given the results of those tests as I write this.

My son is still performing above grade level, but is bored out of his mind. To add insult to injury, they have shoehorned a number of “problem” kids into his classes, because that’s a more equitable arrangement, supposedly.
By foisting unruly kids on the highest achievers, our comically incompetent city administrators get to pretend they are “doing something” in the name of DIE.

My son has noted that although none of the outrageous behavior is directed at him, several of these misbehaving kids, all of them black and brown, are making it difficult for him to remain focused during class. He is very frustrated with this, and doesn’t understand why the teachers won’t discipline the worst offenders. The teachers basically let the kids get away with anything short of violence with never ending warnings that never result in action. All of the kids see what is going on and it’s very demoralizing for them.

My son also notes that this type of mismanagement has never happened in years past. Problem kids who acted out were disciplined immediately.

Well, not anymore! it’s a new era, and thousands of parents who want to put their trust in public institutions are realizing it’s a losing game.

It’s a genuine shame, as until very recently, public education in NYC provided real opportunities to gifted and highly motivated children.

Now, the kids get kicked to the curb so that corrupt liberal pols and their equally ignorant progressive constituents can pat each other on the back for tearing down one of the best public ed systems in the U.S., all in the name of fighting non existent segregation.

Another reader:

Here in Ontario, for the same boneheaded misguided reasons, the province is doing away with so-called “streaming.” I can say, as someone hailing from a lower-class background, if it hadn’t been for the academic streaming in my school system, I would never have been the first in my extended family (I have 44 first cousins) to get a university education. (I was so bored before I was “streamed” up, that a few teachers actually thought I had a learning disability.) Because I’d never met anyone other than my teachers and doctor who’d been to university, I had no idea how to get onto an academic track. Without so-called streaming, I wouldn’t have had the nerve to go to a guidance counsellor and ask how to get into university: I would have been too ashamed of being looked at as “white trash”.

These measures only hurt the actual people–poor and working-class students and their families–who benefit from merit-based education initiatives. The elites may not consciously desire this end, but it certainly benefits them because, Lord knows, their kids all go to private schools and receive expensive private tutoring to ensure they can take their place in the neoliberal world order. Having the gifted kids (from the lower AND middle classes) shut out of a first-class education suits the elites because it means less competition for their dumb-ass kids.

 

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Faithful Presence?

There’s a gently sardonic Catholic joke that goes like this.

At 25: “I can’t believe all the garbage going on in this seminary! I’d better keep my head down and just get ordained, and when I’m a priest, I can do something about it.”

At 30: “I can’t believe the mess in the church! I’m just an assistant priest in this parish, but when I become pastor of my own parish, then I’ll be able to do something about it.”

At 40: “What a hot mess things are in the church! I’m just a parish pastor, but I’ll keep my head down, and when I make monsignor, and rise in influence in the diocese, then I’ll speak out.”

At 50: “Yes, I’m a monsignor, and yes, this diocese is a mess, but what do you expect me to do? I’m not the bishop. But I know a few things about how the Church works, and if I make bishop, then you are going to see things change around here.”

At 60: “What an honor it is to have been made your bishop! I am pleased to step into the shoes of my illustrious predecessor, a faithful steward of the Church in this diocese, a man who was a peacemaker dedicated to moving forward together. I promise you to continue his legacy.”

That came to mind when I read this bruising piece by Nate Fischer, on the occasion of Francis Collins’s resignation from the NIH. He writes:

Collins has long been celebrated by evangelical influencers, and upon his departure those praising him included Russell Moore, Tim Keller, and David French. The well-credentialed  evangelicals who populate urban churches like Keller’s have been taught to aspire to a “faithful presence” in elite institutions, and Collins is often viewed as epitomizing this. He succeeded not just at an elite level, but in the scientific world, a domain where Christians have a particularly hard time gaining respect.

Yet Collins’s record over his 12 years atop the NIH shows serious and repeated moral compromises. That he continues to be praised as a model by elite-adjacent evangelicals suggests that what matters is the “presence” in elite circles far more than faithfulness to any clear Christian moral standard.

Collins’s most troubling action was his explicit defence in 2018 of research using fetal tissue from aborted babies, and the NIH’s 2021 resumption of such research under his leadership after a 2019 moratorium. This August, documents were released revealing that under his watch the NIH had given at least $2.7 million to researchers who sought out aborted babies (with a high quota of minorities) to harvest their organs.

More:

Given Collins’s compromise on abortion, it’s unsurprising he also followed secular trends on sexuality. Here he did not just preside over institutional actions, but personally embraced the language of the sexual left. In a June 2021 letter, Collins wrote that the NIH joins “in celebrating Pride Month and recognizing the struggles, stories, and victories of those who are lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersex, and others under the sexual and gender minority (SGM) umbrella. I applaud the courage and resilience it takes for individuals to live openly and authentically…”

It’s hard to see how a faithful Christian can personally write this. That evangelical influencers continued to praise Collins as he committed these actions suggests there are few compromises with the establishment they would not tolerate for the sake of worldly status.

Collins’s failures, and the way they were often overlooked by prominent Christians, reveal broader flaws in the approach such people have taken to elite careers and cultural influence. This approach, reflected in James Davidson Hunter’s 2010 book To Change the World and Keller’s 2012 book Every Good Endeavor, tends to celebrate prestigious careers while discouraging conflict over moral and cultural issues. This presence at elite levels was often portrayed as allowing Christians to do more to exert real influence in these circles and institutions than the more provocative approaches evangelicals had been known for.

Read it all.

Fischer points out that this “faithful presence” pretense is a flop, at least in Collins’s case. I think that devout Christians in high places can do good — think of judges — but boy, Collins does not appear to be an example of that.

As the culture — especially elite culture — becomes even more anti-Christian, how are faithful orthodox Christians going to be both faithful and present within institutional leadership? Or are we bound to be compromised? I’m in no place to judge Dr. Collins’s faith, of course, but how exactly would those policy decisions he made, and his progressive rhetoric on LGBT, have been different if he had been an atheist?

As Fischer points out at the end of his essay, if Christians who enter into leadership positions in elite institutions are going to end up compromising their Christian principles on serious moral issues, they shouldn’t go into those jobs — for the good of their souls.

 

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David Vs. Goliath Vaccine Showdown

Hi everyone, I’m traveling to Washington today for the TAC Gala tonight, so won’t have the chance to be properly attentive to this blog. I was in Tulsa last night giving a talk to the Oklahoma Council of Public Affairs at its annual gala. I talked about Live Not By Lies and soft totalitarianism. I stayed for a while afterwards talking to folks. People had their own stories. One man told me that he has friends who grew up in the Soviet bloc, and they keep saying the same thing: that a form of totalitarianism is taking shape in America. Another man told me he grew up in Romania as the child of missionaries, and he can recognize things here that are uncomfortably similar to what Romanians went through. Some people told me about really outrageous things they’re having to deal with on the job because of employer vaccine mandates. One woman said that her doctor advised her in particular against getting the vaccine — I assume it was because of a pre-existing condition — and wrote a letter to that effect. It didn’t matter to her employer, who fired her.

I told a story from the stage about a case I learned about just this week. Note well: this is a blog, not a newspaper. I have not had the opportunity to look into this beyond phone calls and texts with a couple of people involved on the same side of the issue. I will not have a chance to get to it till next week because of travel and other things, but I want to get it into the public arena, because if these people have a case, they need help, and they need help now. As you know, I am vaccinated and favor vaccinations, but I also favor robust protection for those who have conscience or other serious concerns, and who don’t want the vaccine.

This doesn’t involve just any employer. This involves the Oak Ridge National Laboratory in Tennessee, one of the world’s top scientific research facilities. I’ve been in touch with Jordan Lefebvre, one of a number of employees of the University of Tennessee — Battelle, who are working at ORNL. They face eventual termination if they don’t get the vaccine by October 15 — even if they have exemptions! Lefebvre and his co-workers with exemptions — up to 140 of them — believe they are the victims of discrimination and an unreasonable accommodation: unpaid leave.

Jordan Lefebvre has been taking notes and has recordings from all his interactions. He sent these notes to me. He and the other resisters are facing the loss of their jobs, and want to challenge their employer in court. For that, you need money to hire a lawyer. Read on:

On Sept. 2, Oak Ridge National Laboratory (ORNL), managed by UT-Battelle LLC, mandated COVID-19 vaccination.

On Sept. 13, ORNL released a “VACCINE REQUIREMENT” fact sheet, which outlines the “Accommodation request process.” The deadline to submit an accommodation was Sept. 15. The deadline for vaccination or approved accommodation was Oct 15. The fact sheet stated that when an accommodation is approved, “Employee registers to test at least weekly. Other preferred accommodations generally include social distancing and wearing face coverings.”

On Sept. 13, I submitted the ORNL-1200 form “Request Form for Religious Accommodation to COVID-19 Vaccination.” After submitting the ORNL-1200 form along with an attached letter on my sincerely held religious beliefs, the “HR Decision” showed “Pending.”

On Sept. 16, at approximately 4 p.m., I checked the C-19 Accommodations system and the “HR Decision” on my accommodation stated “Declined.” I emailed the HR business partner at 4:07 p.m., asking “Is ‘HR declined’ the ORNL decision on my exemption?” Within the hour, the column containing the HR decision was removed from the system. HR never acknowledged my email.

On Sept. 20, HR scheduled an interview for me on Sept. 22 at 12:30 p.m. They sent me a “fact sheet” titled “How fetal cell lines are used for vaccines and other products.”

On Sept. 21, I was interviewed in an office of 172 square feet by a 4-person panel representing ORNL legal counsel, medical, and HR. My personal office is 179 square feet and has a max occupancy notice of two people posted on the door. I was asked the following questions.

1. Briefly describe your objections to each of the COVID-19 vaccines, particularly the Pfizer and Moderna, which are not developed using fetal cell lines. I explained them.

2. Have you been a practicing Catholic your whole life? I said yes.

3. Aside from your religion, do you have any other feelings toward the COVID-19 vaccines? I said aside from the sanctity of human life, no.

4. What is your opinion on religious leaders’ beliefs regarding these vaccinations? I said that they have judged it permissible to use Pfizer and Moderna vaccines.

5. It seems your beliefs are more strongly held than your religious leaders (Pope, etc.), or am I wrong with that? I stated that the church has “judged it permissible to accept under protest, demanding morally acceptable vaccines, or to object and not be vaccinated.” It is based on one’s formed conscience.

6. Do you understand that the cell lines used in these vaccines are frequently used in other medications? Many over-the-counter medicines? I said I was not aware and that I would evaluate that for myself.

7. Have you used the consumer products that contain the cell lines? I said if the prior claim was true, then yes.

8. Are you willing to sign a certification statement indicating you have not, or do not, or will not consume these? I said no.

9. Do you know that we use these stem cells in our research at the lab? I said no and that I would have to research that.

10. Do you have any religious concerns about working for a company that uses these cell lines? I said I would have to research if the lab does work with abortion-derived fetal stem cells.

11. Can you explain how you justify working at ORNL (and its involvement in stem cells) doesn’t offend you, but taking the vaccine does? I stated that knowing and partaking is different from unknowingly partaking. I needed to research their claims.

12. Is there anything else you’d like to let us know as we evaluate your request? I raised my concern about the process and the surprise that I had an interview, given I had seen that I was already declined in the system. They assured me it was a glitch.

13. We have a certification form for each employee to look over and sign, and we can plan on sharing a copy with you. I refused to sign the form as it requested me to check all that apply. That I “have not,” “do not,” “will not” take any of the over-the-counter medication reported to be tested with abortion-derived fetal stem cell lines.

14. Do you have other thoughts on that portion (I have not, do not, and will not) of the form? You are allowed to write in your own thoughts and initial. I left the room with the form.

Sept. 22, at approximately 7:30 a.m., HR director Jody Zahn cancelled all interviews. At 11:16 a.m., the document “Benefits Related to Unpaid Leaves Over 90 Days,” was updated and the revision history was removed to not allow highlighting of changes. At 2:07 p.m., HR director Jody Zahn emailed herself, blind copying individuals with the subject “Exemption Request Decision.” It read as follows:

Good Afternoon,

You have submitted a request for an accommodation to the UT-Battelle COVID-19 vaccination requirement based on a sincerely held religious belief.

UT-Battelle received approximately 150 requests for religious accommodations. They were individually reviewed by a panel of representatives from Human Resources, Health Services and Legal. In addition, the panel conducted personal interviews with 24 staff members in order to better understand their religious beliefs and how those beliefs prevent them from receiving the COVID-19 vaccine. This staff engagement provided a better understanding of the basis for these requests. During each of the two days of interviews, an employee on the interview list tested positive for COVID-19. One employee completed their interaction with the panel before receiving their test results, potentially exposing panel members to the virus. Because (1) the basis for each employee’s request is personal and subjective, and (2) the personal interviews introduce a health and safety risk to the panel members, we have elected to discontinue the interview process and to focus our evaluation on the personal statements that were submitted with the accommodation requests.

UT-Battelle has reviewed the information you submitted and your request for a religious exemption has been approved.

UT-Battelle has evaluated the potential accommodations that we can offer, including those most requested by staff members — regular COVID-19 testing and remote work — and for the following reasons, UT-Battelle cannot provide those requested accommodations. Given the volume of approved exemption requests, the high transmission and low vaccination rates in our local community, the threat to the health and safety of our employees due to the highly contagious COVID-19 Delta variant, and the ongoing costs associated with a long-term testing program for unvaccinated staff members (and staff who may require testing through contact tracing from unvaccinated staff members who become positive for the virus), UT-Battelle has determined that regular testing of staff with religious exemptions would cause undue hardship to UT-Battelle.

In addition, as we have communicated throughout the return to normal on-site operations, ORNL is entrusted with important national missions and the essential nature of your job duties requires that you work on-site at the Lab. In that regard, we have already begun the process of returning staff members to campus, and we remain committed to bringing all staff members back to campus as soon as possible in order to reacclimate to working in-person. For this reason, UT-Battelle has determined that extended remote work would cause undue hardship to UT-Battelle as it would eliminate the essential job function of working on-site and cause disruptions to the Lab’s operations.

In evaluating your request, UT-Battelle has concluded that the only reasonable accommodation that we can provide to you without presenting an undue hardship is to allow you to remain a UT-Battelle employee, but without access to campus, by providing you with an unpaid leave of absence. You may elect to designate vacation time use prior to beginning your unpaid leave, but if you do not do so, your unpaid leave of absence will begin on Oct. 16 if you choose to remain unvaccinated.

Your leave will continue until community conditions improve and you can be accommodated on campus without undue hardship on the Lab or increased risk to staff members or Lab operations. Our intent is to reevaluate this accommodation in 60 days.
Following October 15, you will have these two options:

● Use vacation starting the first workday following October 15, and continuously until exhausted
Once exhausted, an unpaid personal leave of absence will begin
● Begin an unpaid personal leave of absence immediately and retain vacation
Vacation will not be available for use during the unpaid personal leave of absence if not
immediately initiated

Regarding benefits:

● While on vacation, benefits continue as normal
● Once an unpaid personal leave of absence begins, some, but not all, benefits will continue for a limited period of time
● See here for full detail on impact to benefits while on an unpaid personal leave of absence
● See more details in the SBMS exhibit “Benefits Related to Leaves of Absence”

If you have questions, please consult your HR Business Partner.
Jody Zahn
HR Director

Jody Zahn
Director, Human Resources
Oak Ridge National Laboratory
PO Box 2008 MS 6219, Oak Ridge, TN 37831
Office: [deleted by RD]
Fax: [deleted by RD]
Email: [deleted by RD]

On Sept. 22, at 9:08 p.m., the “Benefits Related to Unpaid Leaves Over 90 Days” was updated, changing Medical and Dental benefits for Personal Leave from “Normal rate for two months…” to “Normal rate for up to two months…”

On Sept. 23, my division director and I discussed the situation. I raised my concerns about the process. He was interested in what I was going to do. I emphasized that I was going to work for as long as I could in fulfillment of my responsibilities. I have worked mostly from home since March 2020. Later that day, a project principal investigator on a significant project communicated to me that the Associate Lab Director was requesting “continuity planning” for anyone holding a significant role. We iterated on one of my responsibilities and selected four other individuals who could partially fulfill my responsibilities.

On Sept. 30, at 1:24 p.m., I wrote HR director Jody Zahn formally requesting the C-19 Accommodations system and information there be preserved and that the system be updated to reflect the HR decision that was sent to herself.

On Oct. 1, at 9 p.m., HR director Jody Zahn began updating individual HR decisions in the C-19 Accommodations system.

On Oct. 5, HR business partners began communicating that those with approved religious exemptions going on vacation prior to unpaid leave are due to turn in their badges and equipment on Oct. 15.

To date, a group of us has accounted for ~70 of the religious exemption personnel. We are desperately trying to reach the other ~70 individuals.

Many will go on unpaid leave immediately. We are urgently trying to file a Temporary Restraining Order (TRO) to pause ORNL from placing us on leave after Oct. 15. The TRO will give us 14 days to file a Preliminary Injunction against ORNL/UT-Battelle.

We must file the TRO by Oct. 12 to have a judge review in time to halt ORNL.

It will take 4 to 5 days for lawyers to pull together the information necessary to file. We have reached out to the lawyers at Schaerr Jaffe LLP, Mark Palmetto and Brian Field, and they are willing to represent us. They need a $50,000 retainer to begin the process. They estimated costs of around $200,000 but stated that estimates are rough.

To quote Knoxville’s Mayor Jacobs “in America, it is always about freedom.” Please support this fight for freedom and donate to support our litigation against UT-Battelle’s discrimination.

https://www.givesendgo.com/utbdiscriminates

Again, I do not have ORNL’s side of the story, so caveat lector. If the situation is as Jordan Lefebvre describes, then it seems to me to be unjust anti-religious discrimination. The fact that this is happening at a major US Government research post, one with a $2.4 billion annual budget, raises the stakes significantly. If what Lefebvre reports bothers you, then I encourage you to go to that GiveSendGo account and donate to legal fund for these employees and their David vs. Goliath challenge.

The post David Vs. Goliath Vaccine Showdown appeared first on The American Conservative.

Social Credit System Comes To DOD

The reader who sends this story says:

We fought and lost the Global War On Terror abroad to return to have social credit at home. This will be framed as necessary to prevent another 6 January but I guarantee that it will be the same parade of credentialed leftists deciding who is and is not acceptable. And once implemented in DOD that will be used as a cudgel to press for it in other elite professions.

This is what he’s talking about:

All Defense Department personnel are now subject to “continuous vetting” designed to spot extremists and other insider threats, with surveillance of their public social-media postings likely coming soon, Pentagon officials said Tuesday.

The announcement follows years of effort to comply with a 2011 executive order to improve on the current security-clearance process, which features an initial investigation but generally no followup for five or more years. The new system will raise flags when new information arrives, such as when a DOD employee is arrested.

It arrives as the department grapples with extremism among uniformed and civilian personnel. Conservatives have accused the Biden administration and senior U.S. military leaders of purging right-wing free speech.

Screening troops’ and DOD employees’ social-media posts for extremist views or behavior will become part of the vetting, said William K. Lietzau, who has led the Defense Counterintelligence and Security Agency since March 2020. Lietzau said several pilot programs are intended to help determine how useful it might be to track social-media activity in various ways.

“Whether it’s an event-driven look at social media, whether it’s a regular continuous look at some social media or whether it’s a, a one-time — when they’re investigated — look at social media, there’s different ways you could use some of the social media, search capabilities that are out there,” he said. “We’re still right now analyzing how much value we think there is.”

The department has been working to implement continuous vetting for years, as mandated almost a decade ago by executive order, following shootings at Fort Hood and Army Pfc. Bradley (now Chelsea) Manning’s 2010 arrest for passing top-secret files to Wikileaks.

“Extremists”. As defined by? There are 700,000 civilian employees of the Defense Department. All of them — and I guess all those in uniform — will now have to live with the fact that everything they say online will be tracked by the government, which will look at their words and images with suspicion. Is objecting to vaccine mandates enough to get you tagged as an extremist by the government? Opposition to administration policies? Criticism of DEI instruction? Where are the lines — and should those lines be there at all?

You can see where this is going. If DOD does what the ruling class within American institutions consider to be a good job in filtering out Officially Bad People, then these institutional grandees are going to do exactly what the reader predicts: use the same thing to make sure “extremists” aren’t working for their company or institution. That Emma Sarley woman in Brooklyn was fired by her employer after having a petty contretemps with a Very Online guy in the dog park, who recorded it and pressured the company to can her as a racist. Extremist! Now, what if you said on social media that you thought Emma Sarley had been badly treated by her company. Would you out yourself as an “extremist” in the eyes of your employer? Better not to say anything, I guess. Better keep your mouth shut. Never say anything that contradicts the woke ideology of our ruling class.

Look, if we have neo-Nazis or genuine baddies like that in the DOD, then sure, they need to be identified and dealt with. But doing continuous monitoring of 700,000 civilian employees plus men and women under arms, to see if they are writing or sharing doubleplus ungood things on social media? Do you not see where this is going? All for the sake of making America one big Safe Space, just like a liberal arts college in the Northeast.

The reader adds:

So BLM, Antifa, CRT, Castro praise, and every other leftist cause will be acceptable, but too Christian, too conservative, too white, wrong pronouns and you get flagged because the goal is not about identifying insider threats but about ensuring ideological colonization and cohesion.

So much of the left’s identity is tied up in the idea they support the underdog that they don’t understand in 2021 they are the Man.

Also suppose you are a history buff: what if you end up on the wrong side of the algorithm because you like the Civil War or WW2? This is, again, how conservatives got completely outmaneuvered. We mocked and derided how all the SJWs couldn’t get a “real job” when in fact they created a ready and willing cadre of commissars.

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