Rod Dreher's Blog, page 49

Big Keira Bell Loss On Trans Therapy

This news from Britain is a stunning setback:

The court of appeal has overturned a controversial judgment that children under the age of 16 considering gender reassignment are unlikely to be mature enough to give informed consent to be prescribed puberty-blocking drugs.

Tavistock and Portman NHS foundation trust, which runs NHS England’s only gender identity development service (GIDS) for children, challenged a high court ruling last year in a case brought against the service by Keira Bell, a 24-year-old woman who began taking puberty blockers when she was 16 before detransitioning. The other applicant was the unnamed mother of a teenage autistic girl on the waiting list for treatment.

The three high court judges had also said the doctors of teenagers under 18 may need to consult the courts for authorisation for medical intervention. As a result of the decision, the Tavistock suspended new referrals for puberty blockers and cross-sex hormones for the under-16s.

However, in a judgment handed down on Friday, the lord chief justice, Lord Burnett, Sir Geoffrey Vos and Lady Justice King said it had been “inappropriate” for the high court to issue the guidance.

Keira Bell comments:

Bell said she planned to seek leave to appeal to the supreme court, adding: “A global conversation has begun and has been shaped by this case. There is more to be done. It is a fantasy and deeply concerning that any doctor could believe a 10-year-old could consent to the loss of their fertility.”

Here’s a link to a personal essay in which Bell tells her own story. She was a moody and depressed 14-year-old from a troubled background (mother an alcoholic), and who was struggling to deal with same-sex attraction. More:

As I look back, I see how everything led me to conclude it would be best if I stopped becoming a woman. My thinking was that, if I took hormones, I’d grow taller and wouldn’t look much different from biological men.

I began seeing a psychologist through the National Health Service, or NHS. When I was 15—because I kept insisting that I wanted to be a boy—I was referred to the Gender Identity Development Service, at the Tavistock and Portman clinic in London. There, I was diagnosed with gender dysphoria, which is psychological distress because of a mismatch between your biological sex and your perceived gender identity.

By the time I got to the Tavistock, I was adamant that I needed to transition. It was the kind of brash assertion that’s typical of teenagers. What was really going on was that I was a girl insecure in my body who had experienced parental abandonment, felt alienated from my peers, suffered from anxiety and depression, and struggled with my sexual orientation.

After a series of superficial conversations with social workers, I was put on puberty blockers at age 16. A year later, I was receiving testosterone shots. When 20, I had a double mastectomy. By then, I appeared to have a more masculine build, as well as a man’s voice, a man’s beard, and a man’s name: Quincy, after Quincy Jones.

Five years later, she began to detransition after she realized that her dysphoria was not the cause of her problems, but a symptom of deeper problems. More:

The consequences of what happened to me have been profound: possible infertility, loss of my breasts and inability to breastfeed, atrophied genitals, a permanently changed voice, facial hair. When I was seen at the Tavistock clinic, I had so many issues that it was comforting to think I really had only one that needed solving: I was a male in a female body. But it was the job of the professionals to consider all my co-morbidities, not just to affirm my naïve hope that everything could be solved with hormones and surgery.

If you read the whole thing, you’ll see that this poor young woman was put on hormones and on the conveyor belt to transition without much deliberation at all — because that’s what she wanted.

Parents need to wake up, and wake up fast. There is an entire world of activists and allies devoted to convincing your child that he or she is something other than what they are, in terms of sex and gender. They are constantly trying to undermine your kid. You probably have no idea what it’s like. You might recall me telling you about meeting a Catholic father in Slovenia this summer, a man whose 12-year-old daughter is locked in a profound depression because some older teens from the US that she met online convinced her that she has to choose her gender identity quickly, before puberty really sets in. The girl is obsessed with this idea, doesn’t want to go to school, is struggling with eating, and so forth. This family is sitting in Slovenia, but the Internet made it possible for these ghouls in Oregon to colonize the child’s mind.

Please — please — read Abigail Shrier’s investigative piece about how here in the US, some states are amassing the power to seize custody of minor children who have indicated a desire to change their sex. Excerpt:

Taken individually, no single law in any state completely strips parents’ rights over the care and mental health treatment of their troubled minor teens. But pieced together, laws in California, Oregon, and Washington place troubled minor teens as young as 13 in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own mental health care—including “gender affirming” care—and renders parents powerless to stop them.

Here, for instance, are the powers granted to a 13-year-old child by the state of Washington. Minors age 13 and up are entitled to admit themselves for inpatient and outpatient mental health treatment without parental consent. Health insurers are forbidden from disclosing to the insured parents’ sensitive medical information of minor children—such as that regarding “gender dysphoria [and] gender affirming care.” Minors aged 13 to 18 can withhold mental health records from parents for “sensitive” conditions, which include both “gender dysphoria” and “gender-affirming care.” Insurers in Washington must cover a wide array of “gender-affirming treatments” from tracheal shaves to double mastectomies.

Put these together, and a seventh grader could be entitled to embark on “gender affirming care”—which may include anything from a provider using the child’s name and pronouns to the kid preparing to receive a course of hormones—without her parents’ permission, against her parents’ wishes, covered by her parents’ insurance, and with the parents kept in the dark by insurance companies and medical providers.

Lest you wonder whether there is some madcap elixir polluting the groundwater of Washington State alone, in 2015, Oregon passed a law permitting minors 15 and older to obtain puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries at taxpayers’ expense—all without parental consent. In 2018, California passed a similar bill for all children in foster care, age 12 and up. The California state senate is now considering an amendment to the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act that would bar health insurers from disclosing medical information to parents about their dependents, on pain of criminal liability.

The thing to get clear in your mind is that the ruling class in the US and in Europe — the state, the media, academia, the professions, big business — has accepted gender ideology as true and good. It will increasingly set out to separate children from their bigoted parents. Who is protecting you and your family? Are you aware of how vulnerable you all are?

Think about it: we have become a civilization whose ruling class believes that it is perfectly right and natural to put children on cross-sex hormones in an attempt to change their sex, based only on the say-so of the child and his guardians. As MacIntyre said:

This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.

Well, they told us so. 

The post Big Keira Bell Loss On Trans Therapy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Punishing Hungary For Cause Of ‘Progress’

The European Commission has hit Hungary hard, withholding over 7 billion euro in Covid reconstruction money to punish Hungary for its LGBT media law. From Deutsche Welle:

Hungarian Prime Minister Viktor Orban accused the EU on Friday of not approving Hungary’s coronavirus recovery spending plan because of a row over LGBTQ rights.

The European Commission is responsible for handing out the bloc’s pandemic recovery fund — worth up to €800 billion ($950 billion) — but has yet to approve Hungary’s submission.

The Commission, which is still assessing plans submitted by Orban’s government, has indicated Budapest may miss out on early backing to the value of €7.2 billion in EU grants.

“Reconstruction funds are loans that Brussels does not want to give us now because of the debate around LGBTQ policy,” Orban said in an interview given to state media.

The commission is evaluating the reforms each EU member state has committed to, in exchange for their share of the recovery package.

From a leading German-Hungarian journalist:

RoL mechanism activated against Hungary, HU oppo pol proudly announces. What it means: No EU money for Hungary except if Hungarians vote for Opposition at upcoming elecs. https://t.co/klAJ4QdDVC

— Boris Kálnoky (@bkalnoky) September 17, 2021

Incredible. As Kalnoky goes on to say, if Orban’s party loses next year’s election, a good case can be made that this is the first time the EU has taken down the government of a member state by tactically withholding relief funds as a stick to make sure the vote goes as they wish.

Why are they doing this? The chief (but not exclusive) reason is that they hate the law Hungary passed this summer banning LGBT content for minors. That’s it. That’s why the Western Europeans are trying to blow up the bloc.

Bloomberg wrote earlier this week:

The EU threatened Poland with daily fines and frozen payouts in disputes over LGBTQ discrimination and judicial independence. Driven by several prime ministers, the bloc is harnessing powerful new budgetary tools in an unprecedented push to compel Poland and Hungary to reverse moves that undercut the rule of law or lose access to billions of euros.

More:

The EU is hoping that, with its newfound financial leverage, it will be able to reverse its paltry record on disciplining rogue members, which has made it more complicated to stand up to China and support democratic values around the world. But with Hungary fully dug in, the bloc’s unity will be tested in a confrontation that could reshape the alliance in the coming years — either by effectively forcing member states accused of democratic backsliding to align themselves with its values or make them reconsider membership in the EU itself.

And

EU officials have said that a compromise with Poland over the rule-of-law issues could be possible, but they don’t expect a solution with Hungary at least until after the next national election, which could be in April.

“This is about the EU’s raison d’etre,” Tocci said. “The rule of law questions — whether it’s the judiciary or corruption or civil rights and hence LGBTQ — these are all fundamental pillars of liberal democracy.”

Here’s a strong op-ed by MIT professor Daron Acemoglu, in which he says Hungary must be cast out of the European Union so democracy can work. Excerpts:

To be sure, expelling Hungary, and credibly threatening Poland with the same fate, is a serious decision that should not be made hastily. Any member state can elect a government that might try to weaken democratic institutions (as Italy did with Silvio Berlusconi, and as Britain has done with Boris Johnson). Generally, the best way to deal with would-be authoritarians is to allow democratic institutions to do their jobs and trust voters to remove dangerous politicians.

But Hungary has become the exception that nullifies the rule. After more than a decade under Orbán’s Fidesz Party, its democracy appears to have been fatally wounded, raising doubts that voters could ever remove the current regime.

The longer the EU continues to treat Hungary like a normal democracy, the more damage it will do to its own brand. It should start the process of changing its rules, so that it can take action against Hungary and Poland, even if these countries try to use their veto power. It should then invoke Article Seven of the Treaty on European Union to suspend Hungary’s voting rights, and then stop the delivery of EU funds to the country while it works out the best way of terminating its membership. Barring some miraculous last-moment return to democracy, Hungary must go in order for the European project to survive.

Notice something here? Elected rulers doing things of which the Cathedral does not approve is “weaken[ing] democratic institutions.” Even though Hungary’s ruling party is genuinely and deeply and correctly concerned that it might lose the 2022 election, technocrats like Prof. Acemoglu doesn’t think this should be left to chance. If the Hungarian people won’t deliver the correct result, then the rest of Europe should make them pay.

Here’s the tell:

Moreover, there is now yet another argument for the EU to act against Hungary and Poland. With the Taliban’s reconquest of Afghanistan, there is no longer any doubt that the Western effort to establish democracy and the rule of law by force and foreign aid has failed. From now on, Western countries will have to lead by example. As US President Jimmy Carter said in his inaugural address: “The best way to enhance freedom in other lands is to demonstrate here that our democratic system is worthy of emulation.”

There it is: our liberal democrats (of the left and the right) have failed to win the hearts and minds of foreign peoples, so now they’re going to turn their warmaking on their own dissenting people. I told you the other day when George W. Bush indicated that dissident Americans are the new Al Qaeda. 

The European Commission believes that Hungary’s LGBT media law is a violation of liberal democracy. I remind you that most, and maybe all, EU countries restrict speech to a degree shocking to Americans, whose liberal democracy protects free speech in the Constitution. Here’s Belgium, for example. Much of this I don’t understand, in the sense of it seems to go too far. But the people who best understand what is the correct policy for the Belgians are … the Belgians. Here is a link to a 2019 EU report on media laws to  protect children and minors. It’s perfectly clear that the EU has no problem forbidding speech that it deems harmful to minors. Its beef with Hungary is that the Hungarians do not agree that homosexuality, bisexuality, and transgenderism are phenomena to be encouraged among children and minors. The illiberal leftist democracy that is the EU wishes to override the decisions of Hungarian parents about how their children will be educated on sex and gender matters — and then blame the Hungarians for being illiberal bigots!

Viktor Orban has contrasted “Christian democracy” with “liberal democracy,” in the EU sense. I’m not sure this works as well as it should in English, because it seems to me that Orban doesn’t think that what is called “liberal democracy” is actually liberal, in the proper sense. It sounds like he’s saying “progressive secular democracy” when he says “liberal”. I could be wrong here, because it’s clear that Orban understands that “liberalism” is not neutral. It has a substantive morality baked into it, and that moral telos is to “liberate” the desiring individual from any unchosen duties that might limit his desire.

This is why the liberal ruling class of the EU and the US can believe that teaching a kindergartner that he is free to choose his gender is liberation. This is why woke capitalists have been so eager to get on board this campaign: the more you train people up to think of their relationship to the world primarily in terms of satisfying desires, the easier they can be convinced to buy things.

Neither Poland nor Hungary are trying to force their more traditional views on LGBT on other EU member states. But this is the issue that the EU is going to the mat over — this at a time when the EU is relatively weak, and needs to strengthen itself in a world of declining US power. Incredible. They are putting Europe’s future at risk because they cannot tolerate the thought that there’s one Magyar child who hasn’t heard the gospel of gender fluidity.

Expect the same treatment here in America from our ruling class baizuocracy. They are ginning themselves up for a war they believe they can win: one on the American people, especially traditional religious people. As the media and other institutions manufacture consent to persecute us, they will begin to describe us and our institutions as undemocratic, and a violation of American ideals. And then, those who haven’t already conformed will be brought to heel. American conservatives should look at what’s being done to Hungary, and understand that the same process is coming for us, unless we can somehow stop it.

Oh no, democracy is in danger because people freely voted for a candidate who respects the popular will by rejecting my policy positions. Thankfully, an unelected body of technocrats is stepping in to save democracy by imposing my policy positions upon this reactionary populace.

— Mathis-Louis Bitton (@mlbitton) September 16, 2021

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Penn State & The Baizuocracy

Penn State University sent this out today to its faculty and staff:

Got that? Now you can make an anonymous Title IX complaint against someone, and you don’t even to show up at the hearing, or face your accuser for questioning! You can be convicted on the basis of an anonymous, undefended accusation, and your career will be over.

This is what they call “social justice.”

In 2018, an openly gay Penn State professor was the subject of formal complaints by students after he “misgendered” someone, calling a non-binary student “she”. That’s how thin-skinned these children are. He’s still on faculty there, but now, if he does it, he could be facing federal civil rights charges. Wait, even if he doesn’t do it, but some student wants to punish him with an anonymous accusation, he could be facing federal civil rights charges. Any and all of them could. Thanks to the Biden Justice Department and the university, professors at Penn State now have one more reason to fear their students.

Who can possibly teach under conditions like that? Conditions in which all it takes is an accusation to wreck your life — an accusation that you broke federal civil rights law by calling a “non-binary” person “she”? Seriously, Penn State and the US Department of Justice have now given lunatics like this the means to destroy a professor’s career for not using made-up language:

They’re literally making shit up pic.twitter.com/KsBB4GxgE7

— Libs of Tik Tok (@libsoftiktok) September 14, 2021

The baizuocracy — government by “baizuo,” the Chinese slang term for white Western leftists — is destroying the country and its institutions. Seriously, Penn State seems bound and determined to run every non-conformist out of the university.

Down with the baizuocracy! I’m going to make a special category on this blog for examples of the baizuocracy at work.

The post Penn State & The Baizuocracy appeared first on The American Conservative.

Robert E. Lee, Wendell Berry, & Uncle Charlie

Reader Rob G. passes along this short piece by the Baptist theologian Russell Moore, supporting the removal of Richmond’s Robert E. Lee statue. In it, Moore recalls years ago, as a seminary professor, trying to decide whether it was right to remove a portrait of Lee after a black seminarian winced upon seeing it. Moore counseled removing it, but then went out to see Wendell Berry to see what he would say. Excerpt:

Around the time that I had sent my response to the student, I was out at the poet and novelist’s farm, where at his kitchen table I awkwardly brought up the subject of Lee. I say “awkwardly” because I was quite sure that Berry would disagree with my counsel. After all, I had just read a defense he’d made of Lee, and I was sure he would think that the picture’s removal was one more example of a mobilized and rootless modern society that refused to even remember the past.

Other than the one essay, however, I really had no reason to guess his response. Berry, after all, is an agrarian writer but decidedly not in the strain of “moonlight and magnolias” Southern agrarianism, which at best whitewashes and at worst romanticizes the violent white supremacist caste system of old Dixie. To the contrary, he has written poignantly on the “hidden wound” of white supremacy and the damage it has done.

Still, I found the author’s 1970s-era essay on Lee inconsistent. He portrayed the general as an exemplar of someone facing the choice between principle and community, when he resigned his commission in the United States Army to join the Confederate cause. To Berry, Lee’s motivation was not a defense of slavery but rather a refusal to go to war against his relatives and his home of Virginia. The author concluded the General was right.

“As a highly principled man,” Berry wrote of Lee, “he could not bring himself to renounce the very ground of his principles. And devoted to that ground as he was, he held in himself much of his region’s hope of the renewal of principle. His seems to me to have been an exemplary American choice, one that placed the precise Jeffersonian vision of a rooted devotion to community and homeland above the abstract ’feeling of loyalty and duty of an American citizen.’”

Berry was right, it seems to me, that morality is grounded best in what he would call “membership” rather than in abstractions. Where he was wrong, though, was in seeing the boundaries of that membership. The precise evil that Lee fought to maintain was a community in which some people were seen as members and others were seen as property to be exploited and tortured.

Berry told Moore that removing the portrait was the right thing to do. Read it all. 

Rob G. comments:

Moore makes some good points here, and on one level I agree with him. But I think he fails to grasp the bigger picture, which is that this whole thing is not just about the statues.  His error is that he considers the thing in isolation, which, given the social, cultural, and political issues involved, is at very least shortsighted, and at worst an exercise in do-good and feel-goodism.

I tend to agree with Rob here, and in fact Rob’s comment helps me understand why I agree with Moore in principle, but can’t endorse his column. I wanted to read the entire Berry essay where he discusses Lee, but couldn’t find it online. I did find the Lee excerpt from the essay on Google Books. I couldn’t cut and paste, but I did take some screenshots. Here’s the Lee passage:

 

Berry, who has written movingly on the “hidden wound” of American racism, might have changed his mind on Lee since he penned those words. Still, I find them persuasive. As Berry makes clear, the tragedy of Robert E. Lee was that no matter which choice he made, there would have been pain. For Lee to have remained loyal to the Union would not have entailed mere disagreement with his family and his people; it would have required him to make war on them.

This is something I don’t think we fully consider today — that is, what it means to make war (a real shooting war) on your own family. Could you do it today, to remain loyal to the government in Washington? Even though we are far more connected and aware today, thanks to technology, than the Americans of the 1860s were, it is still a hell of a thing to ask people to take up arms against their own friends and family to be loyal to a distant abstraction.

Would you turn your abilities against your own people? Even if those people believed wrong things? Even if they believed wicked things? I could conceive of a circumstance under which I could do that, but it would be extreme. I would like to think that I would have fought against the slave state of the Confederacy, but I think it would have been so very difficult for a Southerner in 1861 to have turned his back on everything and everyone he had ever known to take up arms against them, even if he believed their cause was unjust.

When I look at a statue of Robert E. Lee, I see a tragic figure: a great man who fought for the wrong side, but did so out of noble motives, and who suffered a deserved defeat — but bore it with dignity, and worked for the reconciliation of the Union. He symbolizes the best of the South — or the white South, at least. I think we can and should look back on him with magnanimity. I understand that good people can disagree on that. But if you are so very sure that Lee deserves no monument, and no sympathy, ask yourself: if there were another war, would you take up arms against your own people, even if they were wrong? If the answer is yes, do you not at least understand the immensity of that tragedy?

I think this contemporary controversy has little to do with the actual Robert E. Lee, and a lot to do with Lee as a symbol of a certain kind of person that America’s ruling class has decided is deplorable, and must be crushed. I don’t believe it’s about justice; I believe it’s about power. And it’s about the victory of a certain kind of radical mindset.

Let us create a figure we will call Uncle Charlie. Every Southerner has an Uncle Charlie in his family, or at least in his family’s circle (Uncle Charlie might be a neighbor). Uncle Charlie is an old white man, and he is a racist. Charlie usually keeps his mouth shut about his racial opinions at family gatherings, but when he’s been drinking beer, he’ll tell a racist joke, or make a comment that ticks everybody off. Maybe Aunt Joanie will say something to him about his big mouth, but more often than not, everybody just rolls their eyes at each other and stays quiet, because it’s easier to tolerate Uncle Charlie’s mouth than to start a big fight over it.

As mad as you can get at Uncle Charlie, you also know that Uncle Charlie is a complicated person. He lost his job when the mill closed twenty years ago, and was never able to get good work again. He was humiliated by his unemployment, and it made him hard, and bitter. His son, your cousin Bobby, died of a drug overdose, and his other son, Dickie — nobody knows what happened to him, but Charlie and Joanie only ever hear from him when he needs money. They don’t have much money, but they can’t stand to think of their flesh and blood suffering, so they usually scrape something together to give to him. You know that this shames Charlie too, because he got drunk last Thanksgiving and talked about how much it hurts him that Dickie don’t care nothin’ for him but that he gives Dickie money.

You also know that when that black family down the road from Charlie and Joanie lost their house in a fire, Charlie and Joanie were the ones who organized the relief effort with the local churches. You remember that time at the family Christmas get-together when you thanked Charlie for doing that, and then pointed out that you didn’t understand how he could be so compassionate to his black neighbors, but still hold on to his racist beliefs. Charlie just looked at you like you were speaking Greek. He literally did not understand the point you were making. And you didn’t understand why he didn’t understand. Later, when you were back home in New York, you tried to explain Uncle Charlie to your friends at the bar, but nobody could figure him out either.

Uncle Charlie taught you and your brothers and sisters how to ride horses. He and Joanie had horses for a while. He also listened to you when you were being bullied at school, and your own parents didn’t have time to hear you out. Charlie did, and he went up to the school to talk to the principal on your behalf. You loved him for that. And as ornery an old cuss as he is, you know that if you got in trouble, Charlie would get in his truck and come to wherever you are to help you out. You might have to listen to his redneck stories all the way home, and put up with his crackpot political commentary, but the point is, Charlie would do anything to help you, because though he thinks you’re a n–ger-loving crazy liberal who got ruined in college, you’re still family.

I’m telling you, nearly every Southern family has an Uncle Charlie. Maybe nearly every family does, period. If the day should come when you and I should feel compelled to take up arms against Uncle Charlie, well, that will be a terrible day. Uncle Charlie cannot be reduced to his ugly opinions about non-white people. Anybody who tells you that you have to prove your own decency by your willingness to denounce Uncle Charlie and treat him like the enemy is, in fact, your real enemy.

That’s what all this feels like to me: it’s not enough for the successors to the Yankees to have won, but they also demand that we all denounce Uncle Charlie, and damn the things that are precious to him. I’m not loyal to the Confederacy (which, as I’ve said a million times, deserved to lose). I am loyal to Uncle Charlie, and to the memory of my ancestors who fought in that war. Abraham Lincoln and the victorious powers were wise in that they made it possible for the South to bear its defeat with relative dignity. The victors realized that the war they fought to preserve the Union could have been won on the battlefield but lost if Southerners had contempt for the Union. Fifty years later, the lack of this kind of wisdom led to the Versailles Treaty, which exacted harsh punishment on Germany, and paved the way for the rise of Hitler.

It is unwise to put people in the position where they believe they have to hate their own family to prove that they are good and worthy of respect. Similarly, it is unwise to put people in the position where they believe they have to violate their own consciences in order to prove to their family that they are worthy of respect. A good society is one that can live with these tensions.

I hold a view that almost nobody does, as far as I can tell. In 2020, there was a Black Lives Matter march in my hometown, St. Francisville. There was also a petition, started by my niece Hannah Leming, calling on the Historical Society to change the annual Audubon Pilgrimage, a festival dedicated to highlighting the Old South plantations around there. Hannah’s petition called on the Historical Society either to expand its scope to include frank discussion of slave life, or to abandon it. After all, nearly half the people who live in West Feliciana Parish are black — and they’ve been excluded from this festival all their lives. Why would they want to be part of a festival that celebrates a culture that enslaved their ancestors.

I wrote about that here. I wrote in support of my niece’s petition. I did not want the Pilgrimage to end, because I think it is important to observe the past and honor what is honorable in it. I hoped the Pilgrimage would simply expand to tell the whole story, not just the moonlight-and-magnolias narrative. The Historical Society ended the Pilgrimage — too quickly, I thought, but I later came to see that it’s simply not possible in this cultural environment to have something like what I envisioned. At the time, there was talk about tearing down the Confederate statue outside the town courthouse. I oppose that. The statue has stood for a very long time, and I think it would be damaging to take it down. What I would like to see instead is a statue built on that same courthouse square to the Rev. Joseph Carter, a brave black pastor who stood down a white mob on the courthouse lawn to register to vote in the 1960s (hear more about that here). Rev. Carter’s courage tells a next chapter in the story connected to that Confederate soldier. He represents the conquering of the social order that the soldier defended — a conquering that came one century later, after more struggle and bloodshed.

Why can’t we tell both stories in statuary — not because the Confederate soldier is morally the equal of Rev. Carter, but because both of them were men of this place, caught up in history, and struggling with loyalty to principle and to people (because the Rev. Carter brought trouble onto his family from racist whites, it could be said that by standing up for his right to vote, he put his family in danger).

In other words, I want more history, not less of it. When I walk through Paris, I loathe the evil that the French revolution’s leaders wrought … but I would not support removing their statues, or their names from public places. They too were Frenchmen. Obviously there has to be a limit to this. I wouldn’t support keeping statues of Hitler or Lenin up, nor would I favor allowing places to be named after Stalin or Mao. But the evil of those figures was so extreme as to be beyond normal categories. When it is possible, I favor more history, not less. In my hometown, the Confederate soldier tells us who we were, and therefore, part of who we are. A statue of Rev. Joseph Carter, same thing. We need to build that statue. I never met the man, but I honor his memory, I recognize him as a brother in Christ, and I thank him for what he did not just for the black people of our parish, but for all of us.

Anyway, back to Lee: would you be able and willing to turn your talents against your people, to the point of taking up arms against them, and killing them for the sake of principle? If so, would that decision be easy for you? If you wouldn’t do it, or if it would be a hard decision to make, maybe then you should spare a little sympathy for Robert E. Lee, and pray that neither you nor any other American will ever have to make a similar tragic decision.

UPDATE: I’m writing my Substack newsletter for later today, and I just ran across something in my notes from the psychiatrist Iain McGilchrist’s great book The Master And His Emissary, about the divided brain. This seems relevant here:

The left hemisphere is always engaged in a purpose: it always has an end in view, and downgrades whatever has no instrumental purpose in sight. The right hemisphere, by contrast, has no designs on anything. It is vigilant for whatever is, without preconceptions, without a predefined purpose. The right hemisphere has a relationship of concern or care (what Heidegger calls Sorge) with whatever happens to be.If one had to encapsulate the principal differences in the experience mediated by the two hemispheres, their two modes of being, one could put it like this. The world of the left hemisphere, dependent on denotative language and abstraction, yields clarity and power to manipulate things that are known, fixed, static, isolated, decontextualised, explicit, disembodied, general in nature, but ultimately lifeless. The right hemisphere, by contrast, yields a world of individual, changing, evolving, interconnected, implicit, incarnate, living beings within the context of the lived world, but in the nature of things never fully graspable, always imperfectly known–and to this world it exists in a relationship of care [Emphasis mine — RD]. The knowledge that is mediated by the left hemisphere is knowledge within a closed system. It has the advantage of perfection, but such perfection is bought ultimately at the price of emptiness, of self-reference. It can mediate knowledge only in terms of a mechanical rearrangement of other things already known. It can never really ‘break out’ to know anything new, because its knowledge is of its own representations only. Where the thing itself is ‘present’ to the right hemisphere, it is only ‘re-presented’ by the left hemisphere, now become an idea of a thing. Where the right hemisphere is conscious of the Other, whatever it may be, the left hemisphere’s consciousness is of itself.

I think of Robert E. Lee — the historical figure, and the statue — within a relationship of care: care for my region, care for its history, care for its people, care for my family, including my ancestors, and so forth. Because I care about all these things, I can care about the figure of Robert E. Lee even though I believe he fought bravely for a bad cause. And because “my people,” as I see it, aren’t only white people, but Southern people, and American people, I recognize that there is an unavoidable and ultimately irresolvable tension here over how to regard Lee. I think it was appropriate, and is appropriate, for white Southerners to reassess the meaning of these Confederate monuments in light of the suffering of our black brothers and sisters. But all of this is happening, it seems to me, not among people who exist in a relationship of care, of context, of the complexities of the lived world, but rather in the context set by the victors in the culture war: one of abstraction, power, and the exercise of power.

The post Robert E. Lee, Wendell Berry, & Uncle Charlie appeared first on The American Conservative.

How Low Did Princeton Go?

On August 31, I wrote about the propaganda Princeton University is putting out to slander and demean Joshua Katz, a tenured Classics professor who publicly dissented from the racialist ideology the university’s leadership has adopted. They seem to be trying to drive Katz out of the university. In the propaganda I cited, the university holds up Katz to incoming freshmen as an example of a racist on campus.

Well, here’s an update. A writer named Greg Piper examined the case, and caught something that had eluded critics:

Princeton’s virtual gallery, “To Be Known and Heard,” was commissioned by the Carl A. Fields Center for Equality and Cultural Understanding and campus engagement office and designed by an advisory committee of faculty, administrators and students.

The “Race and Free Speech” section explores Princeton’s history of grappling with “what crosses the ‘line’ between free speech and freedom of expression, and racist statements and actions.” But it surreptitiously edited the quote that got Katz in trouble.

He had written: “The Black Justice League, which was active on campus from 2014 until 2016, was a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands.” Only the parenthetical is missing from Princeton’s rendering.

The section includes quotes from black professors denouncing Katz for “race-baiting, disguised as free speech” and seemingly not regarding them as “essential features” of Princeton.

But it left out the classics department’s removal of its statement condemning Katz and Eisgruber walking back the threat to investigate him, leading Katz to crow about surviving “cancellation” in a Wall Street Journal op-ed.

That’s right: the Princeton institutional propagandists deliberately doctored a quote to make Katz look even worse. And it kept out other information that would have complicated the charge.

This wasn’t a student activist groups doing this. This involved offices of Princeton University that set out to damage the reputation of a sitting professor, even if they had to doctor a quote to do it. I hope Prof. Katz hires the best lawyer in the business. I think money is the only thing these wealthy fanatics of the Ivy League understand.

By the way, Katz published recently an account in First Things of his conversion to Christianity. It’s a moving essay. Excerpts:

One need not believe in a higher power in order to know that the capacity for wrongdoing exists in each of us, whether or not one wishes to specify certain kinds of wrong with the strong term “sin.” And one need not believe in a higher power in order to know that a world without redemption is a sorry place. Yet here we are. The elite view in the United States is that old-time religion, with its belief in sin and redemption, is very, very bad—whereas an intersectional pile of very, very new orthodoxies must be endorsed and re-endorsed.

These new orthodoxies appear to hold that we should “ban the box” for some, while others we should destroy without mercy. “Redemption” is therefore absurd, or a dirty word: There are those who don’t need it, and those who don’t deserve it. This view is odd, to say the least. And it is shortsighted. For the hour will inexorably come when those who destroy others will become targets themselves, perhaps for an actual sin, perhaps for a manufactured one. When this happens, the destroyers are likely to experience a secular come-to-Jesus moment and suddenly find the possibility of redemption attractive. People of bad faith will wish to be viewed as people of good faith.

We tend not to think of “faith,” a word English has borrowed from Latin fides via French, as having much in common with “good faith”: Bona fides is a term more common in law and commerce than in church, and there are many people of good faith who are not also people of faith. (Vice versa, too—though perhaps a person of faith who is not a person of good faith should not in fact be called a person of faith?) I am not a proselytizer: I have no wish to persuade men and women of good faith to embrace faith. Still, I have a story to tell. It is a banal story, a ­cliché, as old as the hills. But old stories persist because they are retold.

Katz, who explains that he was not raised with religion, talks about the horrifying treatment he has been put through by the mob at Princeton, including the student newspaper’s bringing up a consensual romance he had many years ago with a student he was teaching. [I incorrectly reported in an earlier version that it wasn’t against Princeton’s rules at the time. In fact, it was. I misread the First Things piece — RD]. But this excruciating trial in which he endures having his name dragged through the mud by his ideological enemies, has been a blessing in one way to the relatively new convert:

The hideousness shows no signs of abating, though thanks to the Academic Freedom Alliance and many individuals around the world who have reached out to me, I have this year gained more, and better, friends than I lost. Perhaps someday I will have more to say about this. For now: Though my faith in academia, which had been waning for years, is now largely gone, my faith in the power of God’s mysterious ways is ascendant.

Because religion is still new to me, and because I grew up with the New York Times, which in the guise of news now ­instructs those aptly dubbed by John McWhorter “The Elect” to despise religion, I find it ­remarkable—though I shouldn’t—that many of the people who have worked so hard to keep me going are religious. Not all, to be sure. One is aggressive about his ­atheism, which is just fine with me. But it is undeniable that I owe my sanity largely to a couple dozen churchgoing Christians and synagogue-attending Jews: people who understand sin, redemption, and faith, both in theory and in ­practice.

Read it all. 

I’m sure that his new faith is helping Katz cope, especially the part about not hating one’s persecutors. If he’s able to forgive them, he’s a much better Christian than I am. I’ll just say that after what Princeton has done to Joshua Katz, it had better have a Come-to-Jesus moment with its lawyers.

The post How Low Did Princeton Go? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Ruthie Leming, Gone Ten Years Today

Readers, I beg your indulgence. I am at the LAX airport, and will be spending the day flying home to Baton Rouge. I will attempt to buy online access on the flight, but I have had bad luck with that lately. If your comments are delayed, and if there aren’t as many posts as usual, that’s why.

On this morning ten years ago, my sister Ruthie died at home. Here, from The Little Way of Ruthie Leming, the book I wrote about her, is what happened:

The next morning – September 15, 2011 – Paw left before daylight with his friend Hershel Morris, headed to visit a sick pal in north Louisiana who had been their LSU classmate half a century ago. Paw’s usual habit was to pick the morning paper up out by the road, deliver it to Mike and Ruthie, and drink a cup of coffee with them. Not this morning, though.

Ruthie woke up feeling out of sorts. She told Mike she wouldn’t be able to ride with him to take Rebekah and Claire to school. That was unusual, Mike thought. Ruthie always pushed herself to take that ride. But on this morning, she made the kids’ lunches, and wrote her daily notes to the girls. Since she became ill, Ruthie had been penning short, encouraging messages to her children, and leaving them in the girls’ lunchboxes. That way, they would know that Mama was with them throughout the day.

The girls kissed their mother goodbye, climbed with their father into the Excursion, and left for school. Mam planned to go to Zachary that morning with her friend Kay Graves to get her hair done. Mam’s hairdresser, Big Show’s wife Jan, customarily held a Friday morning slot for Mam, but this week Jan changed the appointment.

Mam rang Ruthie to see if she needed anything from the store, besides cat food.

“No ma’am, the cat food is all I need,” Ruthie said.

“Do you need me to come over?” Mam asked, worried by how weak Ruthie sounded.

“No, I’m going to lay down for a few minutes and get some rest before we go down to get my blood work done.”

“Okay, good. I’ll see you later, then. Love you.”

After dropping the girls off, Mike figured that if Ruthie was sleeping in, he had time to stop by the fire station north of town to check out the new $400,000 rig that was both a rescue truck and a pumper. He wheeled in, said hello to the men, poured himself a cup of coffee, and gave the gleaming red truck an admiring once-over . After an hour or so, Mike said goodbye, and headed home to be with Ruthie.

When he arrived, Mike walked to the back of the house and stuck his head in the bedroom. Ruthie was awake, but still in bed. She said she would join him up front shortly. Mike excused himself, went to the living room, sat on the sofa, and picked up the newspaper. Their routine was to sit together on the couch, read the paper, and talk about the day ahead. That morning, Ruthie shuffled up the hall in her pajamas, sat down next to her husband, and did what she did every other morning.

After resting quietly on the couch for a while, Ruthie lunged abruptly forward and began coughing violently. Mike saw a startling amount of blood pouring from her mouth. She had coughed up blood before, but nothing like this.

“I’m having trouble breathing,” she rasped. “Turn my oxygen up.” Mike did, but the blood kept coming. Ruthie tried to wipe it away with tissues, but couldn’t keep up. Mike retrieved the pulse oximeter, to check the oxygen level in her blood.

“I can’t breathe!” Ruthie gasped. “I can’t breathe!”

The oximeter reading was 84 – far below the normal measure. Mike knew this was a real emergency, and phoned Tim, who was with a patient. He left a tense voicemail.

“Hey Tim, it’s Mike,” he said. “Ruthie’s having a real tough time breathing. Bleeding a lot. Her oxygen is about 84, 85. Just wanted to … see what we needed to do. Thanks.”

Ruthie choked out words conveying to Mike that she couldn’t breathe at all. “Call 911!” she rasped. Mike was alarmed before, but now he was terrified. He ran to the kitchen, made the call, and before he could get off the phone heard the fire department dispatch notice go out on his police radio. Mike darted into the living room to look in once more on Ruthie, still on the couch. She was struggling to catch her breath, drowning in her own blood. (Doctors later said that the main tumor had most likely knifed through an artery in her lung.)

Mike, panicked and feeling helpless, dashed back into the kitchen and phoned the fire station where he had just visited, to tell the rescuers that the call was for his wife, and to please, for God’s sake, hurry. He hung up, shot back to the living room, and saw the love of his life, spattered with blood and terrified. For the first time since they had begun this journey, Mike saw fear in Ruthie’s big brown eyes.

“I’m scared,” she whispered. Then Ruthie fell forward, into her husband’s arms, dead.

“Ruthie!” he screamed. “Don’t leave me!”

Mike, a trained EMT, put Ruthie on the floor and began CPR, but he knew it was too late. The paramedics arrived, pulled him away from Ruthie’s body, and began working on her.

Across the road from Ruthie and Mike’s place, Ronnie Morgan was at home when he heard the emergency dispatch on the police radio. He knew this was the call he had been dreading for 19 months. He followed the paramedics in through the front door. Seeing Ruthie prone on her floor, all Ronnie could think about was the child whose diapers he had changed, and whom he had seen all those years ago, playing in the yard with his kids and all the others from the neighborhood. How many hot summer nights had our families all been together frying fish or boiling crawfish, and there she was, wrestling with the boys, swatting wiffle-ball home runs, playing in mudpuddles with tadpoles? How many nights had we all been down at the camp on the creek, Ruthie drinking cold beer and holding on to Mike by the bonfire, while the next generation of Starhill kids laughed and shouted in the woods by night? All those memories tumbled down around Ronnie as he stood there in Ruthie’s living room, watching the paramedics labor to work a miracle.

She was like one of his own, he thought. And this is how it ends for that sweet little girl.

Ronnie hustled Mike into the kitchen, away from the grim scene unfolding. Mike telephoned Mam, who was 20 minutes away in Zachary. Mam was loading Ruthie’s cat food into the back of her SUV when the call came through. Mike was crying so hard Mam had trouble understanding him.

“Mam, Ruthie’s in trouble,” he choked out. “Come home quick.”

Moments later, the phone rang at the Leming house. It was Tim Lindsey returning, Mike’s earlier call.

“She’s dead! She’s gone! My Ruthie’s gone!” Mike shrieked. “The ambulance is here. I’ve been doing CPR on her. She passed out. I put her on the floor. She’s gone. She’s gone… .”

Mike was screaming so loud Tim had to hold the receiver away from his ear.

“I’m on my way,” Tim said.

Tim jumped into his pick-up and flew south to Starhill. Meanwhile, in the Wal-mart parking lot, Mam had pulled the SUV around to the entrance, and waited on her friend Kay Graves to come out of the store with her bags.

“Hurry, Katie!” she yelled through the open window. “Something’s wrong with Ruthie!”

Kay swung the side door open and threw in her plastic bags, which burst. She jumped into the passenger side and hit the button to turn on the flashers. They sped away. Within minutes, Mam hit Highway 61, turned sharply north, and pushed her big Ford as hard as it would go. The speedometer, Kay noticed, read 120 miles per hour.

Mam’s mobile phone rang. Because Kay and Mam have an understanding that neither will speak on the phone while driving, Mam told her friend that she would have to answer it. It was Ronnie. He asked to speak to Mam.

“She can’t talk, Ronnie, she’s driving.”

“It’s Ruthie,” Ronnie said. “She’s not here at the house. They took her to the hospital. Tim thought that was the best place for her.”

“Ronnie, are you telling me that she’s gone?”

“Yeah, she’s gone.”

Kay ended the call and asked Mam if she understood what had just been said.

“Yes,” Mam said flatly.

“Dottie, do you need me to drive?”

“No,” said Mam. “You drive like a grammaw. I need you to call Ray and tell him.”

“But Dottie –“

“I’m driving! You call him.”

Kay looked out her window at the sky, and said silently to God, I’m about to tell a man that his daughter is dead, and You are going to have to help me do this. She dialed Paw’s number.

“Ray,” she said, “this is Kay.”

“Yeah, baby, what you need?”

“Ray, Ruthie is gone. She’s gone, Ray. Do you understand what I’m telling you?”

There was silence.

“Ray, take a deep breath. Tell me, do you understand what I’ve just said?”

“Yeah,” Paw whispered. “Yeah, I do.”

“Do you have somebody with you?”

“Yes.”

“Go to the West Feliciana Hospital. That’s where she is.”

Paw started to cry.

“Ray, I love you.”

“I love you too, Katie.”

Tim passed the ambulance on Highway 61, headed to the hospital. When he got to Starhill, there was Mike, sitting on the front porch in a rocking chair, with his head in his hands. Ronnie and Carolyn Morgan were there with him. As Tim approached, Mike broke down in tears.

“She’s gone. She’s died. My baby’s gone.”

Mam wheeled her white SUV into the gravel in front of Ruthie’s house, slammed on the brakes, jumped out in a panic, and demanded, “Where’s my baby?!” She did not remember — or more likely, could not accept — the telephone conversations that had just taken place in her presence. Maybe Ruthie would be there after all. Maybe her body wasn’t really at the hospital.

Carolyn tried to embrace Mam, but Mam brushed past and stood before Mike, who sat on a chair, hunched forward, his back throbbing with pain.

“Mike, we need to go to the hospital to be with Ruthie,” Mam said. “You want me to take you?”

Tim told Mam that Ruthie had passed away. For the first time, Mam understood this nightmare was for real.

“I knew this day was coming,” Mam wailed. “Oh, my baby, my baby. My Mike, my Mike. Come here, baby. We lost our Ruthie.”

Mam took Mike into her arms and held him.

“Where is my baby, Tim?” she asked. “I want to see her.”

“Listen,” Tim said, crawfishing a bit, “they’re taking her to the hospital. They’re doing CPR. They’re doing everything they can do. Mike said it was really, really bad, Miss Dot, but she hasn’t been pronounced. We’re going to go to the hospital, and we’re going to see. But I’m really distressed about this situation, and I don’t think there’s going to be a good outcome.”

Kay turned to Mam and said, “Honey, she’s in a better place now. She’s not hurting. Let’s go to town and tell her goodbye.”

Mam and Kay helped Mike climb into Mam’s Ford. The three of them drove on to the hospital in St. Francisville, with Tim following. Nobody said a word.

At some point, Tim called Laura at home and told her Ruthie was dead. She jumped into her Suburban and headed out to Starhill. She passed Mam and Mike driving north, with Tim behind them, signaling for Laura to call him. On the phone, Tim told her to head out to school to pick up Claire and Rebekah.

Laura phoned the office at Bains Elementary and asked to speak to Dot Temple, the principal, who is also Abby’s mother.

“She’s in a meeting.”

“No, I need to speak to Mrs. Temple,” Laura insisted.

“She’s in a meeting.”

“No, I have to talk to Mrs. Temple right now.”

“Why?”

“I have to talk to her! Please go get her, it’s an emergency.”

Dot Temple came on the line. “Mrs. Temple,” Laura said, “Ruthie is dead. We need to get Rebekah. I have to get Abby too, but she won’t answer her cell phone.”

As it happened, Tim had already reached Abby by phone, and had her secretary put the call through to her office at the high school.

“You know, Ruthie is very sick,” Tim said.

“Yeah, is there something new?”

“She died this morning.”

“What?! I was just with her last night. Where is she? What happened?”

“Abby, her body was just so tired. I’m so, so sorry.”

Abby’s shock was genuine. She had been with Ruthie the night before. She knew Ruthie was on a steady decline, she had lost hope a long time ago that Ruthie was going to get a miracle cure, but she was still poleaxed by the news. Because Ruthie didn’t believe she was going to die anytime soon, Abby let herself believe it too.

And now her best friend was dead.

Tim said, “I need you to go get the girls.”

“Do they know?”

“No.”

“Do you want me to tell them?”

“No, just get them to the hospital and I’ll tell them. Laura’s coming to get you.”

Abby went to Maria Peterson, the secretary for the principal, with tears in her eyes.

“I’m leaving, Maria. Ruthie’s dead.”

Maria broke down. The receptionist from the front office walked in, and was told the news. She too burst into tears.

When Abby walked out of her office, there was Laura, waiting and weeping. They embraced, then walked resolutely out to the car, and drove down the Bains Road to the elementary school for Rebekah.

Everyone in the office at Rebekah’s school knew. When Bek came out, Abby told her that her mother is at the hospital, and that she and Miss Laura had come to pick her up. Laura began talking to Bek in her soothing way. Thank God Laura is here, Abby thought.

Then it was off to the middle school. Laura and Bek stayed in the car while Abby went in to get Claire. Claire was at PE, and had to change. Nobody at the middle school, where Ruthie taught, knew yet. Abby worried that the news would get onto Facebook immediately, and that was how Hannah would learn.

When Claire emerged, Abby told her Ruthie was at the hospital, and we needed to get there. On the short drive into town, the girls remained calm, quiet, and tearless. They look like innocent puppies, Laura thought.

Tim arrived at the hospital and met the physician on duty. He said, “Doc, she was a DOA. They’re still performing CPR, but it’s a moot point.”

Tim said, “She’s so sick. She’s suffered. She’s gone. Please call the code.”

Ruthie Leming was now officially dead. Tim went into the hospital room where they had her body. It was not a pretty sight, from the hemorrhaging, and swelling from the violence of rescue efforts. Tim and the hospital staff discussed cleaning Ruthie’s body up and making her presentable for goodbyes.

Standing outside the room where staffers worked on Ruthie’s body, Mam demanded to see her daughter. They told her she couldn’t, not yet.

“I’m telling you that I want to see my child,” she insisted. Someone from the hospital led Mam and Mike to a waiting room, and asked them to please be patient. Finally, they were invited in. Mike went in first. And then Mam followed.

She was not prepared to see her daughter looking so beautiful, and so peaceful. Ruthie’s struggle was over at last. Mam leaned in and pressed her cheek to Ruthie’s. It was still warm.

“Ruthie,” she spoke into her ear, “I’m going to keep my promise. I’m going to help Mike and the girls. I’m going to keep my promise.” Then she sat down next to Ruthie’s true love, and they grieved together.

When Laura and Abby drove into the hospital parking lot on the hill in St. Francisville, Tim was outside waiting. Mike sat in the hospital room, eyes closed, keeping silent vigil with Ruthie’s body. He was in no state to speak to his children. Tim understood, and took over.

The Suburban came to an abrupt stop next to where Tim stood, trying to summon the courage to speak the awful truth on the worst day of these children’s lives. Claire and Rebekah climbed out of the Suburban. Tim took a knee. Claire stood in front of him. Bekah stood by Laura.

“Where’s Mama?” Claire asked.

“I’m so, so sorry, my sweet girls,” said Tim. “Mama has died.”

The girls were in shock. They had not imagined, they could not have imagined, that this was coming. Ruthie had protected them from the thought, reckoning there would be time to make them ready. Bekah wept in Laura’s arms. Claire collapsed into Abby.

“What am I going to do without a mama?” Claire said. “I can’t be without a mama.”

“I know,” said Tim.

“Where’s Daddy? Where’s Daddy? Where’s Daddy!?” Claire asked. Tim, Laura, and Abby led them down the gantlet of sobbing friends and family, into the hospital room where their father was with their mother’s body.

Claire and Bekah wanted to embrace their mother’s body, but they were frightened. Is this really Mama? Claire thought. Ruthie’s face was visible, and a blanket covered her body. Their father, consumed by grief and fear, could not comfort them. All he could say was, “I’m alone. My baby’s gone.” Claire was scared. She had never seen her daddy like this. Her big, strong daddy looked small, weak, lost, and frightened. The world was turned upside down.

The sisters took in the full vision of their mother, her face pale, cold, dead on a hospital bed. Turning from it, they threw themselves into their father’s arms. “I’m going to be so alone,” he cried. Rebekah turned away from her father, then stood at the foot of Ruthie’s bed, saying, “Wake up, Mama. Wake up! Mama, don’t go, please don’t go.”

And on it went. As the pallbearers waited for the hearse at the Starhill Cemetery, they removed their shoes and rolled up their pants. To honor Ruthie, a country girl who hated wearing shoes, they carried her barefoot to her grave.

How country was Ruthie? She could skin a buck, and run a trot line. And she loved Bocephus.

An update on Ruthie’s family. Paw died in 2015. Mike has not yet remarried. Their daughter Claire married last December; she and her husband live in Texas, where he is in graduate school, and she just began her career as a nurse. Hannah is currently living with Mam in Starhill, and taking care of her as Mam mends from a broken hip. Rebekah is in college in Louisiana.

I chose to recount the events of this terrible day instead of one of the many inspiring stories in the book, for a reason. My sister’s story is ultimately one of hope, but as I look back at the last decade in our family, I can see that the sheer violence of Ruthie’s death damaged us all far more than we realized. That was an earthquake whose tremors, even a decade later, can knock down buildings. Death is a hateful thing. If I did not believe in a Savior who trampled down the power of death through his own death and resurrection, I think I would despair endlessly about it.

The post Ruthie Leming, Gone Ten Years Today appeared first on The American Conservative.

Gen. Mark Milley: China’s Man In The Pentagon?

Hi all, I’m sorry to have been away from the keys, but I was tied up all day filming a PragerU segment about Live Not By Lies. And the Internet keeps going on and off at this hotel. Flying back home tomorrow.

Anyway, I was stunned by the news about Gen. Mark Milley today. By now you will have read that the Joint Chiefs head phoned his Chinese counterpart twice during the final months of the Trump administration, to reassure the Chinese that the US wasn’t planning to attack China — this, because Milley was worried about Trump’s mental stability. The first time was right after January 6 of this year. Here’s the second time:

Milley also reassured Chinese Gen. Li Zuocheng of the People’s Liberation Army that the U.S. had no intention of launching a strike against China, according to the paper. It was one of two secret phone calls shared with Li on the issue.

The first took place on Oct. 30, 2020, after Milley reviewed intelligence suggesting China believed the U.S. was preparing for an attack due to military exercises in the South China Sea and Trump’s antagonism toward the country, according to The Post. But Milley told Li he would be warned of an impending attack.

“General Li, you and I have known each other for now five years,” he said, according to the paper. “If we’re going to attack, I’m going to call you ahead of time. It’s not going to be a surprise.”

The top US general called the man who would be his worst enemy in the event of war — and called him on October 30 of last year! — and told him that he would telegraph the US attack ahead of it happening. What the hell?! In what kind of country does the Joint Chiefs head call America’s No. 1 enemy and assure them he will let them know if we plan to attack them? In what kind of country does the top military leader violate the chain of command like this?

If Milley was so afraid of the president’s mental state that he felt compelled to phone the top Chinese general not once but twice, why did Milley not warn Congress and the American public? This makes no sense. Where was Milley during the second impeachment trial? Milley thought he was working for a deranged Commander in Chief capable of starting a war with nuclear-armed China in a fit of pique, but he didn’t want to go public with this concern. Incredible.

Milley had to have been a source for this information. If so, then he was proud of what he did, and figured it would make him look good. I don’t care how bonkers Trump might have been, the head of the US military cannot go around the civilian Commander in Chief — especially not to do his own foreign policy negotiations with our chief foreign rival. Again: if things were as bad as Milley believed they were, he should have publicly threatened to resign, and then gone to Congress to spill the beans. If memory serves, this kind of thing is why Truman fired Gen. MacArthur. I don’t care if you hate Trump, Milley has to go.

One more time: you can think that it was appropriate for him to have called China under these circumstances, but if Milley had any guts, or any sense of responsibility to the country he has sworn to defend, he would have gone public with this at a time when it would have cost him something, but might have spared the country a disaster. But he waited to tell it to Bob Woodward after he (Milley) was safe from Trump, and presumably to ingratiate himself to the people whose admiration he craves. The nation’s military chief doing something like this is beyond extraordinary. He seems like a double creep, Milley does: he didn’t make it public when it could have stopped what Milley regarded as a grave danger to world piece, but when it also would have cost him something; now he’s revealing that he carried out an act radically destabilizing of the civilian chain of command, when doing so could not do any good, but also wouldn’t hurt Milley, and might actually boost his personal stock.

Some character that one has.

 

The post Gen. Mark Milley: China’s Man In The Pentagon? appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Why Hungary?’ The New Yorker Asked Me

The New Yorker noticed my interest in Hungary, and sent Ben Wallace-Wells to Baton Rouge to interview me about it. Excerpts from his piece (which I thought fair):

His time in Hungary was interrupted by book events across Europe. Last week, he tweeted that he had met Pope Francis, briefly, in the Vatican. “I said, ‘Holy Father, I wrote “The Benedict Option.” ’ He took my name tag in his hand, looked at it, then gave me a blank expression. His team trashed the book when it came out in Italy in 2018. C’est la vie.” The depth and sincerity of Dreher’s retreatism has, paradoxically, brought him very close to real power.

That tweet brought me a lot of crap. Most people aren’t aware that when I went to Italy for the Benedict Option book tour in 2018, someone in the Vatican — my publisher did not tell me who — called around to various Italian dioceses asking them not to give me a platform because my book was allegedly against Pope Francis. As far as I know, none agreed to the request. My guess is that it was the Jesuit loudmouth Antonio Spadaro, at the time a close adviser to Francis, and a vocal opponent of my book. Spadaro denounced the book in a 2017 speech at Notre Dame. As editor of the Jesuit journal La Civilta Cattolica, Spadaro published an essay denouncing the Benedict Option as “Donatism.”

And if none of that brought the Benedict Option to the attention of the Pope, the 9/11/2018 Rome speech by Archbishop Georg Gänswein, private secretary of Benedict XVI, praising the book, certainly did. After Monsignor Gänswein delivered it, Vatican journalists in attendance told me that that was going to go off like a bombshell in Francis’s inner circle.

In 2019, Francis appeared to take a swipe at the Benedict Option in a homily.

Anyway, I have no doubt that Francis knows what the Benedict Option is, nor do the Vaticanisti who messaged me after that tweet to say they would have loved to have seen his face. I was hoping to have a laugh with the Holy Father about it, but that didn’t happen. So what! That’s the back story. Whether Francis was aware of it or not — and I doubt he was — someone close to him tried to spoil my book tour in Italy. That’s why I took mischievous pleasure in identifying myself to Francis when I met him. As I said at the time: c’est la vie.

More from the NYer piece:

When I asked Dreher whether he was concerned by such complaints, he told me he was, but that “we expect too much of these post-Communist countries if we judge them by Western standards of clean government.”

This is an accurate quote, but I explained at length that corruption is quite common in all the post-communist countries. It doesn’t justify it, but we should recognize that all of them are struggling with a legacy of the communist past.

I think this is an interesting segment of the piece:

Since Dreher’s return from Hungary, he told me, he had been thinking about Orbán in terms of Huey P. Long, the famed Depression-era governor of Louisiana who denounced the oil companies, fired hundreds of bureaucrats, and replaced them with patronage appointments—another corrupt populist. Having met in downtown Baton Rouge, and spent a little while talking while looking out at the unvegetated Mississippi River, we eventually drove a few minutes to Long’s monumental tombstone, on the grounds of the Louisiana statehouse, which was built by Long himself. The statehouse is the tallest building in Baton Rouge surrounded by twenty-seven acres of well-tended but mostly empty gardens; it’s still probably the most interesting-looking structure in the city. We were looking at a monument to a pre-liberal politics while considering a post-liberal future.

Dreher recalled the memories that his late father, raised poor in Depression-era Louisiana, had of Long. “He said, ‘When I was a kid, the only reason we had schoolbooks, new schoolbooks, was because of Huey Long. And so what if Long skimmed a lot off the top? I didn’t care because Long was someone who tamed the oil companies, and broke the oligarchy’s hold on Louisiana’s politics.’ ” There was, Dreher admitted, a “downside” to Long’s governance, in the institutional corruption that he bequeathed to the state. “But you can’t understand why Huey Long got into power until you understand why people voted for him. Same thing with Orbán.”

And:

American conservatives, Dreher went on, were just beginning to intuit how deep this soft totalitarianism ran. “You might not be that political, you might not even be that religious, but you know that your kids, in order to gain access to élite circles in business or anywhere else, are going to have to disavow the things you taught them,” he said. “That’s where you see the parallel between that and what the Romanians are thinking—that your way of life, your traditions, your religion, it’s all unworthy.” Dreher said that he was struck by “how much more clear-eyed the European Christians are about what we’re facing than the American Christians. American Christians are so lost in past glory, and the idea that we’re only one election away from winning America back for Christ, but just not aware of how shallow and fragile the faith is here. Over there, they have lived through generations of de-Christianization.” He talked it through for a little while longer. “America is about ten years away from being where they are, I think.”

The longer we talked about Hungary, the more Dreher returned to the analogy with America, as if by describing Orbán’s struggle in terms of the culture war he might encourage American conservatives to see themselves as more existentially threatened. “I don’t believe anybody is coming to kill us social and religious conservatives,” Dreher said. “But it is beyond clear to me now that the woke left, which controls all the major institutions of American life, will use the power it has to push people like me to the margins, and congratulate itself for its righteousness in doing so.” When I asked why he’d reached out to Carlson, he said, “I’ll tell you exactly what it was. I wanted to move the Overton window.” Dreher said that he believed Orbánism couldn’t work in the United States—we were simply too multicultural a society to rally around an explicit cultural nationalism—but he thought there were elements that American conservatives ought to learn from. (Carlson, in his broadcast, had emphasized the same point.) “Trump fights like a drunk falling off a barstool,” Dreher said. “Orbán fights like people say Trump fights.”

Read the whole thing — and be there when my son Matthew makes his appearance at the bar where we were drinking and talking. None of this is going to be news to regular readers of this blog, but it’s still interesting to see it reflected through a New Yorker writer’s eyes. I thought the piece was fair and accurate, which is the best one can hope for. I do wish that he had indicated that my concern about wokeness is not just over LGBT matters, but also about racial identity politics. LGBT is the neuralgic point on religious liberty, though, because that’s where the clash is. And I wish Wallace-Wells had mentioned my point that the actual racist party in Hungary, Jobbik, is formally allied with the anti-Orban left — a fact that never seems to make it into the Western media’s coverage of Hungary.

Most of the interview took place over the course of a long afternoon, but Wallace-Wells tried to reach me by phone for a follow up interview. I was in the Tuscan hill town of Montalcino that day, and had bad phone service, plus no WiFi at the hotel. Wallace-Wells sent the questions by e-mail, and I answered them, and sent them back to him the next day when we stopped in another town to eat, and found a WiFi signal. Below is what I sent. You should appreciate that a journalist catches a whale of an answer like this in his net, and has to pare it down to sashimi size:

About the structural changes: Yes, I have heard these complaints, and yes, they do somewhat undermine my support for the Orban government, but don’t negate it, or even close. In my writing about it this summer, I repeatedly cited the fact that even Fidesz supporters I would ask about it would complain to me about the party’s tolerance for corruption. Not knowing the Hungarian language, I couldn’t investigate this on my own, but I heard it often enough – even from those who voted for Fidesz before, and will vote for them again – that I accepted it, or most of it, as true.

What troubles people the most, I found, is the money issue – Orban’s crony capitalism. Nobody likes it at all, and I can’t blame them. The mitigating factors, according to the many people I talked to about it, are these:

 

The economy is doing much better overall under Fidesz than under the previous Socialist government, which makes the corruption easier to tolerate. Over and over, whether talking to business executives or baristas, I heard some version of: yeah, Fidesz is way too easy on corruption, but the opposition will destroy the economy. The last time I heard this in Hungary was from the old cab driver who took me to the airport to leave the country. He went on for a while about how Westerners like me only see the relative wealthy parts of the country, like Budapest, but never see the intense poverty in Hungary’s East. His anger at the Orban government for not addressing this surpassed his abilities to express it adequately in English, which was almost comic at times. And yet, when I asked him who he was going to vote for next year, he said Fidesz, without hesitation, because he was afraid that if the Left regained power, they would end up wrecking the country. This line of thinking reminded me of why so many American social conservatives I know ended up voting for Donald Trump in 2020, despite having little confidence in him: because the Left would be worse.Hungarians accept government corruption as part of life. An American diplomat stationed in the region told me that both the Left and the Right in the US only understand Hungary and Central Europe through American political categories. In truth, he said, by far the biggest problem in all these countries is corruption, which is a legacy of the Communist years. Indeed, talking to Hungarians about this, both pro-Fidesz and anti-Fidesz, nearly all of them told me that the previous Left government was spectacularly corrupt, and they expect the next Left government to be corrupt as well. The people seem to have accepted corruption as a political fact of life, to a degree that shocks me as a Westerner. Nevertheless, given that reality, it does kind of even out in the wash. I shared a cab with a young woman across Budapest once, and got into a discussion with her about her country’s politics. I asked her about the corruption issue. She readily admitted that the Fidesz government had far too much tolerance for corruption, and that it bothered her a lot. But, she said, there’s a kind of corruption that’s worse than financial corruption – and she brought up gender ideology, which is to say, the idea that gender is fluid, and that transgenderism should be protected in law, and so forth. She told me something to the effect that a country can survive financial corruption, but if it becomes morally corrupted, it’s all over. I agree with her on that.

I had an anguished conversation with a middle-aged Catholic woman in Hungary. She told me that her 19-year-old son had asked her recently if she had ever kissed a girl. When she expressed shock that he would dare to ask his mother a question like that, he explained that same-sex experimentation was common in his peer group. The woman told me that her son only reads and watches English-language media, including entertainment media. She blames Netflix (by name) and others for socializing and acculturating her son’s generation to debased American standards of sexual morality. She’s right about that. Funnily enough, traveling through Italy these past ten days on my book tour, I’ve met a surprising number of Italian conservatives – not think-tank intellectuals, who are my usual crowd here, but normies – who startled me with their anti-Americanism. It’s the same kind of thing: they blame American pop culture for debasing their kids. They’re right to, in my judgment. What startled me, though, was how this sometimes went hand in hand with sympathy for Vladimir Putin’s government. The argument seemed to be that whatever Putin’s faults, at least he won’t force us to be woke. This was the same thing I heard from some Hungarians when I expressed concern about Orban’s flirting with the Chinese. Personally, I am far more worried about Orban and the Chinese than I am about Orban and anything else. I do note, however, that many ordinary Hungarians seem to be open to the Chinese for the same reason that Italians are open to the Russians: because they fear American cultural hegemony more than they fear whatever Russia and China stand for.

This is not something I had imagined before going to Hungary. And frankly, it blows my mind that this kind of thing is never reported on in the US media. The American people have no idea how much our country’s progressivist pop culture disgusts people in other countries, even European countries. Of course, the Hungarian woman I spoke to ended up conceding that her son’s generation may well be lost on these questions – which, if true, means that Hungary, as a democracy, will eventually become a Magyar Sweden. That might be inevitable, but I certainly understand why people like her – and she’s a Fidesz supporter – are angry about it.

Also, I became friends with a former European Union official – not a Hungarian, but a Western European – who now works in Budapest. He spoke at length, and with real anger, about the corruption he dealt with in Brussels, but which was widely tolerated because the Eurocrats think that they are on the side of righteousness. He believes them to be quite hypocritical, employing double standards constantly against the former Soviet bloc members of the EU, and justifying it because they believe these countries are backwards and need to be tutored in how to be proper European liberals.

It matters to them that Orban re-nationalized some companies that had been bought by foreigners after Communism’s fall. Hungarians are fierce about their sovereignty. They believed – correctly, I think, as a matter of principle – that if their major industries are owned by foreigners, that they have much less say over the direction of their country. One woman told me that yes, the corruption bothers her a lot, but this is something that can be dealt with through reform legislation, if the Hungarian people push parliament to do so. But if major industries are owned by foreigners, Hungarians are at the mercy of people who may not have their national interest at heart.

Again, you’ll find in my writing, and in the interviews I gave to Hungarian media this past summer, I often brought up corruption as a black mark against Fidesz. That said, I left Hungary agreeing with the consensus that as bad as the corruption is, it is on balance better to have Fidesz in power than the opposition – which I came to believe would do nothing about the corruption problem, other than change the beneficiaries, and who would introduce forms of corruption that Fidesz rejects. Corruption comes in forms other than stealing, you know.

About the judges situation, I talked to a number of Hungarians about this, and had similar conversations with conservative Poles when I was in Warsaw; as you may know, the ruling party in Poland carried out a similar purge of the judiciary, and received similar criticism. The answer I got was that so many of these judges were holdovers from the Communist period, and were seen (by my conservative interlocutors) as corrupt. I do wonder how many such judges could have been holding on for thirty years after the demise of Communism, but I heard this explanation so often, and from some very smart people, that I assumed there must be truth to it. But again, I really don’t know for sure.

The bottom line: whatever the truth is on the details of any of this, corruption does indeed dampen my enthusiasm for the Orban model, and I don’t see at all that it is central to it. I spoke to enough Hungarians this summer to know that corruption is the Fidesz Achilles heel, and that only the perceived incompetence of the opposition, and their perceived vulnerability to corruption, will win Orban the votes of dissatisfied Hungarians. That said, I sense that we in the West expect too much of those post-communist countries if we judge them by Western standards of clean government.

Did you read “The Light That Failed,” by Stephen Holmes and Ivan Krastev? They’re two Western liberals who analyze in that book why liberal democracy and free markets didn’t take off as the West hoped in the post-communist countries. They brought up a widespread tolerance in all those countries for corruption. You simply couldn’t get anything done in the Communist era without engaging in it. This is a lasting legacy, they lament. This is not to say that corruption is good, or even benign, but it is to say that it’s an unfortunate fact of life that has to be taken into account when judging any and all government in the region. I believe we talked about this re: Huey Long in Louisiana. He was massively corrupt, but he did a hell of a lot of good for the state in his day. But he saddled the state with a system that accepted corruption as part of life in government.

The bottom line for me is that I would prefer a liberal democracy based generally on Christian principles, and that tolerated a wide range of free expression and practice. In other words, I would prefer the flawed liberal democracy that we had in our country until about thirty years ago, to the illiberal secularist democracy now coming into existence. John Adams famously said that our constitution is made for a moral and religious people, but would be inadequate to govern any other. We now are beginning to see the truth of that observation, as liberalism outside the boundaries set by the Judeo-Christian tradition degenerates into illiberalism – an illiberalism that renders people like me into enemies of the people, to use the old Communist phrase. This is the situation that we’re all in now, and we had better recognize it. I believe that the United States is entering into a period like Spain in the early 1930s. If I were a Spaniard of that era, I would prefer that we lived in a normal liberal democracy. But Spaniards of Left, Right, and Center were eventually not given that choice. If I had been a Spaniard then, I would have had to have chosen between the unsavory Nationalists, and people on the Left who hailed Stalin, burned churches, and threw priests down wells. There’s not much choice there, is it?

Viktor Orban is not Francisco Franco, nor is the Euro-positive Hungarian Left like the Spanish Communists. But the dynamic is quite similar. And it’s true in America as well. We all seem to be barreling towards a future that is not liberal and democratic, but is going to be either left illiberalism, or right illiberalism. If that’s true, then I know which side I’m on: the side that isn’t going to persecute me and my people. In Rome recently, I met a Syrian Catholic who fled to Europe to escape persecution back home. “Do you think we love Assad?” he said, speaking of Christians like him. “No. We support him because he is the only thing standing between us and the radical Muslims who want to kill us.”

We’re in a much less fraught, but still related, drama here in the West. I don’t believe anybody is coming to kill us social and religious conservatives. But it is beyond clear to me now that the woke left, which controls all the major institutions of American life, will use the power it has to push people like me to the margins, and congratulate itself for its righteousness in so doing. I say that as someone who does not at all want to do that to gays, racial minorities, and others.  I don’t know a single American conservative who wants to push gays back in the closet, reinstitute racial discrimination against minorities, or anything else. If I did, I would oppose those conservatives. But the left doesn’t feel that way about us.

No matter how strenuously American and Western European liberals deny it. We have never had an honest conversation in America about the irreconcilability of gay rights with religious liberty for traditional Christians, Jews, Muslims, and others who do not fully endorse the gay rights agenda. I remember back in the 2000s, when the gay marriage fight went national in a big way. The standard line one heard was something like, “How does my neighbor’s gay marriage hurt me?” – the idea being that obviously it does not, therefore opposition to gay marriage can only come from irrational hatred. That was never true, but the media ignored it, preferring the narrative that would lead to the outcome they desired.

In 2006, Maggie Gallagher published in the Weekly Standard a really interesting article about same-sex marriage, based on a bunch of interviews she did with legal scholars on both sides of the issue. They all agreed that there was no way to reconcile the two claims, at least when religious liberty conflicts with gay rights. The most interesting interview was with Chai Feldblum, then a Georgetown Law professor, and an advocate of gay rights. Feldblum had grown up in an Orthodox Jewish home, and had later, as an out lesbian, advocated for gay rights. But she understood the religious objections, and took them seriously. She told Gallagher that in the end, we cannot fully protect religious liberty and fully protect gay rights – and when the two conflict, said Feldblum, religious liberty has to give way.

I appreciated her honesty. This honesty was non-existent in the media at the time, no doubt because they understood that to investigate this conflict would result in making it plain to the American people the kind of trade-offs they faced – and that this might hurt the gay rights cause.

During this period, there were a number of state referendums in which voters rejected same-sex marriage. The same liberals who denounce Viktor Orban for anti-democratic practices had no regard for democracy back then, when voters produced a result they didn’t like. (Similarly, regarding the judiciary in Hungary, you will recall that some prominent liberal thinkers in recent years have floated the idea of expanding the Supreme Court to weaken court conservatives, who came to power by following our system.) How much regard to the woke corporations have for the democratic decisions made by elected state legislators that go against what wokeness proclaims to be just and right? They set out to punish those states. These corporations, who are accountable to no one in our democracy, behave like lawless oligarchs to push their woke social agenda. Where are the liberal defenders of democracy then?

When I hear liberals today complain about Orban subverting democracy, I know perfectly well that this is a “who, whom?” matter, not one of principle. It’s “who, whom?” all the way down.

Similarly on the question of race, I was educated and formed morally in the post-Civil Rights period. Kids of my generation, even in the Deep South, where I grew up, were taught that what Martin Luther King stood for was true and correct, and in fact profoundly Christian. This is true! I still believe it’s true. But now we are told by the American left that that’s not true, that in fact what the old segregationists believed – in race essentialism – is actually the case. I find this profoundly illiberal, and profoundly anti-Christian.

But this is how it is with the Western left: they sacralize certain people as victims, removing them from normal politics. It’s highly illiberal, but this is what passes for liberal democracy in the United States. This parasitic, illiberal leftism has come to exist within the institutions, structures, and practices of liberal democracy.

So, when American liberals complain about what Orban is doing to minorities they favor, I roll my eyes. They complain that academics are being forced out. First of all, I don’t know that I believe that, but even if it were true, have you seen what the campus left, including the administration, is doing to Joshua Katz at Princeton. They’re trying to drive this distinguished Classics professor – a liberal! – out because he dissents from the woke race ideology that has conquered the university. It’s an ideology that has conquered the Classics department, and has one of Katz’s onetime protegés, Dan-el Padilla Peralta, recently saying on a video Princeton put out for incoming freshmen, that he believes in free speech only in the case of advancing social justice causes, and that he thinks Princeton students should be taught to tear down the university.

It is almost funny the degree to which woke liberals are blind to their own manic illiberalism, and how their actions look to anyone to the right of them. I’m supposed to be grieved over how Viktor Orban is being mean to CEU, when back in my own country, leftist professors and leftist administrators are making it all but impossible for any non-woke professor or student to thrive on campus, or even to exist peaceably? Please.

I don’t know what Viktor Orban’s motives were for sending CEU packing, but if it was to prevent wokeness from gaining a foothold in Hungary and corrupting Hungarian elites, then I think he has done a service to his country. The woke are destroying American higher education. That is perfectly clear. And liberal democracy, as we understand it, is doing nothing to stop them.

About the Roma, I don’t know much, to be honest. I was surprised by the first meeting I had with a state official on my fellowship, a leading parliamentarian. He talked in our conversation about Fidesz’s programs to help the Roma. I was new in the country, and assumed that he was just putting a happy face on it. But I talked to others outside the government, and they told me that many of the Roma actually support Fidesz.

There is an openly racist, anti-Roma, anti-Semitic party in Hungary, and it’s called Jobbik. It is truly a far-right party. Last December, it formally united with the leftist opposition, in an effort to drive Orban from office. You don’t read that in the Western media, do you? It would complicate the narrative. Again, it’s the hypocrisy of the thing. Look at the discourse among American elites about “whiteness”. Anti-white racism is everywhere among elites, especially woke white elites, so I take nothing they say about Orban seriously.

About Muslims, I don’t know how many Muslims are in Hungary, but there’s no doubt that the Orban government is anti-Muslim, and doesn’t want Muslim migrants. I think this is a wise position for a European country to take, given the evidence in other European countries. In the US, we have been able to assimilate Muslim immigrants, but for whatever reasons, that has not been true in Europe. When I was in France this summer, I was unnerved by how frightened the French are by the prospect of intense and widespread violence emerging from the immigrant suburbs. There was talk of civil war. This was the summer when Israeli-Palestinian violence sparked anti-Semitic attacks in many Western European capitals, and in New York and Los Angeles. There were none of those in Hungary. I walked through the Jewish quarter to and from work every day. There were no police guarding synagogues or Jewish businesses. There didn’t have to be. It’s obvious why not. Multiculturalist ideologues don’t want to hear this, but it’s true.

Look, I don’t think Orban or the Hungarians are models of cosmopolitan liberalism. But they seem to understand that the lands of Europe were made by the peoples who settled there, and they can be unmade if enough different people settle there. If they kept Americans like me from settling there, because they considered me and my values to be a threat to Magyarness, I wouldn’t blame them at all. George Soros promotes open borders liberalism and globalized capitalism. Viktor Orban knows well that both things are a threat to the integrity and sovereignty of his country. He also has said in the past that Hungary’s national identity is inextricably tied to the Christian religion, and that he wants to protect that, even as he is notably — and correctly — pro-Jewish. I think people on the left are so wedded to the narrative of Christians-as-oppressors that they never once think about the restraint that Christianity puts, however imperfectly, on our worst impulses. If Orban fails to ground Hungarian democracy in Christian thought and practice, then something quite ugly and racist may well arise. I think often about Ross Douthat’s great line: if you don’t like the Religious Right, wait till you see the Post-Religious Right.

I don’t know anything about the thing you bring up about Orban kicking out a bunch of other churches. I would have to look it up to have an opinion on it, and I don’t think I have time before your deadline. Nevertheless, if it’s true as you report, then of course that troubles me. It also troubles me that in Russia, Evangelicals and Jehovah’s Witnesses lack the religious liberty that Orthodox Christians like me have. That’s wrong! However, we are moving quickly to a de facto situation here in the US in which the religious liberty of traditionalist Christians – that is, non-woke Christians – is going to diminish greatly. If the Equality Act passes, all churches and religious institutions that hold to the Biblical view of homosexuality will be treated as pariahs in law and culture, reduced to the same level as the Ku Klux Klan. Do progressives and liberals not see that? We on the Right do.

One of the key facts of what I call “soft totalitarianism” in my recent book is that this ideology is taking power within the structures of liberal democracy. Take Amazon’s decision earlier this year to stop selling books that present transgenderism as a pathology. Amazon has the right to sell, or to not sell, whatever it wants. But Amazon controls so much of the US retail book market that if it decides not to sell books that take a particular moral or political position, then Amazon will have effectively exiled that debate from the public square. No publisher can afford to take the risk of coming out with a book that Amazon won’t sell. All of this is happening within liberal democracy, which is one reason why this totalitarianism is treading softly into dominance.

Another thought: This is all really about what Alasdair MacIntyre saw in ‘After Virtue,’ which is forty years old now. We in the West have lost our common frame of reference – Christianity, and its liberal democratic successor — which binds us and gives us a framework for reasoning together. This is only becoming clear as actual Christian practice and identification fades away. This is why the Civil Rights Movement was led by black pastors, who advocated in Biblical language and concepts, and it succeeded. No such movement could happen today. America is post-Christian. But lacking any kind of common referent in transcendent values, politics becomes a struggle of power, and only power. What we’re living with now is only going to get more intense, and nasty.

In the end, whatever his faults as a politician and statesman, Viktor Orban seems almost alone on the Western stage as recognizing that we are living through the dissolution of the West as a cohesive, comprehensible civilization. Mass immigration, the end of Christianity and the rise of militant laïcité throughout the West, sexual radicalism, the woke hatred of Western history, and so forth – all of these are coalescing in a storm that is going to wipe out the West as we have known it. Orban might lose. He probably will lose. But at least he will go down fighting.

Come to think of it, two eminent Hungarians – George Soros and Viktor Orban – offer conflicting visions of what it means to be Western in the 21st century. One of them has to win. Sides have to be taken. Orban is no saint, but I know whose side I’m on. I know whose side I have to be on.

That was the end of my e-mail to Ben Wallace-Wells. I think that Soros vs. Orban conflict, with each Hungarian man symbolizing a conflicting vision of what it means to be Western in the 21st century, is pretty good, actually.

 

 

The post ‘Why Hungary?’ The New Yorker Asked Me appeared first on The American Conservative.

Another Sign Of The Apocalyptic Times

When I was in Europe, whether in the former communist countries, or in the western European countries, the thing I heard over and over was disgust about what American popular culture is doing to them, and their kids. In Poland, a high school teacher said to me that there is no institution or force in his country that has a stronger influence on the youth of Poland that social media, through which Western popular culture and its ideals spread. I completely side with those people. It’s not enough to say, “Just turn it off.” OK, fine — but what about the fact that most people will not turn it off? That we all have to live in a society polluted by these people?

So, last night, the most powerful popular culture on the planet proclaimed its judgment on the best of the music videos it has produced in the previous year. The top prize at the Video Music Awards went to:

Lil Nas X won the top prize for video of the year with “Montero (Call Me By Your Name),” then began his acceptance speech by thanking “the gay agenda.” That video also won for best direction and best visual effects.

You might recall that this video features an image of the artist being sodomized by Satan. It leaves nothing to the imagination.

We have seen this sort of thing before. From Live Not By Lies:

The post-World War I generation of writers and artists were marked by their embrace and celebration of anti-cultural philosophies and acts as a way of demonstrating contempt for established hierarchies, institutions, and ways of thinking. Arendt said of some writers who glorified the will to power, “They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.”

Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:

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.

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

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

What are we to make of a culture that not only produces a mass-cult video featuring a gay man being willingly sodomized by Satan, but that celebrates that video as the best one of the year? This is what the late Philip Rieff called a “deathwork.” It does not speak of life. It celebrates death. It is nihilism, and it leads to death.

This is who we Americans have become. This is not a joke. You don’t have to believe in the devil to understand that this is evil, and that this is not where it ends. If you missed it last year, go back and read this powerful 2020 essay by Peter Savodnik, who sets out to understand our woke culture today through the lens of 19th century Russian novels that more or less prophesied the totalitarian revolution to come. Excerpt:

We know how this turned out, and for those who have forgotten, or for those who are too young or ignorant to know, we should remind them over and over: Those who questioned the revolution, objected to any of its ends or means, thought there might be something worth preserving, were deemed hostile combatants or hapless chumps whose false consciousness inhibited progress. In the end, they were all airbrushed. In the end, the way one escaped this airbrushing was to signal, with a great and inauthentic virtue, that one was not a hostile combatant by spotlighting the real enemies of progress. Whether these enemies were real or “real” was immaterial. Only idiots worried about the truth. There was no truth. What was most important was to keep one’s head down and, if need be, accuse wantonly. Accuse! Accuse! Accuse! Or as Americans like to say, the best defense is a good offense. Everyone knew this would never lead to the place they had been promised it would lead to, but what else was there to do? As the violence ratcheted up, it was necessary to signal with ever greater ferocity, to name more names, to out more wrong-thinkers, until all that was left was the pathetic, bloodless corpse of a country dislodged from itself.

Read it all. 

You are tired of hearing me say this. I know that. I am tired of saying it. But something terrible is coming. The house is on fire. Let those who have eyes to see, see. And then act. 

The post Another Sign Of The Apocalyptic Times appeared first on The American Conservative.

Orban Meets Francis

Interesting, this:

PM Orbán met Pope Francis and presented a letter that King Béla IV wrote for Pope Innocent IV in 1250. The King warned of the looming threat of the Tatar invasion and called for the unity of Europe. He was ignored. 35 yrs later HU fended off the Tatars with great bloodshed. pic.twitter.com/PS8JPTJ4my

— Balázs Orbán (@BalazsOrban_HU) September 12, 2021

Here is the text of that letter:

To the most holy father in Christ and Lord Innocent, by divine providence Supreme pontiff of the Holy Roman and Universal Church, Béla, king of Hungary by the same grace, with the respect both due and devoted.

Most of the kingdom of Hungary has been reduced to a desert by the scourge of the Tartars, and it is surrounded like a sheepfold by different infidel peoples like the Ruthenians and the Brodniks on the eastern side and the Bulgarians and Bosnian heretics against whom we have been fighting until now with our armies on the southern side. On the western and northern side there are Germans, from whom, because of our common faith, our kingdom should gain the fruit of some aid. However, it is not any fruit, but rather the thorns of war that our land is forced to endure as they snatch away the wealth of the country by unexpected plundering.

For this reason—and especially because of the Tartars, whom the experience of war has taught us to fear in the same way as all the other nations that they have passed through have learned—after having asked for advice from the prelates and princes of our kingdom, we hasten to flee to the worthy vicar of Christ [the pope] and to his brethren, as to the sole and very last true protector of Christian faith in our ultimate need, so that what we all fear will not happen to us, or rather, through us, to you and to the rest of Christendom.

Day after day news of the Tartars come to us: that they have unified their forces—and not only against us, with whom they are the most enraged, because we refuse to submit to them even after all that injury, while all the other nations that they put to the test became their tributaries, especially the regions which are at the east of our kingdom, such as Russia, the countries of the Cumans and the Brodniks, and Bulgaria, which in large part had once belonged to our dominion. It is rather against the whole of Christendom that their forces are unified, and, insofar as it is deemed certain by several trustworthy people, they have firmly decided to send their countless troops against the whole of Europe soon.

Thus, we are afraid that, if their people arrive, our subjects will be unable or even unwilling to withstand the cruelty of the Tartar ferocity in battle and, against our will, guided by fear, they will end up by submitting to their yoke, just as the above-mentioned neighbors have already done, unless by its careful consideration the farsighted Apostolic see securely and powerfully fortifies our kingdom in order to comfort the peoples living in it.

Indeed, we write this letter principally for two reasons: not to be accused of having shirked what is possible, and not to be considered negligent.

As far as what is possible is concerned, we say that we can conclude after our experience that we did whatever was possible when we exposed ourselves and all we had to the heretofore unknown men and capabilities of the Tartars. As for negligence, we can by no means be accused of it. For, while the Tartars were still fighting against us in our country, we turned to the three principal courts of Christendom seeking help in this affair, namely yours, which is believed and held by Christians to be the highest and master of all the courts; [and we turned to the court] of the emperor, to whom we even declared that we would be ready to submit ourselves if, during the time of the above-mentioned scourge he would have given us valid assistance and help; and we also turned for help to the court of the Franks.

But from all of them we received neither encouragement nor support, only words. In fact, we had recourse to all that was ours and, for the profit of Christendom, we humiliated our royal majesty and gave two of our daughters in marriage to two Ruthenian dukes and the third one to a Polish duke, aiming to learn through them and other friends of ours in the Eastern parts all the secret news about Tartars, so that this way we might face them and resist in a more suitable way their intentions and fraudulent schemes. We even received the Cumans into our kingdom, and—for shame!—today we defend our kingdom with pagans and put down the infidels of the Church with the help of pagans.

Moreover, in order to defend the Christian faith, we have joined by marriage our first-born son to a Cuman woman, in order to avoid the worst, and to have the possibility to create some occasion to bring them to the baptismal font—as we have already done more than once.

So for all these and other reasons we very much hope that it is clear to the Sanctity of your Supreme pontiff, that in these oppressive times we have received no useful aid from any prince or people of the whole Christian Europe, with the exception of the knights Hospitaller in Jerusalem, whose brothers at our request have recently taken up arms against the pagans and the schismatics in defense of our kingdom and the Christian faith. We have already placed part of them in a very dangerous spot, namely in the neighborhood of the Cumans and the Bulgars beyond the Danube, in the area through which the Tartar army found its way to us at the time of the invasion of our kingdom. Regarding that region, we hope and intend that, if God helps our acts and those of the above-mentioned Hospitallers, the Apostolic See may find them sufficiently worthy to grant them its favor. Just as the Danube stretches to the sea of Constantinople, so we can succeed through them to propagate progeny of the Catholic faith, and thus they may bring useful aid to the Roman empire and also to the Holy Land.

We have installed another part of them in the middle of our country, to defend the castles that we are constructing around the Danube, because our peoples are not accustomed to do this. For, after more than one discussion, our council decided that it would be more beneficial to us and to the whole of Europe to safeguard the Danube by fortifications: the Danube is the water of resistance. It was here that Heraclius met Chosroes when he defended the Roman empire, and it was here that we resisted—entirely unprepared, and thus badly injured—the Tartars for ten months, while our kingdom was still almost completely lacking fortifications and defenders.

Because if—God forbid!—this territory were possessed by the Tartars, the door would be open for them to [invade] the other regions of the Catholic faith. This is in part because there is no sea to hamper their passage from here to other Christians, and in part it is because they can settle their families and animals—in which they abound—marvelously well here, better than elsewhere. Attila may serve as an example of someone who, coming from the East to subdue the West, established the center of his authority in the middle of the kingdom of Hungary. On the other hand, the emperors, who came fighting from the West in order to subdue the East, laid down their frontiers inside our country, however much they did for the organization of the army.

May your pontifical Sanctity, pondering all this, find us worthy to procure a medicine before the wound rots. Indeed the multitude of wise people is very surprised that, in the present state of affairs, your Paternity permitted the departure of the king of France, such a noble member of the Church, from the frontiers of Europe.

The multitude is wondering and cannot cease to be amazed at the fact that your Apostolic Clemency offers substantial help to the empire of Constantinople and regions overseas, which, if they were lost—God forbid!—would not harm the inhabitants of Europe as much as if our kingdom alone passed into the possession of the Tartars. We take God and man as our witness that our necessity and the gravity of our situation are so great that, if the various dangers of the roads did not prevent us, we would send not only messengers, as we have done so far, but would personally come as a servant and fall down at your feet to proclaim before the face of the whole Church—so that we may be justified and excused—that, if your fatherly sanctity does not send us help and the need becomes overwhelming, against our will, we may reach an arrangement with the Tartars.

So we humbly beseech you that the Holy Mother Church consider, if not ours, at least the merits of our predecessors, the holy kings who, full of devotion and reverence submitted themselves and their people, preaching to them the orthodox faith, and serving you with purity of faith and in obedience. That is why the Apostolic see promised to them and to their successors all grace and favor if any necessity threatened, at a moment when they did not even ask for it, as the course of things was prosperous for them.

Alas, now this heavy constraint seems to be imminent. Thus, open your fatherly heart, and in this time of persecution, extend your hand with the necessary support for the defense of the faith and for the public utility. Otherwise, if our petition—which is so necessary and so universally favorable for the faithful of the Roman Church—suffers a refusal (which we cannot believe) then we should be obliged by necessity, not like sons but like step-sons, excluded from the flock of the father, to beg for aid elsewhere.

Dated in Patak the day of the bishop and confessor Saint Martin, III of the ides of November.

From the AP account of the Pope’s visit to Budapest:

Pope Francis urged Hungary on Sunday to “extend its arms towards everyone,” in a veiled critique of Prime Minister Viktor Orban’s anti-migrant policies as the pontiff opened a four-day visit to Central Europe, his first big international outing since undergoing intestinal surgery in July.

Francis, 84, appeared in good form during his short visit to Budapest, presiding over a lengthy Mass for a crowd organizers said reached 100,000 people. The pope stood and waved to crowds during a jaunt in his open-sided popemobile and used a golf cart to avoid walking long distances indoors, confessing at one point that he had to sit because “I’m not 15 anymore.” But otherwise he kept up the typical grueling pace of a papal trip despite his ongoing recovery.

Francis only spent seven hours in Budapest before moving on Sunday afternoon to a four-day tour of neighboring Slovakia. The lopsided itinerary suggested that Francis wanted to avoid giving Orban — the type of populist nationalist Francis frequently criticizes — the political boost that comes with hosting a pope for a proper state visit ahead of elections next spring.

Francis did meet upon arrival with Orban, whose refugee policies clash with the pope’s call for welcome and integration of those seeking better lives in Europe. While migration wasn’t on the stated agenda, Orban wrote on Facebook: “I asked Pope Francis not to let Christian Hungary perish.”

Orban has frequently depicted his government as a defender of Christian civilization in Europe and a bulwark against migration from Muslim-majority countries. Francis has expressed solidarity with migrants and refugees and criticized what he called “national populism” advanced by governments like Hungary’s. He has urged governments to welcome and integrate as many migrants as they can.

Francis, in his boundless liberal naïveté, would have been out there welcoming the Tartars, or Tatars, which is to say, the Mongols. It’s incredible how blind liberals can be to the way the world actually works. How can you look around Europe today, where crime from unassimilated and unassimilable migrants is booming, and think that an open-doors policy is a good thing? More to the point, how can Francis actually believe that welcoming hordes of migrants from the Muslim world into a Europe that is scarcely Christian can strengthen the Christian faith in Europe?

Why is the Calvinist Viktor Orban almost the only leader in Europe who sees this?

Here are excerpts from a piece in the current issue of Limen, the magazine of the Hungarian Migration Research Institute. The author is Tamas Deszo, the director of the institute:

More:

And:

Download the whole piece. 

There’s a piece coming out in a few days in The New Yorker, about my passion for Hungary. I told the reporter that over the summer I spent in Budapest, I came to understand that Orban was a visionary, in the sense that he understands — unlike his Western European colleagues — what is actually at stake for Europe. Or as is more likely, they understand it, but only Orban is willing to do something about it — even if it ticks off the Pope.

By the way, you’ve heard of the Visegrad Group, right? It’s the name of the alliance of Hungary, Poland, Slovakia, and the Czech Republic. It was named after the Visegrad castle, where the leaders of the nations met in 1991 to form a mutual aid and friendship alliance after the fall of Communism. The castle was constructed by Bela IV to prepare for the second Mongol invasion. Bela also built fortified towns and forts throughout the country. When the Mongols (Tatars) came a second time, Hungary was able to defend itself.

There is a lesson in this history for us today. This is not a question of Orban or anybody else being big old meanies. This is a question of civilizational survival.

UPDATE: James C. comments:

As Pope Francis left his strongly guarded Vatican walls and boarded a flight to Hungary to lecture Orban about migrants, in Naples an Algerian illegal immigrant stabbed a woman to take her purse. She’s in hospital. In La Spezia, a Tunisian illegal immigrant attempted to rape a French tourist in the central train station. In Rimini, a Somalian illegal immigrant flew into a rage on a bus when asked for his ticket, stabbing 2 women on the bus before going out and attacking a family, slashing the throat of a 5-year-old child. The child is fighting for life in hospital.

These stories happen in Italy every day. Migrants make up a third of Italy’s prison population. Each of them had victims. Jorge Bergoglio is not and will not be a victim. He can continue to wag his finger from behind his walls and earn ever more contempt from Italian people for his cheap liberal utopianism.

The post Orban Meets Francis appeared first on The American Conservative.