Rod Dreher's Blog, page 493

SJWs Chase McCrory Down Alley

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This is pretty scary. The Charlotte Observer describes what happened:

A video posted on Facebook appears to show North Carolina’s former governor, Pat McCrory, and Fox Business Network broadcaster Lou Dobbs being followed down a Washington alley as a group of people shout “shame” and “antigay bigot.” Some stronger language is used as well.

Eventually, police came to McCrory’s aid and pushed the people following him back.

On Sunday, via email, Ricky Diaz, who served as a spokesman for McCrory during his campaign for re-election, issued this statement:

“It’s regrettable that up to a few dozen protesters decided to stalk and shout insults at the governor and police when we should all be listening to each other and coming together as a country in a respectful manner. Governor McCrory is thankful to Lou Dobbs for helping during this incident, and very thankful to the D.C. police for keeping everyone safe during a very successful inaugural weekend.”

If you watch the video, you will hear one of the SJWs screaming, “We got you now!” This, after they had the governor, his wife, and his party trapped in the alley.

Can you imagine being unable to walk on the street without having to fear being chased down an alley by enraged left-wing protesters? I’m sure they see that as justice. They are summoning up a demon that they won’t be able to control, and that will damage them severely. I think that most people can imagine themselves in Pat McCrory’s position, unable to walk down the street minding his own business without being set upon by a righteously indignant SJW mob. And they will think: whatever side those bullies are on, I’m on the other one.

Is this what the SJWs do when they don’t get their way? Chase their opponents down blind alleys and scream at them until the police arrive? Is this what the fight for gay rights has turned into?

This video was posted first on Facebook, then picked up on a gay website before finding its way into the Charlotte Observer. It was apparently shared by LGBT protesters who were proud of what they did, and who expected that the video would make their own side proud of them too. These SJW types have no idea how they’re seen outside their bubble, and how much hatred and resentment they’re calling up. They can’t seem to understand that Donald Trump is not anti-gay. He agrees with Obergefell, and he criticized McCrory and NC Republicans for the bathroom bill. What they’re going to teach Trump is that if you are not 100 percent behind every single thing they want, in their eyes, you may as well be against them, bigot.

A View From Bulgaria

Bulgarian border wall to deter asylum seekers (Ju1978/Shutterstock)

This letter just came in from a reader in Bulgaria. I don’t have time to correct the English, but I think, in a way, it’s better to leave it like it is. This is a man who felt so strongly about this issue that he worked hard to express his views in a language he doesn’t speak well. Again, just because I post something, and post it without comment, that doesn’t mean I agree with it. I think what this Bulgarian says is important for Americans to hear, even if we don’t want to hear it:

Dear Mr.Dreher,

I read your article “Creating The White Tribe” first in Russian and then in English. I read many artiles published in The American Conservative. I thing that this magazin is not only one in USA but one from a very little quantity of media that can think and see what happends in the world.

Your problem as Americans is that you saw at the world as an oil field. If there is oil field that has to belongs to USA oil companies usually.

If you are Christians what you do for Christian minority in Syria? There was a mass killing of Christians and demolition of church in Malala town in Syria. Your country as a the  greatest Democracy what it do? The right answer is NOTHING.The same is in Egypt.

What happends in Bulgaria since 1990 under the rulls of Democracy, Liberal multy-culty model:

– less populated country

– the first place in the world as depopulization / many people dies and not many burns/

– deindustrialization

– if you are Bulgarian and ortodox believer there is no HUMAN RIGHTS WATCH for you to protect you

– the clercs in Muslim mosque receive their salaries from Turkey, Saudi Arabia, Qatar etc. If somebody say: ” The clerck has to receive their money from Bulgarian state this persons is blamed as nazi, hooligan”.

The nastiest thing what happends is invasion of so called “Refugees”. The so called “Refugees” has got money in 500 Euro bills. When they came they start with their habits:

– not like Bulgarian cuesine

– they want to have got personal of ladies that has to clean their rooms in the camps for refugees. They think it is a hotel like “Ritz”.

– if they have not got permission to go to Germany they make unrest. For exsample there were 26 police officers wounded in the unrest in one of capms in Bulgaria last year.

– we have not got the right to BUILD WALL BETWEEN BULGARIA AND TURKEY TO STOP ILLEGAL REFUGEES

– the most of  retired people in Bulagria has got pension, income 100 euro per month. Bulgarian state pay for every refugee 350 euro per month.That’s why we will have got more problems.These money are from our budget not from EU.

Your Victoria Nuland said: “F… of  EU”.

Why I have not got the rights to be orthodox Bulgarian and to be proud of it instead of multy-culty politics of USA and EU. Bulgaria exist since 681 year after Christ and we have 13 centuries history. The Cirilic was invented by Slavish brothers Ciril and Methody in Bulgarian state.

I support The President Trump in his wish  to return proud of people  to be Christian and white man. The white people do not deserve to be victims  of Liberal media and Liberal  multy-culty model. The Liberal media accuse the President Trump in everything and white men in the same that’s why more and more white men will be proud of it and will  show it. The Liberal media will “Creating The White Tribe” and it will be not our faults.

Best regards,

Andreas

Trump’s Diplomacy By Humiliation

It is hard to believe that we are now governed by a president who goes out of his way to provoke other nations. The bizarre contretemps with the president of Mexico is pointlessly destructive of one of America’s most important relationships. What kind of president wakes up determined to insult the president of a friendly country — a country whose cooperation we need? It beggars belief.

We woke up yesterday morning to this:

The U.S. has a 60 billion dollar trade deficit with Mexico. It has been a one-sided deal from the beginning of NAFTA with massive numbers…

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2017

of jobs and companies lost. If Mexico is unwilling to pay for the badly needed wall, then it would be better to cancel the upcoming meeting.

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) January 26, 2017

The Mexican president, whose approval rating is around 12 percent, had no choice but to cancel the meeting. Mexicans reacted with outrage at Trump and the US.  Later, Trump said he was going to pay for the wall by slapping a 20 percent tax on all goods imported from Mexico.

Look, I agree with Trump that we need stronger border enforcement and a tighter immigration policy. I believe that it’s not a bad idea to revisit the trade relationship between our two countries. The Mexican government and people were never going to be enthusiastic about any of this. Seems to me that a normal president reason would tell him that if we’re going to be tough, we ought to be diplomatic about it. Trump, though, relishes conflict. Last night on the radio, I heard the Mexican writer Enrique Krauze say that US-Mexico relations are now at their worst point in 170 years — that is, since the last time the two nations went to war.

Who benefits from this? Is it really to America’s advantage to have the nation on our southern border hating us? Is it really to America’s advantage to set the stage for the Mexicans to elect a president who promises to spite the United States at every turn? If we crash the Mexican economy, does it help us to have a poorer and more chaotic neighbor on our Southern border? The Mexican state is already feeble versus the drug cartels. Do we want to make it worse?

Trump has been in office one week, and he’s already pointlessly insulted and humiliated stupidly one of the most important countries in the world to the US, and brought a difficult but vital relationship between our two nations to the breaking point. Again: why? I understand that the status quo was no longer working, and I accept that we need to change some things. But this is not the way to do it, and this can never be the way mature nations behave. It is frightening that the US president is willing to destroy something so complex and important as our country’s relationship to Mexico. This is diplomacy by humiliation, which is no diplomacy at all. It’s starting to become clear that whoever follows Trump in office is going to have his or her hands full rebuilding things that Trump smashed for no reason other than it felt good to push others around.

 

The Fierce Tyranny Of Now

Alan Jacobs writes:

People regularly get freaked out by stories than turn out to be false, and by the time the facts are known a good deal of damage (not least to personal relationships) has often already been done — plus, the disappearance of the cause of an emotion doesn’t automatically eliminate the emotion itself. In fact, it often leaves that emotion in search of new justifications for its existence.

I have come to believe that it is impossible for anyone who is regularly on social media to have a balanced and accurate understanding of what is happening in the world. To follow a minute-by-minute cycle of news is to be constantly threatened by illusion. So I’m not just staying off Twitter, I’m cutting back on the news sites in my RSS feed, and deleting browser bookmarks to newspapers. Instead, I am turning more of my attention to monthly magazines, quarterly journals, and books. I’m trying to get a somewhat longer view of things — trying to start thinking about issues one when some of the basic facts about them have been sorted out. Taking the short view has burned me far too many times; I’m going to try to prevent that from happening ever again (even if I will sometimes fail). And if once in a while I end up fighting a battle in a war that has already ended … I can live with that.

I was standing on the sidewalk in Washington this afternoon, checking my Twitter feed. I saw several tweets that said this, as captured in the NYT’s headline:

An hour later, sitting on the metro headed to the airport, I actually read The New York Times’ story. The full quote, and its context, is:

Stephen K. Bannon, President Trump’s chief White House strategist, laced into the American press during an interview on Wednesday evening, arguing that news organizations had been “humiliated” by an election outcome few anticipated, and repeatedly describing the media as “the opposition party” of the current administration.

“The media should be embarrassed and humiliated and keep its mouth shut and just listen for a while,” Mr. Bannon said during a telephone call.

That’s a different message, isn’t it? But I had an hour to fume over how absurdly authoritarian the White House is.

In Washington, I heard from Washingtonians that people from the city’s professional class, both Democrats and Republicans, are in a constant state of panic over Trump. Seriously, I heard this from at least five people in these past two days. The last time, someone told me that the sense one has is that for a lot of people, this is an existential crisis. I was reminded of what a reader (who cannot stand Trump) e-mailed me the other day:

I have never seen the Left this unhinged – and that’s saying something. We are seeing violence, calls for assassination, immediate impeachment, claims that the duly elected President is not legitimate, and so on. This is all so far beyond the customary norms of contemporary American political discourse and opposition – as bad as it’s been in recent decades. Something very sinister and ominous is taking place.

I have my theory why this is so, one that goes simply beyond the widely-shared agreement on the awfulness of Trump. If Liberalism is the new religion of the “secularists,” then the election of Trump represents an existential apostasy. If History (with a capital H) has an “arc,” then deviation from its course is a worse threat than global warming. Progress is supposed only to move in one direction, and like a ratchet, can’t go “back.” Politics isn’t politics – it’s movement toward the eschaton.

I brought this up to my interlocutor — not a Trump fan, by the way, or even a Republican — who said yes, that’s exactly it.

There’s this one liberal academic, a woman I don’t know personally but whose opinion I respect so much I followed her on Twitter. She has become deeply and truly crackpot over Trump. Yesterday she retweeted a call for liberals to telephone Trump hotels and ask to be put through to the White House. She urged her followers to do this. Can they possibly believe that this is going to do any good? Is there a single person who will be converted to the cause of anti-Trumpism because of this? Or will it just really tick off Trump’s supporters? I don’t get this at all. It’s just so counterproductive and stupid. I unfollowed her. I’m going to do what Alan’s done, and start unfollowing and deleting a lot.

I agree that we are living in a dramatic time, and that attention must be paid. But it’s hard to think clearly in this media (including social media) environment. More information is making us less informed, and less smart — this, when it is more important to be smart and prudent in the face of the present challenges.

Can any of you suggest “monthly magazines, quarterly journals and books” that are worth reading to give one real and valuable perspective in this moment?

The World Around Us

DCornelius/Shutterstock

A reader writes:

I read with interest the piece on the elite escaping civilization’s collapse, and the piece by Osnos in the New Yorker. I say “with interest” because most of my peers can talk about nothing else these days. The total collapse of the world seems imminent, to hear my entire academic social circle tell it. Yesterday a professor colleague of mine lamented “Trump has undone 15 years of progress in four days!” My wife remarked “If you go by my Facebook feed, the end is near.” I can’t be the only one thinking that this is a monumental illusion. Look around at your actual material world: the evidence for collapse is just not there. (I don’t mean social breakdown that necessitates things like the Ben Op. I mean actual, blood-in-the-streets collapse.)

The first problem is a lack of context and unwillingness to go past the headlines. What has Trump actually done? (Let me quickly add that I was, and remain, a firm Trump opponent.) He has returned us to a Bush-era policy on abortion. The world did not collapse when Bush enacted the same policy, but that has not stopped my liberal friends from claiming this move is “unprecedented.” He has signed directives ordering agencies to explore certain policies — he has emphatically not, despite the headlines and the chatter, “approved the pipeline” or “ordered the wall.” He has not done those things because he cannot do those things. Look at the blaring headline on the NYT site right now: “Trump Starts a Crackdown on Immigration With a Wall.” Read just the headline, as most people do, and you get the impression (fairly) that the wall is now becoming a reality. But it takes until the twenty-third paragraph to see this: “Mr. Trump will not be able to accomplish the goals laid out in the immigration orders by himself.” Only then does the reporter explain that, yes, we have this entity called “Congress” that actually spends the money.

The more important problem is total lack of historical awareness combined with a frenzied and alarmist social media world. Lack of historical knowledge has always been a problem, of course, but how many people have said in the last few months that the country is more divided than it has ever been? I would bet every single one of my liberal friends has said this to me. Are these people completely unaware that we fought a Civil War? That the early 1970s saw hundreds of domestic bombings? That anarchists used to plant bombs on Wall Street and assassinate presidents? Anytime I hear someone say we have peaked in division, I immediately conclude he is not worth listening to.

The social media climate is even more troubling. We tend to follow and read people who think like us, and if you entire social media feed is telling you the sky is falling, then of course it feels like the sky is falling. These are the people you know and trust. But if you tune out the frantic atmosphere of Twitter and Facebook, the world seems — suddenly, almost miraculously — more calm. This roving Eye of Sauron created by social media, in which frantic attention is devoted to one thing before the Eye moves on, and hyperbole is the dominant mode of discourse, is making it impossible to think past not just the next election but indeed the next trending hashtag. It is virtually impossible to perform the very slow, very deliberate, very necessary work of governance when every moment feels like a life or death situation because every person you know is telling you exactly that.

Rich people have always had escape plans and means of keeping out the rabble. Look at castles, or private islands, or Biltmore. This is nothing new. If we point to it as some kind of leading indicator of social collapse, we do ourselves no favors. Yes, we will experience another economic crash because that is what capitalism does: it booms and it busts. We had one in 2008, and guess what? The world survived. We will survive the next one, too. But this Chicken Little approach, where things are either rosy or catastrophic, is disastrous for social life. No one can relax when your entire social media world is filled with totally unjustified doomsaying. We’ve had crummy presidents. We have another one now. But it is not the end of the world: it is merely a less than ideal period. Suffering is not a rude interruption in the pleasant existence we all think we deserve; it is an inextricable part of that existence.

Though I remain a Catholic, I’ve found my truest companions these days in the Eastern thinkers and poets, especially Lao Tzu, Chuang Tzu, Li Po, Tu Fu, and Tao Ch’ien. Read these thinkers and you can truly access the circular nature of the world, how good and evil coexist together and for periods outshine one another, and, most importantly, how important it is to maintain a focus on the longer view and the broader term. A new resident occupies the White House, but the Potomac flows on untroubled. Federal lands may be sold, but Old Faithful still hisses and churns. After the Russian ambassador was shot in Turkey, virtually everyone I follow posted a frantic series of “World War III is here!” items. The next day, things were calm again. The dogs are no doubt barking, but the caravan is still passing.

I’ve taken the rather drastic step of eliminating everyone from my social media world who comments regularly on current events. I no longer start the day with the newspaper; instead, I read novels and poetry and contemplative works while I have coffee. I get the WSJ by mail in the afternoon, when the news seems less drastic and more contextual. We need more of this, I think, and perhaps we need to make it a movement. Slow living? Slow news? Either way, we’ve got to detach from this anxious, always-on-and-blaring online world.

I was doing dishes this morning and looking at our bird feeders outside the kitchen window. On the ground were perhaps a dozen song sparrows, noisily squabbling over seeds. I almost teared up at how merrily they seemed to hop around. As I walked to work a deer glanced at me lazily from the trees, unaffected by my presence. A spring breeze blew the conifers, and a woodpecker chattered at me from a pin oak. Clouds rolled on. I exchanged a few remarks about the weather with a campus police officer. This afternoon I will read a Winnie the Pooh book with our son, and perhaps take him to a creek to look for minnows and float walnut-shell boats downstream.

The world, in all its non-collapsing glory, is still there. It is all around us, and in us, and between us. We need to look up and see it.

Mon Dieu … Is Back In France

Look at what François Fillon is doing:

Much to our surprise in Europe, religion wasn’t a big theme in the 2016 presidential election in the United States, a country that proclaims its trust in God even on its bank notes. It may therefore be puzzling to some Americans to learn that God is back in the political debate on this side of the Atlantic. And that he chose, of all places, France, the sacred land of “laïcité,” the local version of secularism.

The man who brought God — or, more specifically, Christianity — back is François Fillon, a former prime minister who is running in the presidential election in the spring as the nominee of the main center-right Republican Party. Mr. Fillon’s initial platform included a drastic proposal to cut back on public health insurance that caused widespread indignation and forced him to backpedal; to persuade voters that he did not intend to hurt the poorest, Mr. Fillon explained this month that “I am a Gaullist, and furthermore I am a Christian,” and said that as such he would never act against “the respect of human dignity.”

Christian? Did he say Christian? In the media, other politicians were promptly requested to react. The centrist François Bayrou, while pointing out that he was himself “a believer,” was appalled, adding that “in France, for more than a century, the rule has been that you don’t mix politics and religion.”

A former adviser to Nicolas Sarkozy, Henri Guaino, said that Mr. Fillon had committed a “moral error.” And Marine Le Pen of the National Front, sporting around her neck, in lieu of a cross, a heart-shaped silver pendant, said that Mr. Fillon’s “opportunistic use” of his Christianity for political purposes had created “unease.”

More:

This fresh enthusiasm for Christianity has less to do with God, though, than with culture and identity. Polls usually show that close to 55 percent of French citizens describe themselves as Roman Catholics (the rest being divided among Muslims, Jews and Protestants), but only 5 percent to 8 percent go to church regularly. An Ipsos study recently commissioned by the Catholic media group Bayard has created a new category of believers: “committed Catholics,” people who don’t necessarily attend church but identify with the Catholic Church through philanthropy, family life or social involvement. This group is said to include 23 percent of the French population.

Though they represent a variety of opinions on matters from migrants to Pope Francis or political orientations, this group can be seen as a potential electoral bloc. “These cultural Catholics have been under the radar screen because polls did not identify them, and because secularized political and media elites did not see them,” Jean-Pierre Denis, the editor of the Catholic weekly La Vie, told me. The socially conservative Mr. Fillon, he said, “has been smart enough to spot them and tap into them.”

That’s fantastic news. While a practicing Christian has to hope that these cultural Catholics will return to a robust practice of their faith, given how anti-religious French culture has been, it’s a joy to see this. Samuel Gregg writes about “France’s Catholic moment”. Excerpts:

So what has changed? How has it come to pass that movements of young and politically active Catholics such as the Sens Commun were able to openly mobilize center-right voters to support the forthright Catholic Fillon against the self-described catholique agnostique Juppé during the primary runoff? Why did Fillon, Juppé, and Sarkozy all consider themselves obliged to appeal directly to practicing Catholics during the primaries? Is France experiencing what might be called its own Catholic moment?

As with most developments at the confluence of religion and politics, immediate concerns and long-term factors are at work. Among the former is deep angst throughout French society about Islam, something accentuated by Islamist terrorism and the spread of Muslim-dominated “no-go” areas for non-Muslims throughout France. As the Catholic intellectual Pierre Manent demonstrated in his bestselling Situation de la France (2015), many French citizens are consequently asking one of those existential questions beloved by the French: What gives France its distinct character? Some, including many nonbelievers, have concluded that France really cannot be understood without Catholicism, and that the legacy of the Enlightenment and French Revolution has not provided much of a bulwark against creeping Islamization. Fr. Jacques Hamel’s brutal murder by two Islamist terrorists in July 2016 underscored this in a particularly poignant way for many French Catholics, and no doubt for Jews, Protestants, and nonbelievers as well.

More, about the role that the late Cardinal Jean-Marie Lustiger, Archbishop of Paris, did to revive authentic Catholicism, and public Catholicism:

Lustiger, and many of those who became priests (often known as génération Lustiger) during his time as French Catholicism’s public face, gave the Church presence in French society. Many of these men are now bishops: Dominique Rey in Fréjus-Toulon, Olivier de Germay in Corsica, Marc Aillet of Bayonne, the Paris auxiliary Éric de Moulins-Beaufort, the military bishop Luc Ravel, to name just a few. They come from professional families, and invariably possess credentials from France’s elite secular educational institutions as impressive as their counterparts in academia, business, and politics. These bishops are what the French call décomplexé. That means they are unintimidated by secular France and do not feel the need to acquiesce to the dwindling band of progressive Catholics and their views about how practicing Catholics and the Church should behave. In 2015, for example, Bishop Rey provoked controversy by inviting Marion Maréchal-Le Pen to speak alongside representatives from other parties in a discussion about Catholics in public life at his diocese’s summer university. In his response to criticisms, Rey pointed out the obvious: You can hardly have a serious conversation about Catholics in politics and exclude representatives of a political party which regularly receives millions of votes in France.

These génération Lustiger bishops, the priests they have formed, and their lay Catholic equivalents in leadership positions refuse to behave in accord with the expectations of the heirs of Voltaire and Rousseau who have been running French culture since the end of World War II. This independent and self-confident spirit helps explain the resilience of La Manif pour tous, which was more effective in mobilizing public opinion than pro-marriage groups in the United States, in large part because of its ability to put hundreds of thousands of people into the streets of Paris, many of whom are not Catholic. It was only a matter of time before this type of Catholic activism spilled over into party politics. Fillon’s ascendancy indicates that this time has arrived.

Read the whole thing. There may be hope for France.

Anti-‘Suicidality’ Bigots At Stanford

The Associated Students of Stanford University (ASSU) is effectively the student government at the prestigious school. It sent the following e-mail out to all 16,000+ students at Stanford (because every student is automatically an ASSU member):

Content warning: suicidality, mental illness, trauma

In our role as ASSU Executives, we have continued the work of previous campus leaders in our pursuit of a stronger, better, and more caring Stanford. Like many Execs before us, we have chosen to dedicate our efforts to improving the infrastructure of Stanford’s mental health care and wellness. The team we have gathered has accomplished meaningful work throughout the year.

In the letter that follows, Hope G. Yi (they/them) has courageously chosen to share their story about mental health at Stanford. By publicizing their deeply personal narrative, they strive to improve Stanford’s handling of mental health crises on campus. In their capacity as Executive Cabinet Mental Health & Wellbeing Issue Lead, Hope would like to invite anyone who wishes to share their experience with mental health crises on campus or abroad to anonymously and confidentially describe your experience here. You can also use the link to schedule a time to speak directly with Hope.

If you feel triggered or need support, please call the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline: (800) 273- 8255; CAPS: (650) 723-3785; or The Bridge Peer Counseling Center: (650) 723-3392.

You are brave, and you are not alone.

Jackson Beard, ASSU President

Amanda Edelman, ASSU Vice President

_________________________________________

To my Stanford community:

My name is Hope G. Yi, I go by they/them/theirs pronouns, and this is my story:

On January 25th, 2013, I was hospitalized at Stanford Hospital after making an attempt on my life. Everything happened so quickly, but I remember the pounding on my door at 2 AM; I remember being dragged out of my bed and ordered to pack an overnight bag with no explanation; I remember being shoved into a police car, where officers cracked jokes as I sat in the backseat, handcuffed and devastated; I remember being kept from sleeping in order to repeat and relive the same traumatic experience to 12 different doctors who processed my story as if it was just another piece of paperwork to fill out; I remember being gaslit by a Resident Dean, who told me repeatedly that everyone in my dorm was talking about me; I remember being hastily prescribed a medication regimen and handed a stack of papers in lieu of verbal explication of what was being imposed on my body; I remember being threatened to be put in solitary when clarifying that I wasn’t my Asian American roommate, after a nurse had consistently mixed up our charts; I remember not being allowed outside for a breath of fresh air until I had accumulated enough “compliance points.” I was kept at Stanford Hospital for two weeks, where I was stripped of my dignity and agency to exercise my basic rights. In the psych ward, where my very sanity was put to question, any appeal for humane treatment was seen as an act of non-compliance, a diagnostic for further mental instability, and justification for prolonging my hospital stay. For every night in the hospital, Stanford made money off of my residence. Against my will, I was coerced into notifying my parents about what had happened, despite the fact that home wasn’t a safe place, which was one of the reasons why I felt the need to take my life in the first place. After my hospitalization, I spent a month at La Selva, the local residential inpatient program, and then I went back to New Jersey, where I got a lot worse before I got better enough to convince the university to let me back in Autumn 2014.

I am reminded of my trauma every time when I hear pounding on doors, when I have panic attacks in the middle of classes, and even when people approach me for a hug; I feel my trauma, as I scream, I tremble, I suffocate on dried tears and shallow gasps for air as the world seems to tighten its grasp around my neck. I feel my trauma when I see the faces of people who’ve hurt me not just in my nightmares but every waking day, even when they’re not there. Trauma is having your spirit tarred and feathered and wondering if you’ll live long enough to see the day your scars heal.

Ultimately, I needed my time off, and I don’t regret it. And I’m grateful to Stanford for giving me a second chance to rejoin the community and for providing me with the baseline accommodations that I’m entitled to, that I had to fight tooth and nail for, that I need to exist in this environment, which can’t be said for many other institutions. However, what I have serious reservations about is: how Stanford managed my case in a way that scarred me and aggravated my trauma, and having spoken to a handful of other students, I know this isn’t the first–or last–time Stanford has mishandled a crisis case. Maybe I’m wrong, but I feel like there are a lot more of you, and I hope you know you’re not alone.

Since last spring quarter, I’ve been serving as one of the Mental Health and Well-being leads for the ASSU Executive Cabinet, along with Emma Coleman ’17. Having been motivated by my own distressing experiences with Stanford’s mental health support system to serve in this capacity, I’ve been surprised by the wealth of existing resources and organizations on this campus and have been lucky enough to connect with so many great people doing good work through this position. The Bridge Peer Counseling Center, meticulously organized, is available to students 24/7; Stanford Mental Health Outreach (SMHO) facilitates candid conversations to destigmatize mental illnesses; and other student-run organizations in the Mental Health and Well-being Coalition, such as Stanford + Mental Health, the Happiness Collective, Students for Body Positivity, Students 4 Resilience, Power2Act, We Continue, Survivor Peer Support Group, Kardinal Kink, and SHPRC, have been doing meaningful work to serve students and help them survive at Stanford.

On the other hand, this position has reinforced the many ways in which Stanford continues to be limited in its understanding and support of mental health. Despite the efforts of some administrators—such as Carole Pertofsky’s work with iThrive, Alejandro Martinez’s peer counseling and QPR curriculum, Ron Albucher’s CAPS Student Advisory Committee (comprised of mostly grad students), and Chris Griffith’s single-handedly managing the Dean’s Leave of Absence (an entire department’s worth of work!), Stanford does not do enough for its students, especially when it comes to mental health. This is not news. There are so many reasons why this is so, and having attended meeting after meeting, trying to figure out what to do about a problem that is so systemically rooted, I’ve found that, among other factors, there is a fundamental disconnect between administrators and the students they purport to serve. Especially in crises situations, the consequences of this disconnect could be dire. Lives are at stake.

To be clear, I am not writing about my experiences to complain or to garner sympathy; rather, I hope that this calls attention to the hard and ongoing conversation that needs to be had about a topic that the university generally silences.

That said, something I’ve noticed in and out of the mental health community is somewhat of a hierarchy in the way we talk about neurodivergent experiences: it’s become increasingly more acceptable to talk about depression, and more people are beginning to open up about their bipolarity. But suicidality seems to be one of the most taboo topics—and at least for me, it’s because I’m afraid my feelings will be construed as dangerous or unproductive. I’m afraid Stanford will screw me over again and eject me from campus because my unhappiness with the way things are indicates to them that I can’t be “successful” in the way they want me to be. Bottom line is: if you’re suicidal, you’re seen as a liability to Stanford and are, one way or another, removed from campus. The common rhetoric seems to be: “You can be suicidal, just not here,” as opposed to one that revolves around genuine support and rehabilitation. [Emphasis mine. — RD]

If you are willing and able, I call on current Stanford students and alumni who’ve had experiences with 5150s that authorize forced hospitalization and/or involuntary leaves of absence due to mental health issues to gently revisit some of those harder memories and think about ways Stanford could have done more for you; of course, your self-care comes first, so if this will be more harmful than helpful for you, please feel no pressure to share.

To best organize this effort, here is a completely confidential and anonymous Google form, in which you can choose to write about your experiences or schedule a time to meet with me in person. If you’d like a more public outlet for your story, the Mental Health and Well-being Coalition will be organizing an opportunity for you to share your experiences with mental health/suicidality at an event called “Take Back the Stigma” on Wednesday, March 1st for Wellness Week.

Whatever the next steps are from there, I pledge to be transparent in my actions and respectful of your time and space. I can’t promise an immediate change in policy or culture, but what I can promise is that I will do everything I can to make sure that your concerns are communicated to people who give a damn and can do something about it–with your consent, of course–and that your stories are respected. Your trust is sacred to me, and your courage will not be taken for granted. And whether you choose to share or decide you need to heal in your own way at your own pace, know that you are seen, you are heard, and you are loved.

When I was first diagnosed with mental illness, the first thoughts I had were: “Who will love me? Who will hire me?” I recognize I have a lot to lose from sharing my story so publicly, but over the past couple of years, as I’ve found homes in my QTPoC and neurodivergent communities, I’ve discovered that there is no dearth of love in my life, and it is this love that comes with radical vulnerability that supersedes my fear of rejection, that moves me to share my story with you today.

That said, let’s be real: I’m still struggling. I still feel insecure. I still get lonely. I take medication every day to numb the overwhelming urge to make myself disappear. I share this with you because one of my biggest frustrations with many prototypical narratives about mental health is that they rely on this whole overcoming-darkness-for-a-happy-ending script for consumerability. Well, my story is neither happy nor is it ending, and I hope those of you with stories know you don’t need a title or position to have credible ideas, and you don’t need to commodify your trauma or affix a success story to your narrative to be heard and valued.

Thank you for taking the time to read my story.

In solidarity,

Hope G. Yi

(they/them)

A terribly sad story, heaven knows, but also, in more than a few ways, a highly revealing one about the mindset inside one of the most elite college campuses in the United States, and indeed the world. A campus that wishes to remove from its midst a student who is believed to be in danger of killing herself, and then get her mental health treatment, is regarded by the mentally ill student as insensitive.

This is one of those documents historians of the future will look back on as they try to understand what happened to us, and why.

Trump’s ABC Interview

POTUS says we should have stolen Iraq’s oil (Anton Watman/Shutterstock)

At the end of a very long day, I watched the President’s interview with David Muir of ABC News. I heard him say that he favors the return of torture, though he won’t push for it because his Defense Secretary and his CIA director are opposed to it. I heard him say that the United States should have plundered the oil from Iraq, a nation we invaded, though it had not attacked us. And I heard him say that we would have “extreme vetting” of immigrants from certain countries, for the sake of protecting the US from terrorism.

For the record, Omar Mateen, the Orlando shooter, was born in America. Syed Rizwan Farook, one of the San Bernardino shooters, was born in America. Nidal Hasan, the Fort Hood shooter, was born in America.

But on the vetting thing, I want you to listen to this story from a recent episode of This American Life. It’s the story of Sarah, an Iraqi Muslim woman who went to work for US forces occupying her country. She was a translator. Her commanding officer and many other US soldiers she worked with testified in writing to her trustworthiness and her effectiveness in helping them catch terrorists. Her husband was shot and killed by terrorists in large part to pay her back for helping the US. It was too dangerous for her to stay in Iraq after that, so she applied for visas to the US for herself and her teenage sons.

Then somebody denounced her as a spy. She never found out who. The accusation was thrown out of court for lack of evidence. But it was enough to cause the US government to deny her entry into the US.

Twice.

This woman, who lost her husband because she helped our country, who lost her home (which was bombed), who lost everything she owns, and who now lives in Jordan with her boys because it’s too dangerous to live in her own country, all because she was foolish enough to trust the United States of America — she was not given safe haven here, under the Obama administration.

And Trump is going to make it more difficult?

This is not only inhumane, it’s just stupid. If we can’t protect and reward the Sarahs of the world, why should anyone help us in the future?

And by the way, which country will be willing to host US troops as part of a military operation knowing that the Commander in Chief reserves the right to plunder their resources?

Creating The White Tribe

Reader Zapollo comments:

I’m a white guy. I’m a well-educated intellectual who enjoys small arthouse movies, coffehouses and classic blues. If you didn’t know any better, you’d probably mistake me for a lefty urban hipster.

And yet. I find some of the alt-right stuff exerts a pull even on me. Even though I’m smart and informed enough to see through it. It’s seductive because I am not a person with any power or privilege, and yet I am constantly bombarded with messages telling me that I’m a cancer, I’m a problem, everything is my fault.

I am very lower middle class. I’ve never owned a new car, and do my own home repairs as much as I can to save money. I cut my own grass, wash my own dishes, buy my clothes from Walmart. I have no clue how I will ever be able to retire. But oh, brother, to hear the media tell it, I am just drowning in unearned power and privilege, and America will be a much brighter, more loving, more peaceful nation when I finally just keel over and die.

Trust me: After all that, some of the alt-right stuff feels like a warm, soothing bath. A “safe space,” if you will. I recoil from the uglier stuff, but some of it — the “hey, white guys are actually okay, you know! Be proud of yourself, white man!” stuff is really VERY seductive, and it is only with some intellectual effort that I can resist the pull. And yet I still follow this stuff, not really accepting it, but following it just because it’s one of the only places I can go where people are not always telling me I’m the seed of all evil in the world. If it’s a struggle for someone like me to resist the pull, I imagine it’s probably impossible for someone with less education or cultural exposure.

It baffles me that more people on the left can’t understand this, can’t see how they’re just feeding, feeding, feeding the growth of this stuff. They have no problem understanding, and even making excuses for, say, the seductive pull of angry black radicalism for disaffected black men. They’re totally cool with straightforwardly racist stuff like La Raza. Why are they unable to put themselves into the shoes of disaffected white guys and see how something similar might appeal to them? Or if they can make this mental leap, why are they so caustically dismissive of it — an attitude they’d never do with, say, a black kid who has joined the Nation of Islam?

I’m sorry, but there are two alternatives here. You can push for some kind of universalist vision bringing everybody together, or you can have tribes. There’s not a third option. If you don’t want universalism, then you just have to accept that various forms of open white nationalism are eventually going to become a permanent feature of politics. You don’t have to LIKE it. But you have to accept it and learn to live with it — including the inevitable violence and strife that will flow from it.

If the Left can’t let go of identity politics, then let me be clear: What comes next is on THEM. A lot of us don’t want to live in a world of tribes, and we never asked for it. But people will like those young dudes attracted to white nationalism are going to play the game according to the rules as they find them, and they will play to win. Don’t say you weren’t warned.

Pay attention. This is important.

UPDATE: From another reader:

I totally get where this guy is coming from. I’m in his shoes for the most part: white, Christian, male, straight. Add to that that I’m a Southerner. But I’m also a PhD candidate in the humanities, in a discipline where my whole demographic configuration is routinely and openly disparaged as being the fount of all evil in this world. So I have a front-row seat to all of this. I absolutely get it.

I remarked to my wife a couple of weeks ago that witnessing the left’s histrionics for the past several months has made me more racist, more sexist, and more homophobic than I ever would’ve been otherwise. Now, I don’t like that about myself, and I try to self-critique and keep in check some of the more knee-jerk impulses (I must strive for Christian charity above all else, of course), but that’s obviously way more than the left is willing to do. What the left doesn’t get is it’s turning people like me—reasonably moderate, go-along-to-get-along types—into full-blown reactionary radicals. Ideas that I once would’ve rolled my eyes at I’m now willing to give a hearing. I don’t think I’m some paragon of rational thought and self-control by any means, but it concerns me that if I’m willing at least to entertain some of these ideas (critically and deliberately), what about the people who embrace them more impetuously or because their circumstances seemingly leave them no other option? If the left wants to make this all about tribes, I’m siding with my own tribe. That means the Church above all else, of course, but it may come to mean some of those other categories, too. What follows from all of this cannot bode well.

Benedict Option For Skrillionaires

Did you know that Trump adviser Peter Thiel quietly became a citizen of New Zealand as well as the US? Turns out that this is a thing now for people of his class. Evan Osnos of The New Yorker reports that the ultra-rich are now devising escape plans to be used in case civilization collapses — and the island nation is a popular destination. More:

Survivalism, the practice of preparing for a crackup of civilization, tends to evoke a certain picture: the woodsman in the tinfoil hat, the hysteric with the hoard of beans, the religious doomsayer. But in recent years survivalism has expanded to more affluent quarters, taking root in Silicon Valley and New York City, among technology executives, hedge-fund managers, and others in their economic cohort.

Last spring, as the Presidential campaign exposed increasingly toxic divisions in America, Antonio García Martínez, a forty-year-old former Facebook product manager living in San Francisco, bought five wooded acres on an island in the Pacific Northwest and brought in generators, solar panels, and thousands of rounds of ammunition. “When society loses a healthy founding myth, it descends into chaos,” he told me. [Emphasis mine — RD] The author of “Chaos Monkeys,” an acerbic Silicon Valley memoir, García Martínez wanted a refuge that would be far from cities but not entirely isolated. “All these dudes think that one guy alone could somehow withstand the roving mob,” he said. “No, you’re going to need to form a local militia. You just need so many things to actually ride out the apocalypse.” Once he started telling peers in the Bay Area about his “little island project,” they came “out of the woodwork” to describe their own preparations, he said. “I think people who are particularly attuned to the levers by which society actually works understand that we are skating on really thin cultural ice right now.”

No kidding. More:

In building Reddit, a community of thousands of discussion threads, into one of the most frequently visited sites in the world, [doom$day prepper Steve] Huffman has grown aware of the way that technology alters our relations with one another, for better and for worse. He has witnessed how social media can magnify public fear. “It’s easier for people to panic when they’re together,” he said, pointing out that “the Internet has made it easier for people to be together,” yet it also alerts people to emerging risks. Long before the financial crisis became front-page news, early signs appeared in user comments on Reddit. “People were starting to whisper about mortgages. They were worried about student debt. They were worried about debt in general. There was a lot of, ‘This is too good to be true. This doesn’t smell right.’ ” He added, “There’s probably some false positives in there as well, but, in general, I think we’re a pretty good gauge of public sentiment. When we’re talking about a faith-based collapse, you’re going to start to see the chips in the foundation on social media first.”

And:

As public institutions deteriorate, élite anxiety has emerged as a gauge of our national predicament. “Why do people who are envied for being so powerful appear to be so afraid?” [hedge fund manager Robert A.] Johnson asked. “What does that really tell us about our system?” He added, “It’s a very odd thing. You’re basically seeing that the people who’ve been the best at reading the tea leaves—the ones with the most resources, because that’s how they made their money—are now the ones most preparing to pull the rip cord and jump out of the plane.”

Read the whole thing. 

So, that’s the Benedict Option of the superrich. It’s not the one anybody else can afford to take, nor, arguably, is it the one that Christians should take, but that’s beside the point. Those with great resources will always take care of themselves, and let’s be honest: if civilization collapsed, all of us would be looking to protect our families too. What’s interesting here is the canary-in-the-coal-mine aspect of this story.

I’m especially interested in the Silicon Valley guy’s statement about the loss of the “healthy founding myth” of a society being a harbinger of its doom. What do you suppose he’s talking about? Christianity? The political principles of the American founding? Or just a general sense that we’re all in this together as a nation?

What the Benedict Option (FAQ here) has in common with this is a sense that we are on very thin civilizational ice, and the time to prepare for things falling apart is now. But there are at least two important differences:

The Benedict Option does not see the collapse as a future event. It sees the collapse as well underway, only now beginning a sharp quickening. What constitutes the collapse is the dissolution of the Christian faith in the West, and with it the loosening of the ties to certain moral and religious beliefs that held us together. “Religion” comes from the Latin word religare, meaning “to bind.” Without a shared religion, we lose our binding. No alternative myth has arisen to replace Christianity, and people in our day seem unwilling to repent and to return to the faith. The Roman historian Livy said, of his society, “We have reached that point where we can neither bear our vices nor the remedies for them.” He wrote this at the beginning of the Christian era, when Roman power was at its apex. Livy saw the rot setting in, however.
The Benedict Option does not say “head for the hills!”, though if one wanted to do that, fine, but don’t think that geographical isolation is going to save your family’s faith. Rather, the Ben Op is a strategy for sheltering in place, and building the internal practices and external institutions that will impart to Christians the ability to successfully resist and ride out the collapse. As with the early church in the face of plague, for most of us, our role is to be present to help others through what is to come. To do so, we have to be training ourselves and building up our communities right now, while there is time. I’m not talking about being a doomsday prepper in terms of building fortified hideaways in the mountains. I’m talking about building spiritual shelters that are both sanctuaries and sources of light for people lost in the darkness — just as Benedictine monasteries were in the chaos of the early Middle Ages.

Still, don’t lose sight of Robert A. Johnson’s point: that those who have made the most money in our society are those who fear its collapse. What does that tell us? In the Osnos piece, there are a couple of voices from among the superrich saying that escape is the wrong idea, that they ought instead to be working to solve the problems among us that cause them to consider escape. I get that, and it’s true to some extent. But at what point does that view become a form of denial? At what point do you recognize that the conditions under which those problems might be solved do not exist? When do you reach what Alasdair MacIntyre called “a crucial turning point”:

A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.

That “crucial turning point” is where the Benedict Option (pre-order the book here) begins.

Say, readers, I’m about to leave for the airport, headed to Washington DC for the next two days, joining a bunch of folks at the Southern Baptist ERLC’s religious liberty summit. The event is off the record, but there will be a number of key people involved in the religious liberty debate present, and I’ll be talking to many of them outside of conference events. I’m sure I can get some on the record, and I’ll report back here. Point is, approving comments is going to be slow going today. I appreciate your patience.