Rod Dreher's Blog, page 494

The Nation: We Support Non-Violence

This statement just in from Caitlin Graf, vice president of communications at The Nation:

The Nation does not support violence directed at individuals for their speech, however reprehensible that speech may be. Not everyone shares that view or interprets it in the same way, as was clear in the reaction—from left, right and center—to the video of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face by a masked demonstrator. We published one article, by Natasha Lennard that reported, approvingly, on the black bloc organizing behind that incident and other actions taken at the Disrupt J20 Inauguration Day protests. We’ve since published another article, by Peter Van Buren, that condemns such tactics. Editorially, The Nation is committed to nonviolence. But it is also committed to airing differences of opinion, as well as candidly reporting on the strategies different movements choose to take at this time.

The Peter Van Buren piece is quite good. Excerpt:

If violence against those exercising their First Amendment rights (speech, religion, etc.) can ever be condoned, why wouldn’t that also condone tearing off a woman’s hijab, or lynching someone? See how the “violence is justified” argument can work?

… Punching people is not a form of protected speech. Expressed legally in a number of ways, Supreme Court Judge Oliver Wendell Holmes stated, “The right to swing my fist ends where the other man’s nose begins.”

Free-speech protection covers all the things people want to say, from the furthest left to the furthest right. You can burn a flag, display a nude body, fill a fish tank with urine and call it art, put on a KKK uniform and march past a black church, and say whatever Richard Spencer was saying. It means I can write this article.

The First Amendment and the broader traditions of free speech are there to protect the most challenging awful mean terrible hateful racist sexist anti-American garbage people can spew out. The protections are not there to cover the easy stuff most people agree with (though they do). That is the whole point.

I’m glad that The Nation published the Van Buren article, but that doesn’t let them off the hook morally. I have no problem at all with the magazine publishing a report from someone embedded inside the antifas, describing what they do and what they thought about what they were doing. But that’s not what Lennard’s piece did. It explicitly said that their violence, including punching Richard Spencer, was a good thing that the left ought to support. The piece even included a hyperlink through which readers of The Nation could donate money to pay legal expenses for arrested antifas. That’s not “candidly reporting on the strategies different movements choose to take at this time.” That’s straight-up advocacy.

Besides, there are times when it’s irresponsible for a publication to air two sides of a controversy. Would The Nation be comfortable publishing an essay from an ISIS operative, reveling in the aesthetic beauty of mowing infidels down with an automatic weapon? Of course it would never do such a thing, not even for the sake of “airing differences of opinion” (“Some people believe it is wrong to go into gay bars and massacre patrons, but other disagree: you decide.”)

Of course punching somebody and burning cars on the street is not the same thing as murdering others. That’s not the point. The point is that if a magazine chooses to publish an opinion, even one with which its editors disagree, that act implicitly legitimizes the opinion as within the realm of acceptable discourse. Lennard’s piece — which, as of this writing, is No. 2 on the magazine’s most read list (Van Buren’s in No. 5) — concludes like this:

One broken window, or a hundred, is not victory. But nor is over half a million people rallying on the National Mall. Both gain potency only if they are perceived as a threat by those in and around power. And neither action will appear threatening unless followed up again and again with unrelenting force, in a multitude of directions. You don’t have to choose between pink hat and black mask; each of us can wear both. You don’t have to fight neo-Nazis in the street, but you should support those who do.

That’s exactly what The Nation did by publishing Lennard’s piece, and allowing her to put a hyperlink to the fundraising page for imprisoned antifas (in the original, the words “you should support those who do” are hyperlinked). Reportage is fine, even necessary. But the taboo against using violence to solve domestic political disputes is an extremely important one for all people — left, right, and center — to defend.

Marching Off The Identity Politics Cliff

All is not well among the pinks:

While clever, Suh’s pussy hats set the tone for a march that would focus acutely on genitalia at the expense of the transgender community. Signs like “Pussy power,” “Viva la Vulva” and “Pussy grabs back” all sent a clear and oppressive message to trans women, especially: having a vagina is essential to womanhood.

More:

“The main reason I decided not to go was because of the pussy hats,” 28-year-old Jade Lejeck said in an interview Sunday night. “I get that they’re a response to the ‘grab them by the pussy’ thing, but I think some people fixated on it the wrong way.”

Lejeck, a trans woman from Modesto, California, said the hats signaled to her that there would be other trans-exclusionary messages at the women’s marches.

And not just Lejeck:

For 20-year-old Sam Forrey, a nonbinary student in Ohio, and their girlfriend Lilian McDaniel, who is trans, there had been other warning signs that the Women’s March might be a dangerous space for them.

Forrey said that a blurb from the Cut’s “Ultimate Guide to Preparing for the Women’s March” suggesting trans protesters bring identification that matches their gender identity or use the “buddy system” had been the first red flag.

Since legally McDaniel’s sex is still male, she worried that if she were to be arrested she would be placed in a men’s jail, a concern she said always lingers at the back of her mind. McDaniel said she’d planned on attending the march despite these fears — until she saw that people were using it as an excuse to invoke what she called “genital-based” womanhood.

A friend told McDaniel about a protester they’d seen marching with a two-foot-tall hand-knit uterus. She was glad she stayed home.

Sad!

No, actually, super silly. Which is fine with me. But if the left has any sense at all, they will read anti-Trump writer David Brooks’s column today and take it seriously. Excerpts:

Soon after the Trump victory, Prof. Mark Lilla of Columbia wrote a piece on how identity politics was dooming progressive chances. Times readers loved that piece and it vaulted to the top of the most-read charts.

But now progressives seem intent on doubling down on exactly what has doomed them so often. Lilla pointed out that identity politics isolates progressives from the wider country: “The fixation on diversity in our schools and in the press has produced a generation of liberals and progressives narcissistically unaware of conditions outside their self-defined groups, and indifferent to the task of reaching out to Americans in every walk of life.”

Sure enough, if you live in blue America, the marches carpeted your Facebook feed. But The Times’s Julie Bosman was in Niles, Mich., where many women had never heard of the marches, and if they had, I suspect, they would not have felt at home at one.

That’s true. I was up in St. Francisville this morning, and ran into a friend of mine, and older white woman. I told her I was going to DC this week for a meeting, and that set her off talking about the Women’s March. She was stirred up about it.

“I don’t understand what their problem is,” she said. “They were just so disgusting, especially that Ashley Judd. Her mama is a fine Southern lady, and must have been so ashamed of her. Did you see that they wouldn’t even let pro-life people march with them?!”

Oh, I got an earful. She said, “If you see the president, you tell him that I am glad I voted for him, and after seeing that mess in DC this weekend, I look forward to voting for him again.”

Thing is, you will never see a woman like that at a demonstration. But she votes.

More Brooks:

The biggest problem with identity politics is that its categories don’t explain what is going on now. Trump carried a majority of white women. He won the votes of a shocking number of Hispanics.

The central challenge today is not how to celebrate difference. The central threat is not the patriarchy. The central challenge is to rebind a functioning polity and to modernize a binding American idea.

Modern liberalism can’t do that. It is far too lost in the fever swamp of identity politics. And corporate America, by jumping feet first into identity politics under the guise of “diversity,” has made it harder for middle class people to think in any other way. It’s not just corporate America either. When I was in Dallas over the weekend, I was talking with some friends, one of whom sends his kids to Highland Park High School, a public school in the city’s most exclusive area, and one of the top 20 public high schools in the nation. He is frustrated because their literature syllabus is scant on the classics, and heavy on trivial contemporary novels chosen to celebrate diversity.

These kids are the sort who going to be the ruling class one day, whether they end up as Republicans or Democrats. Their imaginations will have been formed by the ideology of diversity. When Brooks talks about the “central challenge” to our politics today, he’s right, but elites are not giving younger generations the tools with which to regard the world in any way other than through the lens of identity politics.

My kids were out not long ago at some event, and I ended up talking with a white teenager in Baton Rouge, a young man who looked like a junior or senior, who said some of the guys in his private-school class are now calling themselves “white nationalists.” This worried him a lot. I asked him about their economic background (comfortably middle class), and then asked him why in the world boys like that would be interested in white nationalism. They’re not economically stressed. What’s in it for them?

“Where does this stuff start with anybody?” the kid said. “They’re looking for an identity. They’re tired of being told that white males are what’s wrong with the world. That white nationalism garbage makes them feel special.”

The Democratic Party and well-meaning elites are calling this demon up.

Racializing The Democratic Party

That’s a clip from C-SPAN of Sally Boynton Brown, an Idaho Democrat who is in contention to become the next head of the DNC. The question to the group of DNC chair candidates was about how the party needs to relate to Black Lives Matter. You can see a clearer version of the clip embedded here. Boynton Brown said that “prejudice exists within our own party,” and we need to talk about it.

I’m a white woman, I don’t get it. … My job is to listen and to be a voice. My job is to shut other white people down when they want to interrupt. [Applause.] My job is to shut other white people down when they say ‘Oh no, I’m a Democrat, I’m not prejudiced, I’m accepting. My job is to make sure that they get that they have privilege. And until we shut our mouths …”

Et cetera. You know where this is going. She concluded by saying that “people of color have the answers,” and that if elected, she will listen to them “so that I can go school the other white people.”

Snarked the reader who sent me this clip, “This bodes well for the future.” Yep.

Anti-white racial self-abasement is not a particularly good look, but hey, maybe that’s what it takes to get ahead in the Democratic Party right now. That’s a good way to create more Republicans. Funny thing is, ardent white liberals who say things like this never seem to want to give up their own positions of power, or to withdraw from seeking positions in power, so a person of color can occupy it. If they really believed their own rhetoric, wouldn’t they stand aside? Why should those party members voting for a new DNC chair choose a white woman who says that she doesn’t “get it,” and who is therefore going to do whatever people of color within the party tell her to do, when they could instead vote for an actual person of color? There are three black candidates and one Hispanic candidate for the job. If what Sally Boynton Brown says about whites in her own party is true, and indeed if what she says about herself is true, then she should withdraw and go to a spa somewhere to flagellate herself.

How She Ruined His Life

I hope you saw Robert VerBruggen’s piece in TAC yesterday, reviewing a new book about due process and sexual assault accusations on campus. Here is a story about a case at Michigan State University that reveals the power mere accusation has to ruin someone’s life. It starts like this:

The facts are largely undisputed: Two college students on summer break – he’s a sophomore; she, a freshman – make a date. It’s Memorial Day weekend, 2014, and their intentions are explicit. They meet and have sex – consensual, enthusiastic – when a passerby interrupts them.

A few hours later, still together, the male student attempts to resume the sexual encounter. He reaches under her shirt to touch her breast. He stops immediately when she asks him to. They agree about these facts.

Yet this “one-time, non-consensual touching,” as university documents summarize it, is the crux of a startling Michigan State University sexual misconduct case. It has generated a thick stack of legal documents, months of MSU administrator time, and tens of thousands of dollars in legal bills since the female student, known here as Melanie, formally complained on Sept. 25, 2015 – almost 16 months after the incident.

“Melanie,” the accuser is described as “well-schooled in feminist theory.” What happened is that she and “Nathan” agreed to have sex (he was a virgin), but were interrupted in flagrante delicto by a passerby who spotted them in the backseat of a car. They stopped. But it rattled Melanie:

She cried, and said she had a flashback to an earlier, abusive relationship in high school. Nathan tried to comfort her, but she described her tearful reaction as distressed, “extremely upset.” Later, they met a few of her friends for dinner in Plymouth and, after that, walked along the train tracks for an hour or longer, as he listened, while she talked. He recalls listening sympathetically. She remembers him dismissing how upset she was, and called his reaction “invalidating.”

Eventually, they sat down, his arm around her. A few hours earlier, they had been interrupted trying to have sex in a car. She says she told him she didn’t want to have sex again that night. This time, he reached beneath her shirt and bra, in what he later described as “a momentary touching of the breast,” and she characterized in a text the next day as “a groping.”

“I told you I don’t want to do this anymore,” she recalled saying to him. “And he did immediately stop.” At no time, she said, was he violent or threatening. At no time in their relationship was he ever physically violent or threatening. She dismisses the first official account of the incident — which stated that Nathan “pushed (Melanie) down and pulled up (her) shirt” offered by the Michigan State University investigator — as an exaggeration. “He never pushed me down,” Melanie said.

In his mind, the transgression, on an evening when they’d engaged in intercourse, was redeemed by his immediate response when she asked him to stop.

She was wounded: In her mind, she’d been sharing deep feelings about being abused by men, thinking he was being supportive. Instead, she experienced his touching as an act of betrayal.

According to Melanie, Nathan knew the campus rules of sexual conduct required him to seek voluntary, “unambiguous and willful” consent to touch her sexually, even if she had given sexual consent in the past, such as when they had sex hours earlier.

[Actually, that isn’t quite accurate. As it happens, this more explicit definition of consent wasn’t in effect on that evening along the railroad tracks. MSU did not adopt the policy until 2015, with similar provisions implemented at the University of Michigan and many other universities.]

Nathan’s reliance on a perceived cue rather than explicit assent was, to Melanie, an admission of sexual assault. (She later warned other students in her poetry class to beware of him, telling a circle of students that he had “sexually assaulted” her. At least one of them inferred that Nathan had raped her.)

So, understand: he touched the breast of a woman with whom he had just had consensual sex. She told him to stop. He stopped. Over a year later, she formally accused him of sexual assault. You’re never going to guess what triggered it:

More than two years after the incident, even Melanie’s gender has changed. When 16 months later she reported what happened on the train tracks, Melanie had been taking male hormones for 12 weeks; she had legally changed her name, adopting a male identity. Her voice dropped; she shaved her facial hair. The woman referred to in this account as Melanie now hopes to surgically alter her gender in the future, and lives and dresses as a man.

Back in 2014, she had also been hospitalized after a suicide attempt, and taken a semester-long medical leave to pursue therapy. While her mental fragility, hormone treatment and gender change appear to have played no role in the administration’s decision-making process, the transitioning did make a difference to Melanie.

Had taking male hormones changed Melanie’s outlook on the situation, the world?

“The world, definitely,” says the senior, who is majoring in art history and humanities at MSU. “I suppose transitioning was one of the driving elements for why I reported, because I felt uncomfortable using the men’s restrooms in my residential college, for fear that I would encounter him.”

That’s right: this hot mess decided that she wanted to live as a man, and worried that she might run into Nathan in the can. So she — along with Michigan State — ruined his life. Thanks feminist theory!

Read the whole thing — especially if you have a son who is in college or headed there. A friend read it and said that it made him want to send his son to college outside of the US. I know what he means.

Punching Richard Spencer

By now everyone will have heard seen the clip of white nationalist leader Richard Spencer being sucker-punched by a masked left-wing “anti-fascist” activist on the streets of Washington. I am on the record in this space as rejecting and loathing everything Richard Spencer stands for. He has publicly denounced me, and said that I represent the decline of this magazine. Spencer is a Nietzschean who despises Christians.

But his being attacked on the street when he was doing nothing violent, and threatening nobody, is indefensible. Many on the Left are celebrating it. I’m not going to link to any of that violence porn. You can find it all over the Internet if you want to see it. It’s not shocking that there are people in the world who take pleasure in watching people they hate be physically assaulted, even when those people are doing nothing more than peaceably exercising their right to free speech. What is shocking, though, is a mainstream magazine publishing a piece praising the act.

Here is what The Nation‘s contributor Natasha Lennard had to say in praise of that thug who slugged Spencer. Excerpts:

The transcendental experience of watching Roger Federer play tennis, David Foster Wallace wrote, was one of “kinetic beauty.” Federer’s balletic precision and mastering of time, on the very edge of what seems possible for a body to achieve, was a form of bodily genius. What Foster Wallace saw in a Federer Moment, I see in a video of neo-Nazi Richard Spencer getting punched in the face.

More:

If bodies run out of formation to take a rock to a Starbucks window, they melt back to the bloc in as many seconds. Bodies reconciled, kinetic beauty. If that sounds to you like a precondition for mob violence, you’re right. But this is only a problem if you think there are no righteous mobs, or that windows feel pain, or that counter-violence (like punching Richard Spencer) is never valid.

In the end, says Lennard, the only way any anti-Trump sentiment will get anywhere is “with unrelenting force, in a multitude of directions.”

“You don’t have to fight neo-Nazis in the street,” she writes, “but you should support those who do.”

That last line hyperlinks to a place where you can donate money to pay the legal costs of arrested antifas.

By publishing this essay, The Nation has implicitly endorsed violence to achieve political goals. It is shocking and contemptible. And it is also the No. 1 most read piece on the magazine’s website.

Natasha Lennard’s reasoning is the same kind used by anti-abortion radicals who believe that extremism in defense of unborn life is no vice — this, to justify destroying abortion clinics and even shooting abortion doctors. The mainstream pro-life movement has loudly denounced it. What sort of response do you think we would see if National Review, the Weekly Standard, or The American Conservative published an essay praising the “kinetic beauty” of watching a shot take out an abortion doctor, or of seeing an abortion clinic burn? What if one of these conservative magazines told its readers that they don’t have to fight abortion by assaulting pro-abortion activists and clinic staff, but they should give money to pay the legal bills of those who do?

I don’t think people like The Nation‘s editors truly understand what they are calling up. What will they say if skinheads starting assaulting people like Black Lives Matter’s Deray McKesson in the street? Where will it stop? How will it stop? Do the editors of that magazine really think they will be physically safe if political violence spreads? Do the liberals who wouldn’t dirty their hands by throwing a rock or swinging a fist honestly believe that they won’t be held responsible for supporting those who do? Could it possibly be the case that they genuinely believe anarchist street violence is going to win them popular support, instead of give ordinary people incentive to back whatever illiberal thing Donald Trump wants to do to suppress them?

Do they really want to live in a society where political questions are decided by street violence and the fear of it? Because that’s what the editors of The Nation are helping to bring about.

#ExactlyYourPresident

Take a look at this three-minute video by someone who says Trump is the logical result of a culture coarsened by a lot of the same people who are now outraged that a barbarian like him is in the White House. Excerpt from the transcript:

And next time you’re watching “Friends” reruns — yes, cuddly innocent “Friends” — go ahead and count the references to pornography, and think about how much cooler and more mainstream porn became with the “Friends” generation, and the perpetual gift that keeps on giving to their kids in syndication. It’s not an exaggeration today to say that the average teenager thinks not recycling is more immoral than pornography.

But morality is relative, right? It only matters every four years, and it only applies to the presidential candidate of the political party that you oppose, because let me guess: we should hold the president to a higher standard than we hold ourselves and our beloved pop culture idols and fetishes. But the thing is, presidential candidates come from the same vulgar, sexist, violent, sex-obsessed locker-room society that we’ve curated, so why would it be so shocking when the cream of this crop rises to the top, and is so corrupt?

It cannot be said often enough: Trump is not the instigator of the crisis; he is a symptom. Trump is America 2017. He did not come from nowhere.

Obviously this message is particularly suited for cultural liberals, but let me say this to my fellow cultural conservatives, especially Christian conservatives: if we participate in this vulgar culture, and we let our children do it, what right do we have to blame liberals? Back during the Fifty Shades Of Grey craze, a female friend told me she was shocked by how many of her friends — people she thought were pretty conservative, even plenty of churchgoers — were reading the book and talking excitedly about it. The cognitive dissonance was staggering.

In Dallas this past weekend, I was told that people are starting to give their first graders smartphones. This is morally insane. You’re giving pornographers direct access to your children’s imaginations. You think that it’s okay because you found some software that can block that sort of thing? What if most or all of the kids in your child’s social milieu have smartphones? Do you think that every single parent will have bothered to block the porn sites? Plus, the mainstream has become so vulgar, violent, and exploitative that it’s simply impossible to keep your kids’ eyes off of that stuff if you give them smartphones.

Stop participating in this Culture of Death. Stop it.

Eyes Wide Open, Monastery Walls Around The Heart

A reader e-mails:

I came across this New York Times story today. It reminded me of your “Trump, John Lewis and American Dissolution” post, specifically the excerpts you quoted from David Hines’ tweetstorm about political violence in the 70s.

The story is about the white nationalist leader Richard Spencer being sucker-punched by a masked left-wing activist on the streets of Washington as he was being interviewed. The DCist website here takes pleasure in different remixes showing the cowardly assault.  (And yes, it was cowardly. I can’t stand what Richard Spencer believes in, but every one of us has the right to stand peaceably on a street corner and talk about our beliefs without having to worry about a thug assaulting us.)

The reader continues:

In Hines’ tweets he talks about how since he and everyone else on his side of the political spectrum is called a Nazi by the left, then that makes him very interested in the physical safety of Nazis. And, lo and behold, not a day after Trump is inaugurated, we have a story in a major national newspaper asking if it is ok to assault people in public for holding an unpopular view. Notwithstanding the one (!) person they quoted disapproving of political violence, the jocular tone of the piece clearly suggests that it is absolutely ok.

Yes. Embedded in the story was this tweet by a former Obama speechwriter:

I don’t care how many different songs you set Richard Spencer being punched to, I’ll laugh at every one.

— Jon Favreau (@jonfavs) January 21, 2017

More from the reader:

This is the part where I say I did not vote for Trump and think the alt-right repulsive, but honestly, watching the increasingly unhinged reactions from the left worry me far more than a fringe racist white power movement. I have grown adults on my Facebook timeline unselfconsciously calling themselves The Resistance. It’s insanity, yet they’re taking themselves completely seriously.

I’m not really sure this has a much to do with Trump either. Oh sure, the left despises him for his lack of character and his policies (such as they are). However, watching what has been happening on college campuses and in our political institutions over the past few years, I can’t help but think the left has been working themselves up to this for a while. They have become so illiberal, so intolerant of their fellow Americans, I think that we would have seen something very similar even if it was Jeb Bush taking the oath of office. They are working themselves up to something ugly. I hesitate to imagine what the reaction is going to be if Trump starts seriously threatening their institutional strongholds like the bureaucracies and the Supreme Court. Just imagine Wisconsin under Scott Walker, but on a national scale.

Next, a friend who is very insightful about politics and history writes:

Something to consider as you develop applications of your book in advance and following it release. 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.

Conservatives keep wryly noting the absence of similar violence, protests and mass assemblies when Obama was elected and reelected. No-one lit themselves on fire in response to the HHS mandate, no significant boycotts were advanced against businesses that brought Indiana to heel over its RFRA, and there were not massive marches on Washington after Obergefell. At base, I believe because the worldview of most conservatives does not invest the political sphere with the same metaphysical status as that of Progressives, conservatives do not view the political sphere as the ultimate battle ground where History unfolds. Expectations from politics are simply less: some justice, some peace, but mostly the daily grind of enduring the world with all its frailties, imperfections, and temporary injustices.

However, as the progressive opposition to Trump ramps up and we experience the unfolding four years as one of constant emergency and calamity, there is a real danger for Christians especially: that Christians become drawn by default into the terms of debate established by Progressives, advanced by the media, echoed by Hollywood, supported on campuses, and amplified ceaselessly on social media. Social media is going to be a the Internet Age’s equivalent of the seven deadly sins – especially sloth – and Christians would be well-advised not to be drawn into its tempting distractions. We are going to be a nation ever more defined by constant and ceaseless outrage over everything, and whatever one says — no matter if it’s meant for amusement or a passing observation — will be inexorably drawn into the outrage amplification machine.

One of the great challenges, then, will be fostering spaces where silence, moderation, contemplation, conversation, and real friendships might blossom. I can already see developing the disposition so common during the great ideological battles of the mid-20th century: if you are not with us, you are against us. Not to be drawn into this secularized Manicheanism will be one of the great challenges for Christians, and it seems to me the unexpected way that the types of Christian communities envisioned in the Benedict Option will be especially necessary. We may not face the threat that we thought might be coming under a Clinton Presidency, but in many respects at least that prospect had the benefit of making it clearer to us what was to be expected and the forms of resistance that would be needed. The current conflagration will be subtler in its iniquity — more akin to the temptations offered by a Screwtape — and the ability to build spaces outside the Politics of the Eschaton will be especially needful.

This strikes me as both true and very important. I had not quite thought of things that way. To me, the Benedict Option has always been about developing the practices, the relationships, and the institutions that would help small- o orthodox Christians endure in a culture that is both actively and passively hostile to our faith. As the second reader said, it has assumed the nature of the enemy. What it did not imagine was the threat to Christian faith from politics itself. That is, by being drawn into the cycle of perpetual outrage, such that the wrath it provokes devours you.

I don’t know about you, but this is a big temptation for me.  This appeared on Twitter last night:

Part of the Left's ongoing outreach, open-mindedness and tolerance. pic.twitter.com/YqoYaocH1z

— Seton Motley (@SetonMotley) January 23, 2017

In response, I tweeted that things like it were “clarifying”. What do they clarify? The nature of the enemy. And, they clarify for me that no matter how bad Trump gets, I will never, ever be on the side of people like this. (It turns out this photo was from a 2014 demonstration, but there were plenty of posters and spoken words from the women’s march this past weekend that were almost as bad. My point still stands.)

Here’s what it also clarifies, in light of my political friend’s words above: the nature of the challenge facing Christians in the wake of a culture capable of this sort of thing. We could find it easy to surrender our principles in the face of terrible things Trump does, because of wrath provoked by our enemies’ malice, and to therefore refuse to criticize or even to judge him, because we don’t want to give his enemies any quarter. I felt that way this weekend after first seeing and hearing what some were saying at the women’s march in Washington. It’s a dangerous state of mind to be in. Plus, if we allow ourselves to be sucked into the cyclone, we could find it easy to allow ourselves to become what so many of those on the left have become: so consumed by hatred — a hatred that they call justice — that they cannot see the humanity of any who oppose them.

Dante understands how this goes and where this goes. I wrote this a couple of years ago about Canto XVI of the Purgatorio:

Tonight we enter the choking, blinding black cloud of Wrath. There Dante meets Marco the Lombard, and asks him what is to blame for the world today having been consumed by evil and chaos. The moral philosophy Marco espouses is at the heart of the Commedia‘s meaning. I have abandoned the Musa translation for the Hollander one here, because it has more grandeur:

First he heaved a heavy sigh, which grief wrung

to a groan, and then began: “Brother,

the world is blind and indeed you come from it.

“You who are still alive assign each cause

only to the heavens, as though they drew

all things along upon their necessary paths.

“If that were so, free choice would be denied you,

and there would be no justice when one feels

joy for doing good or misery for evil.”

Marco refers to the medieval habit of blaming moral failures on forces outside of man’s control — symbolized by the heavenly spheres (hence the belief in horoscopes). Marco’s point here is the same as Shakespeare’s: “The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars, but in ourselves.” Men believe that they can’t help themselves, that they are playthings in the hands of forces larger than themselves — but that isn’t true. Marco continues:



“Yes, the heavens give motion to your inclinations,

I don’t say all of them, but even if I did,

you still possess a light to winnow good from evil,

“and you have free will. Should it bear the strain

in its first struggles with the heavens,

then, rightly nurtured, it will conquer all.”

In less poetic language, Marco concedes that we all have inclinations toward sin, but we can still see good and evil, and have the power, through free will, to resist our sinful inclinations. If we refuse sin the first time, and keep doing so, there’s nothing within our own natures that we cannot overcome. This is what Purgatory is all about: straightening through ascetic labors the crooked paths within us, making ourselves ready for Heaven. Marco goes on to say that if we submit ourselves, in our freedom, to God (“a greater power”), we free ourselves from the forces of fate and instinct. Here’s the clincher:



“Therefore, if the world around you goes astray,

in you is the cause and in you let it be sought…”

The context here is a discussion that Dante the pilgrim launches with Marco, in which he (Dante) seeks to know why the people of his homeland, are caught up in a perpetual cycle of war and vengeance. Marco tells him it’s because your anger has made you blind. But, says Marco, you are not fated to do this. You have free will, given to you by God. Use it to resist your wrathful impulses. And always know that you are not separate from the world and its fallenness, and that if you want a world of peace and true justice, it starts with reforming your own heart.

Whatever else the Benedict Option sets out to do, it looks like one vital part of its mission will be to train Christians to love our enemies, and to bless those that persecute us. To do so is going to require withdrawing from the cycle of outrage created by Trump and his enemies. It’s going to be hard to do this while not embracing a state of denial about what’s going on all around us. We are going to have to keep our eyes wide open, but also construct monastery walls around our hearts.

UPDATE: Just had a phone conversation with a friend. He said that his Facebook feed is lighting up with Evangelicals saying things like, “F–k liberals.” He said he has never seen conservative Christians embrace that kind of spite and vulgarity, until now. It worries him. It should. Note well that he’s not saying that secular liberals are avoiding this kind of thing, not at all. He’s simply pointing out that he never thought he would see Christians embrace the hatred like they’re now doing.

The Horrible New Normal

I was busy all day Saturday in a wonderful Dallas bubble. I gave a talk about the Benedict Option this morning at Providence Christian School, then went to lunch with some folks who are doing amazing work serving the poor, then hung out with new friends and old ones at the Old Monk pub, my old hangout, and then went to a nice long dinner with more Providence folks. It was a great day.

I came back to the hotel room late, and got caught up on the big events of the day: the women’s march, and White House Press Secretary Sean Spicer’s bizarre performance.

First the march. What an appalling spectacle. The women marched in part to protest President Trump’s vulgar and disrespectful attitude toward women. But in so doing … well, look:

The Secret Service has reportedly said it will open an investigation into Madonna after the singer told the Women’s March on Washington that she had thought about ‘blowing up the White House’.

Donning a black p***yhat, the music icon caused controversy by dropping the F-bomb four times, sparking a slew of apologies from broadcasters airing the protest live.

She went on to speak of her rage at the election result, telling the crowd she had thought a lot about ‘blowing up the White House’ but knew that it ‘wouldn’t change anything’.

More:

Tempers ran high as marchers took to Washington D.C.  to oppose Donald Trump’s new presidency – with Ashley Judd joining Madonna in spewing lewd rants against the new President.

The Hollywood actress and the pop star departed from the general spirit of inclusivity and calls for mutual respect with personal attacks not only on Trump but also his family, including daughter Ivanka.

They say well-behaved women rarely make history, and Judd clearly took that quote to heart as she recited a poem written by a 19-year-old from Tennessee.

‘I feel Hitler in these streets, a mustache traded for a toupee,’ she said.

‘I am a nasty woman,’ she continued – referencing Donald’s famous attack on Hillary Clinton. ‘I’m not as nasty as a man who looks like he bathes in Cheeto dust.

‘I’m not as nasty as your own daughter being your favorite sex symbol, your wet dreams infused with your own genes’.

Still more:

Judd continued to proudly repeat the phrase ‘I’m a nasty woman’ as the crowd of thousands continued to cheer.

‘And our p***ies ain’t for grabbing, they’re for reminding you that our walls are stronger than America’s ever will be,’ she concluded.

‘Our p*****s are for our pleasure, for birthing new generations of filthy, vulgar, nasty, proud, Christian, Buddhist, Muslim, Sikh, generations of nasty women.

‘So what today means is that we are far from the end, today marks the beginning, the beginning of our story.’

‘The revolution starts here, the fight for the right to be free, to be who we are, to be equal, lets march together through this darkness and with each step know that we are not afraid.’

‘That we are not alone, that we will not back down, that there is power in our unity, and that no opposing force stands a chance in the face of true solidarity.’

‘And to our detractors that insist that this march will never add up to anything, “f*** you”,’ she proclaimed.

Madonna also performed two of her classic hits, Express Yourself and Human Nature, changing one of the lyrics in the latter song to ‘Donald Trump suck a d***’.

Read the whole thing.  Disgusting. As a reader e-mailed:

Trump is the vulgar one?

They are making him look like Daniel Patrick Moynihan.

But look, it cannot be denied that the march, and sister marches around the country, drew formidable numbers. This is not going away anytime soon. The divisions are deep, and real, and the passions are hot.

And then the Sean Spicer episode. The White House press secretary called a Saturday press conference, and then, in front of reporters, delivered a blistering statement complaining about an unfair tweet, and about reports that the Trump inauguration crowd was smaller than Obama’s first inauguration crowd. In the statement he lied, or at least abused the truth, then stormed off the stage without taking questions.

I watched the clip, and thought, “This is the United States of America?!” It beggars belief. A friend texted:

That press briefing is such a pathetic embarrassment. Honestly. Four more years of thin-skinned lackeys carrying the water of a thin-skinned, self-absorbed narcissist. They didn’t have to say anything. How small they look already. How much they have already diminished the prestige of the office with their petty headcounts.

It’s true. Are we really going to have to endure idiocy like this every time Trump gets wound up about some penny-ante tweet from a reporter? Is it going to be nothing but chaos and outrage? Jonathan V. Last writes:

Rule #1 for press relations is that you can obfuscate, you can misrepresent, you can shade the truth to a ridiculous degree, or play dumb and pretend not to know things you absolutely do know. But you can’t peddle affirmative, provable falsehoods. And it’s not because there’s some code of honor among press secretaries, but because once you’re a proven liar in public, you can’t adequately serve your principal. Every principal needs a spokesman who has the ability, in a crunch, to tell the press something important and know that they’ll be believed 100 percent, without reservation.

But like I said, this isn’t about Spicer.

What’s worrisome is that Spicer wouldn’t have blown his credibility with the national press on Day 2 of the administration unless it was vitally important to Trump.

And if media reports about crowd size are so important to Trump that he’d push Spicer out there to lie for him, then it means that all the tinpot-dictator, authoritarian, characterological tics that people worried about during the campaign are still very much active.

You know who obsessed about crowd size? Fidel Castro. You know who did not? George Washington, John Adams, Andrew Jackson, FDR, Truman, Eisenhower, Reagan, Clinton, and every other man to ever serve as president of these United States of America.

#NeverTrumpster Erick Erickson has a fascinating take on it all:

People are idiots. Donald Trump will keeping winning because people are idiots. And no, I am not talking about Trump supporters. I am mostly talking about the press corps.

Let’s review Saturday shall we?

The press decided to give massive coverage to the Women’s March in Washington with members of the press gleefully reporting every insult against Trump, but patently ignoring that one of the key speakers opposed the collapse of the Berlin Wall because she thought the communists were better than us. Another speaker, Ashley Judd, suggested Trump supporters were Nazis.

Consider the reaction of the press had this been said of Barack Obama. Well, we do not have to ponder it. We know. The press was outraged. Remember how a congressional staffer got fired for tweeting something about the Obama kids? On Friday, multiple people with blue checkmarks on Twitter were attacking Baron Trump and the press said nothing. We also know how the press responded when anyone called Obama a muslim, Nazi, commie, etc.

All this reinforces in many people’s minds that there is a double standard. And that double standard went into full force on Saturday. Supposedly objective reporters spent the day as activists and you all know it.

True. More Erickson:

Now, here we are at the close of Saturday, and the press has been fixated on a President of the United States daring to fight them. They have never had a President push back against them before like this. So now they’re screaming “First Amendment” and offended that Trump is doing all this.

They are screaming and moaning over treatment from a man who won a national election after video revealed he thought he could grab women by, well, you know where. And somehow the press thinks that voters who voted for Trump after that will care about this.

Mind you, the press can claim Trump has a low approval rating, but they have a lower approval rating than him.

The simple fact is that everyone knows the media only focuses on crowd sizes when it works to the Democrats’ advantage; everyone knows the press plays up tea party aggressiveness while downplaying leftwing aggressiveness; and everybody except the press knows that Trump is moving fast on a host of issues and he has them brilliantly focused on themselves.

People are idiots. Trump clearly knows this. And he is exploiting it to his advantage. As long as the press keeps playing up grievances against themselves and focusing on issues that really do not matter, Trump and his Administration can keep flying fast under the radar.

Read the whole thing.  I think Erickson is probably right. Still, a few conclusions from Saturday:

President Trump was a chaos candidate and apparently intends to be a chaos president. Stability, it would seem, is out the window. The White House will lie without hesitation when it serves its perceived interest.
Trump is weaponizing the news media’s biases. Even when the media tell the truth, millions of Trump supporters will not believe them. This is a dangerous situation in a democracy. Consciously or not, Trump is exploiting the American people’s new habit of believing that truth is whatever serves the narrative they wish to believe, including whatever serves the cause of their side gaining or holding power.
The elite media will not understand that it does this too, and has been doing this for years, to conservatives.
Conservatives will be so glad that a Republican president is finally fighting back that they won’t care that it’s insane for a US president to behave this way, and that it undermines the gravity of the office.
The cultural left, convinced of the justice of its own wrathfulness, is not going to protest with dignity or behave with any kind of decency or restraint. It’s going to overreach, again and again and again. It and Trump are going to feed off of each other’s negative energy, and it’s going to drive more and more Americans apart, and not only apart, but towards real enmity. Each side will blame the other 100 percent for the trouble.

One reason that the Benedict Option is going to become more and more appealing in the Trump years is as a shelter and source of resilience during the days of rage to come. In Dallas this weekend, my conversations included one with a college professor and one with a couple of lawyers. The professor talked about the spitefulness against Christians in the academy (even here in Dallas), and how one had to lay low and watch one’s back. The Trump years, I believe, are going to ramp that up. The lawyers talked about how politicized, in terms of progressive cultural dogmas, the professional culture within law has become. I am certain that the Trump years are going to see activists within the law profession push harder on these points as a form of resistance. This is going to fall very hard on the heads of orthodox Christians in law, academia, and other fields prone to left-wing cultural dominance.

Mostly, though, we are going to need a place of shelter within which we can keep our peace amid the chaos. I think of the Monks of Norcia, sheltering in tents just outside the town, observing the rubble of their earthquake-ravaged basilica and monastery. They left for the hills after the first of the series of deadly earthquakes, and made a safe place for themselves to ride out what was coming. In American life, the earth is starting to shake, symbolically. Now is the time to prepare for difficult days ahead.

UPDATE:

Kellyanne Conway on @MeetThePress: Spicer offered "alternative facts"@chucktodd: "Alternative facts are not facts. They are falsehoods."

— Bradd Jaffy (@BraddJaffy) January 22, 2017

“Alternative facts”? I think I threw up a little bit in my mouth.

Failed Education Reform

Surprise, surprise. From the Washington Post:

One of the Obama administration’s signature efforts in education, which pumped billions of federal dollars into overhauling the nation’s worst schools, failed to produce meaningful results, according to a federal analysis.

Test scores, graduation rates and college enrollment were no different in schools that received money through the School Improvement Grants program — the largest federal investment ever targeted to failing schools — than in schools that did not.

The Education Department published the findings on the website of its research division on Wednesday, hours before President Obama’s political appointees walked out the door.

“We’re talking about millions of kids who are assigned to these failing schools, and we just spent several billion dollars promising them things were going to get better,” said Andy Smarick, a resident fellow at the American Enterprise Institute who has long been skeptical that the Obama administration’s strategy would work. “Think of what all that money could have been spent on instead.”

They spent $7 billion, in fact. One of the most enduring shibboleths of education reform is that throwing money at the problem will fix it. A closely related shibboleth is that it can be fixed by fiddling with the method. While these might produce improvements at the margins, no serious reform can happen if kids are raised in chaotic families that do not value education. We can’t fix families, so we pretend that’s not the problem.

Lots of people are angry at the incoming Education Secretary, Betsy DeVos, saying that her past advocacy of school choice and voucher programs will destroy the public school system if she tries to implement them nationally. Well, what we’ve been doing is not working. Why not try something different?

What We Heard At The Trump Inaugural

I apologize for these dashed-off thoughts below. I’ve been traveling all day and unable to get online. I’ve got a dinner to get to shortly, and I want to get something up. I heard the Inaugural Address on the radio while driving. Here’s what I think.

TAC founder Pat Buchanan didn’t get to give a Presidential inaugural address, but he lived to hear a new US president say what he would have said had he been given the chance. I was roadtripping when I heard Trump’s speech, and thought it was remarkable in a number of ways – some good, some bad.

First, the good.

I was astonished, really astonished, by how forthrightly anti-Washington and anti-Establishment it was. I imagine all the Republican Congressional members were almost as uncomfortable with it as the Democrats (to say nothing about the former US presidents attending the ceremony). He basically read them the riot act. I liked this part, to be honest. Somebody on NPR commented on this, saying in effect, “He remembered who sent him to Washington.” Yes, he did.

I was also pleasantly surprised by his economic nationalism, and shocked to think that a Republican president was speaking those words. We haven’t heard language like that at the executive level since … well, have we ever? It was a blistering repudiation of Reaganism and globalism. Did you ever imagine that a GOP president would say words like these? For that matter, a Democratic president? I may end up regretting this, but as a paleocon wet, I liked hearing those words.

Now, the bad.

His hyperbole was awful. “Carnage”? Really? You would think that we had been living out a long national nightmare of Mordorian intensity. It rang false, as did Trump’s grandiose promises to bring all the factories back, eliminate Islamic terrorism, heal the planet, and so forth. He’s raising expectations unrealistically high. When this stuff fails to materialize, is he going to blame “Washington”?

Also, I agree with him that it’s time to draw down American troops around the world, and I suppose I don’t mind him saying that other nations have bled out military dry if that rhetoric is how he manages to sell it to the American people. But there is no sense in which our military has been bled dry. We spend vastly more on our military than anybody else in the world. Trump given the impression that foreign welfare queens have looted the Pentagon is a con man’s line.

Overall, though, this tweet from Michael Brendan Dougherty resonated with me:

So now I get the pleasure of watching a manifest dolt and con-artist make all the ideas I believed in uglier and more menacing. Cool.

— Michael B Dougherty