Rod Dreher's Blog, page 51

Money Down The Toilet In Afghanistan

This sign of American decadence and stupidity in Afghanistan cannot be improved on. The Spectator columnist Cockburn reports on America’s attempt to turn a nation of medieval goat herders and Islamic hillbillies into penis-possessors and vulva-havers suitable for campus life at some of America’s more elite colleges. Excerpts:

So, alongside the billions for bombs went hundreds of millions for gender studies in Afghanistan. According to US government reports, $787 million was spent on gender programs in Afghanistan, but that substantially understates the actual total, since gender goals were folded into practically every undertaking America made in the country.

A recent report from the Special Inspector General for Afghanistan Reconstruction (SIGAR) broke down the difficulties of the project. For starters, in both Dari and Pastho there are no words for ‘gender’. That makes sense, since the distinction between ‘sex’ and ‘gender’ was only invented by a sexually-abusive child psychiatrist in the 1960s, but evidently Americans were caught off-guard. Things didn’t improve from there. Under the US’s guidance, Afghanistan’s 2004 constitution set a 27 percent quota for women in the lower house — higher than the actual figure in America! A strategy that sometimes required having women represent provinces they had never actually been to. Remarkably, this experiment in ‘democracy’ created a government few were willing to fight for, let alone die for.

The initiatives piled up one after another. Do-gooders established a ‘National Masculinity Alliance’, so a few hundred Afghan men could talk about their ‘gender roles’ and ‘examine male attitudes that are harmful to women’.

More:

But all this wasn’t just a stupid waste of money. It routinely actively undermined the ‘nation-building’ that America was supposed to be doing. According to an USAID observer, the gender ideology included in American aid routinely caused rebellions out in the provinces, directly causing the instability America was supposedly fighting. To get Afghanistan’s parliament to endorse the women’s rights measures it wanted, America resorted to bribing them. Soon, bribery became the norm for getting anything done in the parliament.

Cockburn dredges up something so horrible and hilarious that it’s straight out of a Monty Python sketch. In it, the American occupiers attempt to enlighten a group of Afghan women by showing them Marcel Duchamp’s famous urinal-as-museum-piece, and telling them that it’s important art. Cockburn says watch to the 31-second point and see the moment when America failed in Afghanistan:

Read it all. Last night at dinner in Milan, I asked a friend of mine, a veteran Italian foreign correspondent, what he thought of the way America had handled its departure from Afghanistan. “America is a declining power,” he said. “You can’t deny it now.” No, you can’t.

There should be Congressional hearings, but you know there won’t be, because nobody is ever held accountable for anything in this country anymore. Next time you hear one of these people in the American expert class telling you, for example, that Hungary is a fascist state, remember that they are the same geniuses who read Afghanistan and thought they saw a country that was ripe for gender studies and classes on the artistic breakthrough of pissoirs.

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Persecution & Propaganda At Princeton

The auto-destruction of America’s great institutions continues. In July 2020, I wrote about how a woke mob of academics and students at Princeton University were assaulting Joshua Katz, a tenured professor of Classics, over his public dissent from their racial hysterics. I wrote at the time:

Joshua T. Katz, a distinguished Classics professor at Princeton, published a brave essay on Quillette the other day, criticizing a lengthy list of demands by woke Princeton professors. He said there are some things he agrees with. On the other hand:

But then there are dozens of proposals that, if implemented, would lead to civil war on campus and erode even further public confidence in how elite institutions of higher education operate. Some examples: “Reward the invisible work done by faculty of color with course relief and summer salary” and “Faculty of color hired at the junior level should be guaranteed one additional semester of sabbatical” and “Provide additional human resources for the support of junior faculty of color.” Let’s leave aside who qualifies as “of color,” though this is not a trivial point. It boggles my mind that anyone would advocate giving people—extraordinarily privileged people already, let me point out: Princeton professors—extra perks for no reason other than their pigmentation.

Prof. Katz responded to the list’s demand that Princeton apologize to members of the “Black Justice League.” Writes Katz:

The Black Justice League, which was active on campus from 2014 until 2016, was a small local terrorist organization that made life miserable for the many (including the many black students) who did not agree with its members’ demands. Recently I watched an “Instagram Live” of one of its alumni leaders, who—emboldened by recent events and egged on by over 200 supporters who were baying for blood—presided over what was effectively a Struggle Session against one of his former classmates. It was one of the most evil things I have ever witnessed, and I do not say this lightly.

Well, they’ve been dragging out Prof. Katz’s immiseration for over a year now. Incredibly, the university uses him as an example of racism on an official Princeton website dedicated to educating incoming students about the history of racism at Princeton. I repeat: this is an official university website. Here are the Katz parts:

This is jaw-dropping stuff. Princeton University is in effect accusing a sitting professor of being an anti-black racist. The university directs incoming freshmen to read that website, in which Prof. Katz is introduced to them as one of the most evil people on campus, while the revolting race-baiter Eddie Glaude is held up as an aggrieved victim of Katz. I hope Katz has contacted a lawyer about this.

Moreover, as part of the same freshman orientation program, Princeton has produced this video, in which woke professors talk about — what else? — racism. At the 38:38 mark, Prof. Dan-el Padilla Peralta, who, as a Classics student, was mentored by Joshua Katz, but who has now turned on him, says that he’s in favor of free speech, but only to advance “social justice” and “antiracist social justice.” He says faculty help students with this, not to help them “assimilate,” and think well of Princeton, but “to provide them with the tools to tear down this place and make it a better one.”

I wrote about Padilla Peralta earlier this year, following a profile on his radical scholarly activism in The New York Times. From the Times piece:

To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves. Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression. Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past. This past semester, he co-taught a course, with the Activist Graduate School, called “Rupturing Tradition,” which pairs ancient texts with critical race theory and strategies for organizing. “I think that the politics of the living are what constitute classics as a site for productive inquiry,” he told me. “When folks think of classics, I would want them to think about folks of color.” But if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”

My comment on this from that post:

If this doesn’t terrify you, you’re not seeing it for what it is. These scholars believe that the Classics field should exist only for the sake of its own destruction! It is completely perverse. My kids attend a school where everybody studies Latin, and there’s a lot of reading in the Greeks and the Romans. If any of my children fell in love with the Classics and wanted to study them, I would have to discourage them from going into the field, which is committing suicide.

The woke barbarians are already inside the gates. The only people who are going to save Classics are those who can find ways to keep the tradition alive like monastics in Dark Age monasteries.

This guy, Padilla Peralta, and his colleagues are the tormentors of Joshua Katz, and the radical ideologues valorized by Princeton University’s leadership. The university wants incoming freshmen to adopt these radicals’ views on the university, and on education. It is unconscionable, and it is profoundly decadent.

Imagine being Joshua Katz, returning to semester this fall to a campus whose freshman class has been instructed by the university to regard you as a racist. What an evil place Princeton is becoming.

Joshua Katz (Benson Center video)

Katz makes an appearance in Anne Applebaum’s new essay in The Atlantic, which is about what happens to people when they are cancelled. It’s a very good piece, full of horrible details taken from real life cases. It is impossible for any fair-minded, reasonable person to read it and think that wokeness and cancel culture are minor phenomena. Applebaum doesn’t mention “soft totalitarianism” in her essay, but this is exactly the kind of thing at the center of my book Live Not By Lies. 

I’m not going to quote the parts of her essay that I agree with; I fully endorse most of it, and am glad Applebaum is speaking out. But I do take issue with a couple of things. For example:

America remains a safe distance from Mao’s China or Stalin’s Russia. Neither our secretive university committees nor the social-media mobs are backed by authoritarian regimes threatening violence. Despite the right-wing rhetoric that says otherwise, these procedures are not being driven by a “unified left” (there is no “unified left”), or by a unified movement of any kind, let alone by the government. It’s true that some of the university sexual-harassment cases have been shaped by Department of Education Title IX regulations that are shockingly vague, and that can be interpreted in draconian ways. But the administrators who carry out these investigations and disciplinary procedures, whether they work at universities or in the HR departments of magazines, are not doing so because they fear the Gulag. Many pursue them because they believe they are making their institutions better—they are creating a more harmonious workplace, advancing the causes of racial or sexual equality, keeping students safe. Some want to protect their institution’s reputation. Invariably, some want to protect their own reputation. At least two of the people I interviewed believe that they were punished because a white, male boss felt he had to publicly sacrifice another white man in order to protect his own position.

Well, yeah, this is not “hard totalitarianism,” but rather soft totalitarianism. It is still totalitarianism! And of course the persecutors are doing it because they believe they are improving their institutions by removing wicked people from their midst. Doesn’t Applebaum grasp that the Soviet persecutors — the true believers, not the cynics — believed they were doing the same thing? And yes, one distinct aspect of this soft totalitarianism is that it does not depend on the state to work its evil. It depends on radicalism in power within non-governmental institutions. If you are a victim of these monsters, you might be grateful that you have merely been professionally destroyed and shorn of all your friends, and not also sent to the gulag, but it’s not going to mean much to you that your tormentors weren’t agents of the state, but rather private citizens.

Moreover, I reject Applebaum’s claim that these procedures are not driven by a “unified left.” I don’t know where she gets that phrase — I mean, I don’t know where the “right-wing rhetoric” comes from — but it is, in fact, driven by a left unified not via a formal organization or system, but by the widespread agreement that pursuing “antiracism” and “social justice” are so vital that extremism in the pursuit of these goals is no vice.

Applebaum goes on:

Although some have tried to link this social transformation to President Joe Biden or House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, anyone who tries to shoehorn these stories into a right-left political framework has to explain why so few of the victims of this shift can be described as “right wing” or conservative.

Oh, come on! It is certainly true that many prominent victims — academics and those in media fields — have been liberals, that could easily be explained by the fact that those are the most woke professions, and tend to be overwhelmingly liberal in the first place. Second, these are the worlds that intellectuals inhabit. Is Atlantic writer Anne Applebaum going to hear about the conservative company middle manager fired because of an accusation related to his political or social conservatism? Heck, I’m a conservative myself, and unless somebody tells me about it, I’m not likely to hear about it. I could have easily been fired back in 2008 (or thereabouts) when I was falsely accused by a minority colleague of creating a “hostile work environment” because I called a terrorist mob “savages.” I withdrew the published comment to avoid the destruction of my career — I had young children to raise — but I was prepared to fight the absurd allegation. What changed my mind was the certainty that the HR department at my employer would have cashiered a conservative white male employee without a second thought, given the identity of the accuser. You would have heard about it had that happened, because I had, and do have, access to the public square. But how many people don’t? How many people do get dismissed in these cases, and choose not to go public because they’ve been traumatized enough, and don’t want to make it even harder to get employment?

My point is that I get the feeling that Applebaum is trying too hard to exonerate the left — including readers of The Atlantic, and editors there too (remember what Atlantic editor Jeffrey Goldberg did to Kevin D. Williamson?) from responsibility for the totalitarian dystopia they created and sustain. But if she wants to blame cowardly liberal Republican types who run woke capitalist corporations, I’m with her. And yes, there are instances of conservative cancel culture. These are awful, and I condemn them. But they are absolutely dwarfed by the behemoth that the left has created. When I hear about these deplorable examples, I’m reminded of the black-humor quip, “True, Hitler hated the Jews, but you have to remember, the Jews hated Hitler too.”

In any case, I do suggest you read the Applebaum essay, which is important. This was the part that infuriated me the most:

Here is the first thing that happens once you have been accused of breaking a social code, when you find yourself at the center of a social-media storm because of something you said or purportedly said. The phone stops ringing. People stop talking to you. You become toxic. “I have in my department dozens of colleagues—I think I have spoken to zero of them in the past year,” one academic told me. “One of my colleagues I had lunch with at least once a week for more than a decade—he just refused to speak to me anymore, without asking questions.” Another reckoned that, of the 20-odd members in his department, “there are two, one of whom has no power and another of whom is about to retire, who will now speak to me.”

A journalist told me that after he was summarily fired, his acquaintances sorted themselves into three groups. First, the “heroes,” very small in number, who “insist on due process before damaging another person’s life and who stick by their friends.” Second, the “villains,” who think you should “immediately lose your livelihood as soon as the allegation is made.” Some old friends, or people he thought were old friends, even joined the public attack. But the majority were in a third category: “good but useless. They don’t necessarily think the worst of you, and they would like you to get due process, but, you know, they haven’t looked into it. They have reasons to think charitably of you, maybe, but they’re too busy to help. Or they have too much to lose.” One friend told him that she would happily write a defense of him, but she had a book proposal in the works. “I said, ‘Thank you for your candor.’ ”

I can easily imagine what Dante would have done to these people who abandon old friends, falsely accused, to save their own backsides. Revolting creatures. I bet the past year has taught Prof. Joshua Katz a lot about who his friends really are, and what human nature truly is.

 

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Why America Is Losing In Africa

After my talk in Rome tonight, I went to dinner with some friends — Italian journalist and public intellectual types. Pro-Americans. I asked them about how the Afghanistan departure was affecting the United States’ standing in Europe. Grim faces all around the table. They said that America’s image has been taking a beating in Europe for a long time, and is really accelerating downward. It’s not just among the political class, but ordinary people too — even people who have typically been pro-American. You can really feel it in public now, they said. It was widely noticed in Italy, the men agreed, that in his recent addresses about Afghanistan, President Biden did not thank America’s Italian allies for their sacrifices (dead and wounded soldiers) in the long Afghanistan war.We got to talking about how bizarre and counterproductive is America’s insistence on prioritizing LGBT rights in a ham-fisted way that often hurts US diplomacy when it offends local sensibilities. One of the men at the table said, “Diplomats are supposed to be diplomatic, aren’t they?”One of the journalists at the table said he just returned from vacation in the south of France. In the town of St-Raphael, he had been present for the annual ceremony on August 15 to commemorate the Allies landing there to begin the liberation of Provence. “Let me read to you what the woman from the US consulate said,” he remarked, pulling out his phone.“No, you’re not going where I think you’re going,” I said nervously.“I think you know what’s coming,” he said, snickering.Sure enough, he read from what I suppose were his notes on the speech. According to this journalist, the consulate representative said that just as American troops fought Nazis there in 1944, today we all must fight for the liberation of LGBT people. The Italian was amazed that the US diplomat even shoehorned LGBT into a speech commemorating a World War II invasion. I haven’t been able to find a transcript or video of that speech, but this messaging is consistent with the recent “Emma” recruiting video from the US Army, in which a young female soldier likens her military service today to going to Pride marches with her two moms as a girl. It’s all about fighting for freedom.Back in my hotel room, I received the following letter tonight from a reader in Nigeria. He gave me permission to post it as long as I changed a few details to obscure his identity:

I wanted to share some things in response your 29 August article, The West and Rest.I am a full-time (American) missionary.  I have lived here for some years, currently in Lagos. Prior to living here, I did “long short-term” visits for some 15 years. Your article spoke to me because it exactly describes the situation here in Nigeria. That was not always the case.  When I first started to work here, my students described America as “Jerusalem” or “Heaven” — the place everybody wanted to go to.  Post-2001, in the early days of our foreign wars, America was lauded as taking the right approach towards Islam and Islamism, something of great import to the persecuted Christians in this land.  George W. Bush was revered.Over the years, however, things have changed.  I have particularly noticed it in the last four years most intensely.  Some of that can be ascribed to how President Trump treated Nigeria in terms of immigration.  While I support this to some degree personally, I can also understand why the government and people here did not look on it favorably.The larger issue, however, has clearly been the issue of sexuality.  Over the years, my students have gone from asking me first and foremost about how to get a visa for study in America, to asking me why we accept the gay agenda — particularly Christians and the churches.  Add to that our withdrawal from the world — particularly in the fights against ISIS in Syria and in Afghanistan — and the mood here has soured toward America greatly.  (Again, I support our withdrawals per se, but appreciate how it makes us seem “unserious” — as Nigerians would say — when it comes up to standing up against radical Islam.) You add the messages about sexuality coming from the West, and the perception that Americans no longer welcome Nigerian immigrants, and our standing here in the mind of the people has dropped perceptibly in the last few years.  Even my own church here has begun to regard the conservative American churches as too soft on the concept of “gay Christians.”In some instances, I have gone from being thanked for my service here to having students say “Why did you come?  We didn’t invite you, and no one asked for your help!”  I feel it on the street as well.  Whereas my American identity once made me a minor celebrity, more often that not I am not regarded warily, and have been told on more than one occasion to go home, as no one wants me here.As to China — there is no doubt that they are in the ascendency here.  The number of Chinese projects and nationals one can see everywhere is growing exponentially.  The repressive government likes the lack of interference for one reason: there is no challenge on graft or human rights practices.  The people like the money, projects, and two philosophical positions:  first, as you wrote, there is no pressure to adopt LGBTQ positions that are foreign and repugnant to this culture.  Secondly, whereas many of (rightly) us decry the Uighur situation in China, if you are a persecuted Christian who has lost loved ones here [to Islamist violence], it is easy to view China as “serious” about Islamism in a way that America is not.  I can’t stress how important that is to many who are engaged in real low-intensity conflicts with Jihadists in the central and northern parts of this country.So, immigration to a degree.  Add in LGBTQ culture in the decadent West, a Chinese commitment to not interfere in the internal matters or culture of a nation, plus the sense that we in West no longer wish to help Christian minorities abroad fight militant Islam, and the Chinese fortune is definitely on the rise here in Nigeria.  As the most populous country in Africa, as Nigeria goes, so goes the continent.  I often tell my students that the day of Western influence in Nigeria seems to be over, and that the question is now who will win here:  China or Islamism.  I certainly didn’t think it would turn out this way some twenty years ago, but now it seems inevitable.  I feel it on the street.  In the medium to long-term, my wife and are are planning to leave.  But looking at the USA, my home has changed so much in the years I’ve been away, so the question is: where will we go?

Where indeed?

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Ku Klux Kale

The Christian Century is a magazine for the senescent liberal Protestant Mainline. When I heard earlier this month that it had published an article exposing the presence of white supremacists at farmer’s markets, I laughed it off as another example of the dingbat left policing the boundaries. It should not surprise anyone that unsavory people enjoy a delicious tomato as well as the next person. If a Communist or a neo-Nazi enjoys locally grown fruits and vegetables, I can congratulate him on his good taste in food while rejecting his politics. This is called being a grown-up. When this controversy arose in 2019 in Bloomington, Indiana, the adult mayor of that city resisted calls by progressives to kick allegedly white supremacist farmers out of the farmer’s market, saying that as long as the accused vendors were following the law, he was not going to play the role of thought police.

It turns out, though, that the article’s author, a vigilant progressive named Rebecca Bratten Weiss, identifies poor old Self as a gateway drug to the Ku Klux Kale:

Among traditionalist Catholics, one localist trend was labeled by writer Rod Dreher—himself a preeminent spokesman for polite Christian ethno-nationalism—as “crunchy conservatism.” The “crunchy cons” wed environmentalism and holistic living with traditional social mores, withdrawing from the influence of the globalized and secularized world. Piggybacking off this, Dreher proposed his “Benedict Option”—a suggestion that Christians should follow the example of St. Benedict of Nursia by distancing themselves from the evils of the world and living in intentional community with others of shared values.

“Polite Christian ethno-nationalism”? Golly. I wonder how the neurotic Bratten Weiss figures that. Then again, there doesn’t have to be logic for these people to make a vicious accusation like that. If they feel it — and they are always sniffing out wrongthinkers — it must be true. Do I even need to point out here that she clearly hasn’t read The Benedict Option?

Judging by her self-description on her website, Bratten Weiss has a rich inner life:

She has spoken at various academic and cultural events on topics ranging from Nietzsche’s aesthetics and Bronte’s feminism, to ecology in literature and vulgarity in religion.

Rebecca recently completed work on The Dirt, an eco-feminist novel exploring the impact of the fracking industry on a dysfunctional Ohio family.

She is also in the process of revising The Peacemakers, a speculative literary sci-fi in which women in a near-future matriarchy control men via advanced AI technology.

She is a member of the George Sandinistas, and one of the founders of the Muse Writers Collective.

Bratten Weiss looks cheerful, serene, and not at all likely given over to bitter binges on Sylvia Plath and Kate Bush:

 

I had never heard of this unhappy woman until a friend sent me her Christian Century essay last night. Apparently she is a Catholic who has a Patheos blog in which she writes things like this:

How surprising to learn that she used to be an adjunct teacher of English at Franciscan University of Steubenville. And she is some kind of ecumenist, as we learn from this 2019 essay. Excerpts:

Driving home with a load of hay, listening to Johnny Cash, wondering what I could burn as a sacrifice to Hecate, I start thinking that probably not many women on this road, driving truckloads of hay, and listening to Cash, are also contemplating witchcraft. Does this make me necessarily more interesting? Or is it automatically less interesting, because “being interesting” is a motive force for me? Not the only motive force, but maybe it taints everything it touches, so there’s a certain embarrassingly meta quality about all my love, or curiosity, or revenge.

Meta or not, the desire to burn something as a sacrificial offering is real. Thinking about burning is real. I have a truck full of a combustible material, and my truck is driven by combustion. I’m rumbling along on the cusp of a flame.

Bless her heart, I do not doubt it! More:

The internal combustion engine is insufficient for the goddess, however, and I have no intention of burning the hay. The questions about burnt offerings become pragmatic. Like, where to do it? If I start a fire in the back yard the kids will all come gathering around, asking if they can roast marshmallows. But I can’t just go wandering off into the neighbor’s field and start burning things (or can I?).

Then there’s the question of what to burn. Something I value, or something I hate? Which would Hecate prefer?

If I get the answers wrong, who knows, some solid citizen might call and have them send the firetrucks after me, and then it’s pretty awkward if I’d opted to burn, say, the testicles of some Nazi dudes who just happened to be scampering across my backyard at the right time. When I just happened to have my scythe handy. Oops. Now I have this whole conflagration of testicles to explain.

Even if it’s what Hecate wants, the fact is, when you’re castrating Nazis and burning their balls as an offering to ancient Greek goddesses, people tend not to be very understanding. They’re all “oh, the incivility!” Or “this is why Trump keeps winning.”

Now I’m worried that I went too far there, talking about castrating Nazis. Now I’m worried that I’m not interesting or edgy, but instead the kind of person from whom you instinctively back away.

You think? Hey, she said it, not I!

Anyway, as is often the case with censorious progressives, the witchy Bratten Weiss misses the irony of her condemning right-wing farmer’s market types for their exclusivity, in an essay in which she appears to claim that farmer’s markets should be zealously defended as a safe space for progressives and fellow travelers. Down with fascist eggplant! In fact, she hates localism itself, if localists are anything other than progressives:

From the perspective of Christian ethics, localism can be thought of as a way of living out both the mandates of charity and the responsibilities of stewardship.

A chance at political unity, a possible fix to the bleakness of rampant inequality, an emphasis on our moral responsibilities, both to the environment and to the worker—if localism sounds too good to be true, it may be because I have not yet addressed the ways in which it can go tragically wrong. On its own, it is not only insufficient, it can be dangerous. Too great an emphasis on the romance of the immediate can lead to fear of the other. Care for one’s own community can morph into isolationism. Localism can bleed into nationalism—and even White supremacy.

There was a time when I was unaware of this overlap. I rarely discussed politics with other growers; I assumed people who were invested in local food and sustainable agriculture must be liberal or progressive. I associated a familiar hippie farmers market aesthetic with ecological responsibility, multiculturalism, and peaceful coexistence.

Uh oh! People like Bratten Weiss ruin everything. When I wrote Crunchy Cons back in the mid-2000s, I was delighted to draw attention to people like the fundamentalist Christian family in north Texas who raised meat organically because they believed that was the best way to honor God’s Creation. There’s a quote in the book from the patriarch who says how surprised he was to discover that he had more in common with some hippie organic growers than he did with fellow Christian Republicans who lived a more conventional suburban life. Funny, but these folks weren’t threatened by the progressives who shared their love of organic, small-scale agriculture, and neither were the progressive small farmers threatened by them. They found common ground, and even solidarity. I guess Bratten Weiss, who is two tics away from a gran mal seizure, would want to cut the balls off the fundamentalist family’s sons and sacrifice them to a pagan goddess or something.

Bratten Weiss may be a Catholic, but she is definitely a Puritan. I was recently talking with a wealthy conservative white Catholic friend from the South who was explaining to me his discovery of the value of localism. He and his wife bought some land in the historically black part of their town, and are using it to help their black neighbors build community. They let black folks and others use the land for a farmer’s market, and for meetings between black community leaders and the local police, to build closer relationships (he showed me a photo on his smartphone of a recent gathering). He told me that even as relations between the black community and police in other parts of the country have grown worse, they have strengthened in his town, because it turns out that a lot of black people there don’t hate the police; they just want better policing. He talked about a woman black pastor in his town who makes this work of community-building possible. And he talked about long-term plans to restore what was once a thriving commercial sector of black-owned businesses.

My friend said that he has grown disillusioned with national politics, and now focuses on building up localism. This guy is very conservative. I’m guessing that his black woman pastor friend is … not. But they work together because they both want to make the town they share into a better place for them all to live. If Bratten Weiss showed up in their town, she would no doubt do her best to drive these two apart to purify the movement. People like that — and we have them on the Right too — are so exhausting. They are the kind of people from whom you instinctively back away. Unfortunately, they hold a lot of cultural and institutional power right now in America. Which is a big reason that we are in such a mess.

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Hurricane Ida Open Thread

It is a surprisingly cool, serene morning here in Rome as I write this. I feel terrible to be so far away from my home in south Louisiana as everybody there is suffering from the effects of Hurricane Ida. I was up till 3 am Rome time, anxious for my family and friends. My wife texted to say they had lost power in Baton Rouge, but would text me if anything happened. There were no texts throughout the Roman night, which I am choosing to take as a good sign. Baton Rouge was spared the worst of the storm. But as I write, all of New Orleans is without power because the main transmission lines to the city were swept away. God knows how long it’s going to be before they are restored. It could be weeks.

Imagine that: a major American city without power for weeks. Let’s hope it doesn’t take that long, but when Hurricane Gustav blew through in 2008, it took over two weeks for power to be restored to many people in the Baton Rouge area — and it doesn’t seem to have been as destructive as Ida. I guess we’ll know more by light of day. I so appreciate the notes from you readers asking after my family. An Alabama friend even offered a place for my wife and kids. THANK YOU! I have tears in my eyes just thinking of it.

Saw this on the Twitter feed of a Baton Rouge TV meteorologist:

The poor man was so afraid, I guess, that he didn’t put their location into his tweet. Later, it was reported that the entire town of Jean Lafitte — named for the infamous 18th century pirate — went underwater.

 

There is no denying that global warming made this storm especially ferocious:

Scientists had been bracing for the worst since the moment forecasters identified a tropical depression forming last week. The Gulf of Mexico in August is always a hotbed of hurricane formation. “This time of year, it’s like bathtub water,” said Brian Tang, an atmospheric scientist at the University at Albany in New York.

Lately, conditions in the ocean have been exceptionally bad. According to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, parts of the Gulf are three to five degrees Fahrenheit higher than the average for the end of the 20th century. Research shows that human greenhouse gas emissions have caused the ocean to warm faster in recent years than at any point since the end of the last ice age.

All this warm water is to hurricanes what gasoline is to a car engine, Tang said. A powerful storm takes energy from the ocean and converts it into roiling clouds and roaring winds.

As Ida developed, it traveled over the hottest parts of the gulf, sucking up energy to fuel its rapid growth. With no shifting upper atmosphere winds to disrupt it, the ring of thunderstorms around the hurricane’s center — called the eyewall — started to churn faster and faster.

Even worse, the sea surface temperature rose as the hurricane got closer to the coast.

“That’s really like stepping on the accelerator,” Tang said. “Flooring it, basically.”

Hurricane Ida intensified with astonishing rapidity. On August 26, it was a tropical depression. On August 29, it was one of the strongest hurricanes ever to make landfall in the United States. In three days. I don’t know how many people were able to get out of New Orleans in time. Think about how difficult it would be to evacuate a major American city with such short notice.

This is the new normal for the Gulf Coast, I guess. Keep in mind too that right now, Louisiana is one of the world’s hotspots for the Delta variant of Covid. You readers who feel inclined to wag your fingers right now at my state, keep it to yourselves. Please just pray, and donate whatever you can to hurricane relief. At this desperate point, folks there don’t need your spite or condescension. They need your compassion. They need your help.

I will update this post as I hear from family. If you are a Louisiana or Gulf Coast reader, and you still have power, please let us know in the comments how you are and what you are seeing.

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The West And The Rest

I spoke to two Ugandan women at the conference I’m attending. The conference is under Chatham House rules – no quoting anything said here – but after we finished talking, I asked them if I could relay their comments on my blog as long as I didn’t identify them. They said yes.

The women talked about the West’s LGBT ideology as deeply offensive to Africans. The first woman said, “We are at the point where you cannot get development aid, water aid, or any kind of aid from NGOs unless you affirm LGBT. What kind of message do you think that sends to us about what the West cares about?”

The second woman said, “China is making lots of inroads in Africa. We can see it all the time. The Chinese come and build things, and give us things, and they never tell us we have to change to suit their ideology. The Americans and the Europeans demand that we do. The Chinese leave us alone.”

I asked the woman to clarify. Is she saying that the West is pushing Africa into China’s arms because Western elites have made LGBT rights into a global crusade?

Yes, absolutely, she said.

I was reminded of something a semi-retired professor in Budapest told me this past summer, when I was there. I asked him if he wasn’t worried by the Orban government’s plans to allow the Chinese to build a campus of Fudan University there? Not at all, he said. He has spent most of his career teaching in Western universities, and have seen them take a totalitarian turn with wokeness. He said he would be much more worried if a prestigious Western university tried to open a campus in Hungary.

“Fudan University is a great university,” he said. “And the Chinese will respect Hungarian culture. They won’t force us to be woke.”

Incidentally, I had to take a journey from this exurban town into central Rome yesterday to give a speech. I had a taxi driver who was an Arab Christian immigrant from Syria. I asked him how he came to Europe. That got him going.

“Do you think Christians love the Assad government?” he said. “No! But we support Assad because he is the only thing preventing us all from being murdered by Muslims.”

He said that it makes him crazy how little Europeans want to hear from Christians like him who have lived as minorities in Muslim countries. Their testimony, he said, completely contradicts the nice liberal worldview of Europeans, who imagine that we can all live together in peace and harmony. The Syrian said that he often finds himself among Arabs here who don’t realize that he’s a Christian, and that they talk viciously about the “kafir” (a slur term for non-Muslims), and fantasize about the vengeance they intend to take one day.

He said one of the strangest things he has seen is Arab women who do not wear the hijab back in their home countries putting it on when they get to Europe. Why do they do that? I asked.

“I think it’s because they feel safer in Europe identifying as a member of their own people,” he said. There is no more clear public declaration that one is a Muslim woman than wearing a hijab.

As I listened to the Syrian Christian speak, I was reminded of the conversations I had with emigres to the West from Communist countries, lamenting how little Westerners wanted to hear them talk about their own life experiences, vis-à-vis things going on in the West today. These people told me, over and over, that Westerners preferred to keep their minds untroubled about threats facing them, rather than listen to people who have lived experience testifying otherwise. We in the West are so confident in our view of the world that we simply refuse to imagine that we might be wrong.

The Syrian told me he is very pessimistic about Europe’s future. “I hope it doesn’t come to your country,” he said, as we parted.

I thought about what he said. I strongly believe that we Christians (and all men and women of good will) should stand with Muslims when we can, especially (in the US) when they are persecuted for exercising their constitutionally guaranteed freedom of religion. But the Syrian Christian said, emphatically, that everything will be fine in terms of interreligious harmony until Muslims gain numerical majority. Then the mask comes off. “We have seen this many times,” he said.

Is he wrong about this? I have heard some version of this from other Middle Eastern Christians over the years. I resist it not out of liberal sentimentality, heaven knows, but because I have known good Muslims with whom I wish to stand in solidarity. Yet it is impossible to dismiss the steady testimony of these Arab Christians, who have lived a different reality than I have lived. Indeed, I have been hearing a version of this since 1999, when I began attending a Lebanese (Maronite) Catholic church in Brooklyn.

I think that there is a clear connection between this and our American bungling in thinking that we could impose liberal democracy on the Middle East. It comes from a universalist self-deception. My time with the Syrian taxi driver was relatively short, but I remember that he kept saying how frustrated he was by Westerners who refuse to recognize that there are substantial differences between religions (in this case, between Islam and Christianity). What he was getting at, I think, is that Westerners naively think that all religious people, whatever their confession, want the same thing. He said that the image of man — the human person — in the Bible, and the image of man in the Quran, are incompatible.

I look forward to hearing from commentators who have experience in this area. I know we have Muslim readers of this blog. Please, let’s hear from you too. If you prefer to e-mail me, please do: rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. Unless you say otherwise, I will consider your comments publishable, though I won’t use your name unless you ask me to.

(Also, please feel free to comment on LGBT, the West, Africa, and China!)

 

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Lt. Col. Stu Sheller, National Hero

Look at this:

If you watch nothing else today, watch that cri de coeur from a Marine who is disgusted by the lack of accountability among his superiors for what happened in Afghanistan.

And now he has paid a price:

The Marine officer who filmed a viral video calling out senior military and civilian leaders for failures in Afghanistan was relieved of command Friday “based on a lack of trust and confidence,” he said.

“My chain of command is doing exactly what I would do…if I were in their shoes,” Lt. Col. Stu Scheller wrote in identical Facebook and LinkedIn posts announcing his dismissal from command of the Advanced Infantry Training Battalion at Camp Lejeune, N.C.

Marine leaders can address their disagreements with the chain of command through proper channels, not social media, said Maj. Jim Stenger, a Marine Corps spokesman, in an emailed statement confirming that Scheller had been relieved by Col. David Emmel, commanding officer of the School of Infantry-East.

“This is obviously an emotional time for a lot of Marines, and we encourage anyone struggling right now to seek counseling or talk to a fellow Marine,” Stenger said.

Watch the video. That’s a man.

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Afghanistan & The Failure Of The West

I am in Italy at a private international conference where a number of the people here are involved directly in the plight of persecuted Christians around the world. During a Catholic mass this afternoon, word came about the suicide bombings in Kabul. This was not, alas, a surprise; my best source on Afghanistan events has been telling me for some while that it’s just a matter of time. But it is nevertheless a horrible shock.

Under the rules of the conference, I am not allowed to repeat anything said here, or even to say who is here. I think it is fine, though, to say that the people here — Christians from all over the world — are shocked and dismayed by what has happened to America. People can’t believe the utter incompetence of the US administration. As far as I know,

U.S. officials in Kabul gave the Taliban a list of names of American citizens, green card holders and Afghan allies to grant entry into the militant-controlled outer perimeter of the city’s airport, a choice that’s prompted outrage behind the scenes from lawmakers and military officials.

The move, detailed to POLITICO by three U.S. and congressional officials, was designed to expedite the evacuation of tens of thousands of people from Afghanistan as chaos erupted in Afghanistan’s capital city last week after the Taliban seized control of the country. It also came as the Biden administration has been relying on the Taliban for security outside the airport.

But the decision to provide specific names to the Taliban, which has a history of brutally murdering Afghans who collaborated with the U.S. and other coalition forces during the conflict, has angered lawmakers and military officials.

“Basically, they just put all those Afghans on a kill list,” said one defense official, who like others spoke on condition of anonymity to discuss a sensitive topic. “It’s just appalling and shocking and makes you feel unclean.”

A spokesperson for U.S. Central Command declined to comment.

At what point does incompetence become evil? We are there.

The United States government gave these savage cutthroats a list of our people to kill! Who did it? Who? Name names. Fire people. Salt the earth of their reputations forever! I don’t know that I’ve ever been more ashamed of who we are as a nation. The Biden administration trusted the Taliban, and because of that, people who trusted America will die.

People, listen to me: the answer here is not “vote Republican”. It is not to tolerate this appalling level of stupidity, incompetence, and corruption at the highest levels of our military. Defense Secretary Lloyd Austin was overwhelmingly confirmed to lead the Pentagon. Is he going to fire anyone for this debacle? Will Gen. Mark Milley, the Trajan of the Woke, keep his job as Joint Chiefs head?

The fact that Congress has taken no action despite the revelations of institutionalized serial mendacity on Afghanistan highlighted in the Afghanistan Papers shows you how little they care about genuine accountability
They were lied to for years, their money was misspent, and a lot of American lives were lost — and now, a lot of lives of Afghans foolish enough to trust the competence and moral decency of the US Government — so maybe they could muster up more than a yawn at this conduct.

This is what the utterly incompetent Biden administration and the Pentagon leadership has done:

How is this possible?

pic.twitter.com/zHONIPilwT

— Denny Burk (@DennyBurk) August 26, 2021

I know a lot of Republicans are going to want to blame this entirely on the Biden Administration. I will not lift a finger to defend it, but I insist that we not let the Pentagon and State Department brass off the hook. This is a failure across the board of our leadership class.

You know what’s going to happen now, don’t you? There is going to be a mass exodus of Afghans, mostly men, to Europe. Europe will be swamped with these migrants. Germany, led by the retiring Christian Democrat Angela Merkel, opened its doors to a million refugees from the Syrian war. Merkel is retiring, and her Christian Democratic party is now behind the Social Democrats and the Greens in polls. It is likely at this point that Germany will be governed by a Social Democrat-Green coalition. That means open doors, and a likely civilizational catastrophe for Europe.

The West is falling. It’s a suicide. And America’s hands are guiding the dagger into the West’s soft belly.

From The Guardian:

The British Conservative MP Tom Tugendhat has said the explosions that have killed at least 60 people in Kabul are “what defeat looks like”.

Tugendhat, who chairs the foreign affairs select committee, said the west now has no say over the future of Afghanistan. Speaking to BBC Radio 4, he said: “This is what defeat looks like. Defeat is when you don’t control any of the process anymore and if you are lucky you just about get out with your lives and a bit of your equipment and that’s what we are doing at the moment. We don’t have any control, we don’t have any say. It’s a defeat.”

The MP, who is a former Territorial Army soldier who served in Afghanistan, described the situation as “the sun setting over some really pretty terrible decisions by the west over a number of years”.

This is George W. Bush. This is Barack Obama. This is Donald Trump. This is Joe Biden. This is the leadership of the Pentagon. This is the State Department. This is all of us American voters, who kept electing these people. This is you, and this is me.

Mene, mene, tekel upharsin.  Numbered, numbered, weighed, divided.

But look, in Britain, they have their priorities straight: arresting an elderly preacher for having spoken in defense of the Bible’s teaching on marriage:

Arrested for preaching from the Bible in North West London. Pastor Sherwood is 75, notice how the arresting officer kicks him? pic.twitter.com/iwAojPMaNm

— Christian Concern (@CConcern) April 27, 2021

And our American elites — the same ones whose judgment and priorities have wrecked this country — are on top of things at Harvard:

The Puritan colonists who settled in New England in the 1630s had a nagging concern about the churches they were building: How would they ensure that the clergymen would be literate? Their answer was Harvard University, a school that was established to educate the ministry and adopted the motto “Truth for Christ and the Church.” It was named after a pastor, John Harvard, and it would be more than 70 years before the school had a president who was not a clergyman.

Nearly four centuries later, Harvard’s organization of chaplains has elected as its next president an atheist named Greg Epstein, who takes on the job this week.

Mr. Epstein, 44, author of the book “Good Without God,” is a seemingly unusual choice for the role. He will coordinate the activities of more than 40 university chaplains, who lead the Christian, Jewish, Hindu, Buddhist and other religious communities on campus. Yet many Harvard students — some raised in families of faith, others never quite certain how to label their religious identities — attest to the influence that Mr. Epstein has had on their spiritual lives.

“There is a rising group of people who no longer identify with any religious tradition but still experience a real need for conversation and support around what it means to be a good human and live an ethical life,” said Mr. Epstein, who was raised in a Jewish household and has been Harvard’s humanist chaplain since 2005, teaching students about the progressive movement that centers people’s relationships with one another instead of with God.

To Mr. Epstein’s fellow campus chaplains, at least, the notion of being led by an atheist is not as counterintuitive as it might sound; his election was unanimous.

Worthless, the lot of them at Harvard.

I spoke this week with a Catholic priest friend from the UK. He is gutted by what he sees as the institutional church’s failure in the face of Covid. He said the bishops have been silent about the meaning of life, of suffering, and of what the Gospel has to say about any of it. His contempt for the leadership class in the Catholic Church in his country is intense. I have been in touch recently with an Anglican priest friend who feels the same way about his church leaders.

You might think it’s a stretch to compare the disaster in Afghanistan to the spiritual and cultural collapse on the home front. You’re wrong. This is about a total failure of confidence and competence. This is about the revelation of a leadership class that has no reason to expect the trust of the people. We are in a time of apocalypse, a time of unveiling. It is also a time of choosing. Choose well. And prepare for bad times ahead.

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United Way Goes Woke

A reader sent me the following letter, which I’ve edited slightly to protect her privacy and her husband’s job:

I’m sure you get scores of emails like this every day, but I still wanted to send this to further confirm that elements of critical race theory and “wokeness” are seeping into the work world everywhere.

My husband is the [job title at a well-known community organization], serving [a large number of people in a particular geographical area]. His organization depends, to a great degree, on funding from the local United Way.

He recently received the latest funding application from UW of [deleted] (attached), and each item featured a new specification (in all caps and highlighted text, no less) of “MUST INCLUDE AT LEAST ONE GOAL THAT IS FOCUSED ON RACIAL/ETHNIC EQUITY.” Lest the nonprofit managers who depend on the United Way are unsure of what this means, a helpful “Equity and Inclusivity Framework” document (attached) accompanied the application.

Rod, this stuff is straight out of Kendi et al. The buzzwords are there: systemic, dismantled, outcomes, inclusion, equity, etc. And the definition of “racism” is the new, woke definition of oppression exercised by whites over people of color, “what happens at the intersection of race prejudice and power.”

I did a quick search, and the language here is straight from the United Way’s website (https://equity.unitedway.org/equity-toolkit/part-one/build-shared-language). The page I linked here is full of the usual jargon, such as the idea of racism being a “system of oppression created to justify a social, political and economic hierarchy initially constructed with White people at the top …” Both Kendi and the online “implicit association test” are included in the “Favorite Books” and “Training Resources,” respectively, at the bottom of the page.

Note that this page is a resource for the United Way, not for the nonprofits who go to them for funding. Still, in order to get much-needed funding from the United Way, my husband feels that he needs to tacitly agree to these definitions and couch his organization’s goals and planned results in terms that pay homage to the new woke orthodoxy. If he doesn’t do things just right, then guess what? No funding for the [organization] –an organization that is already struggling.

I am (cynically) pretty certain that, even if my husband’s application meets the United Way’s woke requirements, his organization, known for being conservative and upholding more traditional values, will not get the needed funding.

Here are the pages from her husband’s local United Way. I have blanked out the identifying locale:

 

United Way chapters do a lot of good, so we have to be careful not to tar all of them with the bad actions of a few. I don’t think these standards are uniform for all United Way agencies across the country, but before I donated a cent to United Way, I would find out what the situation is my with local United Way organization. I suspect that the policy is set by each local United Way. I just did a quick look at the website for the Capital Area United Way, which serves the Baton Rouge area (where I live), and there are no Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion requirements stated for funding requests.

My advice is that you should check out the website of your local United Way, and if it requires funding applicants to adhere to a DEI framework, don’t give a single farthing to United Way — and tell them, and all your social media contacts, why you aren’t doing so. 

If a charity goes woke, we had better make sure it goes broke. The professional elite class has embraced this malignant, unpopular, divisive, and extremely manipulative ideology, and is trying to shove it down all of our throats. It’s past time to starve this beast.

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Seattle Blue

A reader comments on an earlier thread:

I’m American by choice. I came here reluctantly from Canada exactly 25 years ago this August when my husband took a job in tech. Over the years I came to love this country and I’m not ashamed to say I wept when I finally became a citizen. It’s gutting to realize that the country I grew to love so much is now gone. Not just broken, or struggling, or diseased, but truly dead and gone.

When I moved from a crappy rented duplex in the exurbs of Silicon Valley to our family’s first home in a modest Seattle suburb in 1998 I wouldn’t have dreamed of locking the door during the day, or even the car parked in the driveway overnight. One of the first questions neighbors would ask when I met them was which church I attended. Today I live in a much nicer neighborhood in a much nicer house and have had my purse stolen from my desk in the kitchen while I was at home in the basement. We now have security cameras monitoring our home at all times. Homeless people lay on the grass sleeping beside the playground my daughter takes my grandson to. No one asks what church I attend as my friends and neighbors are almost entirely unchurched apart from one Unitarian. I say friends but they’re not really people I can speak openly to about how I feel about most of what occurs in this country today.

Today I spent some time searching for information about how many Americans were left in Afghanistan. I learned that last week the claim was there were as many as 15,000. A few days later the claim was that there was no way to know the exact number and so no number would be provided. One Sunday news article said that a leaked document showed around 3,200 Americans had been evacuated. Today I read that America has evacuated over 60,000 people. It doesn’t say how many, if any, were American. Other articles said that the US would not ensure safe passage to the airport for Americans. Another article described how one American man had attempted to get to the airport with his son but couldn’t even get near enough to show his passport so gave it up as too dangerous. It really does seem like Americans in Afghanistan have been abandoned. Yet no one talks about that. Perhaps now that the Taliban has stated it doesn’t want any more Afghans to leave it will be possible for Americans to get to the airport. Perhaps that will just make the Americans easier targets.

That America is abandoning its own citizens to the mercies of the Taliban while preening about the tens of thousands of Afghans it has evacuated is just appalling and would have been unthinkable a few years ago. It’s truly disgusting. Public servant used to be a term implying something honorable and laudable. Now it’s just meaningless. Our public servants certainly do not serve us and that has been largely true for quite some time. Now that control of the military has fallen to the successor ideology, the last bastion of service to our country and its citizens is gone. The vast majority of our so called public servants are only really in service to their ideology. Our morality is thoroughly utilitarian now and it is seen as good to step on the faces of your fellow citizens if it means helping the “other” climb up over them. Since being American is a source of shame for our elites as well, why would they concern themselves with American citizens over anyone else?

Today my daughter described an incident that happened as she was leaving a pediatric appointment with her two year old. A man held the door open for her and she said thank you to him, without really seeing who it was. It turned out it was a homeless man who followed her and my grandson for an entire block screaming at her. She told me she was pretty shaken up by it. Of course no one did or said anything to help her, not that it would occur to her that someone should. She just shrugged and said, “what do you expect, it’s Seattle.” She’s right, you do expect that in Seattle. I saw it myself on Sunday because that’s where the aquarium is and I wanted to take my grandsons there on my birthday. Usually we just try to avoid the city as much as possible, but that doesn’t solve anything. Seattle is slowing coming nearer to us, as the homeless move into our neighborhoods and crime steadily increases.

My older daughter came to visit with her son from North Carolina. She left today and when she returns she will have to take her car in to be fixed because at the hotel in Charlotte where she stayed before her flight to Seattle last week, someone stole her catalytic converter during the night. I understand stealing catalytic converters is pretty common now. Her deductible is $1000 because that’s the only way she can afford insurance. During her visit to the West coast, someone stole her diaper bag from the car while she was at a park with her sister. I can empathize because a couple years ago someone smashed the rear window of my car and stole my purse while I walked in a different park with my cousin. It was well hidden, but whoever stole it must have simply watched me hide it. By the time I got back to the car they had already charged $4000 on one of my credit cards. There were probably dozens of witnesses because the park was very crowded that day, but no one said anything to me. No one, police included, looked for the thief, of course, but at least my credit card company reversed the charges. The store, of course, will have raised its prices to cover such losses.

When I went to therapy for anxiety my therapist said I was probably just hard wired to be anxious. Evolutionarily speaking, I would have been the one keeping watch around the fire at night, scanning the darkness for threats. For a few years I have longed to leave, to find a safe harbor somewhere in the world where people are still sane. I didn’t because we have too many ties here. Children and now grandchildren. Other family members who moved to be close to us. So I told myself it wasn’t all that bad and took to reassuring myself that there were still many millions of like minded people out there, in other states. I knew I was a frog in a pot, but thought I would know when to jump out, before the water got too hot. I think I was wrong about that and there may not now be time enough left. Where would we go, anyway?

Many years ago I was what I thought of as “progressive”. Over time, I morphed into a classical liberal and then finally a conservative. Too late. There is nothing left in the America of today to conserve. The ship has sailed away and left us in its wake. The best we can do is tether together some life rafts and try and look out for each other. Until they come looking for us, then, God help us.

I bet there are a lot of Americans who feel similarly, wherever they live. Are you one? Explain in the comments — and don’t forget to say where you live.

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