Rod Dreher's Blog, page 52

Attention Cervix-Havers Of California!

The University of California’s medical staff reaches out to the Cervix-Havers in their community:

“Individuals with a cervix.” You know, women. Those using this crackhead locution are not activists; they are medical professionals. But I guess you can’t tell the difference anymore. But wait, they speak in the letter of a “well woman exam.” Bigots! They mean a “well cervix-haver exam.” Now the clinicians and staff of UHS have made the whole campus an unsafe space. They’re basically the Taliban.

Along those lines, a Cervix-Having reader who is tired of this kind of misogynistic derangement writes to say:

At some point in the midst of my first pregnancy, all the official medical and government websites switched from “pregnant mothers” to “pregnant people” and from “nursing mothers” to “lactating people.” This is ridiculous. And it is offensive. I consider myself a deeply religious person [not a Christian], but becoming a mother has been the single most transformative experience of my life. The impact it has had on my relationship to my body, my femininity, my womanhood is profound. I refuse to pretend that this is a gender-neutral experience, and I am offended that it is now routine, considered enlightened even, to suggest as much. And although the physicality of motherhood may be different for adoptive mothers, I would expect they feel the same. It is past time for women to stand up and protest the erasure of our experiences, the theft of our private spaces, the attack on our achievements—not to mention the multifaceted assault on our daughters that the new gender ideology represents. (According to Abigail Shrier’s book (p. 62), schools are now describing women like Joan of Arc and Catherine the Great as “gender non-conforming.” What happened to “strong women”? I guess only [trans-]men can accomplish great things?) If that makes me a TERF, so be it.

 

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America Abandons Afghan Christians

I write this morning with a very heavy heart. The situation in Afghanistan is much worse than has been reported. I can’t tell you how I know this, but I have sources I absolutely trust. Our soldiers on the ground there are behaving with great courage and honor. Our leadership in Washington is not. The persecution of Christians in Afghanistan has begun. The stories I am hearing are absolutely gutting. They cannot yet be revealed so as not to put those still on the ground in greater danger. Of course Christians aren’t the only ones being persecuted. Any religious minority there is in grave danger, and all Afghans who helped the US in any way are marked men. I bring up the situation for Christians because as an American Christian, their plight grieves me like no other.

I am thinking right now of my visit this summer to the Hungarian government office in Budapest, the one for the bureau that helps Christians and other religious minorities. While there, I heard stories, and saw photographs, of the kinds of savagery that Christians in Muslim countries of the Middle East are suffering. Hungary helped them, in real ways. Hungary is a much more secular country than the United States is, but the Hungarian government had the backs of these vulnerable Christian peoples when my own country’s government did not. Indeed, if you talk to people involved in this world of religious liberty advocacy, you will find that Western governments don’t really care about the fate of Christians. The secularist received narrative is that Christians can only ever be persecutors, never the persecuted. This is how the US and Western European governing classes see it. With individual exceptions, so do our media.

A lot of Afghan Christians are going to die — it could be a genocide. Some are dying now. A lot of Afghans (Muslims and others) who helped our country, and who trusted us not to abandon them, are going to die. Some are dying now. I’m not speculating here; I know this. Soon, everyone will know it.

We will not be able to get all of our people out in time. The Taliban today has officially closed off all access to the Kabul airport. The Taliban holds all the cards here. The leading superpower on the planet is reduced to begging these barbarians for mercy — and they’re not giving it. It seems altogether likely that after the August 31 deadline passes — and the Taliban has said no to extending it — we are going to face mass hostage-taking. Are you prepared to relive the Iran hostage drama of 1979-80? I think it is almost certainly coming, in some version.

Joe Biden owns this. The Carterization of his presidency is well underway. No doubt about that. But he is not the only one who owns this. All the generals, the diplomats, and the national security scholars who for twenty years told us all was going well there — they own this. Biden had more political courage than either Obama or Trump, in that he executed the withdrawal. But it did not have to be like this, our pulling out. We could have gotten our people, and our allies, out in an orderly way. All those government officials (military, foreign service, et alia) who screwed up the planning — they own this catastrophe.

And a catastrophe is certainly is. Leaving aside the human wreckage of what we are seeing now in Afghanistan, and what we will see in the days, weeks, and months to come, think about what this does to America’s international credibility. We literally told people who risked their lives to help us occupy that country not to worry, that we would take care of them. Now, we are telling many of them, “Sorry, you’re on your own.” Who is going to believe us going forward? If you are a country who is being courted by Beijing, you are going to take the Chinese more seriously, because America has shown itself to be a weak, incompetent, feckless superpower.

I watched some of Donald Trump’s Alabama rally the other night, before I got disgusted and turned it off. I don’t blame him for laying into Biden, but he gloated about it, which struck me as deeply unpatriotic with American citizens facing a life-or-death struggle to escape Afghanistan. Besides, I have no confidence at all that this wouldn’t have happened on Trump’s watch, given that he would have had to rely on advice from the same military advisers, and most of the same State Department team. Moreover, Trump’s boasting the other night that the Taliban were afraid of him, and wouldn’t have tried all this if he were in the White House, is crass and empty. He praised our generals as “good,” but defined their quality based on loyalty to him. This shows you how utterly unserious he is about understanding the corruption in the Armed Forces that got us to this point. The wokeness in the US Armed Forces did not start under Joe Biden.

The Carterization of the Biden presidency might just lead to a Trump restoration — in which case America’s decline will only accelerate. The most charitable thing one can say about him is that he is not the leader American needs. Our country is desperately in need of steady, courageous, competent leadership, especially given that the Chinese will almost certainly make bold and aggressive moves, seeing how confused and weak we are. This is not a game. This is not Twitter. This is not cable news. This is reality: stone-cold reality.

I return to the plight of the Christians in Afghanistan. We live in an America where the faith is in steep decline. Our Catholic massgoing president believes that

These people, like all in the governing class, do not care about us Christians who dissent from the successor ideology. I wish I were wrong, but so far, it doesn’t seem like we will many Republicans who care about religious liberty enough to make a big issue of it in the face of the LGBT juggernaut. Maybe we will elect next fall more Republicans to Congress who have the faith and the courage to make this stand. We had better.

I don’t think we will. I believe that just as the leadership of our country abandons Christians in Afghanistan, it will not only abandon them, but actively turn on them at home (and if Republicans are in power, I don’t trust them to push back effectively on this evil). The story I told last night about the conservative Christian man who hired a lesbian, who turned around and denounced him to the Title IX office at their university for his “bigoted” Christian beliefs — this is America today. This is going to expand, this kind of persecution. It’s not what Afghan Christians are facing, God knows, but it’s not nothing. This man was making a good mid-career university salary, and is now reduced to trying to get a low-paying job selling suits at a department store — all because a woke woman for whom he did a good turn stung him with the poisonous barb of accusation.

This is the country we live in. A reader of mine who is not a religious believer wrote in response to that story:

I’m not about cancel culture, doxxing, etc. But there’s always an exception and this is one of them. That Woke lesbian (that’s how she identifies, that’s how she shall be referred) deserves all of it in heavy doses.Forget politics. Who does that to anyone? Especially someone who’s done such a wonderful thing to you? We know the Woke Left is fully capable of such evil, but I always felt that, in real life, people who know each other wouldn’t do that to each other. Turns out I was right to be cynical.One of the thing that happened to me the last year is that I’ve taken steps to avoid any kind of contact with someone I already don’t know. This includes people I run into on a daily basis, be it at work, the gym, my residence, etc. I live in a place with a large Woke population and some of the bigger industries in my area are those that have been infused with Woke ideology or are staffed with the Woke (for example, healthcare). Simply put, I’m surrounded by people who’d consider me the enemy if they knew what my politics were. The lack of human contact can be tough at times, but it’s something I’m used to and it’s worth not potentially running into a life-destroying, screeching banshee like that Woke lesbian.We’re getting a taste of what it’s like living in a police state. The secret police, however, is literally all around us. They’re our neighbors. Our co-workers. Our doctors, nurses, and therapists. They work at Starbucks and teach our children. What’s really crazy about it, however, is that they’re not really living in secret. Every day, through expressing their views or via virtue-signalling, they reveal to us who they are. They claim to be afraid, but they’re not. They know they have the power of the state behind them. They’re quite possibly one of the most insidious and malevolent forces in human history, with the only threshold they haven’t crossed being the one where they openly carry out acts of physical violence (though, I’d argue, getting someone fired is physically violent). I have to wonder if we’re not too far from that.I still hope that there can be a reckoning with as little bloodshed as possible. But my hatred for the Woke and those who enable them grows by the day. I don’t believe in Hell, but, if it exists, I know there’s a special place in hell for the Woke.

Again: what we face in America (and in Western Europe) is very small compared to the life-and-death scenario that our brothers and sisters in Christ (to say nothing of the Muslims and others who helped America) are facing now in Afghanistan. But if, as some Christians believe, God has His hand over America in a special way, I don’t see why He should continue. We spite it. Little Hungary, where very few still go to church, cares enough about persecuted Christians abroad that it has a special office within the Prime Minister’s office, to help them. But the United States? With the Iraq War, we are responsible for causing the chaos that destroyed much of the historical Christian communities of Iraq and Syria — communities that have been there since the people of those villages were first evangelized in the early centuries of the Christian church. And now look at Afghanistan.We used to be the good guys. Are we still? As a Christian and an American, I wonder about that.

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Warning About The Woke Workplace

I hear from time to time from readers who have suffered persecution, or at least harassment, at work from the woke. This one, though, got to me. I have removed the name of the institution from this letter at the writer’s request. I looked him up online and he is who he says he is:

[Recently] I was terminated by [university], found guilty of a Title IX violation against a protected class. A few months prior, I had recruited a lesbian to come work for our department. I had known her for some time in other contexts and knew the quality of her work, so I heavily recruited her. None of that mattered, however, when on the first day she turned to me and said, “Elephant in the room: you’re a former pastor, I’m a married lesbian. What do you think about that? I believe I’m a Christian; do you think I’m a Christian?”

I highly respected her, and so I saw no alternative but to place my career literally in her hands and honor her with a gentle but honest answer. A week later a Title IX investigation began. A month later I was gone.

I asked the reader if he wanted me to put him in touch with a religious liberty lawyer. He said that he had already consulted an attorney, who gave him 50/50 odds of prevailing in federal court. The reader added that he prayed about it, and felt that it was not God’s will that he pursue the case. He adds:

Feel free to write in general about this if you believe it will help wake believers up, but I don’t believe God wants me fighting with the university so please leave the name of the university out. Justice belongs to the Lord.

I could tell you so many incredible stories about what I am seeing God doing. The way He is working in my life makes the suffering my family is going through worth the loss, but I must say, it is still hard. Today, I interviewed for a job selling suits at our local Macys for $17/hr. That’s a long step down, and God will have to perform miracles to make it work even for a family with only one car and no debts outside a mortgage. But He is faithful and always will be.

The reader had a very good job at the university. He was not an academic, but was in administration. He should never have answered that woman’s question, obviously, but what a cruel, spiteful woke creature she is. Why would you even do that to your co-worker, especially one who helped you get hired? This is the kind of thing that makes it risky to have any contact beyond what is strictly necessary with a woke person. They will destroy you for the sake of Social Justice, and won’t even think twice about it.

Pray for this man. He is not young. He and his family are paying a price. Don’t ever think you are safe among the woke, not even if you have been kind to them, and helped them out.

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‘Live Not By Lies’ In Italy

I have some Live Not By Lies news for you. Italian readers can buy the translation now, I believe, and can come hear me talk about it next week in Rome, Milan, Ferrara, and Verona.

For more information about these events, e-mail info — at — giubileiregnani — dot — com

Second, I got information the other day from the producers raising money for a LNBL documentary here in the US. They are R.J. Moeller and David Jacobson; the director who has committed to the project is Justin Folk, who directed 2019’s hit No Safe Spaces. I spoke to my friend Tucker Carlson the other day about the book, and about the lessons we both learned from Hungary about the importance of waking up Americans to the dangers from soft totalitarianism and the woke movement. He agreed to be interviewed for the documentary.

The plan is to get this film made and in distribution in time for the 2022 election season. What the filmmakers plan to do is follow the book’s thesis — namely, that some aspects of contemporary wokeness remind people who escaped Soviet communism of what they left behind — and allow those people who lived it to explain why. The film will also, following the book, interview brave men and women who stayed behind and resisted totalitarianism, giving viewers advice on how to prepare to stand firm in the face of persecution. Totalitarianism — soft or hard — is not fated, but until and unless we wake up as a nation and take firm, decisive measures to stop it, we are going to be left behind to resist. If the Live Not By Lies movie succeeds, it will not only convince viewers to take strong action now to forestall the advance of totalitarianism, but will also teach them how to prepare themselves, their families, and their churches for the coming persecution.

If you believe in this project, please reach out to R.J. and Dave for more information on how you can donate to it. They are taking both tax-deductible donations and for-profit investments. Timing is really important. I think that the instability we can all see made manifest by the catastrophe in Afghanistan, and what it says about our elites, should signal to us that we are a lot closer to a general calamity than we think. Live Not By Lies has done very well in print — it has now sold over 130,000 copies — but a documentary film will have much wider reach. Plus, the older dissidents from Soviet communism are aging, and dying out. It is vital that we get their testimonies on tape now. We can only do this if we have the funding.

I would point out too that though I wrote the book for my fellow Christians, Live Not By Lies has developed a following among non-Christians, including the Orthodox Jewish commentator Dennis Prager (I’m headed out to L.A. next month to film a PragerU spot for it), the liberal Jewish writer and anti-woke activist Bari Weiss, and anti-woke left-wing secularists Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying. This book and its message is for all of us who want to live in freedom.

I leave on Wednesday for Rome. At week’s end, I will be giving an address to a large group of Christians from all over Europe who are committed to building bonds and networks across denominational lines and international borders, so we can help each other in the coming resistance. Now is the time to act. If the book’s message speaks to you, and you have money to invest, please write to R.J. and Dave at LiveNotByLiesProject — at — gmail — dot — com

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Cultural Broken Windows

From an essay in Strategic Culture purporting to explain how the Taliban won:

When an imperialistic society is as corrupt as Britain has been since the creation of the British East India Company in the year 1600, and as America has been since the end of World War II in 1945, with its takeover and control by the MIC (military-industrial complex), which has inevitably produced the cancerous growth of America’s permanent-warfare state, what, then, is a reason to continue living by remaining merely as a colonist or vassal-regime (or even as the imperialist regime itself), which means — when the imposed regime is so profoundly corrupt as any imperialist power necessarily is — to accept such corruption, as this? There’s something that is worse than dying, and it is to continue living under a regime that one utterly despises. That’s a dragged-out death, instead of a quick death. A regime which is as corrupt as any imperialistic regime inevitably is, will be intolerable for a significant number of the residents in any one of its vassal-nations or “colonies.” Death, for them, isn’t such a bad choice, if it means that they will go down fighting to overthrow it. They are driven by the motivation, “Give me liberty, or give me death!” This is a motivation that few, if any, of the imperialistic regime’s hired soldiers (regardless of whether conscripted or not) can match. And when they are foreigners who are fighting on a foreign soil (instead of locals who are defending their land’s own locally determined rulers), they especially and certainly cannot match such motivation, because only the locals can be fighting with a patriotic spirit. This is an intrinsic weakness in any empire. And imperialist leaders tend to ignore it, because they don’t want to understand how repulsive they are to virtually anyone but their own boot-lickers.

I don’t agree with all of that essay, but this is a point worth considering. We have read accounts in recent days — and a source of mine with extensive experience in Afghanistan confirms this — that the Afghan regime we set up was spectacularly corrupt. The author of that essay seems to lionize the Taliban, which I strongly reject. Nevertheless, the fact that the Taliban are scum does not negate the wisdom, if wisdom there is, in his analysis.

I wonder how long it will be before a sufficient number of people in the West — I’m thinking of Europe and the Anglosphere — draw similar conclusions about their own regime. Woke excesses are a staple of this blog, but consider these two recent examples in light of Afghanistan. Here is what Canadian schools are teaching children:

This story appeared in Britain’s Daily Telegraph the other day (I link to the Daily Mail rewrite, because it’s not behind a paywall, but the text below is from the Telegraph:

Police are replacing patrol cars with “hate crime cars” to encourage people to report incidents such as social media comments.

Deputy Chief Constable Julie Cooke said that the cars painted with the police insignia and rainbow designs are now “part of our vehicle fleet” and will be driven daily by officers on patrol.

However, critics have said that forces should instead focus on policing “real” issues such as knife crime and rape, with the latest figures showing poor prosecution rates.

Ms Cooke, the National Police Chiefs’ Council’s (NPCC) lead on LGBT issues, released a video on its Instagram account explaining why police have rainbow vehicles.

Describing them as “hate crime cars”, she said that forces are “always replacing vehicles” and they get the police insignia and “there will normally be then something added on that is to do with the rainbow side of things”.

A spokesman for the NPCC said that they did not have figures on how many had been painted as forces operate independently and it is up to individual forces how many cars they want to convert.

Ms Cooke, who works at Cheshire Police, added that the “cars are there in the communities on normal policing patrol just to show the community that we want you to come forward… It is there to try and give confidence to our LGBT+ community, but also to other under-represented groups”.

She said that the “cost is quite minimal”, but the impact is “huge”.

The number of hate crimes reported to police have more than doubled in recent years, with allegations of transgender hate crime seeing the sharpest rise.

However, cash-strapped forces across the country have faced criticism for focusing on the allegations, a large number of which stem from social media comments.

Even where a crime has not been committed, police record the allegation as a “hate incident”, which could show up on a person’s criminal record checks.

Harry Miller, a former police officer and founder of campaign group Fair Cop, said: “We don’t see the Met with special cars for knife crime, even though the number of stabbings in London is appalling.

“The problem is that the second that you see a rainbow car, you know that it is a police force that has made its mind up about some very contentious issues. You no longer see a police car or a police officer who is there to support everyone, from all political persuasions, without fear or favour.

“They have literally tied their colours to the mast and painted their cars with their political leanings. They are painting rainbows on their cars when we have figures showing that only seven per cent of violent crime ends in a prosecution.

“They have moved from policing crime to policing thoughts and speech, because it is easier.”

How can any morally sane person not have contempt for a social order that behaves this way? What is going to happen when enough people have had enough of it? What happens politically? What happens outside of politics — especially in the US, where many, many people who despise this kind of garbage are armed?

What happens when the New Woke Army, led by SecDef Lloyd Austin and Joint Chiefs head Gen. Thoroughly Modern Milley, ends up alienating the Southern Scots-Irish who make up the bulk of our fighting forces? What happens when these men and women wake up and realize that their country’s military sees them as problem to be solved rather than kinsmen to be cherished?

In Europe, what happens when waves of Afghan refugees begin to arrive? In 2017, national security academic Cheryl Benard, an expert in refugee crises, wrote a deeply disturbing essay asking why Afghan men in the recent (at the time) refugee surge to Europe were unique in committing shocking sexual assaults on European women. The things Benard recounts shock the conscience. She goes through several possible explanations for this behavior, shooting them all down. But then:

This brings us to a third, more compelling and quite disturbing theory—the one that my Afghan friend, the court translator, puts forward. On the basis of his hundreds of interactions with these young men in his professional capacity over the past several years, he believes to have discovered that they are motivated by a deep and abiding contempt for Western civilization. To them, Europeans are the enemy, and their women are legitimate spoils, as are all the other things one can take from them: housing, money, passports. Their laws don’t matter, their culture is uninteresting and, ultimately, their civilization is going to fall anyway to the horde of which one is the spearhead. No need to assimilate, or work hard, or try to build a decent life here for yourself—these Europeans are too soft to seriously punish you for a transgression, and their days are numbered.

And it’s not just the sex crimes, my friend notes. Those may agitate public sentiment the most, but the deliberate, insidious abuse of the welfare system is just as consequential. Afghan refugees, he says, have a particular proclivity to play the system: to lie about their age, to lie about their circumstances, to pretend to be younger, to be handicapped, to belong to an ethnic minority when even the tired eye of an Austrian judge can distinguish the delicate features of a Hazara from those of a Pashtun.

I see his point. In the course of my research, I encountered thirty-year-olds with family in Austria who were passing themselves off as “unaccompanied minors.” I met people misrepresenting an old traffic injury as proof that they had been tortured. I learned of an Afghan family that had emigrated to Hungary two decades ago. The children were born there and attended Hungarian schools. When the refugee crisis erupted, enticed by news of all the associated benefits, this family decided to take on a new identity and make their way to Sweden on the pretense of being brand-new refugees. Claiming to have lost their papers during their “flight,” they registered under new assumed names and reduced the ages of their children; the mother declared herself a widow. Now ensconced in comfortable free housing along with their hale, hearty and very much alive father—whom they pass off as an uncle—with a monthly welfare check, they are smug parasites leeching off the gullibility of Sweden’s taxpayers.

Western legal systems are meticulous and procedural, operate on the basis of rules and rights and forms and documents, and consider you innocent until proven guilty. It didn’t take the refugees long to figure out how to leverage this to their advantage. “They’ll stand right there, balding, grey at the temples, and insist that they’re eighteen,” an exasperated Austrian prosecutor told me. Having “lost” their documents, the only way to refute even the most patently absurd such claim is through expensive lab tests. If you have no documents and no shame, you can assert just about anything and then lean back and wait for the system to try and prove otherwise. If you are rejected, no problem: you can launch multiple appeals. Once you have set foot in Europe, it will be almost impossible to get rid of you; indeed, you can literally commit murder. If a court finds you guilty of rape, you need only argue that if you are sent home, your conservative society will kill you for the dishonorable act—then you can’t be shipped out, because EU law forbids extradition if doing so puts the individual’s life at risk. And murderers cannot be sent back to countries that have the death penalty or a judicial system known to be harsh.

… The young Afghan attackers are saying, yes, that they have no impulse control, that their hormones are raging, and that they hate themselves and the world—but most especially, that they will not tolerate women who are happy, confident and feeling safe in public spaces. They are saying that they have no intention of respecting law, custom, public opinion, local values or common decency, all of which they hate so much that they are ready to put their own lives, their constructive futures and their freedom on the line for the satisfaction of inflicting damage.

Read it all. Benard cites multiple accounts of European political authorities and media types downplaying or hiding the horrors. Well, what happens when European publics have had enough, and no longer wish to defend or live by a social and political order that refuses to defend them? Are Europeans still capable of having had enough? We are about to see.

In the US, what happens if the American people lose faith in the regime? What happens when people simply decide to stop obeying, and actively or passively withdraw their consent? What does that look like? What if a significant number of the American people look at the corruption of the elites — governmental, corporate, media, cultural, and so forth — and conclude that this order is not worth defending?

We might be about to see.

This is why these little woke instances I highlight are meaningful. They are broken windows. Remember Broken Windows Theory? It’s a theory from criminology that says the presence of broken windows in a neighborhood is a sign of disorder that conveys to wrongdoers that disorder will be tolerated here, thus breeding more disorder. People assume nobody cares, so they push it further. Specific instances of wokeness are cultural broken windows, signaling to all the presence of a deep disorder in the culture, and inviting more of it.

Those who tell you not to worry about this stuff, that I’m being alarmist, might be sincere and good-hearted, but they are turning a blind eye to something that’s destroying us, rendering us both incapable of defending ourselves, and dispossessed of a cultural order worth defending.

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The Wiggles Of Weimar

My kids were all little in the 2000s, and grew up in part on The Wiggles, the Australian musical group for kids. They were huge back in the day, though I lost track of them when my kids outgrew them. Well, The Wiggles are now woke. Take a look at this recent sketch, which I’ve cued to the right spot:

In the clip, the character Captain Feathersword addresses the Shirley Shawn unicorn character using “they/them” pronouns. On Twitter, someone asked about it — and one of the Wiggles responded:

I found out about this via an Australian reader, who wrote:

I don’t know if the Wiggles are a big thing in the US, but in Australia, they’re synonymous with children’s entertainment.

Recently they’ve added four new members in the name of inclusion and diversity, and it turns out that one of the occasional characters – Shirley Shawn the Unicorn – now presents as non-binary.  This was stated by one of the chief Wiggles – Anthony Field – on Twitter on April 14

On the fandom page, you can see how they’re applying ‘their’ they/them pronouns

For decades, the Wiggles have been so clean-cut that parents of all political and religious persuasions have been comfortable letting their kids be entertained by them. And even now, given that the latest news seems to have caused not so much as a ripple, I suspect many parents won’t even know that their kids are now being indoctrinated by Australia’s most famous children’s entertainers.

Here’s a screenshot from the fandom page:

What is the point of this? Why can’t kids just be kids? Why do the sick, twisted elites of Anglophone culture have to force their obsessions onto little ones? Not even the Wiggles are allowed to escape the totalitarian sexual revolution. As I write in Live Not By Lies, totalitarianism is

a form of government that combines political authoritarianism with an ideology that seeks to control all aspects of life. This totalitarianism won’t look like the USSR’s. It’s not establishing itself through “hard” means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft forms. This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.

To grasp the threat of totalitarianism, it’s important to understand the difference between it and simple authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is what you have when the state monopolizes political control. That is mere dictatorship—bad, certainly, but totalitarianism is much worse. According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[I]t has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

What you are seeing here is another manifestation of soft totalitarianism. I know what some of you are saying: there he goes again, that right-wing nut, getting bent out of shape over a kid’s show. Sorry, but this is a big deal. They are trying to colonize the minds of pre-school age children with this gender-ideology lie, which seeks to destroy the essence of man. It’s disgusting. They really are coming for our children. Do not be fooled. This is culture war at its purest: to conquer the minds of kids so small they don’t even know that they are being indoctrinated.

(I would just like to stop here and applaud the government of Hungary for caring enough about protecting its children that it passed a law forcing these creepy propagandists to keep their hands off the kids.)

Along those lines, another reader wrote:

My wife and I just had our first child 9 months ago. We used a pregnancy tracking app that’s very chic right now–Ovia. We really loved it and–in tandem with her wonderful doctor–it helped us understand how and why my wife’s pregnancy went the way it did. It has a week-by-week explanation of the unborn baby’s health and the mother’s health.We got pregnant again (praise God) and we’re using same app. But I’ve noticed in the week-by-week updates, we are no longer told about pregnant mothers, but about “pregnant folks.” I know this is classic crotchety old man stuff, but geez. I wonder if we have a term that describes folk who get pregnant. This jargon all happened in the last 6-9 months since our son was born. You talk about acceleration? The hard and hasty approach of this stuff? It’s happening. Even pregnancy is politicizedOf course, I know I have to just tune out the language control so I can focus on my wife and children. But a time is coming when I can’t just tune it out. There will be trouble for those who publicly don’t fall in line.And this makes sense, right? If you want to reshape a society, you have to reshape its center. Family is just about as close as you can get to the center of a normal society (a truly healthy society has God at the center). So if you want to change society, eliminate that center–destroy it. Redefine it.GK Chesterton and Bertrand Russell had this conversation a century ago.I’m younger (25). I grew up in a conservative church body–still a member, becoming a pastor in it. It’s insane to think that all that stuff the crochety old people said in my church was true. Redefine marriage and you lose your world. They were right.Why wasn’t it credible to 10-16 year old me? Because they didn’t have any personal holiness. We had nothing to grab onto. I think having “cells” of resistance is a good idea. But I feel like the only thing I have to work from is personal holiness right now.

We are living through a great unveiling. You can only live in denial for so long about the rottenness. Nobody can be neutral going forward. You must choose . Refusing to choose is a choice.

UPDATE: This letter from a woman who studies at an elite college that sends many students to government, finance, and policy. The emphases are in the original letter:

Please warn your readers because everyone who’s a sane parent, Christian or not, needs to hear this.There is a certain type of parent who thinks, “Well, I’ll just stop my kids from watching The Wiggles.” Do not make the mistake of thinking that this gender ideology is going to evade you or your kids if only you cut out The Wiggles. It is everywhere, and the elites in charge either want it to be everywhere or will spread it everywhere because they’re indifferent about it because tradition has been wiped away. Gender ideology has overtaken our elite institutions, and I know this because I go to one. I have seen the types of people who are going into education and education policy and who want to teach as an act of social justice (as opposed to the standard reasons). These are smart individuals who are going to be influential down the line, and who have a high degree of educational pedigree. Gender ideology is what they care about teaching, and it is what they care about, period.They know that children are malleable and they want to take on the mantle of shaping children, especially with regards to gender, sexuality, and racial grievance. They want your kids to play around with their pronouns: I have heard many people say they believe that more people would choose to not be “cisgender” if they were introduced to gender theory. If your kids are not white (as my future children will not be), they will tell them that white people hate them and thus that your kids should hate white people. If your kids are white, they will call your kids oppressors and make them confess without absolution. (I have heard alumni talking about their teaching careers, and they really sow in racial grievances. It is abhorrent.) They want your kids to learn in school about how polyamory is great, what BDSM is, pornography, how masturbation is a “great way to get to know yourself,” and about “safe ways to practice kinky sex,” and no, I am not exaggerating: these are things I have seen from groups on my campus and on other campuses dedicated to “sexual education,” and much of their work is in creating propaganda for children and future child educators. They want your kids to spend their time and energy on “figuring out my gender” constantly which is why they believe sexual education should be taught from kindergarten onwards, and they don’t believe in, or care about, innocence: sex and pleasure are what matter. They also don’t care about parental rights, because kids don’t get to choose parents—if a parent thinks that there are two genders, and that little Sally can’t become little Harry, the parent is wrong and the teacher supersedes (especially since many of these teachers see themselves as quasi-parents). You, the parent, will never, ever win against that logic, and the schools will enable little Sally in becoming little Harry while calling you a horrible person, both to your child’s face and to yours. (I have seen this happen in high school, and that was four years ago. Things have only gotten worse since.)In short, they want your kids. I cannot emphasize this enough: they want your kids, they want your kids, they want your kids. They think all this stuff is good and moral because this is their religion. The people who want to influence your children are effectively cult members, and the point of all cults is to make more cult members. They run their institutions the way their cult wants them to.These are our elites and our future elites, the broken people who are running or are going to be running our institutions in the future. They hate your guts and I know this because I go to class with them, and they talk about how much they hate Christians and conservatives and white people and about how there are no differences between the sexes. They introduce themselves with pronouns. Every other day, some woman or some little girl I know changes her pronouns to she/they or they/them, goes on testosterone, gets surgery, etc. So many beautiful women—you’d mistake some of them for models and actresses—suddenly cutting off all their hair, dyeing it blue or pink or jet black, putting on breast binders, changing their names, and deepening their voices with weekly shots. So many vulnerable people flocking to gender ideology because they believe in nothing else and it offers them temporary comfort. The social currency of the day is oppression, and if you want to be involved in the mainstream, the only way you can speak is if you are oppressed in some way: so people take on mantles of oppression—gender is one of the ways you can be oppressed and (therefore) be able to speak, and it is one way you can find a community (because there is a big community of people there). It is all they talk about. It is all they think about. It is all the movement wants them to think about. They believe it is all they are, firing neurons, and it shows. The only thing that’s fundamental for them is race, and again, they want your kids believing that, too.Do not trust secular schools, public or private. If your kids go to one, that’s fine (I went to public schools myself all my life), but make sure you talk with them. Help them find better ways to engage with the world, guide them to God, join a church and make sure they have a community of like minded people, engage with their lives, don’t force your views on them, but talk with them about why you don’t believe in gender ideology. Teach them a higher morality than this, a higher truth, some respect for tradition. Otherwise, they might be unable to resist the purpose and the community gender ideology offers them: this is what people miss. It’s not gender dysphoria but friendship and communal support that’s often making people change their whole gender identities. This is especially true for if you have daughters, and even more true for if you have smart daughters, because gender ideology offers them intellectual engagement and something to think about (maybe an alternative is helping your smart daughters read the classics, or to take math classes outside of school). There is an entire indoctrination machine working against you, the parents, and you need to counter that with kindness, love, and patience (Rome wasn’t built in a day). You might not be able to stop it, but you need to acknowledge reality and find ways of communicating about gender ideology with your kids. Do not underestimate any of this. It is evil.There are probably sane parents who read your blog and who think you are a doomsayer: you are not. You understand this ideology and how bad it is. You are not exaggerating. In high school I’d read about the Benedict Option and thought that it seemed ridiculous. I don’t think that anymore, because I have now gone to college with the people who are going to be making decisions for many years down the line. They will only lose their political power and influence when things really collapse, which will be a problem in and of itself: My prediction is that gender ideology will blow up in the next decade or so, mostly because there are going to be medical malpractice lawsuits from women who’ve had their breasts lopped off at the age of 16 by psychotic plastic surgeons and whose lives will have been permanently altered as a result of this gender ideology. But until the lawsuits start coming, it will get worse and worse, and there are going to be people who are left devastated by all of this.

One final note: Remember that the perpetrators of this are often its victims, too. They’re easy to mock and easy to get angry with, but they deserve our love and compassion because they are people, and because they are so sad. I know so many people who’ve changed their gender presentation and identity and not one of them looks genuinely happy. They are miserable. If you are friends with anyone who’s a victim of this, if you know people who are victims of this, please treat them well. Don’t hate them. Hate is bad for your soul, it is bad for theirs, and they will see a caricature of opposition, instead of realizing that they are worth so much more than gender ideology would have them believe.

Lord have mercy on us all.

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History Coming Hard And Fast

A reader writes:

I work in state politics now, but I started out more interested in international relations, did a masters degree in that and in the process interned at the State Department in the summer of 2009. I had the great fortune to study with some really hard-nosed foreign policy realists (some that have published in The American Conservative), but then to contrast that to the people I was around in DC — I got a heavy dose of the “foreign policy establishment.” Everyone I worked with went to a small cluster of schools on the east coast, and likely their parents worked for State, DoD, CIA, etc. — and there was one way of thinking of things. I was accustomed to really questioning foreign policy in our graduate seminars and asking hard questions about what is in the American interest, so I got a lot of weird looks. I could write a book about their cluelessness, but either way, it was eye-opening.One day in the cafeteria I saw Richard Holbrooke, who had recently been appointed as special envoy to Afghanistan and Pakistan, having lunch with James Carville, and it made me think: Is this whole thing is a charade? Are they bringing in Carville to help give some sort of veneer of authenticity to this so-called election and the notion of ‘democracy’ in Afghanistan? Is this whole thing a PR ploy? I don’t know what Carville was doing there, but either way, Holbrooke was sort of a living legend among the elites then given his background with Bosnia (and of course other aspects of Clinton Inc.), but a fellow intern of mine made a comment at the time that I’ve never let him live down along the lines of: “I hope the Afghanistan mission isn’t over and the country fixed before I get a chance to go serve there.” I laughed out loud. He had another year of grad school and didn’t know if there would still be anything for him to do there when it was done. I was really just thinking through the lens of my realist professors who had pressed all of us to think about things like — what does ‘victory’ in Afghanistan look like? How do we know when we get to leave? Of course, none of us could give a plausible answer, and I became a big skeptic of the war.Either way, he finished his master’s degree and went to Afghanistan as a defense contractor — he really wanted to be a part of the solution — but one tour made him a skeptic. The ‘bacha bazi’ stuff was real, and as disgusting as it is described. They were instructed to overlook lots of sexual abuse. He came back very jaded about the incoherent mission, and the waste he described made even him — a big-government, east cost liberal — a skeptic of government spending.When you see this stuff up close — with even a little bit of skepticism — it changes how you think.

The “bacha bazi” stuff refers to a Pashtun practice of forcing boys to dress up like girls and dance, and then become the sex slaves of older men. Here’s a 2015 story from The New York Times that will infuriate you. Excerpt:

In his last phone call home, Lance Cpl. Gregory Buckley Jr. told his father what was troubling him: From his bunk in southern Afghanistan, he could hear Afghan police officers sexually abusing boys they had brought to the base.

“At night we can hear them screaming, but we’re not allowed to do anything about it,” the Marine’s father, Gregory Buckley Sr., recalled his son telling him before he was shot to death at the base in 2012. He urged his son to tell his superiors. “My son said that his officers told him to look the other way because it’s their culture.”

Rampant sexual abuse of children has long been a problem in Afghanistan, particularly among armed commanders who dominate much of the rural landscape and can bully the population. The practice is called bacha bazi, literally “boy play,” and American soldiers and Marines have been instructed not to intervene — in some cases, not even when their Afghan allies have abused boys on military bases, according to interviews and court records.

The policy has endured as American forces have recruited and organized Afghan militias to help hold territory against the Taliban. But soldiers and Marines have been increasingly troubled that instead of weeding out pedophiles, the American military was arming them in some cases and placing them as the commanders of villages — and doing little when they began abusing children.

“The reason we were here is because we heard the terrible things the Taliban were doing to people, how they were taking away human rights,” said Dan Quinn, a former Special Forces captain who beat up an American-backed militia commander for keeping a boy chained to his bed as a sex slave. “But we were putting people into power who would do things that were worse than the Taliban did — that was something village elders voiced to me.”

We empowered the boy-rapers to protect Afghanistan from the head-choppers. Lovely country, that.

Here’s a powerful essay by Tanner Greer, the gist of which you will get in this excerpt. Emphases are in the original:

My youth was witness to a catalog of catastrophe. Our leaders proved unworthy; our institutions were found unsound. One after another, disasters rolled: the invasion of Iraq. The criminal mismanagement of its occupation. The inundation of New Orleans. The open misery of global recession. The quiet suffering of opioids turned epidemic. The election of Donald Trump. The constant churn of crises produced by his misrule. The malfunction of one governing body after another in the face of a global pandemic.  Through it all, the slow unraveling of America’s civic culture.

Yet in this chronicle of shame the American intervention in Afghanistan stands exceptional. There is no partisan dodge that escapes it. There is no domestic rival to pin blame on. There is nothing to shield any of us from the sting of this defeat. Yes, events of this week reveal enormous and largely unnecessary failures in intelligence, logistics, operational planning, cross-government coordination, public communication, and broader strategy on the part of the sitting administration. Yet we must see these humiliations for what they are: the final chapter of two decade long disaster. The scale of these failures are too big, and they occur on a timeline too long, to be excused as the other side’s fault.

American policy in Afghanistan has always traced closely the impulses of the American people: we entered Afghanistan with an unparalleled majority of our nation in support; we surged into it ten years later with another national majority rallied; we now leave the country with a commanding majority of the country in agreement.  Only one congresswoman voted against the initial invasion; regardless of which party has controlled the Hill, each subsequent step of this war has been waged with strong congressional backing. Four presidencies, two from each party, have presided over our long defeat. This is disaster a borne by us all.

16 commanders of American or ISAF troops Afghanistan, ten commanders of CENTCOM, six Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, ten Secretaries of Defense, two special envoys to the region, seven administrators of USAID, 11 Ambassadors Extraordinary and Plenipotentiary, seven Secretaries of State, nine Directors of the Central Intelligence Agency, seven Directors of National Intelligence, ten National Security Advisors, five chairmen of the House Armed Services Committee, six chairmen of the Senate Committee on Foreign Relations and Select Committee on Intelligence, seven chairmen of the House Committee on Foreign Affairs, their staffs, and several dozen secretaries, deputy secretaries, undersecretaries, deputy assistants, desk officers, station chiefs, and division or brigade commanders have directed this defeat. The war in Afghanistan is not the failure of a man, or even of a few men, but of an entire leadership class.

Now, lessons must be learned.

Read it all.One of the most interesting things about the essay is now Greer begins by talking about how weirdly exhilarating the post-9/11 period was. So many of us felt alive, confident, sure of ourselves, revitalized as a nation. They had started a fight with the wrong people. And here we are twenty years later. The next year in the life of the United States is going to be one of the most difficult we have ever lived through. We will either begin to arrest our national decline, or accelerate it.

Here’s some information I picked up today on Twitter from a political scientist:

I’ve looked at enough data to say this: I think Gen X was the last really religious generation in American history.

Millennials are consistently more secular on a number of dimensions of religiosity: attendance, belief, affiliation, etc. pic.twitter.com/fBQYfBvTnZ

— Ryan Burge (@ryanburge) August 21, 2021

It’s clear as can be here, too: Gen X is more likely to believe in God without a doubt in 2018 than they were in the 1990’s.

Big portions of millennials lost belief as they aged into adulthood. Gen X’s belief got stronger. pic.twitter.com/k98wZvLVSP

— Ryan Burge (@ryanburge) August 21, 2021

We as a nation decisively turned away from God at the turn of the millennium. Look at this chart from 2012:

Let the reader understand.

I talked by phone to a Catholic friend today in a major East Coast city. Hadn’t spoken to him since last autumn. He told me that his family and some like-minded ones, along with sympathetic priests, are already starting to put together the rudiments of an underground church network, like Father Tomislav Kolakovic did in pre-Communist Slovakia (I tell the story in Live Not By Lies). Most fellow Christians he knows, however, “are just walking around in a fog.”

I checked in this afternoon with one of the sources for that book, an emigre to America from a Soviet bloc country. He told me that he believes things are about to fall apart in a truly catastrophic way. He’s trying to convince his adult children to leave the US and go to the country with which they have dual citizenship. He’s not sure what he’s going to do.

Last night I talked to a reader who has become a friend, and who works in a position that gives him a great deal of knowledge about things going on in the world (I have to be cagey here). He told me that we have now entered the times for which The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies were written. Coming from this particular friend, given his expertise, this really landed powerfully with me. I have a big decision coming up about a future path that has everything to do with the extension of this work. I can’t say a lot about it here right now, but I can say that it doesn’t involve leaving TAC; it’s rather about a new initiative under consideration that would put the network-building into action. Events happening in the world right now, and the quickening that we can all feel, as well as this friend’s analysis of what is happening and where it is going — all of it is bearing down hard.

History is coming at us fast and rough right now. Keep your heads. Watch closely. Prepare.

 

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Federal Judge: Banning Illegal Migrants Is Racist

This is unbelievable. Though on second thought, it is quite believable, given the rottenness of elite US professional culture:

An almost century-old federal law that makes it a crime for deported migrants to re-enter the U.S. was found unconstitutional by a judge who said its passage in 1929 was motivated, in part, by prejudice against Mexicans and other Latinos.

U.S. District Judge Miranda Du in Reno, Nevada, ruled Wednesday that the law, known as Section 1326, violates the equal protection guarantees of the Constitution’s Fifth Amendment.

“The federal government’s plenary power over immigration does not give it license to enact racially discriminatory statutes in violation of equal protection,” she said in the 43-page ruling.

Du issued the ruling in the case of a Gustavo Carrillo-Lopez, who was indicted on one count of being a deported alien after his arrest in Nevada in 2019. He had previously been deported in 1999 and again in 2012, according to prosecutors.

Rather than deny the charge, which carries a two-year prison term, Carrillo-Lopez’s lawyers attacked the law itself, arguing that it had its roots in racism and cultural animus.

Read it all. 

Arizona candidate for US Senate Blake Masters has a pungent take — and a correct one. Excerpts:

This is a case study in the intellectual sickness of America’s ruling elite.

It goes without saying that the ruling is horrible. (It even calls itself “unprecedented”!) Read it: https://t.co/arioztRPFe

— Blake Masters (@bgmasters) August 21, 2021

That last tweet is the key one of this very good analysis. Elites have tasked themselves with extirpating Evil (racism, sexism, homophobia, transphobia, etc.), and tend to grant themselves extraordinary mandates and powers to rid our society of Evil. If you say, “Hold on, wait a minute!”, you face cancellation. This happened to a friend of mine who stood up at her university and said that the post-George Floyd antiracism campaign there was going too far, and trampling on free speech. She was widely denounced as a racist, even a “Nazi,” and had to leave the university for a while to recover.

The standard conservative modus operandi in these cases is to highlight the insanity in something a liberal elite does, and expect that the liberal establishment will be shamed into correcting the problem. That quit working ages ago. So what does one do now? Elect more Republicans? Well, that’s a start, I guess, but even though that may be better than the alternative, is that really the answer?

Here you have a federal judge, an Obama appointee, who is working to dismantle America’s border in the name of antiracism. This is not some Mark Levin fever dream. This really happened. I believe too that this coming at a time when the credibility of America’s leadership class is being torn to shreds by the Taliban in Afghanistan is going to cause much more of a blowback than it otherwise would. It is remarkable when these Blobsters live up to their reputation. Did you see this the other day?

All the right-wingers who think that white elites are enamored of a “Great Replacement” theory, and who get called paranoid over it, can point to that from the notorious Beltway insider, and say, “Huh.”

A country whose elites refuse to let it control its borders is hardly a country, is it? You know which country doesn’t have this problem? Viktor Orban’s Hungary.

UPDATE: Reader Jonah R.:

This garbage starts to make sense when you realize it’s only a small but disproportionately influential segment of the American population, and that most of them are white and affluent and privileged, and deeply anxious about that fact, and therefore in a status competition with their white, affluent, privileged peers. But it’s a competition for the damned, because the claims and rewards are so ephemeral: Did you make the snarkiest tweet that day? Do you have something to contribute to the office chatter about some book they highlighted on NPR? Did you score “Hamilton” tickets? It’s a rat race with the goal of staying competitive in certain highly selective cultural industries like academia, media, museum curation, and even politics, where there are far more willing new applicants than there are positions to fill.

Case in point: In the past week or two there was a gigantic investigative report on the sports and pop-culture website “The Ringer” going into insane levels of detail about something most of us consider trivial: the guy who got the job–well, the executive producer who gave himself the job–as new Jeopardy host. The reporter must have spent 5,000 words digging through every episode of a frat-boy-like podcast he made nearly a decade ago and comments he allegedly made to young female co-workers at his previous job. The article, more in-depth than some White House reporting I’ve seen lately, is now being credited with getting the would-be host booted from his gig and, more importantly, getting him publicly shamed. The writer is now much in the spotlight this week, because she saved a supposedly beloved middlebrow cultural institution from being besmirched.

I wanted to see what kind of person cares this much about something as trivial as who the Jeopardy host is, so I spent five minutes on Google. The writer of the take-down piece is what I expected: white; early 30s; a graduate of one of the most elite private high schools in the Bay Area known for producing elite cultural influencers most of us have never heard of; graduate of the University of Chicago; book deal; snarky Twitter feed. And what does one do with all of that privilege, with the best education money can buy? Why, one embarks on a career in journalism devoted entirely to mastering the minutiae of popular culture on a website catering to other rich, white, educated, intellectually underachieving thirtysomethings.

Perhaps she’s a nice kid. Who knows? But this is who runs the culture now: Ambitious little career assassins looking to establish themselves among other people who care more about the host of Jeopardy and dopamine hits from getting laughs and “likes” in cyberspace than they do about many real-world issues. Young elites who have never put in a shift rolling burritos at Chipotle, worked in a warehouse, or shook the grease off a fry basket. What they do have is internships at All the Right Places, and a belief inculcated in them since their elite high school days that they’re the best and the brightest. And you can protect an upper-middlebrow institution like Jeopardy by taking down a would-be host based on his speech (who, after all, only went to lowly Pepperdine anyway), then go for it. Twitter, NPR, the New York Times, and all your friends will hail you as a hero, and you won’t hear the voice of anyone who thinks otherwise.

Normally the conflicts between these people wouldn’t matter that much to the rest of us, but they’re trying to get us to change our culture, our language, our politics, etc., with their top-down efforts. As much as they crave each other’s approval, they also hate each other and will always be trying to climb over each other, but they’ll unite against you, because they hate you more. By accident of geography, I’ve lived among these people for half my life, and getting them to see themselves clearly is impossible, but maybe I can help the rest of us see who they are: decadent, presumptuous, and far more privileged than they accuse the rest of us of being. In that sense they’re not much more different from any other cultural elite throughout history, but until now they’ve been better at pretending they’re not.

I heard this segment on NPR the other day in which host Ailsa Chang interrogated TV critic Eric Deggans about why this was such a big deal. They made it sound like he was the second coming of Harvey Weinstein. Then they played a clip of something horrible he said while hosting a comedy podcast years ago. He used the word “ho”. That’s it! Listen to the righteousness with which Chang signs off the segment — her emphatic, “Indeed!”

These are horrible people and they deserve to lose all the power they have in this culture.

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America: The Chernenko Years

I have been out for most of the day. This morning I heard from a couple of well-informed sources about particular Taliban atrocities that have not yet been made public. These are the kinds of things that bring tears to your eyes. One of them in particular I cannot stop thinking about. It is one of the worst things you can imagine. These will all become public soon — I am not authorized to write about them.

None of this had to happen. If the United States had evacuated its people from that country in an orderly way — for example, if we had kept Bagram until all Americans were out — these things would not have happened to Americans and vulnerable Afghans who helped us. This is a stain that will always be with us. Biden, Blinken, Milley, Austin — they should all go. Again: Biden did the right thing by getting us out. But the way he did it was unforgivable.

And it’s not over. There are still a lot of Americans there, at the mercy of the Taliban, those monsters. They really are monsters. Remember all the things ISIS did, including making captured girls into sex slaves of its fighters? Yes, that’s happening now. We are in a very bad situation, and it could easily get much worse, I am reliably told.

I don’t believe a thing our senile Commander in Chief says about any of this now.

Biden admin to Americans in Afghanistan: “Don’t worry, the Taliban promised us they will let you go to the airport.”

But in real life it’s a different story. pic.twitter.com/kvzk4NXzjy

— ماكמאק (@beingrealmac) August 20, 2021

Look at this scoop by Bloomberg:

NEW: Biden assured key allies in June that US security enablers would remain in place in Afghanistan as NATO troops withdrew, so much so that U.K. thought it could maintain its Kabul embassy https://t.co/PItW36GmVB

— Alberto Nardelli (@AlbertoNardelli) August 20, 2021

Y’all know that I have a weakness for pessimism. How can anybody with clear eyes, seeing all this, have any confidence in our leadership? I’m not talking only about Team Biden in place now. I’m talking about the generals who ran this war for the past twenty years. I’m talking about Bush, Trump, and Obama — but especially Trump and Obama, who had reason to know that this was a pointless war.

I’m already seeing signs that the recriminations are shaping up along partisan lines. This is a shame. The failure in Afghanistan is not something you can pin on Democrats alone, or Republicans alone. It is on our entire regime. One of my readers who is a player in the conservative foreign policy establishment e-mailed me when I was in Hungary to tell me that everybody he knows in that world is certain that Hungary is a neo-fascist state, and needs to benefit from a US-instigated color revolution. The reader knows personally that this is crackpot thinking; he was just trying to indicate to me that our best and brightest thinkers are totally blinded by ideology, and their own arrogance.

Here is a powerful essay from the Swedish public intellectual Malcom Kyeyune, who reflects on the perilous geopolitical moment we are now in. I’m going to quote from it here, but you should read it all. Excerpts:

What makes this moment in history so, well, historic, is the almost inescapable sense, shared across the political and national spectrum, that we are watching something very similar before our very eyes: the American empire is burning, and nobody knows what to do about it, much less how to put the fire out.

There may be a deeper aspect to this than a lot of people might perceive at present. On the level of pure geopolitics, the utterly embarrassing debacle of America’s withdrawal from Afghanistan can only serve to make China more bold in any future confrontation over Taiwan. The American eagle is faltering, and its rivals will not sit idly by for long. But this is probably the lesser of the big consequences of Afghanistan. There is another, much more significant implication of the collapse of the American project here, one with much more acute bearing on the immediate future of American society itself. To understand why, it’s useful to reflect on a certain political and historical point made by Carl Schmitt in his by now nearly hundred year old essay, whose english name is often rendered as The Crisis of Parliamentary Democracy. The essay is well worth a read in full today, and the reader might be surprised (or maybe not) at how relevant many of the descriptions of the ongoing political crisis in 1923 may seem to us today, nearly a hundred years later. The most relevant passage, however, deserves to be quoted in full:

 ”In the history of political ideas, there are epochs of great energy and times becalmed, times of motionless status quo. Thus the epoch of monarchy is at an end when a sense of the principle of kingship, of honor, has been lost, if bourgeois kings appear who seek to prove their usefulness and utility instead of their devotion and honor. The external apparatus of monarchical institutions can remain standing very much longer after that. But in spite of it monarchy’s hour has tolled. The convictions inherent in this and no other institution then appear antiquated; practical justifications for it will not be lacking, but it is only an empirical question whether men or organizations come forward who can prove themselves just as useful or even more so than these kings and through this simple fact brush aside monarchy.”

What Schmitt is saying here is very important, and it might very well end up being the true cost of the Afghanistan debacle. Every ruling class throughout history advances various claims about its own legitimacy, without which a stable political order is impossible. Legitimating claims can take many different forms and may change over time, but once they become exhausted or lose their credibility, that is pretty much it.

Kyeyune explores the meaning of Schmitt’s claim, concluding

What Schmitt is saying is that when the legitimating claim for a particular form of elite is used up, when people no longer believe in the concepts or claims that underpin a particular system or claim to rule, the extinction of that particular elite becomes a foregone conclusion.

He goes on to say that Afghanistan is a symbol for “an entire worldview and historical epoch.” It was supposed to be the place where armed humanitarianism drove back the forces of barbaric darkness, and created a better world, one where women didn’t have to live under miserable oppression, among other advances. We can laugh at the gender studies degrees from Kabul University, says Kyeyune, but it’s no laughing matter that Afghan women were more free because the US routed the Taliban.

Even more to the point, he says, is that Afghanistan was the graveyard of technocratic managerial liberalism. The NGO class of experts had free reign, and virtually unlimited money, to remake Afghan society — and failed. The belief of the technocrats that they can shape the world to their will by the sufficient application of force, intelligence, and technique. These primitive monsters  defeated them, just as their kinsmen defeated the Soviet version of modernity.

More Kyeyune:

I suspect we are currently witnessing the catastrophic end of this metaphysical power of legitimacy that has shielded the managerial ruling class for decades. Anyone even briefly familiar with the historical record knows just how much of a Pandora’s box such a loss of legitimacy represents. The signs have obviously been multiplying over many years, but it is only now that the picture is becoming clear to everyone. When Michael Gove said ”I think the people in this country have had enough of experts” in a debate about the merits of Brexit, he probably traced the contours of something much bigger than anyone really knew at the time. Back then, the acute phase of the delegitimization of the managerial class was only just beginning. Now, with Afghanistan, it is impossible to miss.

It is not just that the elite class is incompetent – even kings could be incompetent without undermining belief in monarchy as a system – it is that they are so grossly, spectacularly incompetent that they walk around among us as living rebuttals of meritocracy itself. It is that their application of managerial logic to whatever field they get their grubby mitts on – from homelessness in California to industrial policy to running a war – makes that thing ten times more expensive and a hundred times more dysfunctional. To make the situation worse, the current elites seem almost serene in their willful destruction of the very fields they rely on for legitimacy. When the ”experts” go out of their way to write public letters about how covid supposedly only infects people who hold demonstrations in support of ”structural white supremacy”, while saying that Black Lives Matter demonstrations pose no risk of spreading the virus further, this amounts to the farmer gleefully salting his own fields to make sure nothing can grow there in the future. How can anyone expect the putative peasants of our social order to ”trust the science”, when the elites themselves are going out of their way, against all reason and the tenets of basic self-preservation, to make such a belief completely impossible even for those who really, genuinely, still want to believe?

Like I said, read it all.  

Kyeyune says:

[I]t is quite obvious that the epoch of the liberal technocrat is now over. The bell has well and truly tolled for mankind’s belief in their ability to do anything else than enrich themselves and ruin things for everyone else.

This is where Wokeness intersects with the catastrophe in Afghanistan. This same liberal technocratic class has decided all of a sudden that the United States is choking on white supremacy, and must be re-educated, or else — and is injecting the pure poison of racial division into the American body politic. This same liberal technocratic class has decided all of a sudden that “male” and “female” are abstractions, and is convincing thousands of young people to destroy their minds and their bodies for the sake of realizing their supposedly true selves. This same liberal technocratic class decides what the rest of us can and cannot talk about, and uses its power to punish anyone who says things it doesn’t like. This same liberal technocratic class tells us a leader like Viktor Orban is a villain because he refuses to open the borders of his country to Muslim migrants, and because he doesn’t want the children of his country propagandized to chop off their breasts or chemically castrate themselves.

This liberal technocratic class is destroying law, business, medicine, and science, all in the name of its ideology — and it is expecting the rest of us to live by the lies it tells itself about itself.

No. Forget it. Live not by lies! The lies of these incompetent rogues are tearing apart our country. When will we have had enough of it?

I can’t stop thinking about the story my European friend told me about his time doing graduate work a couple of years ago at Harvard. The American students would ask the professors not to talk about certain topics because it was too triggering to them, and the professors complied. This was not a one-off thing. My European friend concluded that the American ruling class of tomorrow is too psychologically fragile to deal with reality. He left Harvard afraid for the future of the West. What are these people who pee their pants with anger when someone misgenders them going to do when faced with problems in the real world, which isn’t an Ivy League rubber room?

I see that Donald Trump is having a rally in Alabama this weekend. Another opportunity for grift, and diverting the justified outrage of people into cynical self-serving theater. Maybe he would have handled the withdrawal better than Biden (hard to see how it could have been handled worse). But don’t be fooled into thinking Team Trump was any smarter:

1. Trump’s acting Secretary of Defense Chris Miller says this was the last administration’s plan for Afghanistan. If you know anything, you know this is completely clueless. Via @DefenseOne: https://t.co/jDwZBx8UIa pic.twitter.com/UGleR1t6kF

— Thomas Joscelyn (@thomasjoscelyn) August 19, 2021

Click on that tweet and read the whole thread. We will never turn this around if we don’t look at reality square in the face. We are governed by people who are bringing us to ruin. They don’t know what they’re doing, but they have every confidence in their right, indeed their destiny, to do it.

I predict that the ruling class will institute a social credit system to hold on to its power, if they have to — that is, to protect themselves from the people they despise and misgovern. Prepare.

I know, this post is out there even for me. But I can’t get out of my head the fates of these Americans left behind by our idiotic withdrawal strategy. You’ll be hearing soon about what happened to them. It cries to heaven for … well, if not vengeance, then at least some sort of accountability.

 

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St. Stephen, King

I spent yesterday afternoon with Ben Wallace-Wells, a writer for the New Yorker magazine. He flew to Baton Rouge in late August — brave man! — to interview me at length about the interest I have taken in Hungary and its prime minister, Viktor Orban. Orban is a hate figure for American liberals and Establishment conservatives. Wallace-Wells wanted to understand why I feel otherwise about the Hungarian leader.

I won’t get into the answer here — I have blogged a lot about it — but the afternoon spent talking about it did prompt reflections on the moribund state of our culture and civilization. This is because my interest in Orban comes out of frustration and disgust over the inability of American political leadership to meet the crisis with the seriousness and determination it requires. I explained to Wallace-Wells that I don’t believe there is a political solution to this crisis, and I certainly don’t think we are going to vote our way out of it. But I believe that talented, committed political leaders can create the conditions under which non-political forces — chiefly religious ones — can provide rescue.

Today is the Feast of St. Stephen, King of Hungary. He is considered the founder of the Hungarian nation, which came into existence as a state under his rule in the year 1000. Before that, he was a Magyar prince. Both of his parents had been baptized, but Stephen was the first one in the family who was devout.

After succeeding his father Geza, he fought his kinsman Koppany, a bloody conflict that ended with Stephen’s victory, and his coronation on Christmas Day in 1000 (or perhaps 1001) with a crown sent by Pope Sylvester II. You can see this crown on display in the Hungarian Parliament — a material link to the man who first wore it a millennium ago.

Stephen — István, in Hungarian — was a warrior. He united the Hungarian kingdom — all the disparate Magyar tribes — and forced the conversion of his countrymen by the sword. He built churches and monasteries. He died in 1038, and was canonized. Today, in the basilica in Budapest, you can see his preserved right hand:

It would be lovely to say that St. Stephen Christianized his country with sweet persuasion and the power of charitable example, but that didn’t happen a lot in the Middle Ages. The fact that Hungarians of subsequent centuries were able to know and serve the One True God and His Son is because of the deeds of this rough Magyar king. There is a childish impulse today to anathematize our ancestors for not being perfect in every way. This should be resisted. We can and should recognize their flaws while cherishing their virtues. We owe them so much.

The example of St. Stephen the King reminds us that we can’t easily separate religion and politics. I told Ben Wallace-Wells that I was impressed by something Viktor Orban told a journalist once: that as a politician, he can only give people things, but he can’t give them meaning. That is wise, and it would be wise of us to realize those limits in our politicians. When it comes to the faith, all I expect from an American politician is that he or she does everything possible to protect the liberties of the churches (synagogues, mosques) and religious institutions. In Hungary, which is almost entirely Christian, I would expect the state to do more, but the United States is too diverse for that, and besides, America is constitutionally unable to do more.

Viktor Orban is a Calvinist, as are 25 percent of Hungarians. I don’t know whether he is a devout believer, as is his son Gaspar, or whether he is more of a St. Stephen figure. (To be clear, I don’t think any of us know how personally devout the king truly was; I’m simply saying that it’s possible that the national leader can be more Christian in a worldly sense.) Whatever the case, Prime Minister Orban has made it clear that he sees the future of the Hungarian nation depends on the strength of its religious commitment, and its fidelity to its Christian heritage. I admire that, and wish we had more American politicians who understood this. The Church is not the State, but to a significant extent, the Church depends on the State to do its work, if only for the State’s protection.

In the end, Orban’s hopes will fail without a Christian reconversion in Hungary. I told Ben Wallace-Wells that I’m a reader of Michel Houllebecq, and I don’t think that the Western god of shopping and f*cking will be strong enough to defeat whatever rough beast is slouching towards Budapest — and Paris, and London, and Madrid, and Rome, and Stockholm — to be born. History is messy, and so are the lives of historical figures. In his own modern way, in our post-Christian era, Orban, despite his many flaws, is about the most worthy successor of Szent István, Király, that the Magyars could hope for.

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