Rod Dreher's Blog, page 528

Anti-Trump Hypocrites Of The Left

Texas chapter leaders got to chat with senior officials in the Roosevelt Room in the West Wing of the White House today. #HookEm pic.twitter.com/gnl5cEjrwx

— Cocks Not Glocks (@CocksNotGlocks) October 8, 2016

Heard of the “Cocks Not Glocks” anti-gun activists at UT-Austin? The Guardian fills you in:

Demonstrators gathered to brandish sex toys in the air or strap them to their backpacks. Or other places. “We have crazy laws here but this is by far the craziest, that you can’t bring a dildo on to campus legally but you can bring your gun. We’re just trying to fight absurdity with absurdity,” said Rosie Zander, a 20-year-old history student.

“We wanted something fun that people could really engage in. Because it’s hard to get involved in the political process at our age, people our age don’t tend to vote or get involved, and this is so easy. Strap a dildo on and you’re showing the Texas legislature this is not a decision we wanted.”

Standing near a pile of empty boxes and a decorative small forest of upright phalluses, Zander said that Cocks Not Glocks has distributed more than 5,000 dildos in the past five days, donated by sex shops. A few metres away, someone waved a poster that declared “Cock and Load” near a sign fixed to a lamppost advising passers-by that this is a tobacco-free campus.

This trashy behavior gets you invited to the Obama White House. But:

Teenage girls are formally hosted at the White House to talk about dildos, but boy am I OUTRAGED by Mr. Trump! https://t.co/jBWsQq4xNO

— JJ Ladouceur (@smalwigwamlight) October 9, 2016

The truth is, our popular culture has grown extremely vulgar. A female friend of mine who loathes Trump surprised me today by saying, “I don’t want to hear complaining about what Trump said from any of these women who loved ‘Fifty Shades Of Grey.'” Ah. That would be the megaselling sadomasochistic novel that featured lines like:

“No,” I protest, trying to kick him off. He stops.

“If you struggle, I’ll tie your feet too. If you make a noise, Anastasia, I will gag you.”

And:

“How did you feel while I was hitting you and after?”

“I didn’t like it. I’d rather you didn’t do it again.”

“You weren’t meant to like it.”

Heather MacDonald unloads on the Left’s hypocrisy. Excerpt:

If any of these newfound exponents of female modesty felt any comparable nausea at the blatant display of female sexuality and, dare I say it, “pussy,” in Beyoncé’s acclaimed rock video “Formation,” say, they kept it to themselves. Beyoncé and her female chorus line rhythmically thrust their butts, crotches, and breasts to the camera, while Beyoncé brags of her sexual prowess:



Paparazzi, catch my fly, and my cocky fresh

I’m so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress (stylin’)

Oh yeah, baby, oh yeah I, ohhhhh, oh, yes, I like that

I did not come to play with you hoes, haha

I came to slay, bitch

When he f**k me good I take his ass to Red Lobster, cause I slay

If he hit it right, I might take him on a flight on my chopper, cause I slay

Drop him off at the mall, let him buy some J’s, let him shop up, cause I slay

I might get your song played on the radio station, cause I slay

Sounds like a sexual quid pro quo, ripe for a harassment lawsuit. The “Formation” video, which inspired Beyoncé’s Super Bowl halftime performance in January (to another universal swoon from the entertainment industry), also shows a very young girl engaging in some precocious twerking, a grotesque travesty of childhood. No objections to that destruction of the innocence of childhood from the DNC.

President Obama has singled out Beyoncé for praise, and the singer is a big Hillary Clinton supporter, to not a word of protest from Clinton regarding her status as a role model for young girls. Bill Clinton met with Beyoncé and her husband, rapper Jay Z, in September. If Bill or Hillary thinks the lyrics of Jay Z’s “Big Pimpin‘” “horrific,” in Hillary’s words, they are not letting on:

You know I thug em, f**k em, love em, leave em

Cause I don’t fu**in need em

Take em out the hood, keep em lookin good

But I don’t fu**in feed em

First time they fuss I’m breezin

Talkin bout, “What’s the reasons?”

I’m a pimp in every sense of the word, bitch

Better trust than believe em

In the cut where I keep em

til I need a nut, til I need to beat the guts

Then it’s, beep beep and I’m pickin em up

Let em play with the d**k in the truck

Many chicks wanna put Jigga fist in cuffs

Divorce him and split his bucks

Just because you got good head, I’m a break bread

so you can be livin it up? Sh*t I

parts with nothin, y’all be frontin

Me give my heart to a woman?

Not for nothin, never happen.

More:

The sudden onset of Victorian vapors among the liberal intelligentsia and political class at the revelation of Trump’s locker-room talk is part and parcel of the Left’s hypocrisy when it comes to feminism and sexual liberation. A routine objection to Trump is that he makes, in the words of the New York Times, “gutter attacks on women.” But why should women be exempt from Trump’s gutter attacks on anyone he wants to humiliate? Trump’s gratuitous nastiness to men and women alike, kicking people when they are down, unfits him to serve as the premier civic role model for the nation’s children. But the feminists can’t have it both ways: declaring that women should be equal to men in all things and then still demand a chivalric deference to female’s delicate sensibilities. Either women are the same as men or they’re not. It is particularly galling to see the selective resurrection of Victorian values from the same crowd that has been pushing transgender locker rooms on the world, in an effort to destroy the last shred of girls’ innate sexual modesty.

Read the whole thing. She’s right. Trump is a dirtbag, but he’s got plenty of company on the Left. We live in a pornified culture. Can you imagine any president prior to this one bringing to the White House, and honoring, a group of college girls who pass out large plastic phalluses on campus? It infuriates me to see so many conservatives, especially conservative Christians, giving Trump a pass on this inexcusable grossness because at least he’s not Hillary Clinton. But it also infuriates me to see the kind of left-wing hypocrisy Heather Mac Donald is talking about.

I hate this dying culture, and am eager to encourage any and all to secede from it.

UPDATE: People. People. I’m not making an equivalence between sexual assault and a culture that permits extreme displays of vulgarity. I’m saying they are connected in ways that ought to trouble all of us.

Saigon Chopper Time At RNC

Priebus cancels TV appearances, advises RNC staffers to "do what's best for them." It's every man for himself in the #Republican party.

— Alex Baker (@baker_alex) October 9, 2016

Remember, Priebus has spent lots of time personally with Trump since the audio scandal broke on Friday. He knows what’s coming tonight.

This is really happening.

Jason Stanley Spirals Ever Downward

Suzanne Tucker/Shutterstock

The moral and intellectual collapse of troubled Yale philosopher Jason Stanley continues. He’s now claiming that criticism from me and others over his (and unstable Georgetown Prof. Rebecca Kukla’s) foul public vitriol directed at Prof. Richard Swinburne and Swinburne’s defenders is because of — wait for it — anti-Semitism. From a statement he has posted:

On my public post, someone posted a disturbing comment about Swinburne’s death. I contemplated deleting it but then wanted to wait to see if anyone would ‘like’ it before addressing its horrors (no one did). It is hard to avoid the suspicion that the media discussion starting with the September 28th piece in The American Conservative, and then the Washington Times, is straightforwardly anti-Semitic. How did a non-story about the complexity of communication that results when screenshots from private conversations are made public, become a national story about two leftist Jewish professors and the dangers they pose?

At first, the story was solely about me. Then, the other Jewish philosopher who posted on that thread, Rebecca Kukla, was also targeted. What ensued was a terrible anti-Semitic narrative, channeling a virulent 20th century form of anti-Semitism, now present in Russia; that leftist Jews seek to use the issue of homosexuality to target the Christian faith. I hope we can, as a profession, have a respectful discussion about the two disputes I mentioned above. I responded to disrespect in kind, and I regret that this may have made it more difficult. We need to have these conversations, though, in a way that does not invite retribution against our gay colleagues, whose experiences of discrimination need to be highlighted, rather than forced ever more into the shadows. And we need to have it in a way that does not help bring in the stain of anti-Semitism.

Man, is that ever shameless. I didn’t know Stanley was Jewish until after I had posted about him, and I learned that Kukla is Jewish from this blog post of Stanley’s. I guess the charge of anti-Semitism is the last refuge to which a scoundrel like Stanley clings. The “non-story” is, in fact, a big story. As a college professor explained to me, the fact that eminent philosophers at places like Yale, Georgetown, and Columbia (all of whom were represented in the filthy attacks) feel at liberty to say in public fora “F–k you, assholes,” “suck my queer cock,” and similar things, in response to academic colleagues taking positions with which they strongly disagree, tells you a lot about the state of moral and intellectual life in the academy today. Left-wing professors are generally free to say any hateful thing they like about their opponents, demonizing them, cursing them, and driving them out.

For bullies like Jason Stanley to now claim that they are the real victims here is nervy. First Stanley told the Yale Daily News that a Vast Right Wing Conspiracy was out to get him. Now it’s anti-Semites. Who’s it going to be next? The guy can’t simply admit that he was wrong, and promise to be more respectful. He actually wants people to believe too that he didn’t delete a reader statement on his Facebook wall that Swinburne should be killed because he wanted to call out those villains who agreed with its “horrors” (I agree that it was horrible, but I don’t for a second believe Stanley’s rationalization). Spin, spin, spin, Jason Stanley, but you’re not convincing anybody of anything other than that you have a lot of hatred and anger in your heart, as well as having a warped sense of decorum or decency, and that you cannot deal straightforwardly with these problems.

If people outside of Yale (and Georgetown) conclude that both institutions, at least on their philosophy faculties, employ professors who talk like that about those with whom they disagree, well hey, that’s on Yale and Georgetown.

I strongly repudiate the anti-Semitism to which Stanley has been subjected. Anti-Semites are the worst people. And I hate that Stanley has been made to feel physically unsafe because of this. I know what that feels like. My newspaper employer once had to hire off-duty police officers to protect my house 24/7 for three days because a gay-rights proponent was driving through the neighborhood attacking it, and sending homeless men to our door demanding money. The world is full of bad people. I would think that Jason Stanley would do his best to avoid being among them. Try harder, Professor.

Finally, I can’t let this go:

But much worse than that is the legitimation of the very real discrimination that gay philosophers have to face on a daily basis from colleagues, from students, and from the media.

Really? The media abuse gay philosophers daily? So do students? Colleagues? Daily? Bulls*it. I’d like to see evidence of that. As for Christian philosophers, we have evidence that Jason Stanley, Rebecca Kukla, and others are willing to abuse them publicly. A Christian philosopher who spoken about gays they way they did about Christians would be severely disciplined by their university — and ought to be! But there is a double standard in the academy, and all the cowardly spin by a paranoid, emotionally unstable Jason Stanley won’t erase it.

Still, I hope there is enough compassion and camaraderie among the Yale philosophy faculty for someone to stage an intervention. He’s making them all look bad.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

You buried the lede here, which is that he apologized to Swinburne: “I will begin by apologizing to Professor Richard Swinburne. I regret that he is involved at all, and I regret even bringing his name into the conversation in my public post.” Also there’s no link to the original post:

https://feministphilosophers.wordpress.com/2016/10/07/a-statement-from-jason-stanley/

She’s right. Sorry about that — I posted in haste. I have inserted a link into the original.

Answered Prayers & the GOP Meltdown

Hello from Indiana! I was at the Front Porch Republic event at Notre Dame today, but it sounds like the real action was further north, in Elkhorn, Wisconsin. McKay Coppins reports like a boss:

In a jarring illustration of the chaos now engulfing the Republican Party, supporters of Donald Trump clashed bitterly with GOP leaders at a rally here Saturday — booing elected officials, heckling Paul Ryan, and angrily demanding greater establishment support for their beleaguered presidential nominee.

Hey, what was that like? This:

Other elected officials became more combative with the audience. When Rep. Jim Sensenbrenner talked about how voters had been coming to the Fall Fest for years to support Ryan and other local Republicans, hecklers shouted, “Not anymore!” and, “I’m for Donald Trump!”

“Why don’t you listen to what I have to say instead of interrupting me?” Sensenbrenner snapped. Soon, the 73-year-old congressman was in a shouting match with the Trump supporters in the crowd. “Listen to me, please,” he kept repeating, before ordering the audience to “clean up your act.”

By the time it was Ryan’s turn to speak, the mood had grown indisputably hostile. He took the stage to scattered boos, and shouts of, “What about Donald Trump?” and, “Shame on you!”

“Look, let me just start out by saying: There’s a bit of an elephant in the room,” Ryan told the crowd. “And it’s a troubling situation … but that is not what we are here to talk about today. You know what we do here at Fall Fest? We talk about our ideas, we talk about our solutions, we talk about our conservative principles.”

Trump supporters greeted the message with a chorus of boos and abuse.

“Trump for president!”

“Mention Trump!”

“You turned your back on him!”

Coppins tweeted from the scene:

This was one of those events where it feels like you’re watching the Republican Party break up in real time. Unreal.

— McKay Coppins (@mckaycoppins) October 8, 2016

Y’know, time was I would have been unambiguously pleased as a conservative to watch the GOP establishment melt down, so we could open the door for new ideas. Never in a million years would I have expected Donald Freakin’ Trump to be the white-hot Jina Syndrome core. One thinks of the quote attributed to St. Teresa of Avila: “More tears are shed over answered prayers than unanswered ones.”

I never would have imagined the day when I could not allow my children to watch an American presidential debate because I was worried about what lewd and lascivious things the Republican nominee would say on live television. But here we are in October 2016, and this is a thing.

I commend to you this editorial from the Deseret News. To their great credit, Mormons have been right about Trump since the beginning. Excerpt:

In democratic elections, ideas have consequences, leadership matters and character counts.

The idea that women secretly welcome the unbridled and aggressive sexual advances of powerful men has led to the mistreatment, sorrow and subjugation of countless women for far too much of human history.

The notion that strength emanates from harsh, divisive and unbending rhetorical flourish mistakenly equates leadership with craven intimidation.

The belief that the party and the platform matter more than the character of the candidate ignores the wisdom of the ages that, “when the wicked beareth rule, the people mourn.” (Proverbs 29:2)

We understand that politicians and presidential candidates are human and that everyone makes mistakes. We do not believe that what is expressed in an unguarded moment of conversation should be the full measure of an individual. And we unquestionably support the principle that people deserve forgiveness, compassion and a second chance.

But history affirms that leaders’ examples either elevate or demean the lives of those being led. When choosing the ostensible leader of the free world, the American electorate requires the clear assurance that their chosen candidate will consistently put the well-being of others ahead of his or her own personal gratification. The most recent revelations of Trump’s lewdness disturb us not only because of his vulgar objectification of women, but also because they poignantly confirm Trump’s inability to self-govern.

What oozes from this audio is evil.

Well, it is. (Read Alan Jacobs’s comments on it).

The shame of it all is that many of the things Trump stands for, or pretended to stand for, were important and necessary. David Frum has been anti-Trump for a long time, but he gives Trump his due in this excellent essay, “How To Rebuild The Republican Party”. Excerpt:

But for all Trump’s many faults and flaws, he saw things that were true and important—and that few other leaders in his party have acknowledged in the past two decades.

Trump saw that Republican voters are much less religious in behavior than they profess to pollsters. He saw that the social-insurance state has arrived to stay. He saw that Americans regard healthcare as a right, not a privilege. He saw that Republican voters had lost their optimism about their personal futures—and the future of their country. He saw that millions of ordinary people who do not deserve to be dismissed as bigots were sick of the happy talk and reality-denial that goes by the too generous label of “political correctness.” He saw that the immigration polices that might have worked for the mass-production economy of the 1910s don’t make sense in the 2010s. He saw that rank-and-file Republicans had become nearly as disgusted with the power of money in politics as rank-and-file Democrats long have been. He saw that Republican presidents are elected, when they are elected, by employees as well as entrepreneurs. He saw these things, and he was right to see them.

The wiser response to the impending Republican electoral defeat is to learn from Trump’s insights—separate them from Trump’s volatile personality and noxious attitudes—and use them to develop better, more workable, and more broadly acceptable policies for a 21st-century center-right.

It is worth considering this weekend, as it all goes to hell for the GOP, why it was that a figure as ridiculous as Donald J. Trump managed to defeat what was widely thought of as the strongest GOP presidential field in years. For me, I think about that moment in the South Carolina debate back in February, when Trump said flat-out that the Iraq War was a mistake.  Jeb Bush got hot about it, and many in the Republican audience took Jeb’s side. But you know what? Trump was right. Jeb Bush was unquestionably the better man. But Trump was right. 

David Frum doesn’t mention this, but the Iraq War moment can stand for other things that Trump was (is) right about. If you think about it, it’s actually crazy that it took 13 years after the launch of the Iraq War, and the shambles it made of the Middle East, for a Republican presidential candidate, or any kind of senior Republican, to as much as say: “We screwed that up.”

Seriously, contemplate what that means. They could not even talk about it openly. And if they couldn’t talk about Iraq openly, and diverge from the True Conservative™ script, how many more things could they not talk about, for fear of violating True Conservative™ taboos?

It should not have taken a Donald Trump to come along and challenge these Republican shibboleths. The fact that nobody did this until Donald Trump did — Donald Trump, an arrogant, ignorant, shameless fool — is the most damning thing about the Republican Party in the post-Bush era. He is nemesis for this quote from an unnamed George W. Bush aide, printed in an October 2004 story in The New York Times Magazine:

Those were the days.

There Is No More Religious Right

Collin Hansen, an Evangelical Millennial, says the latest Trump mess is “the last spastic breath from the Religious Right before its overdue death.” Mercy! More:

Trump can maintain nearly all his evangelical support in the voting booth despite unrepentant lying and cheating. But these same leaders still insist on a traditional, biblical ethic when it comes to views on same-sex marriage in evangelical ministries.

The latest evidence of Trump’s depravity hits at the same time one of the leading evangelical parachurch ministries, InterVarsity Christian Fellowship, has come under scrutiny for requiring staff to believe that God intends sex to be enjoyed only in the context of marriage between one man and one woman. If you don’t see the connection between these two developments, then you’ll miss the story that will define evangelical unity and witness for the next generation.

To the older evangelicals planning to vote for Trump: You can try to explain the difference in electing a president and hiring a 23-year-old college graduate to evangelize students. You can say we’re electing a commander in chief and not a Sunday school teacher. You can say that God often raises up pagan leaders to deliver his people from their enemies. But no one is fooled by your arguments.

They can see you will apparently excuse anything in a Republican nominee so long as the alternative is a manifestly unqualified Clinton. And they will conclude that they don’t really need to listen to you when it comes to “traditional, biblical ethics.”

Boom! Note well that Hansen is a theological conservative. More:

Grace abounds for Christians who fall short of the glory of God and call on the name of Jesus for forgiveness and salvation. But woe to the hypocrites who hold the most powerful leader in the world to a lower standard than they do the searching young believer who desires to serve God and neighbor.

Read the whole thing.

Some of the Evangelical Old Guard is still standing behind the crotch-grabbing molester.  Bill Bennett, a Catholic social conservative stalwart, is not among them — but he’s stepping back for prudential reasons, not moral ones:

WILLIAM J. BENNETT, a Trump ally, to WaPo: Trump “should step down… It’s a shame, a crying shame, but he can’t win.”

— Robert Costa (@costareports) October 8, 2016

Not “because he is a moral disgrace,” but “because he can’t win.” Whoever thought we would see the day when a breath mint had more integrity than the Book Of Virtues author:

Tic Tac respects all women. We find the recent statements and behavior completely inappropriate and unacceptable.

— Tic Tac USA (@TicTacUSA) October 8, 2016

I don’t know what kind of shape the GOP is going to be in after November, and I don’t think anybody can say. But the future of the Religious Right is a lot more clear. There will still be religious conservatives in America, even among Millennials and Xers. But they will be done with the Old Guard.

When the smoke clears after November, the Benedict Option will be all we will have left.

Hillary Dreams Of ‘Open Borders’

“My dream is a hemispheric common market, with open trade and open borders, some time in the future with energy that is as green and sustainable as we can get it, powering growth and opportunity for every person in the hemisphere.” — Hillary Clinton, in a paid speech to a Brazilian bank, May 16, 2013

Our country is so screwed. This is a foul election. I wish neither one would win.

Quit Now, Trump

Well, gosh, a lot can happen when a guy is on a flight. Here’s the Washington Post story about the Donald Trump audio. Excerpts:

Donald Trump bragged in vulgar terms about kissing, groping and trying to have sex with women during a 2005 conversation caught on a hot microphone — saying that “when you’re a star, they let you do it” — according to a video obtained by The Washington Post.

The video captures Trump talking with Billy Bush of “Access Hollywood” on a bus with Access Hollywood written across the side. They were arriving on the set of “Days of Our Lives” to tape a segment about Trump’s upcoming cameo on the soap opera.

The tape obtained by the Post includes audio of Bush and Trump’s conversation inside the bus, as well as audio and video once they emerge from it to begin shooting the segment.

In that audio, Trump discusses a failed attempt to seduce a woman, whose full name is not given in the video.

“I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it,” Trump is heard saying. It was unclear when the events he was describing took place. The tape was recorded several months after he married his third wife, Melania.

“Whoa,” another voice said.

“I did try and f— her. She was married,” Trump says.

More:

“I’ve gotta use some tic tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump says.“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

“And when you’re a star they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

“Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently Bush’s.

“Grab them by the p—y,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

Your Republican nominee for the presidency, ladies and gentlemen.

Read the whole thing. If you connect to the story, you can hear the audio and watch the video. Billy Bush is about as big a pig as Donald Trump is. Billy Bush is not running for to be President of the United States, though.

Well, well, well. There is no way a pig like this will be elected president. None. It is time for the Republican Party bigs to step in and tell Trump to stand down and let Mike Pence move up. That’s the only way the Republicans will have the remotest chance. If not, Trump might well cause the GOP to lose the Senate too.

I wonder what Christian conservatives who have endorsed Trump will say now? Let’s ask one. Hey CBN correspondent David Brody, whaddaya say about a Republican candidate who bragged about cheating on his third wife and grabbing women’s vaginas?

This just in: Donald Trump is a flawed man! We ALL sin every single day. What if we had a "hot mic" around each one of us all the time?

— David Brody (@TheBrodyFile) October 7, 2016

Unbelievable. I agree with J.D. Vance:

Fellow Christians, everyone is watching us when we apologize for this man. Lord help us. https://t.co/5KAqo8sKmq

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) October 7, 2016

Man, is that debate on Sunday night going to be the best political TV ever. He’s going to spontaneously combust.

But seriously, all you religious conservative Trump backers had better get out now. You know it’s never going to get better for him. We’ve all known that this is the kind of dirtbag he is. Now it is impossible to deny. Somebody on my Twitter feed said that if the Democrats are releasing this tape now, four weeks before the election, just imagine what else they have.

Can you imagine being Mike Pence now, having to face the press and defend this guy? Jeez, Trump talks like Yale and Georgetown philosophers.

The Little Way of … Donald Trump?

Wendell Berry said this in his Jefferson Lecture a few years ago:

My teacher, Wallace Stegner … thought rightly that we Americans, by inclination at least, have been divided into two kinds: “boomers” and “stickers.” Boomers, he said, are “those who pillage and run,” who want “to make a killing and end up on Easy Street,” whereas stickers are “those who settle, and love the life they have made and the place they have made it in.” “Boomer” names a kind of person and a kind of ambition that is the major theme, so far, of the history of the European races in our country. “Sticker” names a kind of person and also a desire that is, so far, a minor theme of that history, but a theme persistent enough to remain significant and to offer, still, a significant hope.

The boomer is motivated by greed, the desire for money, property, and therefore power. James B. Duke was a boomer, if we can extend the definition to include pillage in absentia. He went, or sent, wherever the getting was good, and he got as much as he could take.

Stickers on the contrary are motivated by affection, by such love for a place and its life that they want to preserve it and remain in it. Of my grandfather I need to say only that he shared in the virtues and the faults of his kind and time, one of his virtues being that he was a sticker. He belonged to a family who had come to Kentucky from Virginia, and who intended to go no farther. He was the third in his paternal line to live in the neighborhood of our little town of Port Royal, and he was the second to own the farm where he was born in 1864 and where he died in 1946.

I strongly agree with Alan Jacobs that Berry is wrong to insist on such a black-and-white portrayal. Not everybody who sticks is virtuous; not everybody who booms is vicious. Still, the distinction may be helpful in understanding this bit of news: Donald Trump is far ahead of Hillary Clinton among voters who stayed behind in their hometowns. Excerpt:

How people plan to vote appears to correspond, albeit broadly, with whether they decided to move away from where they grew up. According to the just-released PRRI/The Atlantic poll, 40 percent of Donald Trump’s likely voters live in the community where they spent their youth, compared with just 29 percent of Hillary Clinton voters. And of the 71 percent of Clinton voters who have left their hometowns, most—almost 60 percent of that group—now live more than two hours away.*

The effect is even stronger among white voters, who already tend toward Trump. Even a bit of distance matters: Trump wins by 9 points among white likely voters who live within two hours of their childhood home, but by a whopping 26 percent among whites who live in their hometown proper.

This brings to mind a surprisingly sympathetic essay by David Hill, a self-identified feminist and Hillary Clinton supporter. It starts like this:

I talked at length with a Trump supporter I grew up around. I wanted to understand. I respected her growing up. I wanted to know why a person as kind and compassionate as I remember her is voting for someone like Donald Trump.

She was a family friend, a good person. In rural Ohio, everything was tight. Money, jobs. If you really needed quick cash, she’d put you to work doing landscaping. She’d pay fairly and reliably for the area.

She’s voting for Donald Trump. I disagree with her choice, but I understand why she rejects Clinton so fiercely, and why she’s been swept up in Donald Trump’s particular brand of right-wing populism. I feel that on the left, it’s increasingly easy to ignore these people, to disregard them, to write them off as racists, bigots, or uneducated. I think that’s a loss for everyone involved, and that sometimes listening can help you to at least understand why a person is making the choices they make, so you can work on the root causes. For her, the root cause isn’t racism. In fact, I remember her as one of the only people in the area who proudly hired black workers, in a place where that was a huge issue. She fought over that choice.

The woman has a landscaping business that crashed in 2008, when her customer base dried up in the housing collapse. More:

She told me that every week, it seemed there was another default letter, another foreclosure, another bank demanding more blood from her dry veins. To her, that pile of default notices and demands for payment looked suspiciously similar to Hillary Clinton’s top donor list.

To her, that pile of default notices and demands for payment looked suspiciously similar to Hillary Clinton’s top donor list.

She lost everything she worked so hard for. Obama swore he was going to help. The Wall Street bailout did seem to help Wall Street. But it did absolutely nothing for her. She turns on the news and sees how the Dow Jones is doing better than ever. But that didn’t bring her house and livelihood back. Liberals insist that Obama’s made her life better. But, now she’s driving a car that falls apart randomly while having to pay those same banks for a car she doesn’t own and never will. It’s difficult to convince someone whose life is objectively worse that their life is better. And it’s disengenuous to try. You can break down the specifics, sure. But when someone’s hungry, and you’re busy silencing their complaints by telling them how well world hunger is improving, you’re just going to upset them.

This is not a person who is stupid or racist. She knows Bush caused the economy collapse with his irresponsible tax policies and wars. But she saw liberals as fighting for the banks’ recovery, to hell with her needs. She sees in Hillary someone who celebrates that approach. Who measures US success by the success of multinational mega corporations — corporations who undercut and destroy local businesses. This is a person who grew up in a town with a friendly neighborhood general store, a locally-owned hardware store, farmers’ markets, florists, and auto shops. All of these businesses closed when Walmart moved into town. All their owners now work at that Walmart for a fraction of their previous wages, no benefits, and no hope for something better, something of their own. And now, she sees a free trade supporting former Walmart executive about to come in to office, and it feels like salt in her community’s wounds.

This is a wounded person. Insulting her or continuing to hurt her isn’t going to help. She’s swept up in Trump’s message because she feels someone’s finally listening. Right-wing populism is an awful thing. But desperate people with their backs against the wall will grasp on to whatever they feel will bring a change. Neoliberal capitalism is not sustainable for these people.

Read the whole thing. It should be said that the standard-issue GOP wouldn’t have done anything for this woman either.

My concern is that the pro-Trump “stickers” will be disappointed by Trump, because there’s not a lot he can do to make their jobs come back. I could be wrong. Anyway, if we have an economy that rewards people for being unattached to place, and able and willing to move without hesitation, we are going to get the kind of low social capital society we have now.

Here’s an attempt by a prominent left-wing Anglican clergyman to square the circle. Giles Fraser writes from London:

A thick community is one with a high degree of social solidarity and a low degree of diversity. This is the sort of community where people are similar in language and culture, and where, as a consequence, there is a high degree of trust among people. It’s a relatively stable place – not a lot of coming and going. You grow up where your parents grew up. You die near where you were born. People leave their back doors open and know their neighbours’ business. The best thing about a thick society is that people look after each other and have a high degree of civic pride. The worst is that it’s often not good at dealing with difference, or with outsiders.

A thin community is one with a high degree of diversity and a low degree of social solidarity. In this community (which often isn’t really much of a community at all) you can be as different as you like. Nobody cares. People come and go all the time – “citizens of the world but citizens of nowhere”, to paraphrase Theresa May. You don’t always have much in common with people living next door, and often you don’t even know their names. You shop online. Loneliness can be a problem. But diversity is celebrated.

Fraser talks about how multinational corporations love thin communities, because they are easier to manipulate for the labor market’s needs. He goes on to say that his own south London congregation is highly diverse, and hooray for that; shared faith is the glue that holds them together as a community. However, Britain is an extraordinarily post-Christian, secularized society. More:

Elsewhere, however, difference creates huge gaps in the social fabric, with many people now unconnected to each other, the rich in their gated communities in the sky and poor youth sitting around on the estates smoking weed. As the thick society has gradually thinned out, it is the elderly who pay the price. People don’t visit as much as they used to. We know each other less and less.

Brexit and the new mood in politics is misunderstood as a hostility to outsiders, though it is easily purloined by racists. Rather, it is a cry for community, for togetherness, for the local, for mutuality, for social solidarity. [The new Tory PM] Theresa May, the vicar’s daughter, wants to find all this in a return to the past. That’s the wrong answer. But at least she’s answering the right question. We are still looking for a new – doubtless very different – St Benedict.

So I’ve heard.

The Abolition Of Male

Another triumph in the march of progress:

Starting the first week of October, the government will pay for gender reassignment treatments and surgeries for eligible soldiers — an estimated expense between $2.4 million to $8.4 million per year.

There are between 1,320 and 6,630 transgender troops in the active-duty force of 1.3 million, according the RAND Corp. which conducted a study for the Pentagon. Of those troops, RAND estimates that between 30 and 140 would like hormone treatment, and 25 to 130 would seek surgery.

More:

Hormone therapy doesn’t require designated recovery time, but reassignment surgeries require up to 21 days medical leave plus up to 90 days medical disability, according to RAND. Male-to-female genital surgery, which requires the longest recovery, leaves soldiers nondeployable for 135 days. The study says some might suffer from postoperative complications that would “render them unfit for duty” – for example, 6 to 20% of people who have a vaginoplasty have complications.

Right. Nothing says “unfit for duty” like an unhealed vaginoplasty.

Isn’t it amazing how the Obama administration ordered the military not only to accept trans soldiers, but to pay for their sex-change operation, and nobody complained? Here’s the military’s handbook for dealing with transition.

How can any chaplain from an orthodox Christian church/denomination consider remaining in the military under these conditions?

Meanwhile, at LSU Medical School, gender ideology is being presented to med students as medical fact. From a slide show:

Meanwhile, in Canada, a brave college professor will soon be picking out his pajamas for the progressivist gulag. Psychology professor Jordan Peterson says he will not abide by a proposed law making it a crime not to call a person by his or her chosen personal pronoun. A CBC interviewer struggles to deal with this Neanderthal:

CO: In Ontario, the law states that gender is a “person’s sense of being a woman, a man, both, or neither, or anywhere along the gender spectrum.”

JP: Yes. That particularly statement I regard as logically incoherent to the point of dangerousness. I think that the reason it’s been rushed into law is that people haven’t been paying attention. The mere fact that I don’t want to use pronouns that some else has decided I should use doesn’t mean that I don’t believe that transgender people exist. It also doesn’t make me a bigot. Regardless of how hard people try to push me into that corner — I’m not a bigot.

More:

CO: Isn’t it also the role of a society to make people feel included and to have inclusiveness?

JP: No. It’s not the role of society to make people feel included. That’s not the role of society. The role of society is to maintain a modicum of peace between people. It’s not the role of society to make people feel comfortable. I think society is changing in many ways. I can tell you one thing that I’m very terrified of, and you can think about this. I think that the continual careless pushing of people by left wing radicals is dangerously waking up the right wing. So you can consider this a prophecy from me if you want. Inside the collective is a beast and the beast uses its fists. If you wake up the beast then violence emerges. I’m afraid that this continual pushing by radical left wingers is going to wake up the beast.

Well, Prof. Peterson, you know what they do to prophets. I wonder, though, how the US military is going to respond to soldiers who declare themselves genderfluid, gender non-binary, or whatever of the 31 flavors on offer this month? I’m serious.

Trump To Catholics: ‘I’ve Got Your Back’

From LittleSistersOfThePoor.org

Donald Trump sent a letter to Catholic leaders gathering in Denver. Excerpt:

As First Lady, US Senator, Secretary of State, and two-time presidential candidate, Hillary Clinton has been hostile to the core issues and policies of greatest concern to Catholics: life, religious liberty, Supreme Court nominations, affordable and quality healthcare, educational choice and home schooling.

For instance, Hillary Clinton supports forcing The Little Sisters of the Poor who have taken care of the elderly poor since 1839, pay for contraceptives in their health care plan (even though they have never wanted them, never used them and never will), and having the government fine them heavily if they continue to refuse to abide by this onerous mandate.

That is a hostility to religious liberty you will never see in a Trump Administration.

Hillary Clinton’s hostility to the issues of greatest importance to Catholics is made worse by her running mate Senator Tim Kaine.

Once pro-life and against partial birth abortion, Kaine now has a 100% voting record from the National Abortion Rights Action League. Kaine once was for traditional marriage, even saying “it is a uniquely valuable institution that must be preserved”, but as of 2013, Kaine no longer supported traditional marriage. And on religious liberty? Shockingly, even Kaine supports forcing the Little Sisters of the Poor to pay for contraceptives in their health care plan, and to have the government fine them heavily if they refuse.

On issues and policies of greatest concern to Catholics, the differences between myself and Hillary Clinton are stark. I will stand with Catholics and fight for you. Hillary Clinton has been openly hostile to these core Catholic issues for a long time, and is only going to be worse with Tim Kaine now following her lead.

On life, I am, and will remain, pro-life. I will defend your religious liberties and the right to fully and freely practice your religion, as individuals, business owners and academic institutions. I will make absolutely certain religious orders like The Little Sisters of Poor are not bullied by the federal government because of their religious beliefs. I will protect and work to expand educational choice, the rights of homeschooling families, and end Common Core. I will repeal and replace Obamacare so you can have better and more affordable health care. I will keep our country and communities safe while respecting the dignity of each human being. I will help Catholic families and workers, and all families and workers, by bringing jobs back to our country where they belong. And I will appoint Justices to the Supreme Court who will strictly interpret the Constitution and not legislate from the bench, like Justice Clarence Thomas and the late and beloved great Catholic thinker and jurist, Justice Antonin Scalia.

I find this encouraging.

(Hey readers, I’m about to be traveling for the rest of the day to the Front Porch Republic camp meeting and tent revival at Notre Dame. Comments approval will be slow. Please be patient. You will see posts going up the rest of the day, because I have written them and scheduled them. I’ll approve comments as soon as I get to South Bend and find a wifi connection.)

UPDATE: On the other hand, Trump really is beyond scummy. Excerpt:

In that audio, Trump discusses a failed attempt to seduce a woman, whose full name is not given in the video.

“I moved on her and I failed. I’ll admit it,” Trump is heard saying. It was unclear when the events he was describing took place. The tape was recorded several months after he married his third wife, Melania.

“Whoa,” another voice said.

“I did try and f— her. She was married,” Trump says.

Trump continues: “And I moved on her very heavily. In fact, I took her out furniture shopping. She wanted to get some furniture. I said, ‘I’ll show you where they have some nice furniture.’”

“I moved on her like a bitch, but I couldn’t get there. And she was married,” Trump says. “Then all of a sudden I see her, she’s now got the big phony tits and everything. She’s totally changed her look.”

More:

“I’ve gotta use some tic tacs, just in case I start kissing her,” Trump says.“You know I’m automatically attracted to beautiful — I just start kissing them. It’s like a magnet. Just kiss. I don’t even wait.”

“And when you’re a star they let you do it,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

“Whatever you want,” says another voice, apparently [TV correspondent Billy] Bush’s.

“Grab them by the p—y,” Trump says. “You can do anything.”

Gonna be real interesting to see how Christian Trumpsters spin this one.