Rod Dreher's Blog, page 55

‘Trust’ And ‘Authority’ Are Such Lonely Words

I am vaccinated, and I think you should be too. But this below is a good Twitter thread about how authorities have progressively destroyed their credibility. (The links aren’t live in what follows, except the Jussie Smollett interview; if you want a version where the links are live, go to the original thread):

Yes, I do.

Yesterday I was at a social event in Budapest at which there were people from various European countries. There was a lot of talk about Covid restrictions in this or that country, and a lot of anxiety over who to believe about what. I realized how little I actually know about any of this.

Meanwhile, the medical profession continues to discredit itself via wokeness.Katie Herzog reports:

During a recent endocrinology course at a top medical school in the University of California system, a professor stopped mid-lecture to apologize for something he’d said at the beginning of class.

“I don’t want you to think that I am in any way trying to imply anything, and if you can summon some generosity to forgive me, I would really appreciate it,” the physician says in a recording provided by a student in the class (whom I’ll call Lauren). “Again, I’m very sorry for that. It was certainly not my intention to offend anyone. The worst thing that I can do as a human being is be offensive.”

His offense: using the term “pregnant women.”

“I said ‘when a woman is pregnant,’ which implies that only women can get pregnant and I most sincerely apologize to all of you.”

It wasn’t the first time Lauren had heard an instructor apologize for using language that, to most Americans, would seem utterly inoffensive. Words like “male” and “female.”

Why would medical school professors apologize for referring to a patient’s biological sex? Because, Lauren explains, in the context of her medical school “acknowledging biological sex can be considered transphobic.”

When sex is acknowledged by her instructors, it’s sometimes portrayed as a social construct, not a biological reality, she says. In a lecture on transgender health, an instructor declared: “Biological sex, sexual orientation, and gender are all constructs. These are all constructs that we have created.”

In other words, some of the country’s top medical students are being taught that humans are not, like other mammals, a species comprising two sexes. The notion of sex, they are learning, is just a man-made creation.

The idea that sex is a social construct may be interesting debate fodder in an anthropology class. But in medicine, the material reality of sex really matters, in part because the refusal to acknowledge sex can have devastating effects on patient outcomes.

In 2019, the New England Journal of Medicine reported the case of a 32-year-old transgender man who went to an ER complaining of abdominal pain. While the patient disclosed he was transgender, his medical records did not. He was simply a man. The triage nurse determined that the patient, who was obese, was in pain because he’d stopped taking a medication meant to relieve hypertension. This was no emergency, she decided. She was wrong: The patient was, in fact, pregnant and in labor. By the time hospital staff realized that, it was too late. The baby was dead. And the patient, despite his own shock at being pregnant, was shattered.

More:

Carole Hooven is the author of T: The Story of Testosterone, the Hormone that Dominates and Divides Us and a professor at Harvard who focuses on behavioral endocrinology. I discussed Lauren’s story with her and Hooven found it deeply troubling. “Today’s students will go on to hold professional positions that give them a great deal of power over others’ bodies and minds. These young people are our future doctors, educators, researchers, statisticians, psychologists. To ignore or downplay the reality of sex and sex-based differences is to perversely handicap our understanding and our ability to increase human health and thriving.”

A former dean of a leading medical school agrees: “I don’t know the extent to which the stories you relate are now widespread in medical education, but to the extent that they are — and I hear some of this is popping up at my own institution — they are a serious departure from the expectation that medical education and practice should be based on science and be free from imposition of ideology and ideology-based intimidation.”

He added: “How male and female members of our species develop, how they differ genetically, anatomically, physiologically, and with respect to diseases and their treatment are foundational to clinical medicine and research. Efforts to erase or diminish these foundations should be unacceptable to responsible professional leaders.”

You have to read the whole thing. It’s like something from a dystopian novel … but it is happening right now. If this doesn’t get stopped soon, medical students are going to have to leave America to be trained in actual medical science. You should ask your doctor if he or she believes that men can get pregnant. If your doctor says yes, better find another doctor, because that one is on his or her way to being a quack.

Wokeness is accelerating the auto-destruction of authority, but it didn’t start with wokeness. I’m old enough to remember how the US Government and the Republican Party wrecked its own authority with the Iraq and Afghanistan wars. I recall how Wall Street did the same for Big Business with the 2008 crash. The Democrats are destroying themselves now with their embrace of wokeness. In the eyes of many of the young, Evangelical leaders harmed their own authority by going all-in for Donald Trump. The authority of the US Catholic bishops is a shell of its former self after two decades of scandal, the most recent revelation of which was that the de facto CEO of the US Conference of Catholic Bishops was a serial user of the gay hook-up app Grindr.

By the way, Matthew Hennessey, writing in the Wall Street Journal, sticks up for the unfairly maligned reporting team at The Pillar, which broke the story. Hennessey writes, in part:

Is it news? Without a doubt. Catholicism is the largest religious denomination in the U.S. Its bishops conference is an umbrella organization that provides leadership to the more than 70 million American Catholics in nearly 150 territorial dioceses. In June the conference’s deliberations over whether to deny communion to Catholic politicians who are out of step with church teaching on abortion made headlines.

If the priest who leads the USCCB is living a life antithetical to church teaching on matters of human sexuality, it’s a story—especially if part of his job is to help craft and oversee the church’s response to the past decade’s sexual abuse and misconduct scandals. It’s no secret that a clerical culture of deception enabled those scandals—and children weren’t the only victims. Many good men, including priests and seminarians with bright futures, had their vocations destroyed by that culture.

He goes on to say that the Pillar team got the information legally, and in line with normative journalism practice. Hennessey doesn’t put it this way, but it’s fair to conclude from his writing that what ticked off most of the critics was the fact that it busted a gay priest, and gave weight to the suspicion many lay Catholics have that the priesthood is honeycombed with sexually active gay men who live dishonest lives exploiting the Church.

Do you trust the US military? I don’t, at least not its senior leadership, who have embraced wokeness, and have traded in fighting actual wars for fighting the culture war. Do you trust the media? I don’t, and I am the media! Something as simple as spending time in Hungary, and realizing that while Viktor Orban’s Budapest is not the Athens of Pericles, the reality here is very different from what we Americans and Western Europeans are told by our media. In America, you can scarcely find fair, balanced, accurate coverage of issues involving race, sexuality, or religion. Do you trust academia? Do I even have to ask?

And there’s this:

 

Where is all this going? From Live Not By Lies:

Totalitarian movements, said [Hannah] Arendt, are “mass organizations of atomized, isolated individuals.” She continues:

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

The political theorist wrote those words in the 1950s, a period we look back on as a golden age of community cohesion. Today, loneliness is widely recognized by scientists as a critical social and even medical problem. In the year 2000, Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam published Bowling Alone, an acclaimed study documenting the steep decline of civil society since midcentury and the resulting atomization of America.

Since Putnam’s book, we have experienced the rise of social media networks offering a facsimile of “connection.” Yet we grow ever lonelier and more isolated. It is no coincidence that millennials and members of Generation Z register much higher rates of loneliness than older Americans, as well as significantly greater support for socialism. It’s as if they aspire to a politics that can replace the community they wish they had.

Sooner or later, loneliness and isolation are bound to have political effects. The masses supporting totalitarian movements, says Arendt, grew “out of the fragments of a highly atomized society whose competitive structure and concomitant loneliness of the individual had been held in check only through membership in a class.”

Civic trust is another bond that holds society together. Arendt writes that the Soviet government, in an effort to monopolize control, caused the Soviet people to turn on one another. In the United States, we have seen nothing like the state aggressively dismantling civil society—but it’s happening all the same.

In Bowling Alone, Putnam documented the unraveling of civic bonds since the 1950s. Americans attend fewer club meetings, have fewer dinner parties, eat dinner together as a family less, and are much less connected to their neighbors. They are disconnected from political parties and more skeptical of institutions. They spend much more time alone watching television or cocooning on the internet. The result is that ordinary people feel more anxious, isolated, and vulnerable.

A polity filled with alienated individuals who share little sense of community and purpose are prime targets for totalitarian ideologies and leaders who promise solidarity and meaning.

In hopeful news, I spent some time late Sunday afternoon with people who are doing something about it. That will be the subject of my next post.

The post ‘Trust’ And ‘Authority’ Are Such Lonely Words appeared first on The American Conservative.

In Defense Of J.D. Vance

I have avoided writing about my friend J.D. Vance’s candidacy for US Senate, for a couple of reasons. He’s been a friend since just before Hillbilly Elegy shot to national prominence. I have so much respect and affection for him that I don’t trust myself to evaluate him objectively. I figured that when I write about him, I would need to disclose that, of course, but I also figured it would make what I wrote about him less valuable. Most people know that we are friends, and that I was an early champion of Hillbilly Elegy. I am admitting to you that I cannot be fair about J.D. Vance. I have thought since shortly after I got to know him that he would be a terrific member of Congress (Senator or House member), and have told him for years that I look forward to the day when he runs for office.

That day has arrived. I haven’t talked to J.D. since I’ve been in Hungary (he declared while I was here), and haven’t been following his campaign. I knew that there was some nasty remarks about him coming from the both the Left and some quarters on the Right, but I haven’t followed it, in part because I can’t stand to see a friend trashed. You’d feel the same way if it was happening to your friend.

(This, by the way, is why I deliberately avoid people trashing David Brooks, a friend with whom I disagree about a lot of issues, but who is a good and loyal man, and one to whom I am and will be loyal, no matter what. I scarcely know David French, but I count him as enough of a friend to avoid the piling-on that routinely happens to him, even though I really disagree with him on certain matters, and have said so on this blog. I don’t mind at all disagreeing publicly with either David on politics, policy, or cultural matters, but I will not descend into the vicious assault on their characters. I believe them both to be honorable, and even if they weren’t, they’re my friends, so screw you, jack. Sorry, but that’s how I roll.)

The point is, I know that I have limited credibility when writing about J.D.’s candidacy, so I resolved to choose carefully my opportunities to speak. This is going to be one of those times.

The great Abigail Shrier has written a lengthy and novel defense of J.D. in the face of a specific kind of attack. I had not read The Atlantic piece she references, but was grieved to see it. Nobody likes seeing their friends treated that way in public, but it particularly stings for me, because I know the character of the man who is taking this sh*t because he dares to put himself forward for public office. Here’s the heart of it:

Vance positions himself as a populist. He thunders against Corporate America, university endowments, and the billionaires of Silicon Valley. He is forthright about his defense of religious freedom and his support for many of the Trump-era policies. But he offers something that may be more important right now than any policy position: a conservatism that refrains from denigrating and dividing the American people.

Consider, for a moment, politicians that have overachieved in the years since Vance wrote Hillbilly Elegy. Donald Trump and Joe Biden both confounded their critics and exceeded expectations. The cackling finger-waggers—Hillary Clinton, Kamala Harris, and Elizabeth Warren—all underperformed. There are other differences among them (sex often seems a factor), but at least one important difference between the winners and losers might be described in terms of who did – and didn’t – seem to look down on us. Our 45th President was a man who unapologetically inhaled two Big Macs and two Filet-O-Fish sandwiches at supper and washed it all down with a chocolate shake. A man roundly dismissed as an idiot by the media elite, and every other type of elite. And our 46th, the man who would beat him—in my view, the only Democratic candidate who could—had suffered many more wrenching personal losses than all of his Democratic primary competitors combined. His son still struggles with addiction. For 2020, he dropped the smarmy comebacks of past campaigns and spoke with more humility and less self-righteousness. After an early primary debate in which Kamala Harris brutally scorched him for past missteps, Biden greeted her with, “Go easy on me, kid.”

For years, I received a monthly statement from the Los Angeles Department of Water and Power stamped with a “sad face” at my family’s usage—and was reminded that we are awash in judgmentalism in America. The Left judges us as implicitly biased by looking at our skin color, castigates us for our energy consumption, scorns our resistance to activist-led race and gender educational efforts. The Left judges our choice of automobile, our decision to have three or more children, the food we place in our grocery cart.

But we have no stomach for right-wing Holy Rollers, either. It is impossible to imagine Ralph Reed dominating the Christian political scene today, as he did in the 1990s. His vision of righteousness has ceased to appeal or gain traction. Americans never warmed to Mike Pence, though his personal decency made an impression. They never adored Ivanka either, though she is beautiful and glamorous and promoted harmless things like getting more girls into STEM. Her rarified perfection had a cold, hard, mineral quality. She may sous vide in the sewer of our culture—her Instagram-ready family, cushioned by a pocket of air—but those of us who lack her advantages, we’re forced to swim in this stuff. We were leery of her judgment.

A year ago, for a few months, we were prepared to be judged, and we catapulted White Fragility to the top of every best-seller list. Today, we can’t bear it. We lack the will to judge each other and the heart to let ourselves be judged. (Robin DiAngelo’s sequel released this June – Nice Racism: How Progressive White People Perpetuate Racial Harm—flounders in the rankings on Amazon). DiAngelo and Kendi pound out the Left’s version of fire and brimstone, and they’re losing us: we’re tired of their angry and unforgiving deity.

More:

The suicide attempt rates among teens and even tweens have gone vertical. For teen girls between the ages of 12 and 17, the rates increased by 26% during the summer of 2020 and 50% during the winter of 2021. The July issue of Clinical Psychiatry News reports:

From April 2019 to April 2021, the demand for pediatric behavioral health treatment at [Children’s Hospital Colorado] increased by 90%. In Colorado, suicide is now the number one cause of death among youth and occurs in children as young as 10 years of age.

The hospital has declared a state of emergency.

One of NYC’s top tourist attractions, The Vessel at Hudson Yards, may now permanently close to the public because of too many young jumpers. Is there any more damning indicator of a culture than that it produces hopeless children?

All of which is to say, if politicians have something they want Americans to hear, they ought to dispense with the habits of self-righteousness, superiority and blame. Those ugly tics may help raise the Twitter waves that the Democrats’ mean girls surfed to fame: AOC & Friends. But they are turnoffs to an America that knows there is no “us” and “them” when it comes to pain and hardship and worry.

We are racially mixed and religiously intermarried. Gay and lesbian and transgender Americans aren’t ‘the other’ – as Republicans fooled themselves into thinking for so many years. These are our families—all of our families—even conservative, traditional, and religious families. We worry desperately about money—not because of obsessive acquisitiveness, but because constructing a bulwark against a failing culture requires heaps of it. (How much is private security, in the absence of a police force? Private school, in the absence of non-racist public ones? Non-woke doctors, who will fulfill their oath to heal us? How much is all this going to cost, and how will we possibly afford any of it?)

We are awfully fatigued by the finger-pointing and division. We hear much about what’s wrong with America, and what’s wrong with us. All of our national heroes have been denigrated: The Founders, yes, but even those who destroyed slavery, like Grant and Lincoln. Our children are getting the message; they head off to the Olympics and turn their backs on the American flag. Spare us talk of their high-minded principles: Young people manifesting that level of disrespect aren’t headed anywhere good.

We could stand to hear a few things about what’s good about us, what’s great about this country. Pessimism about the future of America is high and rising across all age groups. Please tell us something, anything, that we might feel good about; please give us hope that America might be better next year.

Intellectuals may balk, but bills that promote patriotic education—a few classes on why we used to think America a unique nation—will sound pretty good to most. Our children should be allowed to feel grateful to inherit America, even as we teach them, forthrightly, the truth about the flaws and complications of her legacy.

The Left’s self-righteousness suffocates us. But the conservative itch to preen is every bit the turn-off. We’re glad you have your perfect faith; many Americans haven’t been to church in months or years. Now isn’t the time to remind us how much better our lives might have been, had we made different choices.

Read Shrier’s whole piece. 

She says, “All of this J.D. Vance seems to know.” Yes, I can tell you as a friend of his, he certainly does. J.D. is a Catholic convert — I was present in 2019 when he was received into the Catholic Church:

New Catholic JD Vance receives his first Communion

But unless he has changed his mind, his attitude towards gay marriage is more in line with his generation’s. He told me once that when he and his wife first married and were living in San Francisco, a committed gay male couple, neighbors of theirs, helped them through the rocky patch of learning how to live together — and for that, J.D. said he would always be grateful. I thought about that after reading Shrier’s piece. J.D. is a social conservative, but in a natural, non-ideological way.

I get that. A decade ago, when I was preparing to move back to my hometown in Louisiana, someone in Philly, where I was then living, asked me how I could stand the thought of relocating to such a rigid, backwards place. I just laughed. Everybody knows who is gay in my hometown. Nobody really cares. For one thing, the younger people are pretty liberal about it, but even the older folks are relaxed in the way they actually live their lives. Jane might be an out lesbian, and that might make some of us uncomfortable, but Jane has been here all her life, she comes from good people, and she’s a good neighbor. I don’t have to agree with the way Jane conducts her private life to love her and defend her.

You might call this hypocrisy: You say you care for Jane, but you don’t care about her enough to support her and her partner having marriage rights, you big hypocrite. This is the kind of thing that only someone who lives in a bubble — a left-wing or a right-wing bubble — could say. It’s about ideology ironing out by force the messy reality of people’s lives. I have a very conservative Southern Baptist friend in Baton Rouge who firmly believes that homosexuality is sinful, and transgenderism is disordered. But in 2016, when catastrophic floods hit our city, he gave shelter in his apartment to a young trans couple who had nowhere else to go. Why? Because he is a Christian, and that was the Christian thing to do. I would have done the same. Does that make us hypocrites? OK, so we’re hypocrites. No big whoop. That’s life.

If you are a white person in the South who rejects racism, you have at some point had to deal with a racist relative. Uncle Bobby might be the kind of man who can be counted on to tell a racist joke at Thanksgiving dinner. You will have learned to tolerate this, because that’s what it means to be in the family. Maybe you will have chosen to take Uncle Bobby aside and tell him why you hate it when he talks that way. Or maybe you will have asked your dad, Bobby’s brother, to have a word with Bobby, and tell him to keep his obnoxious opinions to yourself. Or maybe you will have decided that Bobby is hopeless, and the most loving thing you can do is to tolerate Bobby’s crap, because this is family, and you only get to see them once or twice a year, and you’re not going to blow up Thanksgiving because your idiot uncle can’t keep his fool mouth shut.

Conversely, you might be a member of a Southern family that has a loudmouth young progressive in its ranks — the kind of person who comes home from college to Thanksgiving and seeks to rub everyone’s nose in their political sins and failings. You might deeply hate to see Caitlin show up with her tattoos, her piercings, and her woke politics. But she’s family — Lord have mercy, Dickie and Carolyn sure have had a hell of a hard time raising that child — and you work hard on being tolerant, because this is family, and you only get to see them once or twice a year, and you’re not going to blow up Thanksgiving because your idiot niece can’t keep her fool mouth shut.

This is how it works. Southerners have an advanced capacity to put up with a lot for the sake of keeping social harmony. It can and does lead to all kinds of dysfunction — oh yes indeed it does! — but it also works magic in keeping messy people together. The bonds of family and community cannot be stretched infinitely, of course, but they can be stretched a lot farther than people think.  In my own extended family, we don’t have any people who inhabit ideological and social extremes, but if we did, we would find a way to work through it. That’s just what we do. When I was in the latter years of high school and the first years of college, my father and I were very much at odds politically (actual dialogue: “Daddy, I’m a socialist.” “Got damn, how did I get a son like you?!”), but we held it together.

If you’ve read Hillbilly Elegy, you might have wondered how on earth young J.D. Vance put up with his mother’s drug addiction, and her constant relapsing. He did it out of love and duty. When his book came out, a number of progressives faulted him for blaming Appalachians for their own plight, because he called them out for their laziness and other moral corruption. That was really unfair, because J.D. also talked about the economic and cultural conditions that made it harder for them to choose the morally correct way to live. It wasn’t always this way, but people on the contemporary Left have a way of dividing the world into Victims and Victimizers. Victims can’t ever do wrong, and Victimizers can’t ever be right.

Here’s an example. Black Americans are much less likely than white Americans to have been vaccinated against Covid. Here’s something from a couple of weeks ago:

This spring in Louisiana, my home state, and one where one in three residents is black, a troubling trend emerged when vaccinations first became available:

But as the vaccines have become available to most of Louisiana’s 4.6 million residents, a troubling trend has emerged. Black people appear to be getting vaccinated at significantly lower rates than White residents.

Statewide, White people are 30% more likely to have been vaccinated than Black people, according to state data.

In East Baton Rouge Parish, where about 46% of residents are Black, roughly a third of the first doses administered so far have gone to Black people. White people, who make up 47% of the population, received 56% of the first doses, with 11% of the recipients listed as “other.”

Another analysis done this spring showed that the vaccine laggards in Louisiana were white people in the most pro-Trump parishes, and black people everywhere. 

More recently, a black opinion writer published a column noticing the same trend nationwide. But notice how she frames it: white people who refuse the vaccine are idiot Trump Republicans, but black people who refuse the vaccine — well, you have to understand the historical and social rationales for why they make the choices they do. Standard left-wing double standards: the Victim can never be held responsible for anything he does, and the Victimizer deserves no empathy, ever.

J.D. Vance isn’t like that. He blames individuals for making choices that hurt their prospects at leading a stable and productive life, but he also criticizes the structures that help explain why they do what they do. Isn’t this, you know, honest? Don’t we all know somebody in our extended family, or circles of friends, who has been handed a lot, but who has blown all the advantages his parents gave him through their hard work, and who blames Society for his troubles? Don’t we all know somebody in our extended family, or circles of friends, who has done all the right things, but who has been waylaid by circumstances beyond her control, and is suffering because of it, and could use help?

J.D. Vance speaks for people like that. Abigail Shrier writes:

 “It’s one thing to take an appreciation that cultural circumstances matter,” Vance said to me, of his approach. “It’s another thing to wag your finger at people and tell them the reason they’re not doing better is because they’re just making bad choices. And I think conservatives have to be able to hold two thoughts in their head at the same time: Personal responsibility does really matter; we don’t want to tell everybody that they’re a victim… But also people’s circumstances matter too.”

He talks of Americans yearning to live not the great life and not only the good life, but something far humbler: “a normal life.”

A lot of people have dumped on J.D. for having embraced a lot of the aspects of Trump’s presidency that he rejected back in 2016. I would assume that some of this is strategic — you’re not going to win a GOP primary in 2021 as an opponent of Trump — but I also believe that most of it is completely genuine. Why? Because we all saw a lot in the past four years. Trump remained Trump — but the Left went berserk. Speaking for myself, I hated a lot of what Trump said and did, but I genuinely came to fear the Left, as it became consumed by wokeness. I was never on the side of Never Trump, because I knew what a derelict state the GOP was in, but I also could not be exactly pro-Trump, because I thought he was foolish, undisciplined, and unprincipled. Nevertheless, I ended Trump’s term with more sympathy for him than I started with, precisely because the Left had become so unhinged and so powerful. I have not talked to J.D. about this, but my guess is that he feels the same way.

In any case, he has always believed that the themes that animated Trump’s shaggy-dog campaign in 2016 are right. Here’s an interesting excerpt from a 2016 interview he did with the Ur-liberal NPR interviewer Terry Gross:

GROSS: You know, reading your book, I get the impression that you think – and I think rightfully so – that there’s a lot of similarities between what poor people who are white endure in America and what poor people who are black endure in America. Sure, there’s differences, too, but there’s a lot of things in common. Yet, I’m wondering if you and the people who you grew up with made that connection at all and felt any sense of identification with black people who were your class counterparts.

VANCE: I never thought when I was a kid that there was a sense of competition or animosity towards poor blacks. I just thought there was a recognition that they lived differently – they primarily lived on the other side of town. And we’re both poor, but that’s kind of it. There wasn’t much explicit statement of kinship or of the lack of kinship. Though, I will say there was one really interesting experience I had with my grandma where I started to realize that there was some sort of kinship at least that she felt. And I think I was very lucky to have that exposure to a woman who had lived the life she had but was able to think these thoughts. And what happened is that we were watching a golf tournament. And it was, I believe, the 1997 Masters, where Tiger Woods won.

I was a very young kid, maybe 19 or 20, and the only reason my grandma was watching it was because he was in it. She loved Tiger Woods. And the reason she liked Tiger Woods is because she saw him as an outsider that was shaking up a rich man’s game. And there was this really interesting moment where after he won – and the Masters always has this ceremonial winner’s dinner to celebrate the victor. One of the golfers said something to the effect of, what are we going to have at the winner’s dinner – fried chicken and watermelon, which, of course, was this extraordinarily nasty racist comment.

But it struck me at that moment, one, that that fried chicken and watermelon was almost the cultural food of my people, and my grandma just got so viscerally angry. And she said, those a-holes, they’re never going to let people like us be part of their crowd. And the sense that she had was they both looked down on the black people who were outsiders and the poor, white people who are outsiders. And she really saw the similarities. And that was the first real exposure that she felt some sort of kinship to people who looked very different from her but ultimately were similar in a lot of ways.

And this, from the same conversation:

VANCE: I do. A lot of people in my family are going to be voting for Trump, a lot of my neighbors and friends from back home. So it’s definitely a phenomenon I, I think, recognize and frankly saw coming pretty early. You know, it’s interesting that I don’t think the Trump phenomenon is exclusively about the white poor.

I think that it’s more about the white working-class folks who aren’t necessarily economically destitute but in some ways feel very culturally isolated and very pessimistic about the future. That’s one of the biggest predictors of whether someone will support Donald Trump – it may be the biggest predictor – is the belief that America is headed in the wrong direction, the belief that your kids are not going to have a better life than you did.

And that cynicism really breeds frustration at political elites, but, frankly, that frustration needs to find a better outlet than Donald Trump. And that’s why I’ve made some of the analogies that I have because I don’t think that he’s going to make the problem better. I think, like you said, he is in some ways a pain reliever. He’s someone who makes people feel a little bit better about their problems. But whether he’s elected president or not, those problems are still going to be there, and we’ve got to recognize that.

GROSS: So when you’re having a discussion about the presidential race with someone in your family, someone who’s going to be voting for Trump, what is that conversation like?

VANCE: It typically starts with me making a point that I just made, which is, look, maybe Trump is recognizing some legitimate problems. He’s talking about the opioid epidemic in a way that nobody else is. But he’s not going to fix the problem. You know, better trade deals is not going to make all of these problems just go away.

And typically my family actually recognizes that. That’s what I find so interesting. They don’t think that this guy is going to solve all their problems. They just think he’s at least trying and he’s saying things, primarily to the elites, that they wish they could say themselves. So it’s really interesting. There’s a recognition that Trump isn’t going to solve a lot of these problems, but he’s, at the end of the day, the only person really trying to tap into this frustration.

And it’s, you know, I – so my dad is a Trump supporter, and I love my dad, and I always say, Dad, you know, Trump is not going to actually make any of these problems better. And he says, well, that’s probably true, but at least he’s talking about them and nobody else is and at least he’s not Mitt Romney. At least he’s not George W. Bush. He’s at least trying to talk about these problems.

And I think it’s amazing how low the bar has been set by the political conversation we’ve had for the past 20 or 30 years that this guy, who many people don’t think is going to solve the problems, is still getting a lot of support from people who are blue-collar white folks.

Vance went on to say in that 2016 conversation that he wasn’t planning to vote for Trump because he believed that Trump was “noxious” and leading the white working class to a bad place. I would like to know precisely what happened in the last four years to change his mind. I can tell you, though, from our conversations over the past four years, that his contempt for Woke Capitalist elites is very real, and felt very deeply. He’s a Yale-educated lawyer and investor. He was talking like that privately with me years ago. You can accuse him of being a hypocrite because he takes money from Peter Thiel, but I don’t think Thiel is woke, and if he is, then he is funding a politician who is going to work against his interests. In any case, J.D. knows this world from the inside. He is prepared to be a traitor to the class he was trained to join.

J.D. Vance is the kind of Republican politician we need: a populist who actually thinks deeply and strategically, and who knows how to move within the world of elites. I’ve been banging the gong about Viktor Orban since I’ve been here in Hungary, because in him I see a political leader who believes a lot of the things that non-Establishment US conservatives do, and who has also turned those beliefs and principles into effective government. I have no idea what Vance thinks of Orban, or if he even knows who he is, but a politically and administratively competent patriotic, anti-woke, populist is exactly the kind of Republican I want to vote for.

Look, if I thought J.D. Vance was a fraud, I just wouldn’t write about him. He’s a friend, and I wouldn’t betray him, but I wouldn’t write anything about him. He’s not a fraud. He could have stayed on the West Coast making a pile of money, or gone East and gotten involved in Establishment GOP circles. Instead, he went back to his native Ohio, and wants to make a positive difference for the people from whom he came, and to whom he remains loyal. I’ve heard him say this personally for years now. His religious conversion was real. His love for and devotion to his wife Usha, the daughter of hardworking Indian immigrants, and for their children is one of the foundations of his life. He is in every way the real deal. Conservatives need a normal person like J.D. to carry the torch for us in Washington, not yappy ideologues who can draw a big crowd on social media, but who are more interested in performing to own the libs than in making substantive changes to make the lives of normal people better.

J.D. Vance is a normal person who just happens to have written a surprise bestselling memoir of his life, one that was made into a movie, and that gave him a platform to advocate for and work for the kind of people he wrote about — the kind of people whose struggles, whose defeats, and whose victories made him who he is. If he’s messy, in that he does not believe exactly the same things about Trump that he did in 2016 — well, that shows us that he’s human. Do you believe exactly the same things you did about politics in 2016? I don’t. Normal people change their minds in response to changing conditions. I am no more confident in Donald Trump today than I was in 2016, but the rapid disintegration of American culture has made me more sympathetic to the kind of conservatism of which Trump is a poor symbol. But I do have hope in rising political stars like J.D. Vance — help his campaign out here (he needs to put some policy positions on that website, though) — and Blake Masters, another Thiel guy, who is running for Senate in Arizona (see below).

If these are the kind of candidates that Peter Thiel is bankrolling, I say hooray for Peter Thiel. They have George Soros; we need a Peter Thiel. I disagree with Thiel on some important issues, but I don’t have to agree with Thiel to be excited about the candidacies of these two men he’s helping make their inaugural runs for the Senate. We are not going to vote our way out of this American crisis, but the men and women we elect can work to create the conditions under which we in civil society can fight back against those who are tearing America down, and tearing Americans apart.

To be clear, I’m not endorsing either politician. I can’t do that in this space. But I am saying that we need conservative politicians like J.D. Vance and Blake Masters.

One more thing: someone named Christopher Roach, writing on the American Greatness site, has taken a shot at the Benedict Option in a way that indicates he has not read it, and has no idea what he’s talking about. Look:

In recent years, Rod Dreher argued that Christians may need to retreat from a hostile world in order to maintain their way of life and their sanity. Modeling his proposal on the Christian monasteries that kept learning and culture alive in the collapsing Roman empire, he called it the Benedict Option. In a similar way, many on the Right have counseled starting families and creating separate communities composed of select groups of fellow believers.

There is a word for this strategy: “quiescence.” It is rooted in the belief that doing battle with the culture is both unlikely to succeed and also corrupting.  Proponents argue that it is more realistic to preserve a small flame of civilization than to try to spread the fire of truth in a hostile world.

The problem with this option is that it’s not an option. It’s giving up.

The forces of the aggressive, secular Left are not going to let any of us retreat into our own enclaves. They will hunt down every last private club, pizza shop, and bakery out of mere spite. They will steal your kids and destroy your life.

Roach is one of those people who believe that the Benedict Option is a “head for the hills” counsel. If he had troubled himself to read the book, he would have read in its pages lines saying that we conservative Christians cannot afford to give up on standard politics, if only because we have to defend religious liberty. But he would have also read that politics alone will do nothing for us if we don’t live counterculturally as Christians and conservatives. If politics was the solution, we would not have seen the collapse of Christianity within Generation Z — this happening at a time when conservatives were winning political victories. The Benedict Option argues that if we are going to participate in public life as faithful Christians, then our private lives have to be far more rooted in the teachings and the disciplines of the faith. Viktor Orban said somewhere, speaking of the limits of politics, that he, as a political leader, can give you things, “but I cannot give you meaning.” This is true. A big part of our problem in the US, on both the Left and the Right, is that we have looked to politics to give us meaning. The way it manifests on the Right is typically with the belief that if only we get politics right, everything else will take care of itself. This is a dangerous lie.

Roach goes on to praise the Portuguese authoritarian Antonio Salazar as a good model for America. Maybe, maybe not, but for people like me, who are more concerned with the state of the church than with politics, only 35 percent of Portuguese today practice their faith. That is much better than Spain, which, after the death of the dictator Francisco Franco, suffered a rapid decline in Catholic faith and practice. To be clear, had I been in Spain during the Civil War, I certainly would have backed Franco, given the Stalinist alternative. But controlling Spain’s politics from 1939 until his death in 1975 did not preserve the Catholic faith in Spain. Politics were important to Spain: the Left was burning down churches and murdering priests, and had to be stopped, but Franco’s political power was not enough to make the faith live in the hearts of Spaniards.

This fact has a lot to do with the Benedict Option. We conservatives, especially Christian conservatives, are going to have to master the art of being active in public life (those with a calling to do so), while being far more active and engaged in the lives of our families and communities (a calling which affects us all). It would be very nice if these people who criticize the Benedict Option would actually read the book before griping about it, but I’m not holding my breath.

Point is that I don’t expect J.D. Vance or any other politician to save America from itself. What I hope for is that the “things” they can give us include defending the liberties of our families and our institutions — and that means defending them both against predatory wokeness and an economic system that is indifferent to family flourishing. The rest is up to us, individually, and the choices we make. This is the nature of social reality. To paraphrase T.S. Eliot, you can’t make a system so perfect that nobody has to be good, or self-disciplined, or self-sacrificial, or a responsible parent and neighbor.

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How To Understand Woke Jargon

This by the anti-woke academics Peter Boghossian, James Lindsay, and Bruce Gilley is brilliant and very, very useful. Pass it on. It’s important for those who wish to live not by lies.

 

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Woke Vs. Loyalism Vs. Authoritarianism

A reader writes, commenting on my “Radicalizing To The Right” post:

Let me start at the top by saying I agree with Curtis Yarvin — the current regime will probably last for at least a generation more. As long as the U.S. remains the world’s top economy and as long as people’s basic needs are being met and decadence remains (both on the Left and Right), there’s no reason for this country to fall any time soon.Unless, of course, some sort of calamity strikes.History is a tale of slow-burns, punctuated by sprints. The election of Donald Trump catalyzed a sprint, as did COVID. It won’t be that long until the next major crisis hits that’ll accelerate the process even further. The operative question is, with respect to your blog post, is what will truly mobilize the Right to take the fight straight to the Left?Before I address that, it’s crucial to note that the embrace of authoritarianism on the Right is very real. You saw it in Dr. Karlyn Borysenko’s testimony I shared with you concerning some of the stuff she hears and how White nationalism appears to be taking root in some areas on the Right. White nationalism, any kind of racial nationalism, is inherently authoritarian.But it need not even come in the form of White nationalism. Many conservatives and across the broad right-wing are as exasperated with democracy and liberalism much the same way as the Left, except the Left is much further along the timeline. Those on the Right are loathe to admit it, but many of them share your view that liberalism, even classical liberalism, is a great enabler of what we’ve seen come out of the Left. Given that they’ve lost faith in the country, many of them are turning to examples from history as what they see as preferable societies. Be it Francoist Spain, Chile under Pinochet, or Orban’s Hungary today, even the Right has largely given up on America and would like to see it fundamentally transformed into something a little less exceptional and more in line with what we’ve seen elsewhere in the world throughout history. And, by the way, I hear it on a personal level also, from those I know.So, at least culturally, I see three, not two camps emerging in the coming rift:– Woke Left: This is a group that needs no introduction.– “Loyalists”: These are the classical liberals, the Eric Weinsteins, Bari Weisses, Damon Linkers, and even you, Rod! I call you all the “loyalists” because you all, despite your diverse views, still believe in the American experiment, the Constitution, and embrace our history, good and bad, and would like to see this country stay together. I’m proudly part of this group.– Authoritarian Right: There’s really no other term to describe them right now. Much the way many of the Left came to embrace dictators or, at least, find something redeemable in them, the Right is also embracing dictators and finding something redeemable in them. I never thought I’d hear an American quote Slobodan Milosevic so approvingly (not merely to prove a point), but here we are. Many within this group also approve of breaking the country up, though they seem oblivious to just how messy this would be, even if done peacefully.Most Americans won’t swear allegiance to any of these three groups. But their views will fall broadly within these three groups. My hope is that most Americans will choose loyalism, but I’m not sure of that.As far as what will motivate the Right to finally take the fight to the Left, it’d have to be something like an economic collapse or a total breakdown in law and order, akin to what we recently saw in South Africa. Right now, the Left is just too powerful and the Right far too fractured and, frankly, still too invested in the America they think they know. Much the way the Left’s surge began when they started to make a clean break with America’s ideals and history and began redefining everything, the Right’s surge will begin when they make a clean break in much the same way. They’ll couch their ideology as representing America’s best traditions, of course, much the way the Left occasionally, through spokesmen like Barack Obama and Joe Biden, associate their actions and beliefs as being consistent with America’s best traditions.But the reality is, both sides want a different country altogether. Concerning the favoritism you find in Viktor Orban, I’d caution against wanting America to become like Hungary, even if the latter isn’t the fascist dictatorship it’s unfairly portrayed as. Sweden may not be a socialist state either, but both countries are the product of unique cultures and histories that have little to no precedent in the U.S. Therefore, we cannot (and probably shouldn’t) become Hungary any more than we should become Sweden.I could talk about this for hours on end, but I’ll close by saying this – one day, America as we know it will be no more. Whether we end up as a Third World country or we end up as an authoritarian country, it won’t be the country we lived in for most of our lifetimes. I understand why those on the Right want their own Franco. I really do. But there’s a heavy price to pay for it. When it comes right down to it, I want to be on the side that tried to hold it all together when it was falling apart. I won’t live forever and neither will anyone else. I won’t take part in condemning this country, our people, the land where the blood of our ancestors was spilled, to dictators on either side. Protecting myself, my family, and my way of life is what’s worth fighting for, not for an idea of a “better” society.

That’s a good letter. I believe the reader is right to characterize me as a “Loyalist”; in the end, I prefer a world where people on the Left who disagree with me can rely on a public culture of being left alone as much as possible. I don’t do that out of some indifference to evil or somesuch thing. I do that because as best as I can see this is the only way for us to live together amid our differences. Of course there is no utopia in which everyone can have what they want perfectly. Still, I think that respect and affection for those who are very different from me, and plain old self-interest, makes the classically liberal arrangement the best we can hope for in this fallen world.That said, I believe MacIntyre had it right forty years ago when he observed that the fundamental moral consensus that bound us disparate people together has largely dissolved. (I don’t recall that MacIntyre put it this way, but the decline of Christianity as a shared cultural myth is what did it.) That’s not coming back, not in my lifetime. I am a half-hearted defender of liberal democracy because I really don’t see how it works going forward … but all the actual alternatives seem worse. And by the way, Hungary remains a democracy. If the people don’t like Orban and his party, they can vote them out — and might just do it next year. They’ve voted Orban out before. Funnily enough for a dictator, he abided by the results of the election. He will do it next year if Hungarian voters toss his party out of power.When I say that the US Right needs an Orban, I don’t mean that I would like to see American conservative politicians lift Orbanism from Budapest and implant it in America. I certainly don’t mean that I want to see the GOP tolerate the corruption around Orban (which, note well, is common in the political culture of the former Communist countries, no matter which party is in power), and I damn sure don’t mean that I want the GOP to accept state surveillance of domestic political opponents, as we know that the Hungarians did with the Pegasus software.What I mean is that I would like to see American conservative politicians who are:

Anti-globalist. Don’t engage in trade pacts and political arrangements that stand to hurt the national interest, as defined by something broader than GDP.Pro-national sovereignty. That means allowing countries and states whose customs, laws, and beliefs we conservatives don’t like to have their way, as a general rule)Pro-family. Defending the traditional family in law and policy, including economic policies. Also, pushing back hard on gender ideology.Skeptical of Big Business. Which entails ending the privileging of economic actors. For example, in the aftermath of the 2008 economic crash, when Hungarians were being forced out of their homes because they were unable to pay mortgages, the new Orban government passed a law saying banks could not expel families from their homes. The Orban government is definitely pro-business, but it doesn’t believe the interests of business are the same thing as the interests of society.Defending the national idea and culture. Vigorously opposing things like open-borders migration, trade deals that hurt traditional agriculture and customs, and woke attacks on national and civilizational identity, including religious identity. Also, taking seriously the fact that universities are originators and vectors of toxic, society-destroying ideology, and using power to rein them in. It also means that lawmakers should aggressively fight back against the attempts underway now to destroy museums under the banner of “decolonization.” The Left really is dismantling our civilizational heritage — and the Right is sitting back and letting it happen.Fighting hard — but fighting intelligently. Getting rid of the foolish, self-harming idea that if we have made libs angry, we have done our bit to fight them. Orban takes politics and lawmaking seriously. He fights very hard for the things he believes in, but unlike Donald Trump, he actually has convictions and principles, and he wants actually to fight, and to win — not merely to be seen as fighting.

The reader is right that Hungary is Hungary and America is America — and that’s good! One of the benefits of having lived here this summer is discovering for myself the malign power of US cultural imperialism. It really exists, and I completely understand why people in smaller countries resent it. Nevertheless, the things I’ve outlined above are changes I would like to see come to the conservative movement and the GOP. They can be done within liberal democracy, tailored to American circumstances. They require courage and vision among both leaders and followers. Trump broke the GOP Establishment, for which we should be mostly grateful. But Trump has not the courage, the vision, the character, the discipline, or the skills to be an effective Right-of-center leader. Somebody does.By the way, on the question of the connection between politics and national history and character, I commend to you this Twitter thread by the Australian conservative commentator Gray Connolly. I don’t want to shift the conversation of this thread to Australia and Covid, but I do want to highlight this as an example of why certain government policies that would not be feasible or wise in one country make sense in another — and why this is something we should respect. The kind of policies followed by the Australian government (or the Hungarian government) might in fact be reasonable within the local political and cultural context. The messianic attitude of Americans, both of the Left and of the Right, which holds that the rest of the world ought to adopt our principles and way of life, is offensive and wrong. It led us from the Right into the foolish cause of turning Iraq and Afghanistan into liberal democracies. It is leading us from the Left to make enemies where America should have none.

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Lewis Hamilton Lies About Hungary

I came out of the subway at Déak Ferenc Square in downtown Budapest tonight and saw this scene:

Scene on Deak Ferenc Square in downtown Budapest tonight

It’s the Hungarian Grand Prix weekend. Formula One drivers are supposedly staying in this hotel, and fans have been gathered there for hours. They were there when I entered the subway on the square four hours ago. There are actually fewer of them there now than earlier. It’s a mad scene, though.

About the Formula One race in Hungary this weekend:

[Lewis] Hamilton, a seven-time world champion and eight-time winner of the Hungarian Grand Prix in Budapest, posted in support of the country’s LGBTQ+ community ahead of this year’s edition of the race.

He wrote: “To all in this beautiful country Hungary. Ahead of the Grand Prix this weekend, I want to share my support for those affected by the governments’ anti-LGBTQ+ law. It is unacceptable, cowardly and misguiding for those in power suggest such a law.

“Everyone deserves to have the freedom to be themselves, no matter who they love or how they identify. I urge the people of Hungary to vote in the upcoming referendum to protect the rights of the LGBTQ+ community, they need our support more than ever.

“Please show love for those around you because Love will always win. Sending positivity. #lgbtq”

Hamilton has been vocal about social issues in recent years. Since the start of the 2020 season, he has taken the knee ahead of every F1 race and worn various social and environmental messages on his shirt.

He’s also started the Hamilton Commission, looking at the lack of diversity in motor racing. He has also pledged £20 million to a new charity, Mission 44, aimed at empowering young people from under-represented groups in the U.K..

Aston Martin driver Sebastian Vettel, a four-time world champion, arrived at the Budapest paddock with a rainbow strip on his trainers.

Vettel also spoke out against the legislation.

“Everybody’s free to do what they want and exactly that I guess is the point,” Vettel said. “So I find it embarrassing for a country that is in the European Union having to vote or having some laws like this as part of their constitution, whatever.

“I just think we’ve had so many opportunities to learn in the past and I can’t understand why you’re struggling to see everybody should be free to do what they like, love who they like and it’s along the lines of ‘live and let live’.

“So it’s obviously not for us to make the law, that’s not our role, but I think just to express the support for obviously those who are affected by it.”

I bet if you put a gun to the head of either one of those Formula One drivers and asked them what the Hungarian law says, they would not be able to tell you. The law does not prevent anyone from doing “what they want,” unless what they want is to teach children a progressive ideology on LGBT matters. I certainly understand that that is not how most Western liberals see it, but very many Hungarians — like majorities in Central and Eastern Europeans countries — have unfavorable views of LGBT. The Western Europeans and Americans are seen by many people here as being haughty cultural imperialists — and they’re right.

I was at a social gathering tonight, and talked to some Western academics about this. Both said that their friends back in the UK are convinced that Hungary is going after LGBT people in some vague way. The UK people have no idea what the law actually says, according to the people with whom I spoke, but they are sure that it’s super-horrible. I have had a version of this conversation with a number of Western people living here. Whether or not they support the Hungarian government, they are all amazed by the massive distinction between what life in Hungary is actually like, versus what Western publics, misled by the media, think it’s like.

A professor from a different country — I think the Netherlands, but I’m not sure — said tonight in conversation that his friends back home expected the LGBT Pride march in Budapest last weekend to be some sort of bloodbath. It went off without a hitch, because people here in Budapest have the freedom to protest, and the government has no interest in stopping them. Thanks to the distorted reporting of the media and the fatmouthing of politicians, the publics in Western countries have no real idea what it’s like here.

At this party, a man walked in wearing flip-flops with the Star of David on the straps. Turns out he’s a Hungarian ambassador, and he had just returned from a few days in Israel. He talked about the work he had been doing there, and make a couple of black-humor jokes about how anti-Semitic the Hungarian government is. The joke was that the Orban government is actually quite pro-Israel and pro-Jewish, but because Orban criticizes George Soros, the progressive Daddy Warbucks, the media smear Hungary constantly as anti-Semitic.

Look, there’s plenty to criticize Hungary about, from a progressive point of view. But the outright lies, and manifold distortions of what life in Hungary is really like deeply anger me, and make me hold the US and Western European media in disgust. It is all about defending the Narrative. I have been talking for months with my friend Tucker Carlson about Hungary, and urging him to come here and see for himself what it’s like. He took me up on the offer, and arrives here in Budapest on Sunday to spend a week seeing the place and doing some reporting. Part of his crew arrived here earlier this week. They interviewed me on camera about why Americans should care about Hungary. I told them that Hungary has been facing down a lot of the same challenges that bedevil American conservatives and traditionalists besieged by the woke. Hungary is small and relatively weak, but it punches above its weight because it is led by Viktor Orban, who knows what he believes, is a brilliant political tactician, and is not intimidated. Orban’s Hungary shows what can be accomplished when you have an anti-woke, anti-globalist leader who cares more about politics and strategy than tweeting and lib-owning. Orban fights, but Orban also wins. He is so much further ahead than American conservative politicians on the nature of the fight in front of us. Hungary has a lot to teach American conservatives about how to deal with the woke menace.

I told them something like that. If I had had more time, I would have emphasized that we on the US Right have to start looking beyond the English Channel. There’s so much interesting stuff going on with the Continental Right. People on the European Right don’t suffer the delusions that they are just one election or SCOTUS appointee away from all their problems going away. They understand they are a minority and a hated minority by all the Establishment, and that the high status elements hate them and want them marginalized or destroyed. This isn’t true for the US Right, all too many of which cling to the mythology that the problem is just a handful of elites, and that “real America” is on their side. The American Right is also in thrall to Donald Trump, still believing that somehow, Trump can and will stop the Woke and save the Republic. This illusion prevents an actually effective anti-Woke opposition from rising. But you have heard this from me before.

I hope that after Tucker Carlson’s week here, American conservative leaders — not just politicians, but cultural and religious leaders — start beating a path to Budapest. Do you know that the Orban government established an entire office to help persecuted Christians overseas? I visited it, saw the pictures, read the report, heard the stories. The Orban government is not under the impression that Drag Queen Story Hour is one of the “blessings of liberty.” 

It stands denounced by the liberal media and liberal sports celebrities like Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vittel because it stands for the radical idea that children ought not to be propagandized about sex, gender, and sexuality. Remember when Americans used to believe that? Remember when Americans who believed that were not considered to be Enemies Of The People?

On Friday, walking down Andrassy Avenue with Tucker Carlson’s crew, we saw two gay men holding hands. They deserved to be safe, and they were safe. Nothing was going to happen to them, despite what the liberal Western media and activists would have you believe. Look, I know most people in the US don’t care about Hungary. But you should — especially if you’re conservative. I hope that after Tucker Carlson’s week here, a lot more American conservatives care about Hungary, and stand up for it. I’m getting ready to head home to America after three and a half months here, and I don’t mind saying that I’ve come to respect and even love these conservative underdogs, who are constantly shat on by the US and Western European political and media establishments. You should too.

Lewis Hamilton may know how to drive better than anybody else, but he runs his mouth right into a ditch. I don’t really care about Formula One racing, or about the idiotic opinions of sports celebrities. But I very much care that these lies keep being perpetuated by the Narrative Machine, at the expense of a people who deserve to be defended.

UPDATE: A reader believes that I have misused the infamous David French quote about DQSH as one of the “blessings of liberty” unfairly. He points to something French wrote about it. Excerpt:

Even though the battle over “Frenchism” began with a tweet about drag queens, I honestly did not expect that discussion of drag queens would consume so much of our debate (you can watch the whole thing here). Yet the question of how (or whether) the right should respond legally to drag queens in libraries permeated much of the proceedings. My position was simple — I don’t like drag queen reading hours, but I also want to preserve for all Americans the First Amendment-protected right of viewpoint-neutral access to public facilities when those facilities are opened up for public use. I don’t want the government dispensing access on the basis of its preferred messages or its preferred speakers. Handle bad speech with better speech. Counter bad speakers in the marketplace of ideas, not through the heavy hand of government censorship.

So if my way is inadequate, what was Sohrab’s better plan? I pressed him on this point, and he countered with two ideas. First, hold a Senate hearing where Ted Cruz and Josh Hawley would make the leader of a national library association “sweat.” Second, pass local laws specifically banning the practice. The first idea is hardly worth addressing. It does nothing except (further) elevate drag queen reading hour on the national stage, and it would be unlikely to go as well for his side as Sohrab expects. Librarians can be quite effective at waxing eloquent about the First Amendment and pointing to the countless other ways that public access to libraries improves the public square.

Sohrab’s second point — an outright ban — is worth addressing at greater length. Our present regime that broadly protects viewpoint neutrality in access to public facilities is the hard-won result of decades of litigation from free speech and religious liberty advocates, and it represents both a public good in its own right and a practical blessing for millions of American Christians. As our government continues to grow — including by creating an immense number of public facilities — it is quite simply just that taxpayers are able to have equal access to the facilities they paid to create.

Well, to be clear, I have never believed that David French thinks Drag Queen Story Hour is good per se. I understand the sense in which he meant his remark; that’s the sense in which I quoted it. I appreciate the opportunity to clarify, because I do not want to join in the piling-on of French that’s so popular now on the Right.

The critics of the Orban government are ripping into the new law precisely because they believe that liberty requires granting activists and advocates equal access to the hearts and minds of children, to proclaim their views and dogmas. I think people like Lewis Hamilton and Sebastian Vettel literally don’t know what they are talking about. But I think that informed liberal critics of the law genuinely believe that fundamental rights are being violated here: the right of children and minors to receive LGBT information, and the right of advocates and activists to give it to them.

I deny that they should have that right. It would be interesting to know what David French thinks of the Hungarian law in principle, though American readers should know that Hungary is not bound by the First Amendment and First Amendment jurisprudence. There is little doubt that the Hungarian parliament was acting within Hungarian law when it passed the bill. The European Union claims that the law violates supranational European law. We’ll see.

To clarify: David French does not approve of DQSH, and I never believed that he did. He says equal access is a blessing of liberty. I disagree — though one of the reasons I don’t dogpile French is that he is correct that as far as I can tell, we on the illiberal side of this controversy don’t really have plausible arguments that would work within the US legal system, to defend our position. As I have explained here before, this is why I am torn between Ahmari and French in their great debate. My heart is 100 percent with Ahmari, but what stops me from declaring for him is both the awareness that we live in a post-Christian country where the views of people like Ahmari and me are going to be increasingly unpopular over the years, and that French, as a seasoned litigator, understands better than non-lawyers like Ahmari and me how the abandonment of this legal structure will be used against people like us.

 

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Accelerating Soft Totalitarianism

A reader in France e-mails:

The situation is heating up in France. We don’t have the “passeport sanitaire” and are now being denied entry to public services, bus, trains, restaurants etc. Our girls were especially sad they could no longer go to the public beach at the city lake.I’m organising a protest against these passes, but here one must ask the government permission days/weeks in advance in order to protest the government … cause “liberty”. If not, jail time and massive fines are in order. Ok … fine. I was tossed multiple times yesterday between the police and the mayor’s office who each tell me the other is in charge of protests. You think les citoyens who stormed the Bastille got authorization from the King before they took to the streets? I’ll keep at it today.The French government is also using this opportunity to push through making homeschooling illegal. Many of the pieces are in place and the people are primed for control. It’s going so fast!

Meanwhile, in her invaluable Substack newsletter, Bari Weiss runs this essay by David Sacks, one of the founders of PayPal. He writes about PayPal’s recent decision to partner with the Anti-Defamation League to prevent users of PayPal deemed “extremist” by the ADL from accessing the service. Sacks, who is Jewish, points out that the ADL has gone way beyond its original goal of fighting anti-Semitism, and now denounces as bigoted all kinds of speech that offends leftist sensibilities. Sacks writes about this kind of thing turning into a rudimentary social credit system. More:

The harm is compounded when the loss of speech rights is followed by restrictions on the ability to participate in online economic activity. Within days of the Trump-Parler cancellations, most of the finance tech stack (Stripe, Square, PayPal, Shopify, GoFundMe, and even enterprise SaaS company Okta, which wasn’t used by anyone in the events of January 6) declared they were canceling the accounts of “individuals and organizations connected to the [Capitol] riot.”

Now PayPal has gone much further, creating the economic equivalent of the No-Fly List with the ADL’s assistance. If history is any guide, other fintech companies will soon follow suit. As we saw in the case of speech restrictions, the political monoculture that prevails among employees of these companies will create pressure for all of them to act as a bloc.

When someone mistakenly lands on the No-Fly List, they can at least sue or petition the government for redress. But when your name lands on a No-Buy List created by a consortium of private fintech companies, to whom can you appeal?

As for the notion of building your own PayPal or Facebook: because of their gigantic network effects and economies of scale, there is no viable alternative when the whole industry works together to deny you access.

Kicking people off social media deprives them of the right to speak in our increasingly online world. Locking them out of the financial economy is worse: It deprives them of the right to make a living. We have seen how cancel culture can obliterate one’s ability to earn an income, but now the cancelled may find themselves without a way to pay for goods and services. Previously, cancelled employees who would never again have the opportunity to work for a Fortune 500 company at least had the option to go into business for themselves. But if they cannot purchase equipment, pay employees, or receive payment from clients and customers, that door closes on them, too.

What the woke Left doesn’t seem to realize is that the sort of economic desperation they seek to inflict on their enemies is exactly what produced Trump in the first place. In the wake of Trump’s 2016 victory, many in Washington and Silicon Valley were too busy blaming social media to consider how the policies they had supported in favor of globalization and free trade had hollowed out the industrial base that many working-class Americans depended on for good jobs. Trump channeled the anger of these desperate voters to win crucial swing states in the Rust Belt. These disaffected voters resented the cadre of managerial, media, academic, and governmental elites who acted as if they had a monopoly on truth, morality, and decency. Trump, the outrageous, uncouth billionaire with ridiculous hair, was the perfect avatar of their desire to stick it to them.

Trump is gone, but the resentments he exploited to come to power remain. And now we have this unholy alliance of tech and government coming together to ban “misinformation” and “hate,” which they — and they alone — get to define. What an ideal formula for spreading and deepening these preexisting resentments.

If we continue down this path, a far more dangerous demagogue could emerge. I implore my successors at PayPal and other Big Tech companies to stop throwing kindling on the fires of populism by locking people out of the online public square and the modern web-based economy. Silenced voices and empty stomachs are fuel for the very extremism you claim to oppose.

Read the whole thing. 

The only power strong enough to stop these woke-capitalist soft totalitarians is the state. Mark my words, if the Right can shake free of its preoccupation with Donald Trump, it’s going to nominate a presidential candidate, and Congressional candidates, that will punch these dirtbags as hard as they’re punching the rest of us. I don’t want a “demagogue.” I want a president and a Congress that will do everything in its power to stop these soft totalitarians by braining them across the head with the political equivalent of a cast-iron skillet. I don’t want a president who talks big; I want one who acts against these corporate thugs without pity or apology.But maybe things will go the way the French reader fears. Maybe people are too primed for control. It could happen. Or maybe the Establishment, having consolidated its wokeness, will never again let a politician who threatens it occupy the White House. We can’t afford to be optimistic and therefore passive. We have no choice but to start laying the groundwork for enduring soft totalitarianism with our heads held high. Part of that means developing networks to replace woke ones like PayPal and adjacent services. Other ideas in Live Not By Lies. If you have anybody in your life — at your church, in your friend network, etc. — who emigrated to America from a Communist country, ask them what they think about what’s happening in our country today. You might have to be persistent, because they’ve lived through something like this before, and aren’t going to be as eager to talk today as they were a few years ago.

The post Accelerating Soft Totalitarianism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Radicalizing To The Right

In his recent podcast conversation with his colleague Ezra Klein, Ross Douthat says, in a part of the conversation about J.D. Vance becoming Trumpier:

So, one, there is a strategic element of trying to be Trumpy in the way that you go after liberals that is a novelty of the last five years. There’s also, though, a real radicalization on the right, the assumption that, well, because I — I’m not accusing you of this, but other people saying, well, I met JD Vance five years ago when he was in Aspen, and he seemed like such a reasonable guy, and what happened to him?

Well, the Democratic Party moved substantially to the left. A lot of crazy things happened. Again, we had massive street protests of pandemic turmoil and all kinds of institutions. A lot of stuff went on in the last four or five years. The Kavanaugh hearing was an inflection point for some conservatives. And there’s been a general and I think sincere radicalization of a lot of people who fall or fell into an Ezra Klein’s thoughtful conservatives camp in 2015. And obviously, this hasn’t happened to me because my livelihood depends on being a thoughtful conservative who writes for a liberal readership. And so because of that, I’m sort of constrained and talked to my conservative friends —

EZRA KLEIN: Do you think it would have otherwise?

ROSS DOUTHAT: Well, I mean, I think maybe I’ve been radicalized a little bit, too, but I’m not going to tell you all of my most radical thoughts. Some of it is a little more mysterious to me, right? I looked at the Kavanaugh hearings and saw it as the case where I felt like I could see where both sides were coming from. And the fact that he ended up actually being put on the court, that was not a radicalization moment for me.

I think some of the shifts in sort of internal left wing discourse and politics over the last year or two, maybe some events cost people their jobs in certain liberal institutions … I won’t go into any great detail here, but some of that has had some kind of inevitable effect on me, yeah, absolutely. I guess I’m just saying when there is both a performative element to Republican Trump imitations and also a sincere shift in how some conservatives think about the left and what it wants for America, both of those things are in play in general.

I think maybe I’ve been radicalized a little bit too. Well, I have always been more radical than my friend Ross, but there is no question that events of the past few years — and of the past year in particular — have pushed me farther to the Right. So has working on my book Live Not By Lies, and coming to understand what’s happening in America today as a soft totalitarian revolution. So has being in Hungary this summer. Let me explain without rehashing the argument of the book.

The argument I make in the book is not really mine; it’s the argument made by people who came to America fleeing Communist countries, a bitter experience that helped them understand the cultural revolution underway in America in a particular way — a way that eludes the understanding of most of us Americans, who have no experience with this stuff. In the book, I explain in detail what they mean by that. Regular readers have had lots of this stuff from me, so I won’t rehash it here. But this new development I learned of last night is a great example of the process underway.

There is a bill now before Congress that would establish a federal commission to rename geographical sites. From the text of the bill:

By now, we know where this is going. The thrust to identify evil people — according to woke ideology — and to damn their memory in public life is an open-ended revolutionary project. These terms — “equitable and just,” “cultural diversity” — have nothing to do with equity, justice, or cultural diversity. They are nothing more than weapons used by the Left to attack and destroy history, tradition, and culture they’ve identified as wicked. This is revolutionary. A few years back, I first read social anthropologist Paul Connerton’s book “How Societies Remember,” and wrote a long blog post about it. From that post:

Connerton begins by saying that “our experience of the present very largely depends upon our knowledge of the past,” and that “participants in any social order must presuppose a shared memory.” Those memories, he contends, “are conveyed and sustained by (more or less) ritual performances.” Finally, he argues that these performances have to be embodied to be effective. Let’s unpack this.

When a new regime or social order takes over, the first thing it does is to find ways to sever the society’s connection to its past. ISIS is now doing that in the areas it controls, by erasing any physical embodiment of the memory of the area’s pre-Islamic past. “The more total the aspirations of the new regime, the more imperiously will it seek to introduce an era of forced forgetting,” says Connerton.

ISIS is an extreme example, of course, but this happens in all societies that are undergoing revolutionary change. The Communist regimes of Russia and Eastern Europe tried this too. Echoing Kundera, Connerton says that the “there were people [there] who realised that the struggle of citizens against state power is the struggle of their memory against forced forgetting.”

My copy of the Connerton book is on my shelf back in Louisiana, so I can’t consult it here. I recall, though, that he talks about the symbolic meaning of the French revolutionaries decapitating the King. It is the violent proclamation of a new order. Changing the names of places is a form of this. If the woke, and woke legislators, can change the names of places, they are erasing society’s connection to its own past. What we are living through now in the United States is a change of regime, in which power-holders in Congress and (especially) in all the leading institutions of civil society are explicitly condemning the existing American order, and undertaking well understood measures that will cause radical (= radix, at the roots) change. This is the meaning of all the changes in academia. This is the meaning of removing the statues. This is the meaning of redefining flawed historical actors as History’s Greatest Monsters.

This is not gradual change; this is a cultural revolution. In 2021, after what we have lived through these past few years, you are a fool if you don’t see that.

Hungary is being punished severely by the European Union for having passed a law this summer that restricts the presentation of LGBT content to children and minors. Hungarians are not religious, but they are culturally conservative. The government, seeing how the constant stream of LGBT propaganda aimed at children is changing Western societies (e.g., a 4,000 percent increase over a decade in the number of UK minors referred for transgender treatment), chose to fight back in a modest way. Every society chooses what is appropriate for its youth to experience, and usually codifies that in law. Not every society agrees on these points, but every society sets these rules. There is a reason why our laws set the age of sexual consent at a certain point. Societies differ on what that age is, but all societies recognize that children must be protected from the sexual desire of adults. Societies also set restrictions on whether or not minors can receive certain kinds of sexualized information — porn, I mean. Unlike the countries of Western Europe, Hungary believes that children and minors should not receive information normalizing LGBT. They are trying to protect their youth from the cultural revolution that has consumed the West. They are trying to protect their kids from decadent propaganda like this:

Maybe the Hungarians are wrong. Maybe they went too far. But for many of us American conservatives, it is remarkable and even inspiring that Hungarian lawmakers dared to stand against the woke juggernaut. Our American conservative politicians rarely ever do.

For that, Hungary is being severely punished by the EU, which is withholding Covid relief and rebuilding funds. Hungary is one of the poorer EU countries. The EU is holding it hostage in order to impose its own radical left views of proper child-raising. We who believe in what was standard and normal five minutes ago are not now tolerated, but rather hated by the regime. You don’t think this is cute? Damn you, normie bigot.

This is a cultural revolution.

We are living through a revolution that, in the name of liberal principles, abandons liberalism. Did you ever think that after the Civil Rights Movement, we would ever again live in a country in which people are condemned for the color of their skin, and treated as pariahs? Well, we are. The Left and the major institutions of American society are leading a cultural revolution that demonizes white people. We are expected to agree that this is right and just. That’s what the Democratic Party tells us. That’s what academia tells us, and media, and virtually every other cultural institution. We are told to despise our fathers and grandfathers, because the only thing meaningful about the lives they lived, and the country they built, is that they held opinions that are offensive to most Americans in 2021.

We are told to despise as uniquely horrible the Capitol Hill rioters of January 6. Me, I was and am appalled by what they did, and am all in favor of punishing them. But I was paying attention in 2020, when left-wing rioters ran rampant through many American cities, looting and burning and terrorizing cities, all in the name of “social justice.” The media fell all over itself to cast that violent lawlessness as somehow right and necessary. It was the media, and the Left in general, who cast a shadow of contempt across all law enforcement officers, making them all guilty for the repulsive actions of a few. It was the Left in this country that normalized widespread street violence. And it is the Left today trying to pretend that none of that had anything to do with the January 6 mob.

Being in Hungary has given me a rare (for an American) perspective. The Left, both in Hungary and in Western Europe and the US, construes Hungary as some sort of fascist state because of the policies of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. (Normie Republicans in America do this too.) In 2015, Orban refused to open Hungary’s borders to the tsunami if Mideast refugees. He understands that he leads a small country in the heart of Europe, one with a declining population, and with a unique language and culture. He understands that mass migration and open borders would mean the end of his nation. He also understands that there are very rich and powerful men, like George Soros, who dedicated their wealth and power to dissolving the Hungarian nation. He’s willing to fight this. For this, he’s called a fascist.

He recognized that Soros was using a college he founded, the Central European University, as a beachhead to introduce into elite Hungarian circles the kind of ideology that has conquered the West, and is dissolving the Western tradition everywhere it reigns. He drove most of CEU out of Hungary. For this, he’s called a fascist. I probably wouldn’t have gone as far as he did, but seeing how elite American universities are the fountainhead of this ideology causing America to tear itself apart, maybe I would have done. In any case, it is absurd for the left-wing illiberals who control most American campuses, and who are using their power to destroy entire fields, such as the Classics, for being insufficiently woke, to complain about Orban. In America today, medical schools are denying one of the most fundamental facts of biology: sex — all because of a radical crackpot ideology that came out of leading US universities. Who has been a major funder of transgender ideology, for years? George Soros. Yet the Left, and the US media, constantly condemn Viktor Orban for anti-Semitism because he dares to call out Soros the Destroyer.

It’s a lie. It’s one of the many lies they tell us.

People here criticize Orban for having engineered the sale of most Hungarian media to his own supporters. I agree that it was a dodgy move. The thing that nobody reports, though, is that the biggest Hungarian media outlets in terms of circulation (and therefore influence) are on the Left, and opposed to the government. Whenever a US conservative complains about the utter dominance of the Left in American media, the Left says, “But what about Fox News?” Every conservative with a brain in his head would happily trade Fox News for ABC, NBC, CBS, The New York Times, the Washington Post, NPR … . There’s a similar dynamic at work in Hungary. Two different journalists told me that if not for the Orban policy, no conservative voice would ever be heard in the Hungarian media. I have no way to verify that, but I suspect it’s true.

In any case, we have seen in the US media the replacement of old-fashioned liberalism with a hard-edge, Jacobin wokeness. A liberal reporter, commenting on this, told me that the younger generation of journalists think that “fairness” and “balance” are weasel concepts that make it possible for evil people to have a voice that they do not deserve. This is the death of liberalism. Old-fashioned liberals think conservatives are wrong; the Woke think we are evil.

The bill to wipe all memory of “problematic” people from names of places is not something proposed by a student activist group. It is proposed by Democratic members of Congress. Supermarkets aren’t forcing their employees to go to Bible study and to sit through lectures urging them to embrace conservative political causes; they are, however, compelling employees to sit through woke catechesis, and join progressive activist groups. 

Do I need to go on? My overall point, again, is that what calls itself “liberalism” has become illiberal, and is not interested in defending classical liberalism, regarding what was once cherished as a workable system for allowing diverse people to live together in peace now as an intolerable system that permits Evil to flourish. One reason I have been on the fence in the Ahmari-French debate is that as much as I recognize that Sohrab Ahmari grasps the deep structural problems with liberalism, I can’t think of a better and more fair way for a wildly diverse, pluralistic society to live together peaceably. If we lose liberalism, as flawed as it is, then it is just a struggle for power.

So, if I have become a little bit radicalized over the summer, it’s because I have seen with more clarity what is happening to my country, and how difficult it is going to be to salvage liberalism with the woke controlling all the institutions, and most of the government, and with wokeness explicitly rejecting core liberal principles, like free speech, freedom of religion, and tolerance.

What I’ve also seen is that the Left is almost completely blind to what it’s doing. Here in Hungary, there was outrage on the Left over the Orban government transferring public dollars to private foundations overseeing institutions (educational, etc) broadly favorable to conservatism. Were I on the Hungarian left, I would have complained too. But here’s the thing: massive amounts of public monies have gone for years and years to institutions — colleges and universities — that are broadly favorable to liberalism and/or socialism. Nobody on the Left cares about this, because they believe it is the natural order of the world. They believe that it is their right to use liberal institutions (universities) to advance illiberal, socially destructive ideologies. And they want the public to subsidize the destruction of its own traditions, morals, and political interests.

Orban says no. Unlike Trump, he is a skilled politician who knows how to govern. The challenge I’ve had to face this summer is with my own belief in classical liberalism. I am a half-hearted classical liberal at best, but I honestly believe that classical liberalism on a base of robust Christian belief is about the best form of government we can hope for in the modern age. Not a perfect form of government, but better than the other possibilities on offer. Yet having seen what has happened in the US in the last few years, especially over the last year, I don’t really believe anymore than liberalism as we have known it can defend itself. Nor do I have much confidence that it should be defended. If “liberalism” requires a nation to open its children’s minds to transgender propaganda, then to hell with liberalism. If “liberalism” requires white people to despise themselves for the color of their skin, and requires Asian people to disadvantage their own children, who are supposed to suffer because they study hard and lead disciplined lives, then to hell with liberalism. If “liberalism” means that we are supposed to prove our virtue by denouncing our ancestors and purging our libraries and our classroom of books that have long been part of the canon of Western civilization, then … you know. Why should we want to defend this culture of death?

So where does that leave us, politically? I wish I knew. I can’t see much cause for hope right now on the Right. The most passionate of us are wasting themselves in crackpot causes. The smartest of us seem lost. Damon Linker, a good liberal (I say that unsarcastically; Damon really is a principled man of the center left), worries about the fascist temptation on the Right — specifically, in a shocking podcast conversation between Michael Anton and Curtis Yarvin. Linker:

I have described Anton’s conversation with Yarvin as helping to shift the Overton window away from liberal democracy and toward a defense of tyranny. Yet this isn’t how either man understands the American present. Rather, they agree early on in the podcast (around minute 24) that the current American “regime” is most accurately described as a “theocratic oligarchy” in which an elite class of progressive “priests” ensconced in the bureaucracies of the administrative state, and at Harvard, The New York Times, and other leading institutions of civil society, promulgate and enforce their own version of “reality.” Anton and Yarvin treat this assertion as given and then proceed to talk through how this theocratic oligarchy might be overturned. (One of their substantive disagreements concerns how long this regime might last if it’s not directly challenged. Anton is hopeful it will collapse of its own incompetence and corruption, while Yarvin thinks the current “clown world” could continue onward for decades or even a century, with the United States slowly decaying into something resembling a Third World country.)

I haven’t listened to the podcast, but I generally agree with this diagnosis (by Yarvin and Anton). The rest of their argument (as Linker recounts it) is something I absolutely disagree with. They seem to look forward to some sort of American Napoleon. I can’t go there. Viktor Orban is not that kind of figure. He is an elected democrat, and if he loses next year’s race, he will leave office. Orban’s appeal to conservatives like me is that he is not only deeply unwoke, but he also has a clearer and more accurate read on the Left, and is far more willing than American conservative politicians to play hardball with it. Donald Trump is only superficially like Orban. Trump is a clown who was never serious about governing. He wasted the opportunity history and the American people gave him. He antagonized the Left and accelerated the Left’s radicalization without providing a meaningful and effective opposition from the Right. He tweeted; Orban governs. In fact, I have had many conversations this summer with voters who are ready for a change, but who are planning to return Orban’s party to government because they don’t trust the opposition to govern well. They believe that the opposition will just do what Brussels tells them to do.

Linker writes:

The podcast concludes with Anton quoting another Claremont writer (Angelo Codevilla) on how Trump dropped “the leadership of the deplorables,” which is waiting to be picked up by someone “who will make Trump seem moderate.” Yarvin responds approvingly with a quote by Serbian dictator and indicted genocidal war criminal Slobodan Milošević, who said the goal should be that “no one will dare to beat you anymore.”

That is ugly. No one should quote Slobodan Milosevic. That speech, though, occurred at Kosovo Field, in a context of ethnic Serbs being attacked by ethnic Albanians. Milosevic awakened ethnic nationalism that led to attempted genocide. But look, not having listened to the podcast, what I would say is that if you don’t want to empower an American Milosevic, stop justifying turning white Americans into second-class citizens because of their supposed bloodguiltiness. Why on earth can’t the Left see that this is a formula for tearing the country apart in racial violence? You are pushing people to radicalization. If, God forbid, we get an American Napoleon, or infinitely worse, an American Milosevic, you will share a lot of the blame.

So, yes, I have become more radicalized this summer. I believe I better understand what the end game is for the Left, which is to say the people who hold all the institutional power in the US. The old liberals are gone, or at least they don’t have real power anymore. It’s all revolutionary radicalism, carried out by nice people in pleasant offices, who want to erase history, deny identity, and subjugate those who resist.

You tell me: why are we on the Right supposed to believe that these are normal times, and that we can protect ourselves through normal means?

I hate where this is going. But it’s the Left who is shoving their batons into our backs, pushing us there. I would rather be a reactionary living in a liberal democracy, where we are pretty much left alone. But the Left is not giving people like me that choice. Do I side with the possibly unsavory people who at least don’t hate me, or do I side with the socially privileged people who would just as soon push people like me to the margins, and treat us and the things we love with utter contempt? Is this even a question?

UPDATE: A reader who is so interesting he should get his own blog writes:

I think radicalization was the only possible way forward when the left won the culture war in 2015 and then headed out to shoot the wounded. The whole idea of the liberal experiment emerging out of the Wars Of Religion is that we didn’t have to kill each other over theological differences. The left hasn’t moved to killing, but they are quite comfortable with secular anathemas, excommunications, and declarations of apostasy that have had real-world impact on hundreds to thousands of ordinary Americans who don’t have the time, money, or ability to sit through years of “process is the punishment” litigation. Now they aren’t being executed, but they are being rendered into social pariahs who are borderline unemployable. The left’s current scheme is to marginalize these individuals politically and culturally until they die off. If that plan fails to bear fruit, they will likely resort to more direct means of coercion given that they are now quite comfortable with court-packing and eliminating the electoral college.

Trump was a failed attempt to reset the dynamic by shattering the Republican consensus, but he was incapable of making a broader impact because he was too inept, too corrupt, too incompetent, and too unable to meaningfully learn. The only genuine options (term is from William James) that the US right has is to either adopt the neocon model embodied by the Lincoln Project, where you attempt to curry favor with the woke establishment in the hopes that they will one day let you carry out your preferred foreign policy, to try to reach an accommodation with the status quo a la David French, or to accept that the fusionist experiment failed and start looking around for alternatives. The left raising concerns about fascism would be more credible if they didn’t immediately sound the alarm bells for fascism on the right every time a Republican is or might be in a position of national power. Additionally, I think the idea that Orban, as opposed to the caricature of him as Francisco Franco reborn, represents some kind of massive break with liberalism is oversold. I actually think he would have fit in quite comfortably in Huey Long’s Louisiana, Pendergast’s Kansas City, or (with some variations in ideology) Illinois or New Jersey, none of which are fascist hellholes. If Hungary under Orban is a dictatorship it is frankly a far more benign species of the same where the opposition party meets openly, opposition press reliably functions, and the government can be reliably denounced without fear of retribution. As you have noted, if you start questioning any element of the current woke consensus under your real name, then you are going to face a serious effort to deny you employment and advancement unless you are deeply inside the conservative ghetto.

The current cultural radicalism and revolutionary fervor is something that the left regards as completely normative, which frankly isn’t surprising given again that they in fact won the culture war. No matter what conservatives may believe, Roe vs. Wade isn’t going to be overturned (and would be rendered meaningless at the state level if it were) and there is no judicial magic that is going to reverse more than 50 years of sustained cultural defeats. This is a hard reality for many conservatives to accept, but that is where we are at for the time being and that is why The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies were so important. If they want harder realities to embrace, then they should consider that the US was the sole superpower in 1991 but by 2021 have lost the war on terrorism, with Iraq having been Finlandized by Iran, Afghanistan back under the rule of the Taliban, and Syria divided between Assad, Turkish-aligned and enabled jihadists, ISIS remnants, and Kurdish communists. George W. Bush’s second inaugural address is going to look in retrospect to be just as deluded as Hitler’s call for a thousand-year Reich. If that is a hard pill to swallow by people like myself who fought for America and want us to win, then I am truly sorry.

The key issue that exists on the right is there is no agreement on what comes next or what it would look like. Orban’s Hungary is a fine enough model, but it represents a massive break with American fusionist conservatism in terms of government intervention, and his entire COVID response is absolute anathema for the Jacksonian right that still believes the entire thing is massively overblown, possibly for some sinister purpose. Trump demonstrated that ideological principles are neither the beginning nor the end of the American right, but at this point the US right remains locked in the thrall of his cult of personality and cannot move forward as long as he remains in a commanding position. As a result, intellectual debates and arguments will continue, but the right’s intellectuals that loudly and often decried Trump throughout the 2016 primary illustrated their irrelevance to affecting the actual electorate. This is why the best way forward for the right is an individual who has actual charisma and is able to state Trumpist critiques of the status quo while avoiding his deplorable excesses, corruption, unhinged stream of consciousness, and buffoonery. And the man who can do that is an actual threat to the Cathedral, hence all the fire being directed against JD Vance.

I would also say the endurance of the woke consensus is a direct function of our relative decline. As that becomes more pronounced the status quo will either be discredited and overthrown, or will devolve into something much nastier. The key issue is that the right is now on autopilot and will remain so as long as Trump is in the driver’s seat, which provides the left with the perfect straw man against which to support their consolidation.

 

The post Radicalizing To The Right appeared first on The American Conservative.

Kroger, The Wokest Supermarket

I think it has been well established that the American elite has lost its collective mind. If you doubt it, check out Elizabeth Bruenig’s long piece in The Atlantic about what’s happened to Yale law professor Amy Chua. The title gets to the heart of the matter: “The New Moral Code Of America’s Elite”. It is more of the usual soft-totalitarian crap, this time playing out within Yale University. You might be thinking: who cares about Yale? Here’s what you should know: the people who graduate from Yale and other elite institutions — and now, even not-so-elite ones — are mostly saturated with this “new moral code,” which entails wokeness.

They bring this moral code to the executive offices of major corporations. Which is how we get to supermarket workers having to receive ideological education to be qualified to stack cans of Chicken-of-the-Sea on a shelf.

My first paying job was working at a grocery store in my hometown. I loved it. I got to stock shelves, run the cash register, and do a little bit of everything. I could not have imagined that one day, working in a grocery store would require political re-education. A reader passes along Kroger’s 24-page guide to being a woke cashier and shelf-stocker. I’m going to post excerpts below. We have lost our minds as a country if we force people to undergo this kind of political consciousness training just to put freaking bananas in a bin. Let’s have a look at what the woke capitalists at Kroger compel their employees to study:

What is the point of this? Why should a corporation care about “allyship”? This is a weird form of coercion. A corporation should care that its LGBT employees are treated with the same respect all employees are entitled to. But as you’ll see, this initiative goes far beyond that. Remember, I’m not going to post all the 26 pages, just the worst.

“Partner with leadership”. “Leverage our influence”. “Drive positive impact.” When the Revolution comes, Human Resources Department personnel will be the first against the wall.

Ah, now we’re getting somewhere. Kroger got the woke imprimatur from the HRC. As I write in Live Not By Lies:

Corporations like to brand themselves as being in favor of a predictable constellation of causes, all of them guiding stars of the progressive cosmos. Woke capitalist branding harnesses the unmatched propaganda resources of the advertising industry to send the message, both explicitly and implicitly: the beliefs of social conservatives and religious traditionalists are obstacles to the social good.

As you will see, that’s what Kroger is doing here.

It’s perfectly fine for a company to expect its employees not to bring their political, religious, or cultural proselytizing to the workplace. But that is exactly what Kroger is doing with LGBT! Employees who don’t agree with the ideology behind “allyship” had better go into the closet at work. Kroger says it wants to focus “on behaviors and not beliefs,” but if that were true, they would not be indoctrinating employees by the woke LGBT catechism. They would simply insist on courtesy and respect, not push gender ideology onto unwilling employees. Look:

What does any of this have to do with being a supermarket cashier or stock person? Nothing! Do you have to affirm these contestable categories and definitions in order to treat your LGBT co-worker with respect? No, you don’t. Kroger wishes to indoctrinate its workers, and by so doing make it a less friendly place for people with dissenting moral or religious values to work.

Again, what possible relationship does this ideology have to the ability of a Kroger employee to be a competent and dependable supermarket worker? Since when does corporate management involve itself in propagandizing for left-wing theories that until five minutes ago were confined to the Gender Studies faculty? Since the American elites lost their minds.

Look at this stupidity. Imagine how hard it is for the people at the Kroger in Southern states, with our courtesy codes, to get with this idiotic language policing:

We are re-working ordinary English to accommodate a thin-skinned fringe and their corporate elite allies, and turning the workplace into a massive eggshells-walk. Speaking of walking on eggshells:

“Oppressive”! Gosh. So now some poor young man who got his GED, and is now working as a trainee at the meat market at the Kroger in Opelika, Alabama, might forget to say “xe” or “hir” or some other weird-ass Klingon pronoun to a co-worker or customer, and thus find himself denounced as an oppressor, and fired. Great, just great. Don’t work for Kroger if you want to retain your sanity and self-respect.

Behold, the High Holy Days:

Here’s the most outrageous thing in the whole set:

Kroger tells its employees to get politically active to support a particular (and particularly controversial) law, then tells them to join the LGBT activist group HRC. What an outrageous overstepping of workplace boundaries in a supermarket. In this presentation, Kroger went from being nice to LGBTs to instructing its employees to take specific political stands.

And it tells employees to join these activist organizations:

Unbelievable. A person just wants to be a cashier at the local Kroger, but she has to endure this culture-war harangue by her employer. Imagine what ordinary people who work at Kroger must think as they have this stuff forced on them. They don’t dare object, or even question it publicly, out of fear they will be called a bigot, and fired. But see, that’s okay, because Kroger doesn’t want bigots working for it! If working-class bigots mopping the aisles at Kroger are terrified for their jobs in case someone discovers their bigotry, well, good: that means the system is working. As someone — Robespierre, or maybe Ibram X. Kendi — said, “Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue.”

Plainly Kroger, the largest supermarket chain in America, is a bad place to work for the non-woke. If you are one of the deplorably non-woke, don’t shop there. Don’t participate in this propaganda and indoctrination foisted on working-class people. Look at these charts from Indeed.com to see what people at Kroger are paid:

Unsurprisingly:

 

Kroger fired a couple of workers in Arkansas over this stuff, and are now facing an EEOC suit:

Kroger is being accused of violating federal law for allegedly firing two employees who refused to wear a rainbow emblem, which they believe contradicts their religious beliefs.

The Equal Employment Opportunity Commission accused the supermarket in a lawsuit filed Monday of terminating the women after they asked for a religious accommodation so that they didn’t have to display the rainbow.

The lawsuit claims that a Kroger store in Conway, Ark., implemented a new dress code in April 2019 that “required all employees to wear a new apron with a new logo, a rainbow heart embroidered on the top left portion of the bib.”

The rainbow flag has long been a symbol of the LGBT community.

Both of the defendants in the case, 57-year-old Trudy Rickert and 72-year-old Brenda Lawson, believe “in the literal interpretation of the Bible” and hold “a sincerely held religious belief that homosexuality is a sin.”

Because of these beliefs, the defendants made multiple oral and written requests to management to wear another apron.

“I have a sincerely held religious belief that I cannot wear a symbol that promotes or endorses something that is in violation of my religious faith,” Rickerd told management in a signed hand-written letter May 1, 2019, according to the lawsuit. “I respect others who have a different opinion and am happy to work alongside others who desire to wear the symbol. I am happy to buy another apron to ensure there is no financial hardship on Kroger.”

Rickerd and Lawson claim that instead of granting their requests, they were disciplined multiple times.

According to the lawsuit, Rickerd was fired May 29, 2019, and Lawson was fired June 1, 2019 for repeated violations of the dress code.

Here is a key principle behind Woke Capitalism: You can pay your employees badly and bully them, making them afraid that they’re going to slip up, or that somebody’s going to find out that they are conservative, or go to church … but as long as you say the right pronouns, and get the seal of approval from the leading woke activist groups, hey, you’re golden. All the elites at the country club praise your executives for their social progressivism, and you never run into the grubby Bible-beaters and other grocery-store deplorables anyway, so who cares what they think? Right?

 

 

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The Courage Of Maud Maron

It just might be that the bravest woman in America today is a pro-choice, Bernie-voting public defender named Maud Maron, who is refusing to go quietly into the exile her radical former colleagues have assigned her. Bari Weiss did this piece on her, after Maron filed suit against her former employer.Excerpts:

The suit, which you can read here, claims that Maron was “discriminated against on the basis of race” by her employer, Legal Aid Society, and her union, the Association of Legal Aid Attorneys. It claims that both defendants “published knowingly false statements in furtherance of ideological and political motives divorced from the core functions of Ms. Maron’s employment.” In other words: it says she was forced out of her job because of her political views and her race, a violation of Title VII of the Civil Rights Act.

“None of this would have happened if I just said I loved books like White Fragility, and I’m a fan of Bill de Blasio’s proposals for changing New York City public schools, and I planned to vote for Maya Wiley for mayor. The reason they went after me is because I have a different point of view,” she said.

That difference came out most starkly in education, and in Maron’s role on the school board and as a candidate for city council she was outspoken in her views.

“I am very open about what I stand for. I am pro-integration. I am pro-diversity. And also I reject the narrative that white parents are to blame for the failures of our school system. I object to the mayor’s proposal to get rid of specialized admissions tests to schools like Stuyvesant. And I believe that racial essentialism is racist and should not be taught in school,” she told me.

This apparently didn’t sit well with some of her colleagues.

Then she wrote an op-ed in the New York Post opposing certain race-radical policies in NYC public schools. More:

Three days after she published the piece, the Black Attorneys of Legal Aid Caucus put out a lengthy statement saying that “Maud Maron has no business having a career in public defense, and we’re ashamed that she works for the Legal Aid Society.” It declared: “Maud is racist, and openly so,” and offered no evidence to back up the charge. It said that this veteran public defender was a “prominent opponent of equality” and a “classic example of what 21st century racism looks like.”

The statement said that Maron “is one of many charlatans who took this job not out of a desire to make a difference, but for purposes of self-imaging.” It claimed: “She pretends to favor integration while fighting against it and denying the existence of racism in education.”

The statement also accused Maron of being terrible at her job. “No public defender can legitimately claim to be a proponent of racial justice if they are lax in how they do the work,” it said, adding that “we know for a fact that Maud’s commitment to zealous representation of poor people of color is questionable at best.”

One former colleague told me that the accusation of racism in an organization like Legal Aid “is the equivalent of calling someone who works at a Jewish organization anti-Jewish. It becomes impossible to work there.” Never mind that several lawyers who worked alongside Maud told me that the allegations were absurd.

“She was beyond terrific,” said James Chubinsky, Maron’s former supervisor. “When she joined the Bronx Division I didn’t understand why she wasn’t coming as a supervisor, given her resume. She handled the toughest cases and arraignments, she did an enormous amount of work, and she went out of her way to engage the less experienced lawyers in the cases she was handling,” said Chubinsky, who spent the past 41 years at the organization, until he retired a year-and-a-half ago. “Any suggestion that she was anything other than a top-flight lawyer that the Legal Aid Society should be damn proud to have on their staff is a crock.”

Read the whole piece to learn more, or better yet — much better — listen to Bari Weiss’s hourlong podcast interview with Maron. It’s one of the most moving things I have heard in ages. The degree of persecution this poor woman — a left-wing lawyer who has dedicated her career to defending poor minorities — is enduring by these woke monsters is vile and un-American. Listening to Maron tell Weiss about how she is taking this public stand because she wants her children to know that their mother had courage, and would not let a malicious mob run over her — well, it had me near tears. If some future writer wants to do a Live Not By Lies based on experiences of contemporary Americans resisting these totalitarians among us, Maud Maron should be on the cover.

I was surprised and moved by the final minutes of the podcast interview, when Maron says that she read Live Not By Lies over the Fourth of July weekend, and was really moved by it. She said that she disagrees with its author (me) about a number of important issues, but she loves the book and the stories of courage it tells. She says that it makes her realize that we who reject this cruelty and hysteria can actually stand with each other to fight it, even if we disagree on much. Maud is right about that. This point is actually made by former anti-totalitarian dissidents in the book itself. Here, look:

As important as it is for Christians to strengthen their ties to one another, they should not neglect to nurture friendships with people of goodwill outside the churches. In the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, Christian dissidents had to maintain close contact with secular dissidents because there were so few believers within resistance circles.

As lawyer Ján Čarnigurský puts it, “There weren’t many people in general who wanted to stand up to communism. You have to take allies where you could. The secret police tried to keep secular liberals and Christians apart, and they wanted to keep Czechs and Slovaks divided. They did not succeed because the leaders of the movement had become friends with leaders in other circles.”

In the Slovak region, František Mikloško reached out to liberals not because he had to but because he genuinely wanted to.

“To this day, communicating with the secular liberal world really enriches my views,” he says. “It is important for me to have my home and to be aware that I know where I stand. I know my values. But I have to stay in contact with the liberal world, because otherwise there is the danger of degeneration.”

Mikloško’s close association with secular liberal writers and artists helped him to understand the world beyond church circles and to think critically about himself and other Christian activists. And, he says, liberal artists were able to perceive and describe the essence of communism better than Christians—a skill that helped them all survive, even thrive, under oppression.

And this part also:

Being active in a wider movement for liberty, democracy, and human rights helped shape the Benda children in other ways. Though Václav and Kamila Benda held their Catholic beliefs uncompromisingly within the family, they showed their children by example the importance of working with good and decent people outside the moral and theological community of the church.

Patrik reminds me that his family were the only Christians involved in the movement in Prague. All other senior Charter 77 members were secular. Though most were strongly anti-communist in one way or another, one, Petr Uhl, was a self-described “revolutionary Marxist,” but one who believed that a Marxist state without human rights is not worth fighting for.

“In Charter 77, you had people of totally different worldviews and ideas joined together,” says Patrik. “You had, for example, democratic socialists on the one side and fervent Catholics on the other side. It was totally normal for me that as a small child, I was being raised in a community of people with very different opinions. So it shattered the bubble around me.”

The lesson of valuing diversity within a broader unity of shared goals is something that Christians today need to embrace.

“When we look at what’s happening in America today, we see that you are building walls and creating gaps between people,” he says. “For us, we are always willing to speak, to talk with the other side to avoid building walls between people. You know, it is much easier to indoctrinate someone who is enclosed within a set of walls.”

Gotta say here that Bari Weiss is doing terrific work telling the stories of brave people like Maud Maron, and building those alliances across community boundaries. These women, Maud and Bari, give me hope.

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The Second Coming Of Helmut Kentler

I almost don’t want to recommend this New Yorker story about a German experiment that placed foster children with pedophiles, because it is hideous. But people today need to know what it used to be like, and how we got to the point where we are today. Excerpts:

In 2017, a German man who goes by the name Marco came across an article in a Berlin newspaper with a photograph of a professor he recognized from childhood. The first thing he noticed was the man’s lips. They were thin, almost nonexistent, a trait that Marco had always found repellent. He was surprised to read that the professor, Helmut Kentler, had been one of the most influential sexologists in Germany. The article described a new research report that had investigated what was called the “Kentler experiment.” Beginning in the late sixties, Kentler had placed neglected children in foster homes run by pedophiles. The experiment was authorized and financially supported by the Berlin Senate. In a report submitted to the Senate, in 1988, Kentler had described it as a “complete success.”

Marco had grown up in foster care, and his foster father had frequently taken him to Kentler’s home. Now he was thirty-four, with a one-year-old daughter, and her meals and naps structured his days. After he read the article, he said, “I just pushed it aside. I didn’t react emotionally. I did what I do every day: nothing, really. I sat around in front of the computer.”

Marco looks like a movie star—he is tanned, with a firm jaw, thick dark hair, and a long, symmetrical face. As an adult, he has cried only once. “If someone were to die in front of me, I would of course want to help them, but it wouldn’t affect me emotionally,” he told me. “I have a wall, and emotions just hit against it.” He lived with his girlfriend, a hairdresser, but they never discussed his childhood. He was unemployed. Once, he tried to work as a mailman, but after a few days he quit, because whenever a stranger made an expression that reminded him of his foster father, an engineer named Fritz Henkel, he had the sensation that he was not actually alive, that his heart had stopped beating, and that the color had drained from the world. When he tried to speak, it felt as if his voice didn’t belong to him.

Several months after reading the article, Marco looked up the number for Teresa Nentwig, a young political scientist at the University of Göttingen Institute for Democracy Research, who had written the report on Kentler. He felt both curious and ashamed. When she answered the phone, he identified himself as “an affected person.” He told her that his foster father had spoken with Kentler on the phone every week. In ways that Marco had never understood, Kentler, a psychologist and a professor of social education at the University of Hannover, had seemed deeply invested in his upbringing.

Nentwig had assumed that Kentler’s experiment ended in the nineteen-seventies. But Marco told her he had lived in his foster home until 2003, when he was twenty-one. “I was totally shocked,” she said. She remembers Marco saying several times, “You are the first person I’ve told—this is the first time I’ve told my story.” As a child, he’d taken it for granted that the way he was treated was normal. “Such things happen,” he told himself. “The world is like this: it’s eat and be eaten.” But now, he said, “I realized the state has been watching.”

The state was watching all right. And it accepted Kentler as an expert. They all did:

When a public prosecutor launched an investigation, Helmut Kentler, who called himself Henkel’s “permanent adviser,” intervened on Henkel’s behalf—a pattern that repeats throughout more than eight hundred pages of case files about Henkel’s home. Kentler was a well-known scholar, the author of several books on sex education and parenting, and he was often quoted in Germany’s leading newspapers and on its TV programs. The newspaper Die Zeit had described him as the “nation’s chief authority on questions of sexual education.” On university letterhead, Kentler issued what he called an “expert opinion,” explaining that he had come to know Henkel through a “research project.” He commended Henkel on his parenting skills and disparaged a psychologist who invaded the privacy of his home, making “wild interpretations.” Sometimes, Kentler wrote, an airplane is not a phallic symbol—it is simply a plane. The criminal investigation was suspended.

Kentler was raised by a hysterically repressive military father. He later realized he (Kentler) was gay. More:

In 1960, Kentler got a degree in psychology, a field that allowed him to be “an engineer in the realm of the . . . manipulatable soul,” he said at a lecture. He became involved in the student movement, and at a meeting of the Republican Club, a group established by left-wing intellectuals, he publicly identified himself as gay for the first time. Not long afterward, he wrote, he decided to turn “my passions into a profession (which is also good for the passions: they are controlled).” He earned a doctorate in social education from the University of Hannover, publishing his dissertation, a guidebook called “Parents Learn Sex Education,” in 1975. He was inspired by the Marxist psychoanalyst Wilhelm Reich, who had argued that the free flow of sexual energy was essential to building a new kind of society. Kentler’s dissertation urged parents to teach their children that they should never be ashamed of their desires. “Once the first feelings of shame exist, they multiply easily and expand into all areas of life,” he wrote.

Like many of his contemporaries, Kentler came to believe that sexual repression was key to understanding the Fascist consciousness. In 1977, the sociologist Klaus Theweleit published “Male Fantasies,” a two-volume book that drew on the diaries of German paramilitary fighters and concluded that their inhibited drives—along with a fear of anything gooey, gushing, or smelly—had been channelled into a new outlet: destruction. When Kentler read “Male Fantasies,” he could see Schreber, the child-care author whose principles his parents had followed, “at work everywhere,” he wrote. Kentler argued that ideas like Schreber’s (he had been so widely read that one book went through forty editions) had poisoned three generations of Germans, creating “authoritarian personalities who have to identify with a ‘great man’ around them to feel great themselves.” Kentler’s goal was to develop a child-rearing philosophy for a new kind of German man. Sexual liberation, he wrote, was the best way to “prevent another Auschwitz.”

Good God. And, here we go:

Suddenly, it seemed as if all relationship structures could—and must—be reconfigured, if there was any hope of producing a generation less damaged than the previous one. In the late sixties, educators in more than thirty German cities and towns began establishing experimental day-care centers, where children were encouraged to be naked and to explore one another’s bodies. “There is no question that they were trying (in a desperate sort of neo-Rousseauian authoritarian antiauthoritarianism) to remake German/human nature,” Herzog writes. Kentler inserted himself into a movement that was urgently working to undo the sexual legacy of Fascism but struggling to differentiate among various taboos. In 1976, the magazine Das Blatt argued that forbidden sexual desire, such as that for children, was the “revolutionary event that turns our everyday life on its head, that lets feelings break out and that shatters the basis of our thinking.” A few years later, Germany’s newly established Green Party, which brought together antiwar protesters, environmental activists, and veterans of the student movement, tried to address the “oppression of children’s sexuality.” Members of the Party advocated abolishing the age of consent for sex between children and adults.

A key figure of the German radical left:

Here is a 1982 video by a major French-German politician (Cohn-Bendit) talking about 5 years old girls undressing him. They used to brag about that on National TV with no consequences. https://t.co/BlKYVmZ23F

— عمر (@D_503zam) July 21, 2021

The story goes on to say that Kentler was open in testimony before the German parliament about his program placing runaway boys with pedophile foster fathers — and nobody cared! Look:

[I]n a 2020 report commissioned by the Berlin Senate, scholars at the University of Hildesheim concluded that “the Senate also ran foster homes or shared flats for young Berliners with pedophile men in other parts of West Germany.” The fifty-eight-page report was preliminary and vague; the authors said there were about a thousand unsorted files in the basement of a government building that they had been unable to read. No names were revealed, but the authors wrote that “these foster homes were run by sometimes powerful men who lived alone and who were given this power by academia, research institutions and other pedagogical environments that accepted, supported or even lived out pedophile stances.” The report concluded that some “senate actors” had been “part of this network,” while others had merely tolerated the foster homes “because ‘icons’ of educational reform policies supported such arrangements.”

Finally:

For much of his career, Kentler spoke of pedophiles as benefactors. They offered neglected children “a possibility of therapy,” he told Der Spiegel, in 1980. When the Berlin Senate commissioned him to prepare an expert report on the subject of “Homosexuals as caregivers and educators,” in 1988, he explained that there was no need to worry that children would be harmed by sexual contact with caretakers, as long as the interaction was not “forced.” The consequences can be “very positive, especially when the sexual relationship can be characterized as mutual love,” he wrote.

Read the whole thing.The story goes on to criticize the right-wing AfD party in Germany for allegedly exploiting the pedophile scandal involving Henkel to justify more restrictive sex laws in contemporary Germany.

In his Sunday NYT column, Ross Douthat uses this story as a springboard to ask: Can the Left regulate sex? He concludes:

Progressives are not quite in the cultural position that Christian churches once occupied in this country, but they are close enough that the question “how should the left regulate sex?” increasingly implicates our whole society.

… I don’t know how long the current period of progressive cultural power can last. But so long as it does, these debates will continue, because the regulation of sex is an inescapable obligation of power.

So progressives will continue to teeter between two anxieties. On the one hand, the fear of turning into the very Puritans and Comstocks they brag of having toppled. On the other, the fear of Helmut Kentler’s legacy, and liberation as a path into the abyss.

I am as skeptical as I can possibly be that the Left will ever regulate sex effectively. Granted, there is not one monolithic “Left” any more than there is a monolithic “Right.” The general thrust of the Left — at least those with power and influence — is towards greater “liberation.” I mean, look, here is the cultural Left’s idea of good advice for teenagers:

Elizabeth Bruenig has a sobering piece in The Atlantic about how so-called “porn literacy” education — high school courses that aim to teach students how to navigate pornography “ethically” — are hopelessly outmoded because of the extreme nature of modern porn, and its ubiquity. Excerpts:

But dismissing porn literacy as progressive evangelizing suggests an enormous misapprehension of the problem itself. Many digital natives who pride themselves on a certain kind of ennui likely far underestimate exactly how difficult it is to be an ethical user of pornography, or even to begin to judge how to be such a person, given the dark, circuitous routes porn travels before it arrives as a thumbnail on a streaming site. And parents who imagine porn-literacy courses like Fonte’s to be little more than crash courses in en vogue libertinism seem entirely unaware of how dire the stakes are. The risk isn’t that their children may be exposed to something “dirty” or politically incorrect, but that their children may well be exposed to things that are brutal, cruel, vicious, even genuinely criminal—the sort of material law-enforcement agents carefully train themselves to encounter—all without a sense of how to distinguish the authentically violent from that which only masquerades as such. If anything, courses like Fonte’s aren’t given nearly enough funding, time, or other resources to fully demonstrate just how onerous ethical porn use really is. Without that kind of guidance, how are teenagers supposed to have any idea how to be good people in the world we’ve created?

How are any of us, for that matter?

Bruenig talks with cops and activists, and says that the world of online pornography is so incredibly twisted, and the most grotesque stuff is so widespread, that it is all but impossible to manage. More:

On a July weekend, I sat down with four teenagers—three girls and one boy, ranging in age from 16 to 18—to talk about their reflections on pornography and the way it has influenced their lives so far. None of them was especially enthusiastic about the genre, largely because they were enthusiastic about sex. (I agreed not to use their real names so that they could speak candidly about this sensitive topic.)

“The boys that I have had sex with,” Thalia, 17, told me, “I can tell while having sex with them which one’s watched too much porn, based on how they behave during sex.” It comes across as a certain impersonal performance, she said, “or they’ll do certain things that … I know they probably wouldn’t have thought of organically.”

I asked about the nature of those learned behaviors. Were they violent, disconcerting, uncomfortable?

“When I first started having sex, I thought that I was just—because of watching porn and also listening to other people my age talk about sex, the weird ubiquity of BDSM [sadomasochism] culture—I thought that I was just supposed to like being, like, choked and stuff,” Thalia said.

Joy, 18, agreed: “I think there was a point in my life where I tried to convince myself that I could possibly be into that. And now that I have grown up, I’m like, ‘No way, I would never let anyone do that to me.’”

“Personally I have only had sex with one person,” Callie, 18, added. “And he is not even as exposed to porn as I would think that most boys are, and he thought that [choking] was a normal thing.”

Thalia mused that the light, obligatory strangling had become vanilla among a certain set of her peers. “It’s taken on a weird flavor, maybe, where it’s like—who can have the most weird, violent sex? It’s like a contest.”

This is not just a thing of the Left. Where have you seen any serious, sustained proposals from politicians of the Right to ban or otherwise regulate online porn? I believe that this is a civilization-killing phenomenon, and that the emergence of all these weird sexualities (and genderfluidity, etc.) are a related phenomenon to online porn as a normal part of society, and of growing up in our decadent era. In the future, I believe that whatever survives us will ban online pornography, for the sake of saving our ability to live together in moral sanity.

That said, there is no question but that the two cultural pillars of the Left today are Race and Sex. Back in 2013, two years before Obergefell, I wrote a widely-read blog post here titled “Sex After Christianity”. It said, in part:

The magnitude of the defeat suffered by moral traditionalists will become ever clearer as older Americans pass from the scene. Poll after poll shows that for the young, homosexuality is normal and gay marriage is no big deal—except, of course, if one opposes it, in which case one has the approximate moral status of a segregationist in the late 1960s.

All this is, in fact, a much bigger deal than most people on both sides realize, and for a reason that eludes even ardent opponents of gay rights. Back in 1993, a cover story in The Nation identified the gay-rights cause as the summit and keystone of the culture war:

All the crosscurrents of present-day liberation struggles are subsumed in the gay struggle. The gay moment is in some ways similar to the moment that other communities have experienced in the nation’s past, but it is also something more, because sexual identity is in crisis throughout the population, and gay people—at once the most conspicuous subjects and objects of the crisis—have been forced to invent a complete cosmology to grasp it. No one says the changes will come easily. But it’s just possible that a small and despised sexual minority will change America forever.

They were right, and though the word “cosmology” may strike readers as philosophically grandiose, its use now appears downright prophetic. The struggle for the rights of “a small and despised sexual minority” would not have succeeded if the old Christian cosmology had held: put bluntly, the gay-rights cause has succeeded precisely because the Christian cosmology has dissipated in the mind of the West.

Same-sex marriage strikes the decisive blow against the old order. The Nation’s triumphalist rhetoric from two decades ago is not overripe; the radicals appreciated what was at stake far better than did many—especially bourgeois apologists for same-sex marriage as a conservative phenomenon. Gay marriage will indeed change America forever, in ways that are only now becoming visible. For better or for worse, it will make ours a far less Christian culture. It already is doing exactly that.

Part of this revolution is the hardening into orthodoxy of the twentieth-century belief that sexual desire is the essence of identity. If you can’t look at the fact of ubiquitous hardcore porn considered a normal part of American childhood, and if you can’t look at the fact that mainstream magazines like Teen Vogue advise young readers on the best lubricants to use for being rogered up the rear, and if you can’t observe that progressives are actually arguing now over whether it is appropriate for little children to see sadomasochist queers at Pride events — if you can’t look at all that and see the Second Coming of Helmut Kentler, I say you are blind as a bat.

Notice too that all the politicians, journalists, and others in Germany deferred to Kentler’s authority, as he incarnated the elite-culture Zeitgeist. In Germany, he was the Ibram X. Kendi of Baby Boomer sexual liberation: a quack who was revered as a prophet and a healer. We all can see how insane medical authorities, and adjacent gatekeepers, have gone about transgenderism today. Thirty, forty, fifty years ago, one of the most respected psychological authorities in Germany was placing foster children with pedophiles, with the knowledge and approval of the German parliament. Today, top doctors, hospitals, and medical schools are cutting healthy breasts off of young females, and jacking children up with cross-sex hormones, all in a grand experiment to liberate them from biology. And Democratic politicians cheer it on, while judges do little or nothing to stop the insanity.

I am certain that in several decades’ time, maximum, we will see this transgender madness in the same way that we see Helmut Kentler’s pedophile foster program. If we’re lucky. 

You know who else was there in 1968, in Germany, and saw the devastating effects of the Sexual Revolution? Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI. In 2019, in a reflection about the connection between this culture and the sex abuse crisis in the Catholic Church, he wrote:

The matter begins with the state-prescribed and supported introduction of children and youths into the nature of sexuality. In Germany, the then-Minister of Health, Ms. (Käte) Strobel, had a film made in which everything that had previously not been allowed to be shown publicly, including sexual intercourse, was now shown for the purpose of education. What at first was only intended for the sexual education of young people consequently was widely accepted as a feasible option.

Similar effects were achieved by the “Sexkoffer” published by the Austrian government [A controversial ‘suitcase’ of sex education materials used in Austrian schools in the late 1980s]. Sexual and pornographic movies then became a common occurrence, to the point that they were screened at newsreel theaters [Bahnhofskinos]. I still remember seeing, as I was walking through the city of Regensburg one day, crowds of people lining up in front of a large cinema, something we had previously only seen in times of war, when some special allocation was to be hoped for. I also remember arriving in the city on Good Friday in the year 1970 and seeing all the billboards plastered up with a large poster of two completely naked people in a close embrace.

Among the freedoms that the Revolution of 1968 sought to fight for was this all-out sexual freedom, one which no longer conceded any norms.

The mental collapse was also linked to a propensity for violence. That is why sex films were no longer allowed on airplanes because violence would break out among the small community of passengers. And since the clothing of that time equally provoked aggression, school principals also made attempts at introducing school uniforms with a view to facilitating a climate of learning.

Part of the physiognomy of the Revolution of ‘68 was that pedophilia was then also diagnosed as allowed and appropriate.

For the young people in the Church, but not only for them, this was in many ways a very difficult time. I have always wondered how young people in this situation could approach the priesthood and accept it, with all its ramifications. The extensive collapse of the next generation of priests in those years and the very high number of laicizations were a consequence of all these developments.

BXVI goes on to talk about the simultaneous degradation of theological norms within the Church, in the wake of the Second Vatican Council. Now, imagine how young people in our contemporary situation, with hardcore violent porn everywhere, with the annihilation of gender and sexual identity, and with the demand that all sexual expression short of incest and pederasty (for now) must be affirmed and mainstreamed — how can young people in this situation approach the priesthood and accept it, with all its ramifications? How can young people in this situation today approach the faith itself, and accept it? Or family life, as we have long understood it to be?

We are living through a general civilizational collapse. No wonder Benedict XVI says we need a Benedict Option. It’s all falling down around us.

Here is a 2020 RT documentary about Kentler and his paedo-files:

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