Rod Dreher's Blog, page 566

Ken Myers on Post-Christian America

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Ken Myers on the renewal of Christian culture:

“The recovery of the culture of the people of God will make us look profoundly different from our neighbors. In a post-Christian society, all faithful people begin to look a little Amish. But we must remember that we are always against the world for the world. This is not a call to retreat, but a call to provide a faithful public witness. We stand on a common ground of human nature with our neighbors. We are all creatures made in the image of a Triune God, called to fellowship with him, to love for one another, and for stewardship of our earthly home. Our hearts are restless until we rest in him. These are not religious opinions, but faithful descriptions of what is really the case. We are in fact this sort of creature, and our shared public life should honor this sort of fact, not just those facts measurable through material means. At the very least, public life should not make such facts about human identity less plausible or inaccessible, nor should government interfere with the ordering of the practical affairs of shared life so as to thwart human flourishing in its fullest forms. I hope that the newly energized champions of the common good are committed to all of its ramifications, and prepared to be reviled and persecuted and spoken ill of falsely when they bear witness to it. I hope they can then rejoice and be glad, for their reward will be great in heaven.”

This is from a lecture he gave called “Christian Faithfulness in Post-Christian America,” and which you can listen to for free by clicking the link in this sentence.

Ken is the founder and host of the Mars Hill Audio Journal, which in my opinion is the most important journalistic resource bar none for orthodox Christians attempting to understand modernity. If you aren’t a subscriber, you are really missing out. And you shouldn’t miss out. Everything I write about the Benedict Option is really just a footnote to Ken’s indispensable work.

The Ben Op As Light Fiction

Trevin Wax raves about the novel The Awakening of Miss Prim. Excerpts:

Here’s the gist of the storyline. A well-educated woman (Prudencia Prim) moves to the village of San Ireneo de Arnois and takes a job as the private librarian for an eccentric man (think, C. S. Lewis), a master of languages who carefully tends to the education of multiple children. He is also a practicing Catholic with a deep appreciation for gifts inherited from Western civilization. As Miss Prim gets to know her boss, the children, and the people who make their homes in this village, she finds herself drawn to different belief system and new way of life.

A good premise. A Spanish setting. Good characters. Fenollera delivers these and more.

From researching the book, I think the village is actually supposed to be in France. But it’s clearly meant to be a Franco-Iberian village. More:

But the big takeaway from this book is its quiet rebellion, the way it charms the reader while challenging modernity and many of its problems. It’s as if someone dreamed up what Rod Dreher’s “Benedict Option” for cultural engagement would look like in Spain, extended from church to a whole community, and then wrote a novel about it.

In a world exhausted by the hectic pace of life in capitalist societies or the ideology that squelches innovation and individuality in socialist societies, Fenollera’s family-based model of economics (which resembles Distributism) has great appeal. She defends Christianity’s social teaching by painting a portrait rather than just mounting an argument, but even then, her portrait does include debate and logic and argumentation.

Literature lovers will love the book’s fireside debates over the world’s greatest works. (Should Little Women be on that list, or not?!) From the Greek epics, to the greatest fairy tales, Awakening overflows with references Western classics – never just to analyze and study them, but to let them shape and form us as human beings. Shakespeare, Cervantes, Dostoevsky, Chesterton, Austen, Swift are all mentioned, as are theologians like Anselm, Augustine, Jerome, and Chrysostom.

The beauty of this book is its portrait of Christianity as a life-giving vision of the world.

Read the whole thing. 

Trevin messaged me last week and said he had just finished the book, and thought I would love it. I am too swamped with writing my Benedict Option book for any pleasure reading now, but my wife Julie ordered it for herself. She devoured it, and said that the only thing wrong with it is that it was too short. It’s an ordinary length for a novel, but she wanted it to last forever.

From an interview with its author, a young Spanish journalist:

Did the idea for your book start with Pride and Prejudice or did the parallels only become apparent as you got into the writing?

I think the idea started with my love of good books. There are a large number of nods and literary references in the novel, because literature plays a major role in the book. The story of Miss Prim is set in San Ireneo de Arnois, a small village that has decided to declare war on the modern world. Its inhabitants have a deep love for the culture of the classical era and the old European civilizations, and are willing to maintain it and uphold it. And literature has a special role to play in their defence of their values. The characters in the book speak about Jane Austen, but also about Dostoyevsky, Dante, Virgil, Schiller, Racine and Petrarch, among others.

San Ireneo is not far off being a utopia, in which the inhabitants have all willingly cast off their once high powered selves in favour of a simpler and more meaningful life. Could you see such a community flourishing in our new age of mindfulness, especially perhaps for

older communities?

Many of the readers who have read the book keep asking me: ”Where is San Ireneo de Arnois?’ Obviously, no such village exists, it is an imaginary place. But when they enquire whether I know of a similar place, the answer is that San Ireneo does exist, it is real, because it is Europe, it is part of our European DNA. Europe was built upon small communities, often located in the vicinity of abbeys, with small-scale economies, tight-knit families, neighbourly relations, traditions, and a life where order reigned, where there was a time and place for everything. And this idea strikes a nostalgic chord with many readers, especially with those who live in cities full of noise and hustle. I believe that regaining a smaller-scale, more human lifestyle is not impossible. And you do not need to be a senior citizen to realize that the answers to our problems do not always lie in what is new, but also in what is old; that the key is not necessarily found in the future, but also in the past.

Flipping through its pages, I see that it’s got homeschooling, an abbey, old books, good food, and Distributists. Here’s an excerpt:

“I’m surprised you’re one of them. I’d never have dreamed you were a utopian.”

Horacio took a generous gulp of brandy and regarded her affectionately.

“It would be utopian to imagine that the present-day world could go into reverse and completely reorganize itself. But there’s nothing utopian about this village, Prudencia. What we are is hugely privileged. Nowadays, to live quietly and simply you have to take refuse in a small community, a village or hamlet where the din and aggression of the overgrown cities can’t reach; a remote corner like this, where you know nevertheless that about a couple of hundred miles away, just in case” — he smiled — “a vigorous, vibrant metropolis exists.”

Pensively, Miss Prim placed her empty glass on the table.

“This does seem like a very prosperous place.”

“It is, in all senses.”

“So you’re all refugees from the city, romantic fugitives?”

“We have escaped the city, you’re right, but not all for the same reasons. Some, like old Judge Bassett and I, made the decision after having got all we possibly could out of life, because we knew that finding a quiet, cultured environment like the one that’s grown up here is a rare freedom. Others, like Herminia Treaumont, are reformers. They’ve come to believe that contemporary life wears women out, debases the family, and crushes the human capacity for thought, and they want to try something different. And there’s a third groups, to which your Man in the Wing Chair belongs, whose aim is to escape from the dragon. They want to protect their children from the influences of the world, to return to the purity of old customs, recover the splendor of an ancient culture.”

Horacio paused to pour himself another glass of brandy.

“Do you understand what I’m trying to tell you, Prudencia? You can’t build yourself a world made to measure, but you can build a village. …”

Here’s a link to buy the book.  Julie says it’s light, very pleasurable reading. I’ve got to travel next week, so I’ll plan on taking it along on the flight (I find it hard to read serious books on planes). If The Awakening of Miss Prim sounds like the sort of book that would interest you, why not get a copy, and let’s plan on having a book club discussion here when I get back from my trip in a couple of weeks?

Orlando: The Reichstag Fire

Hold your Godwins, please. The term “Reichstag fire” refers to the 1933 arson at the German parliament building, committed by at least one communist. Hitler, the new chancellor, did not let this crisis go to waste. He took advantage of the outrage over the attack to push for sweeping laws suppressing communists, the Nazis’ political rivals. In this sense, Orlando is a “Reichstag fire” event, I predict, because it is a genuine and appalling atrocity that will lead to the demonization, in law and in custom, of orthodox Christians and any who disagree with whatever LGBTs and their allies want.

It’s going to happen. Social and religious conservatives had better get ready for it.

We already saw this yesterday, with this statement by Democratic Congressman Don Beyer from Virginia:

Number three, we must recognize that homophobia cannot be contained. Hatred breeds hatred. We are horrified that one man targeted LGBT victims at two a.m. on an Orlando Sunday morning. But we are not blameless, when we tell government contractors it is okay to discriminate against someone because they are gay or lesbian – or tell transgender school children that we will not respect their gender identity.

Our sincere, sustained message of inclusion will create a powerful wall against LGBT hate.

Got it? You oppose laws allowing transgendered males into the women’s bathroom and locker room, you are complicit in Omar Mateen’s slaughter. The only way to stop future massacres, presumably, is to suppress speech and thought we don’t like.

Catholic Bishop Robert Lynch, whose Florida diocese paid $100,000 to settle a claim made by a former employee who accused Lynch of sexually harrassing him, is on the train:

Second, sadly it is religion, including our own, which targets, mostly verbally, and also often breeds contempt for gays, lesbians and transgender people. Attacks today on LGBT men and women often plant the seed of contempt, then hatred, which can ultimately lead to violence. Those women and men who were mowed down early yesterday morning were all made in the image and likeness of God. We teach that. We should believe that. We must stand for that. Without yet knowing who perpetrated the PULSE mass murders, when I saw the Imam come forward at a press conference yesterday morning, I knew that somewhere in the story there would be a search to find religious roots. While deranged people do senseless things, all of us observe, judge and act from some kind of religious background. Singling out people for victimization because of their religion, their sexual orientation, their nationality must be offensive to God’s ears. It has to stop also.

 

It is certainly true that Christians who hate gays and abuse them are sinning and should repent. But what is “victimization”? Does that include opposing same-sex marriage, or transgender bathroom bills? Does it include affirming what the Roman Catholic church teaches about homosexuality? That’s how people are taking the bishop’s remarks. Here’s Zack Ford at Think Progress, spurning the prayers and good wishes of Baptist leader Russell Moore, because Moore upholds the biblical view of sexuality, but embracing Bishop Lynch:

One religious leader, however, actually demonstrated that there is another option. Bishop Robert Lynch, who serves the Catholic diocese of St. Petersburg, Florida, didn’t try to reconcile the beliefs his Church espouses. He took responsibility. … The United States Conference of Catholic Bishops has dedicated millions of dollars to opposing LGBT equality over the years. Bishop Lynch may be the first actively serving member of that organization to admit that these efforts may have had consequences for LGBT people.

Ford goes on to list what conservative Christians must do, including:

If people who share Moore’s beliefs reach out to their LGBT neighbors now or in the future, they should consider that what they want us to feel might not be the same as what we actually hear.

If you want us to feel love, then do not tell us our sexuality is wrong or that the only way to be right is to be celibate. What we hear is actually that we are unworthy of love.

If you want us to feel equal, then do not try to justify refusing us jobs, housing, or goods and services in the name of your religious beliefs. What we hear is that we deserve to be treated as second-class citizens.

If you want us to feel community, then do not tell us that you cannot condone our marriages. What we hear is that our families are not welcome to share a neighborhood with yours.

If you want us to feel dignity, then do not tell us that we cannot be transgender or try to tell us what bathrooms we can or cannot use. What we hear is that you aren’t actually interested or invested in understanding who we are or supporting our wellness.

And so on. Otherwise, “sympathy without affirmation rings hollow; it is unworthy of our gratitude.” Ford, good progressive that he is, says “do not encourage us to demonize Islam or pass the blame onto terrorism.” Of course not, even though the mass murderer was an Islamic terrorist. We must remember who the real enemy is here: Russell Moore and people like him. People like me.

I don’t know how widely shared Ford’s view is among the LGBT community and its allies, but I suspect it is general, and it is sincere. What Ford and those who agree with him are doing is demanding that we give up what we believe to be true, or nothing we say about love, respect, and the rest of it matters.

I believe this will be the line that emerges out of Orlando. And the campaign will happen because it’s in the playbook. GLSEN has over the years managed to get its teaching programs mainstreamed in schools under the guise of stopping bullying and making schools “safe.” The stated theory is that if you really want to stop bullying, you will teach children that there’s nothing wrong with homosexuality, transgenderism, etc. That is to say, it’s not enough that kids be taught respect and tolerance; kids must be taught that what orthodox Christianity says is not only wrong, but by implication makes schools unsafe.

It has been an extraordinarily successful campaign. And we are about to see it scaled up to the national level. Any Republican politician, and any religious leader, who opposes what the LGBT activists and their allies in the Democratic Party want is going to be tarred as having the blood of Orlando victims on their hands.

I anticipate the comments to this post: “How dare you worry about how this is going to affect your community when we haven’t even buried the victims yet?!” And that reaction, however inadvertently, is part of the campaign. Zack Ford, Rep. Beyer, Bishop Lynch and others are using the Orlando atrocity to advance goals, political and religious. I don’t doubt their sincerity. Nor do I doubt, not for one second, how effective they are going to be.

Now we will see the price individual Christians are willing to pay to remain faithful. Now we will see how many Christians have the inner strength to obey Jesus’s command: “But I say to you, Love your enemies, bless them that curse you, do good to them that hate you, and pray for them which spitefully use you, and persecute you.”

When I talk about the need for the Benedict Option, this is part of what I mean: the need for orthodox Christians to come together in thick communities to keep our faith, to help each other through things like what’s to come, and to remind one another that no matter what, we cannot return hatred for hatred. That is forbidden to us.

Omar Mateen Confidential

So, let’s see what we’ve learned about the Orlando terrorist today:

1. He was likely a closet case.

He had been drinking at Pulse at least a dozen times. From USA Today:

As investigators on Monday scoured the details of Orlando nightclub shooter Omar Mateen’s life, several regulars at the Pulse nightclub offered a startling revelation: They had seen Mateen there before, they said, drinking, arguing and talking about his family.

The FBI late Monday told USA TODAY that it was reviewing these eyewitness accounts, but that it wasn’t clear whether Mateen’s possible visits may have served as efforts to scout the target or whether he was a patron of the club. Orlando Police Chief John Mina on Monday said he had no information about the sightings.

Pulse patron Kevin West said the 29-year-old Mateen even messaged him on and off for a year before the shooting, using a gay chat and dating app called Jack’d, the Los Angeles Times reported.

What kind of devout Muslim goes drinking booze at a gay bar? You’re going to blame Islam for this guy? Really?

2. He was probably mentally ill.

His ex-wife said yesterday that he was bipolar. Today, there was this from a high school friend who said Mateen cheered on 9/11:

“He didn’t hide it,” Aahil Khan said of Mateen’s happiness at attacks on New York and Washington, D.C. “He said they suspended him because he was yelling to everyone that it was a good thing. He was the only one there who wasn’t upset that they attacked.”

“I feel like that was a big moment in his life, seeing” the attacks.

Khan said it was clear even then that Mateen was mentally ill.

“I felt sorry for him,” said Khan, who lost touch with Mateen after high school and believed his former friend was depressed, somewhat delusional and paranoid. “He couldn’t control his emotions.”

3. He was filled with rage at everybody.

From a co-worker of Mateen’s:

“There was never a moment where he didn’t have anger and rage,” Gilroy told “The Kelly File”. “And he was always loud and cursing. And anytime a female or a black person came by, he would use horrible words.”

On one occasion, Gilroy said, Mateen told him, “I would just like to kill all those [n-words]” after a conversation between Mateen and a black man. “A few times he mentioned homosexuals and Jewish people,” Gilroy said, “but we didn’t deal with them quite as often, so it was mostly women and blacks, because those were the people in front of us.”

Gilroy told Florida Today that he complained to his superiors several times about Mateen, but they refused to take action because, Gilroy claimed, Mateen was Muslim. Gilroy said he quit G4S in 2015 after Mateen began sending him dozens of harassing text and phone messages per day.

“Everything he said was toxic,” Gilroy told the paper, “and the company wouldn’t do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people.”

This guy Mateen fits into nobody’s pet theory. Which won’t stop people from putting him there.

View From Your Table

Lake Balaton, Hungary

I may be wrong, but I think this is our first VFYT from Hungary. The reader, a Hungarian, writes:

Amid all this horrible news, a little relief: view from my table at Lake Balaton with some riesling in the bottle. Between the two glasses you can see Mount Badacsony in the background. The house dates back to the 1860s, it was a press house (used for making wine).

Here’s a photo of the reader’s lake house. I want to go to there!:

Scapegoating Of Christians Begins

A reader e-mails to say that at his company today, one of the executives sent out an e-mail to all employees, saying that in the wake of the Orlando attack, employees should register with the HR department as LGBT “allies,” and start attending the company’s LGBT events. The reader worries that if he doesn’t sign up as an ally, he will be marked out within the company as an enemy, especially in light of Orlando.

Another reader forwards an e-mail message his Congressman, Rep. Don Beyer (D-VA), sent to constituents. In it, he makes religious and social conservatives complicit in the Orlando massacre:

Number three, we must recognize that homophobia cannot be contained. Hatred breeds hatred. We are horrified that one man targeted LGBT victims at two a.m. on an Orlando Sunday morning. But we are not blameless, when we tell government contractors it is okay to discriminate against someone because they are gay or lesbian – or tell transgender school children that we will not respect their gender identity.

Our sincere, sustained message of inclusion will create a powerful wall against LGBT hate.

Another reader sends this outrageous column by CBC senior correspondent Neil Macdonald, in which he implicates all conservative religious believers in the Orlando mass murder.

You expect to see writers for Salon, Slate, Vox and other left-wing sites making that argument. But a US Congressman saying that if you oppose transgenders in girls’ locker rooms, you’re complicit with mass murder? It’s beyond disgusting.

And it’s just starting.

The other day, the Associated Press ran a piece talking about how alienated and anxious Evangelicals feel in the current moment. Excerpts:

Pastor Richie Clendenen stepped away from the pulpit, microphone in hand. He walked the aisles of Christian Fellowship Church, his voice rising to describe the perils believers face in 21st-century America.

“The Bible says in this life you will have troubles, you will have persecutions. And Jesus takes it a step further: You’ll be hated by all nations for my name’s sake,” he said.

“Let me tell you,” the minister said, “that time is here.”

More:

Clendenen said he saw “a lot of fear, a lot of anger” in his church after the Supreme Court [Obergefell] ruling. He said it made him feel that Christians like him had been pushed to the edge of a cliff.

“It has become the keystone issue,” he said, sitting in his office, where photos of his father and grandfather, both preachers, are on display. “I never thought we’d be in the place we are today. I never thought that the values I’ve held my whole life would bring us to a point where we were alienated or suppressed.”

And:

Some good may come of these hard times, he believes. Conservative Christians who have been complacent will have to decide just how much their religion matters “when there’s a price to pay for it,” he said. Christianity has often thrived in countries where it faces intense opposition, he noted.

Preaching now, Clendenen urged congregants to hold fast to their positions in a country that has grown hostile to them. And as the worship service wound down, he issued a final exhortation.

“Don’t give up,” he said. “Don’t let your light go out.”

Read the whole thing.

I have not the slightest doubt in my mind that if Hillary Clinton becomes president, the scapegoating of orthodox Christians of all kinds around LGBT issues will get much worse. The line will be that of the CBC’s Macdonald, who said:

Islam may be more overt about its homophobia than the other major religions — anyone who’s worked in the Middle East has heard some fool in high office declaring that there are no gays in Islam, and therefore no AIDS — but the fact is, conservative iterations of all the monotheistic faiths are deeply and actively and systemically anti-gay.

The sacred monotheistic texts contain prohibitions that would by just about any legal definition be considered hate speech in the modern secular world. …

Fundamentalists and traditionalists of all three faiths not only regard such passages as divine instruction, they actually portray their homophobia as a matter of religious freedom; something noble, protected by constitutions and essential to democracy, when in fact they are working to oppress and deny fundamental rights to people based solely upon the sexuality with which they were born.

The assault on orthodox Christians in particular and religious liberty in general will become much more intense. There can be no doubt at all that if Hillary Clinton becomes president, it will be turned into federal policy. Mark my words: under a Clinton administration, the IRS will be used to deny the tax-exempt status of Christian colleges that don’t capitulate.

Most conservative Christians I know find Donald Trump to be an excrescence. But as the attacks on Christians mount, and the campaign to demonize religious liberty as cover for hatred goes into overdrive, they will have to consider more carefully whether or not to vote for Trump as a matter of self-protection. As the AP story said:

Trump uses rhetoric that has resonance for Christian conservatives who fear their teachings on marriage will soon be outlawed as hate speech.

“We’re going to protect Christianity and I can say that,” Trump has said. “I don’t have to be politically correct.”

Every conservative Christian I know who has told me he or she is voting for Trump, despite everything, has said fear of what Clinton will do to religious liberty is at the heart of their decision. I get that. Boy, do I get that. And this week, it’s becoming ever clearer.

Who Owns The Orlando Massacre?

If you have the time, watch that ten-minute clip from SkyNews. In it, the gay journalist Owen Jones storms off the set of a program because he believes that the host and the other guest are downplaying the hatred of homosexuals angle to the Orlando shooting.

I have to say I’m somewhat sympathetic to him here. I don’t like it when, in the wake of Islamic terror attacks, commenters reflexively fall back on departicularizing language, e.g., “It was an attack on our freedom,” or “It was an attack on us all.” This sometimes seems to be a way of evading difficult truths. There is no way to divorce what happened in Orlando from the killer’s pathological hatred of gays. Jones is right to call them on it.

But I’m also somewhat sympathetic to the others on the program. It seems to me that Jones was trying to force them to say that the attack was about nothing other than homosexuality. That was his entire contribution to the discussion — and that is too reductive. Whatever the flaws in their discussion — and again, Jones made a good point, even if he got stuck on it — I took the host and the other guest to be trying to express simple human solidarity with the gays killed in the nightclub. I sympathize with the female guest on the show who tells Jones that she resents his attempt to “claim ownership of the horror of this crime.” She’s right that there is a tendency among some gay commenters (the always-excitable Mark Joseph Stern is a prime example) and their allies to bully people into reacting to the atrocity in approved ways.

The battle for control of the narrative is ugly.

Islam, Homosexuality, & Capital Punishment

Omar Mateen’s imam said he had no idea the guy had been radicalized. Excerpt:

Dr Rahman said he had not feared Mateen could be radicalised, because he had worked security and gone to the police academy.

“He was working security, he was working for the police department, so we assumed there was a background check. Why would we think anything like that? We were thinking that he might be a safety factor for us,” he said.

“Our impression was the family was very pro-American, that they were maybe more aligned with American than us,” he added.

Despite the fact that another young man who had visited the mosque on occasion became America’s first suicide bomber in Syria in 2014, Dr Rahman said the teaching at the mosque was peaceful and moderate.

“This is nothing that the Mosque is teaching them,” he said. “They get it from the Internet.”

My guess is that the imam is telling the truth, but that’s just a courtesy, assuming honesty until given a clear reason to think otherwise. My experience in Dallas in dealing with Muslim leaders a decade ago makes me wary, though. Back then, it was nothing but lies, bullying, and character assassination from their side. Here’s a piece I wrote in 2008 detailing my many run-ins with local Muslim leaders, particularly Mohammad Elmougy, an Egyptian-born hotelier who was at that time the leader of the Dallas area chapter of CAIR. Excerpts:

When I had the opportunity to ask a question, I told Dr. Syeed that his sentiments were laudable, but if ISNA really stood for peace and tolerance, why did it have on its board …and then I rattled off a list of board members and their direct connections to Islamic extremism. Dr. Syeed had been polite and professorial to that point, but at that point, he dropped his mask. He literally shook his fist at me, said this inquisition was worthy of Nazi Germany, and that I would one day “repent.” I told him mine was a fair question, and that I would appreciate an answer. I didn’t get one. But I had learned an important lesson about how groups like his operate: by evading legitimate queries, and browbeating journalists into retreat by calling them bigots and persecutors.

After I wrote a Morning News column about the Syeed encounter, I found myself identified on a local Islamic blog as” The New Face of Hate.” It turned out that the north Texas Muslim community had been engaged in a running battle with the Dallas Morning News since a series of investigative articles in the early part of the decade had uncovered alleged connections between the Holy Land Foundation charity and Hamas. The News’ reporter on the Holy Land story, Steve McGonigle, had had to be guarded for a while after threats, and the newspaper was picketed by local Muslims. Before I arrived, the newspaper had been making outreach efforts to the Dallas Islamic community in the wake of the Holy Land stories and indictments. And now I had come to town and spoiled things.

On a lark, I joined the Islamic blog’s listserv, to which several leading Dallas Muslims subscribed. I used my own name, which got me booted after a day or so upon discovery. Fortunately, in the short time I was on the site I printed out e-mails in which participants deliberated a plan to quietly approach unwitting business and religious leaders in the city and enlist them in a campaign to force the News’ publisher to fire me because of the threat I posed to the safety of Muslims.

“Dreher needs to be ruined,” one message said. Another suggested that “a campaign must be planned and carefully executed to expose this hate-monger and render him a joke.” I made all this public on the editorial board’s blog and sent copies to the newspaper’s lawyer. My guess is that aborted the whispering campaign before it could launch. But again, it was useful to see what journalists are up against.

More:

Two years ago, the editor-in-chief of my newspaper, a very fair-minded man, put together a working lunch in which Mohamed Elmougy, for years the leader of CAIR in Dallas, and I could meet to discuss our differences. Mr. Elmougy, who is no longer with CAIR but who had been for some time the leading public voice of Dallas-area Muslims, brought with him two associates. The editor-in-chief and the editorial page editor of the News accompanied me. Mr. Elmougy and I did most of the talking. It was a long meeting, but a cordial one. As we waited for the check, Mr. Elmougy said he didn’t understand why I considered Shaykh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the popular satellite TV evangelist and spiritual advisor of the Muslim Brotherhood, to be violent. I responded by pointing out that Qaradawi has advocated executing homosexuals, and that he gave advice on his website about how a Muslim man can beat his wife in an Islamically correct way.

“That’s violent,” I told Mr. Elmougy. He slammed his hand on the table and said he agreed with the Shaykh, and that he wouldn’t apologize for it. He went on to tell a story about an adulteress who came to the Prophet asking for release from her sins. The Prophet ordered her stoned to death, said Mr. Elmougy, and declared that he could see her rejoicing in paradise. Mr. Elmougy finished his account by saying that things we Westerners consider to be unacceptable violence are considered by Muslims like him to be pro-family “deterrence.”

I thanked him for his candor, for admitting that he favors executing gays, wife-beating, stoning adulteresses, and chopping the hands off of thieves. I could tell, though, that my colleagues from the paper were shocked by what they had heard. American journalists simply aren’t used to hearing Islamic leaders in this country talk like that. And Islamic leaders in this country, I’d wager, are not used to being questioned sharply about their views. It’s also the case that Mr. Elmougy fits no Westerner’s idea of what a radical Muslim looks like. He is smart, well-dressed, professional, and to all appearances, Westernized. You simply don’t expect to be sitting in a fancy steakhouse and to hear a man who looks like the manager of a luxury hotel—which is what he was at the time—advocating medieval tortures. The cognitive dissonance can be overwhelming.

One more bit:

My next meeting with Mr. Elmougy came a year later, in the late autumn of 2006, when he led a delegation of local Muslim leaders in to the paper to meet with the editorial board, mostly to complain about, well, me, and to clear up misunderstandings that my supposedly biased rantings might have caused among my colleagues. The meeting was on the record, and I openly recorded it, later transcribing the session and posting it to the editorial board blog of the News. That transcript exposes how at least some Muslim leaders deal with media inquiries: through obfuscation, misdirection, and defensive accusations of bigotry. Allow me to dwell on this transcript to give you a flavor of how this sort of session goes. You can find the transcript archived at [link is now dead — RD]. Mr. Elmougy began the meeting by stating that his goal was to help journalists “find out how could we live in harmony …as opposed to pointing the finger.” He added that he wanted “to create some kind of comfort level,” and to end journalistic suspicion of Islam and Muslims. “We need to figure out a way [to] help you get rid of that.”

Notice what he’s doing here. He’s framing everyday journalistic practice—asking critical, skeptical questions—as an antisocial, even bigoted, act. He begins by trying to put his media audience on the defensive, as if they, the journalists, should be ashamed of themselves for their inquiries.

Read the whole thing.

I genuinely don’t trust US Muslim leaders or the American news media to report accurately about what’s going on. On the other hand, I don’t trust alternative media either, because the question of Islam in America is so fraught with ideological anxieties on both the Left and the Right that it’s impossible to know when you’re getting the truth, and when you’re being spun.

I try to keep front to mind something an old friend who worked for years undercover in counterterrorism told me. She said that the best sources she had were Muslims who were sick of what was happening in their own community, and wanted to do something about it. You will never know about them, she said, because their lives depend on preserving their anonymity. The Muslim community in America, she said — this was back in 2002, so things may have changed — is dominated by Muslim Brotherhood hacks well-funded by the Saudis and other Gulf Arabs. Ordinary Muslims who just want to pray and to get on with their lives in America are intimidated by them — and their fears are often justified. Her point was to warn me not to jump to conclusions about what the broader Muslim community is or is not doing to fight terrorism. But she also warned me to be very careful about believing what their leadership says.

I hope that this mass murder will finally force American journalists to ask probing questions of US Muslim leaders about whether or not they agree with the sharia mandate that homosexuals ought to be murdered — and if they do not, why don’t they? Do you want to know what they really think, journalists, or do you only want to manage the news?

Note well that there is a world of difference between considering homosexuality to be sinful — as all three Abrahamic religions do (minus contemporary liberal versions of Judaism and Christianity) — and believing that gays should be put to death. So don’t make a false equivalence among the three.

Donald Trump, Loser

This long investigation by The New York Times into Trump’s casino business in Atlantic City is a revelation. How can you read this and believe the man is anything other than a charlatan? Excerpts:

His audacious personality and opulent properties brought attention — and countless players — to Atlantic City as it sought to overtake Las Vegas as the country’s gambling capital. But a close examination of regulatory reviews, court records and security filings by The New York Times leaves little doubt that Mr. Trump’s casino business was a protracted failure. Though he now says his casinos were overtaken by the same tidal wave that eventually slammed this seaside city’s gambling industry, in reality he was failing in Atlantic City long before Atlantic City itself was failing.

But even as his companies did poorly, Mr. Trump did well. He put up little of his own money, shifted personal debts to the casinos and collected millions of dollars in salary, bonuses and other payments. The burden of his failures fell on investors and others who had bet on his business acumen.

In three interviews with The Times since late April, Mr. Trump acknowledged in general terms that high debt and lagging revenues had plagued his casinos. He did not recall details about some issues, but did not question The Times’s findings. He repeatedly emphasized that what really mattered about his time in Atlantic City was that he had made a lot of money there.

You got that? He built his “success” on the backs of his investors, whom he bilked. More:

Mr. Trump assembled his casino empire by borrowing money at such high interest rates — after telling regulators he would not — that the businesses had almost no chance to succeed.

His casino companies made four trips to bankruptcy court, each time persuading bondholders to accept less money rather than be wiped out. But the companies repeatedly added more expensive debt and returned to the court for protection from lenders.

After narrowly escaping financial ruin in the early 1990s by delaying payments on his debts, Mr. Trump avoided a second potential crisis by taking his casinos public and shifting the risk to stockholders.

And he never was able to draw in enough gamblers to support all of the borrowing. During a decade when other casinos here thrived, Mr. Trump’s lagged, posting huge losses year after year. Stock and bondholders lost more than $1.5 billion.

All the while, Mr. Trump received copious amounts for himself, with the help of a compliant board. In one instance, The Times found, Mr. Trump pulled more than $1 million from his failing public company, describing the transaction in securities filings in ways that may have been illegal, according to legal experts.

Mr. Trump now says that he left Atlantic City at the perfect time. The record, however, shows that he struggled to hang on to his casinos years after the city had peaked, and failed only because his investors no longer wanted him in a management role.

He ruined a lot of small business owners who never got paid, or got paid pennies on the dollar, when he went bankrupt. And then there were his investors, who were weirdly mesmerized by this guy. More:

In retrospect, David Hanlon, a veteran casino executive who ran Merv Griffin’s Atlantic City operations at the time of the Resorts battle, said, Mr. Trump succeeded in repeatedly convincing investors, bankers and Wall Street that “his name had real value.”

“They were so in love with him that they came back a second, third and fourth time,” Mr. Hanlon said. “They let him strip out assets. It was awful to watch. It was astonishing. I have to give Trump credit for using his celebrity time and time again.”

Read the whole thing. Seriously, read it. This man might become the US president. Why are people so eager to believe him? Well, let’s ask Scott Adams, who predicted ages ago that Trump would win the nomination. Adams said that Trump may be ignorant of science, but he’s got an intuitive understanding of what science says works for politicians. Excerpts:

But here’s the wrinkle with the view that Trump is not a man of science. One of the things science knows for sure – without a smidge of doubt – is that humans are irrational and we can be influenced by many things…except the truth. Truth is useless for persuasion whenever emotions are involved.

You know what field has a lot of emotional content? Politics. All of it. It is all emotional, from top to bottom. In politics, facts are generally irrelevant. Facts do come in handy while performing the boring work of governing. But during an election, facts are just noise.

So when Rand Paul (for example) tried to win the nomination with his calm demeanor and command of the issues, he fizzled on the launchpad. No traction whatsoever. That’s because Rand Paul did not understand the SCIENCE of persuasion.

Yeah, it’s a science. See my Persuasion Reading List and check it out for yourself, especially the books Influence, Impossible to Ignore, and Thinking, Fast and Slow. The science of persuasion is robust and settled. People are irrational and their decisions are based on emotion, influence, and random variables. Reason is mostly an illusion.

Which of the many candidates for president this season is familiar with the SCIENCE of persuasion? Only Trump, until recently. He saved time and money by ignoring the stuff that doesn’t matter (facts) while putting all of his energy into the stuff that does. And it is working.

And that bothers a lot of people because we think we love reason, and we think we love the truth. What we don’t know is that we don’t really love reason (or use it) and most of what they think of as the truth is actually cognitive dissonance and bias. Human brains did not evolve to provide us with truth. Our brains evolved to keep us alive. So if the false movie in your head is different from the false movie in mine – but we both survive and procreate – nature is satisfied. Truth is irrelevant.

The inconvenient truth about Trump is that he’s operating on a persuasion level because it is compatible with science. And science is awesome.

Trump is apparently a better liar than Bill Clinton, if you can imagine it.

Exploiting Orlando

I wasn’t going to post anything like this until tomorrow, but the sickening quality of the post-Orlando reaction is simply overwhelming, and is a story in and of itself:

What has happened in Orlando is just the beginning. Our leadership is weak and ineffective. I called it and asked for the ban. Must be tough

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) June 12, 2016

Omar Mateen was born in America. He is an American. This is scapegoating.

Hillary found her own customary scapegoat, which Charles C.W. Cooke called her out on:

He passed a background check. Twice. What’s your plan? https://t.co/8NzJxSY5Nl

— Charles C. W. Cooke (@charlescwcooke) June 12, 2016

President Obama put his own political spin on the massacre. From John Podhoretz’s column:

Omar Mateen called the cops to pledge his fealty to ISIS as he was carrying out his mass murderer in Orlando early Sunday morning. Twelve hours later, the president of the United States declared that “we have no definitive assessment on the motivation” of Omar Mateen but that “we know he was a person filled with hate.” So I guess the president thinks Mateen didn’t mean it? Here again, and horribly, we have an unmistakable indication that Obama finds it astonishingly easy to divorce himself from a reality he doesn’t like — the reality of the Islamist terror war against the United States and how it is moving to our shores in the form of lone-wolf attacks.

More:

So determined is the president to avoid the subject of Islamist, ISIS-inspired or ISIS-directed terrorism that he concluded his remarks with an astonishing insistence that “we need the strength and courage to change” our attitudes toward the gay, lesbian, bisexual and transgender community. That’s just disgusting. There’s no other word for it. America’s national attitude toward LGBT people didn’t shoot up the Pulse nightclub. This country’s national attitude has undergone a sea-change in the past 20 years, by the way, in case the president hasn’t noticed.

Despite the inconvenient facts that the mass killer was a Muslim Democrat who pledged allegiance to ISIS, a transgendered ACLU staff lawyer reminds his flock who the REAL enemy is — conservative Christians and Republicans:

I don’t care who shooter claimed allegiance to. We don’t have to look beyond the hateful culture right here to understand how this happened

— Chase Strangio (@chasestrangio) June 12, 2016

Jeffrey Goldberg, bless him, makes an obvious point that’s astonishingly not obvious to very many people:

This needs to be reiterated: Orlando massacre can be about Islamism, access to guns, homophobia and mental illness, all at the same time.

— (((Goldberg))) (@JeffreyGoldberg) June 12, 2016

I expect the emerging story from the Left will be it’s all the fault of conservative Christians and the NRA, because the Left will not be able to bear the tension between two of its favorite causes: fighting “homophobia” and fighting “Islamophobia.”

From the Right the story will be, “Muslims! It’s the Muslims!” And they will have something of a point, especially as things like this come out, via Florida Today. According to a former co-worker of Mateen’s:

Gilroy, a former Fort Pierce police officer, said Mateen frequently made homophobic and racial comments. Gilroy said he complained to his employer several times but it did nothing because he was Muslim. Gilroy quit after he said Mateen began stalking him via multiple text messages — 20 or 30 a day. He also sent Gilroy 13 to 15 phone messages a day, he said.

“I quit because everything he said was toxic,” Gilroy said Sunday, “and the company wouldn’t do anything. This guy was unhinged and unstable. He talked of killing people.”

If it is true that the employers would not take action against Mateen because they feared being called Islamophobic, then that is damning — to them and their judgment. It reveals the peril of political correctness.

But here’s the thing: there will never be a way to stop lone wolves like Mateen. Blaming all the Muslims in America for this atrocity is unjust and dangerous. I don’t know that anybody in this country, left or right, has the ability to restrain themselves.

You probably have your own fears, but I believe that some on the Left will use this as a kind of Reichstag fire, to justify further cracking down on free speech, and demonizing Christians. I hope I’m wrong. I don’t think I will be.