Rod Dreher's Blog, page 59

What’s Happening To America?

I wrote this over the weekend, but didn’t want to post it on Independence Day. Too gloomy. I tried to spend the day thinking happy thoughts about our country, and where it’s headed. The best I could manage came from an American friend I had drinks with yesterday: “We have to be hitting a breaking point. Normal people won’t put up with this for much longer.”

Maybe so. Please God, make it so.

Look at this:

Impunity. Nothing makes me more angry these days then the fact that our country has accepted that citizens like this woman – peacefully protesting allowing biological males to expose themselves in female spas – can be robbed, assaulted, and cornered by these jackals without… https://t.co/hhPEAmwINC

— Jason Beale (@jabeale) July 3, 2021

Yep. And if you aren’t at work, and no children are around to listen to it, check out these angry parents in Virginia’s Loudoun County reading aloud in a school board meeting from books assigned in ninth-grade English class in the progressive-run public schools there. (This is VERY NSFW; you don’t have to have the volume up to be able to read the texts, though):

And read this from the liberal writer Kevin Drum: “If you hate the culture war, blame liberals.” Excerpts:

More:

Read it all.

Part of me hopes that this fuels a massive backlash on the Right in 2022 and 2024. The Left, especially in the media, have been pushing this garbage tearing our country apart, and legitimizing criminal behavior on the street. But another part of me wonders what the point would be. For as hard as so many conservatives fought for a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court, we can’t even get enough conservative justices — all we need is four, and we have six — to get SCOTUS even to hear the case granting transgenders access to bathrooms consistent with their preferred gender identity, nor can we get four to agree to hear the big religious liberty case involving the poor Washington florist who was set upon by the gay men whom she had loyally served for nine years. I didn’t say we couldn’t get those justices to rule in a conservative way. I said we couldn’t get enough of them even to agree to hear the cases. 

And the US military, in which conservatives have long had faith, is going woke. A conservative reader who works in a high position in the national security field e-mailed to say that he can’t see how we are going to revive the Republic

when you have two generations that have been raised on Howard Zinn and are ambivalent at best on whether or not the US should be defended in the first place. We have no common culture, and the left’s current hypergrievance mindset ensures that any disparity in outcomes is always due to systemic internalized discrimination, false consciousness, and a grievance mindset that undermines any kind of social cohesion. The left already wants to modify the electoral college, SCOTUS, and God knows what else.

The other part that the national security right doesn’t get but France’s Macron oddly does is you can’t run a society as a world power with an elite in a state of self-loathing of it’s own heritage and cynical calculation that precludes any kind of genuine mobilization or even the basis for creating it. This is why any idea that the US will rise to the occasion to fight for Taiwan or Ukraine is utter delusion. In our current state we are a spent force and anyone can see it.

I’m old enough to remember how bleak things looked for America in the late 1970s. We had been defeated in Vietnam, and Iran humiliated us. The economy was in terrible shape. Crime was out of control. National morale was in the ditch. And then we turned things around.Can we do it again? The future is not determined. Do we have the capacity to resist anymore? I’m not sure. What do you think? In a post-Christian country, where will the sources of resistance come from? Please don’t tell me right-wing Evangelicals going to grifty conferences to hoot and holler about how the election was stolen, and how God was an American patriot. That kind of thing is easily defeated by the forces in power in our country now.

The post What’s Happening To America? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Conservative SCOTUS Betrays Barronelle

This one hurts:

The legal battle of a Richland florist who refused to create wedding bouquets for a gay customer ended this week when the U.S. Supreme Court declined to hear her case for a second time, but the journey was not in vain, she said.

Baronelle Stutzman, the owner of Arlene’s Flowers, said on Friday that the experience has been a godsend and she has no regrets about taking a stand for her religious beliefs.

“We have been extremely blessed throughout this,” she said in a phone interview Friday. “We feel we have won by all the people we’ve met, the examples (of faith) we’ve seen.”

The case began in 2013, when Stutzman refused to provide flowers for the same-sex wedding of longtime customer Rob Ingersoll and his partner, Curt Freed. Instead, Stutzman suggested several other florists in the area who would help them.

“After Curt and I were turned away from our local flower shop, we canceled the plans for our dream wedding because we were afraid it would happen again,” said Ingersoll. “We had a small ceremony at home instead. We hope this decision sends a message to other LGBTQ people that no one should have to experience the hurt that we did.”

State Attorney General Bob Ferguson filed a consumer-protection lawsuit against Stutzman for refusing to serve the couple, alleging that she was violating Washington’s law against discrimination.

Stutzman, who has been represented by the Alliance Defending Freedom, had argued that forcing her to provide flowers violated her religious beliefs and was tantamount to “compelled speech” because it would force her to endorse same-sex marriage.

In a 2017 ruling, the state’s high court ruled unanimously that Stutzman violated Washington’s anti-discrimination law.

More:

On Friday, the U.S. Supreme Court turned down Stutzman’s petition to review the case. Justices Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito and Neil Gorsuch indicated they would have agreed to review the decision, leaving them one short of the four needed for the court to take the case.

“This case has always been about ensuring basic fairness, justice and equality for all Washingtonians,” Ferguson said on Friday. “Today, we won.”

Where were you, John Roberts and Amy Coney Barrett? These two, by the way, also were among the majority that refused to hear the Gavin Grimm case, handing a big victory to transgender bathroom-invaders.

I first met Baronelle Stutzman at an Alliance Defending Freedom conference in 2017. Back then, I blogged a couple of times about her case. From one of those posts:

Denny Burk, a Southern Baptist theologian and pastor, gave expert testimony in the Baronnelle Stutzman case. Here he reflects on what it means. Excerpt:

When I was first asked to give testimony, I thought my role as an SBC pastor and seminary professor would simply be to enter into the record what Southern Baptists believe about marriage. But that is not at all what it turned out to be.

For an entire day, I sat across the table from attorneys representing the Washington Attorney General and the ACLU (two different attorneys because Ms. Stutzman is being sued by the state and by the gay couple that she was once friends with). These attorneys didn’t merely ask me what Southern Baptist believe. They tried to show that what Southern Baptists believe amounts to invidious discrimination.

I had to defend not only our denomination’s statement of faith (The Baptist Faith and Message) but also resolutions passed by our denomination going back 30 and 40 years. It was hostile questioning intended to discredit what Southern Baptists believe about marriage. They wanted to discredit us so that they could discredit her. And make no mistake, once they succeed in punishing her, others will use this precedent to punish the rest of us—and not just Southern Baptists but any person who dares to act on their belief that marriage is the union of one man and one woman.

This is important for traditional Christians. It might be more important than you think it is. The ACLU, most of the media, the legal establishment, the Democratic Party — they all hate us. I mean, hate us. If Barronelle Stutzman were a Muslim, we never would have heard of this story. She is a Southern Baptist, therefore she must be destroyed. To paraphrase Terry Mattingly, the Grand Unified Theory here is: The Religious Right Must Lose. 

This will never end. It will never, ever end. Best get that learned now. This case is going all the way to the US Supreme Court, which will either refuse to hear it (in which case the Washington court’s ruling stands), or it will hear it and render a judgment. I would not bet money on that judgment going in Stutzman’s favor.

So, we have to fight where and how we can, but we also have to realize that we will probably lose. What then? If we have any courage at all, we are not going to compromise our consciences. What will we do? How will we pay the debts inflicted on us by our persecutors? How will we work again? How do you get along in a society in which the people who hold the greatest power think you are Public Enemy No. 1?

From The Benedict Option:

In the end, it comes down to what believers are willing to suffer for the faith. Are we ready to have our social capital devalued and lose professional status, including the possibility of accumulating wealth? Are we prepared to relocate to places far from the wealth and power of the cities of the empire, in search of a more religiously free way of life? It’s going to come to that for more and more of us. The time of testing is at hand.

“A lot of Christians see no difference between being faithfully Christian and being professionally and socially ambitious,” says a religious liberty activist. “That is ending.”

Like I keep saying: this may not be the end of the world, but it is the end of a world. When the might of the State of Washington and the American Civil Liberties Union comes down on the head of gentle, grandmotherly, small-town florist, and seeks her ruin for declining to arrange flowers for a gay wedding, you know that we are dealing with a bottomless well of hatred. You know exactly what we are dealing with here. So, prepare. We are all going to be asked to pay the cost of discipleship. When I interviewed her last summer, Stutzman said to me: “If they can come after me, they can go after anybody.”

From another post of mine from back then:

Never mind that Stutzman knew her customer, Rob Ingersoll, was gay, and had been kindly serving him for a decade or so. In this story in the Christian Science Monitor, Ingersoll talks about how Stutzman, a gentle grandmother (I met her last year), broke the news to him:

As part of the preparations, Ingersoll went to his favorite florist to ask her personally if she would handle the flowers.

At that brief meeting, Stutzman reached across the counter and took hold of Ingersoll’s hand. He would later recall to Freed the words she used: “You know I love you dearly. I think you are a wonderful person, but my religion doesn’t allow me to do this.”

In response to Ingersoll’s request for a referral, she suggested three local florists from among a dozen flower shops in the area. They talked a bit more, then hugged, and Ingersoll left the shop.

So he went and got the ACLU on his side, and he sued the hateful hag. Because #lovewins, or something.

David French, who is a lawyer, describes the injustices that the Washington courts have inflicted on Barronelle Stutzman on behalf of these two spiteful narcissists:

The pretext for overriding the florist’s rights to free speech and religious liberty was Washington’s so-called “public accommodations law,” which required the owner, Barronelle Stutzman, to provide goods and services to customers “regardless” of their sexual orientation.

Let’s be clear, according to the plain language of the law and the undisputed facts of the case, Stutzman did nothing illegal. She had always consistently and joyfully served gay clients, including the man who ultimately decided to bring potentially ruinous legal claims against her. On each of those prior occasions, however, she was not using her artistic talents to help her clients celebrate an occasion she considered immoral.

In other words, she was not discriminating on the basis of sexual orientation. She was making a decision not to help celebrate an action, a form of expression. She would no more celebrate a gay wedding than she would any form of immorality, gay or straight. To dispense with her argument, the court did what numerous progressive courts have done: It rewrote the law. It rejected what it called the “status/conduct” distinction, and essentially interpreted the word “orientation” to also mean “action.”

To understand how nonsensical and dangerous this is, one need merely apply it to other categories of expression. Is it now racial discrimination to refuse to bake a cake with Confederate flag icing, since the person asking for such a cake will almost always be white? Is it gender discrimination for fashion designers to refuse to “dress” Ivanka or Melania Trump? They’re women, after all.

French says that the state Supreme Court compared what Stutzman did to Jim Crow. It’s fatuous nonsense. French points out that in the segregated South, black Americans were widely denied access to goods and services. Here?:

The gay couple in this case had no trouble finding flowers. Stutzman even recommended other florists who would have been happy to help them celebrate their wedding. So, given the absence of any real harm, the court said that the state had a compelling state interest in punishing the “independent social evil” of discrimination toward a “broader societal purpose: eradicating barriers to equal treatment of all citizens in the commercial marketplace.”

That’s it right there: the state religion. It reserves for itself the exclusive ability to name, define, and eradicate “social evils,” and heaven help the individual citizen who disagrees. There is no need to show a traditional, legally recognized harm. There is no need to prove lack of access to alternative artistic expressions. There is only the need to show that the business owner won’t use her unique talents to help celebrate the sexual revolution.

You should read his entire piece.

Last summer, I met Barronelle Stutzman, and interviewed her. Look at and listen to this video of her to get a sense of the kind of woman she is. When I was with her, the serenity of her bearing conveyed the granite strength of her religious conviction. This Southern Baptist woman shall not be moved. The state court has made it possible for the plaintiffs to sue her personally to cover their legal fees, which will probably go up to a million dollars. Understand: they aren’t satisfied to destroy this 72-year-old woman’s livelihood, but they also want to bankrupt her.

Because #LoveWins, always.

The Catholic philosopher Michael Hanby said last year of Barronelle Stutzman:

I am deeply aware of how scandalous, even how obscene, it seems to speak of martyrdom from within the relative safety and prosperity of the liberal West, while so many of our brothers and sisters elsewhere in the world are dying for the faith. I have no answer to this powerful objection, and so I am also aware of the famous remark of Wittgenstein, “whereof one cannot speak, thereof one must be silent.” And yet the suffering of a Barronelle Stutzman does not become less real simply because liberal order has perfected the art of bleeding its victims slowly and invisibly through ten-thousand bureaucratic paper cuts, rather than with the sword or lions in the Colosseum. Certainly we must be grateful for that, and yet there is a peculiar challenge for Christian faith and witness in the fact that liberal order diffuses its power quietly, almost imperceptibly, without blood or spectacle or responsibility. It creates a real possibility that one’s sufferings may be visible only to God, so that it will always be possible to say, as many of our Catholic brethren seem only too eager to say, “Move on, there is really nothing to see here.”

Attention must be paid. What they do to her today, they will do to you tomorrow. Count on it. Will you and I have the courage to pay the price Barronelle Stutzman is paying? Will you and I at least stand with her and help her pay the financial cost her persecutors will levy on her? In The Benedict Option, I write:

A Christian family might be forced to sell or close a business rather than submit to state dictates. The Stormans family of Washington state faced this decision after the U.S. Supreme Court upheld a state law requiring its pharmacy to sell pills the family considers abortifacient. Depending on the ultimate outcome of her legal fight, florist Barronelle Stutzman, who declined for conscience reasons to arrange flowers for a gay wedding, faces the same choice.

When that price needs to be paid, Benedict Option Christians should be ready to support one another economically—through offering jobs, patronizing businesses, professional networking, and so forth. This will not be a cure-all; the conversion of the public square into a politicized zone will be too far-reaching for orthodox Christian networks to employ or otherwise financially support all their economic refugees. But we will be able to help some.

Given how much Americans have come to rely on middle-class comfort, freedom, and stability, Christians will be sorely tempted to say or do anything asked of us to hold on to what we have. That is the way of spiritual death. When the Roman proconsul told Polycarp he would burn him at the stake if he didn’t worship the emperor, the elderly second-century bishop retorted that the proconsul threatened temporary fire, which was nothing compared with the fire of judgment that awaited the ungodly.

If Polycarp was willing to lose his life rather than deny his faith, how can we Christians today be unwilling to lose our jobs if put to the test? If Barronelle Stutzman is prepared to lose her business as the cost of Christian discipleship, how can we do anything less?

If you are a Christian who donates to charitable causes, please, please consider giving to the legal organization Alliance Defending Freedom, which stood by Barronelle every step of the way, and which will stand by any of us, all the way to the Supreme Court.

This is a short clip of Barronelle explaining her case. This is the gentle Christian grandmother that this gay couple has crushed. This is the gentle Christian grandmother that a majority of the US Supreme Court — including two conservative justices — refused even to consider helping. We are on our own, folks. Understand that. Prepare. The Supreme Court will not save us from soft totalitarianism. Barronelle Stutzman refuses to live by lies, and is paying a heavy price. Her courage belongs in my Live Not By Lies book.

If there is a reliable fund for people to donate to so the Stutzmans don’t lose their house now, I will pass that information on to those (like me) who wish to donate.

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Hungary Helps Persecuted Christians

[Readers, I didn’t want to end this day on a bilious note (see previous entry), so I’ve gone into my subscription-only Substack newsletter archive for a post from earlier this week reporting good news about great work being done to make the world a better place. If you want to subscribe to my newsletter, in which I focus on good news, or at least news that makes life worthwhile, click here. No gloom, no doom over there. Shocking, ain’t it? — RD]

On Tuesday in Budapest, I paid a visit to Tristan Azbej, Hungary’s State Secretary for the Aid of Persecuted Christians and for the Hungary Helps Program at the Prime Minister’s Office. Can you believe that Hungary has an entire ministry dedicated to helping persecuted Christians? It’s the only one like it in the world. This is an initiative of Prime Minister Viktor Orban, who is a Calvinist. Azbej is a Catholic, and so is his friend Bertalan Kiss, who met me at the gate of the ministry. Kiss is the government’s Senior Political Advisor on Church Relations.

The first thing the men did was take me to the basement of the secretariat, to see the austere chapel, built in what had been a storage room. Here it is:

 

The plainness of the chapel belies its complex design. Azbej and Kiss showed me how it was designed to accommodate the liturgical needs of any visiting cleric (they often get them from the Middle East, which has various Catholic rites), including Orthodox and Protestant ones. To the left of the altar is a shelf with various liturgical books in different languages. In the cabinet below are vestments from several different rites. There are relics of different saints there, including St. Charbel, the Maronite Catholic, and a Hungarian who was murdered by the Communists.

Azbej told me they have regular mass in the chapel for those in the secretariat who want to come. He and Kiss begin each day’s work singing lauds there. He said that the work his staff does with victims of genocide causes some to have to descend to the basement chapel to pray for strength.

What a remarkable space — and in a government building, too. But they are definitely doing the Lord’s work there. Azbej took me into his office upstairs. He has mementoes all over from the places he’s been taking aid from Hungary to hurting Christians and others — for example, Yazidis persecuted by ISIS, Rohingya Muslims persecuted by Myanman, and Sephardic Jews suffering in Yemen. Said Azbej, “Helping only Christians wouldn’t be very Christian.”

I asked Azbej which was his most valuable memento. He pointed to this photo from a Catholic church in Iraq, on the Nineveh Plain. ISIS destroyed the church when they invaded, and desecrated Christian graves. After ISIS was driven out, Hungary rebuilt the church, and poured aid into the village to get it back on its feet. The grateful people of the town renamed their village to include “Hungary” in its name (I can’t remember precisely, but I think Azbej told us that the people added the phrase “daughter of Hungary” to the name of their town).

This picture was of the first baptisms that took place in the town, in their rebuilt church. Thirteen souls became Christians that day, thanks in part to the generosity of the people of Hungary:

As we talked in his office, Azbej told me that the persecution of Christians worldwide is the worst human rights crisis of our time, “and the most concealed.”

More than a third of a billion people around the world — Christians — are persecuted, Azbej said, but their plight is barely mentioned in United Nations, European Union, and human rights NGO circles.

“The reason for that is mostly political. First of all, the Muslim majority countries, they don’t necessarily persecute Christians, but they are interested in hiding the fact that Christians are persecuted,” Azbej said. “Second, the Western liberal governments and politicians want to conceal this fact, simply because it doesn’t fit their narrative. In their narrative, Christianity is the oppressor, is the persecuting ideology that they say— falsely, I think — is persecuting sexual minorities. They are only interested in that.”

Azbej said he and his staff have to deal with this denial every day in the diplomatic world. This is why his Hungary Helps program not only has to deliver aid to persecuted Christians, but has to advocate for them too.

“I’ll give you an example,” he said. “Nigeria currently is where the most severe Christian persecution takes place. Last year there were close to 3,000 reported cases of jihadists murdering Christians for their beliefs. Whenever I talk with Western diplomats and politicians about this, they try to convince me that it has nothing to do with persecution.”

Azbej recalled a conversation with a high-ranking Western diplomat.

“When I explained about the genocide committed by Boko Haram against Nigerian Christians, he told me it wasn’t religious persecution. This was near the beginning of my appointment, so I was really shocked. Do you know what he told me the cause was? Climate change. He said it was farmer-herder conflict caused by climate change.

“I explained the reports and the testimonies we received on the ground,” Azbej continued. “It is true that herders are attacking farmers, but the herders are all jihadists who get weapons and funding from al Qaeda. We had numerous testimonies of them overrunning villages and burning Christians inside their churches. We had a report where they burned alive 150 Christian martyrs inside their church, then they razed the church to the ground and built a mosque instead. But the Western diplomat kept insisting it was climate change.”

Azbej said his secretariat logically belongs in the foreign ministry, but instead he reports personally to PM Orban, because the issue of persecuted Christians is a priority for him. Whenever the secretariat receives representatives from persecuted Christian churches, Azbej takes them over to meet Orban. (A couple of years ago I was present in a meeting with Orban at the Buda Castle in which a bishop from a Middle Eastern church thanked Orban with great emotion for all that Hungary had done for his people).

“We don’t look at this work as a government policy,” Azbej said. “We look at this as something from above.”

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Soft Totalitarianism Hardens

It. Never. Stops.

If you love this game, you are welcome here. Football is for all. Football is for everyone.

The NFL stands by the LGBTQ+ community today and every day.

For more information on how you can help the @TrevorProject, visit https://t.co/YtauzLAHIF pic.twitter.com/bkdWkAZ3vF

— NFL (@NFL) June 28, 2021

I don’t care if football is gay. I don’t care if football is anti-gay. I don’t want football to be either. I want football to be football. I know I sound like a broken record, y’all, but this kind of crap advances the totalitarianization of our society. From Live Not By Lies:

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

Infusing every aspect of life with ideology was a standard aspect of Soviet totalitarianism. Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shockbrigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

Another sign of the totalitarianization of US society:

California added five more states, including Florida, to the list of places where state-funded travel is banned because of laws that discriminate against members of the LGBTQ community, the state attorney general announced Monday.

Democratic Attorney General Rob Bonta added Florida, Arkansas, Montana, North Dakota and West Virginia to the list that now has 17 states where state employee travel is forbidden except under limited circumstances.

“Make no mistake: We’re in the midst of an unprecedented wave of bigotry and discrimination in this country — and the State of California is not going to support it,” Bonta said.

Lawmakers in 2016 banned non-essential travel to states with laws that discriminate against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. The 12 other states on the list are: Texas, Alabama, Idaho, Iowa, Oklahoma, South Carolina, South Dakota, Kentucky, North Carolina, Kansas, Mississippi, Tennessee.

The five states newly added to the list have introduced bills in their legislatures this year that prevent transgender women and girls from participating in school sports consistent with their gender identity, block access to health care and allow the discrimination of the LGBTQ community, Bonta said.

They hate the rest of us. Do you think Texas, Florida, Arkansas, and the rest of those states on California’s blacklist give a rat’s rear end about how the laws of California treat LGBT people? No, they don’t. They are happy to let California be California. But California wants all of America to be California. These Californians, they tell themselves that they love virtue, but they really just hate their fellow Americans who don’t agree with them about LGBT.

We have heard this kind of thing before. Here, for example:

What is the goal toward which we are heading? The peaceful enjoyment of liberty and equality; the reign of that eternal justice whose laws have been inscribed, not in marble and stone, but in the hearts of all men, even in that of the slave who forgets them and in that of the tyrant who denies them. We seek an order of things in which all the base and cruel passions are enchained, all the beneficent and generous passions are awakened by the laws; where distinctions are born only of equality itself; where the citizen is subject to the magistrate, the magistrate to the people, and the people to justice; where our country assures the well-being of each individual, and where each individual proudly enjoys our country’s prosperity and glory; where every soul grows greater through the continual flow of republican sentiments, and by the need of deserving the esteem of a great people…

… Since the soul of the Republic is virtue, equality, and since your goal is to found, to consolidate the Republic, it follows that the first rule of your political conduct ought to be to relate all your efforts to maintaining equality and developing virtue… Thus everything that tends to excite love of country, to purify morals, to elevate souls, to direct the passions of the human heart toward the public interest ought to be adopted or established by you. .If the mainspring of popular government in peacetime is virtue, amid revolution it is at the same time [both] virtue and terror: virtue, without which terror is fatal; terror, without which virtue is impotent. Terror is nothing but prompt, severe, inflexible justice; it is therefore an emanation of virtue. It is less a special principle than a consequence of the general principle of democracy applied to our country’s most pressing needs.

That was from a famous speech by Maximilien Robespierre, in 1794, justifying the Reign of Terror. An early historian of the French Revolution, Aulard, described the politics of the Jacobins like this:

All politics, according to Robespierre, must tend to establish the reign of virtue and confound vice. He reasoned thus: those who are virtuous are right; error is a corruption of the heart; error cannot be sincere; error is always deliberate.

We are creating a Jacobin state in America. It’s accelerating. I know some of you are sick and tired of me banging the drum on all this, but dammit, we are losing our country — and if we do, there won’t be any going back. At the rate we’re going, there will be blood.

Look what they’re doing to the military:

Mandatory military celebration of LGBT Pride. If you are a traditional Christian in the military, you are SOL. Violate your convictions with this required affirmation of something you regard as sinful, or be dishonorably discharged. This is one reason why I am strongly discouraging my son from joining the military. The point is not that you have to serve alongside LGBT soldiers. Everybody can do that. The point is that you are compelled to affirm homosexuality and transgenderism, and thus deny your religious beliefs.

I am in Vienna today. Last week in Budapest, I told an American I know there that I would be back in the city on July 4, and asked him if he wanted to get together as two temporary expats to celebrate Independence Day. He said he wasn’t sure. “I’m not feeling too bullish on America these days,” he said, with audible sadness. I thought of that this morning when I read this shocking op-ed essay in the Washington Post, illustrating the depths of our moral decline. Excerpts:

Rowello explains that she is married to a transsexual, once her husband, now her wife. More from the Pride Parade:

Just as we got settled, our elementary-schooler pointed in the direction of oncoming floats, raising an eyebrow at a barechested man in dark sunglasses whose black suspenders clipped into a leather thong. The man paused to be spanked playfully by a partner with a flog. “What are they doing?” my curious kid asked as our toddler cheered them on. The pair was the first of a few dozen kinksters who danced down the street, laughing together as they twirled their whips and batons, some leading companions by leashes. At the time, my children were too young to understand the nuance of the situation, but I told them the truth: That these folks were members of our community celebrating who they are and what they like to do.

Children! Her own children! More:

As much as I want them to spend time in queer spaces so they can be with families like their own, I also want them to know that they shouldn’t limit their understanding of what relationships or expression look like to whatever’s most familiar. I want them to see that they can make their own ways in the world — and know that they’ll be supported and celebrated by their community. If we want our children to learn and grow from their experiences at Pride, we should hope that they’ll encounter kink when they attend. How else can they learn about the scope and vitality of queer life?

More:

Children who witness kink culture are reassured that alternative experiences of sexuality and expression are valid — no matter who they become as they mature, helping them recognize that their personal experiences aren’t bad or wrong, and that they aren’t alone in their experiences. I can’t think of a more relevant or important reminder for youth, who often struggle with feelings of isolation and confusion as they discover more about themselves and wrestle with concerns about whether they’re normal enough. Including kink in Pride opens space for families to have necessary and powerful conversations with young people about health, safety, consent, and — most uniquely — pleasure. Kink visibility is a reminder that any person can and should shamelessly explore what brings joy and excitement. We don’t talk to our children enough about pursuing sex to fulfill carnal needs that delight and captivate us in the moment.

Sharing the language of kink culture with young people provides them with valuable information about safe sex practices — such as the importance of establishing boundaries, safe words and signals, affirming the importance of planning and research and the need to seek and give enthusiastic consent. I never want my children to worry that exploring any aspect of consensual sex or touch is too taboo.

Read it all. 

This filth is something that the Washington Post, the leading newspaper in the American capital, a newspaper owned by the richest man in the world, sees fit to publish. They consider this legitimate public debate.

This is demonic, you know — and it is a sign of something horrible to come. From Live Not By Lies:

The post-World War I generation of writers and artists were marked by their embrace and celebration of anti-cultural philosophies and acts as a way of demonstrating contempt for established hierarchies, institutions, and ways of thinking. Arendt said of some writers who glorified the will to power, “They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.”

Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

Regarding transgressive sexuality as a social good was not an innovation of the sexual revolution. Like the contemporary West, late imperial Russia was also awash in what historian James Billington called “a preoccupation with sex that is quite without parallel in earlier Russian culture.” Among the social and intellectual elite, sexual adventurism, celebrations of perversion, and all manner of sensuality was common. And not just among the elites: the laboring masses, alone in the city, with no church to bind their consciences with guilt, or village gossips to shame them, found comfort in sex.

The end of official censorship after the 1905 uprising opened the floodgates to erotic literature, which found renewal in sexual passion. “The sensualism of the age was in a very intimate sense demonic,” Billington writes, detailing how the figure of Satan became a Romantic hero for artists and musicians. They admired the diabolic willingness to stop at nothing to satisfy one’s desires and to exercise one’s will.

“They read not Darwin, but the Marquis de Sade.” Today they read the Washington Post, where a perverted Philadelphia mother teaches her little children to celebrate a sadomasochistic parade in the streets. Wake up, people, and see what’s around you. Prepare! 

I don’t know about you, but I cannot share a country with these people. I mean, I will — what choice do I have? — but they are not my opponents. They, and the elites who are forcing all this on us, are my enemies. History tells us where this is all headed. When it all falls down, the fault will be on them, these barbarians.

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Intersectionality Comes To The Petrochemical Plant

A reader in south Louisiana passes along this cartoon, which appeared in a newsletter a major petrochemical plant [I’m not naming it yet, for legal reasons] sent to employees at its local plant, in an effort to incentivize them to attend diversity, equity, and inclusion training. My source sent the screenshot from an employee newsletter, but I found a high-resolution version of the same cartoon online, and have pasted it in below. It’s just incredible that woke junk has made it into the workplace at this level of specificity. What does “intersectionality” have to do with whether or not you can get the job done at the Louisiana plant? Why do people at this plant need to be forced by their woke capitalist bosses to think about intersectionality and oppression? This is woke capitalist social engineering. Notice in particular the way this cute little cartoon characterizes Christians:

(The cartoon is by Miriam Dobson, and can be viewed here.)

I hope to live long enough for the greater mass of conservative voters to realize that Big Business Is Our Enemy. It is corporate America that’s doing some of the heaviest and most effective labor of radicalizing American society along woke lines. I guarantee you that there are a lot of workers at that Louisiana plant who are being made to hate their employer because of this. I know I would. This is the whole Live Not By Lies thing: under soft totalitarianism, every aspect of life is made political. Keep in mind that this kind of totalitarian indoctrination — training people within a workplace to unify around resistance to white Christian heterosexual “oppressors” — is happening not in a totalitarian state, but in a liberal democracy, by a major corporation.

One thing to consider here is that “intersectionality,” a concept that was once confined to semi-fringey academic circles, is now being forced onto employees at a Louisiana petrochemical plant. Think about how thoroughly wokeness has penetrated American life and institutions. I might be wrong, but I cannot believe that most Americans like this garbage. What I cannot understand is why there have been no national-level Republicans taking up the fight against it. You think all those people at the Louisiana petrochemical plant — which is owned by a multinational corporation — enjoy being propagandized and indoctrinated like this? My source said that white managers at this facility were instructed to apologize to their non-white employees for their “white privilege.” I’m trying to nail that down. If so, I’m going to name the facility, and speak to employment lawyers to find out if this is even legal.

If this is happening in your workplace, take screenshots of the material and send it to me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. If I can authenticate it, I’ll publicize it, without using your name. I don’t think these corporations can be shamed at this point, but this poison will only be stopped by lawsuits.

 

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Why White Leftists Will Never Criticize CRT

I received this challenging e-mail from a reader who gave me permission to post it as long as I keep his identity protected. This is a really thoughtful letter, and it is appalling that we live in a time when a man who writes something like this has to fear for his livelihood if his name became attached to it:

I’m writing in response to Rod Dreher’s “Coming Race Crack-Up?”, particularly the following section:

“If you are on the Left, please, I beg you, get out of your bubble and realize how the kind of racial rhetoric that has been completely normalized in your circles sounds to those who don’t exist within them. Critical Race Theory is the acid that will dissolve America, no question. If you want to keep this country together, and make it possible for us to live peaceably together, and continue the long, slow work of making progress towards loving each other more perfectly, then you had better fight CRT, whatever your politics.”

I empathize with this appeal, and respect the spirit in which it is made. It seems to beg the question: “why don’t any of you challenge CRT?” The appeal expresses the divide that makes our different American experiences so difficult to imagine for one another, particularly across political lines.

I am a Leftist. I believe I am many things people on the right may not like. I am a college professor, an artist, and I live in an east-coast metropolis. I wear skinny jeans, eat avocado toast, and I read post-modern theory. I usually drink my coffee black, but I certainly don’t mind lattes. I also oppose CRT and identity politics in general. However, I tend to keep this opposition repressed. I believe I can articulate why I keep silent and, in general, why you will not see much criticism of CRT coming from the Left.

In order to understand it, you must understand that the Left, as you might imagine it, does not exist. By this I mean that the term “Left” does not refer to a consistent ideology or an actual group the members of which have solidarity. We on the Left are a loose (so very loose) coalition of distinct groups, many of whom have interests that are very much at odds with one another.

Interestingly, many on the Left are better understood as Conservatives. By this, I mean to express that a Conservative is someone who works to preserve his or her lifestyle, his or her people. There are Conservatives for every group in the world, and there are corresponding Liberals who try to change what the Conservatives are trying to protect. This tension can be irritating, but also productive.

In the United States, the term “Conservative” refers to a specific set of characteristics that have developed over the course of US history: typically Christian, pro-Capitalism, a preference for either the rural or the suburban, a preference for modernist infrastructures, and an individualist philosophy. Even with this specifically US Conservatism (which I admit I am simplifying here for the sake of argument) many on the “Left” are still Conservatives. Pro-family values? The Latin American community is die-hard into that. Boys should be boys and girls should be girls? Most Black Americans defend their gender roles with unrelenting zeal. And if you are super pro-capitalism, you might find yourself smiling at some of the lyrics you’d find in rap’s greatest hits, celebrating money, hard work, and all the beautiful clothing and cars financial success can bring into your life.

While we might associate racial minorities with the Left because of their voting habits, typically blue, they otherwise share many of the same values as white, Republican-voting Conservatives. Why do these groups vote differently, then? Simply because politicians from either party are better or worse at reassuring different groups of Americans that they have and will continue to represent the interests of these groups. Blacks and Latinos tend to vote Democrat for pretty much the same reason Whites tend to vote Republican, not because there is any Marxist preference innate to darker skin.

And yet you are more likely to see a socialist over on the Democrat’s side. Because of the unique power of parties in the United States, different groups must fit together under these small umbrellas. There are Neoliberal Democrats (Clintons), Keynesian Democrats (Obama), and Socialist Democrats (Sanders). These kids don’t play well together. In fact, their interests are often fundamentally opposed. But out of all the Democrats, the ones who argue for economic equality, the socialists, are the ones who have the least power. Perhaps this power has been increasing in recent year, but it is still miniscule. Even Bernie Sanders’ flavor of “Socialism” is a soft-core version that is less Socialist than the US and the UK actually were before the 80s. The most radical thing he’s actually done is save the word “Socialist” from vilification… somewhat.

So… what about Critical Race Theory? Why are we talking about how weak class-based politics are on the left? This is where things get a little gross. Because, as you might know, Capitalism is competitive. Left or Right, we all can agree on that. And when you compete, of course you compete to win. And CRT is a great strategy for keeping white people from competing.

To clarify, it must be asserted that Critical Race Theory is, itself, not a cohesive set of ideas, but simply a tendency to make race the central device to investigate injustice. This, itself, is not really that radical as it is undeniable that race does play a role, depending on one’s specific context, in determining how fairly one will be treated both legally and economically. However, the nature of that role is inherently ambiguous.

Further, it’s unclear what’s the best strategy to combat this inequality. Even many Republicans, so often generalized as racists, desire to see race lose its relevance in determining one’s social position. Hence, you can place a lot of different ideas underneath the term. And only a handful of people will ever read the central texts of any school of thought, meaning that whatever is written in whichever CRT book isn’t actually as relevant as what ends up on Twitter. CRT is only relevant insofar as it does something. So, what does it do? How is it used?

I think the reader already has a good idea how it is used. To shame, to slander, and to silence whiteness. It is innate to CRT to prioritize the perspective of the non-white subject. This is justified on the premise that the white perspective is the one that has been historically prioritized and remains the dominant perspective. White claims to “color-blindness” are here ridiculed because it is held that white people cannot see their own whiteness, because they made the white condition the universal condition. The brilliance of this is that any argument made by a white person that does not conform to the CRT program innately confirms CRT’s conclusions and, retroactively, also its promises.

The white subject thus effectively immobilized, s/he is no longer in a position to advocate for his or her interests. But what are the white’s interests? Any white American who believes in the liberalism of our society will argue that there are no white interests. That there are only our interests as Americans. Unfortunately, as per above, CRT argues that your beliefs in a universal human condition are a type of white self-delusion. This is how race works. Race does not exist in the capital “R” Reality, but only in social reality. Other people tell you what your race is. And since you can’t change what they think, you cannot change your race. You have been made white, and you are being told what that whiteness means. And what this means, for you, is that any interest you might intuitively hold to be universal is now a white interest. Since you ought to be ashamed for your whiteness, for your ugly and ongoing history, you ought to shut up. Stop advocating for your white self.

So since you are now effectively silenced, not by formal government, by the way, but by a community form of governance in which shame is the means of control, it will now be easier to surpass you economically. Because if you unite on the basis of race you are Nazis and if you unite on the basis of class you are no longer a Republican, you are now an alienated individual rather than a citizen, with solidarity, with community. This is to say, identity politics are not opposed to our economic system. It fits right in, which is why it is proliferating. If you look in the literature of CRT, you will notice that it forbids whites from escaping their racial responsibility by recourse to their economic powerlessness. Poor whites are still privileged.

Class is not an option. CRT is being used to turn a black person’s economic success into an American triumph and a white person’s economic success into an American disgrace, black poverty into America’s shame and white poverty into a non-topic. Any time I have ever tried to talk about poverty as a general problem, I have been greeted with some version of: “we are talking about black people now”. This, of course, bothers me because I’m the kind of Leftist who does care about class.

But who am I supposed to talk to about this? Who can I team up with? Where is the space for this conversation on the Right? If I say the words “class solidarity”, you might imagine me in a green beret and coveralls, smoking a cigar. You might distrust me if I say the loss of manufacturing jobs in the US disturbs me as well as a Marxist thinker like David Harvey. If I argued that a stern condemnation of Neoliberalism is something Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders have in common, you might think I’m playing some sort of trick. Maybe I am wrong, but I do not feel I have any space to critique capitalism on the right.

My political identity was formed in the Bush era, as a direct consequence of the war in Iraq. As a kid, I was told that I was not allowed to question the war, that doing so was un-American and that “if you don’t like it, you can get out”. The walls around conservatism have always been too high for me to climb, and so I’m not on that side. On the side that does grant me a small, tiny little space, we have a rule: do not criticize identity politics.

This one rule is the rule that holds all the different groups that vote for Democrats together. Not even a nuanced, considerate good-faith argument is allowed, especially from a straight white man. Allegiance is expected, or you are off the team. You get severed from any networks, and since the Conservatives won’t have you, because their economic ideals are more important to them than any of the other values they hold, where are you going to go?

Where could I go? I would be less than a zombie. I’d be an outsider’s outsider. We all need community to survive, and if I question, even a little, the lines about race I am expected to swallow, I will have none.

And yet the system of moral control implied by CRT, the way this disqualifies me from social participation even on the Left, is now causing me to question my allegiances. It’s frustrating, because it should not be so strange to imagine a diversity of parties, all with different interests, some shared and some opposed. If that were the case, I would assert that while we will, perhaps, never see eye to eye in regards to economics, I absolutely agree with the Right that we have a major cultural issue here that we need to do something about. Presently, however, we’re in an all-or-nothing situation. No critiques of capital on the Right, no critiques of identity politics on the Left. Factionalism, more that CRT, is tearing us apart, because Factionalism is what prevents people like me on the “Left” from saying something about CRT.

Though, when I heard Sen. Josh Hawley compare Mark Zuckerberg and other tech CEOs to “modern day robber barons”, appropriating a critique of 19th-century industrialists, it did give me some hope…

What an interesting letter. I don’t agree that the Right is hidebound to free-market fundamentalism, though it certainly still remains the dominant orientation towards the economy on the Right. Patrick Deneen and I, in our Budapest discussion the other evening, both said that we are the kind of social conservatives who would be happy to see more state intervention in the economy for the sake of upholding the common good — specifically, to make it easier for people to have kids and raise families.

If you haven’t read this new piece from Bari Weiss about how Amazon is using wokeness to disguise the fact that it treats its workers like crap, please do. She draws attention to the Amazon Playbook, a guide to being super-duper inclusive in scripting dramas for Amazon video productions. Click on the link and check it out yourself. This is some high-octane bullshit. Bari comments:

The playbook explains that “the work of diversity, equity, and inclusion requires all of us to disrupt those biases, and the longstanding customs and practices in the industry, in order to achieve real, lasting change. This work is not easy to do, but don’t worry, we’re in this together.”

Are we, though? I wonder how the Amazon drivers afraid to take a bathroom break in order to keep up with their delivery quotas would feel about that. Or the workers in JFK8, the company’s Staten Island warehouse, who labor under the all-seeing eye of Jeff Bezos. More than 60 percent of the people who work in that warehouse, which is the size of 15 football fields, are black or Hispanic. And, according to a recent New York Times investigation, black workers at JFK8 were almost “50 percent more likely to be fired.”

I would really love for an Amazon executive to explain to me how understanding the difference between Disabled and disabled — Amazon’s Inclusion Playbook told me that Disabled with a capital “D” refers to those who are culturally Disabled, whatever that means — makes an actual difference in the lives of anyone at all.

As Newsweek editor Batya Ungar-Sargon has noted: wokeness is, almost always, a smokescreen. By focusing the attention and energy of the rich and powerful on say, whether using the word Latinx is preferable to Hispanic, we let them off the hook for actually doing something about the fact that Latinos remain more than twice as likely to live below the poverty line as whites and Asians.

Batya put it to me this way: “‘Doing the work’ means hiring diversity specialists to call their children white supremacists in a prep school class they can put on their transcript to help their chances of getting into Harvard. It has absolutely nothing to do with asking those who could actually make a difference with regard to true inequality to sacrifice anything of themselves.”

It is an amazing thing to behold Amazon executives LARP as gender studies majors.

The first American politician to stand up credibly and courageously to both wokeness and cutthroat corporate America will win the votes of the great American middle. I would love to vote for a candidate like that, even if he or she had a D after their name. I think that person, if he is going to emerge at all, is more likely to emerge on the Right. A candidate who not only rejected wokeness in general, but promoted old-fashioned American unity around hard work, mutual respect, and the content of our character — man, that person would win the presidency going away.

It’s going to take a Hispanic to do it, I think. President Gonzales is going to bring America back, out of the morass of spite and destruction left by wokeness.

Anyway, back to the reader’s letter. I would welcome a place for Leftists open to social conservatism and Rightists open to economic leftism could exchange ideas. I am confident that any Rightist who publicly participated in such a conversation would at worst be made fun of by others on the Right. Any Leftist who did would be denounced as bigot-adjacent, and therefore toxic. Which is why the author of this letter asked me to keep his name off his letter. No conservative who wrote to express doubts about free-market fundamentalism and the GOP would have had to go nameless. That’s the difference.

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Head East, Conservative Intellectual

Two nights ago, I appeared with Patrick Deneen onstage at Mathias Corvinus Collegium (MCC), an institute of higher education here in Budapest. I talked about The Benedict Option; Patrick talked about how it intersects with Why Liberalism Failed. We were interviewed by Boris Kalnoky, the esteemed former correspondent for Die Welt who now heads the media department at MCC. It was a serious discussion. This was my first time to go over to MCC in the nearly three months I’ve been in Budapest, but I run into MCC people all over the city, at intellectual events. When an American professor — an atheist and anti-woke leftist — contacted me to ask if he should take a fellowship MCC offered, I told him absolutely, yes. “It’s conservative,” I told him, “but open-minded. You are going to be able to have the kinds of robust intellectual discussions there that you can’t back at your own university.”

Now I see that The New York Times has published a hit piece on MCC. The gist of it is that the government of Viktor Orban has transferred a huge amount of public funds into the college to guarantee its stability even if the opposition comes to power. Excerpt:

On a leafy hilltop in Budapest, a small educational foundation inside an aging, former Communist police building has audacious plans to train a conservative future elite. It is constructing a colossal campus, wooing conservative intellectuals for the faculty and expanding its programs to train 10,000 students across Hungary and elsewhere in Europe.

The price tag is expected to run into many millions of dollars, but money isn’t a problem: The privately managed foundation, Mathias Corvinus Collegium, or M.C.C., was recently granted more than $1.7 billion in government money and assets from a powerful benefactor: Hungary’s prime minister, Viktor Orban.

A hero to Europe’s far right, Mr. Orban says he wants to overhaul education and reshape his country’s society to have a more nationalistic, conservative body politic. But his critics argue that the donation is legalized theft, employed to tighten Mr. Orban’s grip on power by transferring public money to foundations run by political allies.

That “far right” smear again. The New York Times, like most Western journalism outlets, is incapable of telling the truth about Orban and his party. They are not “far right.” Fidesz is center-right. Hungary actually has a far-right party. It’s called Jobbik, and it’s openly anti-Semitic — or was, until it underwent some kind of strange makeover, and now says its Jew-hating is in the past. Last December, Jobbik formally teamed up with the left-wing opposition, in hopes of beating Orban in the 2022 race. Yes, the left-wing parties are now formally allied with a party whose stars have called their capital city “Judapest,” and called for making a list of Hungarian Jews who pose national security threats. But please, New York Times, tell us another story about Viktor Orban being mean to George Soros.

To be fair, it really is an extraordinary financial move, and I fully understand why liberals would be angry about it. Here’s more:

M.C.C. is not a university in its own right, but a residential college. It provides special seminars and a dormitory to students, selected after a battery of I.Q. and other tests, who then receive stipends, networking opportunities and exclusive fellowships. Orban critics have labeled the foundation as an institution designed to breed right-wing intellectuals.

In an interview with The New York Times, Balazs Orban [head of the MCC board, and not related to the PM] said that the M.C.C. project was critical for a small country like Hungary, with its history of occupation by foreign powers.

“It’s very important for us to have our own agenda, have our own mind-set, have our own independence, culture,” he said. “We always have to fight for it.”

He was adamant that fomenting “patriotism” among the next generation of Hungary’s leaders was the priority.

“Ideology is not important. Patriotism is,” he said.

But recent articles and podcasts produced by M.C.C. have discussed reading lists or pushed intellectual lines supportive of the government’s antiglobalist message, discussing topics such as patriotism at a time of globalism, or whether political correctness is tolerance or oppression.

That “but” is so telling. “Patriotism at a time of globalism” is a really interesting topic. What does it mean to be a patriot in a globalist world? And isn’t it perfectly fine to question whether political correctness is simply tolerance, or a form of oppression? It’s bizarre that the writer of this piece thinks these are signs of right-wingery.

More:

Ivan Krastev, a Bulgarian political analyst, said that the changes in Hungary appeared mostly to be about money and power. But he noted that leaders in Hungary and Poland viewed universities as key battlegrounds in their quest to retain power.

“There is a very strong fear that universities are totally lost for the conservative side, that they are totally dominated by left liberals, and getting control of universities is becoming a big priority for these governments,” Mr. Krastev said.

Well, that’s exactly right: the universities are totally lost for the conservative side. All you have to do is look at the US and Europe to see the decline of the liberal university into the morass of the soft-totalitarian ideology of wokeness. With MCC, it seems to me that Orban is trying to give conservative, traditionalist ideas a fighting chance to have some influence over the next generations.

This is priceless in its cluelessness:

Even if the opposition comes to power next year, it is unclear whether they could dismantle the educational foundations or restore universities to their previous status. A future parliament could not change the rules regulating public interest foundations without a two-thirds majority.

Elections lose their meaning if a “deep state, with competencies, assets and revenues given to Fidesz,” remains in control no matter who wins, said Balint Magyar, a sociologist and former two-term education minister who researches post-Communist governments.

Gosh, you mean that it’s possible for a deep state of committed ideological partisans buried deep inside institutional bureaucracies could stymie the policies and initiatives of a democratically-elected political leader they oppose? Say it isn’t so!

It seems to me that Viktor Orban sees how this game is played by the left, and is determined to do his damnedest not to lose, and not to see his country and its institutions absorbed by the leftist, globalist borg. The Times story points out how in Poland, a similar new institution of higher education was recently launched to train conservative, traditionalist-minded lawyers and others. I think this is all great news! Poland and Hungary are not going to sit back and let happen to their countries what happened to US and European higher education, and how it has poisoned society with totalitarian ideas spread to institutions. These two Visegrad countries are fighting back. It’s a David vs. Goliath story, for sure. Good on David!

This Times piece is a classic example of how to journalists, especially elite journalists, don’t see their own profound biases, and think that events and structures in the world that favor their own prejudices are simply naturally occurring processes. It doesn’t seem to occur to the reporter, Valerie Hopkins, that in the US and elsewhere in Europe, vast sums of public monies go to established universities to promote liberal causes and leftist values. Nobody notices. Nobody cares. It just strikes liberals as in the natural order of things.

It’s like that in the media. Among US journalists, you often hear bitter complaints about the bias of Fox News, and sometimes you hear expressed a grudging belief that the existence of Fox means there is balance in the American media. This is because journalists are so overwhelmingly liberal that they can’t perceive how far to the left, and how unbalanced, their viewpoint is. I’ve written before about a study, now over 20 years old, by two professors at Baruch College, who demonstrated that the US media did a good job of reporting on the rise of the religious right as a force within the Republican Party, but missed entirely the parallel rise of the secular left as a force within the Democratic Party. Their thesis was that the media didn’t see what was right in front of their eyes because to them, it was only natural that secular liberals would grow more dominant within the Democratic Party. It wasn’t news; it was nature.

Again, I don’t deny that the MCC thing is a real story. What ticks me off is the one-sided nature of the piece, the facts that complicate the narrative. In Hungary, based on voting trends, more than half of the population is conservative. I am told by Hungarian conservatives that the universities here are like universities in every other Western country: heavily dominated by the left. If you have eyes to see, you have watched over the past twenty to thirty years Western universities give birth to radical, socially destabilizing ideologies that are now, in the US for sure, convulsing society. You have also watched universities grow ever more progressive. Look at this data-driven analysis showing that conservative professors barely exist in US academia anymore. 

You have also seen academic culture shift from being liberal, but striving for balance, to being militantly leftist, considering fairness to be a strategy through which the vice-ridden try to corrupt the people. Knowing that college-educated people set the tone for society, especially among the elites, you would be a fool not to see that the radical imbalance of political and cultural perspective within the universities is going to have a massive effect on the direction of your country. If you’re a Hungarian conservative, and you see the US tearing itself apart over racial identity politics and gender ideology, and you see that as a nightmare scenario for your country; and if you further see that your country is despised by most of its western European neighbors over its social conservatism, which those same neighbors would dearly love to eradicate — well, what do you do?

One strategy might be to use public funds to found a training college that gives conservative viewpoints a fighting chance to be heard among the young. It’s a good bet that at least half of those kids, whatever their own political and social beliefs, come from families that lean conservative — families that pay taxes, and who may well wish that their children could get a college education without being indoctrinated into wokeness. You might actually consider that endowing an institution of higher education where your kids will be guaranteed to get a real education should Western wokeness conquer established Hungarian universities to be a good expenditure of public monies. But you are not the kind of person that a New York Times reporter is going to bother to talk to.

I’m not saying that what the Orban government did with MCC is necessarily good (though I believe it is); I’m just saying that if you are The New York Times, and you are going to write a report on it, you have an obligation to at least attempt to explain why the government is doing this. There is always more to any story about Hungary and its politics than Magyar Man Bad — but the Western media never get this. I have been so grateful for my time this summer here in Budapest, because it has helped me to see that.

At that MCC event the other night, we had a reception after the interview on stage. I raised a glass and thanked my host. In my remarks, I pointed out how two years ago, after speaking at a Budapest conference on religious liberty, I was in a group of speakers invited to meet with Viktor Orban. I expected it to be a quick meet-and-greet photo op. Instead, he took all of us — maybe fifteen people, from around the world, into a meeting room and discoursed intelligently for about ninety minutes, in flawless English, about all kinds of social and political issues. He answered all our questions. He ended by saying that he hopes that conservatives will come to see Budapest as their intellectual home. I thought it was a nice gesture, but only that. However (I told the MCC crowd), having been here in Budapest for three months, and having seen from the outside how many conservative professors — and not just conservative professors — MCC has brought in from all over the world for visiting fellowships, to talk with students and with each other, I have seen that the Orban government is making good on that idea. For that, I said, I am grateful.

Naturally, The New York Times hates that. Fine, let them. Every conservative professor and every conservative student on American campuses knows exactly what’s going on here — what the Times cannot and will not see. Every one of them understands how besieged people like us are on US campuses and within US institutions, and how scared we are in most places to speak out, for fear of being harassed and professionally ruined. They do things differently at MCC. As I said to the anti-woke leftist prof headed over here, there is a more open atmosphere of debate and intellectual inquiry at MCC than at the university from which you are coming.

This matters for the long-term direction of Hungary, and of the West. Budapest really is becoming an intellectual capital of the Right — and because Viktor Orban doesn’t care what The New York Times crowd thinks, the institutions he has created are going to last even when the day comes that a progressive government comes to power, and flush with EU cash, sets out to transform Hungary according to the malign Brussels vision. What’s happening on many US and European university campuses — the consolidation in power of aggressive leftism — is one version of the postliberal future; what’s happening here in Hungary an alternative version of the postliberal future. If American and western European universities were still places where old-fashioned liberalism was in control, there would not be nearly as much of a need for places like MCC, and it would be a lot harder to defend what Orban has done here. But we don’t live in that world, and haven’t for some time. Orban is fighting the battle that’s actually in front of us, and using his power to secure a foothold for patriotic, traditional Hungarian conservatives in a world where all the power in the Western world is stacked up against them.

You can’t expect The New York Times to understand that. But American conservatives, especially those in academia, can. Maybe they should be grateful to the Times for alerting them to the fact that some political leader, somewhere, is doing more than lamenting the total domination of higher education by the forces that despise tradition. Maybe they should look into what MCC has to offer, and come over to help build a network of intellectual resistance to the present and coming soft totalitarianism. In America, conservatives just talk about how nice it would be if someone would do this. In Viktor Orban’s Hungary, they’re actually doing it.

UPDATE: The NYT and most other liberals, especially within the academic establishment, still operate on the false premise that universities are neutral institutions. They used to be, more or less, or aspired to be. They no longer are. The liberal freakout over MCC is a version of the dynamic that conservatives are so used to: any challenge to progressivism’s discourse hegemony is treated like an intolerable outrage. For example:

Liberals: “Gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay, gay. Trans. Traaaaaaaaaans! Gay trans gay trans! Trans gay! GAAAAY!”

Conservatives: “Gay? Trans?”

Liberals: “BIGOTS!”

Orban understands the game. He refuses to play it by the left’s rules.

Let me suggest another way to look at it. The formation in the US of Historically Black Colleges and Universities (HBCUs), using state money, was a necessary response to the inability of black people to get an education at segregated institutions of higher learning. The parallel is not perfect, obviously; there are no laws prohibiting conservatives from being educated at liberal universities. But legality aside, it is increasingly difficult for conservatives (and others) to get an education that is not saturated with woke ideology. And we know perfectly well how intimidating conservative professors and students find campus life in many places. Black students could not go to school at white universities in the American Jim Crow era; conservatives do not face that kind of discrimination today. But conservatives do face the de facto and systematic exclusion of their ideas, convictions, and perspectives from campus life. Under conditions like this, the use of public money to launch an intentionally conservative institution of higher education can be defended as using state money to increase intellectual diversity.

One more thing. I’ve written here before that you cannot understand anything about Orban and his popularity with Hungarians without understanding the profound concern Hungarians have about sovereignty and survival. I did not understand this until I came to Hungary. The Treaty of Trianon, which concluded World War I for the Hungarians, dismembered their country. They lost two-thirds of their historic territory. Slovaks, Romanians, and others who lived under Hungarian rule were grateful for the treaty, which transferred lands in which they were dominant to them, taking them away from Budapest. But Hungarians experienced this as a savage wound. I’m not taking a position on the justice of the treaty; I am simply pointing out that it continues to exist as a festering wound within the Hungarian psyche.

And then, of course, they endured forty years of occupation by a foreign totalitarian power.

Hungarians like Viktor Orban and their supporters see the European Union as a foreign power that seeks to rob their country of its sovereignty. They are a European nation, and want to be part of the EU. But like many conservatives in other European countries, they rankle at what they regard as EU overreach and interference in their internal affairs beyond the scope of what the confederation permits. Orban reacted so strongly in 2015 to the EU’s decision to open the floodgates to migrants — a decision backed with money from Orban’s great enemy, billionaire globalist George Soros — because they see migration as a direct threat to their sovereignty and survival as a people. Orban and those who support him quite rightly recognize wokeness, the successor ideology to liberalism, as a direct threat to Hungarian sovereignty and survival. They know that they are not going to get a do-over here. They are watching what is happening in the US and Western Europe, and are determined to do what they can to save Hungary from the fates of the rest of us.

You get none of this in the NYT report. You get none of this in any Western media report about Hungary. But it’s true, and it’s important. Orban is a complicated man, and it’s fair to criticize him for this or that. But “Magyar Man Bad” is an absurd caricature.

UPDATE.2: Peter Boghossian, the anti-woke liberal atheist philosopher, messages me to say:

I am completely convinced the US university system is rotten to the core. It must be defunded, but rather than doing that, Biden just recently gave them *billions*. New universities are popping up, but the university system is still perceived as being a path to social and economic mobility.

This is a dastardly problem. Woke professors have jobs for life. They’ve idea-laundered nearly all of their moral impulses. They also view the university system as an indoctrination mill. I don’t think they can be saved.

In fact, universities must fall if we are to preserve what’s left of the republic. That’s not hyperbole.

The post Head East, Conservative Intellectual appeared first on The American Conservative.

Life Inside A Woke Corporation

I had a conference call on Sunday night with two guys back in the US. Both are young conservative Christian friends who worked for the same major American media company (one still does, but the other quit a few months back). They are white males. They reached out to me via a mutual friend after my book Live Not By Lies had an impact on them. They agreed to talk to me for the record if I consented to keeping their details private. What follows is my record of our conversation, revised to honor their concerns. I sent the draft version of this post to them both to make sure I had written down our conversation accurately, and that I had protected them both. The one who still works for this company (I’ll call it ACME) has a family to support, and can’t afford to lose his job.

I will call these men Rick and Charlie. Their real names aren’t even close to this. I hate that I have to write like this, but these are the stakes. People are scared to death for their careers – and they have reason to be.

ACME has become increasingly woke, and this has caused big demoralization within the corporation among those who dissent from its progressive line. After one particular high-profile incident a year or so ago involving a public figure who worked for the company being fired for an extremely minor social media post, Rick said that “all of the conservatives I know at ACME were like, I’m keeping my mouth shut.”

Rick had a significant amount of responsibility inside ACME, working on a marketing team.

He loved his job, and loved the company. After the George Floyd killing, ACME went into internal panic mode. They had lots of Zoom discussions about race. “The white people could talk, but none of us did,” says Rick. “The assumption was that we didn’t have anything to say, so none of us did.”

Rick says that in these endless strings of meetings, ACME executives would give black people an opportunity to voice their frustrations and anger, and to talk about their “lived experiences” with racism, or what they perceived to be racism.

“Some of these things really were racism,” says Rick. “Others weren’t specific to race, but were everybody’s lived experience. Everybody gets treated badly in the same way at some point. But you couldn’t say that out loud. I sat through countless hours of that kind of meeting.”

Then the team in Rick’s division started talking about hiring.

“That was an interesting conundrum. There were a lot of questions for us for producers. What is the legality of us calling agencies and saying, ‘We’re looking to hire directors, but only black directors’? ACME partnered with outside firms that would promise us we can get you women, we can get you black directors, we can get you around any sticky problems like that. I didn’t explore the legality of it, but it felt pretty weird.”

Rick said that in his division, the quality and effectiveness of the work they were doing took a back seat to identity politics. “It became our total motivation: hiring x number of female directors, and x number of black directors.”

There was one case in which the team had the budget to make a hire, and considered taking on a freelancer who had done superb work for them in the past, under budget. The problem: he was a white male.

“Someone present in the hiring meeting said, ‘White people had it good for 400 years – it’s about time they felt the sting,’” says Rick. “None of the people leading the meeting said a word about that.”

There was another case in which a team was carrying out an expensive shoot in an environment in which a black actor hired for the shoot decided on the set that they didn’t want to subject themself to a minor inconvenience that was part of the contract. After the shoot ended, ACME offices were filled with lamentations over how racially insensitive ACME was to expect a black person to do something they didn’t want to do — even though the request was extremely minor, and the actor had signed on for it. As Rick put it, expecting a black actor to honor a professional commitment was considered intolerably racist by ACME staff.

As a conservative Christian, Rick says he felt uncomfortable having to promote LGBT in his work for the company. At one point, he was asked to cast non-binary children in one project. He did as he was told, but as a Christian, thought, “How did I let this get away from me?”

What’s more, he realized that he did not have a voice inside the company, which is a vast enterprise with billions in annual revenue.

“There are internal teams for all voices. They’ll check out content with the various teams to see if it’s accurate or offensive. There’s nothing for Christians. Stuff like that was starting to bother me.”

Rick is also a conservative, and was a supporter of Donald Trump. “On set, I would hear people dogging Trump supporters and Christians. I didn’t say anything. This made friendships so hollow. You just knew that if these people knew this little thing about you [your politics or religion], they probably wouldn’t want to be friends anymore.”

Charlie, who still works at ACME, and who was silent during most of our call, chimed in. He recalled being present when a senior executive of the corporation, in a private session, said that “since we’re all friends here” – meaning by this, because I’m confident that we all agree – and then tore into political conservatives.

“I think most of people at ACME who are on the left have no idea that there might be anybody in the workplace who is a conservative,” Charlie says. “They see the world as divided between good people and bad people. The people we work with are good people, so there couldn’t be any conservatives here.”

Rick says he would speak to the one other believer he knew within ACME, and they would talk quietly about what their last straw was going to be. When he made the decision to quit, Rick’s star was on the rise there [I looked him up online at the ACME website, and he seems to have been a rising start at the company]. But he was torn up inside.

“I realized I was using my God-given talents to promote this company where I no longer have a voice, and to promote values I don’t believe in,” Rick recalls. “I kept coming back to the Solzhenitsyn quote you cite in Live Not By Lies: ‘Let the lie exist, but not through me.’”

Now Rick has changed careers totally. He is training to start his own business. For him, as a Christian conservative, it’s worth it. He says, “I just want to work at a place where I’m not beholden to someone else’s ideas.”

Still, Rick wishes he had been bolder in the workplace, especially from the beginning. He wishes he had challenged co-workers’ opinions of whites, males, conservatives, and Christians. “If you start by being vocal, and being your true self – as clichéd as that sounds – and insisting that I have value, even if you don’t think I do – I wish I had done that.”

Charlie says:

It’s important to have a community where you can vent. That’s been incredibly helpful to me. Eventually you can sniff out the fellow conservatives within the organization – people with whom you can have a gut check and say, ‘Am I crazy, or is this wrong’? It doesn’t have to be within the company. The bottling it up is soul-crushing. You have to constantly be on so you don’t say something that could get you fired.

Charlie says he has been trying to help the Evangelical congregation of which he’s a part learn more about the principles of wokeness and critical theory. He says people there seem to be grateful that someone – even a layman like Charlie – is giving them guidance about this confusing stuff.

“Churches need to step up and recognize where we’re at, and start preparing people,” Charlie says. “You’re going to have church members who are going to lose their jobs. We have to start building safety nets. People we’re in community with, we need to step up and help people know that their church members have their backs. I would like to see more pastors read Live Not By Lies and understand what’s happening now, and what’s coming. We need to prepare.”

I told Rick and Charlie that it’s so discouraging to me to hear good-willed, intelligent conservative churchmen try to temporize on this stuff, to avoid having to take a controversial stand. Too often the people who recognize this evil for what it is are those who are so far out there ideologically that you don’t want to be associated with them.

Charlie agreed, saying, “It’s going to be reasonable people having the courage to speak up, saying that you don’t have to be on the crazy far right to see that this is wrong.”

Hey readers, you want to be impressed and encouraged? Check out biotech investor Vivek Ramaswamy’s recent speech condemning woke capitalism:

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Transgender, Transracial, What’s The Difference?

A reader in Madrid sends me this photo from the Spanish city of Valencia. It’s a poster put up by the city government:

It reads: “In Valencia, there are men with a vulva and women with a penis. Yes.”

Well, no. This is a lie. This is a lie that the government of the city of Valencia is telling with big street signs. Yet to the European Union elites, Hungarian PM Viktor Orban is the real problem.

It’s insane. My Madrid reader said, “This [trans] crusade is turning into not-so-soft totalitarianism.” In this case, the city government is attempting to compel people to believe that biological facts are not real.

Aleteia reports some success in Europe pushing back against the insanity. Excerpt:

One of Europe’s most venerable art institutions has done an about-face after trying to “cancel” an artist for what had been termed “transphobic” viewpoints.

The reversal, following an online petition against the Royal Academy of Arts in London, is the latest example of Europeans pushing back against transgender ideology.

The Academy had decided not to stock in its gift shop works by Jess De Wahls after eight social media users complained about her viewpoints on gender ideology.

De Wahls, in a 2019 blog post, had said she had “no issue with somebody who feels more comfortable expressing themselves as if they are the other sex,” but could not “accept people’s unsubstantiated assertions that they are in fact the opposite sex to when they were born and deserve to be extended the same rights as if they were born as such.”

The art museum apologized for having removed De Wahls’s work, saying it had “no right to judge her views.”

De Wahls urged all such institutions to “make space for disagreement.” She told the Times of London that she hoped that her experience would encourage others to stand up for their views on gender.

“There are going to be a lot more people like me who will not sit down and just take it. Enough is enough. It is totalitarian, it’s scary and I’m just so sick of it. Humans can’t change sex. Let’s get back to the facts and go from there.”

De Wahls, 38, told the Times that the climate of “fear” around discussion of gender reminded her of her childhood in East Germany, where people “didn’t know who was working for the Stasi, so you wouldn’t know who you had to be careful with.”

“I was six when the [Berlin] wall came down, but my parents lived through this,” she said. “Their formative years were spent in a state of fear. That’s what set my alarm bells [off], when people started reacting this way, saying [privately] I completely agree with you, but I don’t know if I can say anything at work because I might lose my job.”

There may be a US media blackout on my book Live Not By Lies, but you can’t keep the message down forever. People who lived under Communism know exactly what this is. If you know anyone in your own life who grew up under Communism, ask them what they think about critical race theory, gender ideology, and wokeness. (But you had better hope that they trust you enough to tell you the truth.)

Meanwhile, here is a video from a black woman in Los Angeles who is on Team Orban, whether she knows it or not:

A woman confronted the staff at the Wi Spa in Los Angeles after a man walked into the women’s section with his genitals hanging out in front of girls. He identified as a “woman.” The employees said he had a right to do that. The employees say that it’s the law.

Part 1 pic.twitter.com/m1VbU0WU6A

— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) June 27, 2021

The woman was confronted by a woke male ally who tried to insist that the man was “transgender.”

“It must be hard not being a real man, huh? Try it.”

Part 2 pic.twitter.com/PjdV9pXE75

— Ian Miles Cheong @ stillgray.substack.com (@stillgray) June 27, 2021

But you know what? The spa employees are probably right: under California law, the penis-haver seems to have a right to be flashing his junk in the women’s space.

How did we let this happen to us as a country?

Check out this insanity. Oli London, a mentally disturbed young Englishman who has a bizarre obsession with the K-pop star Park Jimin, has had many plastic surgeries in an attempt to look like his idol. Now he has finished his surgeries (he says), and believes he looks Korean. Thus, he has announced that he is “transracial” — he is no longer an Englishman, but a Korean. A non-binary Korean. Look:

He’s getting a massive amount of blowback from this, but he’s not backing down:

Oli London has a point. I’m serious. If men can have vulvas, and women can have penises, despite their biology, and despite their DNA, by what standard do we tell Oli London that he can’t be an ethnic Korean, despite having the DNA of an Englishman? I think he’s beyond bonkers, but if identity is a matter of self-perception and assertion, no matter what biology testifies, then Oli has a valid point. As did Rachel Dolezal, the fake black woman from a few years back. I think she was nuts, and not remotely black, but I see no logical reason to approve of transsexualism without approving of transracialism. Do you?

 

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Francis Cheers ‘Pastoral Zeal’ Of LGBT Crusader

We live in truly revolutionary times. Look at the letter Pope Francis wrote to the Father James Martin, the Jesuit crusader for the normalization of LGBT in Catholic life:

Dear brother:

Thank you for your mail and for the photos. Please thank your nephew for his kindness to me and for having chosen the name Francisco. And congratulate him on the socks. He made me laugh. Tell him that I pray for him and ask him to do so for me.

Regarding your P.S. [about the Outreach LGBT Ministry Conference], I want to thank you for your pastoral zeal and your ability to be close to people, with that closeness that Jesus had and that reflects the closeness of God. Our Heavenly Father approaches with love every one of his children, each and everyone. His heart is to open to each and everyone. He is Father. God’s “style” has three aspects: closeness, compassion and tenderness. This is how he draws closer to each one of us.

Thinking about your pastoral work, I see that you are continuously looking to imitate this style of God. You are a priest for all men and women, just as God is the Father for all men and women. I pray for you to continue in this way, being close, compassionate and with great tenderness.

And I pray for your faithful, your “parishioners,” and anyone whom the Lord places in your care, so that you protect them, and make them grow in the love of Our Lord Jesus Christ.

Please don’t forget to pray for me. May Jesus bless you and may the Holy Virgin protect you.

Fraternally,

Francisco

Here’s the original tweet:

Pope Francis @Pontifex has sent a beautiful letter on the occasion of the Outreach LGBTQ Catholic Ministry Webinar, which happened yesterday, expressing his support for this ministry and encouraging us to imitate God’s “style” of “closeness, compassion and tenderness”… pic.twitter.com/O9nTftoLDi

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) June 27, 2021

 

America, the Jesuit magazine, writes:

Francis is well informed of the work Father Martin is doing. He has sought to encourage him in this ministry and for this reason, in a significant public gesture of encouragement and support, he received him in a private audience in the library of the Vatican’s Apostolic Palace on September 30, 2019.

His letter on the eve of Saturday’s outreach conference can be understood in this same light.

And if there are any conservatives who want to pretend that this was a form letter written by someone close to the Pope, and that Francis really doesn’t know what’s in it, they should reflect that the original was written in Spanish, by Francis himself, in his own hand:

There can be no doubt that Father Martin is an extremely effective advocate of his cause. And there can equally be no doubt that as America claims, Francis is well informed of the work Father Martin is doing. I wonder, though, if the Pope knows about this:

That image is by a gay artist named Douglas Blanchard (Father Martin gives him credit in the next tweet), and is taken from his 2014 book, Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision, which depicts Jesus as a gay man. From the book’s description on Amazon:

Meet Jesus as a gay man of today in a contemporary city with The Passion of Christ: A Gay Vision. In stunning new images, the modern Christ figure is jeered by fundamentalists, tortured by Marine look-alikes, and rises again to enjoy homoerotic moments with God. His surprisingly diverse friends join him on a journey from suffering to freedom. Readers call it “accessible but profound.” Some are moved to tears. The 24 paintings in the gay Passion cover Jesus’ final days, including his arrest, trial, crucifixion, and resurrection. A queer Passion is important now because Christianity is being used to justify hate and discrimination against lesbian, gay, bisexual and transgender people. Each image is accompanied by insightful commentary, plus a short prayer and scripture. If Jesus came back today, would he be crucified all over again? Would we even recognize him? See for yourself in the gay vision of the Passion.

You can see all the paintings in the Blanchard series here. Here a a couple of them. I know some of you will be shocked and offended by this blasphemy, but you need to understand that this stuff is out there, and is being promoted by a priest whose mission is dear to Pope Francis’s heart. To be clear, Father Martin didn’t tweet out these particular images, but another one from the same series, depicting Jesus as a gay man. This is the artistic fruit of a profoundly corrupt mind:

 

The work Father Martin is doing is for the sake of mainstreaming and normalizing this kind of thing in the Catholic Church. And he’s very, very good at it. Consider again the Pope’s words to him: “I want to thank you for your pastoral zeal and your ability to be close to people, with that closeness that Jesus had and that reflects the closeness of God.”

Something big is happening, right in front of our eyes.

Meanwhile, on the Italian front, the Vatican has taken an unusual step of asking the Italian state to reconsider a proposed antidiscrimination bill, on the grounds that it violates religious liberty guarantees given to the Catholic Church under a longstanding treaty. The Church has already warned that the bill could lead to criminal proceedings against those who believe a family requires a father and a mother — which is the teaching of the Catholic Church.

This is where Francis’s sentimental characterization of Father Martin’s ministry is leading. It is an extraordinary thing.

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