Rod Dreher's Blog, page 597
March 26, 2016
‘Stop This Protestant Coughing!’
After five years as a bishop’s chaplain in two dioceses, in 1983 Skeoch was appointed Vicar of St Gabriel’s, Pimlico, where he remained until his retirement in 2007. In terms of population, this was one of the largest parishes in central London, with the Churchill Gardens estate at one end of the housing spectrum and stuccoed streets and squares at the other. Skeoch and his curates were often seen out and about in their soutanes, perhaps, some said unkindly, more often shopping than visiting parishioners.
There was a pastoral strategy of a kind, however, and Skeoch, with his teaching experience, made the Church of England primary school in the heart of the council estate a key element in his plan. He began a weekly school Mass with full Catholic ceremonial, and woe to the child who reacted amiss to the incense – “Stop this Protestant coughing!” would be the invariable rebuke.
Late in life, Fr. Skeoch was received into the Roman church under the Ordinariate. His fellow convert priest, Fr. Hunwicke, remembers him fondly over at his blog. One of Fr. Hunwicke’s readers offers this anecdote about the dearly departed:
I understand that the late Canon was given to voicing his displeasure by using the phrase “This is monstrous! This is outrageous!” or words to that effect.
On one occasion on a Continental holiday he arrived very late in the day at an abbey, where the monk at the gatehouse, in a very scruffy and muddy habit, who had evidently been gardening, told him that he was unfortunately too late for the evening meal. The Canon went through his “monstrous, outrageous” routine whereupon with a sigh the monk went off and managed to procure a plate of food.
The next morning the Canon entered the Abbey church for Lauds to discover that the gardener had now morphed into the Abbot.
No other nation on earth could have produced P.G. Wodehouse.
March 25, 2016
Holy Hops For Easter
An American reader writes:
We’re drinking the Monkish Blonde this Easter season and giving thanks for all the good people in the world trying to keep the faith.
Amen, sister! I wish a blessed Easter weekend to all my readers observing the holy day.
Birra Nursia is the beer brewed in small batches by the Benedictine Monks of Norcia. Follow that link to learn more about it, and to see a photo of Brother Francis, the brewmaster. It’s really good beer, and I would give anything for a tall, cold bottle of the Extra right now (10 percent alcohol). And look, you can buy it in America through their online store! Every penny made goes to keep the monastery going in the hometown of St. Benedict. Good people, good beer. Birra Nursia is a Benedict Option everybody can cheerfully embrace.
God Bless Asad Shah
The Facebook message that got Asad Shah killed by a fellow Muslim
May God have mercy on the soul of Asad Shah, a Glasgow immigrant shopkeeper killed on Thursday. From the Telegraph:
A popular shopkeeper was stabbed to death by another Muslim in a “religiously prejudiced” attack hours after posting an Easter message on Facebook to “my beloved Christian nation”.
Asad Shah, 40, a devout Muslim originally from the Pakistani city of Rabwah, had his head stamped on during a savage attack, according to one eyewitness.
Around four hours earlier the victim wrote online: “Good Friday and a very Happy Easter, especially to my beloved Christian nation.
“Let’s follow the real footstep of beloved holy Jesus Christ and get the real success in both worlds.”
On Friday afternoon, police confirmed that a 32-year-old Muslim man had been arrested in connection with Mr Shah’s death.
More:
Resident Isabella Graham, 64, said Mr Shah had previously employed her daughter at the shop. She said: “He was an amazing, wonderful man, he couldn’t do enough for you. He wouldn’t hurt anybody. Nobody in Shawlands would have a bad word to say about him. I can’t believe he’s gone.”
Brothers Qaiser and Omar Khan told BBC Scotland they knew Mr Shah well and had repaired his cars in the past. They described him as “a humble, sweet person”.
Omar Khan added: “I’ve known him since I was a wee boy so this is shocking news. He was a very straight-forward, humble person who was very good with his customers. He cared about his family a lot.”
Here’s a glimpse, from his YouTube page, of the kind of man this immigrant was. Fast forward to the 1:20 mark; this is him showing love to neighborhood Scottish children, who love him back.
And below, just a couple of days ago, is Shah’s video condemnation of the Brussels bombings. He speaks slowly, haltingly, in a heavy accent. I have tried to transcribe some of his remarks from the first seven minutes. The video is below this partial transcript; please watch at least a little bit of it so you can see how gentle and sincere he was:
My beloved, all-beloved mankind. We are created for a special, spiritual, very sacred and nobel purpose on this earth. Life, as we know, this life is very short. My beloved, all mankind, the All-Beloved Creator created us to live on this earth with love, together, without causing any disorder, any fight, any bloodshedding on this earth. … We are here for only a few years on this earth, in this life, for a special spiritual purpose: to define ourselves, to get wisdom of knowledge, and to purify ourselves. … This is our preparation for the life that is after this life. … We are here to live together because we are created as a mankind-family on this earth, to live with love and with taking care of each other … .
Asad Shah is with our Creator today. I am confident of that. Please, Christians, wherever you are this Easter weekend, pray for the soul of a righteous man, murdered for his compassion and love of mankind.
Remember, too, that if you condemn all Muslims over the bloodthirsty killers of ISIS, you also condemn this good man Asad Shah, may his memory be eternal.
UPDATE: Meanwhile, look at this scum, also in the news today:
The spiritual leader of Scotland’s biggest mosque has praised an Islamist assassin amid fresh concerns about the threat of radicalism at the Muslim centre of worship.
Habib ur Rehman, the imam of Glasgow Central Mosque, said extremist Mumtaz Qadri was a “true Muslim” and equated his actions with the French resistance against the Nazis during World War Two.
He made his remarks last month as he protested the execution of Qadri for the 2011 murder of Salman Taseer, the governor of Punjab who had championed the rights of Christians being persecuted under blasphemy laws.
Is there any wonder that there walks the streets of Glasgow a Muslim willing to murder another Muslim for treating Christians humanely? If there is any way for the UK to deport cretins like that imam, I devoutly wish they would use it.
A reminder of the kind of Muslim that the leader of Scotland’s largest mosque is not:
Cheer Up, Conservatives
Really good column by David Brooks today, in which he looks to the GOP’s future beyond Trump. Excerpts:
This is a moment for honesty. Valuably, Trump has exposed the rottenness of the consultant culture, and the squirrelly way politicians now talk to us. This is a moment for revived American nationalism. Trump’s closed, ethnic nationalism is dominant because Iraq, globalization and broken immigration policies have discredited the expansive open form of nationalism that usually dominates American culture.
And:
This is also a moment for sociology. Reaganism was very economic, built around tax policies, enterprise zones and the conception of the human being as a rational, utility-driven individual. The Adam Smith necktie was the emblem of that movement.
It might be time to invest in Émile Durkheim neckties, because today’s problems relate to binding a fragmenting society, reweaving family and social connections, relating across the diversity of a globalized world. Homo economicus is a myth and conservatism needs a worldview that is accurate about human nature.
Read the whole thing. Brooks says that nobody knows what the next GOP will look like, but “it’s exciting to be present at the creation.” I agree. It’s about the only good news to come out of this wretched campaign: knowing that the old model is finally smashed, and the way forward is open for new ways of thinking on the Right.
That said, I am going to stick with my Alasdair MacIntyre necktie for now. I don’t know how you re-establish those social bonds when we have created a culture of autonomous individualists who don’t order their lives toward a common religion, or anything higher than what they desire. As sociologist Christian Smith and his colleagues put it, there is something deeply wrong with American culture today. We have eaten all our seed corn. Yes, we need a new politics, but politics can at best be only a partial answer to our crisis. The Republicans do need a worldview that is accurate about human nature, but can a nation in which nearly everyone has come to view freedom as the absence of restraint on the autonomous individual’s will really bring itself to see human nature as it really is, much less develop policies and laws to account for that? I’m skeptical.
I am a social and religious conservative who cannot be a libertarian on principle, because I am a conservative. Yet I find that I have to be a libertarian for pragmatic reasons, because I want my little platoon left alone by the government. And I am an embittered ex-Republican who is trying to bring himself around to realizing that as awful as the GOP is, they, and their judicial appointments, are the only thing standing between my little platoon and some pretty unfortunate outcomes. So yeah, I’ll take good cheer where I can find it.
Hey, looking for some new ideas to revive the Republican Party? You might find a few here, in Crunchy Cons. Here’s the Crunchy Con Manifesto. If you like what you see, then read the book:
We are conservatives who stand outside the conservative mainstream; therefore, we can see things that matter more clearly.
Modern conservatism has become too focused on money, power, and the accumulation of stuff, and insufficiently concerned with the content of our individual and social character.
Big business deserves as much skepticism as big government.
Culture is more important than politics and economics.
A conservatism that does not practice restraint, humility, and good stewardship—especially of the natural world—is not fundamentally conservative.
Small, Local, Old, and Particular are almost always better than Big, Global, New, and Abstract.
Beauty is more important than efficiency.
The relentlessness of media-driven pop culture deadens our senses to authentic truth, beauty, and wisdom.
We share Russell Kirk’s conviction that “the institution most essential to conserve is the family.
“Politics and economics won’t save us; if our culture is to be saved at all, it will be by faithfully living by the Permanent Things, conserving these ancient moral truths in the choices we make in our everyday lives.
What If Diversity Is Our Weakness?
A reader left this comment on the “What’s The Matter With Utah?” thread. I think it’s really thought-provoking and challenging, but he posted it under his real name, and I’m worried that if I approve it, it will set him up to be attacked. Reader, if you are sure that you want me to approve it, let me know and I will. But I want to throw the comment out there for discussion, because the issues the reader brings up are real, and difficult:
The patterns displayed by Trump’s performance are ‘confusing’ only because they challenge core beliefs on both sides of the political spectrum about race and diversity. Conservatives are straining to deny the obvious because Trumps’s success confirms a long-denied narrative about the racial roots of the Southern realignment, as has been reiterated in at least a half-dozen op-eds a week. Occam’s Razor would suggest that the story, if a bit simplified, is the cleanest way to explain why an identity-politics candidate is performing well in the Old Confederacy states. Trump is winning in part because these are the same people who are losers in the global wage-arbitration realignment, to places like China, but that’s just one more factor that reinforces their central racialist schema for understanding the world.
But the Left is also reluctant to acknowledge one important element of that narrative: The Putnam hypothesis that racial polarization increases with social contact. This denial is a deeply pernicious epistemological flaw, grounded in an incorrect understanding of human nature. A central dogma of post-religious society is that provincialism and xenophobia are a product of ignorance, and that when people come into contact with one another, they inevitably become more tolerant. But this conviction is a consequence of statistical anomalies, and is not at all representative of broader human nature.
Left-leaning members of the media believe that precisely because it works so well for them. When they encounter minorities in the fields of law, journalism, or politics, those minorities are almost always the handful of successful exceptions to the broader trend of poverty, lack of education, and social malaise. If the only blacks (Hispanics, etc) you encounter are the ones who are disproportionately successful, then it reinforces your conviction in the irrationality of racism, and the necessary existence of deeply perverse moral defects in anyone who doesn’t assent to the “obvious truth” of diversity as a source of social cohesion and institutional success.
Outside those enclaves, it’s easier to see the consequences of building policy around those outliers. Skimming off the handful of successful minorities and concentrating them (whether through affirmative action or by legitimate personal success) into a handful of wealthy multi-ethnic enclaves is itself a reason why many black communities are deprived of the social capital and networking needed to escape poverty. But worse, it tends to create a world where the points of contact between poor whites and poor blacks are entirely negative, and reinforce negative stereotypes in a way that falls far closer to the concept of “rational racism” (in the classic “taxi driver who avoids certain neighborhoods” sense) than the Leftist-orthodox rainbows-and-unicorns celebration of personal experiences as a remedy for bigotry. (This doctrine has only been reinforced by the outcome of the SSM debate, where the communities where homosexuals can comfortably be “out” are the ones where you’d expect to find lots of economically successful and charismatic public figures, in fields like sports and entertainment.)
I live in a poor part of town, about 50% black, 30% Hispanic, and 20% white. All my neighbors are black, and relatively poor. The house next to mine has three junker cars in the back yard, slowly rusting. At night (including last night!), I often hear gunshots and screaming fights between belligerent family members who use all manner of violent-sounding profanity to describe what they’d like to do to one another. God save the fatherless kids in the middle of those fights. Last month a repo-man came to our door asking about the working hours of our neighbor, in an attempt to intercept her; we told him that, so far as we can tell, she is unemployed and lives off benefits. Her children occasionally drop by with grandkids to avail themselves of free babysitting while they smoke pot. The kids seem nice enough, sometimes, but I won’t let my girls go over to play for fear of their parents’ drugs, booze, and guns. It’s hard to sleep, between the gunshots and the foundation-shaking ‘music’ that cars charitably broadcast to the neighborhood. Last fall one of the peach trees I’d been carefully tending was ripped up when a criminal fleeing the police was chased through my yard, eventually being tackled and cuffed on the back of my car after everyone in my house woke up to bullhorn-loud demands to “drop your weapon.”
To me, the existence of a Trump who loses Utah makes perfect sense. It’s hard to sustain anti-racism in the face of a world of social pathology that makes so many parts of the racist narrative feel so deeply rational and appealing. As a lower-elementary kid, I don’t remember ever comprehending the idea of racial prejudice when I attended a private school where there were three black kids, all of them from the families of wealthy politicians. They were so talented, and friendly, and, aside from skin color, so much like us! But when I transferred into the public school system in middle school, and I had to listen to sexually violent “suck my dick, bitch!” rap lyrics on the school bus every day, suddenly I didn’t like black kids nearly as much as I did before. I still said all the right things in public about racial tolerance, but they felt more than a little fake. The black kids were mean. They swore. They fought. They made fun of me. They talked about hurting other people with guns and knives, and it was scary. Despite what my parents said, I felt that the value of being in a “more integrated” public school was all a sham — and having a Trump-esque figure in my circle of friends willing to admit that sham in public would have felt liberating. It was making me vastly less tolerant and open-minded than the unnaturally white private school I had attended before.
Two years later, I started listening to a lot of Rush Limbaugh, and the guy really made sense to me.
I’m aware that tendency cuts both ways. I’m sure there are things that my black neighbors dislike about my house and family — My dog barks too much! I have messy-looking vegetable gardens in the front yard! I’m a dorky-looking nebbish on a bicycle! — and I’m sure they have to work to avoid letting that personal frustration evolve into some broader critique of “white people” in general. All the same socio-economic self-sortings that make working-class white racism feel justified against blacks (or Hispanics) are increasingly likely to cut the other way, as white working-class communities dissolve into meth addiction and out-of-wedlock births and are perceived as dysfunctional by “minorities” that are (in the case of Hispanics particularly) passing them by. Most of the best maintained houses in my neighborhood are owned by Mexicans with a talent for working in construction, and I’m sure they hate living next to poor white trash families in homes with rotting frames without the resources to escape to the exurbs, and who are trapped here pulling down their property values.
But what liberal wants to go up on live TV and admit the obvious truth, that segregation and demographic homogeneity are a powerful force for racial harmony, the best antidote for Trumpian racial resentment, and the easiest way to create the kind of social cohesion that allows us to have a generous Scandinavian welfare state? What conservative wants to tell successful blacks in the position of a Ben Carson or a Clarence Thomas that they should have maintained their identity in poor black neighborhoods, full of selfish (or even well-meaning) friends and relatives who will try to drag them back down into poverty? Which StopTrump secularist organization wants to publicly advocate the sort of strong religiously-motivated homogeneity of Mormon choirs, as an alternative to the “celebrating our diversity” whitewashing of cultural suicide by an African-American artistic community that went from Jazz at Carnegie Hall to the bitches-and-hos hip-hop that blares from every window-rattling car that drives past my front yard?
If Trump is defeated by normal mechanisms, then states like Utah will deserve much of the credit — and that means that the voluntary racial segregation that arose through Mormon migration and discrimination (until recently, by explicit doctrine!) will deserve part of that credit. But no one will dare to say that out loud.
The “Putnam hypothesis” the reader refers to is the research that Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam undertook that … well, read the 2007 Boston Globe piece about it. Excerpt:
It has become increasingly popular to speak of racial and ethnic diversity as a civic strength. From multicultural festivals to pronouncements from political leaders, the message is the same: our differences make us stronger.
But a massive new study, based on detailed interviews of nearly 30,000 people across America, has concluded just the opposite. Harvard political scientist Robert Putnam — famous for “Bowling Alone,” his 2000 book on declining civic engagement — has found that the greater the diversity in a community, the fewer people vote and the less they volunteer, the less they give to charity and work on community projects. In the most diverse communities, neighbors trust one another about half as much as they do in the most homogenous settings. The study, the largest ever on civic engagement in America, found that virtually all measures of civic health are lower in more diverse settings.
“The extent of the effect is shocking,” says Scott Page, a University of Michigan political scientist.
The study comes at a time when the future of the American melting pot is the focus of intense political debate, from immigration to race-based admissions to schools, and it poses challenges to advocates on all sides of the issues. The study is already being cited by some conservatives as proof of the harm large-scale immigration causes to the nation’s social fabric. But with demographic trends already pushing the nation inexorably toward greater diversity, the real question may yet lie ahead: how to handle the unsettling social changes that Putnam’s research predicts.
“We can’t ignore the findings,” says Ali Noorani, executive director of the Massachusetts Immigrant and Refugee Advocacy Coalition. “The big question we have to ask ourselves is, what do we do about it; what are the next steps?”
The study is part of a fascinating new portrait of diversity emerging from recent scholarship. Diversity, it shows, makes us uncomfortable — but discomfort, it turns out, isn’t always a bad thing. Unease with differences helps explain why teams of engineers from different cultures may be ideally suited to solve a vexing problem. Culture clashes can produce a dynamic give-and-take, generating a solution that may have eluded a group of people with more similar backgrounds and approaches. At the same time, though, Putnam’s work adds to a growing body of research indicating that more diverse populations seem to extend themselves less on behalf of collective needs and goals.
His findings on the downsides of diversity have also posed a challenge for Putnam, a liberal academic whose own values put him squarely in the pro-diversity camp. Suddenly finding himself the bearer of bad news, Putnam has struggled with how to present his work. He gathered the initial raw data in 2000 and issued a press release the following year outlining the results. He then spent several years testing other possible explanations.
When he finally published a detailed scholarly analysis in June in the journal Scandinavian Political Studies, he faced criticism for straying from data into advocacy. His paper argues strongly that the negative effects of diversity can be remedied, and says history suggests that ethnic diversity may eventually fade as a sharp line of social demarcation.
“Having aligned himself with the central planners intent on sustaining such social engineering, Putnam concludes the facts with a stern pep talk,” wrote conservative commentator Ilana Mercer, in a recent Orange County Register op-ed titled “Greater diversity equals more misery.”
March 24, 2016
Mickey Rat
Used to be that the Republican coalition was made up of free marketers, libertarians, social and religious conservatives, and national security hawks. Their commonalities, versus the Democratic Party’s coalition, made it possible for them to elide their differences. Besides, when it got right down to it, most religious and social conservatives (wrongly) didn’t see any particular threat to their values from capitalism.
Now, if you are one of those social or religious conservatives, you are living in a Reaganesque dreamland. Since the Indiana RFRA debacle last year — ifyou haven’t read Prof. Kingsfield on its implications, you really, really must — Big Business has shown itself to be the most powerful enemy of social conservatives. The most powerful enemy because, well, they’re so powerful, period, and also powerful in that they generally tell the GOP what to do.
Today we see that the Walt Disney company is the enemy of traditional Christians not only because of their sleazy Disney Channel programming, but also because … well, read on:
Another industry is warning Georgia’s governor not to sign a religious-liberty bill into law — the latest to suggest that the state risks losing business over the measure.
The Walt Disney Co. and its subsidiary movie studio, Marvel, said in a statement Wednesday that they would stop all film production in the state should the Free Exercise Protection Act, which opponents describe as anti-gay, becomes law.
“Disney and Marvel are inclusive companies, and although we have had great experiences filming in Georgia, we will plan to take our business elsewhere should any legislation allowing discriminatory practices be signed into state law,” the Disney Co. said in a statement.
What does the Georgia bill do? From the Post:
The bill, which passed the state legislature last week, protects religious leaders from being forced to perform same-sex marriage ceremonies and individuals from being forced to attend such events. It also allows faith-based organizations to deny use of their facilities for events they find “objectionable” and exempts them from having to hire or retain any employee whose religious beliefs or practices differ from those of the organization.
That’s it. The bill offered weak religious liberty protection to dissenters from the emerging cultural orthodoxy. But it was better than nothing. And that’s not enough for Disney.
Last night, under pressure, the Georgia legislature watered down even the weak bill it put forward. As Ryan T. Anderson and Roger Severino write:
The new version of the bill provides Religious Freedom Restoration Act levels of protection for certain protected persons, but it explicitly says these protections cannot apply in cases of “invidious discrimination.” Of course, no one is in favor of invidious discrimination, but the problem is that in the hands of a liberal judge, everything looks like invidious discrimination even when it is not, such as religious universities or adoption agencies that want their policies to reflect their teachings on marriage. This apes the bad “fix” that gutted the Indiana religious freedom bill.
What this “fix” means in practice is that if a new or existing law creating special legal privileges based on sexual orientation and gender identity conflicts with a sincere religious belief, the Georgia religious freedom bill may provide no protection—not even the standard balancing test that is the hallmark of religious freedom restoration acts. So in an area where we most need religious liberty protection, the new Georgia law goes out of its way to disclaim it.
You will have seen, no doubt, that the National Football League weighed in, threatening to kick Atlanta out of consideration for the next Super Bowl. Nobody is talking about anti-gay discrimination in pro football. What the NFL cannot abide is the possibility that Georgia might offer an affirmative defense in court for the shrinking number of Christians who oppose same-sex marriage.
When you’ve lost Disney and the NFL — that is, when even Disney and the NFL consider “religious liberty” to be a code word for “hate” — you’ve lost, period. Get it straight in your head now, orthodox Christians, Jews, and Muslims: Big Business is the enemy.
There is precious little we can do about it now, but we can at least stop fooling ourselves that the free market is a friend to orthodox religion. It never was, but now, it’s positively hostile.
At the state and local level, there are Republican politicians who are willing to try to protect religious liberty, but they’re getting smashed on the economic front by nationals and multinationals. As angry as I get when GOP pols put economics over moral principle, I can understand it. Don’t agree with it, but understand it. Traditional Christians and other social conservatives face a terrible choice: vote for Democrats, who will gleefully stomp on religious liberty, or vote for Republicans, who will feebly oppose it, then cave, because the business of America is and always will be Business.
If this doesn’t compel conservative Christians to radically rethink their politics, they are so far in the GOP tank that they can’t tell up from down. Reagan is dead, and so is his coalition.
What’s The Matter With Utah?
A reader writes:
I have always loved Utah. Certainly, it’s a beautiful state, but I have always felt something else there. Utah’s people seem to have a purpose – an extra dimension. Perhaps the way they chose to live is not exactly the same as that of your friends in Italy, and their option is not Benedictine, but it seems to be an option nonetheless. Trump got shredded in Utah. The angry, disillusioned, corroded layer of society instinctively voting Trump does not seem to be there. I wonder why that is.
I don’t know. Readers, what do you think? Must be something about the LDS faith … but what? Except for Park City, for the Sundance Film Festival, I’ve never been to Utah. Help me understand what the reader sees. What’s the matter with Utah? Why are they not messed up like the rest of us are messed up?
Michael Brendan Dougherty has at least a partial answer:
Groups that tend to do better economically in diverse societies have more trouble sympathizing with groups that struggle, and often tend to blame that struggle on innate traits or character faults. This is not the case in Utah. Despite being one of the whitest and most conservative states in the country, Utah implemented a simple and seemingly radical policy that has had great success in solving homelessness. Namely, Utah gave homes to the homeless. And they saved a bundle by doing so, since homelessness drives spending both in social services and the corrections department.
Another commonality of anti-Trump states is their high fertility. Utah leads the way with the highest fertility rate of all states (excluding territories), at 2.33 children per woman. Utah is also a state in the bottom third of divorce statistics.
Utah lags the rest of the nation in its diversity. But it is a low-crime, economically healthy state with stronger-than-average marriages. And Utah’s people have enough confidence in themselves and the future to invest in their society over the long term by having children at a higher rate than any other state in the country. The message is obvious: Voters who are well integrated into the mediating institutions of society don’t buy what Trump is selling.
Shorter MBD: Because Utah is full of Mormons.
UPDATE: A Catholic reader who once worked in an office full of Mormons writes:
I have never been more impressed with a group of people. There is so much faith and real joy. And virtue–the non-alcohol, non-caffeinated (much as that grinds against my own inclinations) mode of life (in addition to the years served as missionaries) really does contribute to the inculcation of virtue (though, as my college experience with some non-practicing LDS from Utah shows, those who do not buy in rebel HARD).
They embody what I wish American Catholics did more consistently: an adherence to traditional values of faith and family with a willingness to explore economic policy that is not just tax cuts (Many of them told me they were so suspicious of government welfare because the Mormon church was so generous a provider of such services).
In short, they are the opposite of Trump’s style.
In addition, I think some of their opposition to Trump stems from unique history. It is hard to paint with so broad a brush, but it has been my experience that Mormons are very against wholesale condemnation of a religious belief. Given their history, this is understandable. All this talk of banning Muslims speaks to them at a very visceral level. Even though Cruz shares in that to a point, Trump is sui generis. I think that also plays a huge role.
I am sure there are many dimensions I am not addressing, but these are the dimensions I can speak to from personal experience. People who want to enact the BenOp have lots to learn from them. Truly delightful people.
Europe At War
The Islamic State group has trained at least 400 fighters to target Europe in deadly waves of attacks, deploying interlocking terror cells like the ones that struck Brussels and Paris with orders to choose the time, place and method for maximum chaos, officials have told The Associated Press.
The network of agile and semiautonomous cells shows the reach of the extremist group in Europe even as it loses ground in Syria and Iraq.
Maintaining 24/7 human and technical surveillance on just one target requires something like two dozen operatives, and even the larger European security services can effectively watch only a few handfuls of would-be terrorists at one time. Even then, mistakes will be made. To say nothing of the alarming progress made by Europe’s jihadists recently in communications security—this was a big reason why November’s Paris attackers were not stopped in time—that is blunting the effective Western counterterrorism methods that have been honed since 9/11. The depressing bottom line is that even the best intelligence cannot compensate for political failings on an epic scale.
Simply put, Europe has imported a major threat into its countries, one that did not exist a couple generations ago. It can be endlessly debated why this problem has grown so serious so quickly—for instance, how much is due to Europe’s failures at assimilation of immigrants versus the innate aggression of some of those immigrants (and their children)?—but that the threat is large and growing can no longer be denied by the sentient.
What, then, is to be done? Admitting the extent of this threat is the necessary first step, albeit one that the EU’s political class seems congenitally unable to address. Instead, the public is treated to the now-customary clichés about religion having “nothing to do with terrorism,” combined with ritual admonitions about “Islamophobia.” One wonders how much more of this organized dishonesty the European public can take.
Europe is now at war again. The threat today is less terrorism than a low-grade insurgency, a guerrilla war of sorts, that hangs over much of the continent as thousands of jihadists, made proficient killers by ISIS in Syria and Iraq, return home with visions of killing “infidels,” their former neighbors. There will be no parley or negotiation with such mass murderers. Parsing the death-cult ideology that drives ISIS fighters, with the hope of making it less noxious, makes as much sense as trying to divine the finer political points of the Manson family.
We should expect more guerrilla-like attacks like Brussels yesterday: moderate in scale, relatively easy to plan and execute against soft targets, and utterly terrifying to the public. At some point, angry Europeans, fed up with their supine political class, will begin to strike back, and that’s when the really terrifying scenarios come into play. European security services worry deeply about the next Anders Breivik targeting not fellow Europeans, but Muslim migrants. “We’re just one Baruch Goldstein away from all-out war,” explained a senior EU terrorism official, citing the American-born Israeli terrorist, fed up with Palestinian violence, who walked into a Hebron mosque in 1994, guns blazing, and murdered 29 innocent Muslims.
More:
When that violence comes, a practically disarmed Europe will be all but powerless to stop it. To take the case of Belgium, at the Cold War’s end a generation ago, its army had seven brigades with 18 infantry battalions, plus some 30 more battalions in the reserve. Today, Belgium’s army has only two brigades and six infantry battalions, some 3,000 bayonets in all. That tiny force would have trouble exerting control over even one bumptious Brussels neighborhood in the event of serious crisis.
Back in 2012, Switzerland conducted military exercises premised on conditions in Europe getting out of control, between migration, radicalism and economic decline. They repeated those exercises the following year, and since then the Swiss, who have a knack for preparing for all contingencies, have warned that Europe’s burgeoning interlinked crises may result in major war. Such warnings were pooh-poohed by EU bien-pensants at the time; now they seem prescient.
When I was in Italy recently, I had an unexpected conversation, with someone in a position to know, about specific ISIS threats in the country that are known to Italian intelligence. I can’t be specific about them here, but they genuinely shocked me — the targets, I mean. If those Islamic terror cells activate themselves, Europe is not only going to have to worry about its train stations and airports. This would be all-out guerrilla war, and nobody would be safe.
It is hard to imagine Europe emerging out of the other side of this thing at some future date with its liberal political order intact. (Note well that by “liberal,” I don’t mean “left-of-center”.) Michael Brendan Dougherty writes:
When a sense of order and security disappears from a nation, freedom disappears soon after. Europe’s leaders denied for decades that they had problems of assimilation, then convinced themselves that radicalization within the modern European ghetto would burn itself out. Now they have almost convinced themselves that a nearly uncontrolled wave of migration carries no significant risks to Europe. But, slowly, the steady pace of attacks, the threat of popular electoral revolt, and a foreboding climate of fear and self-censorship are transforming Europe into something it never intended to be.
But unless something fortunate, unforeseen event happens, Europe is going to have to become that illiberal thing, or see itself torn to pieces by Islamic violence.
There is absolutely no room for “I told you so” gloating from American conservatives. Yes, the European elites have brought this problem onto themselves, in their ideological blindness, and exorcising this demon is going to exact a horrible cost from a lot of innocent people, Muslim and non-Muslim, who never sought war, and only wanted to live in peace.
One of these days — sooner rather than later — Europeans will tire of hashtags, candles in the square, and diversity-is-our-strength lectures from their leaders. Then what?
A Belgian reader wrote yesterday, in the immediate aftermath of the bombings (before it was known who did it):
Earlier today you made an observation that particularly resonated with me as a Belgian post-citizen:
“If the Islamic terrorists can pull this off in the heart of a European capital that is already expecting something like this (as they must have been after the arrest of Abdeslam, is anywhere in Europe safe?”
If you’ll allow me to put in my two cents: no, nowhere in Europe is safe, though on a metaphysical level the biggest threat does not originate with people like Salah Abdeslam or today’s attackers, who I’m going to speculate were not members of the Brazilian-Belgian Santo Daime or Sino-Belgian buddhist communities. The reason attacks like these have an impact far beyond their immediate human and economic toll is that we feel helpless, and we feel helpless because our mental defenses have been progressively demonized and dismantled. Ever since the november 2015 Paris attacks I have decided to steer clear of places like Antwerp and Brussels, especially airports and train stations, as much as possible due to the fact that I consider them to be the free-fire zones of a country that is profoundly diabolical in the sense you’ve earlier used the term on your blog.
Belgium perfectly captures what life devolves to in a post-nation-state that has been torn apart by the sort of modern gnostic speculation that Eric Voegelin first identified and conservatives like Pat Buchanan and the late William F. Buckley, Jr. have warned the us all about for decades. Nations have been theorized as conceptually from their states (which is of course true), shoe-horning in the idea that the nation-state is to be condemned as an arbitrary and oppressive historical contingency ought to be replaced by more socially just (because in fine infinitely inclusive and thus infinitely able to transcend the national “body”) post-national societies. Which logically leads the nation, or at least its academically well-credentialed elites, to abandon its primary mental defense, the conviction that one’s nation is not the world and therefore does not a priori owe the world anything.
Politically this has translated into an intellectual forfeiture of our authority, once considered self-evident, to sovereignly decide which outsiders are to be allowed into the territory and under what conditions, to be replaced by an ongoing commitment to becoming a post-national collection of self-interested individuals. Individuals for whom Belgium and the rest of the EU are not the objects of any primordial affiliation but rather geographical areas to be efficiently exploited in the pursuit of one’s individual project of the willed self. This is not to say that Belgium does not force immigrants to attend for example mandatory “integration courses” and does not means-test them at every turn. We do, and often in the most condescending and petty ways possible so as to really stick it to them. The ultimate meaning of all such seemingly tough-on-immigrants measures in Belgium and other EU countries however lies in the fact that hey are just technocratically designed and implemented (and thus sometimes easily gamed) band-aids meant to treat the symptoms of explicitly anti-assimilationist policies and placate national electorates that are becoming increasingly aware of the fact that their elites are engaged in a diabolical project of taking apart their nations via their right to, in the nation they consider their own, discriminate (among) non-nationals on the basis of (putative) ethnic, cultural and, yes, religious affinity.
What this evolution has made me realize is that ultimately Belgium and the rest of the EU are qualitatively no different from, say, Somalia. Not because nowadays both have people that look different from me in them, which would be the left’s preferred genre since it allows the gnostic elite project of immanentizing the eschaton through national dissolution to portray all dissent as frustrated ethno-nationalism. In other words odious people resentful over being on the losing side of a universe bending towards gnostic justice. Rather it is because I have a citizen-polity relation with neither Belgium nor Somalia. And neither can count on my allegiance beyond the bare minimum required to keep me out of legal trouble. Which is why I, as a 31-year-old who is legally obligated to participate in Belgium’s democratic elections for the next half-century or so and is thus expected to care about the public good, have decided to opt out of any sincere commitment to the active public life and instead retreat into private life, much like East Bloc populations living under actually existing socialism. By doing so I hope to be able to sit out actually existing neo-liberal globalism (which, like actually existing socialism, turns out to be much less fun than advertised) without getting myself killed because I wanted to be a hero and do something for the common good that no one cares about anyway.
I do of course care about the victims of today’s terrorist attacks and their families, but am unable to imagine any path forward emerging from the elite minds of a sanctimoniously oikophobic post-nation-state like this one. Much like in the wake of the Paris attacks media, political, academic and religious (of the European moralistic therapeutic deism variety) elites are already calling upon us to “not give in to fear” and participate in all sorts of feel-good rallies and other impotent actionism. To me these elite-sanctioned responses are themselves necessarily just as diabolic as the post-nation-state condition that makes the attacks to which they are a response so impactful. Given that the non-Christian far-right have been the only ones consistently denouncing the elites’ demonization and dissolution of the nation-state, all the Enlightenment and Christian values in the name of which we are now being called upon to not give in to fear come to be seen through the lens of their instrumental finality, i.e. apologia for continued neo-liberal globalist disintegration of our nations and our selves. Which predictably will lead to intensified attacks on all dissent from the post-nation-state with its de facto open borders and right-wing populist pushback against those attacks. And thus we can expect not only more attacks like today’s but also increasing societal polarization along both the left vs. right and immigrant vs. non-immigrant axes, regardless of how well we equip law enforcement to defend us in the free-fire zones of the post-nation-state. As long as we continue to indulge gnostic speculators for whom the nation is a symbolic proxy for the loathed body to be disavowed and shed, Belgium and the EU will continue to be diabolic places where every public space can turn into a free-fire zone at any moment.
Finally on this point, here, via Gates of Vienna, is an extraordinary editorial in the Milan daily Il Giornale. The headline? “Let’s Expel Islam From Our Lands”. Expect to see more things like this. Excerpts:
Other attacks, more deaths. Now not even surprise attacks, arriving out of the blue, but they respond blow for blow, as in a war because Islam has declared war on the West. Enough with the lies of “mavericks” talking about moderate Islam, about possible dialogue. A few hours after the arrest of the beast Salah in Brussels, a member of the terrorist commandos who saw action in Paris four months ago, Islamic volunteers blew themselves up yesterday at the airport and in the metro of the Belgian capital; they were already armed and on alert. They filled their bombs with nails to cause more harm. They do not stop; they will not stop. They are not desperate; they are the bourgeoisie of Islam that some have called “integrated”, whom we are supposed to trust.
Islam and its god are incompatible with our civilization, have the blood of our children on their hands, and are not satiated. This is the problem. The rest is just chit-chat.
OK, you can revoke the citizenship of naturalized Muslim citizens, but what do you do with the millions of Muslims who were born in Europe? Has a modern state ever expelled people like them? Where would they go?
Ban Gay Men, Say Gay SJWs
It never ends with the SJWs (MSSA/Shutterstock)
A gay reader sends in this example of Social Justice Warriors gone wild in the UK:
The National Union of Students’ LGBT Campaign has passed a motion calling for the abolition of representatives for gay men – because they “don’t face oppression” in the LGBT community.
The NUS LGBT+ Campaign discussed the issue at its annual conference, which took place in Sheffield this week.
At the event, delegates passed that blames “cis gay men” for “misogyny, transphobia, racism and biphobia”.
It says: “Misogyny, transphobia, racism and biphobia are often present in LGBT+ societies. This is unfortunately more likely to occur when the society is dominated by white cis gay men.”
The motion continues to call on LGBT societies at universities – many of whom have dedicated reps for lesbians, trans people, bi people and gay men – to abolish the role for gay men.
You’ve got to click on that “motion” hyperlink above, and read what these loonies resolved at their conference. NUS = National Union of Students. For example:
Conference Believes
1) Ace students are included under the NUS LGBT+ banner and have their own caucus at LGBT+ Conference, but have no representative on the committee
2) ‘Ace’ is used in this sense to include both asexual and aromantic spectrum identified students
Got that? “Ace” is now an oppressed group.
The reader writes, of SJWs:
I felt for a while that their hearts were in the right place-or at least in a nearby vicinity- but they’re hugely misguided. But this piece has changed my view from them being misguided to them being downright cannibalistic, vapid, sorry excuses for intellectuals.
Sooner or later, they will consume themselves. But a lot of damage will be done before that blessed day.
The Real Donald Trump
“@Don_Vito_08: “A picture is worth a thousand words” @realDonaldTrump#LyingTed#NeverCruz@MELANIATRUMPpic.twitter.com/5bvVEwMVF8“
— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) March 24, 2016
I wish to associate myself with this tweet below:
To recap, today Trump:
– Said Ted Cruz’s wife is ugly
– Whined it’s unfair others ran for nomination
– Sells this as confidence & strength
— Ari Schulman (@AriSchulman) March 24, 2016
UPDATE: Changed the headline because it had not occurred to me that it was disrespectful on Maundy Thursday for Western Christians. Apologies.
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