Rod Dreher's Blog, page 62

A Uniformed Social Justice Warrior

The Left’s long march through the institutions continues through the US military. Here’s news from the front lines of the culture war, a war that the Pentagon’s leadership is apparently planning to win for the Left:

Its active wars ending, its ranks both smaller and more diverse and its talent needs shifting, the Pentagon is embracing ideas like inclusion and adopting many of the efforts long used in the private sector to recruit and retain women and people of color.

Yet while many inside and outside the military have embraced the effort as overdue, some Republican lawmakers and influential conservatives are mounting an inchoate but increasingly loud protest and promoting the idea that the armed forces are becoming the latest pawn in America’s culture wars.

They have taken aim at a variety of initiatives, including a possible Pentagon plan to increase monitoring of social media posts from service members and the addition of reading recommendations on “white supremacy and systemic racism” to military training guides.

In stoking opposition, those critics say the Pentagon’s policies amount to imposing a liberal, and in some cases unpatriotic, worldview on the armed forces.

At a Senate Armed Services Committee hearing on the military budget Thursday morning, Senator Tom Cotton, Republican of Arkansas, grilled Mr. Austin as to whether he believed that the military “is a fundamentally racist organization.”

He ticked off a long list of complaints he said his office had received from service members about mandatory training sessions on “police brutality, white privilege and systemic racism.”

Mr. Austin responded that he did not believe the military was racist but defended the department’s policies.

“Diversity, equity and inclusion is important to this military now and it will be important in the future,” he said.

At times cutting off Mr. Austin when he tried to reply, Mr. Cotton warned, “We’re hearing reports of plummeting morale, growing mistrust between the races and sexes where none existed just six months ago, and unexpected retirements and separations, based on these trainings alone.”

How widely those views are actually held among service members in an increasingly politically diverse military is impossible to know. Military culture varies by service branches, rank and generations.

But the Pentagon’s leadership says its approach is necessary both to uphold the nation’s values and to assure that it can recruit people with the skills necessary for 21st-century warfare.

“The secretary has been very clear and fairly unapologetic about the fact that we want to get all the best talent that is available from the American people,” said John F. Kirby, a spokesman for Mr. Austin.

The Pentagon’s culture war has a new hero of battle: Lt. Col. Andrew “Dru” Rhodes, who describes himself as a “fervent anti-racist and anti-sexist.” He’s a white dude and a battalion commander. If this report is true, then he does not like white dudes. He reportedly told troops under his command that “white people are part of the problem.” As the reader who sent that to me said, “CRT [Critical Race Theory] will destroy our great military before China even gets the chance.”

 

Back to the NYT story that prompted this post, the informed source who passed it on said that the Pentagon is chasing a woke demographic that doesn’t exist:

A generation raised on Howard Zinn and the 1619 Project are not going to enlist, they are ambivalent at best about whether or not the US should be defended in the first place. So that leaves you with outliers that the current leadership regards as unacceptable and déclassé.

This is the same as so much of the woke Hollywood bombs, the marketing types are convinced that there is this massive demographic of woke types just waiting to consume. They believe this in large part bc of Twitter and the results are entirely predictable, just as they are likely to find here. Name one wokeist who is more likely to join an institution they see as racist, imperialist, and warmongering just bc its leadership mouths woke platitudes.

Heck, military service is considered déclassé for all but a small sliver of the middle class for cultural reasons, what do we expect to change?

If the US military earns for itself a reputation as hostile to white males and unwoke people, why should they put their lives on the line to defend a country that considers them to be “part of the problem”? What the Pentagon is doing here is really dangerous, and really foolish.

The military told Human Events, which broke the Dru Rhodes story, that it will investigate it. If it can be proven that Rhodes made those remarks, then he must be removed from command duty. If he isn’t cashiered, that will send a powerful signal to the troops — and to the country — about the kind of military we have, and are getting.

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The Woke J.R.R. Tolkien

The reader who sent this in cites it as an example of O’Sullivan’s First Law: “All organizations that are not actually right-wing will over time become left-wing.” The Tolkien Society has announced its summer seminar — and hoo boy, is it ever woke!

We are extremely excited to invite you to our upcoming Tolkien Society online seminar on Saturday and Sunday 3rd-4th July! The schedule is now live on the website and can be viewed here.

With sixteen speakers coming to you live in your own home, the day promises to be full of new and fascinating insights into ‘Tolkien and Diversity’.

What is even better is that the event (to be hosted on Zoom) is free to attend. If you would like to attend then please sign up here. The Zoom link and further details will be shared closer to the event only with those who have registered.

The full list of speakers are as follows:

Cordeliah Logsdon – Gondor in Transition: A Brief Introduction to Transgender Realities in The Lord of the Rings
Clare Moore – The Problem of Pain: Portraying Physical Disability in the Fantasy of J. R. R. Tolkien
V. Elizabeth King – “The Burnt Hand Teaches Most About Fire”: Applying Traumatic Stress and Ecological Frameworks to Narratives of Displacement and Resettlement Across Cultures in Tolkien’s Middle-earth
Christopher Vaccaro – Pardoning Saruman?: The Queer in Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings
Sultana Raza – Projecting Indian Myths, Culture and History onto Tolkien’s Worlds
Nicholas Birns – The Lossoth: Indigeneity, Identity, and Power
Kristine Larsen – The Problematic Perimeters of Elrond Half-elven and Ronald English-Catholic
Cami Agan – Hearkening to the Other: Athrabeth Finrod ah Andreth
Sara Brown – The Invisible Other: Tolkien’s Dwarf-Women and the ‘Feminine Lack’
Sonali Chunodkar – Desire of the Ring: An Indian Academic’s Adventures in her Quest for the Perilous Realm
Robin Reid – Queer Atheists, Agnostics, and Animists, Oh, My!
Joel Merriner – Hidden Visions: Iconographies of Alterity in Soviet Bloc Illustrations for The Lord of the Rings
Eric Reinders – Questions of Caste in The Lord of the Rings and its Multiple Chinese Translations
Dawn Walls-Thumma – Stars Less Strange: An Analysis of Fanfiction and Representation within the Tolkien Fan Community
Danna Petersen-Deeprose – “Something Mighty Queer”: Destabilizing Cishetero Amatonormativity in the Works of Tolkien
Martha Celis-Mendoza – Translation as a means of representation and diversity in Tolkien’s scholarship and fandom

We look forward to seeing you at the Seminar,

WIll Sherwood
Education Secretary of The Tolkien Society

I, for one, cannot wait for the destabilization of cishetero amatonormativity in the works of Tolkien. I figure it’s going to be about Sam pitching and Frodo catching.

Good grief, is this ever stupid. Wokeness ruins everything, doesn’t it?

 

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The Meaning Of A Man’s Death

(As I write this, there is a funeral going on in Bucharest. I couldn’t get back down there — cross-border travel is still difficult because of Covid — but my heart is with my friends. I posted this to my subscription-only Substack newsletter a couple of days ago, but in honor of my friend Alin, I want to share it with you all.)

Maybe you will have seen by now my blog post about the utterly shocking death of Alin Bogdan, the head of the tiny publishing house that brought out Live Not By Lies in Romania. I spent the weekend in his company, and rejoiced with him as we saw the book become the first breakout hit of his little company’s life. I ate with him, went to churches with him, drank with him, visited a monastery with him, and enjoyed his company immensely. When we said goodbye at the Bucharest airport, I hugged him hard, and promised I would be back. He died the next morning — this morning, Tuesday. He was 43, and leaves behind a wife and a nine-year-old daughter.

One of the Romanian Christian men who was with us for much of the weekend e-mailed the rest of us tonight to say:

Dear brothers in Christ,

The only thought that I had about the shocking death of Alin is that we are living and fighting a real spiritual, unseen war, and that we should be prepared any time for literally anything, including death.

It’s a real blessing that we know each other and that we can pray for one another.

May God be with Alin, his daughter and family.

Christ has risen!

I’m still trying to process the meaning of what happened, though of course we will never know why God permitted this. Here was a man, a faithful believer, at the height of his professional success, dying of a heart attack. My late sister Ruthie died at 42, but she had nineteen months since her cancer diagnosis to prepare for the day. Alin went to sleep on Monday night, and I don’t know if he ever woke up.

Our friend Catalin, who worked with Alin at the publishing house, told me that this photo I posted the other night, taken near midnight Friday in a church in the Old Town, features Alin in the far distance, bent over an icon of Christ the Savior, reverencing it. He could not have known that in a handful of days, he would come face to face with Christ himself.

The thought is overwhelming. Truly.

One of the most striking things about Alin was the sadness in his eyes. I have no idea where it came from, having just met him, though when I told him and the others on the way to the airport that I had a particularly difficult spiritual struggle, he said from the back seat, in a modest voice, “You are not the only one in this car who struggles with that.” I knew that I liked him, but when he said that, I felt this electric bond of kinship between us. That survives him, at least in my heart.

I find I’m thinking about what the member of our fellowship said about Alin’s death reminding us that we are fighting a real spiritual war, and that we should be prepared at any moment for anything, even death. I could be wrong, but I don’t read him as saying that Alin was in some sense killed by his spiritual enemies, like the result of a voodoo curse or something like that. But we do believe that there is spiritual meaning in all things that happen.

The meaning of Alin’s death, as far as I can discern now, is, in part, that we should not take any day for granted, and take no one around us for granted. This is a lesson that, when written out like this, sounds like a greeting-card sentiment. But it’s true! In the right order of things, this 42-year-old man who had just had one of the greatest professional successes of his life ought to have gone on to keep building his business on the back of that victory. I received an e-mail from Smaranda Nistor, the translator into Romanian of Live Not By Lies, e-mailed me yesterday with a story about our late-night Saturday dinner, right after the shockingly large conference. It had gotten to be near midnight, and our food still hadn’t arrived. I was so tired I was about to fall asleep, so I asked Catalin, who was also exhausted, if he would take me back to the hotel. Smaranda lives near Catalin, and asked for a ride home.

She told me that Alin asked to her to please stay on a little longer at the party, that he would take her home. She said she considered it, but seeing how tired Alin was, and knowing that to take her home would require him to go thirty minutes out of his way, she declined. She reminded him that they would be meeting again this week to discuss the new books he wanted her to work on as a translator.

“Now I keep looking at his photo from the time we met back in 2014, and I swallow hard my tears,” she wrote yesterday. “Why did I leave, why didn’t I stay on, why didn’t I steal a few hours more with him?”

Maybe that’s a lesson for us from Alin’s death: steal as many hours as you can with those you love. Stay late at the party. Don’t miss an opportunity to show love. As I write this, I recall with shame my failure to go visit my dying friend Bishop Charles Jenkins. There was too much going on, I thought at the time. There will be time later. He died while I was here in Hungary. I am filled with regret.

I wrote back to Smaranda and told her I had been impressed by the great weariness on Alin’s face, and wondered what burdens he was carrying. She wrote back to tell me. They were the burdens of loyalty. She explained that he stayed loyal to those he loved, or had once loved, even as they mocked him publicly. Even old friends! He was loyal to his political mentor, even though this caused Alin to be jeered by those same old friends. He was, Smaranda wrote, “loyal to his Christian faith, also under constant siege today.”

“And, unlike so many modern people, he avoided blaming everybody else for his pains,” she wrote. “He just bore them inside, trying to look at them as the inevitable difficulty of living. Until it was too much to bear in just one heart, however large.”

I have to stop writing. I’m crying. This brave little man, who struck me when I met him as quiet, serious, and unassuming, was a hero. Look at this photo of him in our group at the Antim Monastery. Alin is the short, bald one. Would he strike you as any kind of hero?

 

But he was! Smaranda told me more, things I can’t say in public, and I’m telling you, this was a great man, a knight of faith. He carried his cross with modesty, until it crushed him. Alin Bogdan may never be canonized, but I have no doubt that he is a saint. How incredibly blessed I was to have spent the last weekend of his earthly life with him. I will be thinking about the mystery of Alin’s life for the rest of my days. I will be asking him, in heaven, for his prayers, and to walk with me on this difficult path that we were both on, and that all of us struggling to be faithful in a faithless time are on. I have no doubt that the fellowship formed by us Christian brothers last weekend in Bucharest will continue on for all our lives — that Alin’s sacrifice will bond us forever.

I agreed yesterday to join the Bucharest brothers in praying daily for our Catholic brother Alin’s soul. The men are planning to read two kathismas from the Psalms daily for Alin, for the next forty days. A “kathisma” is a Greek division of the Psalms (see here) to make it easier to pray the entire Psalter over the course of one week. Follow that click for the list of kathismata, or click here. We are starting today, the day of Alin’s wake, with the first two kathismas, encompassing Psalms 1 through 8. Please join us, if you like.

I leave you with this photo below that I took in a Bucharest Orthodox church on Friday night, near midnight on my first evening in the city. I was impressed by the woman in the foreground, on her knees with a battered prayerbook, praying into the night. Catalin told me yesterday that the man in the background, in the shadows, venerating the icon of Christ the Savior, is Alin, who is now with his Lord. I believe that I was photographing a saint, and didn’t know it. I went to Romania eager to see the land of so many saints, martyrs, and confessors of the Communist yoke. I did not know that I was going to meet a living one, who bore the pains of heartbrokenness with humility and grace, until it literally broke his heart.

How many saints and heroes do you meet every day, and don’t know who they really are? How many people are carrying immense burdens, but don’t let it show? How can we love them more, and help them carry their crosses? These questions Alin’s death leaves with me. With you too, I hope.

Today, on this very day, and on every day, steal hours.

—

That was the end of my Substack post. I subsequently received an e-mail from the same Romanian brother who wrote above about Alin’s death and spiritual war. He explained what he meant:

Indeed, I was not thinking, when I wrote that we should be prepared for any trial, including (sudden) death, at some curse or something like that. What I had in mind was that our archenemy, the devil, the father of all lies,  the murderer of man, really is like a roaring lion looking for us to devour. He was upset by the deeds Alin contributed with ContraMundum. He was furious because his lies where exposed and because your visit lifted so many hearts and minds. And he envied the wish Alin had to return to Orthodoxy, and to receive Christ in communion. And I think that he tried to kill all this, to ruin the works and to silence the voices. But then, why did God allow all this? I think that He allowed this because He can turn the bad outcomes in saving ones. And I think that indeed there is a sign for us too in what is going on. ”Stealing the hours” is definitely one meaning.But then I think there is more to it, something that has to do with our particular condition, with our concrete lives and crosses. On Monday I talked with [another of our fellowship] about what was the meaning of this bright weekend? What this gift from above means? What should we do about the fruits of this spiritual labor? What God wants from us now? Is it about a spiritual rebirth? A cultural revival? And then, Alin’s death strikes us hard, beyond what any of us could expect.I think one of the answers is in this sermon that a bishop gave the other day:

“And I don’t know how long it will be allowed for us to have a good time, quiet time, time with peace, in which we can worship. This night is coming over us, too. And they will not come suddenly to close our churches; we will close them ourselves, for no one to be able to enter them. (…)There will come a night when they will teach us that we must believe otherwise, not as the true Light has taught us. Others will teach us how to marry, as we do not know how to marry, man and woman, and to raise babies within the blessed family. They will come to teach us to marry differently, you know how they want to teach us – that this is a completely “special” month – [Pride Month]. Not a month in which the Holy Spirit descends upon us, but a month in which other spirits roam through the days, however we may still have, of the Christians. (…)

And there will come another night, dear believers, before the end of this world, to put it bluntly, a short night, for the Lord said that for the elect those days will be shortened, a short night in which I do not know how many of us will be able to find any light; a night in which we will be even more persecuted, in which we will not be able to buy, we will not be able to sell, we will not have anything to eat, if we want to be with the Light and we will not want to enter this new «kingdom». That night will be difficult, but whoever gathers his spiritual strength and ”provisions” during the day will then have something to eat and something to relate to.Now, when we have strength, when we have grace from God, when the church bells ring, when the Liturgy is offered, when we can confess our sins in front of a priest – he who now gathers, as the Romanian saying goes, white money for dark days, and let us gather those things of the Light for the dark days, whoever does this will be more protected.”– excerpts translated from “Do the work of God during the day, do AS MUCH AS POSSIBLE, for THE NIGHT IS COMING, THE END IS COMING, when no one can work anymore” – Sermon-warning of PS DAMASCHIN LUCHIAN on the Sunday of the Man Blind From Birth 

At bottom line, what I understand from the recent events and Alin’s  death is that is later than we think. That is indeed as serious as it can gets — a matter of life and death. Not yet in a political way, but definitely in a spiritual one. Something tells me that the grace we all felt is not about a conservative rebirth or a cultural or religious revival, but about a final awakening call, a final chance to work in the daylight, before the night falls, and a call to a brotherhood of the Cross so we wouldn’t feel alone anymore.So I when I said that we must always be prepared for anything, I was thinking about being spiritually ready, for the battle is fierce and the night is coming, by going to confession and taking the Holy Communion as often as we can, by asking the prayers of our spiritual fathers and friends, by sharing the fight together.

Amen. This is powerful stuff. One week ago today, I had never met Alin or any of these Orthodox men. When I left Bucharest on Monday morning, I knew that I had made friends for life. When I hugged Alin goodbye at the airport, he had fewer than 24 hours to live. But look at what a testimony he left behind! Any good that Live Not By Lies does in Romania (the Romanian page for the book is here), to awaken the Romanian people to the reality of our time, is because Alin Bogdan thought it would be a worthy book to translate and publish in his language. You are reading about him now because he left us so suddenly. I barely knew him more than you readers do, but my life has been forever changed by three days spent with this quiet, humble servant of God. He is a sign sent to us all. That I believe.Read the signs of the times, my friends. And pray for Alin, and those in Romania who loved him, and who mourn his passing.

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Hungary Stands Tall, Will Not Kneel

I have mentioned in this space before how weird it is that US culture war issues — Black Lives Matter, in particular — have been taken up by the Left in Europe, including Hungary. I can’t tell you how many conversations I’ve had with Hungarians who are sick of it. They feel manipulated into saying things that have nothing to do with them. Well, the other day, the Hungarian national soccer team caused controversy:

The Hungarian national football team won’t kneel before kick-offs during the upcoming EURO 2020, Hungary’s Football Association (MLSZ) announced in a statement.

According to MLSZ’s explanation: “Core values ​​of the sport are equal opportunities, respect for teammates and the opponent. Football could become the most popular sport in the world because it belongs to everyone. The Hungarian national team not only follows international rules and norms in all cases, but also pays respect to everyone – be it an opponent, a fan or anyone else.”

MLSZ’s statement further highlights its “A gyűlölet nem pálya” (“Racism is not a field of play”) campaign, in practice for years now, additionally recalling that UEFA and FIFA rules don’t allow any kind of politics on the field or in the stadium, “which MLSZ not only accepts but also agrees with.”

Good for them. Anti-black racism is not a problem in Hungarian society, because there are so few black people here. What these football players object to is the politicization of their sport by the Left. Unfortunately, in a match the other day, some Hungarian plans booed the Irish team for taking a knee. The Hungarian players on the field pointed to the “Respect” patch on their own jerseys, trying to signal to their fans to, well, respect the choice of the Irish players. That was the right thing to do, in my view.

Still, I am proud of the Hungarian team for refusing to be bullied into participation in a political act. My guess is that the Hungarian fans were not booing in support of racism, but booing because they are tired of the performative political gestures that politicize sports. And they’re right. Here is the full statement by the Hungarian team:

The basic values ​​of the sport are equal opportunities, respect for the teammate and the opponent. Football may have become the most popular sport in the world because it belongs to everyone. The Hungarian national team not only follows the international rules and norms in all cases, but also pays tribute to everyone – be it an opponent, a fan or anyone else. MLSZ has been fighting all forms of hatred for years as part of the “Hate is not a track” campaign. The rules of UEFA and FIFA do not allow politicking on the field and in the stadium, which the MLSZ not only accepts but also agrees with. The national team will not express its condemnation of any form of hatred by kneeling before the matches.

 

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Pink Police State Comes For Your Kids

Yesterday I wrote about how Alphonso David, the head of the rich (thanks to corporate donations) and powerful Human Rights Campaign, took to the pages of The New York Times to call on government officials and administrators to defy laws limiting transgender rights, e.g., forbidding hormonal treatments for minor children. People like David, and the elites who fund his organization, have no respect for the law or anything else that gets in the way of their totalitarian goals. We should be grateful to him for showing his hand.

Comes today this new City Journal piece by the courageous journalist Abigail Shrier, who writes about what happens when the State comes for your children. Read on:

Ahmed is a Pakistani immigrant, a faithful Muslim, and until recently, a financial consultant to Seattle’s high-tech sector. But when he reached me by phone in October 2020, he was just one more frightened father. Days earlier, he and his wife had checked their 16-year-old son into Seattle Children’s Hospital for credible threats of suicide. Now, Ahmed was worried that the white coats who had gently admitted his son to their care would refuse to return him.

“They sent an email to us, you know, ‘you should take your ‘daughter’ to the gender clinic,’” he told me.

At first, Ahmed (I have changed names in this essay to protect the identities of minor children) assumed there had been a mistake. He had dropped off a son, Syed, to the hospital, in a terrible state of distress. Now, the email he received from the mental health experts used a new name for that son and claimed he was Ahmed’s daughter. “They were trying to create a customer for their gender clinic . . . and they seemed to absolutely want to push us in that direction,” he said when I spoke to him again this May, recalling the horror of last October. “We had calls with counselors and therapists in the establishment, telling us how important it is for him to change his gender, because that’s the only way he’s going to be better out of this suicidal depressive state.”

Syed had been a “straight-A student” and—according to his parents and the family’s therapist—quite brilliant. He is also on the autism spectrum, a young man who neglects to make eye contact and must be given rules for how long to shake hands, shower, or brush his teeth. High school was a slog for him, as it often is for kids on the spectrum who find that the social demands of adolescence have risen beyond their capacity to meet them. “He tried to ask a few girls out. It didn’t work out and he got frustrated and angry, and that kind of thing. And so, those girl-boy things get kind of tough for autistic kids, those developmental issues. And that’s where puberty can be very, very hard with the hormones rushing and all this stuff.”

Syed was depressed, and spent a lot of time on the Internet. He barely slept, and started having hallucinations. And he began to fixate, as many autism spectrum people do, on an idea: in Syed’s case, that he is transgender. More:

As child psychiatrist and expert in gender dysphoria Susan Bradley said to me: “The messages these kids pick up [from trans influencers] when they’re online is, ‘We’re the only people who understand you. Your people, your parents, don’t really understand you.’ And it may be the first time in their lives that anybody has said to them, ‘We understand you. We know you. You’re okay. You’re just like us.’ And it’s powerful.”

I asked Bradley if introducing gender ideology to kids who tend to fixate is like introducing cocaine to those susceptible to addiction. She agreed: “It has the same power to assuage all the alienation and grief and distress that these kids have been struggling with.”

They put Syed, who was spiraling into some kind of psychosis, into the hospital, against his will. He was diagnosed with gender dysphoria. More:

The age at which minors in the State of Washington can receive mental health and gender-affirming care without parental permission is 13. In other words, the emails Ahmed received from the hospital were effectively a courtesy; the hospital did not require Ahmed’s permission to begin his son on a path to medical transition.

But unlike some other parents I would later speak with, Ahmed’s cool head prevailed. Believing he might be walking into a trap, Ahmed reached out to both a lawyer and a psychiatrist friend he trusted. The psychiatrist gave him advice that he believes saved his son, saying, in Ahmed’s words: “You have to be very, very careful, because if you come across as just even a little bit anti-trans or anything, they’re going to call the Child Protective Services on you and take custody of your kid.” The lawyer told Ahmed the same: “What you want to do is agree with them and take your kid home. When the gender counselors advise you to ‘affirm,’ go along with it. Just say ‘Uh-huh, uh-huh, okay, let’s take him home, and we’ll go to the gender clinic.’”

Ahmed assured Seattle Children’s Hospital that he would take his son to a gender clinic and commence his son’s transition. Instead, he collected his son, quit his job, and moved his family of four out of Washington.

Was Ahmed’s reaction extreme? When I first heard it, back in October 2020, I wondered whether he hadn’t overreacted. But as a growing number of parents began contacting me with similar stories, and I delved into the state laws of Washington, Oregon, and California, I came to a different conclusion. Taken individually, no single law in any state completely strips parents’ rights over the care and mental health treatment of their troubled minor teens. But pieced together, laws in California, Oregon, and Washington place troubled minor teens as young as 13 in the driver’s seat when it comes to their own mental health care—including “gender affirming” care—and renders parents powerless to stop them.

And:

Lest you wonder whether there is some madcap elixir polluting the groundwater of Washington State alone, in 2015, Oregon passed a law permitting minors 15 and older to obtain puberty blockers, cross-sex hormones, and surgeries at taxpayers’ expense—all without parental consent. In 2018, California passed a similar bill for all children in foster care, age 12 and up. The California state senate is now considering an amendment to the Confidentiality of Medical Information Act that would bar health insurers from disclosing medical information to parents about their dependents, on pain of criminal liability.

Read it all.This is America, 2021. States whose lawmakers are trying to protect families from these ghouls are now under attack by the LGBT Industrial Complex, which, as I wrote yesterday, is trying to encourage its janissaries to defy the law.

In Romania over the weekend, after I gave my Live Not By Lies talk about soft totalitarianism, a prominent conservative commentator who heard it wrote something saying that Dreher was too alarmist. Liberal institutions will protect us, he asserted.

He is wrong. He is naive. What happens in America today will happen in Romania tomorrow. Ask the families of Washington, Oregon, and California how much liberal institutions are protecting them and their children.

I am losing faith in the state, and in our democracy, because those who have gained control of its institutions have declared that people like us are evil. They want our children. Yesterday I spoke to a Hungarian who said to me that if we will not defend our children from these devils, who are we, anyway? This is exactly right.

It is time to start building underground railroads for families like Ahmed’s. I’m serious. We have to create an infrastructure within which these families can leave these soft totalitarian states, and find shelter elsewhere. The states that still have not been captured by the woke should try to help, but eventually that won’t be enough. Gallup just reported that for the first time, a majority of Republicans support gay marriage. This is not surprising, and it doesn’t mean that they also support trans extremism. But let’s not kid ourselves: within a decade, they will. The people at the HRC, in major corporations, and nearl every major institution in this country, will insist on it. In Hungary, I talked to an anti-government liberal who said he supports gay marriage, but not transgenderism. I told him that that was the standard position for American liberals a decade ago — but today, it is considered shockingly bigoted, and any liberal who believed it would not say so out loud, for fear of his job.

I predict in a decade, the GOP will have gone this same direction. The purpose of the Republican Party is eventually to ratify whatever progressive gains Democrats made years earlier.

We have to act now, in concrete ways, while we have time, and the liberty to do so. Never, ever forget this warning story from Live Not By Lies:

Sometimes, a stranger who sees deeper and farther than the crowd appears to warn of trouble coming. These stories often end with people disbelieving the prophet and suffering for their blindness. Here, though, is a tale about a people who heard the prophet’s warnings, did as he advised, and were ready when the crisis struck.

In 1943, a Jesuit priest and anti-fascist activist named Tomislav Poglajen fled his native Croatia one step ahead of the Gestapo and settled in Czechoslovakia. To conceal himself from the Nazis, he assumed his Slovak mother’s name—Kolaković—and took up a teaching position in Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak region. The priest, thirty-seven years old and with a thick shock of prematurely white hair, had spent some his priestly training studying the Soviet Union. He believed that the defeat of Nazi totalitarianism would occasion a great conflict between Soviet totalitarianism and the liberal democratic West. Though Father Kolaković worried about the threats to Christian life and witness from the rich, materialistic West, he was far more concerned about the dangers of communism, which he correctly saw as an imperialistic ideology.

By the time Father Kolaković reached Bratislava, it was clear that Czechoslovakia would eventually be liberated by the Red Army. In fact, in 1944, the Czech government in exile made a formal agreement with Stalin, guaranteeing that after driving the Nazis out, the Soviets would give the nation its freedom.

Because he knows how the Soviets thought, Father Kolaković knew this was a lie. He warned Slovak Catholics that when the war ended, Czechoslovakia would fall to the rule of a Soviet puppet government. He dedicated himself to preparing them for persecution.

Father Kolaković knew that the clericalism and passivity of traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing, he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the church by subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.

“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.

Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. The total destruction of the First World War opened the eyes of younger Catholics to the need for a new evangelization. A Belgian priest named Joseph Cardijn, whose father had been killed in a mining accident, started a lay movement to do this among the working class. These were the Young Christian Workers, called “Jocists” after the initials of their name in French. Inspired by the Jocist example, Father Kolaković adapted it to the needs of the Catholic Church in German-occupied Slovakia. He established cells of faithful young Catholics who came together for prayer, study, and fellowship.

The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility, he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists became the motto for what Father Kolaković called his “Family”: “See. Judge. Act.” See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.

Václav Vaško, a Kolaković follower, recalled late in his life that Father Kolaković’s ministry excited so many young Catholics because it energized the laity and gave them a sense of leadership responsibility.

“It is remarkable how Kolaković almost instantly succeeded in creating a community of trust and mutual friendship from a diverse grouping of people (priests, religious and lay people of different ages, education, or spiritual maturity),” Vaško wrote.

The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.

The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. “By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate.”

In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolaković had predicted. Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolaković’s top two lieutenants—physician Silvester Krčméry and priest Vladimír Jukl—quietly set up Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.

The underground church, led by the visionary cleric’s spiritual children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty. The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.

Why did Father Kolaković know what was coming to the people of Central Europe? He was not supernaturally gifted, at least not that we know. Rather, he had studied Soviet communism intensely to prepare for missionary work in Russia and understood how the Soviets thought and behaved. He could read the geopolitical signs of the times. And as a priest who had been organizing Catholic resistance to the Nazi version of totalitarianism, he had on-the-ground experience with clandestine combat against monstrous ideology.

Today’s survivors of Soviet communism are, in their way, our own Kolakovićes, warning us of a coming totalitarianism—a form of government that combines political authoritarianism with an ideology that seeks to control all aspects of life. This totalitarianism won’t look like the USSR’s. It’s not establishing itself through “hard” means like armed revolution, or enforcing itself with gulags. Rather, it exercises control, at least initially, in soft forms. This totalitarianism is therapeutic. It masks its hatred of dissenters from its utopian ideology in the guise of helping and healing.

Like the “healing” of an autistic boy whom they have convinced is transgender. What is it going to take to wake you up and make you understand what we are facing? I spoke to an American clergyman this past spring, urging him to warn his parishioners about gender ideology, and help them figure out how to combat it. He turned me away, saying he wasn’t going to let “politics” enter into his congregation. He said he believed that this was not going to be a problem for them — that they would be able to resist.

I’m afraid he is wrong, as the Slovak bishops of the 1940s were wrong. Readers, do not wait for your religious leaders to act. There is not time. Organize, build, pray, prepare. The day is coming ever closer when we are going to have to be prepared to break the law to save our children.

The post Pink Police State Comes For Your Kids appeared first on The American Conservative.

Three Days

Alin Bogdan was a journalist, but then he left to become a political consultant. He also founded a small conservative publishing house, Contra Mundum, dedicated to translating books into Romanian. On the Contra Mundum webpage, they describe their mission like this:

Contra Mundum [Against the World] is a publishing house for books that take us out of today’s world, a world dominated by intellectual and aesthetic conformity, moral relativism and the media-advertised lie sold as an indisputable truth.

Naturally, they were interested in buying Romanian rights to Live Not By Lies. The Romanian version came out there about a month ago. It has sold well. Alin welcomed me to Bucharest last weekend to do media promotions, and to give a talk about it at a church conference. Catalin and Ninel, the two other men at Contra Mundum, picked me up at the airport on Friday afternoon. That night, we met Alin and some others at a restaurant in the Old Town.

He was soft-spoken and serious, and I loved being around him. As I wrote earlier, it was an incredible time for me in Romania. The conference drew five times more people than Alin and his team expected, and we sold a blockbuster 400 books at that one event — something I’ve never done in America with any of my books, and something massive for Romania, they told me.

We all retired late Saturday night to a restaurant to celebrate our astonishing good fortune.

“This book might have started a movement here,” said Catalin.

“We are not even on the map as a publishing house!” said Ninel.

“Now you are!” I replied.

Alin just sat there quiet, looking satisfied. As well he should have. This little publishing house he founded had its first hit — and the book was such a hit that people all over the country were buzzing about it on social media.

The next morning I went to the Orthodox liturgy Catalin, Ninel, and some other Orthodox friends, but Alin, being Catholic, didn’t join us. He met up with us later, at the Antim Monastery. Here we all are in the courtyard there on Sunday afternoon. Alin is the short man on my left:

Most of us went later to the National Village Museum, and sat out back at the day’s end, drinking coffee and cold drinks, and talking about doom and gloom. “Somebody tell a joke,” said Alin, finally. We talked more about doom and gloom. “Really, somebody tell a joke,” he said. We continued on. Then he told a joke. That was Alin.

The next morning, he, Ninel, and Catalin arrived at my hotel to take me to the airport. I had expected to take a taxi, but they wouldn’t dream of it. On the way there, they told me how much my book and my talk meant to them, and to Romanian Christians. I told them that I could not possibly express how much being with them over the weekend meant to me, and how much these three days in Bucharest was balm to my soul. I mentioned a particularly heavy spiritual struggle that has been with me for a long time, and how much comfort and hope I took from this the weekend in Bucharest with these new brothers in Christ. I told them all that they were a gift from God to me, and that I would never forget the graces of this weekend. I meant every word.

From the back seat came Alin’s soft voice: “You aren’t the only one in this car who carries this burden.” I turned and looked at him. His eyes were so sad, but so warm. We agreed to pray for each other.

They walked me into the airport, and I checked in. Then I walked over to say my final goodbyes. Once more, they said how they never, ever expected a weekend like this, and I said the same thing. Orders are pouring in from all over the country for the book. The publishing house has now made its mark. The sky’s the limit! I promised them I would come back, and I meant it. They said we would make it happen. Finally, we had to say farewell. I gave each of them a big embrace. Alin hugged me especially tight. It touched me, and made me wonder about the weight of his cross. I felt in that moment that I had a true brother in this small, intense man.

He had less than twenty-four hours to live.

Alin Bogdan died this morning in Bucharest of a heart attack. He was 42, and leaves behind a wife and a nine-year-old daughter.

Please pray for him, for his wife and child, and for all who loved him. The Contra Mundum team went from their moment of greatest professional triumph to this unspeakable agony. Catalin wrote me with the news:

Dear Rod,

We learned with unspeakable pain about the death this morning of a dear and close friend, the journalist Alin Bogdan.

We spent the past few days with Alin, organizing the event at Precupeții Noi – something that I now see as a gift from God. These were days full of great satisfaction, with a conference attended by several hundred people, followed by hundreds of other messages and reactions. This event, which Alin made possible as the director of the ContraMundum publishing house, had something uplifting and I think gave hope to many. In addition, following the event, we have been able to read one of the most beautiful, profound, and generous stories about Romania written by an American journalist. I am referring to the material you published on your blog in The American Conservative.

https://www.theamericanconservative.com/dreher/what-i-saw-in-bucharest-live-not-by-lies/

I hope that if God allowed this to happen, it was because the past few days, that we have all felt were touched by special grace, this particular moment in time has been a good time for the salvation of his soul.

Let us pray for the soul of our friend Alin Bogdan. God rest him in peace and may He receive him in His Kingdom!

The picture I’m adding here, taken two days ago, is the last one I took of Alin.

 

Just like that, my new brother is gone. I’m crying as I write this. The only consolation I have is the thought that I may have gained a powerful intercessor in heaven who will walk with me through this vale of tears.

We never know what tomorrow will bring. Right now, on this day, make peace with those around you. Tell people you love them. Don’t wait. Cherish every day. The memory of these three days in Bucharest will be with me for the rest of my life, as will the sense that Alin, that dear man, is with me.

UPDATE: Catalin points out that in this photo I posted here the other day, the man on the right, bending over an icon in a Bucharest church on Friday night, is Alin. He is venerating an icon of Christ the Savior. He had no way of knowing that within three days, he would presumably be face to face with his Lord.

The post Three Days appeared first on The American Conservative.

Human Rights Campaign’s Contempt For Democracy

I’m old enough to remember the days when all right-thinking people demanded that Kim Davis, a Christian county clerk in Kentucky who opposed same-sex marriage, either issue gay marriage licenses as the Supreme Court required as a result of its Obergefell decision, or resign. I was one of those people. Though I agreed with Davis that the decision was morally wrong, I also believed — and do believe — that as a matter of rule of law, she was obligated to resign from her position if she could not in good conscience enforce the law of the land. And I wrote about it several times in this space — for example, in this piece, saying that as a staunch defender of religious liberty, “Free Kim Davis” (she was jailed because she refused either to resign or obey the law) this is not a hill for our side to die on. Back then, in 2015, polls should that three out of four Americans believed that a public official should either obey the law, or resign.

That was then. Now that the shoe is on the other foot, Alphonso Davis, head of the big LGBT lobby Human Rights Campaign, has taken to the op-ed page of The New York Times to proclaim that we don’t need no stinkin’ lawful public officials:

Davis writes, in part:

Far from state legislative outliers, these new laws are the latest in a series of unprecedented legislative assaults aimed at trans people that have swept state houses this year, officially making 2021 the worst year for anti-L.G.B.T.Q. legislation in recent history. With more than 20 new laws so far, the number is more than double what we saw in the last three years combined.

L.G.B.T.Q. Americans — and particularly transgender and nonbinary people — are not simply living in a state of emergency, we are living in many states of imminent danger. The usual calls to action aren’t enough against these threats; we are now firmly in the territory of needing those in positions of authority to actively defy these laws — especially those enforcement agencies and leaders tasked with implementing the unconstitutional and un-American assaults on the civil rights of millions of L.G.B.T.Q. people.

This is the same revolting moral blackmail that LGBT activists constantly use: give us what we want or you will have blood on your hands, bigots! The idea that if state and local officials don’t disobey laws meant to keep biological males out of women’s athletic competitions, the boys-who-think-they-are-girls will hurt themselves, is absurd. But who stands up to this kind of cheap blackmail? More:

Active resistance is needed from administrators within the education system who are tasked with enforcing discriminatory trans sports bans, which isolate and prevent trans students from playing sports on teams consistent with their gender identity. These laws — already enacted this year in Arkansas, Alabama, Tennessee, Mississippi, Montana and West Virginia, and executive orders signed in South Dakota — effectively exclude trans youth from sports activities, which takes a devastating toll on the social, physical and emotional health of trans students and further isolates them from their peers.

Democratically enacted laws mean nothing to Alphonso David and activists like him. The only people in the world who matter are LGBT people. Everybody else needs to shut up and give them what they demand.

In this insanely privileged rant, we hear the voice of the radicalized employees of major newspapers and publishing houses, who believe they have the right to refuse to work with people and material that offends their sensibility. These people — and those who answer Alphonso David’s call — would rather tear the entire system down than not get what they want right this very second. 

This is a clarifying moment. LGBT activists like David are no more respectful of democracy and the rule of law than Kim Davis was. The difference is that Davis stood virtually alone, and was despised by the elites. By contrast, the Human Rights Campaign grossed $48 million in the last available reporting period (2019), and its president was paid $570,000. These are the one percent. They don’t care what they have to do to your rights to get what they want.

And as much as I hate to say it, these shrieky little Stalinists might succeed. In a recent Substack newsletter, Richard Hanania observes that for all their anti-woke bluster, Republican politicians actually don’t have any idea what to do to fight it.

He makes a detailed case that wokeness emerged out of decades of federal government activism using civil rights law. If conservatives and conservative politicians want to actually do something to fight it instead of just whine about how unfair it all is, Hanania has a suggestion:

Low tax people have the Norquist pledge, and the Second Amendment crowd fights background checks, etc.

Yet the anti-woke seem unaware that the things they care about have much to do with policy. They treat every cultural outrage as an isolated event, as just another instance of elites deciding to be “woke,” without such decisions being connected to anything government has ever done.

Getting rid of disparate impact and narrowly defining what “hostile work environment” means or even eliminating the concept entirely will not change the culture overnight. Things have already gone too far, and it took about half a century to go from the color blind ideals most Americans thought they were signing up for with the Civil Rights Act to a world of “birthing parents” and “white fragility.”

Constantine converted to Christianity, which helped spread the religion across the Roman Empire. Yet the reign of Julian the Pagan couldn’t undo Christianization; just because government helped create or spread a cultural phenomenon does not mean that government can likewise rewind the tape to an earlier point in history. Dobbin points out that when the Reagan administration tried to roll back civil rights enforcement, the business community fought back, as many large corporations had come to be staffed by true believers.

The hope would be that, just as the original creation of concepts like “disparate impact” and “AAPI” had eventual consequences few would have imagined at the time, reversing past policies could likewise shape the culture in the long term.

The punchline of all this is that an anti-wokeness agenda would involve, at the very least,

1) Eliminating disparate impact, making the law require evidence of intentional discrimination.

2) Getting rid of the concept of hostile work environment, or defining it in extremely narrow and explicit terms, making sure that it does not restrict political or religious speech.

3) Repealing the executive orders that created and expanded affirmative action among government contractors and the federal workforce.

One reason to be optimistic is that much of this work can be done without having to pass laws, which is almost impossible to do on controversial issues in the current environment, but through the executive branch and the courts. Republican administrations have tried similar things in the past, though usually without making anti-wokeness a real priority.

In Reagan’s second term, repealing affirmative action requirements for contractors was apparently on the table, but the administration backed down in the face of congressional resistance (see also this). More recently, a Washington Post story reporting that the Trump Administration was thinking about undoing disparate impact was dated January 5, 2021 (yes, “January 5, 2021” as in the day before January 6, 2021). Politics is about priorities, and the Trump administration clearly cared little about this issue, despite the president’s voters being animated by concerns about PC.

More:

In other policy areas over which it had control, the Trump administration largely delivered for its supporters: tougher sanctions on Iran to please the war hawks, lower refugee caps for immigration restrictionists, and undoing Obama era gun regulations.

Yet the disparate impact issue was not even being considered until weeks before Trump left office. The Executive Order banning critical race theory training, similarly coming late in the administration, was only signed because Chris Rufo got on Tucker. Conservatives celebrated, without any of them seeming to notice that Trump could’ve literally signed an EO at any time in his presidency to end affirmative action within the federal government and among all government contractors, not just the most absurd form of “anti-racism training” that exists (ironically, during the 2016 primaries Jeb! bragged about ending affirmative action by EO while governor of Florida, though he was hated by the most strident anti-wokes in his party).

Taking apart disparate impact and repealing affirmative action executive orders should be litmus tests for Republican presidential candidates in the same way taxes and abortion are.

Why hasn’t this happened already? Probably because the payoff to fighting wokeness is more long term. People seek immediate gratification; you can change the tax rate or how many immigrants you let in immediately, while it’s hard to convince people to have a political fight today in the hopes of having an uncertain effect on culture years or even decades down the line. Moreover, it’s hard work to go to war with an entrenched bureaucracy that has the media completely on its side, especially if you haven’t explained to your voters why doing so is necessary. Nonetheless, I’m convinced there is no short-cut to changing the culture.

Read the whole thing. Seriously — it’s important. If our side doesn’t start fighting this stuff hard, we will get soft totalitarianism. We will get these pink police staters like Alphonso David demanding that their minions throughout administrative bureaucracies defy the law to enforce their priorities. These people do not give a rat’s rear end about respecting law or the rights of anybody who gets in their way. They are who they are. But what about us conservatives? Why do we sit back willing to accept performative (but essentially toothless) anti-wokeness from Trump, and nothing at all from other conservative lawmakers? Meanwhile, those who hate us, and who are well-funded by woke capitalist corporations (take a look at the Who’s Who of HRC’s corporate donors), and can take to the op-ed page of The New York Times and call for mass defiance of the law, out of contempt for us, their fellow Americans, who do not share their views.

I am living right now in a country, Hungary, whose conservative leader has openly said he wants to make Hungary an illiberal democracy. I will be returning at summer’s end to a country that is actually becoming an illiberal left-wing democracy. And the Republican Party doesn’t care. Neither do tens of millions of Republican voters who want Trump back, because he made them feel good, even as the shock troops of wokeness consolidated power within institutions.

UPDATE: I’ve been thinking about this overnight. Looked at from a sympathetic direction, Alphonso David is asking his followers in political and administrative positions to live not by lies — that is, to refuse to cooperate with what he believes is a grave injustice. Six years ago, I wrote that I believed that Kim Davis should also not live by lies — but that she should resign if she believed so strongly in not cooperating with evil. Even though I agreed with Davis morally, I knew that we couldn’t have a viable democracy if people reserved to themselves the right to pick and choose which laws to observe.

We see now with Alphonso David’s exhortation that at least some leaders on the Left are the same as Kim Davis. What the president of the Human Rights Campaign has done is call for an insurrection against democracy, on behalf of transgendered people. There will be no corporate blowback for HRC from this, because wokeness has captured the elites.

And truth to tell, I believe in the principle of civil disobedience. I think the Civil Rights protesters of the 1960s were right to do what they did to protest segregation. I believe Augustine was right to say that an unjust law is no law at all. If I believe that, then, on what grounds do I tell Alphonso David that he is wrong because he draws the line in a different place than I do?

Well, he is wrong because he draws the line in a different place than I do. The 1960s Civil Rights protesters, by their civil, nonviolent disobedience, stood against laws that denied the basic humanity of black Americans. A civil order that treats some people who live under it as second class, solely because of their race, is a corrupt civil order whose foundations come into question. Their civil disobedience magnified the crisis that was already present, and brought to the surface the deep contradiction of the American order. As a consequence, in law we resolved that contradiction.

The question here is this: do laws forbidding biological males who identify as females from playing on female sports teams fundamentally call into question the American system? Do laws forbidding physicians and parents from permanently altering the bodies of minors with hormones and surgeries, and altering their minds through therapies designed to convince them that their bodies are lying to them, and that they are of the opposite sex — are those laws so contrary to the American order that they must be defied in the name of a higher moral order?

If I’m honest, then hell yes, I would encourage physicians, medical personnel, school administrators, and others to defy laws that mandate cooperating with the evil of the Trans-Industrial Complex. I believe that we are dealing with something so fundamentally wrong, and so destructive of civilization, that one ought to refuse to comply with laws requiring submission to its ideology. As wrong as I think same-sex marriage is, transgenderism, which obliterates the sex binary, is in a whole different category. In that sense, I am no different from Alphonso David, except that I’m on the other side.

The truth is, the center cannot hold. Law has to be anchored in shared belief of a transcendent order, whether authored by divinity or existing in some ideal realm. Alphonso David and his side believe that the right of male athletes to compete against women, while posing as women, and the right of children to take hormones, bind their breasts, and tuck their penises, is so sacred that it is worth risking the American democratic order to force into reality. I do not. In fact, seeing the radicalism of the pro-trans side has made me, I realized clearly this morning, has inclined me to take up Alphonso-ism, but from the other side.

Like I said, the center is not going to hold. I remember back in the 1990s, when a massive controversy arose on the Right over a First Things symposium positing the end of democracy. From the lead essay of that symposium:

The proposition examined in the following articles is this: The government of the United States of America no longer governs by the consent of the governed. With respect to the American people, the judiciary has in effect declared that the most important questions about how we ought to order our life together are outside the purview of “things of their knowledge.” Not that judges necessarily claim greater knowledge; they simply claim, and exercise, the power to decide. The citizens of this democratic republic are deemed to lack the competence for self-government. The Supreme Court itself—notably in the Casey decision of 1992-has raised the alarm about the legitimacy of law in the present regime. Its proposed solution is that citizens should defer to the decisions of the Court. Our authors do not consent to that solution. The twelfth Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, Harlan Fiske Stone (1872-1946), expressed his anxiety: “While unconstitutional exercise of power by the executive or legislative branches of the Government is subject to judicial restraint, the only check upon our own exercise of power is our own sense of restraint.” The courts have not, and perhaps cannot, restrain themselves, and it may be that in the present regime no other effective restraints are available. If so, we are witnessing the end of democracy.

As important as democracy is, the symposium addresses another question still more sobering. Law, as it is presently made by the judiciary, has declared its independence from morality. Indeed, as explained below, morality—especially traditional morality, and most especially morality associated with religion—has been declared legally suspect and a threat to the public order. Among the most elementary principles of Western Civilization is the truth that laws which violate the moral law are null and void and must in conscience be disobeyed. In the past and at present, this principle has been invoked, on both the right and the left, by those who are frequently viewed as extremists. It was, however, the principle invoked by the founders of this nation. It was the principle invoked by the antislavery movement and, more recently, by Martin Luther King, Jr. It is the principle invoked today by, among many others, Pope John Paul II.

In this connection, Professor Robert George of Princeton explores the significance of the encyclical Evangelium Vitae (The Gospel of Life). Addressing laws made also by our courts, the Pope declares, “Laws and decrees enacted in contravention of the moral order, and hence of the divine will, can have no binding force in conscience. . . . Indeed such laws undermine the very nature of authority and result in shameful abuse.” We would only add to Professor George’s brilliant analysis that the footnotes to that section of Evangelium Vitae refer to the 1937 encyclical of Pius XI, Mit Brennender Sorge (With Burning Concern) and other papal statements condemning the crimes of Nazi Germany. America is not and, please God, will never become Nazi Germany, but it is only blind hubris that denies it can happen here and, in peculiarly American ways, may be happening here.

As I recall, I ended up back then sharing the view that as long as we retain the right to change the system using legal democratic means, then we should continue to uphold the regime, and work patiently within it for that change. What would the alternative be?

Well, here we are twenty-five years later, and the power of the regime — not only the state, but corporations, schools, and the institutions of civil society — is even greater, and even more radical. I have no doubt at all but that this regime is eventually going to deploy technology, via a social credit system, to demonize dissent, command conformity, and crush Christians and any other refuseniks. The head of a $48 million organization, Human Rights Campaign, which depends heavily on donations from major corporations, would not have published what he did in The New York Times if he had the slightest doubt about whether or not his corporate patrons would abandon him. I think he has probably judged them accurately. The fix is in.

Let’s not fool ourselves, though — we on the Right, I mean. As Christopher Caldwell wrote in his devastating book last year, to get at the devil of racial segregation — and he asserts without reservation that it was indeed a devil — we cut down principles in constitutional law that protected Americans from progressives running amok. Caldwell:

Just half a decade into the civil rights revolution, America had something it had never had at the federal level, something the overwhelming majority of its citizens would never have approved: an explicit system of racial preference. Plainly the civil rights acts had wrought a change in the country’s constitutional culture. The innovations of the 1960s had given progressives control over the most important levers of government, control that would endure for as long as the public was afraid of being called racist.

Not just excluded and exploited Southern blacks but all aggrieved minorities now sought to press their claims under this new model of progressive governance. The civil rights model of executive orders, litigation, and court-ordered redress eventually became the basis for resolving every question pitting a newly emergent idea of fairness against old traditions: the persistence of different roles for men and women, the moral standing of homosexuality, the welcome that is due to immigrants, the consideration befitting wheelchair-bound people. Civil rights gradually turned into a license for government to do what the Constitution would not previously have permitted. It moved beyond the context of Jim Crow laws almost immediately, winning what its apostles saw as liberation after liberation.

The civil rights movement was a template. The new system for overthrowing the traditions that hindered black people became the model for overthrowing every tradition in American life, starting with the roles of men and women.

Here’s the core of his argument:

The goal of the civil rights laws, at least as they were understood by a sentimental public, was to short-circuit the sham democracies of the American South, to bring them into conformity with the Constitution. But it turned out to be harder than anticipated to distinguish between the South’s democracy and everybody else’s. If the spirit of the law was to humiliate Southern bigots, the letter of the law put the entire country—all its institutions— under the threat of lawsuits and prosecutions for discrimination.

Not just in law, but in culture too. More:

In the quarter-century after Reagan, conservatives lost every battle against the substance of political correctness. … Political correctness was not a joke after all. It was the most comprehensive ideological capture of institutional power in the history of the United States.

… This language of “-bashing” and “-phobia” and “bigotry” and “lies” was new. No longer was the irreconcilability of individuals’ and society’s sexual priorities a tragedy or a disagreement. Recast in the categories of civil rights law, it was a crime, a crime that was being committed against a whole class of people. The customs and traditions in the name of which it was being committed were mere alibis.

… Once social issues could be cast as battles over civil rights, Republicans would lose 100 percent of the time. The agenda of “diversity” advanced when its proponents won elections and when they lost them. Voters had not yet figured that out. As soon as they did, the old style of democratic politics would be dead.

He’s talking about Trump’s emergence. Trump failed. Can we produce someone who can succeed? More to the point, can anyone succeed against this evil without overturning the democratic constitutional order?

Alasdair MacIntyre’s words from forty years ago were prophetic:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman empire declined into the Dark Ages.  Nonetheless certain parallels there are.  A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium.  What they set themselves to achieve instead–often not recognizing fully what they were doing–was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness.  If my account of our moral condition, we ought also to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point.  What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us.  And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope.  This time, however, the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time.  And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament.  We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another–doubtless very different–St. Benedict.

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Anti-White Racist Psychiatrist Speaks At Yale

It’s hard to come up with a better example of the woke totalitarian capture of elite institutions than this Yale School of Medicine lecture by a hardcore anti-white racist psychiatrist, the audio of which is posted on Bari Weiss’s Substack. Weiss highlights these lines from the lecture:

This is the cost of talking to white people at all. The cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil. (Time stamp: 6:45)I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor.  (Time stamp: 7:17)White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time.  (Time stamp: 17:06)We are now in a psychological predicament, because white people feel that we are bullying them when we bring up race. They feel that we should be thanking them for all that they have done for us. They are confused, and so are we. We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall. It’s just like sort of not a good idea. (Time stamp 17:13)We need to remember that directly talking about race to white people is useless, because they are at the wrong level of conversation. Addressing racism assumes that white people can see and process what we are talking about. They can’t. That’s why they sound demented. They don’t even know they have a mask on. White people think it’s their actual face. We need to get to know the mask. (Time stamp 17:54)

This racist rant was sponsored by Yale. From the poster:

 

If you go to the Bari Weiss site, you can also read the text of an interview that Katie Herzog did with Dr. Khilanani. It’s chilling, absolutely chilling. What we all need to confront is the fact that this psychiatrist, under the auspices of one of the most prestigious universities in America, delivered a lecture featuring unapologetic, unrestrained racism, and … nobody in that institution or in her circles cared. This is par for the course. They expect it. At some level, they want it.

Do I believe that most white people who heard it, or who, within the Yale community, heard it, believe what Dr. Khilanani said? No, I don’t, though I’m just guessing. But I am 100 percent sure that they are terrified to say something about it, because if you spoke up, that would be the end of you professionally.

This is how our elites think, people. They are mainstreaming anti-white racism, and treating it as good. This is a  psychiatrist, invited by Yale to speak about white people as psychopaths, fantasizing openly about murdering white people because of the color of their skin, and we just go along like it’s no big deal. The New York Times doesn’t care. The Washington Post doesn’t care. NPR doesn’t care. The networks don’t care. If a whiny middle-aged white woman makes life uncomfortable for a person of color in public, it’s time for a new round of Karen stories. But let one of the most privileged people in this country — a New York psychiatrist invited to lecture by Yale — deliver a lecture demonizing white people, and … yawn. The fact that Dr. Khilanani felt at liberty to give a talk like this without fear of repercussion tells you a lot about where we are.

I don’t ever want to see Donald Trump again. He had these people’s number, in a way, but he did little or nothing effective to stop them. I want to vote for a presidential candidate who will move against these dirtbags and their institutions without mercy. Enough is enough. I’m not sure what can be done, but if we keep tolerating this, there is going to be violence, one way or another.  I am not willing to sit here and listen to these aristocrats like Dr. Khilanani, and malignant institutions like Yale, turn people against me, my children, and my neighbors, because we are white.

What is wrong with you people at Yale, white and non-white, standing for this? Do you have consciences? Do you have spines? You disgust me. Live not by lies!

UPDATE: The New York Times reports on the controversy today. It says Yale is trying to distance itself from this loon.

The post Anti-White Racist Psychiatrist Speaks At Yale appeared first on The American Conservative.

Yale’s Anti-White Racist Psychiatrist

It’s hard to come up with a better example of the woke totalitarian capture of elite institutions than this Yale School of Medicine lecture by a hardcore anti-white racist psychiatrist, the audio of which is posted on Bari Weiss’s Substack. Weiss highlights these lines from the lecture:

This is the cost of talking to white people at all. The cost of your own life, as they suck you dry. There are no good apples out there. White people make my blood boil. (Time stamp: 6:45)I had fantasies of unloading a revolver into the head of any white person that got in my way, burying their body, and wiping my bloody hands as I walked away relatively guiltless with a bounce in my step. Like I did the world a fucking favor.  (Time stamp: 7:17)White people are out of their minds and they have been for a long time.  (Time stamp: 17:06)We are now in a psychological predicament, because white people feel that we are bullying them when we bring up race. They feel that we should be thanking them for all that they have done for us. They are confused, and so are we. We keep forgetting that directly talking about race is a waste of our breath. We are asking a demented, violent predator who thinks that they are a saint or a superhero, to accept responsibility. It ain’t gonna happen. They have five holes in their brain. It’s like banging your head against a brick wall. It’s just like sort of not a good idea. (Time stamp 17:13)We need to remember that directly talking about race to white people is useless, because they are at the wrong level of conversation. Addressing racism assumes that white people can see and process what we are talking about. They can’t. That’s why they sound demented. They don’t even know they have a mask on. White people think it’s their actual face. We need to get to know the mask. (Time stamp 17:54)

This racist rant was sponsored by Yale. From the poster:

 

If you go to the Bari Weiss site, you can also read the text of an interview that Katie Herzog did with Dr. Khilanani. It’s chilling, absolutely chilling. What we all need to confront is the fact that this psychiatrist, under the auspices of one of the most prestigious universities in America, delivered a lecture featuring unapologetic, unrestrained racism, and … nobody in that institution or in her circles cared. This is par for the course. They expect it. At some level, they want it.

Do I believe that most white people who heard it, or who, within the Yale community, heard it, believe what Dr. Khilanani said? No, I don’t, though I’m just guessing. But I am 100 percent sure that they are terrified to say something about it, because if you spoke up, that would be the end of you professionally.

This is how our elites think, people. They are mainstreaming anti-white racism, and treating it as good. This is a  psychiatrist, invited by Yale to speak about white people as psychopaths, fantasizing openly about murdering white people because of the color of their skin, and we just go along like it’s no big deal. The New York Times doesn’t care. The Washington Post doesn’t care. NPR doesn’t care. The networks don’t care. If a whiny middle-aged white woman makes life uncomfortable for a person of color in public, it’s time for a new round of Karen stories. But let one of the most privileged people in this country — a Yale psychiatrist — deliver a lecture demonizing white people, and … yawn. The fact that Dr. Khilanani felt at liberty to give a talk like this without fear of repercussion tells you a lot about where we are.

I don’t ever want to see Donald Trump again. He had these people’s number, in a way, but he did little or nothing effective to stop them. I want to vote for a presidential candidate who will move against these dirtbags and their institutions without mercy. Enough is enough. I’m not sure what can be done, but if we keep tolerating this, there is going to be violence, one way or another.  I am not willing to sit here and listen to these aristocrats like Dr. Khilanani, and malignant institutions like Yale, turn people against me, my children, and my neighbors, because we are white.

What is wrong with you people at Yale, white and non-white, standing for this? Do you have consciences? Do you have spines? You disgust me. Live not by lies!

The post Yale’s Anti-White Racist Psychiatrist appeared first on The American Conservative.

Orban Protects Euro Christianity Better Than Pope

I know some of you think this spot has become a Viktor Orban stan blog, but I gotta say, once you live in Central Europe, as I have been doing for the past two months, it really opens your eyes as to how unfairly people and countries here are treated by the West. The latest example of that comes via this report from National Catholic Register‘s Edward Pentin, who writes:

Pope Francis’ planned visit to Hungary in September is threatening to cause a diplomatic rift after it has emerged the Holy Father may only stay three hours in the country, omit a courtesy visit to Hungary’s president, and then spend a possible three and a half days in neighboring Slovakia.

According to sources in the Vatican and Hungary, efforts are being made to convince the Pope to stay in Hungary beyond the morning of Sept. 12 where he will celebrate the closing Mass of the International Eucharistic Congress taking place in the capital Budapest.

They are also trying to persuade the Pope from intentionally skipping courtesy visits to the country’s president, János Áder, a Catholic, and its Prime Minister, Viktor Orbán, as well as customary addresses to civic and political leaders — despite persistent invitations by the Hungarian government for the Pope to make a state visit.

“Political tensions behind the scenes are due to the Vatican wanting to avoid any political meetings, including visiting the Presidential Palace in Budapest which should be part of the package,” an informed source in Budapest told the Register June 2.

“Something is not right here, at least from the point of view of diplomacy and protocol,” wrote Luis Badilla, editor of Il Sismografo, a news aggregator run by the Vatican Secretariat of State.

According to the latest proposed itinerary, the Pope will be driven straight from the airport to the congress venue of Heroes’ Square in central Budapest. After the closing Mass, he is expected to leave for the Slovakian capital Bratislava.

This would be a staggering snub of the Hungarian government of Prime Minister Viktor Orban. And it would be carried out by a pontiff who had no problem meeting with the Communist dictators of Cuba (and for the record, I have no problem with that). He met with Emma Bonino, Italy’s most noted abortion rights advocate (I do have a problem with that, though.)

It’s easy to imagine that Francis doesn’t like Orban. Francis believes Europe should throw open its doors to Third World immigrants; Orban believes that would be the death of Europe. The Catholic journalist John L. Allen Jr. has written that the plight of migrants is the cornerstone of Francis’s papacy.  Francis has refused to meet with leading Italian politician Matteo Salvini in protest of Salvini’s anti-immigration views and policies. This is clearly why Francis refuses to meet with Orban.

If I were Orban (a Calvinist, though his wife and kids are Catholic), I would wear that as a badge of honor. You can make a case that his policies have done more to protect Europe’s Christianity than the pontiff’s. Hear me out.

At the height of the 2015 refugee crisis, Orban wrote an op-ed in Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung laying out his own position. From the Guardian’s report:

“Everything which is now taking place before our eyes threatens to have explosive consequences for the whole of Europe,” Orbán wrote in Germany’s Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung. “Europe’s response is madness. We must acknowledge that the European Union’s misguided immigration policy is responsible for this situation.

“Irresponsibility is the mark of every European politician who holds out the promise of a better life to immigrants and encourages them to leave everything behind and risk their lives in setting out for Europe. If Europe does not return to the path of common sense, it will find itself laid low in a battle for its fate.”

More:

Orbán said the razor-wire fence erected on Hungary’s southern border with Serbia was essential to defending the Schengen zone’s external borders. He denied that the emergency was a refugee crisis, but one of mass migration.

“Those arriving have been raised in another religion, and represent a radically different culture. Most of them are not Christians, but Muslims,” he said. “This is an important question, because Europe and European identity is rooted in Christianity.

“Is it not worrying in itself that European Christianity is now barely able to keep Europe Christian? There is no alternative, and we have no option but to defend our borders.”

In 2018, Orban gave an interview to the German newspaper Bild. Excerpt:

BILD: Now the EU is not only based on law, but also on solidarity: Why can Germany accept 2 million refugees, but Hungary not 2000?

Orbán: “The difference is that they wanted the migrants. And we don’t. [Note: He is referring to German Chancellor Angela Merkel opening Germany’s borders in 2015, and taking in one million migrants. — RD] We do our job by protecting the Schengen external border with Serbia. That has cost us an additional billion euros since 2015 and Brussels doesn’t pay us a cent. In any case, the solution to the problem is certainly not to distribute people who are illegally in the EU throughout the EU. We think you have to help where the problem is and not bring the immigrants here. ”

BILD: Why don’t Hungarians want refugees?

Orbán: “We don’t see these people as Muslim refugees. We consider them to be Muslim invaders. To get to Hungary from Syria, for example, you have to cross four countries, all of which are not as rich as Germany, but are stable. So you are already not running for your life there. It is also proven by the fact that they are economic migrants looking for a better life. ”

BILD: Is that why one is worth less as a human being?

Orbán: “If someone wants to come to your house – they knock on the door and ask: Can we come in, can we stay? They didn’t do that, they broke the border illegally. It wasn’t a wave of refugees, it was an invasion. When it came to migration, I never understood how in a country like Germany — which for us is the best example of discipline and the rule of law — chaos, anarchy and the illegal crossing of borders could be celebrated as something good. ”

BILD: Is it our own fault?

Orbán:  “The refugee issue is politically a European problem, but sociologically it is a German problem. Since you mentioned the EU refugee quota: Why was the Portuguese Prime Minister able to shout: “Welcome, come to us !?” Because no refugee wants to go to Portugal, everyone wants to go to Germany! The reason the people are in your country is not because they are refugees, but because they want a German life.

But I can only speak for the Hungarian people and that doesn’t want migration. As I understand it, it is not possible for the people to have a will on a fundamental issue, and the government refuses to do it. We are talking about the sovereignty and cultural identity of the country. We have to uphold the right to be able to decide who can live on Hungarian territory. ”

BILD: Apparently it shouldn’t be Muslims …

Orbán:  “We believe that a high number of Muslims necessarily leads to parallel societies, because Christian and Muslim societies will never combine. Multiculturalism is just an illusion. We don’t want that. And we don’t want anything to be forced upon us. Take Budapest as a positive example: a cosmopolitan melting pot with no parallel society. “

Don’t say that the Hungarians don’t care about charity. In 2019, they established Hungary Helps, a foreign relief agency under the Prime Minister’s office.

The situation with the migrants is morally excruciating — everybody must see that. But it is also crystal-clear that most of these migrants are not fleeing war, but are economic migrants seeking a better life in Europe. The Pope is to be commended for his compassion to them, but you cannot maintain a country or a civilization through open-borders sentimentality. I am sure the Pope is sincere, but his policies would destroy Europe, and put a final stake through the heart of a European Christianity that is practically on its deathbed.

On a more minor matter, but still a significant one, Pope Francis has preached against gender ideology, correctly calling it “demonic.” One of the only European countries to have done something to fight it in law is — world of wonders! — Viktor Orban’s Hungary. In 2018, Orban’s government defunded and disaccredited gender studies in the country’s universities. Last year, Hungary outlawed changing one’s sex on legal documents after birth. Last December, the Hungarian government amended the country’s constitution to define marriage as exclusively between one man and one woman — as the Catholic Church teaches. Back in 2005, US lawmakers couldn’t even vote a Federal Marriage Amendment out of the Senate and send it to the states. But in 2020, Hungary amended its constitution to reflect moral truth — again, a moral truth proclaimed by the Catholic Church.

But Viktor Orban is too dirty for Pope Francis to meet.

Here’s a link to a big political speech Orban gave last autumn. I know my liberal readers will hate it, but conservatives, read it and see if you think this man is such a threat to Christian Europe that the Pope should shun him. Excerpts:

The basic tenets of Christian democratic and liberal thinking are diametrically opposed to each other. In their attacks liberals take aim at the very things that are most important to us, the cornerstones of the political order we wish for, the values at the core of conservative-Christian democratic heritage – such as the nation, the family and religious tradition.

There is a recognition that if things continue like this then Christian-conservative forces will be assisting in the weakening of nations, the elimination of religious traditions, and the debasement and mockery of the family. Here in Central Europe this recognition has risen to the level of public and state policy. Here the red warning light has lit up, we have activated the emergency brake, and – primarily in Poland and Hungary – we have rung the alarm bells.

More:

Liberal and conservative politics also clash – and even engage in a life-or-death struggle – on the issue of migration. According to loopy liberals, there is no reason to fear mass immigration, or even a flood of immigration; and there is no reason to fear it even if the national and religious traditions of the uninvited guests are starkly different from ours – or indeed opposed to ours. We are told that terrorism, crime, anti-Semitism and the emergence of parallel societies are only temporary irregularities, or perhaps the birth pangs of a radiant new world about to come into being. But the conservative-Christian democratic camp rejects such an unpredictable experiment on societies and individuals, because they believe that the risks of chronic intercultural tensions and violence are unacceptably high. Unless we ignore the laws of mathematics, it is not difficult to see the reality of sure, slow, but accelerating population replacement.

There are also irreconcilable differences in education policy. According to conservatives we must focus on characteristic national traditions, and the purpose of education is for our children to be capable of becoming patriots who can carry forward our tried and tested traditions. At the same time, Christian democrats also expect schools to reinforce the sex identity that the Creator has conferred on each child at birth: to help girls become fine and admirable women; and to help boys become men who are able to provide security and support for their families. Schools should protect the ideal and values of the family, and should keep minors away from gender ideology and rainbow propaganda. Liberals see this as medieval backwardness at best, and as clerical fascism at worst. In their view the purpose of school education can only be to lead children towards their inner selves, making them capable of self-realisation, introducing them to the beauties of the universal political order, and therefore peeling away from them the enveloping layers of tradition inherited from the lives of their great-grandparents, grandparents and parents.

Liberals also believe – and for some mysterious reason this is what they defend most ardently – that the sufficient condition for just and morally grounded governance is general, universal reason, and there is no need whatsoever for absolute values revealed by God, and the religious and biblical traditions that have grown out of these. In fact, they say, a dividing wall must be built between church and government, and the influence of religion must be banished from the public sphere. Hungarian readers know little of the breadth, depth and bitter struggles of this debate which extends across the whole of Western civilisation. They believe that this is merely the sedimentary deposit of our Hungarian existence, or perhaps our existence as a “miserable small Central European state”. Therefore they cannot see – and perhaps cannot even appreciate – the unyielding and insightful basic principle in our national-Christian Constitution, according to which the state and church function on distinct parallel paths. Whilst preserving the autonomy of church and state, this seeks to replace separation with the integration of religion into the life of society, maintaining a spirit of tolerance for religious views. Indeed Christian democrats also believe that, in order to strengthen justice, public morals and the common good, the need for religion, biblical traditions and our churches is greater today than it has been for centuries.

I understand well why Jorge Bergoglio doesn’t want to meet with Viktor Orban. I don’t understand at all why the Roman pontiff refuses to do so.

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