Rod Dreher's Blog, page 73

‘Yankee Go Home’

Ed West is a prominent British conservative journalist. In this piece, written more in a tone of sorrow than anger, he reflects on how he has soured on America. Excerpts:

To my generation, growing up in the Cold War, that sense of America The Protector still lingered. I remember as a child seeing US troops at Checkpoint Charlie and being aware that it was thanks to them that we didn’t have to keep our eyes down like the poor prisoners of East Berlin. As a British child, when you watched American films or American TV, you identified with the Americans against our common enemies around the world.

Like many people here, I considered 9/11 as an attack on us too, and not just because of the dozens of Britons killed; I was furious when the BBC aired a panel show a couple of days later in which various (mostly Muslim) guests and audience members shouted about how the Americans had it coming, in front of a distraught-looking American diplomat.

And yet a lot has happened since. There is now a feeling, and I suspect it is growing on the British Right, that America is no longer a force for good in the world — quite the opposite. “Civilisations die from suicide,” as Arnold Toynbee famously said, and the United States, or at least its Ivy League-educated elite, is the Rev Jim Jones of the West.

More:

So while far more British people on the Right see themselves as pro-American, this barely makes any sense anymore. Certainly on issues of social democracy, relating to welfare and redistribution, most Europeans are more Left-wing than Americans, with the British somewhat closer to the US median. Yet on social justice issues — related to race, immigration, gender and sexuality — America is far more radical than the European norm. And in 21st century politics, those latter issues are more salient to people’s voting habits.

It was once a rather fond cliché to say that when America sneezes Britain catches a cold, but that idea seems less benign now that America’s politics has mutated into something genuinely toxic and destructive. Its elites are aren’t just misguided, they are deranged and malignant. With the country losing its Christian faith, they are driven by a new religious moral fervour towards the utopian goal of “equity”, equality of outcome transferred from the individual to the racial group, a project destined to stoke hatred and conflict.

Read it all. 

West sees how the American woke cultural virus is rolling through Britain, which, as he explains, lacks immunities that non-English-speaking European countries have, and he faults us for transmitting the poison that is tearing up his own country. I find it hard to object, sadly.

Just yesterday at coffee hour after church, I was telling some friends about being in the Czech Republic in 2018, on a Benedict Option book tour, and taking questions at every stop from Czechs who were both mystified by and frightened of “gender ideology” — that is, the destruction of the gender binary in favor of transgenderism and the rest of the anarchy that comes with it. They saw this as a form of cultural insanity coming to them from America. I told them that they were absolutely right to be concerned, and that they should be defensive. Ten years ago, I explained to the Czechs, this insane ideology was more or less confined to campuses. Now it is taking over all the elite institutions in America.

What a weird and depressing position to be in, standing in a foreign country warning foreigners to be on the defensive about an ideological sickness propagated by my own country. It felt shameful, but what was I supposed to do? America was advancing a deeply destructive lie.

In Tablet, the conservative geopolitical strategist Angelo Codevilla advocates exodus. Excerpts:

Today, the oligarchy that controls American society’s commanding heights leaves those who are neither its members nor its clients little choice but to marshal their forces for their own exodus. The federal government, the governments of states and localities run by the Democratic Party, along with the major corporations, the educational establishment, and the news media set strict but movable boundaries about what they may or may not say—on pain of being cast out, isolated from society’s mainstream. Using an ever-shifting variety of urgent excuses, which range from the coronavirus, to the threat of domestic terrorism, to catastrophic climate change, to the evils of racism, they issue edicts that they enforce through anti-democratic means—from social pressure and threats, to corporate censorship of digital platforms, to bureaucratic fiat. Nobody voted for this.

I don’t agree with all of Codevilla’s grievances listed in the essay. But I generally side with him about the malignancy of the “oligarchs” who run this country, and I support the thrust of his argument to muster political power to separate ourselves from these woke oligarchs. Codevilla concludes:

The oligarchy’s cancellation of most ordinary people out of its desired America leaves the latter with the choice between helotry and exodus. But since submission to inconstant, inept masters is impossible, common sense suggests counter-canceling: limiting involvement with the oligarchy to minimizing its interference on individuals who don’t share its aims and preferences.

The oligarchy’s cancellation of ordinary working people—of those who actively participate in forms of organized religion, and are otherwise attached to the common norms and values that prevailed in America and shaped the civilization in and by which most of us live—signals an alienation deeper than that between citizens of different but friendly nations. Asking how this cultural chasm has come to be detracts from the hard task of understanding its depth and making the best of it. Like married couples who have lost or given up what had united them, trying to work through irreconcilable differences only drives Americans’ domestic quarrels toward more violence.

That is why going one’s own way, while paying no more attention to the woke than is absolutely necessary, should be the agenda of the country party, which in this case includes all of those who still feel an attachment to the ideals of republican citizenship that we once shared in common as Americans.

Read it all. 

The problem is that I don’t know how to “separate.” The idea of a geographical separation is impossible; this is not 1861. We are stuck with each other in one country. But how can we keep living this way, with powerful people who really hate us, and who are eager to use their power to compel us to behave as they want us to? I’m thinking out loud here; I really don’t know what the answer is. But I’m open to conversations that I would not have been before.

Something about what’s happening in Georgia triggered me. This weekend, thinking about what Woke Capitalists (and Major League Baseball) are trying to do to Georgia over its voting law — which (see this Georgia Public Broadcasting analysis) is not remotely as bad as what the “Jim Crow on steroids” Democrats are saying — that Randy Newman line the songwriter puts into the mouth of Louisana Gov. Huey P. Long kept running around my head:

Ain’t no Standard Oil men gonna run this state.

Gonna be run by little folks like me and you.

Look at this from the well-known law professor:

…Schumer is pushing New York for the MLB All-Stars game. Yet, New York has fewer early voting days, a restriction on passing out food and water worth over $1, and requiring an excuse for an absentee ballot. So, if Georgia is “Jim Crow on steroids,” what is the New York law?

— Jonathan Turley (@JonathanTurley) April 4, 2021

It’s total hypocrisy by the Woke party and the Woke Capitalists, who are bitching about having to do business in Georgia, but who have no problem doing business in the People’s Republic of China, which is enacting an actual genocide, complete with concentration camps, against the Uighur Muslim people.

On Friday, I listened to this Fresh Air interview with Alec MacGillis, author of Fulfilled, a new book about Amazon. It made this stalwart right winger hopeful that the Amazon workers in Bessemer, Alabama, get their union. No corporation should have the power Amazon does. Excerpt:

DAVIES: So as you were writing about these great disparities in the United States among regions and tech companies’ role in it, you thought Amazon would be a good lens for examining all this. Let’s just start with, how big was Amazon before the pandemic? How big is it now?

MACGILLIS: I think it’s really kind of hard for us to even comprehend just how big it’s gotten. It was huge already before the pandemic, with several hundred thousand workers around the country, more than a hundred fulfillment centers as they call their primary warehouses, about, you know, 40% of the e-commerce market in the country was controlled by Amazon, just a huge share of it. The company, of course, has also been growing incredibly rapidly in a whole other realm, namely the so-called cloud, the world of online tech infrastructure that other companies rent – essentially rent from Amazon in all these data centers that have also sprung up around the country. That’s a whole other part of Amazon that’s been incredibly lucrative for them. So they were already very large before the pandemic.

But what has happened in this past year is really kind of hard to grasp. In the span of just a single year, they hired more than 400,000 additional employees. And that does not include all the delivery drivers that we see all around our cities that are actually not technically employed by Amazon, even though they wear Amazon jerseys and drive Amazon vans. The company has added roughly 50% more warehouse space in just the past year. Its sales have gone up about 40% year over year. Its stock price went up more than 80%. Jeff Bezos’ personal wealth went up about $58 billion over the past year.

Perhaps because we’re right in the middle of it, we can’t really grasp just how much how it’s gotten. We may be averting our eyes from the scale of the growth, partly because we all feel somewhat complicit in it. The fact is that the company grew so much over the past year because Americans, in much greater numbers than before, really embraced the sort of one-click approach to our daily life. And now we just see it. We see it everywhere around us. I mean, you see the vans just coming up and down your streets constantly. If you’re out on the highway, the number of, you know – on tractor trailers is just stunning and almost kind of eerie when you start to count them over just a short stretch of highway. It’s just an incredible growth in reach and in size and penetration in our economy and in our daily life.

Amazon, as you will recall, recently decided that Ryan T. Anderson’s book critical of transgenderism will not be sold by it. Because of that, it is going to be very difficult for publishers to take a chance on publishing any books critical of gender ideology. If Amazon won’t sell them, then it’s too risky to publish them, given how much of a hold Amazon has over the book retail market in America. Like I said, too much damn power. More from the interview:

DAVIES: Yeah. And I guess we should just note that Amazon and the other tech giants have some serious ammunition to battle, you know, in Congress and regulatory agencies.

MACGILLIS: Absolutely. They’ve vastly increased their spending on lobbying in recent years. They’re now some of the very biggest spenders on the influence industry in Washington. Many people who used to be in government have now sort of cycled through the revolving door into these companies. The Obama administration, which was strikingly lax in its approach to the growth of the giants, sent a lot of people, you know, into these companies. So there are very strong ties between government and the companies. And then in the case of Amazon, there’s even more kind of direct ammunition, namely the company’s really remarkable growth in Washington itself.

The company has – clearly has set out to grow its presence and raise his profile in Washington, which will only help it in these fights to come. The company – of course, Jeff Bezos bought The Washington Post. He bought the largest mansion in town, which he spent about $35 million on to sort of turn it into a great kind of salon for having, you know, local gatherings of the power elite. They’re spending a lot more on lobbying. They’re getting all sorts of large contracts from the government for their cloud services.

And then finally, they decided to put their second national headquarters just outside Washington – 25,000 high-paid jobs, billions in investment. So the company has greatly increased its profile in Washington, which makes sense if you think that for a company like Amazon, the main threat right now comes not from other corporate rivals, but really from the possibility of government intervention.

Here’s a slogan for the next presidential candidate I will vote for:

Ain’t no Woke Capitalists gonna run this State

Gonna be run by little folks like me and you

Roger Kimball writes:

We are living at a moment that is both increasingly fissiparous and increasingly dominated by a totalizing ideology, the ideology of racialist wokeness and radical sexual exoticism.

More and more, the disciples of that species of “politics-is-everything” determine the lineaments of our social life. Give obeisance or leave your job. Mouth the platitudes or forgo admission to college. Carry the placards or risk ostracism. To those who are lucky enough to have found a niche on the sidelines apart from the machine-like demands for loyalty (“silence is violence”), the whole process can still seem faintly comical or at least absurd.

But there is a distinctly malevolent aspect to what is unfolding, as Arendt saw with brutal lucidity. It’s easy to understand and reject the horrors of totalitarianism. It is much less easy to grasp its inexorable logic or its seemingly implacable attractions. It was part of Arendt’s genius to grasp and explain that side of the phenomenon as well, the “irresistible appeal of the totalitarian movements’ spurious claim to have abolished the separation between private and public life and to have restored a mysterious irrational wholeness in man.” It’s what makes the effort to transform politics into God so appealing to susceptible souls, and so dangerous for society as a whole.

I believe that soft totalitarianism is coming, because it is the inexorable logic of the post-liberal Left, which has gained control of nearly all the institutions in American life. I strongly believe in preparing for long-term resistance, which is what my book Live Not By Lies is about. But I also believe in fighting these SOBs as hard as we can, while we can. It is not traditionally in the Republican Party’s DNA to be anti-Big Business and anti-institutional, but if the conservative party cannot muster the wherewithal to stick it to Woke Capital, and woke institutions, hard, in the ribs, for the sake of democracy, then by God, let’s start a party that will. These people are ruining America. Until and unless America recovers herself, I’m with my Tory pal Ed West: Yankee go home. 

The post ‘Yankee Go Home’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

Ndona Muboyayi Lives Not By Lies

Here’s a dynamite interview Conor Friedersdorf did with Ndona Muboyayi, a black woman of Congolese descent who is running for school board in Evanston, Ill. — and is having to fight the Left, on behalf of her children and others. She grew up in Evanston, then moved away. When she returned, she found it had changed. Excerpts:

Evanston to me was almost a utopia. Which is why I told my children, while we were living outside Toronto, “When we move back to the States, let’s move to Evanston.” I gave my children and my husband, who grew up in the Democratic Republic of Congo, this idea that it would be a place of both Black unity and people working together across color lines. But when we got here in 2018, within the first year, my children were being taught about white supremacy and white privilege and that all white people were rich and racist. My son and daughter came home like, What is this?

Friedersdorf: What was the problem with those lessons, beyond your children not liking them?

Mboyayi: My children have always been so proud of who they are. Then all of a sudden they started to question themselves because of what they were taught after arriving here. My son has wanted to be a lawyer since he was 11. Then one day he came home and told me, “But Mommy, there are these systems put in place that prevent Black people from accomplishing anything.” That’s what they’re teaching Black kids: that all of this time for the past 400 years, this is what [white people have] done to you and your people. The narrative is, “You can’t get ahead.”

Of course I want my children to know about slavery and Jim Crow. But I want it to be balanced out with the rest of the truth. They’re not taught about Black people who accomplished things in spite of white supremacy; or about the Black people today who got ahead, built things, achieved things; and those who had opportunities that their ancestors fought for.

More:

Friedersdorf: Tell me more about the narrative you want to challenge.

Mboyayi: One day my daughter told me she was taught that all white people are privileged and part of a system of white supremacy. My son said the same thing. So I reached out to my daughter’s teacher to find out what exactly was being taught. It was pretty much like she said: that all white people were part of this system of white supremacy, and that all white people, because of the color of their skin, had privilege. I said, “But that’s not true.” And the teacher said, “Well, what do you mean?”

I have traveled a lot. My father was a university professor and taught in both the United States and Paris, France. And when I visited, I saw white people in public housing. I’ve been to Belgium and Switzerland and seen very poor white people. I’ve visited other parts of Europe. I lived in Canada for 10 years. There are poor white people in Canada as well. I’m not saying systemic racism doesn’t exist, but class exists too, and I don’t believe that all white people have privilege. That white person who’s living in the Appalachian Mountains, who has no means or prospect of changing their situation—do they, too, have privilege? Compared to me and my kids?

I’ve spent a lot of time in Central Africa because my dad is from the Congo. And some of the propaganda that’s being spread right now here in Evanston is similar to some of the divisiveness that took place in Rwanda before the massacre. I’m not saying that is what’s going to happen here, but when you start labeling people in a negative manner based on their race or ethnic group, this leads to division and destruction, not finding common ground and positive solutions.

Read it all. 

She says that she’s doing this because she doesn’t want her children or other black children to be taught by the school system that they can’t get ahead, that they can’t accomplish anything, because the white man has his boot on their neck. Muboyayi goes on to say that people are terrified in Evanston to speak out against this stuff, because left-wing activist go after their jobs. She explains that she’s self-employed, so she feels responsible for using her relative safety on that front to take a stand against this racist garbage.

That woman is a hero. If Evanston had even ten like her, the lie would go down.

You and me, let’s be like Ndona Muboyayi — before we get an American Rwanda.

UPDATE: On the “American Rwanda” front, this repulsive neoracist propaganda, written by Elie Mystal, appeared in The Nation. Excerpt:

I’ve said, here and elsewhere, that one of the principal benefits of the pandemic is how I’ve been able to exclude racism and whiteness generally from my day-to-day life. Over the past year, I have, of course, still had to interact with white people on Zoom or watch them on television or worry about whether they would succeed in reelecting a white-supremacist president. But white people aren’t in my face all of the time. I can, more or less, only deal with whiteness when I want to. Their cops aren’t hunting me when I drive through my neighborhood; their hang-ups aren’t bothering me (or threatening me) when I’m just trying to do some shopping.

That’s because I haven’t been driving or shopping in person. White people haven’t improved; I’ve just been able to limit my exposure to them. I’ve turned my house into Wakanda: a technically advanced, globally isolated home base from which I can pick and choose when and how often to interact with white people.

To be clear, it’s not that most or even many of my interactions with white people are “bad”; it’s that I’m able to choose when to expose myself to interactions with potentially bad white people.

If you read on, you’ll see that Mystal, the magazine’s “social justice correspondent,” writes of a crypto-Klucker verbally assaulting a black youth outside a drugstore. What happened? An elderly white woman rolled down the window of her car and asked the black teenager if this was a place where one could get a Covid shot. That’s it. That’s what happened.

 

The post Ndona Muboyayi Lives Not By Lies appeared first on The American Conservative.

Elites Vs. America

Hannah Arendt, in her book The Origins Of Totalitarianism, writes of the elites in pre-totalitarian Germany and Russia:

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

With each passing day, I am struck by how committed American elites are to tearing this country apart for the sake of instituting their idea of social justice.

Consider this from the governor of Vermont:

In this screengrab from the Vermont health department website, you can find out who is eligible for the vaccine in that state:

If you are a 40 year old ordinary white Vermonter who doesn’t work in health care or public safety, you’re out of luck, whitey. BIPOCs and immigrants are vaulted ahead of you, simply because of their race and/or immigration status.

What an evil thing: to say that some people are allowed to get a life-saving vaccine before others, only because of the color of their skin or their immigration status. This policy is probably unconstitutional, and can only make people resentful. And Gov. Scott, note well, is a white Republican. More important, he is an elite. I’m sure he feels great about his great-souled self, condemning white people under 50 to struggling against Covid without a vaccine while giving BIPOCs and immigrants whatever they want.

You heard about the man killed today while attacking the US Capitol, right? His name was Noah Green, a black man who was reportedly a member of the Nation of Islam, the black supremacist group. He murdered a Capitol police officer, whose two children no longer have a daddy. According to the Washington Post, Green’s family said he was mentally ill, and paranoid. Billy Evans, the dead cop, was white. I think the media have done the right thing in not jumping to conclusions about a racial motive here, or a political motive. We just don’t know.

But look, if Noah Green was a white man who was affiliated with a white hate group, do you think the news coverage would be as sober and as responsible? Of course it wouldn’t. We all know this. There is still not one shred of evidence to suggest that Robert Long, the suspected Atlanta mass shooter at the massage parlors, was motivated by anti-Asian hate. But we have been living through countless hours and reams of print coverage about his racist act. When it comes to anything at all to do with race, I do not trust the US news media.

They’ll be just fine without my trust. But I am sure that I’m not alone. And they have 100 percent done this to themselves.

A reader writes:

Memory hole warning: Facebook has already deleted [Noah Green’s] account it seems.Remember the time that Democrat terrorist tried to wipe out a bunch of Republican representatives and Senators, nearly killing Steve Scalise? Me neither or just barely. It got memory-holed quick. I’m predicting another memory hole here very soon.But the violent protest by right wingers at the Capitol? That will be used as a bogeyman for years to justify surveillance state being turned towards dissidents on the right.

I was in the car today and heard this NPR All Things Considered story about the history of solidarity between black and Asian Americans. From the introduction:

And now, with heightened calls for solidarity between the Black and Asian American communities, we wanted to look at the relationship between them and how their civil rights movements have interacted. Joining us now is anti-racist author and consultant Kim Tran. Her research focuses on Asian American solidarity with the Black Lives Matter movement.

So, with so many of these reported bias attacks on Asian-Americans being committed by blacks, NPR invited an activist on to manage the narrative. Here is a question from NPR host Ailsa Chang. Notice how leading it is, and how it is stated in the language of activism. NPR isn’t even trying to be unbiased here. This is not a question from a journalist; it’s a statement from a member of the diversity faculty:

Well, as you say, there has been tension between these two communities – Black Americans and Asian Americans. And even though the common goal of these two movements is to address colonization and to dismantle white supremacy, white supremacy has harmed Black Americans in a very different way than it has harmed Asian Americans. Like, Asians in this country have never felt what it’s like to be enslaved in this country, to be mass incarcerated, right?

Chang asks not one question of her guest, a self-identified “queer Vietnamese woman,” that refers to actual black assaults on Asian people. Nor does she bring up well-known phenomena like the black rioters’ attacks on Korean store owners in South Central Los Angeles in the 1990s — an incident that revealed to the nation the hostility between these two ethnic groups. She asks not one challenging question of this activist. Here’s Ailsa Chang in fact chastising her fellow Asian-Americans for not being committed to Black Lives Matter:

Well, where can Asian Americans start to better show up? Because at some level, it seems that there has to be some acknowledgement that they do enjoy greater privilege in this society than Black Americans do and therefore might be able to exert leverage if they were to fuse their movement with Black Americans.

It’s incredibly insulting to the intelligence of listeners. It’s straight-up activism. For all my adult life as a conservative, I’ve argued with fellow conservatives who say we should defund NPR. Now, though, I couldn’t make that case. NPR has always been liberal, but sometime in the last two or three years, it started operating like the Oberlin campus radio station.

Maybe Ailsa Chang didn’t ask hard questions because she had listened to this episode of NPR’s Code Switch podcast. Excerpt of a conversation between host Gene Demby and NPR reporter Alyssa Jeong Perry:

Once again, NPR is managing the narrative. All these attacks on Asian people are really the fault of white people. Besides, who is this researcher from the University of Michigan? Can we see the work? Because according to federal statistics from 2018 (the most recent stats available; the Justice Department did not publish Asian stats for 2019, and has not yet issues a report on 2020 statistics), no single race accounted for more than 27.5 percent of violent bias attacks on Asian-Americans. And that 27.5 percent figure came from blacks, who are only 13 percent of the US population:

That NPR Code Switch episode goes to unintentionally comic links to emphasize that actually, blacks and Asians work together to fight racism. They even cite Martin Luther King’s opposition to the Vietnam War as an example — as if that war, tragic and misguided as it was, was simply a matter of whites attacking Asians (NPR did not invite on any of the Vietnamese boat people who came here to escape communism). And NPR’s host once again cites as fact the unsupported claim that the Atlanta shooting was racially motivated. Read the transcript for yourself. 

This is one more example of elites in American culture ginning up race hatred on spurious grounds.

Here’s another example. In Georgia today, Major League Baseball decided to move the All-Star Game from Atlanta to protest the state’s new voting law.

 

Joe Biden called the new Georgia voting law “Jim Crow on steroids,” a theme that has become common with Democrats. But an analysis of the law in The Dispatch, the Never Trumper site, detailed why this claim is groundless. Excerpts:

But attempts by prominent Democrats—including the president—to tie SB 202 to the Jim Crow era are incredibly disingenuous. For starters, the bill actually expands voting access for most Georgians, mandating precincts hold at least 17 days of early voting—including two Saturdays, with Sundays optional—leading up to the election. Voting locations during this period must be open for at least eight hours, and can operate between 7:00 a.m. and 7:00 p.m. Several states (including Biden’s home state of Delaware, which will not implement it until 2022) do not currently allow any in-person early voting, and plenty, like New Jersey, offer far fewer than 17 days.

Despite Biden saying the bill implements absentee voting restrictions that “effectively deny” the franchise to “countless” voters, SB 202 leaves in place no-excuse absentee voting with a few tweaks. It tightens the window to apply for an absentee ballot to “just” 67 days, and mandates applications—which can now be completed online—be received by election officials at least 11 days before an election to ensure a ballot can be mailed and returned by Election Day. The bill requires Georgia’s secretary of state to make a blank absentee ballot application available online, but prohibits government agencies from mailing one to voters unsolicited—and requires third-party groups doing so to include a variety of disclaimers.

Rather than signature matching—which is time-intensive for election officials—voters will verify their identity in absentee ballot applications by including the identification number on their driver’s license or voter identification card, which is free. If a Georgian has neither, he or she can, pursuant to Georgia Code Section 21-2-417, include a photocopy or digital picture of a “current utility bill, bank statement, government check, paycheck, or other government document” that includes his or her name and address.* When mailing back their ballots, voters must print their driver’s license number (or the last four digits of their social security number) on an inner envelope. (An August 2016 Gallup survey found photo ID requirements for voting were overwhelmingly popular: 80 percent of voters supported them, including 77 percent of nonwhite voters.) SB 202 also codifies ballot drop boxes into law; Georgia added them for the first time in 2020 as a pandemic measure, and the law now stipulates that there be one for every 100,000 registered voters or advance voting locations in a county, whichever is smaller.

Among other things (it’s a 95-page bill!), SB 202 allows election workers to begin processing absentee ballots two weeks before an election to avoid reporting delays, and requires them to announce the total number of ballots cast—in-person, absentee, early, and provisional—by 10:00 p.m. on election night so voters know how many outstanding votes remain to be counted. It also restructures the State Election Board, demoting the secretary of state from chair to a non-voting member.

One minor provision that’s received outsized attention is a prohibition on outside groups or people distributing money, gifts, food, or drinks to voters within 150 feet of a polling place or 25 feet of voters standing in line to vote. Polling places, however, can make self-service water receptacles available to voters waiting in line.

The Dispatch points out that President Trump’s unsubstantiated griping about voter fraud in Georgia has something to do with the Democrats’ reaction, but the Democrats are nevertheless reacting based on a lie. More:

A day after dozens of black business executives called on corporate America to vocally oppose the legislation, several major companies based in Georgia—which had until then remained above the fray—did exactly that. “The Coca-Cola Company does not support this legislation, as it makes it harder for people to vote, not easier,” CEO James Quincey said. Ed Bastian, chief executive at Delta Airlines, wrote that he “need[s] to make it crystal clear that the final bill is unacceptable and does not match Delta’s values.” Some progressive activists have gone further, calling for various economic boycotts of the state—and Biden himself joined them in an interview with ESPN earlier this week.

“I would strongly support them doing that,” Biden said when asked by Sage Steele about Major League Baseball considering moving its annual All-Star game out of Atlanta this summer. “This is Jim Crow on steroids, what they’re doing in Georgia.”

[GOP state elections official Gabriel] Sterling [who fought with his own party against Trump’s claims] wasn’t pleased. “I think it’s morally reprehensible and disgusting that he’s perpetuating economic blackmail over a lie,” he told The Dispatch. “It’s a lie. This is no different than the lie of Trump saying there was voter fraud in this state. And the people who are going to be most hurt by [a boycott] are the workers in all of these places that are going to be impacted.”

Here, by the way, is the Atlanta Journal-Constitution’s short piece offering highlights of the law. Read it and tell me where the Jim Crow is.

The elites who run Major League Baseball did the woke thing instead of the fair thing, the truth-based thing — and now Atlanta is going to suffer. I appreciate how the Georgia state legislature is pushing back hard against attempts by Big Business to bully the state, taking away Delta’s $35 million tax break over its CEO attacking the law and mischaracterizing it as part of a corporate campaign against Georgia. We have seen Woke Capitalism bully state lawmakers at least since the 2015 corporate gang-up against Indiana for passing a state Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which the state repealed after Big Business and the NCAA demanded it. At some point, conservatives have to start making Big Business pay a price for pushing around elected representatives over laws that have nothing to do with their corporate activities.

The point I want to make is that the Democratic Party and corporate elites (including MLB) are once again telling lies and inflicting economic pain to stir up racial hatred. One definition of a totalitarian society is one in which everything is politicized. What does a state compelling voters to show up with identification have to do with Major League Baseball? Or flying passenger aircraft?

A reader e-mailed today about the MLB cancellation:

I don’t know what it was about this that made me so mad. Is it that I’m reaching a boiling point with corporate wokeness? Is it that baseball, something that means so much to me and which has been a part of my life for so long has now become infected by this virus?Regardless, when I saw this I thought about your recent posts asking people what we can do when things like this happen. Well, it’s not much, but I just emailed the league and my own beloved Cleveland Indians to lodge my complaints. I emailed the league to tell them I wouldn’t watch their All Star Game, wherever they move it to. I’m sure they’re shaking in their boots. But I also emailed my own team, which may have had no input in the league’s decision, to tell them I am boycotting their stadium this season. It’s the teams that can influence how the league acts, so if I have to hurt my own team, then so be it. Again, the team likely won’t even pay attention to my email. In the end, the league will probably lose $1000 from me. Peanuts. But it’s a start. I’m tired of all this.For what it’s worth, here’s what I wrote to the team:

To Whom It May Concern:

This is the first time in my life I’ve ever written one of these types of massages. I just saw that MLB has decided to move the All Star Game out of Atlanta due to the State of Georgia passage of a voting reform bill.  Let me just say that I am disgusted by the league’s action, which represents yet another example of the politicization of almost every aspect of our society by powerful groups and individuals outside of our government. I am an attorney. I read the Georgia bill to understand what it is and what it is not. It is not restrictive like some people are pretending, and it most certainly is not Jim Crow as a few people are dishonestly indicating. In fact, in some ways the voting rights of Georgia’s citizens have expanded. None of that really matters, though, because the league caved into mounting pressure by certain groups and individuals with an agenda, and responded accordingly. In the end, the league doesn’t really care what this law actually does. It’s about appearances and catering to certain interest groups. I shouldn’t even have to say this, but with the way MLB has become so politicized, I will mention that I am not a Trump supporter or someone with any type of political ax to grind. I am politically agnostic in many things. But I am fed up with seeing these types of actions being taken by large American corporations again and again with little regard for the real facts at issue, the perspective of millions of people who see things differently, and while delving into political matters that have little to do with the corporation’s purpose. Please, just stick to baseball.  Why am I sending this to you? As you can imagine, I have no intention of watching the All Star Game this year, which is something I watch annually. But now I’ve decided to take this one step further. I will not be attending any games this season at Progressive Field. This pains me a great deal. I have two little boys who have never been to a major league game before. I wanted to take them last year for the first time, but couldn’t due to the pandemic. This year I planned to take them multiple times, and to let them have a special outing with their grandad. But not this year. Baseball is special to me and my family. It is generational. It is dear to my heart. In my family, it is about fathers and sons. It is about players and teams from the past that we reminisce about and cherish. But not this year.  I imagine this email will be cast aside. So be it. I will not support the league, and sadly my beloved Indians, because of the league’s actions. I know there are others who feel the same way. Please, please just stick to baseball. 

Good for you, reader. I hope there are tens of thousands of baseball fans just like you who write to your local team to tell them that you’re sick of this woke corporate bullying, and of them politicizing every damn thing.I remind you of the Hannah Arendt quote that started this post:

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

These elites — media, political, medical, corporate, military, athletic — are destroying the fabric of life in this country for the sake of their ideological crusade. When the shooting starts, remember: they did this to us.UPDATE: David Brooks, who says he strongly opposes the Georgia law, said today he is uncomfortable with big powerful corporations exercising political power. He’s right:

The post Elites Vs. America appeared first on The American Conservative.

Cosmos & Chickadee

One of the Live Not By Lies themes I keep banging on is the importance of elites and elite networks in driving cultural revolution. From the book:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter.

Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed
networks and powerful institutions.”

This is why it is critically important to keep an eye on intellectual discourse. Those who do not will leave the gates unguarded. As the Polish dissident and émigré Czesław Miłosz put it, “It was only toward the middle of the twentieth century that the inhabitants of many European countries came, in general unpleasantly, to the realization that their fate could be influenced directly by intricate and abstruse books of philosophy.”

Arendt warns that the twentieth-century totalitarian experience shows how a determined and skillful minority can come to rule over an indifferent and disengaged majority. In our time, most people regard the politically correct insanity of campus radicals as not worthy of attention. They mock them as “snowflakes” and “social justice warriors.”

This is a serious mistake. In radicalizing the broader class of elites, social justice warriors (SJWs) are playing a similar historic role to the Bolsheviks in prerevolutionary Russia. SJW ranks are full of middle-class, secular, educated young people wracked by guilt and anxiety over their own privilege, alienated from their own traditions, and desperate to identify with something, or someone, to give them a sense of wholeness and purpose. For them, the ideology of social justice — as defined not by church teaching but by critical theorists in the academy — functions as a pseudo-religion. Far from being confined to campuses and dry intellectual journals, SJW ideals are transforming elite institutions and networks of power and influence.

Twenty years ago, what we now call gender ideology (encompassing transgenderism and all its variants) was confined mostly to the academic fringes. Now it has conquered American institutions, and if it were up to the Democratic Party and our Democratic president, would be written into civil rights law. After Obergefell, religious liberty litigators and activists assumed that it would be years before the trans battles were joined. In fact, it was mere months.

This is why I focus my fire on leading institutions, e.g. today’s post criticizing the wokeness of Duke Divinity School.They are the leading edge of decline-and-fall. They are the ones taking us over the cliff.

It is not enough to point out the bad Christian intellectual elites. Where are the good ones, the ones who can build a plausible future for Christianity?

Ross Douthat explores this in his new Substack essay, titled “The Cul-de-Sacs of the Christian Intellectual”. In the piece, Ross discusses the role of the Christian public intellectual in the present moment. Here he talks about the four people (including, improbably, me) in his list of four different responses to the challenges of our time:

In my casually-chosen list of influential public intellectuals from the last twenty years, I represented Christianity with Fr. James Martin, Rod Dreher, Charles Taylor, David Bentley Hart and Tim Keller. I picked Taylor because he’s the scholar who’s produced something closest to a conventional definition of an Important Work, 2007’s A Secular Age, and Keller because he’s the most mainstream embodiment of the Calvinist revival within evangelicalism. But I picked Hart, Dreher and Martin because their work — more popular in the latter two cases, more idiosyncratic in Hart’s case — seems especially responsive to the dilemmas that confront Christian thinkers right now, and the challenges facing Biblical religion amid the decadence of its stepchild, liberalism.

It’s flattering that Ross included me on that list with people who have actually been well-educated. I think it’s because for all my shortcomings, I managed to identify with some precision the most serious problem facing Christianity today, and to propose a way (the Benedict Option) of dealing with it. Father Martin and I could hardly be more opposite, but Ross did not choose any of us because he agrees with us, necessarily.

Ross says that the neoconservative Christian intellectual project — Neuhaus-Novak-Weigel-ism — is dead. What can we do now?

From this apparent cul-de-sac, what is to be done? Well, one possibility is to go back to the ideas that the neoconservatives rejected or critiqued. That’s arguably what you find, in different forms, in the recent work of Hart and Father Martin (with Pope Francis looming behind them as a spiritual inspiration): New attempts at moral or theological adaptation, new attempts to find common ground with liberalism or to embrace some of the commitments of the left. This is not, crucially, an adaptation to secularism and anti-supernaturalism; that road I think almost everyone concedes is the deadest of dead ends. Instead in Martin’s writings and ministry you see an attempt to stretch, expand or adapt the Christian tradition sufficiently so that much of the sexual revolution, with abortion as the major exception, can be encompassed and accepted: Maybe not always formally, with new dogmatic pronouncements to contradict the old ones, but at least in a de facto way, with a theology of welcome that resolves the tensions between the church and post-1960s sexual culture and enables Christianity to breathe and preach anew.

David Bentley Hart is attempting to saddle theological orthodoxy (more or less) to far-left economics, and apparently plans to insult the world into compliance. But what about responses from the Right? Ross:

But if you don’t follow the new adaptationists, then what are the other post-neoconservative possibilities? Here’s where Dreher is important, as the eloquent and prolific spokesman for the view that what Christians need is less a vision to transform a decadent society than a plan to survive the “long night” of tyranny and social-cultural breakdown waiting in its wings. This view reflects his fundamental pessimism about our cultural circumstances — you can read the two of us going back and forth about our differences in this conversation — and his sense that the West may be too far gone to be renewed without some intervening catastrophe or Change. That doesn’t mean he’s given up on renewal — his interests roll in all kinds of possibilities — but both The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies, his two major statements, are fundamentally arguments about communal resilience under pressure, informed by analogies to the Dark Ages and Communist persecution, respectively. So even if Christian communities seeking revitalization can draw important lessons from his work (including communities that don’t share his traditionalism in full), the Dreher vision generally assumes that a slow decline under decadent conditions is the best that Christians can hope for in the short run, and that our social order’s worst features are likely to deliver something grimmer and more oppressive soon, that to be defeated must be first survived.

There’s me, and there’s the Neo-Integralists:

Which, bristling with impatience with this pessimism, is where the various forms of post-liberal Christian thought come in. As I said in my last post, I think it will be a little while before we can decide on a central post-liberal influencer from the Patrick Deneen/Adrian Vermeule/Edmund Waldstein/Sohrab Ahmari list. But the tendency is certainly important right now, embodying both a rejection of any accommodation with liberalism and an impatience with any form of quietism or defeatism.

Can it really be the case, the post-liberals ask, that Christians facing the present age can only choose between accommodation and resilience-in-retreat? Isn’t the current form of liberalism obviously weakened, exhausted and beset with self-contradictions — and very, very far from being the all-conquering historical force implied by some of Dreher’s dramatic historical analogies? And of so, why should we regard the failure of Christian neoconservatism as proving something definitive about the impossibility of Christian witness, when maybe all it shows is that Christian witness fails if it yokes itself to Americanist pieties and the liberal/Christian convergence of 1955?

But with that said, the post-liberal project also feels like a tentative beginning, prone to dialectical confidence yet unformed as yet in various respects, and it’s easy enough to see how it could end up in its own cul-de-sacs. If it’s a fantasy for neoconservatives to imagine restoring the lost 1950s, after all, the idea of plugging Christian concepts from the 1880s or 1260s into the political landscape of the 2020s does not necessarily bring us closer to political realism. If it’s folly for liberal Christians to imagine reaching a permanent accommodation with socialism or secular progressivism or liberalism itself, the idea of simply defeating liberalism and remaking liberal culture through a top-down administrative coup does not necessarily answer the challenge by enlarging it. If naively embracing the sexual revolution is a dead end for Christianity, it’s not clear that new roads open immediately if we simply act as though it didn’t happen. If it’s a historical mistake to suggest that we can only have certain political liberties and socioeconomic goods under the rule of liberalism, it still remains to be explained what post-liberal Christians have learned about power and its corruptions from all the places in which the last Christendom went wrong.

Read the whole thing. There’s a lot more in the essay than I’ve mentioned here. And you should subscribe to Ross’s Substack, which is free. If you’ve missed bloggy Douthat, well, you pretty much get him back here.

Deneen and Ahmari are friends of mine, whom I greatly like and respect. But my main beef with the Neo-Integralists is that theirs is a project that is intellectually interesting, but can’t actually go anywhere until and unless Catholicism converts, and re-converts, millions more people. (Integralism is a political model that integrates the authorities of Church and State.) Leaving aside the fact that most Americans are not Catholics, in this country, relatively few Catholics recognize the Church’s binding authority on their consciences. In a 2019 Pew survey, only about one-third of US Catholics said they believe that the Eucharist actually becomes the Body and Blood of Jesus Christ at the consecration part of the mass. If you have only one in three Catholics who understand one of the most basic claims of Catholicism, you have a long, long way to go to convince American Catholics, much less the non-Catholic majority, to submit to the authority of the Pope in governance.

I should point out that Orthodox Integralism was how Russia was run until the Revolution, so there is a long history of it in my own religious tradition. According to The Josias, an intellectually stimulating integralist site Catholic Integralism can be defined simply, like this:

Catholic Integralism is a tradition of thought that, rejecting the liberal separation of politics from concern with the end of human life, holds that political rule must order man to his final goal. Since, however, man has both a temporal and an eternal end, integralism holds that there are two powers that rule him: a temporal power and a spiritual power. And since man’s temporal end is subordinated to his eternal end, the temporal power must be subordinated to the spiritual power.

I am sympathetic to this in principle, especially the first sentence. But I see no way in our post-Christian situation to carry out the second and third sentences without some form of authoritarianism. My chief concern is what tying Church and State together would do to the Church. The Republic of Ireland was a more or less integralist Catholic democracy, but the cover-up of sex abuse by the institutional Church, and the complicity of the Irish state with it, has been a wholesale catastrophe for the Church. Anyway, I don’t see Neo-Integralism as being a serious option, barring a meaningful religious revival.

The Benedict Option’s aims are far more modest: to keep the Christian faith alive through the new Dark Age, with the hope of renewing our civilization in the future. Whether we are talking about a Christianized liberal democracy or some Neo-Integralist system, both would require a far more meaningfully Christian population than we have today. If you want to know what may be happening to the Christian churches today, read historian Edward J. Watts’s The Final Pagan Generation, which discusses Roman elites of the fourth century, when the Roman Empire was going Christian, though it was hard for elites to recognize how much trouble they were in.

The other day, I wrote about Plenty Coups, the last great chief of the Crow Indians, who negotiated the transition for his tribe from their traditional way of life to life after the coming of the white man (read: modernity). I see in Plenty Coups’ story a possible hopeful way forward for us traditional Christians. What I did not appreciate was picked up by several of you readers: that a negative way to interpret Plenty Coups’ story is that he sold out the Crow way of life to hold on to their land. Reader Sam M. said it would be like surrendering to Moralistic Therapeutic Deism so we could keep our cathedrals.

To be fair to Plenty Coups, there really was no way for the Indians to hold on to their nomadic way of life, which depended on hunting and waging war with other tribes. We Christians don’t face a situation as drastic as that. We can hold on to our beliefs and rituals, though we can’t hold on to the normal way of living to which we have all become accustomed. A reader who is a Catholic priest sent in this smart comment:

I was struck by the Plenty Coups story. That the tribe would embrace his vision and then carry out the change are astonishing events–really all but unimaginable in audacity, scope, and sacrifice.The core question to my mind is the ultimate nature of that change and its relation to their cosmology (and hence the true nature of the change they underwent). For it’s one thing to shift from a particular  pattern (Crow) to another (Chickadee) within a given cosmos–as rare and difficult as such a change would be, the cosmos remains the same  despite the extreme dislocation experienced. It is, however, an entirely different matter to abandon one cosmos for another, because then a person really does becomes a stranger in a  strange universe.At some point Plenty Coups himself, if not the tribe, moved from changing patterns to changing cosmos by becoming Christian. I’d be particularly interested in that latter move on the human and theological level to see how it  took place and how the old cosmos was understood afterward.As for our situation, his story is ambiguous or breaks down as a  parallel precisely because as Christians we can change patterns, but not cosmology. And that is where the real fight is shaping up.If we are asked to adapt to living as a marginalized group within a secularized culture, that can be done. If asked to adopt a secular cosmology, we can’t.One reading of the present moment is that Western liberal secularism is struggling between a pragmatic form (and hence willing to leave ultimate questions of meaning open to interpretation, including religious interpretation) and an ideological form (and hence absolutely rejecting religion and claims of objective purpose as enemies of humanity).The thing is, ideological secularism denies any relation of creation and humanity to God.  Once that happens, questions of meaning have no answer outside individual or perhaps a culturally imposed narratives. If either becomes the Creed, Christians can only follow the pattern of the martyrs. If instead pragmatic secularism reigns, any number of patterns may be available.An urgent question for Christians is whether we think the basic structures of sexual differentiation, marriage, procreation, and family are fundamentally part of a cosmology or simply a set of customs to be adapted as cultural circumstances require. [Emphasis mine — RD]For some Christians setting those structures aside is like shifting from Crow to Chickadee. For others it is a shift from an old cosmos to a new one, and thus from an old religion to a new one.Of course, there is no new religion, so if the issues are cosmological, we can’t adapt to ideological secularism and remain authentic Christians.  It is the old problem of syncretism which so troubled Israel and has ever haunted the Church.Whatever one thinks is the right path forward, those who believe the way to deal with these issues is a matter of becoming chickadees already live in a different cosmos than those who think the issues are cosmological. I think that is ultimately an unbridgeable divide. If so, the schism or apostasy is already upon us.

This is true. I read the Plenty Coups tale as abandoning patterns, not a cosmos (though he did convert late in life to Catholicism, which was abandoning a cosmos, though he seems to have held on to some of the old Crow religion, in a syncretistic fashion). The Crow Sun Dance was a kind of ritual prayer for vengeance on their enemies, but it lost its meaning when the US Government put an end to tribal warfare. Did that mean an end to the Crow cosmos, or just a pattern of life? I don’t know enough Crow history to say. From what I could glean from the book Radical Hope, where I learned of Plenty Coups’ story, it seemed to me that the Crow were forced to abandon a pattern of life (nomadic, warlike, hunting), not a cosmos. But on second thought, the division is not so clean. If the Crow cosmos cannot make sense outside of a nomadic, warlike, hunting way of life, then the cosmos-pattern distinction may not make much difference.The priest’s comments make me see the four choices Douthat sees in a different light.All three of the preserve the cosmos options — Neo-Integralism, the Benedict Option, and Hart’s Christian socialism — either presume a change of pattern (Ben Op) or seek to cause one (the other two).Father James Martin’s model, though, is a change the cosmos strategy. As Ross said, Father Martin is trying to stretch the Catholic Christian cosmos to encompass and make peace with the Sexual Revolution. This cannot be done. In my 2013 essay “Sex After Christianity,” published four years before The Benedict Option , I said:

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

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

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

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

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

More:

Gay marriage signifies the final triumph of the Sexual Revolution and the dethroning of Christianity because it denies the core concept of Christian anthropology. In classical Christian teaching, the divinely sanctioned union of male and female is an icon of the relationship of Christ to His church and ultimately of God to His creation. This is why gay marriage negates Christian cosmology, from which we derive our modern concept of human rights and other fundamental goods of modernity. Whether we can keep them in the post-Christian epoch remains to be seen.

It also remains to be seen whether we can keep Christianity without accepting Christian chastity. Sociologist Christian Smith’s research on what he has termed “moralistic therapeutic deism”—the feelgood, pseudo-Christianity that has supplanted the normative version of the faith in contemporary America—suggests that the task will be extremely difficult.

Conservative Christians have lost the fight over gay marriage and, as we have seen, did so decades before anyone even thought same-sex marriage was a possibility. Gay-marriage proponents succeeded so quickly because they showed the public that what they were fighting for was consonant with what most post-1960s Americans already believed about the meaning of sex and marriage. The question Western Christians face now is whether or not they are going to lose Christianity altogether in this new dispensation.

Too many of them think that same-sex marriage is merely a question of sexual ethics. They fail to see that gay marriage, and the concomitant collapse of marriage among poor and working-class heterosexuals, makes perfect sense given the autonomous individualism sacralized by modernity and embraced by contemporary culture—indeed, by many who call themselves Christians. They don’t grasp that Christianity, properly understood, is not a moralistic therapeutic adjunct to bourgeois individualism—a common response among American Christians, one denounced by Rieff in 2005 as “simply pathetic”—but is radically opposed to the cultural order (or disorder) that reigns today.

They are fighting the culture war moralistically, not cosmologically. They have not only lost the culture, but unless they understand the nature of the fight and change their strategy to fight cosmologically, within a few generations they may also lose their religion.

I hope you’ll read it all. All of this is to say that the Chickadee of Father Martin’s approach is, deep down, another religion. It cannot be reconciled with the Christian cosmos, because it cannot be reconciled with what Christianity teaches man is, and is for.If that’s true, then it is clear that the accommodationist/assimilationist Christian intellectuals — who hold the high ground in most sizable Christian institutions — are moving from strength to strength. That leaves us Christian intellectuals who uphold the authentically Christian cosmos with the grave challenge of how to keep our cosmos alive in the hearts, minds, and lives of the Christian people. The way I see it, you can be an orthodox Christian socialist, like David Bentley Hart, or you can be a Catholic Neo-Integralist, but given how immense the cultural tides, and the powers and principalities of the era are aligned against us, if you are not first a practitioner of the Benedict Option, you’re not going to make it. You will be assimilated.

The post Cosmos & Chickadee appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Right We Need

I have really smart readers. One of them — a conservative embedded in the Deep State — writes:

I just wanted to offer up the following observations from Douthat’s column as far as what the future is likely to hold. Douthat writes:

Yes, conservatives have Fox News and talk radio, the Republican Party has its business-class support and Trump had Michael Flynn and the MyPillow C.E.O. and Jerry Falwell Jr. But our generals are mostly allergic to politics and the military’s most recent political intervention was a counterstrike against a critique from Tucker Carlson. Our corporations dislike socialism but their main strategy for keeping it at bay is to go all in on cultural-left politics. Our churches are fractured, scandal-ridden and declining. Our aristocracy — sorry, meritocracy — is divided between hand-wringing liberals and militant progressives. And our conservative party isn’t eager to tear our constitution up and start anew: Instead it’s hyper-constitutionalist, because its current share of power depends on some of the Constitution’s most antique instruments.

… Under Weimar’s conditions, the right’s radicalization threatened, and eventually delivered, the outright destruction of German liberalism and the German left. (And then much, much more destruction beyond that.)

But under contemporary American conditions, further right-wing radicalization seem more likely to be a suicide weapon — a way for a weakened movement to instigate a period of crisis, maybe, but one that would probably only hasten its marginalization and defeat.

This is something that needs to be understood regarding a right-wing backlash and any discussion of Weimar America. Much of the security state is itching to go after a right-wing domestic terrorist threat and the most likely outcome of any right-wing action would not be Weimar Germany but rather a repeat of 6 January to the enthusiastic clapping of our social betters in the press and on social media.

I think this is very much on-point and something that cultural conservatives really need to internalize as fusionism continues to circle the drain as they consider the political future.

The backlash against wokeness from the right is definitely coming, but it isn’t going to resemble anything like 1930s Germany because the left controls the high and the low ground through its cultural power, particularly the controlling interest over the credentialing organs that determine who gets credentialed for participation into our non-hereditary aristocracy. The key test for whether or not the right is actually prepared to internalize the hard lesson of how weak their hand is and learn for it is going to be an important one, especially since it will determine whether or not more Trump-style grifting and blood and soil win out over the saner models.

As Douthat notes, the entire woke capital phenomenon is a cynical cost-benefit calculation by big business to concede on all cultural issues to the left in return for immunity on all economic issues. If the right wants to change that dynamic then it has to be prepared to inflict economic costs on big business, including antitrust action, regulation, support for big labor, ending tax breaks, and a whole host of issues. This is a complete anathema to the fusionist, business, and donor class of the party but if implemented it would be highly effective. If conservatives are actually concerned about wokeness in the military and its detrimental impact then the solution is not to wring hands over it but to identify the general officers and senior civilians who are pushing it and to stop confirming them through Congress to send a clear message that general officers are not owed a promotion.

Again, these solutions are not difficult or even impossible, but so far as I can determine they have never been attempted because the leadership class of the GOP is so captive to the donor, think tank, and activist classes on these issues.

One of the main problems that now exists is not that you don’t have a lot of people who are concerned and looking to take action — you do — but that their only conception of how to do so basically amounts to “voting Republican,” which serves to either empower the existing leadership class that holds them in contempt as rubes or Trump-style grifters who see them as suckers. Hawley, who was a big hope in intellectual circles as a thinking man’s populist has likely been discredited in the near-term by the events of 6 January and his Pyrrhic quest to gain access to Trump’s fanbase, leaving Tucker Carlson as one of the few voices who is willing to challenge the status quo.

I actually think that Trump shattering the existing GOP power structures and showing the leadership and donor class for the ineffectual empty suits who were happy to grovel at his feet was a good thing. He just decided to throw it all away by embracing first COVID denialism and then election conspiracy theories. My assumption for a long time has been that the decaying state of the right was a vacuum that is going to be filled sooner or later, it is just a matter of what ends up emerging, just as the far-right has emerged in Europe due to the decline of the “respectable” conservative parties.

Interesting observations. I share this reader’s deep doubts about the Right, given the inability of either the leadership class or the vast followership class to get beyond obsession with Trump, whose resistance was entirely performative — meaning that he made a big show of fighting, but didn’t actually accomplish a lot, because he was so undisciplined. The MyPillow dude is now claiming that Trump will be re-installed in the White House in August. These are ridiculous people, and the longer conservatives listen to them, the harder it is going to be to build effective resistance to the Left.

I hope that J.D. Vance’s likely US Senate bid in 2022 becomes an opportunity to test this reader’s thesis. I hope J.D. runs against woke capital from the Right.  You might recall that back in 2016, when Hillbilly Elegy came out, he he was openly supportive of Trumpist themes, but said Trump was the wrong person to get things done (in the sense that he didn’t have what it took to follow through). He was right about that, as we now know. He seems to be positioning himself as a populist who takes it seriously.

To sum up the reader’s critique, voting Republican is not enough. Conservatives, in his view, have to vote for Republicans who are willing to take on Woke Capital and other left-captured institutions, even the US military — and not just take them on symbolically, but really make them pay a price.

I see this morning that Woke Capital is lining up against the state of Georgia over its new voting law. At least one prominent Georgia Republican gets what’s happening:

The CEOs’ comments triggered threats of backlash from Republican legislators who embraced the contentious election overhaul as a necessary measure to restore confidence.

Kemp and other GOP leaders say they were caught off guard by the opposition, and the Georgia House retaliated by narrowly voting to end a lucrative tax break on jet fuel during the final, frenzied day of the legislative session. The measure never came up for a final vote in the Senate, where leaders are more lukewarm on overtly punishing Delta.

“They like our public policy when we’re doing things that benefit them,” said House Speaker David Ralston, adding: “You don’t feed a dog that bites your hand. You got to keep that in mind sometimes.”

Leaving aside the merits or demerits of the Georgia law, this is once again Big Business throwing its weight around on legislation that has nothing to do with it. This is what they did in 2015, with the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act, bullying state lawmakers into repealing it. Whether or not the new Georgia law is good or bad, I resent the hell out of corporations pushing the state around like that. It is long past time for conservative voters to wake up and realize that Big Business is not our friend, and is in some cases our enemy.

Oh, even before I finished writing this, I checked Twitter, and it seems that J.D. Vance has declared himself:

https://t.co/Ji7GZrFCOA pic.twitter.com/DrlYLZi7l9

— J.D. Vance (@JDVance1) April 1, 2021

Great! More populist Republicans with spine, please!

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‘Live Not By Lies’ News

What are you doing today at 1pm Eastern? I’d like to invite you to join the online seminar sponsored by the Victims Of Communism Memorial Foundation, in which the scholar Flagg Taylor and I will be discussing Live Not By Lies, and the meaning of the European dissident movement generally. Flagg is close to the Benda family, whom I’ve celebrated in two books now, and is the editor of The Long Night of the Watchman, the English language edition of the late Vaclav Benda’s essays. It’s free to watch it online, but you need to register here.

I’m happy to report that last week, we crossed the 100,000 threshold in the numbers of Live Not By Lies copies sold. Thank you all so much for your support. This book has sold so well — better than any of my previous books by far — without coverage in the mainstream media. It is moving primarily by word of mouth. I keep hearing from people that they encountered the book, realized how true and how urgently important its message was, and told everybody they know that they need to get this book. The best advocate for Live Not By Lies has been the news cycle, as it becomes impossible for people to deny the advance of soft totalitarianism.

But some still are. Yesterday I had two separate conversations with Evangelical friends who report running into a wall of denial in their respective churches. One is dealing with his own congregation, and the other is dealing with a broader church body, but both report that too many people are still wanting to believe that everything is normal, and will work out fine if we just sit still and wait. One of my friends said church leaders he’s talking to want to avoid talking about any of this, because it feels too controversial. Fear of controversy is going to be fatal for traditional Christians. The wolves really are at the door.

In the book, I talk about how Slovak Catholic bishops chastised Father Tomislav Kolakovic, and told him to stop alarming the laity in the 1943-46 period, with his talk about how the Communists were going to take power in that country, and persecute the Church. It can’t happen here, they said. Thankfully, Father Kolakovic did not listen to them, and continued his work building the rudiments of an underground church. When the Iron Curtain fell over Czechoslovakia, and the persecution began, some Slovak Catholics were ready for it because they listened to Father Kolakovic, and not the don’t worry, be happy bromides of their bishops.

So it is with us.

I have other news. I wanted to pass along an exciting update, and an invitation to get involved.

I have just partnered with like-minded film producers based in Los Angeles to develop video content and a documentary project inspired by Live Not By Lies. The book has struck a resonant chord with Christians and others who recognize that some form of left-wing totalitarianism — that is, an ideological attempt to impose conformity on the population, and to suppress, even persecute, dissenters, especially religious ones — is emerging now. We want to make a documentary about the experiences of the dissidents I feature in the book, and others. We want to let them tell their stories, to issue their warnings to the West, and to share their advice for how to prepare. But we want it to be much broader than just a movie.

This spring we will launch Phase One of the content campaign, which involves the creation of an online community of people who have lived under totalitarian regimes around the world. We will be building out this online presence with unique videos, interviews, Q&As, and live streamed events featuring me and other significant cultural voices on the subject of soft totalitarianism, free speech, and invasive technologies.

Concurrently, Phase Two will involve the development of a feature-length documentary film, further exploring the themes and storylines found in the book with a specific additional focus on things like the Christian church in contemporary China and its sphere of influence. In Live Not By Lies, I limited my focus to the churches of the Soviet bloc, because that is where my experience and contacts were. Of course there is a wealth of testimonies from Christians and other anti-communist dissidents from China and other Asian nations, and also from Cuba and now, Venezuela. We want to empower those voices to warn the contemporary West, and the Western churches. In fact, it might even be more important to hear from Chinese Christians, because they are having to live through a persecution aided by modern surveillance technology. What we are going to be dealing with in America is in some ways more like what Chinese Christians and other anti-communist dissidents are dealing with than what the Soviet-bloc believers did.

If you have any interest in participating in these efforts, please reach out and the producers will be in touch about the details: livenotbyliesproject – at – gmail.com.

Again, I thank you all for your interest and support. I deeply believe in the importance of this work, and in its urgency. If you are able to help get the message out, please join us.

 

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Which God Is Served At Duke Divinity?

Yesterday I posted this tweet:A reader of this blog who follows me on Twitter, and who has had recent experience studying at Duke Divinity School (I checked), wrote me about this. He remains shaken by his time there. I have slightly edited his e-mail to remove identifying details, and publish this with his permission:

The sentiments Dr. Freeman shared in that tweet are not unusual for Duke Divinity professors. With Dean Greg Jones, a moderate Methodist, leaving this summer, and the famous incident concerning the Catholic professor at Duke [I wrote about that case here and here — RD], there has been a growing intolerance at Duke, a school which once prided itself on being moderate when compared to Yale or Harvard, while still being a great school.Curtis’ tweet is symptomatic of the culture at Duke, among faculty and students. Kendi and other racial theorists are now fairly common on syllabi. [Deleted a sentence because it made a specific comment about a professor based on hearsay. — RD] It is also common to read and hear things (from professors) like: “Jesus was queer,” “Jesus is non-binary,” as well as statements that amount to: “if you think homosexuality is wrong, then you hate homosexuals and are a bigot.” Further, many professors, most notably the emerita professor, Mary McClintock Fulkerson, are huge Foucault fans, which is problematic on many levels.It all boils down to this: white people are evil, destined for evil; if you are a conservative you can go rot in hell, even though we don’t believe in hell. I know I sound ridiculous, especially with the first statement; however, I am telling the truth. This is the messaging at its most basic level.Another popular book to read for classes at Duke includes “Jesus and John Wayne” by Kristen Kobes Du Mez, a professor at Calvin, who decries the evangelical movement (and really religious conservatives in general) with nearly no citations. Has Duke had its issues in the past? Certainly! (This can be seen in particular with its treatment of Willie Jennings who made a turn to the radical after pretty bad mistreatment at the school; he is now writing loony things at Yale.) However, Duke is turning into Yale and Harvard. It has been slower, but it is coming. My message to future divinity school students, whatever their denominational leanings: do not go to Duke anymore.For many years, Duke Divinity was the school of Hauerwas, Richard Hays, EP Sanders and many other fabulous theologians who literally changed the world of New Testament, even I would argue for Catholics and Orthodox. Now we have people like Curtis Freeman, Valerie Cooper, and transgender activist Robyn Henderson-Espinoza who routinely say in class sentiments similar to Dr. Freeman’s tweets. They hate evangelicals. They hate religious conservatives. I promise you, Mr. Dreher, they will sell their brothers and sisters to the consumer state.I have many friends at Duke who have been ostracized and criticized for being traditional Christians, whether they be Methodists or Catholics. At Duke the goal is no longer to form the next EP Sanders, the next Richard Hays, or the next Hauerwas. The goal is to destroy evangelicals and anyone who stands in the way of the BLM/LGBTQIA religion. If you need more stories or evidence, I have them. Just let me know.

In related Duke Divinity news, these dropped today:It turns out that CJ — a female-to-male transgender — has a turbulent inner life:She doesn’t like the governor of Texas any more than she likes Ronald Reagan:Or me:Mmmmph! The idea that I would be scared of a fragile loony like this pitiable 26-year-old dementor, whose name I don’t even know, is risible. I read around this unwell young woman’s Substack, and let me tell you, her Twitter feed and her Substack tell us more about the kind of place Duke Divinity is than they do about her. No kidding, she’s angry and unstable, but she’s angry and unstable for the Woke, so hey, come on down and train for serving the church. Seriously, this testifies to the decadence of one of America’s most prestigious institutions of theological training. What could someone so spite-filled and disordered have to tell anybody about God? Anyway, she’ll fit in at Duke, sounds like.I have heard similar stories from people I’ve met in recent years who, like my correspondent, have attended prestigious divinity schools. I can think of specific stories from Harvard, Yale, and Emory, but there are others. I’m genuinely curious to know how and why these schools have become so radically divorced from anything like historically normative Christianity. I’m also interested to know why anybody who considers himself a religious moderate or conservative attend them. Sounds completely miserable.

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Trans Girls & Techno-Utopia

Please take six minutes and watch this Prager U presentation by Abigail Shrier on Prager U, explaining the core thesis of her controversial bestseller Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters:

This might be the most important six minutes of your day. I’m serious. Last night, a Massachusetts friend told me that he had been helping a homeschooling Catholic family whose teenage daughter announced that she is trans. How did the mind virus get to her? Through the smartphone her parents gave her so she could stay in touch with them on trips with her sports team.

If you have more time, listen to Shrier’s 90-minute podcast interview with Jordan Peterson. I know all this information already, because I’ve been following her, but it never fails to shock. It’s like a science fiction movie. To be clear, Shrier says she is not anti-trans; she says she has no problem at all with adults who have transitioned after making an informed choice. It’s the way the trans phenomenon expresses itself among adolescent and teenage girls that concerns her. She said it has every indication of being a social phenomenon propelled by teen and adolescent female psychology (the same thing that causes rashes of cutting, anorexia, and other self-harm among girls that age), and that it is encouraged by activists, media, and the medical industry. The damage that these kids do to their bodies is, well, irreversible. It is beyond crazy that we allow children and minors to make these permanent life-altering decisions. Shrier points out that in Oregon, the medical age of consent is 15. That means your daughter can have her breasts removed and get on testosterone without your consent, even though she cannot legally buy a wine cooler.

Peterson tries to burrow down to the core philosophical concept behind the trans phenomenon, and trans activism. I was driving when I heard this discussion, so I can’t remember whether this is what Shrier and Peterson said, or my own opinion. I think it is all about the satanic false promise in the Garden of Eden ye shall be as gods. We want to be self-created. We want to make the natural world capitulate to our wills. We not only want it to, we demand that it do so. We think this will make us happy. It never has, though; it’s contrary to our nature. We will be in for a great re-learning, but not for some time yet.

You will not hear this perspective in our media. You need to hear it, though, especially if you have daughters. You really do. I heard today from two different well-informed friends involved in their (conservative) churches, who are trying to head off their churches surrendering to Ibram X. Kendi Thought, and who get nothing but blank stares and shrugs when they try to wake their fellow congregants up. Nobody wants to hear it. Everybody wants to go along, pretending everything is going to be okay, because woke craziness can’t happen to them.

I often feel like I’m beating a dead horse here, but then I’ll realize how relatively few people understand what is being done to this country by bad actors who hold the cultural and institutional high ground, so I keep on.

Yesterday I heard a great podcast by Jonathan Pageau, who interviewed Neil DeGraide, half of the pop duo Dirt Poor Robins. They break down four songs from the DPR concept album Deadhorse, which is about a world in which humanity has freed itself from all natural limits, but made itself miserable, and a stranger to itself. The subject of transgenderism doesn’t come up, but it’s hard not to think about it when DeGraide discusses how technology has abstracted us from each other and from the natural world, such that we think that achieving a state of frictionless pleasure is not only possible, but our sovereign right. The Dirt Poor Robins have this gorgeous, terrifying song, “No Land Beyond,” about the cost of losing a sense of transcendence, and losing the ability to read patterns in the natural world that connect us to reality. I love these lines:

If you don’t know
Why the bell tolls
You’ll only hear the chimes

If you don’t know of
The language spoken
You’ll only hear the rhymes

More powerful lines:

My kingdom come
My will be done
All trials shunned
I must be loved by everyone
I know if I wasn’t so terrified
I might see the light
Not as a flame or end of life
For us there was no land
No land beyond the edges of our outstretched hands
Can we beggars understand
More than our appetite demands?

Below is the video for the whole song (and this is a link to the entire Deadhorse concept album in one long YouTube video). These poor girls of whom Abigail Shrier speaks and writes are victims of a dystopian world of unreality. Their bodies and their lives are collateral damage of our techno-utopian hubris.

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Ruining Music To Accommodate Trans Insanity

Jessye DeSilva, a male performer and vocal teacher who identifies as queer, rails against trans bigotry in vocal music. Excerpt:

While we can perhaps generalize by saying that a singer who undergoes testosterone-dominant puberty during adolescence will have a relatively larger larynx, vocal tract, and vocal folds, we have to also understand that every voice is different regardless of gender identity. No two cis women have the same size and shape vocal tract (not to mention resonance chambers!). We cannot dissect our students to look at and measure the physical differences between their larynges, but we know this to be true on some level. And so why do we continue to treat their voices as if they must line up on two sides of the spectrum in terms of gender? I may have come to this philosophy through a lens of inclusivity and safety for myself and my gender nonconforming students, but what of my cisgender students whose voices don’t fit the perceived norm? How many singers who identify as cisgender have developed inferiority complexes when they discover something “different” about their own instruments? When we talk about timbre in terms of what is to be desired or expected, we aren’t necessarily talking about vocal science, rather we are often talking about aesthetics. Rather than equating aesthetics with fact, wouldn’t our field be so much richer if we could teach the voice in front of us to sing with efficiency and comfort, and to explore the colors available to them as they relate to the styles THEY want to sing? Many of us who are teachers have experienced some form of gatekeeping in relation to our own journeys as students. Why would we want to place similar gates in the paths of our students?

While many strict categorical notions of the voice come from the western classical tradition, those of us who work in the diverse field of popular musics often receive our training either in classical programs or from teachers who began there. This issue of academia and training is perhaps another conversation entirely, but suffice it to say, the roots of white supremacy and cisnormativity run DEEP not only in our society, but also in our field! If we want to combat elitism in the music community and fully explore the diversity of styles available to us today, we must also re-examine the role of gender in upholding an outdated (and frankly, inaccurate) notion of how we view the human voice.

Who are you to tell that baritone with boobs that “she” can’t sing the soprano part? Bigot!

This is not just a random kook’s opinion. The reader who sent that to me said these conversations have been going on in music for at least five years. Here, for example, is a link to a piece on transgender choral students from Choral Journal, a journal of the field. Excerpt:

As the gender landscape in the United States becomes more complex, choral teachers may find it necessary to reconsider the structure and/or names of their choral ensembles. Will a “women’s choir” at the high school level serve the needs of all women—including trans women who sing in the lower octave? Will a “men’s choir” be inclusive of trans men who formerly sang soprano—or still wish to? Sara and Jon both sang in high school co-ed ensembles in which they transitioned quite easily. Skyler (who identifies as a-gender and uses they/them/their pronouns)began in a single-gender ensemble then moved into two co-ed choirs. Skyler was unsure about how they would feel about singing in a single-gender ensemble now that they have disclosed their non-binary identity. They said, “Sometimes I’m a little unsure about being in groups that are specifically labeled for a gender.” There are no easy answers. Choral educators should learn as much as they can about gender and how it influences their choral philosophy and pedagogy. If they discover incongruence, perhaps a change in program structure (or simply an ensemble name change) is called for.

Yes, in fact, there are easy answers: stick with what works. You cannot refute the reality of sound by insisting that reality fit into your imaginative construct, for the sake of creating a fake social harmony that doesn’t exist. This is madness. Progressives are behaving like Charles Foster Kane, pushing his wife Susan to perform in opera though she can’t sing it, because he thought he could, by force of will, bend reality to his desires.

These progressives are going to ruin music for the sake of Social Justice. They refuse to see the world as it is. When will this stop? When will people tell the Emperor that he can’t sing soprano?

It’s going to happen sooner or later. But not before a lot of insanity, and a lot of destruction.

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Crybullies Sue Christian Colleges

A professor of law sent this Washington Post story to me, with the comment:

A suit to “Bob Jones” Christian schools—take away their tax exempt status for discriminating against LGBTQ students, just like what happened to Bob Jones U when it used to ban interracial dating. There are some technical legal problems (regarding standing to sue) for the private plaintiffs, but one wonders how much the Biden administration will resist.

What does the Post story say? Excerpts:

Elizabeth Hunter says she became suicidal after Bob Jones University administrators grilled the former student about her sexuality for tweeting “happy Pride” and writing a book with lesbian characters. She was fined, sent to anti-gay counseling and removed from her job at the campus TV station. Veronica Penales says she’s told officials at Baylor University, where she is a sophomore, that people leave anti-gay notes on her door, but they don’t investigate. Lucas Wilson said he graduated from Liberty University with “a profound sense of shame” after being encouraged to go to conversion therapy.

The three are among 33 current and past students at federally funded Christian colleges and universities cited in a federal lawsuit filed Monday against the U.S. Department of Education. The suit says the religious exemption the schools are given that allow them to have discriminatory policies is unconstitutional because they receive government funding. The class-action suit, filed by the nonprofit Religious Exemption Accountability Project, references 25 schools across the country.

“The Plaintiffs seek safety and justice for themselves and for the countless sexual and gender minority students whose oppression, fueled by government funding, and unrestrained by government intervention, persists with injurious consequences to mind, body and soul,” reads the suit, filed in U.S. District Court in Oregon. “The Department’s inaction leaves students unprotected from the harms of conversion therapy, expulsion, denial of housing and healthcare, sexual and physical abuse and harassment, as well as the less visible, but no less damaging, consequences of institutionalized shame, fear, anxiety and loneliness.”

So they chose to go to these Christian schools, but are now trying to break the Christian schools to their will. More:

The suit injects dozens of personal experiences into a debate about religious liberty and ­LGBTQ rights that’s often been more legalistic. It seeks to put individual faces and names on an aspect of Equality Act debate that doesn’t get much attention — students at conservative Christian schools.

It cites a gay ICU nurse who said he was admitted to a graduate nursing program, sold his car, left his old job and was days away from starting school when he was allegedly told his admission was rescinded because he is engaged to a man. “A grown man with a successful career, loving family and fiancé, [he] went into his closet, curled up in a ball and cried,” the suit says. It cites a queer student who recalls being regularly called slurs on a Christian school’s campus and is afraid to walk at night alone. According to the suit, that person is often subject to disciplinary action for wearing feminine-style clothing. Another said he was fired as a resident assistant and then kicked out of school for being openly bisexual.

Why on earth would you intentionally go to a conservative Christian university, one whose policies towards gay sexuality were clear, then curl up in a ball and cry when the school acts on the basis of its clearly stated policies? Nobody should be called slurs on a campus, Christian or not, but why is that a matter for federal court? And if a school wants to kick men out for wearing women’s clothes, why shouldn’t they have that right? What these plaintiffs are trying to do is to compel every school in this country to conform, even at the cost of their consciences.

Read it all.

From the REAP website, here’s a profile of one of the plantiffs:

Hayden Brown lives in York, NE. He identifies as a queer demiboy and is majoring in English Education with an emphasis in reading instruction.

Hayden studies at York College. They came out as part of the LGBTQ+ community the summer after their freshman year to their parents, who forced him into therapy designed to push Hayden toward changing their identity. School officials have attempted to interfere with her education, including by asking her to withdraw from a study abroad program in Vienna, Austria because of her sexual orientation, and by telling her to change her clothes when she wears high heels or dresses.

So York College has to have all federal funding taken away because queer demiboy wants to wear dresses to class, and his Christian school says no, you can’t do it. Great. This is what the Left fights for now.

From the profile of plaintiff Jake Picker, whose photo is at the top of this item:

Jake Picker lives in Waco, TX. He identifies as queer.

He attends Baylor University as a pre-med student and expects to graduate in May 2021 with a degree in Biology and Biochemistry. Baylor has several official anti-LGBTQ+ student policies, including stating, “Christian churches across the ages and around the world have affirmed purity in singleness and fidelity in marriage between a man and a woman as the biblical norm. Temptations to deviate from this norm include both heterosexual sex outside of marriage and homosexual behavior.” This policy and others like it result in Jake feeling unsafe and unprotected at school.

So he can’t even name a single harm he suffered! He just feels “unsafe and unprotected.” Religious liberty should be taken from Baylor because this queer crybully chose to attend a Baptist university whose policies were perfectly clear before he filed his application, and because Christian teaching hurts his feelings. It’s infuriating.

These plaintiffs are not victims. They are crybullies. What they seek in this lawsuit is the end of exemptions to Title IX for religious schools. What this would mean is that religious schools would either have to change their policies on LGBT, or lose all federal funding. The crybullies and the progressives will not stop until they have crushed dissenting Christians.

The thing about the famous 1982 Bob Jones case is that SCOTUS held that the IRS can remove the tax-exempt status of a religious school because “[g]overnment has a fundamental, overriding interest in eradicating racial discrimination in education . . . which substantially outweighs whatever burden denial of tax benefits places on [the University’s] exercise of their religious beliefs.” I’d like to hear the opinions of lawyers in this blog’s readership, but it seems to me that the Biden administration could simply announce a policy change at the IRS, and tax exemption for religious colleges and universities that discriminate against LGBTs would disappear.

Understand, though, that the Bob Jones case involved federal tax exemption, but the federal LGBT lawsuit would be even broader, taking away all federal funding from non-compliant schools.

It’s not enough that LGBT folks have nearly every university in the country. They’re going to smash the few Christians holdouts. Love wins through hatred.

 

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