Rod Dreher's Blog, page 74

Who Is The Plenty Coups Of The Christians?

Well, more bad news on the religion front, this time from Gallup:

Sarah Pulliam Bailey, writing in the WaPo, qualifies the numbers:

Tara Isabella Burton, author of “Strange Rites: New Religions for a Godless World,” attributes the national decline in religious affiliation to two major trends among younger Americans. First, she points to broader shifts suggesting a larger distrust of institutions, including police and pharmaceutical companies. Some Americans are disillusioned by the behavior of religious leaders, including the Roman Catholic Church’s sexual abuse scandal and the strong White evangelical alignment with former president Donald Trump.

Southern Baptists see historic drop in membership

The other major trend Burton describes is how people are mixing and matching from various religious traditions to create their own. Many people who don’t identify with a particular religious institution still say they believe in God, pray or do things that tend to be associated with faith.

“Why shouldn’t I pray or meditate or attend a liturgy, or perhaps I feel closer to the divine when I can do something privately rather than something that’s prescribed for me,” she said. “It’s my own spin on it.”

Younger generations that grew up with the Internet have a different kind of relationship with information, texts and hierarchy, Burton said.

“Existing trends in American religious life were exacerbated by generations that grew up in Internet culture that celebrates ownership — the idea that you can re-create a meme or narrative,” she said. “You have ownership over curating your own experience.”

That makes perfect sense, but this is still terrible news for Christianity (and other forms of revealed religion). Christianity, Judaism, Islam and other religions proclaim that their teachings are objectively true. This new spirituality holds the choosing individual as the ultimate arbiter of truth. What the choosers are doing is worshiping themselves. In most respects, we are no better off with a “spiritual but not religious” people, because the revealed truth will be lost in one or more generations. The only advantage I can see is that the young who give themselves over to this cafeteria spirituality are at least not denying the reality of the numinous and the transcendent, as atheists do. That is a starting place for true conversion.

Shadi Hamid notes the danger, saying that Trumpism/QAnon on the Right and wokeness on the Left have become pseudo-religions for people:

“The vacuum [of religion] can’t just remain a vacuum,” Hamid said. “Americans are believers in some sense, and there has to be structures of belief and belonging. The question is, what takes the place of that religious affiliation?”

Hate to remind you, but in the early 20th century, Communism and Nazism moved into the place created by exhausted Christianity. These political ideologies were pseudo-religions. Among a number of young American Christians, the pseudo-religion of wokeness is parasitically conquering Christian structures and language, because even though it is counter-Christian in some key ways, it provides a more vigorous experience of moral rectitude and purpose.

Anyway, the new Gallup data are just one more sign that we are in a post-Christian nation. My book The Benedict Option came out four years ago this month. A lot of Christians said it was too pessimistic, even alarmist. I wonder how these words from the first chapter look now, in light of all that has happened since then, and in light of the new Gallup findings:

The advance of gay civil rights, along with a reversal of religious liberties for believers who do not accept the LGBT agenda, had been slowly but steadily happening for years. The U.S. Supreme Court’s Obergefell decision declaring a constitutional right to same-sex marriage was the Waterloo of religious conservatism. It was  the moment that the Sexual Revolution triumphed decisively, and the culture war, as we have known it since the 1960s, came to an end. In the wake of Obergefell, Christian beliefs about the sexual complementarity of marriage are considered to be abominable prejudice—and in a growing number of cases, punishable. The public square has been lost.

Not only have we lost the public square, but the supposed high ground of our churches is no safe place either. So what if those around us don’t share our morality? We can still retain our faith and teaching within the walls of our churches, we may think, but that’s placing unwarranted confidence in the health of our religious institutions. The changes that have overtaken the West in modern times have revolutionized everything, even the church, which no longer forms souls but caters to selves. As conservative Anglican theologian Ephraim Radner has said, “There is no safe place in the world or in our churches within which to be a Christian. It is a new epoch.”

Don’t be fooled by the large number of churches you see today. Unprecedented numbers of young adult Americans say they have no religious affiliation at all. According to the Pew Research Center, one in three 18-to-29-year-olds have put religion aside, if they ever picked it up in the first place.2 If the demographic trends continue, our churches will soon be empty.

Even more troubling, many of the churches that do stay open will have been hollowed out by a sneaky kind of secularism to the point where the “Christianity” taught there is devoid of power and life. It has already happened in most of them. In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton examined the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers from a wide variety of backgrounds. What they found was that in most cases, teenagers adhered to a mushy pseudoreligion the researchers deemed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD).

MTD has five basic tenets:

1.  A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
2.  God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
3.  The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
4. God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
5. Good people go to heaven when they die.

This creed, they found, is especially prominent among Catholic and Mainline Protestant teenagers. Evangelical teenagers fared measurably better but were still far from historic biblical orthodoxy. Smith and Denton claimed that MTD is colonizing existing Christian churches, destroying biblical Christianity from within, and replacing it with a pseudo-Christianity that is “only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.”

MTD is not entirely wrong. After all, God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering—the Way of the Cross—as the pathway to God. Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.

As bleak as Christian Smith’s 2005 findings were, his follow-up research, a third installment of which was published in 2011, was even grimmer. Surveying the moral beliefs of 18-to-23-year-olds, Smith and his colleagues found that only 40 percent of young Christians sampled said that their personal moral beliefs were grounded in the Bible or some other religious sensibility.4 Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the beliefs of even these faithful are biblically coherent. Many of these “Christians” are actually committed moral individualists who neither know nor practice a coherent Bible-based morality.

An astonishing 61 percent of the emerging adults had no moral problem at all with materialism and consumerism. An added 30 percent expressed some qualms but figured it was not worth worrying about. In this view, say Smith and his team, “all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”

These are not bad people. Rather, they are young adults who have been terribly failed by family, church, and the other institutions that formed—or rather, failed to form—their consciences and their imaginations.

MTD is the de facto religion not simply of American teenagers but also of American adults. To a remarkable degree, teenagers have adopted the religious attitudes of their parents. We have been an MTD nation for some time now, though that may have been disguised.

“America has lived a long time off its thin Christian veneer, partly necessitated by the Cold War,” Smith told me in an interview. “That is all finally being stripped away by the combination of mass consumer capitalism and liberal individualism.”

The data from Smith and other researchers make clear what so many of us are desperate to deny: the flood is rising to the rafters in the American church. Every single congregation in America must ask itself if it has compromised so much with the world that it has been compromised in its faithfulness. Is the Christianity we have been living out in our families, congregations, and communities a means of deeper conversion, or does it function as a vaccination against taking faith with the seriousness the Gospel demands?

If you haven’t read the book yet, then read the whole thing.  I met a prominent West Coast Evangelical pastor last fall in Nashville. He told me that when The Benedict Option came out in 2017, a lot of people in his circles dismissed it as alarmist. Now, he said, it’s their reality.

Last week, I read a fascinating short book relevant to this issue, and wrote about on Daily Dreher, my Substack newsletter. I almost never quote my newsletter here, but the Gallup news makes this pertinent. Here’s what I wrote, in part:

I have just finished, within the past few minutes, an extraordinary book. It is short — you can read it in one long sitting — and very much worth your time. It is called Radical Hope: Ethics In The Face of Cultural Devastation, by Jonathan Lear. It is about Plenty Coups (1848-1932), the last great chief of the Crow tribe, and how a dream vision he had as a boy guided his people in the agonizing transition between their traditional way of life, and modernity imposed by the white man. This little book, and the life and work of Chief Plenty Coups, has much to teach us traditional Christians in this post-Christian, and increasingly anti-Christian, age.

I learned about the book when one of you, or perhaps someone who reads my blog (I’m not sure; information comes at me these days in a firehose stream), sent me this 2009 review essay by the philosopher Charles Taylor. Taylor writes:

Radical Hope is first of all an analysis of what is involved when a culture dies. This has been the fate of many aboriginal peoples in the last couple of centuries. Jonathan Lear takes as the main subject of his study the Crow tribe of the western US, who were more or less pressured to give up their hunting way of life and enter a reservation near the end of the nineteenth century.

The issue is not genocide. Many of the Crow people survive; but their culture is gone. Lear takes as his basic text a statement by the tribe’s great chief, Plenty Coups, describing the transition many years after in the late 1920s, near the end of his life: “When the buffalo went away the hearts of my people fell to the ground, and they could not lift them up again. After this nothing happened.”

Lear concentrates on those last four words. What can they mean? Of course, they could be an expression of dejection, of depression. But he sets that aside for good reasons. He argues that if we interpret the statement psychologically, we are being “guided by our own sense of what is true” and ignoring the question of “Plenty Coups’s humanity” and the particular cultural circumstances in which he found himself. We have to take this expression more literally. We can grasp it if we try to understand the Crow culture when it was fully functioning, when hunting (mainly of buffalo), and then war, which was necessary to maintain a sufficient territory for hunting, were the crucial activities around which excellence and honor revolved. The concept of a “coup” (reflected in the informant’s name) was of a heroic exploit, but of a very special kind. The sense of the word is more or less the same it has in the English borrowing from the French, as when someone says: “I pulled off a great coup.”

“After this, nothing happened” means, in Lear’s interpretation, that nothing comprehensible to the traditional Crow way of understanding happened. Their worldview was smashed to bits by the coming of the white man.

When the white man conquered all Indians, he put an end to the way of life in which achieving coups in the Crow way was possible. Jonathan Lear, the author, tries to explain how utterly devastating the victory of white culture over Indian culture was by using the metaphor of a restaurant. Say you went to a restaurant and ordered a buffalo burger, but were told that buffalo burgers were no longer on the menu, because there are no more buffalo. That would be bad, but that’s not really what the Crow suffered. Rather, imagine that you wanted to go to a restaurant to order a buffalo burger, but discovered that restaurants no longer existed, and that “ordering” had no meaning. That is more like what the Crow endured.

That is to say, everything that gave their lives meaning was taken from them. They came from a warrior culture, in which excellence was understood to be fighting well and victoriously. The telos of the tribe was victory in war. The women of the tribe understood their roles as preparing their men for war against their enemies, principally the Sioux. All of that was taken from them, and from all Indian tribes, by the white man. Lear’s book doesn’t argue whether or not this was right; he rather examines the phenomenon of cultural collapse, and investigates the role this visionary chief, Plenty Coups, played in giving his people hope through the storm.

Lear talks about one manifestation of cultural collapse: the fate of the Sun Dance. It was an important religious ritual for the Crow, connected to their militarism:

To take one example we have already encountered: The Sun Dance, being a prayer for revenge, was naturally saturated with military episodes. What is one to do with the Sun Dance when it is no longer possible to fight? Roughly speaking, a culture faced with this kind of devastation has three choices:

1. Keep dancing even though the point of the dance has been lost. The ritual continues, though no one can any longer say what the dance is for.

2. Invent a new aim for the dance. The dance continues, but now its purpose is, for example, to facilitate good negotiations with whites, usher good weather for farming, or restore health to a sick relative.

3. Give up the dance. This is an implicit recognition that there is no longer any point in dancing the Sun Dance.

When I read this, the first thing that came to mind was a story told to me by the headmaster of a Christian school serving the poor in a major city. All of the students there were either black or Hispanic. The headmaster told me about a time that the grandfather of two little black girls (whom he was raising) could not make it to school to pick them up on time. The headmaster took the girls to his own home to await the grandfather. The children were fascinated by framed photographs of the headmaster and his wife at their wedding.

The older of the little girls pointed to one of the pictures, then said to her sister, “See, this is how it’s supposed to be.”

As went the Sun Dance for the Crow, so has gone marriage for the urban black poor. And now the loss of the meaning of marriage is spreading more widely in our civilization. We are forgetting how to do this, and why.

We are also forgetting the meaning of Christianity. Some continue to carry out the rituals, though no one can say with confidence what the rituals are for. Those people are dying out. Others — the young — are giving up the religion. That leaves the rest of us to figure out how to live out the faith in these radically new circumstances.

Back to the Crow. Lear says that the collapse of the telos of the Crow tribe destroyed their idea of what it meant to be a Crow. In other words, it was a devastating attack on “Crow subjectivity.” Lear writes:

If the traditional Crow experienced devastation in things they might do, they also experienced a terrible attack on what they might be. If we consider a vibrant culture, it is possible to distinguish:

1. Established social roles. These will include socially sanctioned forms of marriage, sexual reproduction, family, and clan; standard social positions such as warrior, squaw, medicine man, and chief; ceremonial rituals; and so on.

2. Standards of excellence associated with these roles. These give us a sense of a culture’s own ideals: what it would be, say, to be really outstanding as a chief, as a squaw, as a warrior, as a medicine man.

3. The possibility of constituting oneself as a certain sort of person-namely, one who embodies those ideals. I shall call such a person a Crow subject. This is what young Plenty Coups aspired to: to be a chief, to be outstanding as chief, and thus to be a living embodiment of what it was to be a Crow.

The idea of a Crow subject requires more than this sort of identification. It requires internalizing the ideals associated with the standards of excellence associated with social roles. And it requires making those ideals a life’s task. To take an example from traditional Crow culture, being a Crow warrior subjectively understood was not just a matter of occupying the social role of Crow warrior.

Nor was it merely a matter of being extremely good at being a Crow warrior-understood as a social role. That is, it was not enough merely to be very good at killing Sioux in battle, and so on. To be a Crow subject one had to fulfill these conditions, but one also needed to constitute oneself as a person for whom living up to the relevant ideals constituted who one was.

This was more than a mere psychological matter of “identifying” oneself in a particular way. It required a steadfast commitment stretching over much of one’s life to organize one’s life in relation to those ideals. And it required a certain success in doing so. That is, being a Crow subject required more than inhabiting a social role, being excellent in that role, and even identifying oneself in those terms. It required all these things, but in addition it required a lifelong commitment to shaping oneself to be this kind of person. Subjectivity, so understood, is a never-ending task.

This helps me understand more clearly what I was getting at in The Benedict Option: advocating for the creation of ways of life within which authentic Christian subjectivity can be realized in the face of a hostile broader culture that denies it. In my judgment, most Western Christians today haven’t really contemplated the terrifying fact that Christian subjectivity (in the Lear sense) is being devastated by post-Christian culture. The change that has come over the West in a short period of time has not been comprehended by most Christians, who believe falsely that it is possible to continue living the faith without real effort. That is, they don’t comprehend how radical the attack on Christianity is. And they don’t comprehend the futility of a response based on the false idea that we simply need to keep doing the same things that we have always done, and everything will work out.

Lear says that by 1940, it became possible to ask an ironic question that would have made no sense in 1840: “Among the Crow, is there a Crow?” That is, among the people who still identify as Crow, is there to be found anyone who is recognizably Crow? How do you know? More:

Alma Hogan Snell reports that her grandmother regularly complained, “I’m living a life I don’t understand”: She would lament, “I’m living a life I don’t understand.” She would be working and talking-then immediately she would fall silent. She would continue to work, but she was silent. I would be with her, and I would sit silent and wait for her. I became accustomed to that, so I was a very quiet individual at times. Then she’d come up with this sound she always made, “Hummmm, aaahh.”

She said it mournfully, like this thing that she was thinking about in her mind was so overwhelming; “Why has this thing come upon us? Now we are made to say `yes’ and `no.’ When the white man comes to us, we just naturally say `yes.’ We are not obligated to take what he has, but my children, my grandchildren are always right there to say, `Yes, we’ll do it. We’ll do it.’ They seem to like to do it. They seem to like what they see. I feel like I am losing my children to this new world of life that I don’t know.””

Sounds like a lot of Christian parents I know. By now you may be thinking, “What can we Christians learn from the cultural catastrophe that befell the Indians?”

So let’s ask: what did Plenty Coups do for his people?

As a boy, Plenty Coups did what Crow males often did, which was to fast and go out into the woods to dream. He had a dream in which he was shown the disappearance of the buffalo, and the triumph of the white man, symbolized by a devastating storm. This would devastate his people. But they could overcome it, said the dream, if they would listen to the voice of the chickadee. In Crow culture, the chickadee is a small bird, but a very wise one. The meaning here is that the Crow should learn to rely on their intelligence to prevail. The old martial values of Crow life would not help them survive against the war being waged against them. They needed something different.

Lear’s account of the dream’s meaning:

As a youth, alone in the woods for a few days as part of a tribal ritual of manhood, Plenty Coups dreamt of a storm that would fell all but one of the trees of the forest. On that one, lone surviving tree was a chickadee, a humble member of the Crow people’s aviary pantheon, noted for its capacity to listen and adaptively change course. When Plenty Coups returned, he told the dream to the tribal elders who interpreted it to mean that the Crow would face some catastrophe (the dream’s devastating storm) and that to survive it they would have to adapt from Crow virtues to Chickadee ones: from war virtues to other, more humble habits like listening, observing, and adapting to new situations, trading one sort of courage (martial) for another. They thought that the old Chickadee, who was no Crow, would have to be repurposed as a new icon of a new kind of courage and take the old Crow’s place.

A tribal elder said:

“The tribes who have fought the White man have all been beaten, wiped out. By listening as the Chickadee listens, we may escape this and keep our lands.”

The Crow accepted communally this interpretation of the dream, and committed themselves to living by its wisdom — this, even though the dream had not specified what the wisdom of the Chickadee would mean precisely for them.

Plenty Coups grew up to lead his tribe through this agonizing transition. The Crow made common cause with the white man against their enemies, not, said Plenty Coups, out of love for the white man or hatred for their enemies, but because they reckoned that this was the only way for them to survive as a people and keep their land.

Lear:

This is a problem for moral psychology. If, roughly speaking, we believe ought implies can: if we think that in these challenging tines people ought to find new ways-not just of surviving-but of living well, we need to give an account of how it might be psychologically possible to do so. It would be depressing news indeed to learn that, should a civilization collapse, there might nevertheless be decent ways to go forward-but the best people of the civilization would be the least equipped to find them. Is it in the lineaments of our psychological natures that my flourishing as a member of my culture makes me less able to confront the challenges of a radically new future?

That is, are there ways in which a person brought up in a culture’s traditional understanding of courage might draw upon his own inner resources to broaden his understanding of what courage might be? In such a case, one would begin with a culture’s thick understanding of courage; but one would somehow find ways to thin it out: find ways to face circumstances courageously that the older thick conception never envisaged. The issue would then be one not simply of going over to the thick concepts of another culture, but of drawing on their traditions in novel ways in the face of novel challenges.

If this is a possible act, it would be good to know what kind of psychological adjustments make it possible. I want to argue that Plenty Coups did make just this sort of transformation.

First, the entire tribe fortified itself for this apocalypse by taking Plenty Coups’ dream as a valid prophecy sent by God. They could not fully comprehend its meaning at the time. All they could be sure of was that apocalypse was coming, and that they would survive as a people only by listening to the wisdom of the Chickadee. Lear writes:

The only substantive commitment embodied in the chickadee virtue is that if one listens and learns from others in the right way-even in radically different circumstances, even with the collapse of one’s world-something good will come of it.

We would like our ethics to be grounded in psychological reality. Thus whatever flexibility is required of a virtuous person, it ought to be something that can be inculcated in the education and training of a culture. But a culture does not tend to train the young to endure its own breakdown-and it is fairly easy to see why. A culture embodies a sense of life’s possibilities, and it tries to instill that sense in the young. An outstanding young member of the culture will learn to face these possibilities well. The situation we are dealing with here, however, is the breakdown of a culture’s sense of possibility itself.

This inability to conceive of its own devastation will tend to be the blind spot of any culture. By and large a culture will not teach its young: “These are ways in which you can succeed, and these are ways in which you will fail; these are dangers you might face, and here are opportunities; these acts are shameful, and these are worthy of honor-and, oh yes, one more thing, this entire structure of evaluating the world might cease to make sense.”

This is not an impossible thought to teach, but it is a relatively new idea in the history of cultures, and one can see why a robust culture would avoid it.

You can see in this why so few Christians today can conceive of our own devastation, and why we are not preparing our young for what is coming into being now. Plenty Coups’ dream-vision prepared the Crow people for the catastrophic reality coming for them, but also offered them hope for survival.

Plenty Coups led his people toward compromise with the white man, and allyship, even though he had every reason to believe that their world was over. He was trying to shore up a place for his people amid the ruins of Indian life. The Sioux, on the other hand, chose to fight to the end. Chief Sitting Bull of the Sioux criticized the Crow as collaborators. But time has shown that Plenty Coups’ vision was vindicated. Those who resisted the white man violently, however much courage that required, lost everything. The Crow managed to negotiate much better terms for themselves, and to come through the crisis in far better shape than their rival tribes.

This, says Lear, is because Plenty Coups gave his people “radical hope” — that is, hope that despite apocalypse, survival is possible if the people meet the onrushing crisis with a certain understanding. This is the virtue of the Chickadee: to listen and, despite your weakness, to pivot wisely based on the information you gather. Lear says that the Crow had to alter their definition of courage in the face of radically new circumstances. The old warrior virtues were useless under these new conditions. It was impossible to defeat the might of the white man. Plenty Coups saw that if it was impossible to survive this kind of fight, then it was no longer honorable to die this way, but rash. What Plenty Coups did, anchored by his faith that his dream was truly sent by God, was to redefine what it meant to be courageous, and what it meant for the Crow to live well.

Plenty Coups encouraged the young people of his tribe to get an education, because only by learning the knowledge of the white man would they be able to protect their people from the white man’s depredations. And he made a number of trips to Washington to fight — often successfully — for the land rights of his people. He was under no illusions about the white man, but he berated those of his people who surrendered to victimhood (though they were indeed victims!), saying to them, “Self-pity has stolen your courage, robbed you of your spirit and self-respect.”

Lear explains the “radical hope” of Plenty Coups like this:

Thus I think the case is made not just that it was psychologically advantageous not to give in to despair but also that it would have been a mistake to do so. It would also have been a mistake to “go down fighting.” The radical hope that was embedded in the ideal of the chickadee helped Plenty Coups throughout his life to make creative decisions in radically new historical circumstances.

And his fidelity to hope fits all of Aristotle’s hallmarks of courage. With the virtue of the chickadee he was able to reorient himself to what was genuinely shameful (criterion 1)-and to teach others. What would be shameful now would be to turn one’s back on the genuine wisdom of others; to give in to despair; to nostalgically insist that one can go back to the old ways without any change.

At a certain historical point, feeling ashamed that you can no longer live as a traditional warrior may be psychologically understandable, but it is a mistake. By providing an ideal for the times, Plenty Coups did not merely give himself and his people the psychological resources to adapt to a new situation; he also gave them an ideal in relation to which they could aim for something fine (criterion 2).

The aim was not merely the biological survival of the individual members of the tribe-however important that was-but the future flourishing of traditional tribal values, customs, and memories in a new context. This is an admirable goal. Moreover, the virtue of the chickadee explicitly advocates developing good judgment, and making decisions on how to act that are based on knowledge (criterion 3). This has been evident in the tribe’s defense of its land. And Plenty Coups’s strategy has involved serious risk (criterion 4).

This was not the paradigm risk of death on the battlefield, to be sure. It was a greater risk: that one had reoriented oneself toward shame in the wrong sort of way, and was unwittingly doing something shameful, not fine; that one’s strategy would not ultimately work and that the Crow would lose their land, their values-indeed, that they would be destroyed as a people. The stakes could not have been higher for Plenty Coups and his people.

Finally, it has been the aim of this entire chapter to argue that Plenty Coups’s radical hope was not mere wish-fulfilling optimism (criterion 5), but was rather a radical form of hope that constituted courage and made it possible. After all, through a series of canny decisions and acts, the Crow were able to hold onto their land, and Plenty Coups helped to create a space in which traditional Crow values can be preserved in memory, transmitted to a new generation, and, one hopes, renewed in a new historical era. This was possible because Plenty Coups was able to bring about an astonishing imaginative transformation.

Through his dream — and his fidelity to it — Plenty Coups was able to transform the destruction of a telos into a teleological suspension of the ethical. A traditional way of life was being destroyed, and along with it came the destruction of its conception of the good life. The nature of human happiness became essentially unclear and problematic. In such conditions, the temptation to despair is all but overwhelming.

And it was in just such a moment that Plenty Coups’s dream predicted that destruction and offered an image of salvation-and a route to it. The traditional forms of living a good life were going to be destroyed, but there was spiritual backing for the thought that new good forms of living would arise for the Crow, if only they would adhere to the virtues of the chickadee.

… I often receive criticism from other Christians who say that the Benedict Option is a form of surrender. These are people you might call Sitting Bull Christians. I don’t doubt their bravery, and I wish it were possible to prevail following their counsel, but I think it is a wasted gesture if you are riding horses into the face of liquid modernity’s Panzer divisions. This is what we are facing now. How can we endure faithfully, and having endured faithfully, prevail over those who would destroy us, body and soul, and our cultural memory of what it means to be Christian? This is what constitutes victory for Christians in the post-Christian world.

We really are living through a civilizational apocalypse that is visiting on us small-o orthodox Christians the same disorientation and dispossession that the coming of modernity via the US Army and the pioneers visited on the Crow and other Indian tribes. Chief Plenty Coups was baptized into the Catholic Church in 1917. We have the right to hope that he is in heaven, and that he will pray for us to attend to the wisdom of the Chickadee.

(If you like that kind of content, you can subscribe to Daily Dreher here, for five dollars a month.)

In light of the catastrophe that is overtaking us, familiar modes of Christian leadership are dead, dead, dead. We need leaders who can give us radical hope, and who can forge a path for us within which we can remember who we are, and what we are to do. Yes, we are waiting for another, doubtless very different, St. Benedict, but we are also waiting for another, doubtless very different, Plenty Coups.

The post Who Is The Plenty Coups Of The Christians? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Attack Of The SJW Karens!

This is absolutely infuriating:

A group of current and former teachers and others in Loudoun County, Virginia, compiled a lengthy list of parents suspected of disagreeing with school system actions, including its teaching of controversial racial concepts — with a stated purpose in part to “infiltrate,” use “hackers” to silence parents’ communications, and “expose these people publicly.”

Members of a 624-member private Facebook group called “Anti-Racist Parents of Loudoun County” named parents and plotted fundraising and other offline work. Some used pseudonyms, but The Daily Wire has identified them as a who’s who of the affluent jurisdiction outside D.C., including school staff and elected officials.

The sheriff’s criminal investigations division is reviewing the matter — but the group’s activities might be no surprise to top law enforcement because the county’s prosecutor, narrowly elected with the help of $845,000 in cash from George Soros, appears to be a member of the Facebook group.

Secret communications reviewed by The Daily Wire do not offer any evidence of racism by the group’s targets. Their opponents were apparently those who objected to, sought to debate, or were even simply “neutral” about “critical race theory,” a radical philosophy opposed by many liberals and conservatives but increasingly embraced by governments.

In recent years, Loudoun’s school system has flooded its curricula and policies with racial rhetoric, paying about $500,000 to one racial consulting company alone. It required all staff to undergo “Equity in the Center” training that promoted a sense of injustice and urgency.

More:

What follows is the story of the wealthiest county in America descending into a moral panic as a group of suburban white women egged each other to extremes against perceived “evil,” while a school system seemed to slide from serving taxpayers to targeting them.

And:

In response, a local mother named Jen Durham began what turned into a massive thread, writing:

This is a call for volunteers to combat the anti-CRT activities of the P.A.C.T. folks, the stoplcpscrt website, and the like. Looking for folks who are interested in volunteering to organize, lead, execute, and donate regarding the following points:

Gather information (community mailing lists, list of folks who are in charge of the anti-CRT movement, lists of local lawmakers/folks in charge) Infiltrate (create fake online profiles and join these groups to collect and communicate information, hackers who can either shut down their websites or redirect them to pro-CRT/anti-racist informational webpages) Spread information (expose these people publicly, create online petitions, create counter-mailings) Find a way to gather donations for these efforts. Volunteering is great, but these activities can be costly and not everyone has extra funds readily available

Anyone who is interested in this, please feel free to comment here or PM me directly and indicate what you can help with. Then we can hold a kickoff call and start on action items.

“I’m listing them this way: -First name -Last name -Alias(es) -Location,” Durham wrote.

“I’m losing any hope that remaining civil towards these people changes anything,” she wrote. “Avoiding these people isn’t enough to stop the spread of their evil rhetoric.”

“Anyone know any hackers?” she reiterated.

You’ve got to read the whole thing. These are mostly Loudoun County elites conspiring to trash parents who object to Critical Race Theory in the schools. It is shocking. And it shows you what parents are up against. These parents are “evil” according to one of the activists. Therefore, anything goes.

A similar story from The New York Times, about laws coming up in state legislatures to keep biological boys out of girls’ sports. Notice the framing here:

The last time Republicans in South Dakota made a serious push to bar transgender girls from school sports, in 2019, their bill was known only by its nondescript numerical title, Senate Bill 49. Its two main sponsors were men. And it died without ever getting out of committee, just 10 days after it was introduced.

But when Republicans decided to try again in January, they were far more strategic in their approach. The sponsors this time were two women who modeled their bill after a template provided by a conservative legal organization. They gave the bill a name that suggested noble intent: the “act to promote continued fairness in women’s sports.” Supporters from Minnesota and Idaho traveled to the Capitol in Pierre to testify that a new law was urgently needed to keep anyone with male biological characteristics out of female competitions, even though they acknowledged only a handful of examples of that happening in South Dakota.

“These efforts appear to be far more slick, and far more organized,” said Elizabeth A. Skarin of the American Civil Liberties Union of South Dakota, which opposes the bill. “Anytime they give a bill a name in South Dakota,” she added, “you know something’s up.”

Then things took an unexpected turn. Gov. Kristi Noem, who is seen as a possible contender for the Republican presidential nomination in 2024, demanded changes to the bill. The response was swift and harsh: Social conservative activists and Republican lawmakers accused Ms. Noem of bowing to pressure from business and athletics organizations, which have been successful at stopping laws in other states that single out transgender people for exclusion and feed ugly stereotypes. On Monday, the legislature rejected her changes, setting up a showdown that could drag out for several days.

South Dakota is just one of a growing number of states where Republicans are diving into a culture war clash that seems to have come out of nowhere. It has been brought about by a coordinated and poll-tested campaign by social conservative organizations like the American Principles Project and Concerned Women for America, which say they are determined to move forward with what may be one of their last footholds in the fight against expanding L.G.B.T.Q. rights.

It’s classical “Republicans pounce” framing. Gosh, they have no idea why Republicans are eager to fight this culture war. The story goes on to say that there are only a tiny number of trans athletes who want to compete, so why are these awful Republicans, spurred on by Ben Shapiro and Tucker Carlson, being so mean? Well, maybe because conservatives are becoming more aware of the Law of Merited Impossibility as an operating principle of the Left. There are almost no transgender athletes wishing to compete, and when there’s a bunch of them, you bigots are going to deserve it. 

So, The New York Times would like you all to know that you parents and others who are concerned about this are being tools of right-wing media and the GOP, who want to “feed ugly stereotypes” about trans athletes. Like what? That biological males (like Hannah Mouncey, 6’2″ and 250 lbs) dominate females?

Spot Hannah Mouncey, the biological male on this Australian women’s team

The connection between the Loudoun County conspiracy against parents and the NYT “Republicans pounce on transgenders” story is that the elites within the various systems are aligned against ordinary people, and parents. They are like Jen Durham; they see us as “evil,” and therefore in no way deserving of fair play.

Never, ever believe the mainstream media when it comes to reporting on issues having to do with sexual orientation and gender identity, race, immigration, or other hot button social issues. And question everything about your local education bureaucracy too. None of these people have your best interests at heart.

The post Attack Of The SJW Karens! appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Lovely People’ & The Social Credit System

A reader sent me a link to something extraordinary: a short graphic novel called Lovely People, by Minna Sundberg. It’s about life under a social credit system. Excerpts:

“Alizongle” is an amalgam of Alibaba, Amazon, and Google. It’s a shopping behemoth that’s integrated with the State. Here’s a Christian character discovering that the Bible she reads on her device has now been revised, and that if she doesn’t accept the revised version, it will cost her severely in social credit.

 

If you have had trouble wrapping your mind around how a social credit system works, read this graphic novel. Show it to your kids. Tell them that this is what we have to prepare ourselves to fight.

Yesterday I had lunch with two interesting young men traveling through my city on a spring break errand. They are Christian college students who attend two prominent public universities back East. I’ll call them Jack and Ken. They came recommended by a friend who was their teacher in high school. Jack and Ken are fans of my work, and wanted to meet me. I did it as a favor to my friend, their teacher, but it turned out to be a real pleasure for me.

I say “pleasure,” despite the grimness of our discussion. I find that it is always a pleasure to spend time with people who are awake to the harsh reality of what we are facing, and not surrendering to soft totalitarianism. A lot of what Jack and Ken told me was just confirmation of what I already know to be true. But they gave me information that was new to me as well. I did not take notes, so what follows is the best I can remember.

I had not realized how systemic wokeness is. Both young men talked about how everything in their colleges is set up to compel conformity. For example, Jack talked about how at freshman orientation, he and all the other male freshman had to endure days of instruction in how rotten men are, and how they’re all potential rapists. Then, on the last day, they all signed pledges to disrupt masculinity. Jack said he’s ashamed of himself now for signing it, but he was a freshman just starting college, and this was put in front of him.

Ken said that at his university, he has been ashamed this past year to hear himself saying things in class that he doesn’t believe. To voice any kind of dissent from the progressive position on anything is to invite a mob pile-on, he said. But to be silent hurts your grade, which is determined in part by class participation. So you end up saying things you don’t believe for the sake of protecting your grade while also guarding your back from the woke mob attack. Ken is embarrassed for himself for having been so manipulated.

The guys — both Evangelicals — talked about how they’re seeing churches and college ministries collapse in the face of wokeness. One said that in a campus ministry he’s involved with, the ministry took a stance against sexually active gays in leadership. Now there’s a push to have that ministry kicked off campus, and students involved with the ministry are resigning from it. (I looked this up later, and it’s true.) Both men talked about how Critical Race Theory is tearing through churches now, and how it is impossible to discuss or debate it with adherents — in their circles, all white middle class people.

One of them said that he has learned from this experience that for most white middle-class people, church is about affirming what the white middle class thinks is good. When white middle class standards change — as they have for homosexuality, and as they are now doing for race — then churches change too. It’s not about church changing culture; it’s about culture changing the church. This is happening all over. Jack said that Social Justice ideology is parasitically conquering churches and church organizations to which his generation belongs.

“When you have been raised in suburban Evangelicalism,” said Jack, “when church group is about not much more than hanging out with your friends, playing a few games, and talking about your feelings, you end up craving something that gives you an experience of depth and moral purpose. That’s why so many of my generation are falling for BLM and social justice. It gives them the challenge that they’ve been dying to have, but have never gotten from anything at church.”

We talked also about their Christian high school, which started out as traditional and conservative, but which is becoming woke under pressure from parents to provide their kids for middle-class success. We discussed how many conservative Christian parents claim that they want a Christian education for their kids, but what they really want is the same experience they could get in a public or secular private school, with a little Jesus sauce on top.

What I took away from this lunch conversation with these two exceptionally mature young men is the truth of Conquest’s Second Law of Politics: Any organization not explicitly right-wing sooner or later becomes left-wing. And I got a better understanding of why we will have a social credit system in this country sooner rather than later: the woke gatekeepers are discipling a generation of conformists, and making the cost of dissent higher than most are willing to pay.

These two young men struck me as the kind of people who have seen the future the world is planning for them, and who have decided to dissent. They both said that The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies have been key for them. One of the guys said that at a coffee shop he likes to frequent, the owner keeps a stack of Live Not By Lies, and passes them out to patrons he thinks would benefit from reading it. I forgot to ask the name of that coffee shop, so Ken, if you’re reading this, write me to tell me. I would like to contact the owner to thank him.

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Mohammed Anwar’s Mystery Murderers

Y’all, I’m old enough to remember when the Journalism-Industrial Complex went berserk when it thought a teenage boy in a MAGA hat gave the stink-eye to an elderly Indian. Heck, I’m even old enough to remember when a white Southern Baptist sex-obsessed incel went berserk and shot up massage parlors where prostitution is on the menu, and where he had been to seeking service in the past, the Journalism-Industrial Complex crapped its pants over the Racist Implications Of It All.

Well, in Our Nation’s Capital the other day, two teen girls — a 13-year-old and a 15-year-old — allegedly tazed an Uber Eats driver in an attempt to steal his car, and ran off with it, crashing the thing and killing the driver, who was a South Asian immigrant, Mohammed Anwar.

You can read the entire account of the felony murder in the Washington Post and never learn a thing about the race of the alleged carjackers. But if you watch the video, you will see that they are black:

Black teenagers allegedly kill South Asian man in carjacking. It would seem that if we were concerned about crimes against Asians, this would be a story. But as of this writing, there is nothing about it in The New York Times. I googled to see if any of the networks had covered it. NBC News had something three days ago, which did not mention the race of the alleged perpetrators. This is understandable, because at that point, no video existed. Well, now it does. The story has not been updated. The other two networks aren’t carrying it, at least not that I could find. USA Today finally reported the story this afternoon, but said nothing about the race of those arrested for the crime.

The New York Post reported on it, but did not mention the race of the alleged perpetrators (though it did embed a video). Nothing on NPR, as of this writing.

As a matter of news judgment, I can understand not including race in crime reporting if it does not appear to be connected to the crime. But our news media did not care that one bit of evidence in the Atlanta mass murder connects that crime to racial animus (an NPR show last week conducted a lengthy interview with a professor who said that yeah, the Atlanta police say there is no evidence of racial bias in that crime, but they probably don’t know what they’re talking about). That suspected killer was a white man, and therefore fit the narrative. There is as much evidence that the crime that these two black juveniles are charged with had an anti-Asian racial-bias element as there was that the Atlanta shootings were racially biased — but the media treat these stories with very different standards.

Besides, how do we know race is not relevant to the crime? NBC 4 in Washington, in its report about Anwar’s killing, reported these data about the rise in carjackings:

The story also had an interview with an unpaid (white) member of the DC city government structure, who said that carjackings involving juveniles are definitely increasing, and one with a black neighborhood activist talking about the same. What nobody is saying is the race of these juvenile carjackers. Why is that significant? Because if there is a common profile of these carjackers, it would give potential victims a little more information they could use to protect themselves. But God forbid that the media would encourage racial profiling, even if it stood to save the lives of men like Mohammed Anwar.

An anecdote about that: When I was living in Dallas years ago, and working at the Dallas Morning News, I remember how crazy it was one afternoon that police put out an alert about an armed robber on the loose in an Uptown neighborhood, but my newspaper would not give out the man’s race. We knew he was black, because the police, in putting out a description, said so. It was relevant! Here was an armed robber on the loose, and cops wanted people to be aware, and on the defense. But somebody in our newsroom decided it was more important that the public not have potential anti-black stereotypes reaffirmed than that the public protect itself from a gunman who happened to be black.

A USA Today “race and inclusion editor” lost her job after tweeting this out about the Boulder mass shooting last week:

The alleged shooter, of course, is of Syrian extraction.

I’m just surprised that USA Today fired her. Anyway, in the wake of her dismissal, Jhaveri wrote an essay about how she’s the real victim here. Excerpt:

I’ve often written that, in sports, the burden of speaking out against racism, sexism and homophobia often falls on the shoulders of marginalized players. Within USA TODAY, most of this work is also done by racialized reporters. In my case, I rarely, if ever, had the support of USA TODAY’s top editors. When the fall out from each column left me vulnerable to social media attacks and harassment, USA TODAY never offered public, institutional support.

As a columnist and editor, I’ve had to walk the fine line of advocating for diverse and better stories, while also realizing that the comfort of our white audiences needed to be kept top of mind. On social media, that is what I failed at. There is nothing so offensive to some readers as calling out white supremacy, or, as the backlash over this Oral Roberts University column shows, taking a difficult stand for true equality and inclusion.

Sadly, none of this is new.

This is not about bias, or keeping personal opinions off of Twitter. It’s about challenging whiteness and being punished for it. As a columnist and Race and Inclusion editor with our Sports Media Group, it was my job to push for anti-racism and inclusion in our stories and with our staff. That work can not be done without calling out existing power relations, often in a public forum.

I bet Jhaveri was honestly shocked at her firing. She was hired to racialize stories, and to push the Narrative into daily journalism.

Last week, Heather Mac Donald published a piece at Quillette talking about how anti-Asian hate crimes have mostly been carried out by black suspects. Excerpts:

In fact, the suspects in all of these cases were black; the news reports rarely mentioned that detail. Had the suspects been white, their race would have led each news report, as it did for Robert Aaron Long. A former member of the Oakland police department’s robbery undercover suppression team tells me that this racial pattern of attack and its lack of coverage is longstanding. No one cares about Asian robbery victims, he says, “We used to follow around elderly Asians, waiting for the bad guys to start circling. This has been one of my long-term frustrations. They are pretending to care now but ironically blaming it on white supremacy”—even though the suspects in Asian robbery attacks are almost exclusively, in this cop’s experience, black.

The New York Police Department compiles the most extensive data on hate crimes in the country. These data confirm the Oakland officer’s observation. A black New Yorker is over six times as likely to commit a hate crime against an Asian as a white New Yorker, according to New York Police Department data. In 2020, blacks made up 50 percent of all suspects in anti-Asian attacks in New York City, even though blacks are 24 percent of the city’s population. Whites made up 10 percent of all suspects in anti-Asian attacks in 2020 in New York City but account for 32 percent of the city’s population. If we include black Hispanics in the black category, blacks account for 60 percent of all anti-Asian attacks in 2020.

More:

White supremacy is also apparently getting whites beaten up. Blacks commit 88 percent of all interracial violence between whites and blacks, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Yet on March 22nd, 2021, CNN ran a special entitled “Afraid: Fear in America’s Communities of Color,” as if whites were putting US minorities at risk. The move to blame white supremacy for black-perpetrated attacks on Asians results in a strange linguistic divide. Press reports refer to activists condemning “anti-Asian racism” and fighting anti-Asian “hate.” The intended referent in such observations is whites. But the actual referent is blacks.

The lie about white supremacist violence is not innocuous. It forms the basis of the Biden administration’s policy in national security and in a host of domestic welfare programs. It is the pretext for Big Tech and Big Media’s silencing of speech. And the shamelessness with which that lie is constructed grows more brazen by the day. It must be fought with facts before it irrevocably alters our culture.

Read it all.

Does anyone doubt that the death of Mohammed Anwar would be national news if his alleged killers were white? How disgusting our media are. It’s all Narrative, all the time. It’s so often about managing the story instead of telling the truth and letting people make up their own minds. It’s about manufacturing consent for this wholesale neoracist renovation of American society to fit woke standards.

Muriel Bowser, the black Washington DC mayor, has as of this writing said nothing publicly about the killing of Mohammed Anwar. But she did tweet this victim-blaming post out (and deleted it after harsh criticism):

This is the same Muriel Bowser who repainted a block of a DC street leading to the White House thus (seen in this satellite image):

But she can’t find a word to say about an elderly brown man who appears to have been killed in a carjacking by two black teenagers.

And of course, the media remain silent, lost in their bubble. I talked the other day to a friend who works in national journalism, a Boomer who is a robust liberal, but an honest, old-fashioned one. He was furious about the state of the profession. Said that his news organization doesn’t even try to be fair anymore. Said if he could afford it, he would retire, and wash his hands of the whole damn thing, this profession to which he has devoted his life, and even earlier in his career, reporting from a dangerous part of the world, risked his life. I don’t blame him.

Interestingly, that friend mentioned that he was at a social gathering in which he found himself talking to a married couple who immigrated from China. He told me that they said the things they see happening in America now remind them of what happened in their native country in the Cultural Revolution.

“You know that that’s what my book is about, right?” I said to my friend. He did not.

I went on to say that I keep hearing this same message over and over from immigrants to America from Communist countries, but nobody in the media ever writes about it. They don’t want to know. I told him I’ve sold 100,000 copies of Live Not By Lies in five months, based largely on word of mouth, as the mainstream media have ignored it.

“There is zero chance that [his news organization] would cover your book,” he said, angrily. He wasn’t apologizing, nor should he apologize. He was angry because as an honest liberal, he knows that this is a story — what immigrants from Communist countries are saying — but one that his news organization would suppress because it doesn’t fit the Narrative.

 

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Lil Nas X’s Satan Shoes

This is not a joke:

Lil Nas X is fully leaning into his new hellish aesthetic — teaming up with an idea org to release “Satan Shoes” … this on the heels of his polarizing music video on the same subject.

The rapper/pop star is putting out a limited release of Nike sneakers that are all about the Prince of Darkness and his kingdom … right down to the box artwork and even the shoe design itself, which features a pentagram emblem sitting on the laces.

The shoe body is a Nike Air Max ’97, which MSCHF — the company behind this campaign — has reinvented with Nas X’s new ‘Montero’ song and video in mind. It’s got a bible scripture emblazoned on the side, Luke 10:18, which references Satan’s banishment from heaven.

There’s also a 666 reference toward the back of the shoe … with another number in front of it, alluding to which limited unit it is. Word is, MSCHF/Nike are only dishing out 666 of these puppies to the public … so if you have 6/666, that seems to mean you got the 6th model.

Here’s the kicker … apparently, these shoes will contain one drop of human blood somewhere along the soles. And no, not the metaphorical blood, sweat and tears of the factory workers who will presumably put these together … like, actual plasma-filled red stuff.

This comes after the release of the new video by the gay hip-hop artist, which shows him being seduced by Satan in the form of a serpent going down on him. Then Lil Nas X slides down a stripper poll to Hell to give Lucifer a lap dance, and to position himself to be sodomized by the Devil.

homophobes who accuse gay people of going to hell, with the dethroning of Satan as a means of ‘dismantling the throne of judgment and punishment that has kept many of us from embracing our true selves out of fear.’

RS also says that a leader of the Church of Satan, David Harris, thinks the video is awesome:

Indeed, the ending of the video, in which Lil Nas X snaps Satan’s neck and puts the horns on his own head to crown himself as a god, is what struck Harris as “the most Satanic part of the video.” “We view ourselves as the most powerful beings in the world. The fact that he crowned himself as Satan — now, that’s Satanic,” he says, noting it’s especially empowering in the context of Lil Nas X making a statement about his own journey as a black gay artist who has faced bigotry.

As for the infamous intratheistic lap dance, far from being sacareligious [sic], Satanists believe in all forms of consensual sexuality, so “someone giving a lap dance to anyone who wants one is obviously more than welcome within the confines of Satanism,” he says.

So there you have it: Lil Nas X has the Church of Satan’s stamp of approval. As one Lil Nas X fan summed up on Twitter, in response to tongue-clucking over the androgyny and lurid sexuality of the video: “Either you getting piped by satanhimself or u ain’t livin right.”

Either you are being sodomized by the Devil or you ain’t livin’ right. This is pop culture today, and Nike’s all over it, selling shoes that openly glorify the ultimate incarnation of evil.

Lil Nas X knows what he’s doing. Back in January, he told NPR:

Pride.com celebrates the song:

Even through the ridiculousness of it all, it’s definitely a moment for Lil Nas X and gay representation in pop culture at large. The song and video is unabashedly queer (one of the lyrics reads “shoot a child in your mouth while I’m ridin”), and watching a Black pop star strut around in underwear and heels and be embraced by much of the public and his fans feels momentous.

He’s not talking about actually firing bullets at children, but ejaculating. Classy, this guy.

Sign of these decadent times. From Live Not By Lies:

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

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

UPDATE: Nike says it did not produce these shoes. They are Nikes, but bought by some other company, which altered them. Don’t blame Nike for this.

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When Should A Conservative Speak Out?

A reader writes:

In yesterday’s post (“DoD Decline Into Wokeness”), your anonymous correspondent wrote this:

Regarding purging outspoken conservatives, everyone should think of social media as an information-gathering system for the secret police. Practice ketman or some other form of hiding within your organization. You may choose to sacrifice yourself by being a profile in courage, but once the activists and partisans who praise you move on, how will you feed your family? These are the economic realities of today’s America. If you are not being asked to renounce your faith, then consider that you can probably put up with a lot to protect your job.

I’ve seen this type of advice before, in your blog and elsewhere, and I see the sense in it. But a big part of me wants to push back: If conservatives stay quiet in public spaces, won’t we just facilitate the decline of those spaces and of culture? What we need, I want to say, is not fewer quiet conservatives who keep their heads down, but more outspoken conservatives who stand up straight. The time may come for all of us to hide in the shadows, but I don’t think we’re there yet — and hiding now will only hasten the day.

Of course, not all silence is cowardice. This decision must ultimately be a personal one, and there are plenty of good, prudent reasons for people to practice ketman: particularities of employment, the need for income stability, etc. For my part, I work at a nominally Christian college that is obviously shifting left but still has a formal commitment to genuine freedom for dissenting voices, so I’m much more outspoken than I would be if I worked at a secular company. Even so, I expect my job to be less secure in 5–10 years than it is today (which is to say, it will never be easier to speak my mind than it is right now).

I’m under no illusions that my social media posts are doing much good in stemming the progressive tide. But they may be doing some good, right? Even if I am only preaching to the choir, sometimes the choir needs a good preaching-to. My quieter conservative friends, or those in less sympathetic employment, may find themselves fortified and encouraged, may learn arguments and explore resources that will help them to live not by lies, or, at the very least, may read something that makes them say, “I’m not alone; I’m not crazy; someone else sees this, too,” and I have to believe that’s not nothing.

All of which is a long way to ask: How should people decide whether to practice ketman or to practice small, visible acts of defiance? Not people with tenure or with significant platforms and name recognition, but everyday people with everyday jobs and everyday lives who look around and think, “No, I’m pretty sure women aren’t men — may I not say so?” I know what Jordan Peterson would and perhaps should do, but what about my buddy Kyle?

I’m curious to see what you or your readers might advise.

That’s a great letter. I find that I am being asked the same thing more often in interviews for Live Not By Lies. It’s a hard question to answer, because I don’t want some poor soul who is a family breadwinner to blow that up on my advice, when I don’t know all the pertinent facts. The fact is, there is no way to do this without risking suffering — and that’s okay. What I usually tell people is to talk about it with their pastor and with others whose wisdom they trust before doing it. But that seems unsatisfying too. I want to give people clear, unqualified advice, but I find that to be impossible without knowing more about their personal situation.

What do you think? I will only take serious answers in the comments — no progressive trolling on this question.

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‘Equitable Streets’

The mindset that James Lindsay calls “Critical Social Justice” makes it impossible to think certain thoughts. Take a look at what Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg just tweeted:

These disparities are awful, but we know how to fix them. It’s time to reverse these patterns of exclusion and invest in safer, equitable streets.https://t.co/PXZX1qsMyV pic.twitter.com/qbUU1jXtgu

— Secretary Pete Buttigieg (@SecretaryPete) March 24, 2021

“Equitable streets”? What he’s talking about is the fact that, according to this report, poor people, black people, and Native Americans die disproportionately crossing the street:

Also, poor people:

Look, I have no trouble believing that street design in poorer neighborhoods is overall less pedestrian-friendly than in wealthier neighborhoods. I’m not saying that I do believe it; I’m just saying that it seems plausible.

Nevertheless, the idea that because more black people die in pedestrian accidents than whites, Latinos, or Asians, our street design is “inequitable,” and therefore disadvantages black people, is pretty shaky. In academic studies, persistent poverty has been linked to a lack of self-control (see, for example, here), though there is real debate about causation (i.e., are poor people poor because they lack self-control, or does poverty create a lack of self-control in individuals suffering it?). Might it not be the case that the higher rates of pedestrian deaths among the poor, and among black Americans, might have to do with lesser self-control?

Maybe, maybe not. But it’s worth considering. Why are Asian pedestrians far less likely to be hit by cars than white and Hispanic pedestrians? Could there be something in Asian culture that rewards cautiousness, and inculcates it into those within the culture?

When I moved to New York City, one of the first things I learned is that jaywalking — crossing a street against the light — is common. You can usually tell who the tourists in Manhattan are by their refusal to jaywalk. Jaywalking is dangerous, but it is embedded in the culture of New York City. Toward the end of his last term, Mayor Giuliani tried to get cops to enforce the anti-jaywalking laws, but it was hopeless, and they gave up quickly. Whenever I go to Europe, it feels weird not to jaywalk. And in truth, it’s a lot easier to get away with jaywalking in a more freewheeling culture like Italy than in buttoned-up Germany.

Russia is well known for having lots of driving accidents, including involving pedestrians. It’s so bad there that you can find compilations on YouTube of Russian close calls with pedestrians. This article looks into the problem. Excerpt:

Russians have long believed that careless driving is just a part of the national mentality, and that foreigners are somehow more responsible drivers, unlike Russians who love to break the rules. This is not quite true, however, argues Alexander Shumsky, head of Probok.net, a project that works on improving the country’s transportation system.

There is no such thing as a national driving mentality, adds Shumsky, but rather, only a set of habits that results from the existing environment: the quality of road infrastructure, traffic management and society’s general cultural level.

“When we put Russians into a German environment, for example, they become more law-abiding, and it’s not because of the high fines but because the surrounding culture doesn’t let them stand out,” Shumsky explains. “The same is true the other way round: if we put a German into a Russian context, then after a short while he or she will start to drive the way Russians do, breaking the rules, etc. – all because the surrounding environment pushes him or her to do it.”

Basically, people are the same all over the world: they cross the street, exceed the speed limit and make U-turns in places where it’s convenient for them, even if it means breaking the rules.

The article goes on to say that there are structural problems with Russian street design and traffic laws, the changing of which might fix the problem. But it does say that Russians have a habit of doing what they want to do — crossing the street where they want to cross, regardless of whether or not there’s a crosswalk there, and just paying the fines for speeding, and continuing to drive like they want to. So there is a cultural element that makes Russia a much more dangerous place to drive than in Europe and the US.

Anyway, the idea that the disparities in pedestrian deaths can only be explained through racism shows the poverty of Critical Social Justice thought. Ibram X. Kendi writes:

Racial inequity is when two or more racial groups are not standing on approximately equal footing. Here’s an example of racial inequity: 71 percent of White families lived in owner-occupied homes in 2014, compared to 45 percent of Latinx families and 41 percent of Black families. Racial equity is when two or more racial groups are standing on a relatively equal footing. An example of racial equity would be if there were relatively equitable percentages of all three racial groups living in owner-occupied homes in the forties, seventies, or, better, nineties.

A racist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial inequity between racial groups. An antiracist policy is any measure that produces or sustains racial equity between racial groups. By policy, I mean written and unwritten laws, rules, procedures, processes, regulations, and guidelines that govern people. There is no such thing as a nonracist or race-neutral policy. Every policy in every institution in every community in every nation is producing or sustaining either racial inequity or equity between racial groups.

So because proportionally more black people die in pedestrian accidents than nonblack people, our streets are inequitable. The Transportation Secretary believes that we must build equitable streets, whatever that is. Individual agency has no role in street crossing. It can only be those bigoted streets. The Biden administration is going to build streets so perfect that nobody has to exercise common sense in crossing them.

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The Hate Crimes False Narrative

I’ve said this before here on many occasions, but it still boggles my mind to think about how clueless the Left is about the way they are using race to demonize half the country, and to create the conditions for bitter racial hostility. In Oakland, a bunch of rich people have given money to be distributed, via the Mayor’s Office, to poor families in this Covid crisis — but not poor white families:

A program to give $500 monthly checks to low-income families of color in Oakland, California, has been criticized for explicitly excluding the 10,000 white residents living in poverty in the city.

The lottery system, funded by private philanthropists, will see the no-strings-attached checks go to households with an annual income of less than $59,000 if they have at least one child. The other half of the $500 checks will go to those earning under $30,000.

According to data from an Oakland Equity Indicators Report, cited by officials to justify favoring people of color, white households earn about three times that of African-American ones.

The same report states around 8 per cent of the city’s white residents, approximately 10,000 people, live in poverty.

Schaaf told the Associated Press the reason for limiting eligibility to black, indigenous and other people of color was that white households in Oakland make on average about three times as much as black households.

Mayor Schaaf said: ‘We have designed this demonstration project to add to the body of evidence, and to begin this relentless campaign to adopt a guaranteed income federally.’

These progressives are so race-blind that they think — or at least behave like they think — that this is all white people:

When I was a junior in high school, a group of us went over spring break on a college tour of the Northeast and mid-Atlantic, led by our school’s guidance counselor. The short bus stopped somewhere in Appalachia for gas. I saw a white Appalachian family there gassing up their beat-up pick-up truck. The bed of the truck was full of scrawny, dirty, scabby children. I lived in a poor state, and in fact grew up in a rural part of it, where there is poverty, especially black poverty. But I had never seen anyone, black or white, as poor as that family. Nearly forty years later, I can still see in my mind’s eye the way a little boy with stringy blond hair looked at me through the bus window. It was like an outtake from those Walker Evans photographs of poor tenant farmers in the Depression. It felt like I was in another country.

But yeah, according to the Narrative, those white people are oppressors. Don’t feed the oppressor.

In Quillette, Heather Mac Donald has a good piece about how the Left cannot help but impose the Narrative on the recent mass shootings. Excerpts:

The problem with this interpretation [that the Atlanta shootings were an anti-Asian hate crime] was that there was no evidence to support it. Long told the police that he had targeted the three Atlanta spas to purge himself of his lust and his addiction to pornography. This explanation is wholly credible. All three establishments have been investigated for prostitution, and Long had frequented at least two of them. Customer reviews of the massage parlors attest to their provision of sexual services. Long has said nothing about Asian responsibility for the coronavirus. Indeed, if he were upset by a supposed connection between Asians and the pandemic, one would expect him to have avoided close contact with Asians. By all accounts, Long was tormented by an inability to control his sexual thoughts and behavior, which he believed to be a violation of his Christian faith. He also said nothing about hatred of Asians per se. Perhaps a revelation of anti-Asian animus will emerge, but for now, Long appears to have targeted presumed sex workers who happened, given the demographics of the massage trade in Atlanta, to be Asian. Long intended to target a business in Florida next that made pornography, he told police. The employees there were unlikely to be Asian.

The uncontradicted evidence for Long’s motivation and the absence of evidence for a white supremacist impulse were no impediment to the narrative. Anyone who doubted that narrative was complicit in white supremacy. Reuters was reprimanded on social media for the headline: “Sex addiction, not racial hatred, may have driven suspect in Georgia spa shootings.” The news organization’s revised attempt—“Motive in Georgia spa shootings uncertain, but Asian-Americans fearful”—earned it no absolution. “We don’t let mass casualty shooters diagnose themselves,” sniffed a terrorism expert at Georgia State University. Needless to say, had Long told the police that he was seeking revenge on Asians for COVID, his self-diagnosis would have been taken as definitive proof.

Both Harris and Biden obliquely referred to the question of motive while dismissing its relevance. “Whatever the killer’s motive, these facts are clear,” Harris said. “Six out of the eight people killed on Tuesday night were of Asian descent.” Biden was similarly unconcerned about the relationship between Long’s intentions and the atrocity’s significance: “Whatever the motivation, we know this: Too many Asian-Americans have been walking up and down the streets and worrying.”

Well, yes, but Harris doesn’t mention the fact that the anti-Asian hate crimes in this recent wave have been carried out by black assailants. Mac Donald lists a number of them, giving details of the crimes. She goes on:

In fact, the suspects in all of these cases were black; the news reports rarely mentioned that detail. Had the suspects been white, their race would have led each news report, as it did for Robert Aaron Long. A former member of the Oakland police department’s robbery undercover suppression team tells me that this racial pattern of attack and its lack of coverage is longstanding. No one cares about Asian robbery victims, he says, “We used to follow around elderly Asians, waiting for the bad guys to start circling. This has been one of my long-term frustrations. They are pretending to care now but ironically blaming it on white supremacy”—even though the suspects in Asian robbery attacks are almost exclusively, in this cop’s experience, black.

The New York Police Department compiles the most extensive data on hate crimes in the country. These data confirm the Oakland officer’s observation. A black New Yorker is over six times as likely to commit a hate crime against an Asian as a white New Yorker, according to New York Police Department data. In 2020, blacks made up 50 percent of all suspects in anti-Asian attacks in New York City, even though blacks are 24 percent of the city’s population. Whites made up 10 percent of all suspects in anti-Asian attacks in 2020 in New York City but account for 32 percent of the city’s population. If we include black Hispanics in the black category, blacks account for 60 percent of all anti-Asian attacks in 2020.

More:

White supremacy is also apparently getting whites beaten up. Blacks commit 88 percent of all interracial violence between whites and blacks, according to the Bureau of Justice Statistics. Yet on March 22nd, 2021, CNN ran a special entitled “Afraid: Fear in America’s Communities of Color,” as if whites were putting US minorities at risk. The move to blame white supremacy for black-perpetrated attacks on Asians results in a strange linguistic divide. Press reports refer to activists condemning “anti-Asian racism” and fighting anti-Asian “hate.” The intended referent in such observations is whites. But the actual referent is blacks.

The lie about white supremacist violence is not innocuous. It forms the basis of the Biden administration’s policy in national security and in a host of domestic welfare programs. It is the pretext for Big Tech and Big Media’s silencing of speech. And the shamelessness with which that lie is constructed grows more brazen by the day. It must be fought with facts before it irrevocably alters our culture.

Read it all. 

These lies, and this false narrative, is unquestionably going to spark a fierce white racial backlash. These progressive liars are summoning demons from the deep. I cannot imagine why these liars can’t see that. It’s probably because the only white people they know are those who either capitulate to it, or are so afraid to voice objections that the liars have reason to believe that these people accept the Narrative.

As Mac Donald says, though, this progressive racism is not innocuous. It is malicious, and is turning Americans of all races against each other, teaching us to live in fear and loathing.

Live not by lies!

 

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DoD Decline Into Wokeness

If you missed my colleague Shaun Rieley’s defense of Tucker Carlson’s criticism of the military, I urge you to read it. Rieley, for what it’s worth, is a veteran of the Iraq War. Excerpt:

This seems to be the rationale, for example, behind the Pentagon’s official press release responding to Carlson, which asserts that “the American military works best when it represents all the American people.” On this account, the military is, first and foremost, an egalitarian and representative body, rather than an exclusive and hierarchical one.

But we are entitled to ask: Is this true? Could viewing the military as a representative body, and members of the military as representatives of their respective identity group, make for a more effective service? The short answer is: No. An effective military is not identical with a representative one, and neither does the military exist to be a representative institution. In fact, the opposite is closer to the truth.

Carlson’s comments effectively highlight the tension between the social requirements of an effective military and the democratic social ideals of inclusion and equality. He was attacked for comments drawing attention back to the military’s purpose for existing: to defend the country and its citizens from existential threats. When this end is subverted in favor of ideological pursuits disconnected from the realities of warfare and statecraft, the military does risk becoming less effective, because priorities are being assigned based on a rationale other than the fighting and winning of wars.

On this issue, I heard from someone who is deeply embedded in the national security establishment, who has particular insights that this person would prefer not to be attached to his/her name, so I’m not going to say it. I have even agreed to paraphrase this person’s communication for their protection. What follows is not a direct quote, but the agreed-upon paraphrase:

The US military is transitioning into decadence. The top cadre of military leaders are willing to manage the decline as long as they don’t have to suffer for it. In the coming decades, most military activity will center on the effects of the decline of American global hegemony. Military leaders will likely choose to engage in direct fights only when they can be sure of victory (usually against non-state actors). The Iraq catastrophe probably means that the US will not engage in “pre-emptive” warfare, but will instead try to change regimes by fomenting revolutions.

We are not likely to fight China. War with China would be opposed by US-based global corporations, because it would be too costly for them. (On the culture war front, US corporate relationships with China is why the Chinese can run a police state with concentration camps, with no complaints, but the real threat is Russia and former Soviet bloc democracies and their anti-LGBT legislation.)

If the only actual adversaries that US military is likely to engage in the decades to come are non-state actors, they will be fairly easy to defeat (unless these adversaries figure out how to counter American drones). This is why the leadership class of the military doesn’t care as much as it should about the US losing its military edge.

And we are doing exactly that. This has been well-documented for some time:

https://www.washingtonpost.com/world/national-security/us-military-edge-has-eroded-to-a-dangerous-degree-study-for-congress-finds/2018/11/13/ea83fd96-e7bc-11e8-bd89-eecf3b178206_story.html

https://www.latimes.com/politics/la-na-pol-national-defense-study-20181114-story.html

https://www.nbcnews.com/think/opinion/china-s-military-capabilities-are-gaining-u-s-pentagon-needs-ncna1234383

So, the national security elites surely know this, and don’t intend to start a war with either Russia or China. What does this have to do with the top brass advancing wokeness in the military? Because they don’t actually think America is going to have to fight a real war, so this is one way they can advance professionally. The US military leadership understands that the Republican Party is never going to act against any agency or department of the military under any circumstances, so the military would do well to appease the Democrats.

Again, this is not my opinion, but the opinion of my interlocutor, who goes on:

Regarding purging outspoken conservatives, everyone should think of social media as an information-gathering system for the secret police. Practice ketman or some other form of hiding within your organization. You may choose to sacrifice yourself by being a profile in courage, but once the activists and partisans who praise you move on, how will you feed your family? These are the economic realities of today’s America. If you are not being asked to renounce your faith, then consider that you can probably put up with a lot to protect your job.

The thing you ought to be asking is: what are you biding your time for? This is also what political conservatives should be asking to prepare for regaining power. The problem is that the GOP is controlled by the corporate donor class, which hates cultural conservatism, and the “Trump cult” is too strong within the party to allow for any effective challengers to rise. Overall, most conservatives are so powerless that they satisfy themselves with performative libs-owning, while the libs steadily gain power over institutions.

Ross Douthat’s column about ways things could go wrong for Biden is spot on (and if anything, Douthat overestimates Biden’s strength). Even so, the broader culture is still going to decline because nobody on the Right has a vision for how to roll back wokeness. The best the Right manages to do is to block the worst of the Left’s excesses, but it never actually conserves anything socially or culturally. Controlling elite institutions and exercising their powers to promote and punish, and to serve as gatekeepers, is an extremely effective way of implementing an ideology. We are living through that now.

The ugly truth is that anyone who expects the Pentagon to do anything more than manage decline is living in La-La Land, a utopia where America succeeded in the Iraq War, is not about to leave Afghanistan in defeat, and marched confidently through two John McCain presidential terms instead of back to back Obama administrations.

I repeat: this is not my opinion, but one from my correspondent, whom I can’t identify, but who is in a position to know what he/she is talking about.

 

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Segregating ‘Sesame Street’

Sesame Street is now teaching race consciousness to little-bitties:

This makes me really sad, and I’m not kidding or exaggerating. Let me explain.

I was born in 1967. Sesame Street was born two years later. I don’t remember a time before Sesame Street. It was my window into a world beyond the rural South. In 1999, when my wife and I moved to brownstone Brooklyn, I remember thinking, “I live on Sesame Street” — this, because the streets there reminded me of what I had grown up with. Though our parish (county) was half black and half white, until I started elementary school, I lived in a world that was de facto segregated. The interesting thing to me now is that I can’t recall anybody ever teaching me about white supremacy, or why segregation was a good thing, or any of it. Maybe some white parents did teach that to their kids, but mine didn’t. Still, the ambient feeling in the air was that white people and black people are very different, and have nothing in common, so we shouldn’t mix with black people more than we strictly have to. I don’t know if any black parents taught that to their children back then, but I imagine most black kids from my town of my generation grew up with the same set of unarticulated assumptions.

How could we not have? Landmark Civil Rights legislation was less than a decade old. You cannot change a culture that took hundreds of years to make with the stroke of a pen.

As a child growing up in the early 1970s, Sesame Street was the only exposure I had to black people as people like me — this, as opposed to seeing them in the stores, and being polite, but not engaged with them. Sesame Street was where I learned how to see past color, into the humanity of black people. If you didn’t live it, it’s hard to express how totalizing the idea of color was in the South of that era. Even the most broad-minded people could not see past color — and to be fair, given that the society was governed by Jim Crow apartheid until more or less the day before I was born, you can understand how consciousness of whiteness and blackness pervaded everything. You had no choice but to see color as sorting everything about social life.

Sesame Street was not like where I lived. It was a place where color didn’t matter. Smithsonian magazine writes about how the show was designed to be like that. Excerpt:

Back when the show was less entrenched in popular culture, “Sesame Street” had its critics. A Boston Globe columnist took a swipe at the show in 1970for striving not only to teach literacy but “to inculcate the Golden Rule, the Beatitudes and the Civil Rights Act of 1964 through the television screen.” That same year, Mississippi public television concluded that its viewers were not ready for the portrayal of multiracial harmony on city streets and wouldn’t air “Sesame Street.” Parents successfully petitioned the station to bring it back and invited the show’s cast to visit Jackson, Mississippi. When the show came to town, the local police showed up in riot gear. Describing the visit in a 1988 interview, Loretta Long recalled, “Little white kids would reach out to kiss me or ‘Gordon,’ the other black character, and you could see their mothers were uneasy. But they’d loosen up, because how can you hate someone who makes your child so happy?”

Yes! Exactly! Gordon was my favorite human character on Sesame Street. I wanted him to be in my life — and in a way, he was. Even as a small child, I sensed that Sesame Street was radical. The way race was depicted on that program was not like what I saw in real life. It showed how we could live together, if we learned to see each other first as fellow humans, not as bearers of racial identity. I’m telling you, Sesame Street was the only place this vision existed for little white kids in the South (and little black kids too). It was the only place kids like me received a counternarrative to what daily life programmed into our heads about black-white relations.

I hadn’t realized how deeply the new progressive racial obsession bothered me until I saw that clip above, and realized that woke Sesame Street is now setting out to undo all the work that had been accomplished in the generations the show catechized. You know who taught my generation of children to see color? White people who longed for segregation’s return, and black people who lived in fear of white people who longed for segregation’s return.

Now kids can get that from Sesame Street. Good job, progressives; you are the most regressive force in American society today. I guess somebody has to teach the kids why it’s good to have segregated college graduations, but I’m with Thomas Chatterton Williams on this:

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