Rod Dreher's Blog, page 76

Damon Young: To Stop White Supremacy, Eliminate Whites

Damon Young, a black writer for The Root, a black-oriented commentary site owned by the same people who own Jezebel, Gizmodo, and The Onion (their parent company is Univision), had this to say at The Root about the Atlanta massage parlor mass murders:

I don’t have much to add here today that hasn’t already been said.

Whiteness is a public health crisis. It shortens life expectancies, it pollutes air, it constricts equilibrium, it devastates forests, it melts ice caps, it sparks (and funds) wars, it flattens dialects, it infests consciousnesses, and it kills people—white people and people who are not white, my mom included. There will be people who die, in 2050, because of white supremacy-induced decisions from 1850.

A line can and should be drawn from the actions of the white supremacist who walked into three Atlanta-area massage parlors yesterday, and allegedly killed eight people—six of whom were of Asian descent—to the relentless anti-Asian rhetoric pollinating national discourse over the past year. The former president, and the party of the former president, can and should be blamed for this and the sudden increase of racist violence against Asian Americans. The line doesn’t stop there, though. It extends back 400 years and has tentacles clawing everywhere white supremacy exists here, in America, which is everywhere.

There’s a line connecting this act of terror to the 11 people killed at the Tree of Life synagogue in 2018, and the nine people killed at Emanuel African Methodist Episcopal Church in 2015, of course. But also to gentrification, to red-lining, to racial profiling, to gerrymandering, to voter oppression, to mass incarceration, to the war on drugs, to the subprime mortgage crisis, to the vast disparities in both COVID deaths and who receives COVID vaccinations, to how the men and women who stormed the capitol just went home and had dinner with their families afterward. While we were still processing and recovering from what we witnessed, they were already back on their couches, watching Criminal Minds.

White supremacy is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it. I guess a vaccine could work, too. But we’ve had 400 years to develop one, so I won’t hold my breath.

Is this calling for genocide? I find it hard to read it any other way. “It won’t stop until there are no more bodies left for it to infect.” So we have to kill “it”. That is, the bodies that it could infect. White bodies.

He seems to believe that to be white at all is to be a white supremacist. Imagine writing this about any other ethnic group. Imagine:

Jewishness is a virus that, like other viruses, will not die until there are no bodies left for it to infect. Which means the only way to stop it is to locate it, isolate it, extract it, and kill it. I guess a vaccine could work, too. But we’ve had 400 years to develop one, so I won’t hold my breath.

Damon Young would be out of a job if he wrote that, and would deserve to be. It’s straight-up Nazism. You could read similar descriptions of black people in white supremacist literature. Stone-cold evil this is, wherever it emerges. But now, it is fashionable in the US progressive media to dehumanize white people.

A decade ago, the author David Livingstone Smith appeared on NPR to talk about his new book Less Than Human, which covered the process of dehumanization as a precursor to mass murder. From the book:

Sometimes the Nazis thought of their enemies as vicious, bloodthirsty predators rather than parasites. When partisans in occupied regions of the Soviet Union began to wage a guerilla war against German forces, Walter von Reichenau, the commander-in-chief of the German army, issued an order to inflict a “severe but just retribution upon the Jewish subhuman elements” (the Nazis considered all of their enemies as part of “international Jewry”, and were convinced that Jews controlled the national governments of Russia, the United Kingdom, and the United States). Military historian Mary R. Habeck confirms that, “soldiers and officers thought of the Russians and Jews as ‘animals’ … that had to perish. Dehumanizing the enemy allowed German soldiers and officers to agree with the Nazis’ new vision of warfare, and to fight without granting the Soviets any mercy or quarter.”

The Holocaust is the most thoroughly documented example of the ravages of dehumanization. Its hideousness strains the limits of imagination. And yet, focusing on it can be strangely comforting. It’s all too easy to imagine that the Third Reich was a bizarre aberration, a kind of mass insanity instigated by a small group of deranged ideologues who conspired to seize political power and bend a nation to their will. Alternatively, it’s tempting to imagine that the Germans were (or are) a uniquely cruel and bloodthirsty people. But these diagnoses are dangerously wrong. What’s most disturbing about the Nazi phenomenon is not that the Nazis were madmen or monsters. It’s that they were ordinary human beings.

When we think of dehumanization during World War II our minds turn to the Holocaust, but it wasn’t only the Germans who dehumanized their enemies. While the architects of the Final Solution were busy implementing their lethal program of racial hygiene, the Russian-Jewish poet and novelist Ilya Ehrenburg was churning out propaganda for distribution to Stalin’s Red Army. These pamphlets seethed with dehumanizing rhetoric: they spoke of “the smell of Germany’s animal breath,” and described Germans as “two-legged animals who have mastered the technique of war” — “ersatz men” who ought to be annihilated. “The Germans are not human beings,” Ehrenburg wrote, “… If you kill one German, kill another — there is nothing more amusing for us than a heap of German corpses.”

This wasn’t idle talk. The Wehrmacht had taken the lives of 23 million Soviet citizens, roughly half of them civilians. When the tide of the war finally turned, a torrent of Russian forces poured into Germany from the east, and their inexorable advance became an orgy of rape and murder. “They were certainly egged on by Ehrenburg and other Soviet propagandists…” writes journalist Giles McDonough:

East Prussia was the first German region visited by the Red Army … In the course of a single night the red army killed seventy-two women and one man. Most of the women had been raped, of whom the oldest was eighty-four. Some of the victims had been crucified … A witness who made it to the west talked of a poor village girl who was raped by an entire tank squadron from eight in the evening to nine in the morning. One man was shot and fed to the pigs.

Damon Young and The Root are preparing their readers to commit racist atrocities by dehumanizing those they will victimize. The Root is owned and published by Univision. Here is Univision’s executive leadership team. I bet not one of these people are aware that their company is underwriting what could easily be read as a casual exhortation to anti-white genocide. They ought to be.

The post Damon Young: To Stop White Supremacy, Eliminate Whites appeared first on The American Conservative.

Racializing The Atlanta Massage Parlor Killings

It is striking to see how quickly our media has racialized the narrative of the horrific murders at the Georgia massage parlors. From what we know so far, the alleged murderer was a young man tormented by his compulsive sexual desires. He visited massage parlors in the past, and went to this one to kill the women he once depended on to gratify his desires. From all the available evidence, these killings were the misogynistic act of a sexually depraved man.

But the media and others are bound and determined to make this a racial thing, because six of the dead women are Asian. The same media who couldn’t figure out the racial angle when black men attacked Asians on the street without provocation now seem giddy over the prospect of an anti-Asian hate crime committed by a white man. The New York Times, for example:

The Washington Post:

The alleged killer himself admitted that the motivation for his crime was sexual, not racial! But our media cannot allow that to stand. They are going to find a way to racialize the story no matter what.

And not just the media. Evangelical commenter Ed Stetzer of Wheaton College writes:

As we listen to the cries of so many Asian-Americans today, it would be shameful not to acknolwedge their pain and to see this as the racially connected violence that it is.

All of the locations have been described in news reports as asian massage parlors. And, Daniel Yang asked, “[W]ill anyone point out that the Western sexual fetish for Asian women is racist?” So, yes, of course this is connected to race.

Too frequently we brush off the discrimination faced by our Asian American brothers and sisters because it does not fit into our narratives around race. Asian Americans bring a complex and rich tradition and experience to the church that is frequently underrepresented in broader conversations. It is grievous that it takes a tragedy on this scale to wake us up to their concerns or to highlight their voices in our midst.

Oh, come on. Absolutely Christians and everybody else ought to be opposed to anti-Asian racism. But Stetzer calls this “racially connected violence,” as if the fact that most of the victims were Asian makes racist motive clear. If these killings really are driven by racial hatred, then by all means let’s confront that demon and exorcise it. But there is no reason at this point to believe that. In many cities, if you want to go to a massage parlor for sexual activity, those places will be staffed by Asian women. It’s well worth asking why, and if these are women who were sexually trafficked into sex slavery. But at this point, we don’t even know if the killer had a sexual fetish for Asian women. All we know is that he went to massage parlors. It is more reasonable to think that he went to massage parlors for the same reason that Willie Sutton robbed banks: because that’s where the money is.

The alleged killer is also a Southern Baptist, so now we are seeing Southern Baptists demonized. Stetzer (who is Baptist) again:

Over the past few years, women theologians, historians, and church leaders have authored books on the intersection of women and North American Protestantism. Disturbingly, most identified common themes were the corrosive elements of Protestant theology of sexuality and gender. While claiming orthodoxy and resisting the tide of the sexual revolution, church leaders remained ignorant of how their rhetoric laid a foundation for misogyny and violence.

In one example, Rachel Joy Welcher outlines how many popular books on sexuality “use wartime imagery to communicate practical strategies Christian men can employ to fight sexual lust…. Depicting purity as an all-encompassing pursuit which involves one’s motivations, mind, and heart.”

As Welcher concludes, this constant stream of portraying women as dangerous sources of lust that need to be avoided inevitably shaped the way young Christian men perceived and acted towards women. In trying to guard men against the evil of pornography, church leaders failed to construct a positive theology of sexuality and gender.

Victim advocate Rachel Denhollander drew attention to this in response to the tragedy:

The man who murdered women in a massage parlor yesterday says he was “eliminating temptation” because he had a sex addiction.

He was a baptized member of an SBC church.

Brothers. Pastors. Seminary heads. How you teach sexuality matters. It can be life and death…

As church leaders, we must reckon with our role in shaping the culture that gave rise to these events.

The Washington Post wrote a story about the alleged killer’s connections to his Southern Baptist church. Excerpts:

According to a video that was captured by The Post before it was deleted, on Sunday the church’s pastor, the Rev. Jerry Dockery, gave a sermon on the apocalypse. Christ was coming soon, Dockery said, and the world must be ready.

“We’ve had, what, 45 presidents in our brief history as a nation? How many other kings around the world? How many other rulers have sat upon thrones, claiming to be in charge?” he asked. “The King is coming again.”

When Christ returns, Dockery said, he will wage war against those who have rejected his name.

“There is one word devoted to their demise,” the pastor said. “Swept away! Banished! Judged. They have no power before God. Satan himself is bound and released and then bound again and banished. That great dragon deceiver — just that quickly — God throws him into an eternal torment. And then we read where everyone — everyone that rejects Christ — will join Satan, the Beast and the false prophet in hell.”

It is not uncommon for pastors to preach on the apocalypse, and it’s unclear whether Long heard the pastor’s teachings Sunday. Police said Long told them he had a “sex addiction,” and authorities said he apparently lashed out at what he saw as sources of temptation.

Wait a damn minute here. The story says — correctly — that pastors preach on the apocalypse all the time, and the reporters don’t even know if the suspect was in church to hear that sermon. But they’re still going to bring it up. Why on earth would they do that, if not to connect a bog-standard Baptist sermon about the End Times to the murderous mindset of a man who the paper’s reporters don’t even know for sure was in church that day! 

The story goes on to talk about how the murders might be connected to conservative Southern Baptist theology. There are something like 16 million Southern Baptists in America. About half of them are men. Eight million men have been exposed to some degree to conservative Southern Baptist teachings about sexual purity, but this is the first one who has gone out and shot women at a massage parlor. Does it even occur to these journalists and commentators that the problem here is not necessarily Southern Baptist theology, but a depraved young man? Of course not! Anything to destroy one’s culture war enemies.

Of course I know nothing about how Southern Baptist churches teach sexuality. I may well agree on certain points with critics of their approach. But it is slanderous and inciteful on its face to blame Southern Baptist theology for these murders, with almost no evidence whatsoever. We know that serial killers often target prostitutes, for a variety of reasons, including a contempt for women who do sex work.If the women at these spas were prostitutes, then what Long is alleged to have done is explainable by misogyny, and his turning outward his hatred of himself for having uncontrollable sexual desires. We know that Long was so tormented by his demons — his obsessions with sex and pornography — that he went to rehab for sexual addiction.We also know that he was a quiet loner and weirdo in high school, who was sometimes bullied.

Every young Christian man who takes the teachings of his faith seriously, and tries to live by them, struggles to conquer sexual desire. This is normal. This does not turn them into monsters. Where are all the other Southern Baptist misogynist serial killers? They don’t exist. We are likely to find out that this Long fellow had deep psychological problems — again, he went to rehab for his sex addiction. But hey, why miss this opportunity to slander and slime conservative Southern Baptists. The fact that conservative Southern Baptists are against Critical Race Theory is, incredibly, also trotted out in this story — as if that had anything to do with mass murder.

The Post had this paragraph, which explains a lot of the coverage we’re seeing:

Long has told police the shootings were not racially motivated. But Melissa May Borja, a religion scholar in the Department of American Culture at the University of Michigan, said that it’s important for people to not just consider his intent but also his impact.

“Maybe he didn’t intend to harm Asian Americans, but it’s clearly had a disparate impact on Asian American women,” she said, adding that women doing the work in spas like the ones Long targeted tend to be economically vulnerable and the targets of harassment.

And there it is: the alleged killer has said point blank that he did not target his victims because they were Asian, that their race was just a coincidence. But disparate impact theory makes his murders racist, even if the killer himself said they were not, and even if all the available evidence indicates that these killings were acts of a depraved man who was driven to homicide by his sexual urges. It just feels too good to our elites — media, professors, et alia — to blame their ideological enemies.

I say this all the time on this blog, but it can’t be said often enough. Here is a quote from Live Not By Lies:

[I]n 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

Do not look in the file of incriminating evidence to see whether or not the accused rose up against the Soviets with arms or words. Ask him instead to which class he belongs, what is his background, his education, his profession. These are the questions that will determine the fate of the accused. That is the meaning and essence of the Red Terror.

Note well that an individual’s words and deeds had nothing to do with determining one’s guilt or innocence. One was presumed guilty based entirely on one’s class and social status. A revolution that began as an attempt to right historical injustices quickly became an exterminationist exercise of raw power. Communists justified the imprisonment, ruin, and even the execution of people who stood in the way of Progress as necessary to achieve historical justice over alleged exploiters of privilege.

A softer, bloodless form of the same logic is at work in American institutions. Social justice progressives advance their malignant concept of justice in part by terrorizing dissenters as thoroughly as any inquisitor on the hunt for enemies of religious orthodoxy.

For these journalists, academics, preachers, politicians and other commenters, the most important thing to know about the mass murders in Atlanta is that the victims were Asian women, and the confessed killer was a white male Southern Baptist. No facts that complicate the narrative should be allowed to interfere with the conclusions drawn, which is that this is the fault of white supremacy and religious conservatism.

We are in the middle of a moral panic over race and racism in this country, a panic driven by the media and elite institutions. We are seeing a horrible act of mass murder being turned into a culture-war weapon by people who are not seeking understanding, but just looking for enemies, and looking to reinforce an intoxicating narrative.

UPDATE: OK, OK, some of you are saying, “Why should we believe the killer when he says he didn’t kill out of racial motives?” Well, usually when someone confesses to a crime, and says, “This is why I did it,” we give them the benefit of the doubt, especially if the facts in the case fit the claim. We know that Long has a history of disordered sexuality, and went to rehab for sex addiction. He says he visited those massage parlors before. It stands to reason that a deeply religious man who is sexually compulsive and tormented by his desires would seek to eliminate what he believed to be the sources of his torment. (To be clear, those victims were innocent; the sources of Long’s torment were inside of Long.)

There is a single Korean media report in which someone says that the killer said he was going to “kill all Asians.”

It may yet come out that Long was motivated by racism. If so, let’s confront that ugly reality. My point is that people in the media, and in progressive circles, are acting as if they are excited to pin all of this on race hatred, when that may play little or no role at all in why that man killed all those people (not all of his victims were Asian, too).

A bigmouth Evangelical race-baiter at The King’s College in New York is now trying to blame Long’s Baptist Church, and the 9Marks movement, for what Long did:

This is utter slander, and disgusting. Of course Bradley will get away with it.

We are moving towards a war of all against all.

UPDATE.2: I think people must have this idea that Long chose to attack Asian massage parlors because he hates Asians. In fact, based on what we know at this point, he went to those massage parlors to kill because those were the ones he had gone to for sex.

Why would have have gone to Asian massage parlors for sex, and not to other massage parlors? Because low-end Asian massage parlors are often fronts for prostitution. The New York Times did a story on this phenomenon in 2019. Excerpts:

In strip malls across the country, neon signs and brightly colored placards promise hot stones, acupuncture and shiatsu with photos of women or couples receiving relaxing shoulder rubs. But a traditionally Asian form of therapeutic relaxation with deep roots in big-city Chinatowns has spun off a different kind of massage parlor that has little to do with traditional remedies. It has exploded into a $3 billion-a-year sex industry that relies on pervasive secrecy, close-knit ownership rings and tens of thousands of mostly foreign women ensnared in a form of modern indentured servitude.

The frequently middle-aged women who work in parlors with names like Orchids of Asia and Rainbow Spa are often struggling to pay off high debts to family members, loan sharks, labor traffickers and lawyers who help them file phony asylum claims. In some cases, their passports are taken and their illegal immigration status keeps them further in the shadows, with some of them rotated every 10 days to two weeks between spas operated by the same owners. Forced to pay for their own supplies and even their own condoms, many women must sleep on the same massage tables where they service customers and cook on hot plates in cramped kitchens or on back steps.

“We stopped thinking about just cages, bars and chains as the means of coercion,” said John Richmond, the State Department’s top anti-trafficking official. “They are using nonviolent forms of coercion.”

More:

Law enforcement officials said there were an estimated 9,000 illicit massage parlors across the country, from Orlando to Los Angeles. The epicenter of this national underground is the bustling Chinatown in Flushing, in the New York City borough of Queens. Women — typically Chinese, but also Korean, Thai and East European — arrive at Kennedy International Airport, learn the trade and are sent out to places like Virginia, Iowa, Texas and Florida. Women are recruited locally through ads in Chinese-language newspapers or over the social network WeChat.

“Flushing is the center of this network,” said Lori Cohen, the director of Sanctuary for Families’ Anti-Trafficking Initiative, which has interviewed around 1,000 massage workers over the past five years and helped the 49-year-old immigrant who was sexually assaulted leave the business after she was arrested. “They are showing up in different parts of the country, but all of them have addresses in Flushing, Queens,” she said.

And here’s why it’s easier to use Asian massage parlors as prostitution fronts:

One reason the Asian massage parlors remain so poorly understood is the extreme reluctance of the women to speak with the police and even with their own lawyers.

“Even though I’ve represented many, many women arrested in unlicensed massage parlors, because of the level of distrust of people working, almost all immigrants, almost all undocumented, they don’t trust even their attorneys enough to let them know what’s happened to them,” Ms. Latimer said.

Some fear retaliation by traffickers to their families in China, and some feel morally indebted to those who helped find them a job, said Chris Muller, the director of training and external affairs at Restore NYC, an anti-sex-trafficking organization.

“This is a powerful exploitation tactic,” he said. “Any favor is implied there is going to be a payment back. ‘Look at what I have done for you. I found you a job. I found you a place to live and this is how you repay me?’”

Small networks of spas are also common, and their ownership structures are complex and opaque. “It’s rare that you have a mom-and-pop business where they’re just running one,” said Lt. Christopher Sharpe of the New York Police Department’s vice section. “Usually if they’re running one, they have a second or a third business.”

If you are some country-hick Georgia Baptist who wants to see a prostitute, you are probably going to figure your best chance is to go to a strip-mall Asian massage parlor.

UPDATE.3: A reader comments:

I’ve gone to massage parlours in my time. Indeed, for quite a while I would say it was an addiction, in that I went even when I knew that I couldn’t afford it and would end up eeking out my last twelve euros in a budget supermarket the weekend before payday. Many (though not all) of those places were staffed by Chinese and Thai women. For what it’s worth, I tended to prefer the Asian girls because they had a gracefulness, a subtlety, which the South American and Eastern European girls often lacked. The latter would ask “You want happy end?” with a bored look on their faces before starting the massage. With Asians, it was all a bit more mysterious and magical. (Yes, no doubt I’m guilty of neo-colonialist Orientalism, or something.)

Sometimes I felt anger towards those women. Even rage. And though I was a Christian, it was not because I thought “They’ve seduced me into impurity and sin, those wicked harlots!” It was because those massages left me disgusted at my own weakness and desperation. I’m sure that if I’d been an atheist, that feeling would have been just as strong, if not stronger.

There is a moment at the end of such massages where the great moment has passed and the girl starts wrapping things up. She wipes you down, says “It’s finish” and starts putting her oils and stuff away. And you swing off the table and start groping for your clothes, deflated, naked, feeling foolish. The exotic seductress of half an hour ago is gone; the girl is now all business and thinking of her next client. You hand over the money, aghast at how much you are throwing away for those fleeting minutes of pleasure. As you leave she gives you a fake smile, looking restlessly at the door even as she does so, impatient for you to be gone. She might even give you a hug, but if you kiss her she’ll turn her lips away. Because, of course, she doesn’t really give a damn about you. How could you have imagined otherwise? You step out onto the street, hoping no one you know sees you, and start the lonely walk home.

Occasionally the masseuses are kinder and friendlier than that, but even they are businesswomen first and foremost.

The worst massages are the ones where the girl is rude and half-hearted the entire time, not bothering to hide her distaste for what she is doing, and you stay on the table anyway like a fool, because you’ve started now and who knows, maybe she’ll get nicer if you give it another five minutes, and she’s already touched you down there once so if you leave now she’ll demand the full price anyway … I’ve left such massage parlours in a very black mood indeed.

I obviously don’t know what the killer’s motives were in this case. I have a hard time believing, though, that they were either “I hate Asians!” or “They tempted me to fornication, which my pastor says is really bad!” When, in my own life, I have felt rage at masseuses, it was not for either of those reasons. It was because of my fury at myself for being weak and gullible, and the brutality with which the illusion would melt away at the end of the encounters, exposing my own loneliness and emptiness.

The post Racializing The Atlanta Massage Parlor Killings appeared first on The American Conservative.

The War On Religious Liberty

A reader who watched the Senate Judiciary Committee hearing on the Equality Act today said:

Senator Durbin’s closing statement struck me as a classic example of your law of merited impossibility.

In response to the religious liberty concerns aired at the hearing, he first says that he just doesn’t believe that the Equality Act will actually cause some of the scenarios identified by the witnesses and by Republican Senators.

But he then says the following:

I do believe that people who want to blatantly discriminate and use religion as their weapon have gone too far. We have to have limits on what they can do. I might remind us in history that the Ku Klux Klan was not burning question marks. They were burning a cross. They were making some distorted connection with a religion. And God forbid that anybody would buy that. We don’t need that in America regardless of the times, regardless of the organization, wherever they come down on the political spectrum.

Here it is, cued to that moment:

 

You might recall back in the first decade of this century, when the public arguments over same-sex marriage were raging, that it was very hard for opponents to get a hearing in the media. The news media were all-in on advocacy journalism. There were no two sides to this issue. I was there; I remember it. Opponents of same-sex marriage, when they weren’t ignored, were all treated like slack-jawed bigots. When people like me would talk about how religious liberty, and religious institutions, would be impacted, we were dismissed. “How come nobody can explain to me how my gay neighbors’ marriage affects mine?” was the usual line. Well, there was a good explanation, having to do with what marriage means in law, and the secondary and tertiary effects of changing marriage laws.

But of course nobody wanted to hear it. As a fellow journalist said to me when I complained that our newspaper was totally biased against traditionalists, “Do you think that back in the Civil Rights era, we had an obligation to give equal time to the Ku Klux Klan?” That’s how journalists thought back then. That’s how Sen. Durbin thinks now.

They have run the same playbook on transgenderism. Ask yourself how often you have read, heard, or seen opposition to trans rights claims explained. I’m not asking how often you have heard them convincingly explained. I am asking how often you have heard them explained at all. What I call The Law Of Merited Impossibility is very much in effect here: “It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.” That is, the advocates for radical social changes minimize the chances of bad things happening as a result of what they demand, and when it becomes obvious to everybody else that they were lying, they will say that’s beside the point, that bigots had it coming.

Now the Equality Act is closer to passage than it has ever been. The threat to religious liberty in this country is immense. As Albert Mohler explains today:

The legislation known as the “Equality Act” represents the greatest present threat to religious liberty in the United States. The House of Representatives has passed the legislation twice—in 2019 and again in February of this year. The Democratic majority in that chamber has forwarded the bill to the Senate, which is soon to begin debate over the bill. President Joe Biden campaigned on a promise to sign the bill, and his administration is working hard to see the bill approved by the Senate and sent to his desk for signature.

The Equality Act represents a defining issue for the entire nation. The act would amend the Civil Rights Act to add sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity to protected classes covered by the bill. The scope of the bill is vast, covering housing, employment, public accommodations, education, credit, and all programs receiving federal funding. No aspect of American public life would be unchanged, and the bill would invade the private sphere as well.

Beyond the direct legislative reach of the bill, the Equality Act would send a clear moral message throughout the culture, with both national and international consequences. The forces pushing for the passage of the Equality Act clearly intend these consequences. A moral message will be telegraphed throughout society, normalizing virtually everything comprehended within the ever-expanding categories of LGBTQ.

Yet the Equality Act is not merely a message. It is a draconian threat of legal, political, financial, and cultural coercion, and the coercive powers of the new moral order will be directed—as the Equality Act makes clear—against any resistance. Make no mistake about it: That coercion will be brought against religious schools, ministries, non-profits, and all religious institutions. The bill does not even acknowledge the sacred rights of religious congregations and denominations. Individual believers too will be coerced into compliance with the new moral regime, which is coming with a vengeance.

I wouldn’t normally quote so much from another article, but as we know that people rarely click through to read more, I’m going to post this below, because it’s so important:

The lead sponsor of the Equality Act in the House of Representatives is Rep. David Cicilline [D-RI], an openly gay congressman who is confident of ultimate victory in the current Congress: “This is going to be a vote that’s going to be remembered in the history books, and I think people are going to want to be on the right side of history.”

When he was asked about the threat the Act would present to religious institutions and their right to operate by their own religious convictions, Cicilline offered these chilling words: “The determination would have to be made as to whether or not the decisions they are making are connected to their religious teachings and to their core functions as a religious organization,” he explained, “or is it a pretext to discriminate?”

The determination will have to be made. With those words, every religious congregation, denomination, and institution is put on notice: The government will determine if your hiring and housing and student conduct and employee policies are truly “connected” to your religious teachings, or if you are merely using a claim of religious conviction as a “pretext to discriminate.”

These words mean the effective death of religious liberty, for the burden of proof will now fall to each religious institution to prove to the government’s satisfaction that its convictions are authentic.

Furthermore, the United States government would be effectively transformed into an anti-theological state. Note carefully that the specific forms of religion that are targeted by the Equality Act share one major theological distinctive. Each, in its own way, makes a claim to written revelation. Each of those religious texts defines sexuality, marriage, and gender in explicitly theological terms. The Torah, the Bible, the Quran, the Book of Mormon, and other religious texts are recognized as divinely inspired by American citizens and their religious bodies ranging, according to theological convictions, from Orthodox Judaism to Roman Catholicism to Evangelical Protestantism to Islam and Mormons and Seventh-Day Adventists and more.

Evangelicals and Catholics, Orthodox Jews and Muslims, Seventh-day Adventists and Mormons all understand the radical theological differences that separate us. But the factor common to all is the claim of an authoritative scripture. That is actually the central fact that explains the antipathy of the moral revolutionaries and their willingness to deploy the coercive powers of the state against believers. Those religious texts are incompatible with the normalization of LGBTQ identities, behaviors, relationships, and gender confusions.

The Equality Act, therefore, represents the threat of government coercion against a certain structure of theology, doctrine, and morality. This means the threat of the state directed against any claim of divine revelation that contradicts the new morality, the newly minted definition of marriage, and the newly constructed “rights” of the LGBTQ revolution.

Visible before our eyes is the threat of an anti-theological state and the end of authentic religious liberty in America. Don’t take my word for it—just take Congressman Cicilline at his.

This is what I talk about in Live Not By Lies — it’s here. Our government is about to array itself decisively against religious believers whose faith cannot live by what it considers to be lies regarding human nature and moral truth. It will be coercive. Most Christians (and others) will be shocked, because they didn’t see it coming. The media have not prepared them for it. Nor have their leaders. In fact, I would guess that most Christians have no idea what’s coming, because they have been under the assumption that as long as they are nice, no bad thing can happen to them.

They are about to learn otherwise.

It is possible that the Equality Act won’t pass this time. It has passed the House, but it will have problems in the Senate. If it passes there, though, it will be law, because President Biden has said he will sign it.

If the only reason this law doesn’t pass is the prospect of a Republican filibuster, then you can be pretty confident that religious liberty is hanging by a thread. Be honest: do you think there is anything in this culture that suggests that the forces pushing the Equality Act are going to stand down in the years to come?

The Washington Post has a piece today about the Equality Act, and the clash between LGBT rights and religious liberty. Excerpts:

Jesse Hammons, a transgender man, is suing the University of Maryland Medical System after his gender-affirming hysterectomy was canceled by a Catholic subsidiary.

“There are some people who say we need to compromise. But I don’t know how to compromise on existing. I’m asking to go to a hospital that already provides the health care I need and provide me the same care that they would provide any other patient,” he said.

The Equality Act would amend the Civil Rights Act to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity. It would include, among other areas, employment, education, housing and public accommodations — a category it would alsobroaden. What makes it more sweeping than past anti-discrimination measures is it explicitly overridesthe Religious Freedom Restoration Act (RFRA), which prohibits the federal government from “substantially burdening” individuals’ exercise of religion unless it is for a “compelling government interest.”

“His gender-affirming hysterectomy” is a phrase that has never before occurred in the history of forever. But here we are. If the Equality Act passes, the Catholic hospital would be forced to remove the uterus from a woman because she demands it, so she can live as a man.

Notice this:

The Equality Act matches Americans’ fast-moving rejection of discrimination based on gender identity and sexual orientation. More than 6 in 10 Americans say business owners should not be allowed to refuse services to LGBTQ people on the basis of religion.

However, the Equality Act would reframe the legal nature of religious spaces, said Dan Balserak, director of religious liberty at the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops. “The Equality Act takes these spaces that have traditionally been regarded as privately operated enterprises and brings them in reach of this statute that was intended to combat race discrimination,” he said.

That’s exactly the right comparison, say the act’s supporters. Any challenges experienced by religious institutions and people will either be worked out in court or should be set aside so that LGBTQ people can have full equality, they say.

It is extraordinary, the incursion on religious liberties. But there are religious people — the Post found them, of course — who are happy to see the liberties of their churches and institutions taken away to promote LGBT rights:

Sister Simone Campbell, an attorney who heads the liberal Catholic advocacy group Network, brushed off conservative faith groups’ concerns, saying the Supreme Court will ensure proper exemptions if needed.

“The frustration is, it seems to me we’re being called to be more pastoral and less bureaucratic,” she said. “My problem is: Why do you want to exclude? In my tradition, Jesus included everyone.”

This liberal nun is either lying to herself, or lying to everyone else. She knows, or should know, perfectly well that this is not about “inclusion.” This is about forcing Christian hospitals to perform surgical interventions and other medical acts that they believe to be gravely immoral. But she doesn’t care. (Similarly, in Austria today, 600 Catholic priests have signed a petition refusing to obey the Vatican’s order that they cannot bless same-sex unions. It’s open schism. Of course nothing will happen to them.)

More from the Post story:

Sam Ruff has a personal stake in fate of the Equality Act. He is president of the LGBTQ student club Refuge at Wheaton College, a Christian school where all community members must commit to no sexual relations outside of heterosexual marriage. If the Equality Act passes, he understands the school could lose public funding and have to downsize. But he said it’s still worth it for the act to pass.

“It’s a false dichotomy to separate faith from LGBT protections. I definitely think any sort of discrimination against queer people is unacceptable, and as Christians there’s no reason we should be doing so,” he said.

No reason at all? Is Sam Ruff really that shallow? There are many, many reasons. They may not convince Sam Ruff, whose sexual identity is more important to him than the liberty of the Christian institution he has chosen to attend. It is not a false dichotomy at all. Ruff is, apparently, the kind of Christian who is willing to throw aside the clear witness of Scripture, and 2,000 years of Christian tradition, so he can get what he wants. And he doesn’t mind seeing the Christian university he has chosen to attend suffer so he can get it.

In Senate testimony today, Abigail Shrier, an Orthodox Jew, testified:

“If S393 merely proposed to extend employment and public housing rights to gay and transgender Americans, I would be supporting this bill instead of testifying against it,” Shrier explained. “I am here today because the bill does much more. And no one who wrote it appears to have thoughtfully considered what it would mean for women and girls.”

Not only did Shrier note that the bill would hurt female athletes whose hard work and achievements in sports could be usurped by a biological male who identifies as a woman, but she also raised questions about the risk associated with housing biological males with females in correctional facilities and domestic violence shelters as well as allowing male teachers who say they are female to accompany young girls to the bathroom in schools.

“Does that strike anyone in this room as safe or sensible?” Shrier asked. “The plain truth is that it is not sensible, not safe, and certainly not just to end these hard-won protections for women and girls in the name of equality.”

This legislation, Shrier explained, has “nothing to do with transgender people and everything to do with opportunistic self-identification by violent male felons” who will take advantage of instances such as when the Washington Correctional Center for Women allowed prisoners to live in certain facilities based on their gender identities, resulting in the rape of at least one female.

“If you pass this bill, you can expect hundreds more victims, like this one,” Shrier warned.

Instead of supporting the protections for biological sex outlined in Title IX and established by women such as the late U.S. Supreme Court Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, Shrier said congressional proponents and supporters of the Equality Act are “concerned about the progressive groups that will call you a transphobe or a homophobe if you don’t do exactly as they say and abandon women and girls.”

“I have probably interviewed more transgender Americans than any person in this room, and I can honestly say that, excepting political activists, most do not want to obliterate women’s rights and safe spaces,” Shrier said. “Most would never think of stealing women’s scholarships by forcing young women into demoralizing contests with male bodies. But gender ideology, which is at the heart of this bill, is misogyny in progressive clothing. Gender ideology tells women and girls that they are not entitled to their fear or their sense of unfairness as their protective spaces are eliminated.”

Watch and listen closely to see how the media cover Shrier’s testimony. She’s not talking about religious liberty, but she’s talking about an extraordinary loss of liberty for girls and women. What has happened is that activists have plugged the Civil Rights template into the LGBT issue, and completely elided past the fact that sex is not the same thing as race, or even the same kind of thing as race. This is why the Senate Judiciary Committee chairman can make the outrageous claim that religious beliefs that are common around the world, and were overwhelmingly shared by Christians in this country until starting about twenty years ago, are akin to Klan ideology.

The post The War On Religious Liberty appeared first on The American Conservative.

SJW Pentagon Culture War Against Allies

A reader passes this along:

This is now part of US warmaking strategy: to fight the culture war with nations that do not share progressive social values regarding sexual orientation and gender identity.

Hungary is a NATO ally. Late last year, Hungarian lawmakers changed the country’s constitution:

The country’s politicians approved the bill on Tuesday. The new law defines marriage as between a man and a woman and asserts that the “foundation of the family is marriage and the parent-child relationship. The mother is a woman, the father is a man.”

Hungary has codified the understanding of marriage that was universal within the West until pretty much the day before yesterday, but now, the United States government has declared Hungary an enemy of its defense strategy for that.

Think about that. Hungary’s definition of marriage is the orthodox Christian definition of marriage. And now, the new administration has set the Defense Department against nations that believe what orthodox Christians believe marriage is. If you don’t think that persecution of orthodox Christians and other dissenters — what I talk about in Live Not By Lies — is coming to the United States, you are living in a dream world.

I have written in this space in recent days about my concern for my 17-year-old son, who wants to join the military. Normally I would have been proud of that fact. But now? Do I want him to be part of an organization whose leadership has formally committed itself to fighting governments that enshrine into law the principles that our religion teaches? Do I want my Orthodox Christian son to be put in the position of fighting other Christians whose nations are faithful to what we believe to be true?

Do you?

Poland is a NATO ally. The Polish constitution defines marriage as between one man and one woman. Polish gay couples cannot legally adopt. Now the Polish parliament is considering a move to ban all LGBT adoptions — a move that is quite popular in that overwhelmingly Catholic country.

Is Poland now the enemy of America? Do the Poles have to worry that the US Department of Defense is setting its sights on them as enemy combatants in the culture war? Yes, they do.

The Czech Republic is by far the most secular and liberal of the former Soviet bloc nations, but attempts to pass gay marriage into law have stalled. The Czech Republic is also a NATO ally. Is it normal for members of a military alliance to have to worry about the Defense Department of an allied nation targeting their countries as culture war enemies?

Turkey is also a NATO ally. Do I even have to tell you how that Muslim country regards LGBT rights? But now the Turks have to regard American military personnel stationed in that country as culture-war enemy combatants, because of the order of the US Commander in Chief.

Greece is a NATO ally. Though generally liberal on sexual matters, it does not have same-sex marriage. Is the Pentagon now Greece’s culture war enemy?

It is one thing to put US government policy behind supporting gay rights at home and abroad. But to put US armed might behind that same policy, especially when not all US allies share that goal, is something else. We are telling Hungary, Poland, and other NATO member states, “Diversity is our strength — and if you hold diverse opinions about what marriage and homosexuality are, we are going to use US military might to strong-arm you into submission.”

Seriously, what does it mean that the US military is now formally committed to combatting homophobia, transphobia, etc., in other countries? What do NATO allies like Hungary, Poland, and Turkey have to worry about? What do other allies, like Arab states, have to take into consideration under these new Biden-era rules?

The aggressive culture-war politicization of the US military by the Left is something I did not see coming. Time for people on the Right to wake up. This is not the America you thought it was.

The post SJW Pentagon Culture War Against Allies appeared first on The American Conservative.

There Is No Epidemic Of Trans Murders

It is remarkable to see how the news media gaslights around the transgender issue. You cannot believe a thing you see, hear, or read, because it is all shaped not by facts, but by Narrative.

On Sunday, I was driving and listening to Sunday All Things Considered on NPR. They touted an upcoming story in which Dr. Eric Vilain, an expert in transgender participation in sports, was going to separate fact from fiction in the debate, but asking what the science says. I thought, this expert is going to say that people who insist that this is unfair to biological female athletes are worried about nothing, and that we should celebrate diversity. There is no way NPR would have on an expert who would reach any other conclusion.

Sure enough, that’s what happened. From the report:

MARTIN: As we said, these – there are a number of these bills making their way through state legislatures. Moving forward, how would you like people to think about this debate? Is there something you would encourage people to think about? Or…

VILAIN: I would encourage parents and people interested in sports to look at all the sides of the issue and not being fixated on the sole issue of gender. There are so many different attributes for an athlete that make them so diverse, so interesting, so different. Some will be good at one sport. Some will be good at other sports. And we should just celebrate this diversity.

Of course! Celebrate diversity! Diversity is our strength! Never mind that female athletes are at a tremendous disadvantage against male-to-female transgenders. NPR called Science to ask, and now Science has spoken.

Or take the Washington Post‘s profile of Chloe Clark, a male-to-female transgendered 15 year old who, according to the Post, is bearing up as “lawmakers attack her right to exist.” Oh? Republican state legislators are trying to have Clark killed? No. Lawmakers are debating whether or not to outlaw prescribing cross-sex hormones to juveniles, and whether or not to ban transgendered females (“females”) from competing against biological females. But the Washington Post wants people to believe that these Republicans would just as soon see Chloe die:

Fourteen was the exact age at which Chloe, her doctors and her parents made the decision for her to begin taking estrogen, following the medical guidelines for young people diagnosed with gender dysphoria and understanding the high rates of suicide for transgender youth who don’t receive the care they need. But that private choice in Chloe’s doctor’s office was now the subject of legislation across the country, with 17 states weighing bills that would bar or criminalize gender-affirming care for kids. Two of these bills are in Chloe’s own state of Missouri.

The 10th-grader knew the country was debating her right to play sports, to get medical care — debating her right to exist —but she couldn’t bring herself to read the news coverage or to speak out against the legislation.

“Debating her right to exist” — this is straight-up propaganda. If you disagree with the pro-trans narrative on hormones and surgeries for minors, or on MtF athletes, then you want to see trans people eliminated, and murdered by their own hand.

Now comes a new NBC News piece about transgender murders that is straight-up gaslighting:

Two hundred and sixty-six percent?! Wow, that’s horrible. A national epidemic! But you know what that really means? There have been eleven trans murder victims this year, over three in the same period last year. From the story:

Braxton is one of at least 11 transgender people murdered so far in 2021 — a 266 percent increase from this point last year, when three trans people had been murdered. More than half of the victims so far in 2021, including Braxton, are Black trans women. According to a Thursday news release from the National Black Justice Coalition, an LGBTQ civil rights organization, the most recent known victim was Diamond “Kyree” Sanders, who was shot and killed March 3.

The Human Rights Campaign, an LGBTQ advocacy group, has called violence against transgender people “a national epidemic” and requested in a list of policy recommendations released in November that the Biden administration form an interagency working group to address anti-transgender violence.

Advocates say preventing anti-trans violence requires a comprehensive approach that spans many sectors, but it also requires governments and law enforcement to better understand the trans community.

According to police, Braxton was murdered inside their apartment.  NBC reports that Braxton used to be involved in prostitution, and was planning to create an account online with OnlyFans, where Braxton could share nude images of himself with paying customers. Police have given no further details on this killing — such as, if it had to do with prostitution, as so many transgender murders do. There is no reason at all to believe at this point that Braxton’s murder was a hate crime. But of course the LGBT activist organizations pump it up, and the media go along with it.

Let’s see who the eleven dead transpeople are so far this year.

Diamond Kyree Sanders was killed in Cincinnati in a robbery the other day. Again, no reason to believe Sanders was killed for being transgender. It’s a robbery. But that does not stop the activist and sympathetic media from saying, See! See! A national epidemic of anti-trans violence!

On March 3, police in Jacksonville found the body of Jeremy “Jenna” Franks, a male-to-female transgender, in a ditch. Franks had been murdered. Once again, police have released no evidence that this murder had to do with Franks’s transgender status. NBC’s story says Franks was a homeless drug addict. But … you know. Never let a homeless trans drug addict’s killing go to waste when it can be spun as anti-trans violence.

Teenager J.J. Bright, a female-to-male transgender, was killed by their mother in Ambridge, Pa., recently. The mother also killed her 22-year-old nonbinary daughter, Jasmine Cannady (the Human Rights Campaign counts Cannady as part of its 11, because she was gender-nonconforming). Police have not released a motive for the shooting. The mother is said to have been struggling with mental health issues since her discharge from the military. A neighbor said she recently was hospitalized for psychiatric issues.  A family member said that the alleged killer has not committed a hate crime, as she supported equal rights.

There have been two murders of transgendered people in Puerto Rico this year. One, of a homeless MtF transgender, looks like a clear case of murder because the person was trans. The second, of a FtM trans, is unclear.

Chynaa Carrillo, a MtF transgender, was beaten to death in Pennsylvania earlier this year. Police shot and killed Carillo’s attacker, a former Marine and convicted murderer who was out on parole. No motive has yet been released by police for the killing. We have no reason to believe that it had anything to do with Carrillo’s gender identity. Maybe the two were dating, and the killer got violent in the same way he had with his murdered wife. Maybe the violence was triggered by the killer discovering that Carrillo was really a biological man. Or maybe it was just a robbery. We don’t know. But of course the Human Rights Campaign is waving the bloody flag.

Dominique Jackson was shot to death in Jackson, Miss., last month. Police have arrested a man in the case. They have said nothing about a hate-crime motive.

Tyianna “Davarea” Alexander was shot in the head, along with a male companion, on the street on Chicago’s South Side. No indication that this drive-by shooting was a hate crime. Might have been, might not have been. They were out on the street at 5 a.m. Was Alexander a prostitute, out on the street that early in the dead of winter? No more details have been made available yet.

Here in my own city, a MtF transgender called Fifty Bandz was shot to death by their male lover in a domestic dispute. 

In Atlanta, a MtF transgender who went by the name of Bianca Bankz was found shot to death in their apartment, alongside the body of their male killer. Police say it was a murder-suicide. No indication of a hate crime.

So, of the eleven US murders of trans or gender-nonconforming people this year, only two — the ones in Puerto Rico — appear to have been probably motivated by anti-trans hatred. They are still horrible — no one deserves to be murdered — but the killings do not have the meaning that are being attributed to them. NBC News puffs this as “anti-trans violence,” but has almost no evidence for that claim. Not all violence victimizing trans people is “anti-trans,” just as not all violence victimizing black people is “anti-black.” The LGBT lobby Human Rights Campaign says this about its list:

These victims were killed by acquaintances, partners or strangers, some of whom have been arrested and charged, while others have yet to be identified. Some of these cases involve clear anti-transgender bias. In others, the victim’s transgender status may have put them at risk in other ways, such as forcing them into unemployment, poverty, homelessness and/or survival sex work.

While the details of these cases differ, it is clear that fatal violence disproportionately affects transgender women of color — particularly Black transgender women — and that the intersections of racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia and unchecked access to guns conspire to deprive them of employment, housing, healthcare and other necessities.

Incredible. Any time a trans person is involved in deadly violence, HRC assumes it has to do with bigotry. If they engaged in extremely risky behavior, such as street prostitution, well, that’s the fault of bigotry too.

NBC News is only repeating what activists say — this, to create a phony crisis demanding government intervention. It is surely no coincidence that these fake-news stories are appearing while the Equality Act is before Congress.

Again: whenever the national media report anything about trans issues, you’re safe to assume that they are lying or otherwise spinning advocacy journalism, unless you can verify otherwise.

The post There Is No Epidemic Of Trans Murders appeared first on The American Conservative.

Aaron Renn & Rod Dreher Talk

I’m really looking forward to being interviewed live on Wednesday by Aaron Renn, principal author and editor of the website and newsletter The Masculinist, which is one of the most important and necessary Christian sites. From Aaron’s announcement:

Next Wednesday, March 17th at 2 pm Eastern Time, The Masculinist will be interviewing Rod Dreher live on our YouTube Channel. He will be discussing his new book Live Not By Lies, and discussing his other book The Benedict Option. The Live Interview will talk about the challenges facing the church in today’s world, and how Christians should be living in the 21st century West.

It’ll be an interesting conversation with a thought-provoking author.

Check out the Premier to the video here, and set a reminder so you can see the show live and ask live questions.

If you can’t make the interview but want to have one of your questions asked in the interview, leave it in the comments section. We will try to address them during the show.

I really hope you’ll make time to watch.

Also, this coming weekend, I’m going to be appearing at Patrick Henry College with Prof. Daniel Mahoney and Prof. Joshua Mitchell — and you can watch it online. Register here. 

 

The post Aaron Renn & Rod Dreher Talk appeared first on The American Conservative.

More On Military Social Justice Warriors

A reader writes:

Been a big fan for years. Forgive me typing this out fast. But I think you’ve got it at least partly wrong on the military wokeness stuff. I agree with the wider problem, e.g. How to Be Antiracist in the Navy. But as an active-duty officer, I think most of the anger against Tucker Carlson is coming from normal military members who aren’t woke, but see him as demeaning the service of women in the military. Women have been in service now since the 70s, and have done a fine job. I serve alongside women every day. I think there might be a good abstract argument for an all-male military, but that ship sailed years and years ago; this isn’t a battle worth fighting right now. The women in combat thing is certainly a problem, but that image of Tucker and the “pregnant woman fighting our wars” is not talking about women fighting in combat. Pilots (who run our Air Force long after they stop actively flying) wear their silly “pajama suits” (what non-fliers call them) around the office every day. It annoys everyone else, but it is a pilot tradition. So it is perfectly reasonable that if we have women pilots, and they become women commanders who mostly have desk duty, that they can have access to maternity flight suits. We have had maternity combat uniforms for years. Probably since the 90s at least. But Tucker Carlson does not mention that, because it doesn’t help his boomer-inflaming cause. I know you like him, and I respect the fact that he gets stuff right sometimes, but I’m starting to think about you and Tucker Carlson in the way you think about the GOP and Donald Trump. Don’t tie yourself to this guy. He’s an asshole.I know it is a bit unfair to impugn Carlson for his lack of service, but I hope you understand how female servicemembers who have put their life on the line on multiple deployments to Afghanistan or Iraq or wherever feel when they see this chicken-hawk  in his thousand-dollar suit mocking their maternity flight suits. That makes people angry. Women have lost limbs and died to protect this country, Rod. And practically every female servicemember out there who has been in for a few years has had to miss a kid’s birthday, an anniversary with their husband, etc., while on deployment. I think that is where the anger against Tucker is coming from. It would have happened regardless of whether the military had a wider wokeness problem. Again, maybe women shouldn’t be in service at all – but if that is what you are worried about come out and say it. Don’t be mealy-mouthed about it.Additionally, it sort of bothers me how you write off the whole military (not wanting your son to serve, etc.) because of some of these wokeness incidents. There are a lot of people serving quite honorably, who are just trying to do their job. Just two summers ago, not a single officer in the legal office at a major Air Force base where I worked knew what the term cisgender even meant. These were all recent law school grads. Obviously some of this stuff is getting forced down the military’s throat, but we get dumb corporate PR-style training all the time. Every year there is some silly new type of training on the (very real problem) of sexual harassment/assault. Our cyber training has featured a cartoon featuring the three little pigs for years. Most of the infantile stuff goes in one ear and out the other. So don’t write us all off. The wokeness stuff is a small part of a massive organization. I promise you it isn’t trickling down much to your average soldier/sailor/airman.

Another reader:

I’m glad you are talking about this. I have heard grumblings from close friends and acquaintances (actual combat veterans who served in actual infantry and even special operations) about all the BS around women in the military. I sent you the Marine study awhile back (I believe it is the same one you linked to today) but there are also studies of women who ended up serving in conditions like combat in Iraq. That is, studies drawn not from exercises but from actual service of women deployed who, for whatever reason, were deployed longer or under conditions that resembled combat. The injury rate was staggering. The cumulative stress is something the female body apparently can’t handle like the male.

I’m a defense contractor and my perspective from here is that the military at some level knows it is in trouble with respect to finding the personnel physically and mentally fit to serve, and the military is hoping that new technology will save the day. As flattering to myself and my company as it would be to believe that, I don’t believe it for a second. This has the feel of a fever dream near the end before succumbing to the sickness.All the crap about women as “warfighters” is absolute insanity. (Except for pilots, that might be fine–I have no special knowledge there.) Trust your gut here. Nobody, no grunt who actually fights believes that women in combat make us more lethal. But no one is asking the actual infantrymen who fight. This is like the trans hysteria–complete gaslighting. Even if there exist a couple of women here or there who can cut it, the statistics show quite clearly that a massive amount of resources are wasted finding those few out of hundreds who washout. Those resources could have been used on hundreds of men who could do the job and who never got a chance because of all the spaces reserved for women, 99% of whom wash out. That doesn’t make the military stronger, it makes it weaker.Think about all the mass delusions our elites are laboring under right now. The police genocide of black men for example. Is it that hard to believe that we are under a similar delusion with respect to our ability to defeat a peer adversary? No doubt America has the ability to project power across the globe in a way that China could not hope to match, but just because China could not project power at a moment’s notice in South America like we could doesn’t mean that they could not sweep us out of the Pacific. Our military is designed to accomplish a wide range of tasks befitting an imperial power. China’s military is honed and finely-tuned to do one and only one thing: destroy ours in the Pacific.If you look at our spending, it is spending on a military that is deployed across the globe. It is spent maintaining decades old equipment worn out from two decades-long foreign wars. It is spent with an eye towards being able to project some power anywhere on the planet quickly. But China’s spending is all towards new equipment. Every year that goes by, we tread water with old equipment but every year Chinas’ net amount of new equipment is greater. And all of it, every bit of it, is directed like a spear at our Pacific presence.

Another reader, this one a retired military officer:

The military has definitely gone woke and there are few areas not infected. I’ll give you a few examples that were from the last few years of my career — just as a personal account from an insider.My deputy — a damn fine airman — got pregnant 3 times in 4 years. I was (and still am) happy for her. I love her children and her family and we are very close friends to this day. But man, I can’t tell you how much it affected us operationally. The reality is that the manpower cuts that started in the Clinton era and have largely continued to present day have left units in no position to cover long-term losses in manning. I’m very supportive of generous maternity leave but the DoD has done a very poor job of accommodating those units that are already short-manned with support when mothers take maternity leave.That last example is how operations are affected in garrison — in a deployed environment it’s different. I personally know an AF doctor, a surgeon, who openly admits that she timed her 4 pregnancies to get out of deployments. The military life is actually pretty good, stateside (or on a family-accompanied long-tour to Germany or the UK) but, at some point, everybody has to pay the piper via deployment. And if, for some reason, you cannot go — that tasking has to be filled by someone else. Which means that my surgeon acquaintance interrupted the lives of 4 other families. Lest anyone think this is rare — I personally know 3 others who have gotten pregnant to avoid deployment.In case you are wondering who goes in their place — well, chances are good that it’s a man.From another angle of wokeness: I worked closely with a gay colonel. He was among the worst commanders I experienced in my career. He was not bad at his job because he was gay — but he was hired into it because he was gay. The military, in theory, is the country’s greatest meritocracy — but that hangs in the balance.And finally, the trans-front: A few years ago, I was in a room with a lieutenant colonel who made an unfunny, lame joke that, if you squinted really hard and turned your head sideways, could have possibly been seen as anti-trans. A junior enlisted yelled at the senior officer and the incident was met with no discipline.I’m not saying that statements made in poor taste should not be accounted for, but crossing the line of officer/enlisted — especially by one so junior to one so senior — would have been unheard of ten years ago.

So those are some perspectives for you to consider.Look at the Faculty Resources for Diversity & Inclusion page at the US Naval Academy. An excerpt:The US Naval Academy is mainlining this racist bilge from Kendi and DiAngelo into the midshipmen’s heads! Where is the actual diversity of perspective here? Where is the McWhorter, for example?

Tomorrow’s elite leaders of the US Navy are being indoctrinated in this poison. Where is Congress? Why are they letting this happen?

Today is pub date for the paperback edition of Ross Douthat’s The Decadent Society. I was talking with my fellow TAC podcaster Kale Zelden this morning about what we’re going to discuss on our next podcast (recording this evening), and we talked about institutional decadence having set in when an institution ceases to care, except nominally, in its purported mission. He said that if you’ve ever worked for a non-profit, you’ll know that whatever their stated mission, for many of them, the real mission is making sure the non-profit will always be in business. He talked about the Catholic Church (he’s Catholic) as having institutionally lost sight of what the Church exists for. We talked about how the US military’s senior leadership, regarding the spread of wokeness, seems more interested in making itself into an institution that gains plaudits from elites than in maintaining a tight focus on its mission: winning wars.

Can you think of a single major American institution that you have confidence is focused in its recruitment, hiring, and promotion on the personnel — regardless of race, sex, or anything else — that are best prepared to carry out the institution’s mission? I can: professional sports. People care about one thing with professional sports teams: winning. You’re not going to see the NFL, NBA, MLB, or any other leagues hiring players that fill diversity quotas, or that mean teams are models of racial equity. No, they want to win. I would rather the LSU Tigers be 100 percent black men, and win, than to Look Like Louisiana, putting an equitable number of white people and women on the team, and lose. Nobody ever talks about applying these formulas and mandates to professional athletics, because we take fulfilling the mission with utmost seriousness.

But other institutions? Not so much. What’s interesting is that they get extremely touchy when told that reality doesn’t match their claims. I argued once with a newsroom manager about whether or not the new diversity mandates made our journalism better. I pointed out an objective measurement of how quality had suffered in a particular way. The answer was uncompromising: “When you factor in diversity as a component of quality, there’s no discrepancy.” What that really means: diversity cannot fail. If the new mandates result in a poorer quality product, then we are not allowed to notice that.

Maybe one reason the US Military brass got so angry at Tucker Carlson was this recent news:

According to a Saturday report from the Telegraph, the Army is “considering a reversal of its new gender-neutral physical test to instead include different evaluation categories for men and women.”

A study from the Pentagon noted that at least 65% of female soldiers were failing the military’s Army Combat Fitness Test. At least 90% of male soldiers passed the test.

In response to the study, Congress has halted implementation of the new test, and the military is looking into whether the test is actually fair.

“In the ACFT there are six events — the maximum deadlift, a standing power throw, hand-release pushups, a spring, drag and carry, leg tuck, and a two-mile run,” the Telegraph noted. “To pass the test those taking it must score at least 360 points out of a possible 600, and those who achieve higher scores are more likely to be promoted.”

Average women’s scores, according to the outlet, are approximately 100 points lower than men’s.

An unnamed Army official told Military.com that it is imperative to “figure out a way to make it fair to both genders.”

“We are not going to artificially inflate the raw score for women, but we have to figure out a way to make it fair to both genders,” the officer explained. “We need a fair way that accounts for physiological differences. If anything, it’s a more gender-neutral assessment process because it doesn’t show the raw scores.”

“Make it fair to both genders” means “make it possible for the brass to pretend that the ideological goal has been achieved.”

How fair is it to a female soldier to send her out into the field of combat with a false sense of how capable she is, owing to her physical strength? How fair is it to the male soldiers relying on her? Whose lives are on the line in those situations (as is hers)?

Kristen Griest, the Army’s first female infantry officer, is not happy with the Army’s desire to scrap gender-neutral physical testing. Excerpt:

Reverting to gender-based scoring and reducing the minimum standard for combat arms will also hurt the women in those branches. Under a gender-based system, women in combat arms have to fight every day to dispel the notion that their presence inherently weakens these previously all-male units. Lower female standards also reinforce the belief that women cannot perform the same job as men, therefore making it difficult for women to earn the trust and confidence of their teammates. The original ACFT promised some respite from these perceptions, but a reversion to gender-based scoring threatens to validate them. While it may be difficult for a 120-pound woman to lift or drag 250 pounds, the Army cannot artificially absolve women of that responsibility; it may still exist on the battlefield. The entire purpose of creating a gender-neutral test was to acknowledge the reality that each job has objective physical standards to which all soldiers should be held, regardless of gender. The intent was not to ensure that women and men will have an equal likelihood of meeting those standards. Rather, it is incumbent upon women who volunteer for the combat arms profession to ensure they are fully capable and qualified for it. To not require women to meet equal standards in combat arms will not only undermine their credibility, but also place those women, their teammates, and the mission at risk.

Keep writing me about this. I want to have this discussion. Happy to hear and consider opinions from all sides.

 

The post More On Military Social Justice Warriors appeared first on The American Conservative.

US Military: Social Justice Warriors

I still struggle to process the meaning of the Pentagon’s propaganda blitzkrieg against Tucker Carlson. Even if you think Carlson is wrong in his criticism of the woke military (see here for some of it), the fact that the Defense Department has reacted so aggressively is extraordinarily troubling. I would have been troubled by it had the DoD hit out at left-wing media critics like this. But to my knowledge, they never have. They reserved this kind of response for a conservative media figure who questioned the military’s new wokeness. This tells us something.

I’ve been hearing from a number of you since I first posted about it the other day. A pastor I know personally told me that one of his congregation is in a service academy, and sends him photographs of assignments and readings they are given. The young person asks the pastor for advice on how to navigate all this as a Christian. The pastor said he — the pastor — is a conservative, but the things that the new woke military is putting into the heads of our young people are shocking. Let me be clear: the pastor is not hearing about this second-hand; he’s seeing photos of the actual documents. I have asked him to share them with me so I can pass them on to you. I’m waiting to hear back.

A reader writes:

You need to see this. This has gone way overboard. Now, it’s the II Marine Expeditionary Force’s (II MEF) Information Group getting into the fray with Tucker Carlson. Just so you and readers who might be unaware understand, the II MEF is a three-star command, roughly equivalent to a corps in the Army, and is a major warfighting unit.

https://twitter.com/iimigofficial/status/1370373548045430786

[This tweet has since been deleted, but I think this was it: — RD]

This one really takes the cake:

https://twitter.com/iimigofficial/status/1370377174277050375

[This one too — I wasn’t able to see it before it was taken down, but I think this was it. — RD]

Then they realized they overstepped and began to walk it back:

…before owing it to their “aggressive nature:”

https://twitter.com/iimigofficial/status/1370423764299710467

[This tweet has also been deleted, but this appears to be the one: — RD]

Mind you, this is just a few of the many tweets, posts, and statements made by military personnel in reaction to what Tucker Carlson (hadn’t) said. Once upon a time, the military was called “baby killers” and “military intelligence” was an oxymoron. Did the military lash out like this, uncontrollably, then?

There’s a difference between defending one’s honor and engaging in cultural and political beefs. This is the latter and it’s totally unbecoming of the military. I cannot believe this is being tolerated, but should I really be surprised?

This also proves that there’s no “there” anymore – it’s “here.” The military has become consumed with Wokeism and the Left has fully conquered it. I’ve said before, once the Left subverted the military, then it’s subverted the last institution in America that was truly national and something of a refuge for conservatives. The battle, if not the war, has been lost.

What else is there for the Left to come after?

Sen. Cruz hit the ceiling, appropriately:

Under Biden, the military is launching political attacks to intimidate Tucker Carlson & other civilians who criticize their policy decisions.

Officials in uniform are being used for the campaign.

I’ve demanded a meeting with the Commandant of the USMC to put a stop to it. pic.twitter.com/Ihl8xRJr0S

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) March 14, 2021

The USMC has apologized profusely for the tweets.

Still, this is one of those moments when the veil slipped to reveal what’s really there. Whoever was in charge of the USMC Twitter account got out ahead of his bosses, but not that far ahead. The DoD put out a press release last week trashing Carlson in extraordinary terms. 

Kirby addressed the insults to the entire U.S. military straight on. “I want to be very clear right up front, that the diversity of our military is one of our greatest strengths,” he said. “I’ve seen it for myself in long months at sea and in the combat waged by our troops in Iraq and Afghanistan. I’ve seen it up on Capitol Hill just this past month. And I see it every day here right at the Pentagon.”

More:

No job in the military is barred to women, the press secretary noted. They fly jets, fight in infantry squads, drive tanks, command warships and soon to lead combatant commands — President Joe Biden has nominated Air Force Gen. Jacqueline Van Ovost to command U.S. Transportation Command and Army Lt. Gen. Laura Richardson to command U.S. Southern Command.

“To be sure, we still have a lot of work to do to make our military more inclusive, more respectful of everyone, especially women,” Kirby said.

Back in 2015, the US Marine Corps’ own study found that when it comes to infantry combat, diversity was our weakness:

All-male ground combat teams outperformed their mixed-gender counterparts in nearly every capacity during a recent infantry integration test, Marine Corps officials revealed Thursday.

Data collected during a monthslong experiment showed Marine teams with female members performed at lower overall levels, completed tasks more slowly and fired weapons with less accuracy than their all-male counterparts. In addition, female Marines sustained significantly higher injury rates and demonstrated lower levels of physical performance capacity overall, officials said.

The troubling findings come as Commandant of the Marine Corps Gen. Joseph Dunford prepares to make a crucial decision regarding the integration of female troops into closed combat roles.

Which was precisely Tucker Carlson’s point! He was only stating pretty much what the USMC itself found in 2015. But all that has been memory-holed. If the US military is so confident in its woke policies, why it is so damn touchy when criticized?

Let me share with you something I have learned in the past few days. What follows is a mixture of my own opinion, informed by hearing from someone very much in a position to provided informed background.

That woke culture has overtaken the military at the highest levels should not surprise us. The military does not stand separate from the rest of Western culture. The Tucker Carlson incident highlights what rubes and dupes cultural conservatives have been for quite some time. We on the cultural right have been living under the illusion that the US military is a conservative institution, and that only culturally conservative Americans are drawn to serve in it.

Part of our being duped is our willingness to trust the national security wing of the GOP coalition. We assumed wrongly that because they identified as conservatives, that they were conservatives in all things.

Thomas Donnelly at AEI was one of the top neocon defense hawks:

Now he’s Giselle Donnelly, still employed at AEI as a defense hawk:

In 2018, when Giselle came out as a transwoman, I wrote about the Washington Post’s fawning profile of zir. Excerpt:

This paragraph of the profile jumped out at me. It’s about how Donnelly, having divorced his first wife, met the woman who is now his (her, whatever) second wife: Beth Taylor, a Navy veteran who runs a studio in DC that helps men transition to presenting themselves as female:

Giselle and Beth shared a love of national security, wine, gender fluidity and BDSM. They soon began dating, and last year they were married. Those close to them who missed this time in their lives will soon be able to see it up close and personal. For about two and a half years, a film crew followed them and documented their relationship, along with Giselle’s gender journey.

National security, wine, gender fluidity, and sadomasochism. American as apple pie.

More:

AEI President Arthur Brooks and Vice President for Foreign Policy Danielle Pletka told me their decision to support Giselle was a simple one, since she’s the same person dedicated to the same principles that made her a good fit for the institution all this time. “We are proud that she is part of the AEI family,” they told me.

You cannot get more Establishment Conservative Washington than Arthur Brooks and Danielle Pletka. They are in the Inner Ring. And they ratify Thomas Donnelly having become Giselle Donnelly. You may think this is a wonderful thing, or you may think this is a terrible thing, or you may not know what to think at all. But you must recognize that this event happening at one of the top right-wing institutions in Washington is a very big thing indeed.

Anyway, there is a reason why the national security elites in this country see the culturally conservative governments of the Visegrad countries as … well, if not enemies, then not exactly allies. What we call “wokeness” has now been folded into the American mainstream — and now wokeness is armed. Twenty years ago, these same people took America to war to turn Afghanistan and Iraq into liberal democracies. Having learned nothing, now the newest iteration of the regnant American ideology infuses US warmaking. Never mind that in reality, units that have women in combat roles perform less well than all-male ones, for reasons that are perfectly obvious to anyone not blinded by ideology. But the ideology of the ruling class will not allow reality to intrude.

A US Navy anti-discrimination task force recommended recently that all Naval personnel commit themselves to saying this pledge:

I pledge to advocate for and acknowledge all lived experiences and intersectional identities of every Sailor in the Navy. I pledge to engage in ongoing self-reflection, education and knowledge sharing to better myself and my communities. I pledge to be an example in establishing healthy, inclusive and team-oriented environments. I pledge to constructively share all experiences and information gained from activities above to inform the development of Navywide reforms.

And America’s adversaries be like:

The American Right is, at this moment, powerless to do anything about it. A decade ago, there was a mass movement in France against same-sex marriage. This is not because the French are Gallic Falwells. It’s because for all their liberality and atheism, the French have a strong cultural sense that children need mothers and fathers. Back in 2014, the New Yorker published a piece about the movement, noting how different it is from US opposition to gay marriage (e.g., it’s not an exclusively right-wing movement, and it has resisted tying itself to any political party). This movement produced a mass demonstration in Paris to oppose the proposed gay marriage law. Ultimately, the Manif Pour Tous movement did not prevail, but the fact that they were able to get so many French people out onto the street to take this stand was an incredible thing when you think that the much more religious, much more consciously conservative Americans did nothing like that. The fact is, cultural conservatism in America is dead. When even the US military is woke, it’s over. As the reader above writes, what remains for the cultural Left to conquer? And, if cultural conservatives can’t even keep the US military as a preserve from wokeness, how can they expect to address the threat from Silicon Valley and cancel culture?

Back to the military: the officer corps has become woke because there is every incentive to do so. Almost nobody on the Right will ever oppose whatever the military wants — this is why Tucker Carlson’s objections caused such alarm: he’s a prominent right-wing voice who questions the military — so the generals and the other officer corps know they have nothing to fear from the Right. It’s the same thing with Big Business: corporate leaders know that the right-wing masses are patsies so sold out to free-market fundamentalism that they cannot bring themselves to question anything Big Business does. Both the military and Big Business have learned that if you embrace wokeness and advance progressive goals, you can neutralize the Left’s criticism of the security state, defense spending, American hegemony, corporate power, and so forth.

Ambitious officers understand this, and understand that to oppose wokeness, in all its manifestations, is to jeopardize your career, but to embrace and advocate it is smart. The US might not be able to prevail on battlefields, but our leadership can prevail in the fight for career advancement. What happens when the US has to face a real enemy? The DoD can rally itself behind the “diversity is our strength” slogan, but the Marines’ own experience is that women — no doubt because of their own relative physical weakness — cannot perform in combat as well as men. Think about what happened to the Red Army when Stalin began purging its officer corps according to politics. When the woke Stalinist generals were sent into battle against Finland in 1940 and against the Nazis in 1941, they failed badly. What’s going to happen to us should China force a confrontation?

Take a look at these stories. Seriously, read them:

https://warontherocks.com/2015/11/millennium-challenge-the-real-story-of-a-corrupted-military-exercise-and-its-legacy/

https://www.wearethemighty.com/articles/that-time-a-marine-general-led-a-fictional-iran-against-the-us-military-and-won/

https://news.yahoo.com/were-going-to-lose-fast-us-air-force-held-a-war-game-that-started-with-a-chinese-biological-attack-170003936.html

https://www.wearethemighty.com/mighty-trending/us-losing-simulated-war-games/

https://www.businessinsider.com/the-us-apparently-gets-its-ass-handed-to-it-in-war-games-2019-3

The US has been losing war games, and losing them badly, for some time. We are a lot weaker than we think. The military’s obsession with wokeness — did you know that the US Navy’s leadership has its sailors reading Ibram X. Kendi, and other radicals? — is doing nothing for helping us win wars. But this is what the leadership says. I have seen with my own eyes how journalism executives talked themselves into believing that “diversity and inclusion” programs that they were eager to advance actually helped make journalism better. When they did not get the results they wanted, they ignored the facts. One liberal assistant editor told me that he asked to go back to reporting, because so much of his time was taken up re-reporting stories badly reported by minority recruits who were given more responsibility than they were ready for, solely because white people higher up in the newsroom wanted to feel that they were champions of Progress by hiring reporters on the basis of skin color. This assistant editor — white, gay, and liberal — told me that he lived in fear that in re-reporting the work of young journalists of color, he was going to miss something, and end up sued for libel. That’s how bad the work was.

Now, to be clear, the idea here isn’t that journalists of color are less talented than white journalists. The problem is that journalism’s obsession with wokeness caused newsroom leaders — white people, mostly — to throw standards overboard for the sake of promoting people who had the right qualifications (skin color, gender), but who were not yet ready to do the jobs in which they were put for the sake of Progress. But nobody could say so publicly. To notice was to be guilty of bigotry. This is how you end up with The New York Times forcing the resignation of one of its best journalists, on the most important story of this moment, because some pissy rich high school students felt triggered by his using the n-word on a field trip, in a theoretical discussion about whether using the n-word is grounds for cancelling someone.

Journalism is one thing; national security is another.

My younger son is 17, and wants to join the military. I have been writing here about how normally I would have supported that, but my conscience really bothers me about it, most of all because I do not trust the US Government not to waste the lives of our soldiers in stupid, pointless wars, but also, as of late, because I do not want my son to put his life on the line serving an organization that values ideology more than it does the lives of its soldiers. In other words, if my son were to become a Marine, I would be appalled that the USMC would send him out into combat in a half-female platoon, knowing that these platoons, based on the USMC’s own research, do not perform as well as all-male ones. They would be putting the life of my son on the line for woke political ideology, and I cannot stand that thought. Nor do I want my son to have to affirm garbage trans ideology and Kendi Thought as a condition of defending his country. He should not be taught to think by the US military that he is a lesser man because he is white. His mother and I have raised him to deplore racism, and not to judge people on the basis of their skin color, but rather by the content of their character. And I should want him to go into the US military to unlearn that?

A reader who is a veteran and a Catholic told me that he has come to see the state of the institutional Catholic Church and the US military establishment as having a lot in common. The leadership class of both institutions, said the reader, regards the faithful masses as an abstraction, a stepping stone to sustain their own ambitions. This is why the US military can have spent so much blood and treasure in the past 20 years without a solid, sustainable victory, and nobody has to pay a price for it. This is why the Catholic Church can suffer such astounding losses of the faithful, and in moral authority, and the careerists still carry on within the institution. This, said the reader, is what it means for institutions to be decadent. The reader said he would tell anyone planning to enter the military now the same thing he would tell anyone planning to become a Catholic: to separate belief in the truth with the actual corruption and decadence you’re going to encounter. And go in with eyes wide open, setting aside nostalgic illusions about the institution(s). About the military, my reader said that wokeness is an elite phenomenon interested in managing status among the elites. The vast majority of junior officers and enlisted men and women are not caught up in it, but they still have to know that they cannot be seen or heard to dissent from it, at the risk of being targeted by the Thought Police as a threat.

Cultural and religious conservatives need to fight hard to see clearly what is happening. The country is no longer what we thought it was. Take a look at this essay, “No More Cakes And Ale.” Excerpts:

The world we once regarded as normal no longer exists. If certain powerful figures in the political and medical communities have their will, we will never return to the way things were. As Klaus Schwab states in his book,  COVID-19: The Great Reset, “Many of us are pondering when things will return to normal. The short response is: never.”

This is surely bad enough. It is perhaps even more alarming that many people don’t seem to care that their world is collapsing, an attitude that only hastens the collapse. They no longer believe in their culture, their nation, and the formative values of the Judeo-Christian West, having succumbed to civilizational fatigue. “A civilization can survive only if its members… believe in its basic values,” writes Joel Kotkin in The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. “Today our key institutions…reject many of the fundamental ideals that have long defined Western culture.”

This is a pan-historical dilemma. As Arthur Bryant points out in his fascinating The Study of England: Makers of the Realm, a major reason for the decay of Rome lay in “a lack of faith and hope,” the gradual demoralization of a people seeing “no purpose either in society or their own lives,” indifferent to their history, disdainful of learning, lacking “individual character,” and recognizing no “ideal strong enough to inspire the masses to perform duty.” The result is despondency and self-despising, and I would hazard the suggestion that, mutatis mutandis, the analogy holds for the contemporary West as well.

Four years ago this week, my book The Benedict Option was published, to much controversy. A lot of my fellow conservative Christians thought it was alarmist, and dismissed it. That’s a far less plausible position to defend today. The title of the book came from this final paragraph of philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre’s 1980s book After Virtue:

It is always dangerous to draw too precise parallels between one historical period and another; and among the most misleading of such parallels are those which have been drawn between our own age in Europe and North America and the epoch in which the Roman Empire declined into the Dark Ages. None the less certain parallels there are. A crucial turning point in that earlier history occurred when men and women of good will turned aside from the task of shoring up the Roman imperium and ceased to identify the continuation of civility and moral community with the maintenance of that imperium. What they set themselves to achieve instead—often not recognising fully what they were doing—was the construction of new forms of community within which the moral life could be sustained so that both morality and civility might survive the coming ages of barbarism and darkness. If my account of our moral condition is correct [one characterized by moral incoherence and unsettlable moral disputes in the modern world], we ought to conclude that for some time now we too have reached that turning point. What matters at this stage is the construction of local forms of community within which civility and the intellectual and moral life can be sustained through the new dark ages which are already upon us. And if the tradition of the virtues was able to survive the horrors of the last dark ages, we are not entirely without grounds for hope. This time however the barbarians are not waiting beyond the frontiers; they have already been governing us for quite some time. And it is our lack of consciousness of this that constitutes part of our predicament. We are waiting not for a Godot, but for another—doubtless very different—St. Benedict.

The fact that the generals whose sole job it is to shore up the imperium are now fierce advocates of an ideology that weakens it is a sign of the times. The fact that the Pentagon decided to make a prominent conservative commentator its Public Enemy No. 1 is a sign too that they know that Tucker Carlson has the potential to wake people on the Right up to what is being done to our military by these ambitious ideologues, and to end the knee-jerk support for anything the military wants to do that has been common on our side.

The post US Military: Social Justice Warriors appeared first on The American Conservative.

From Hell’s Ashes, Redemption

In my book Live Not By Lies, I talk about the worst prison of all in the Communist world: Pitesti, in Romania. From the book:

In his life as a political prisoner in communist Romania, the late Lutheran pastor Richard Wurmbrand testified to both truths. The Romania that Soviet troops occupied at the end of World War II was a deeply religious country. After Romanian Stalinists seized dictatorial control in 1947, among the most vicious anti-Christian persecution in the history of Soviet-style communism began.

From 1949 to 1951, the state conducted the “Piteşti Experiment.” The Piteşti prison was established as a factory to reengineer the human soul. Its masters subjected political prisoners, including clergy, to insane methods of torture to utterly destroy them psychologically so they could be remade as fully obedient citizens of the People’s Republic.

Wurmbrand, held captive from 1948 until he was ransomed into Western exile in 1964, was an inmate at Piteşti. In 1966 testimony before a US Senate committee, Wurmbrand spoke of how the communists broke bones, used red-hot irons, and all manner of physical torture. They were also spiritually and psychologically sadistic, almost beyond comprehension. Wurmbrand told the story of a young Christian prisoner in Piteşti who was tied to a cross for days. Twice daily, the cross bearing the man was laid flat on the floor, and one hundred other inmates were forced by guards to urinate and defecate on him.

Then the cross was erected again and the Communists, swearing and mocking, “Look your Christ, look your Christ, how beautiful he is, adore him, kneel before him, how fine he smells, your Christ.” And then the Sunday morning came and a Catholic priest, an acquaintance of mine, has been put to the belt, in the dirt of a cell with 100 prisoners, a plate with excrements, and one with urine was given to him and he was obliged to say the holy mass upon these elements, and he did it.

Wurmbrand asked the priest how he could consent to commit such sacrilege. The Catholic priest was “half-mad,” Wurmbrand recalled, and begged him to show mercy. All the other prisoners were beaten until they accepted this profane communion while the communist prison guards taunted them.

Wurmbrand told the American lawmakers:

I am a very insignificant and a very little man. I have been in prison among the weak ones and the little ones, but I speak for a suffering country and for a suffering church and for the heroes and the saints of the 20th century; we have had such saints in our prison to which I did not dare to lift my eyes.

After his release, Pastor Wurmbrand, who died in 2001, devoted the rest of his life to speaking out for persecuted Christians. “Not all of us are called to die a martyr’s death,” he wrote, “but all of us are called to have the same spirit of self-sacrifice and love to the very end as these martyrs had.”

Accompanying other persecuted people in their suffering can lead us to deep repentance and spiritual strength. One of Wurmbrand’s fellow Piteşti prisoners was George Calciu, an Orthodox Christian medical student who was eventually ordained a priest. In 1985, he was sent into exile in the United States, where he served at a northern Virginia parish until his  death in 2006.

In a lengthy 1996 interview, Father George told about his encounter with a fellow prisoner named Constantine Oprisan. They met when Calciu was transferred from Piteşti to Jilava, a prison that was built entirely underground. The communists put four prisoners in each cell. In his cell was a man named Constantine Oprisan, who was deathly ill with tuberculosis. From their first day in captivity there, Oprisan coughed up fluid in his lungs.

The man was suffocating. Perhaps a whole liter of phlegm and blood came up, and my stomach became upset. I was ready to vomit. Constantine Oprisan noticed this and said to me, “Forgive me.” I was so ashamed! Since I was a student in medicine, I decided then to take care of him . . . and told the others that I would take care of Constantine Oprisan. He was not able to move, and I did everything for him. I put him on the bucket to urinate. I washed his body. I fed him. We had a bowl for food. I took this bowl and put it in front of his mouth.

Constantine Oprisan—“he was like a saint,” Father George said—was so weak that he could barely talk. But every word he said to his cellmates was about Christ. Hearing him say his daily prayers had a profound effect on the other three men, as did simply looking at the “flood of love in his face.”

Constantine Oprisan was a physical wreck because he had been so badly tortured in Piteşti for three years, reported Father George. Yet he would not curse his torturers and spent his days in prayer.

All the while, we did not realize how important Constantine Oprisan was for us. He was the justification of our life in this cell. Over the course of a year, he became weaker and weaker. We felt that he had finished his time here and would die.

After he died every one of us felt that something in us had died. We understood that, sick as he was and in our care like a child, he had been the pillar of our life in the cell.

After the cellmates washed his body and prepared it for burial, they alerted the guards that Constantine Oprisan was dead. The guards led the men out of the windowless cell for the first time in a year. Then the guard ordered Calciu and another man to take the body outside and bury it. Constantine Oprisan was nothing but skin and bones; his muscle tissue had wasted away. For some reason, the skin pulled tight over his emaciated skeleton had turned yellow.

My friend took a flower and put it on his chest—a blue flower. The guard started to cry out to us and forced us to go back into the cell. Before we went into the cell, we turned around and looked at Constantine Oprisan—his yellow body and this blue flower. This is the image that I have kept in my memory—the body of Constantine Oprisan completely emaciated and the blue flower on his chest.

Looking back on that drama nearly a half century later, Father George said that nursing the helpless Constantine Oprisan in the final year of his life revealed to him “the light of God.”

When I took care of Constantine Oprisan in the cell, I was very happy. I was very happy because I felt his spirituality penetrating my soul. I learned from him to be good, to forgive, not to curse your torturer, not to consider anything of this world to be a treasure for you. In fact, he was living on another level. Only his body was with us—and his love. Can you imagine? We were in a cell without windows, without air, humid, filthy—yet we had moments of happiness that we never reached in freedom. I cannot explain it.

In terms of sacramental theology, a mystery is a truth that cannot be explained, only accepted. The long death of Constantine Oprisan, which gave spiritual life to those who helped him bear his suffering, is just such a mystery. The stricken prisoner was dying, but because he had already died to himself for Christ’s sake, he was able to be an icon to the others—a window into eternity through which the divine light passed to illuminate the other men in that dark, filthy cell.

When I give talks about the book — like I did today to a luncheon group at the Greek Orthodox cathedral in Birmingham, Alabama — I talk about how as Christians, we know that if we suffer faithfully, uniting our agonies to Christ’s, that God will use them for our redemption, and the redemption of the world, even if we do not live to see it.

I was able to share with my lunch audience this news from Romania, sent to me this morning by Frederica Mathewes-Green:

Piteşti Prison of communist Romania was home to unspeakable horrors, where thousands suffered for their faith in Christ and political dissension.

Now, the former penal facility is set to become the site of a future Orthodox church in honor of all who suffered there.

The foundation stone for the future church was placed and consecrated on Monday by His Eminence Archbishop Calinic of Argeș and Muscel. The necessary arrangements for building a new church were worked out by Fr. Cozmin Ionuț Miloiu, who currently serves in the chapel at the prison building, reports the Basilica News Agency.

Glory to God! The Communists made that piece of earth into Hell, but now they are dead, and a church will rise on the site! There is reason to hope!

Watch the 34-minute documentary about Pitesti, featuring the late Fathers Roman Braga and George Calciu,  Orthodox priests who suffered there:

The post From Hell’s Ashes, Redemption appeared first on The American Conservative.

Why Amazon Is Stiffing Trans-Dissident Authors

So now we finally know why Amazon refuses to sell Ryan T. Anderson’s book When Harry Became Sally (which you can still buy directly from its publisher, Encounter Books):

Amazon informed senators on Thursday that it instituted a new policy banning books that treat gender dysphoria as a mental illness from its platform.

The e-commerce giant explained its policy, which had previously not been public, in response to a request for clarification from senators concerned about the banning of When Harry Became Sally: Responding to the Transgender Moment by Ryan T. Anderson. Amazon pulled the book from its shelves on February 21.

“We have chosen not to sell books that frame LGBTQ+ identity as a mental illness,” said Amazon. Author Ryan T. Anderson pushed back on Twitter, saying the ban is based on misinterpretations of his book.

First reported by the Wall Street Journal on Friday, the news comes as further confirmation of the ideological guidelines Amazon uses to determine which books it will allow. Amazon is the largest bookseller in the country, with over half of all book sales coming from the platform.

Three years ago, Anderson pushed back hard against the claim from a trans New York Times columnist that in his book, he refers to transgendered people as “crazy.” He says he does not, and challenges the Times to identify a single passage from his book in which he does that.

Also three years ago, the Washington Post ran a hit piece on the book that baldly misstated what Anderson’s book actually says. The Post corrected its mistakes — see Matt Franck’s thread here — but the errors were so basic that they would not have been made had the reporter been interested in doing fundamental journalism, instead of writing a propaganda screed.

In a tweet today, Anderson gets at why this is such a monumentally important case:

There is a debate, which Amazon is seeking to shut down, about how best to help patients who experience gender dysphoria. Amazon’s delisting of my book cuts off vital political and cultural discussion about important matters when we need it most. https://t.co/4CBQzLODoL

— Ryan T. Anderson (@RyanTAnd) March 12, 2021

He’s absolutely right about that: Amazon is using its unparalleled cultural power to make the public debate over a controversial issue go away. As I have been saying here, no matter what the issue, if Amazon will not sell books on particular issues, or books that take a particular position on an issue, then that means books like that will by and large not be published. Publishers cannot afford to publish books that will not be sold on the most important book retailing platform in the world. If intellectuals like Ryan Anderson — whose book is well-reasoned and documented, and in which he repeatedly urges critics of transgenderism to treat gender dysphorics with respect — cannot even make their case in the public square because the monopsony bookseller refuses to sell certain books, then we are not living in the country we thought we were.

Note well that this is not a decision driven by science. This is a decision driven by politics and politics alone.

Where are the free speech, no-banned-books liberals? I don’t expect to hear from them. That kind of liberal has died out.

What can we do about this? For one, Congress can hold hearings about the effect of Amazon’s monopsony, and Big Tech’s power, on free speech and debate. Congress can pass laws restricting book retailers who have a large share of the market from doing things like this. And conservatives (and others) can think creatively about creating a big online retailer for dissident books — this, given that if Amazon is prepared to take this extraordinary measure to shut down sales of books that offend against progressive ideology, there is no reason to think that it will stop there. If Amazon refuses to sell books that characterize LGBT as mental illness, why would they still sell books that characterize this as sinful? You know, books like The Bible.

I remind you that you can still buy Mein Kampf on Amazon.

I also remind you that you can still buy Ryan T. Anderson’s book on Barnes & Noble’s website. I imagine that there is nobody at Barnes & Noble’s corporate HQ who agrees with Anderson’s point of view. But they are booksellers, and they know that with that comes a moral responsibility to support free debate and expression. In a liberal democracy, it is as dangerous to have the sales of books dominated by a single seller as it is for the news media to be dominated by a single source.

 

The post Why Amazon Is Stiffing Trans-Dissident Authors appeared first on The American Conservative.