Rod Dreher's Blog, page 77

Tucker Vs. The Pentagon

Tucker Carlson laid into the woke Pentagon last night. This is well worth watching:

President Biden said we are building combat body armor for women, and maternity flight suits. The Defense Department will now pay for sex change operations. And so on.

This is more “hypernormalization.”

The word hypernormalization was coined by Alexei Yurchak, a professor of anthropology who was born in Leningrad and later went to teach in the United States. He introduced the word in his book Everything Was Forever, Until It Was No More: The Last Soviet Generation (2006), which describes paradoxes of Soviet life during the 1970s and 1980s. He says that everyone in the Soviet Union knew the system was failing, but no one could imagine an alternative to the status quo, and politicians and citizens alike were resigned to maintaining the pretense of a functioning society. Over time, this delusion became a self-fulfilling prophecy and the fakeness was accepted by everyone as real, an effect that Yurchak termed hypernormalization.

At Georgetown Law School, you are not permitted to notice that black students are at the bottom of law classes; if you notice it and say so, you will lose your job. If someone who has noticed it and tells you so, and you fail to report that thought criminal, your job will be at risk too.

Hypernormalization. 

And now Tucker is noticing the hypernormalization of the Defense Department. Bizarrely, the Pentagon are unleashing a public relations barrage against him. In a normal country, the media would be concerned about the Pentagon — the greatest war-making institution in the history of the world! — turning its top guns on a cable news show host. But in our hypernormalized country, they support the defense establishment.

Tells you something about where we are as a country, doesn’t it?

A reader writes:

I’m old enough to recall when you once said something to the effect of, “If you think the fact the only people Americans trust are those entrusted to exercise violence on our behalf isn’t a sign our social fabric has come undone, you’re ineducable.”

But what happens when even those entrusted to exercise violence on our behalf also lose the trust of the public? We don’t know, because we’re not there yet. But we’re getting there. Take a look at this latest poll on Americans’ trust in the military:

About 56 percent of Americans surveyed said they have “great deal of trust and confidence” in the military, down from 70 percent in 2018. The poll includes views of more than 2,500 individuals who were asked questions in early February 2021.

This is startling stuff. A 14% drop inside of three years is pretty steep, considering how consistently high the public’s trust of the military has been for at least 20 years. Nor should it come as a surprise to anyone. As journalist Kristina Wong tweets:

Some people are surprised military leaders are weighing in on political commentary from a media figure. As someone who has covered the military for 10+ years, I am not. Twitter has lowered the threshold for leaders (and anyone in the military) to express their views abt [sic] anything.

This was the logical and predictable outcome of a military that has become increasingly politicized, in accelerated fashion over the last decade. Yes, a lot of that was Trump’s fault. He often placed the military in the political line of fire, often in impossible positions the military should never be placed in. But it also goes back to Obama, who made clear his intention was to radically transform the service to more reflect left-wing sentiments and values. He was more successful than he realized.

This poll comes out just as another Tucker Carlson-involved controversy has erupted over his remarks on women serving in the military and how Wokeness has seemingly taken over the military as well. Predictably, military leadership and the Twitter intelligentsia have erupted in fury. One of the less-furious responses tried to spin their reaction as non-partisan:

The  @DeptofDefense  and the U.S. military is always political, but it can’t be partisan. Their response isn’t partisan. Senior leaders are not attacking @TuckerCarlson. They’re defending the women who have been fighting, sacrificing, and killing in our wars.

Before overviewing their reactions, it’s important to note – Tucker Carlson didn’t say what they said he said. Feel free to watch the whole video, but these are the remarks that caused the uproar:

So we’ve got new hairstyles and maternity flight suits. Pregnant women are going to fight our wars. It’s a mockery of the U.S. military. While China’s military become more masculine as it’s assembled the world’s largest navy, our military needs to become — as Joe Biden says, more feminine, whatever feminine means anymore, since men and women no longer exist. The bottom line is, it’s out of control, and the Pentagon is going along with this. Again, this is a mockery of the U.S. military and its core mission, which is winning wars.

Carlson was responding to President Biden’s assertion that “We’re making good progress designing body armor that fits women properly, tailoring combat uniforms for women, creating maternity flight suits, updating requirements for their hairstyles. And some of it’s going to take an intensity of purpose and mission to really change the culture and habits that cause women to leave the military.”

Carlson may have extrapolated too much, though “maternity flight suits” implies women are going to be permitted to fly in the military while pregnant. I’ve read studies that say there the medical risks are low, even when it comes to flying in a high-G environment, such as in a fighter plane, and I have no choice but to defer to their judgment. Again, context is critical here – Carlson contrasted this with China’s plan to “cultivate masculinity” and massive military build-up to challenge U.S. supremacy in the Asia-Pacific. It’s all happening at a time when national security leaders, many of whom will support or have supported the Biden administration, are sounding the alarm about the threat posed by China.

So, how did the military leadership respond to Carlson’s remarks?

Women lead our most lethal units with character. They will dominate ANY future battlefield we’re called to fight on.

Last I checked, everyone was complaining not enough women lead our “most lethal units.” Moving on:

Let’s be clear…women make our military stronger.

This sounds like typical propaganda from our college campuses and media. The irony is that the leftists are right – women are like men. Good women make the military stronger, bad women make the military weaker, just like the men. But being a woman alone doesn’t make the military stronger. Sorry, but the truth hurts. Again, Carlson never condemned women serving in the military. He condemned the fact the military is focusing far too much of its bandwidth trying to accommodate everyone in an arena that punishes those who need lots of accommodations. He was also condemning the fact that the military keeps pursuing policies that actually sow division by indulging in differences rather than cultivating a unified identity.

“Non-partisan?” Please.

I’m skeptical that China really poses the threat as described by our corrupt and politicized national security community. However, if they really think China can do the kind of damage they say China’s capable of inflicting (and they can still inflict quite a bit), then I’m not only skeptical the U.S. can meet the threat, but I also think the U.S. will endure a level of loss that it hasn’t seen in a long time. And all this “Girl Power” spirit might evaporate very quickly in the face of significant bloodshed. After all, a 2016 poll showed only 38% of female respondents supported women registering for Selective Service, despite the fact it would symbolically place women on the same level as men in terms of national obligations. Again, women are like men – they want to serve in the military if they choose to, but they don’t want to be forced to serve. Yet men can be. Who’s privileged here?

Or, major bloodshed may not sway the American public, to say nothing of the media or our politicians. I used to believe seeing the faces of large numbers of women killed in war would actually appall the public, but I feel like they would actually exploit this. “See? Women ARE brave and dying on the battlefield and are as good warriors as men.” Or, “Three in ten combat deaths are women. We need to change that.” America has become so brainwashed and demoralized we just might go along with this.

In the Woke World, the deaths of hundreds or thousands of Americans is glorious as long as it’s overrepresented by females and people of color. I truly believe we’re there.

I consider myself a patriotic conservative, but if I have anything to do with it, none of my kids — male or female — are going to put their lives on the line to defend what this country is becoming.

UPDATE: A reader comments:

I’m a career military officer. While there are some real issues here, Carlson gets some things wrong:

-Joe Biden has been President for less than two months. The development of maternity uniforms was already in motion, and has nothing to do with the Biden White House. If women are going to be in the military, there will be a demand for maternity versions of uniforms. We’ve have maternity versions of fatigues for years (and at least in the Marine Corps, of the service dress uniform)…this just expands the principle.

-Obviously having women in combat requires body armor fitted to women. Female Marines have conducted training in body armor for decades and just put up with any fit issues. There’s a real argument to be made about the merits of putting women in all combat arms fields, but that decision was already made…and *not* by the armed services but by our political leadership. This is merely a necessary consequence.

-Maternity flight suits do NOT mean having pregnant women fly. Aviators and related personnel in multiple services wear flight suits as a convenient everyday work uniform. Flight suits were originally designed to be worn while flying, just as camouflage fatigues were originally designed to be worn in ground combat. Both are now used as general work uniforms as often as for their original purpose.

-This is important: the military is SUPPOSED to be responsive to the direction of political leadership. We’re not a timocracy, the armed services are constitutionally obligated to carry out the lawful orders and direction of our civilian bosses–the President, Defense Secretary, service Secretaries, etc. Anyone angry that the military isn’t resisting decisions made by civilian leadership empowered to make them isn’t appreciating that. If you don’t think we should put women in combat situations, or think we spent too much bandwidth enabling that transition, that’s totally fair…but take it up with the President’s appointees and Congress, whose wheelhouse those questions of force structure are. The uniformed military advises, but political leadership decides what the force looks like and what its priorities are. That’s how our system is supposed to work.

Look, in 2015 the Marine Corps concluded a massive study finding that mixed-gender teams underperformed all-male teams, which found a fairly dim reception with the political leadership at the time. I can complain about what the political leadership should have done or should be doing all I want, but at the end of the day when the decision is made I have to carry it out, because part of military discipline is obedience to civilian leadership. The solution to civilian leadership being wrong is better civilian leadership, not the military trying to actively resist. That’s a door we shouldn’t want to open.

-I have concerns about mixed-gender combat units and women in combat roles. I have sympathy with a lot of Tucker Carlson’s priors and concerns on this. But…I personally know a lot of women who have served diligently and effectively, including women who have served successful in combat. Carlson’s commentary, regardless of his intent, came across as insulting. That’s why you see a lot of angry military voices being raised, even those belonging to people who share a lot of Carlson’s concerns. We’re all human here, and we’re all sensitive on behalf of our friends and colleagues. If you have an argument that the entire military should be all-male, I’ll listen and honestly I think there’s a reasonable case there. But I’ll also react negatively if it feels like you’re belittling the service of fellow Marines I personally know and respect. Right or wrong, how Carlson constructed his segment is a big part of this.

(Should go without saying but these views are mine rather than those of the DOD or any of the services)

UPDATE.2: Another reader comments:

Although the leftist revolution (Bolshevism?) that we are watching unfold in real time is disheartening on so many levels, this particular ship sailed several decades ago.

I suppose the pun is intended. Before becoming an academic, I served six years in the Navy during the early-to-mid-eighties and then fourteen more years on and off again in the Navy Reserve (finally retiring in 2010). I have plenty of first-hand experience with women in the military.

To begin, it is undeniable that without so-called gender-norming (i.e., different standards for males and females), the vast majority of women cannot make the grade in all kinds of military roles. For instance, when we had fires onboard and had to do any heavy lifting, like carrying things up steep, narrow ladder-wells from deck to deck, the women had to step aside; there was nothing de jure about it, they simply couldn’t physically do such things. And I am not even talking about the limitations that inhibit them from actually performing in combat arms, the Seals, the Rangers, etc. This argument alone should be nearly sufficient to end the bulk of this discussion.

But focusing on that overlooks other–and I believe more–important considerations regarding morale and combat efficiency that are themselves predicated on so many realities about human nature (as found in its two forms, male and female), but realities that we are now pretty determined to ignore. In my experience–one of the ships that I was on during the 80s was a research vessel that was one of very few at the time that allowed males and females to serve together–let’s just say that all kinds of shenanigans and drama took place that should not have been taking place. You simply cannot put young men and women at sea together for long periods of time and not expect such things as I experienced to not occur–regardless of how much forced education and training they put you through (and I sat through plenty and eventually just had to shut my mouth). And that goes even more so for submarines and tanks and living out in the field. You need to be focused on the mission–whatever it is–and bringing women into the mix seriously detracted from it.

None of this is to say that I didn’t encounter some women with fine character who were simply trying to get along in the world. But that is really kind of irrelevant, in my view, though the successful wedge issue centered on promotion and the argument that women who were denied the same experiences as men could not move up in the ranks. Of course, that begged all kinds of questions and missed an important point, a point people were making even back then but to no avail: the military should not be viewed primarily in terms of a career (though, in fairness, within a society reliant upon an all-volunteer military it has to get pitched that way to folks, and so, as society changed, so did the military–reality, common-sense, and combat efficiency be damned–and so plenty of young women signed up).

If I recall, part of the historical explanation/blame comes from the Bush I administration; Bush I ignored Elaine Donnely’s committee that recommended against women in combat and on combat vessels, and the Pentagon hasn’t looked back. To be sure, there were quantum leaps under both Clinton and Obama, but, to mix metaphors, the horse has sailed and it’s more than a little late trying to close the barn door now. I suppose I take some satisfaction in venting here–and hearing Carlson do so–but the long march through our institutions isn’t stopping.

We are living in/through a stunning ontological revolution regarding human nature, and what is happening in the military is as emblematic of it as anything. We simply do not want there to be limiting difference between males and females. Of course, we’re not even sure we want males and females–consumer capitalism, and the military needed to defend it, needs interchangeable androgynous parts. Christian churches had better get their anthropology as clearly articulated as possible in order to make it possible for females to conscientiously object–assuming the free exercise clause will continue protect the religious.

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Georgetown Law Doesn’t Care About The Truth

This is such a story of our moment:

Georgetown Law has fired one white professor and placed another on administrative leave after a video of their discussion about a black student in their class was condemned on social media.

Dean Bill Treanor anounced on Thursday that the school had ended its relationship with Professor Sandra Sellers after the video showed her complaining on Zoom that black students were predominantly at the bottom of her class.

She was speaking to Professor David Batson, who was placed on leave on Thursday pending a further investigation by the prestigious law school, which was attended by former first daughter Tiffany Trump.

The dean revealed that Sellers had told him she had intended to resign when they met to discuss what he branded as ‘reprehensible statements concerning the evaluation of Black students’.

The video shows Sellers talking with Batson in what she believed was a private conversation about the performance of a black student in a class they both teach.

‘They were a bit jumbled. It’s like let me reason through that, what you just said,’ Sellers says of the student’s performance, who the Black Law Students Asssociation claims is the only black person in the class.

‘You know what? I hate to say this, I end up having this angst every semester, that a lot of my lower ones are blacks,’ the adjunct professor of mediation and negotiation continues.

More:

The Black Law Student Association had been among the groups calling for Sellers’ resignation and an apology from Batson.

The group issued a statement on Wednesday in which they claimed that the recorded conversation is proof of Sellers’ bias in her grading of black students.

‘These racist statements reveal not only Sellers’ beliefs about black students in her classes, but also how her racist thoughts have translated to racist actions. Professor Sellers’ bias has impacted the grades of black students in her classes historically, in her own words,’ the statement said.

Read it all.

Watch the video here. The professors apparently didn’t know that it would be visible to everybody.

Here’s the thing: What if what Prof. Sellers says is true? What if most of her black students are in the bottom of the class? Does truth not matter here? The BLSA says the Sellers statement reveals that she is a racist. How? Is it considered to be a metaphysical impossibility that black students are at the bottom of her class because they aren’t keeping up with the rest?

Do low class grades by minority students prove that the professor is racist? Is it possible that those particular students can’t do the work as well as the others? And if this is a persistent problem at Georgetown Law, is the school maybe allowing in students under diversity rules that open the door to students who aren’t fully prepared to do the coursework at Georgetown Law? Could that be it? If what Sellers says is true, and if it’s true across different classes (as the other professor’s lack of challenging her statement might indicate), maybe that tells Georgetown Law something about its admission standards.

Those questions aren’t even being considered here. Rather, the idea is to destroy Prof. Sellers’ career and reputation. And this is a warning to other professors when it comes to grading black students: if their scores place them near the bottom of the class, you might end up denounced publicly as a racist, and fired.

Maybe Prof. Sellers really is a racist who grades black students unfairly. If that is true, then she should be fired. But that has not been demonstrated by any of this. What has been demonstrated is that Georgetown Law is run by administrators who will throw professors under the bus when the mob demands it, without any real investigation.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

This is remarkably similar to what Amy Wax of Penn said a few years back that got her into hot water.

For Wax, all that saved her was her tenure and she has gone on to continue to say politically incorrect things.

As a lawyer I am heartened that at least some law professors don’t keep these thoughts to themselves (although it sure looks like the two professors at Georgetown thought they were having an unobserved unrecorded conversation) and engage in the self censorship that is what happens in totalitarian states.

However, on the other hand, it is troubling that the deans and rest of the faculty are afraid to stand up for their colleagues unpopular but true statements.

Another reader:

With the exception of particular types of courses, law school exams and grading are uniformly done pseudonymously using assigned numbers, because the legal profession is paranoid about the appearance of bias and fairness. There would be no way to tell if a student is black or otherwise for even a committed racist to discriminate against them, unless one subscribes to the notion that you can discern a student’s race through their school writing. That said, moot courts, clinics, and some practical skills-based courses necessarily involve seeing how the students perform in person, and it’s very possible that a negotiation and mediation course would involve observing the students performing the subject matter of the course, which is negotiation.That doesn’t necessarily speak to whether she’s discriminating against black students if the course does involve physical observation, but this renders the dispute impossible to resolve in any kind of objective fashion: this type of course would involve qualitative judgment calls (otherwise it would be a blind grading course), and for people concerned about racial disparities in grading, an admission by the professor that the black students get lower grades in her class is effectively an admission that she judges black students to be worse. If statistics, especially when you the grader are aware of the outcome presented in those statistics, is always going to be considered dispositive evidence over trust and respect for professional and professorial judgment and discretion, then Prof. Sellers is discriminating against black students per se.Given that the post-60s American null hypothesis of “negative interactions or evaluations between people of different races are presumptively due to something other than racial prejudice” has been shattered (particularly in academia), your own demand for some type of evidence that she’s a racist is a moot point; the evidence is already there for the people outraged, she said she judges black students to be worse. Unfortunately, there’s no way to effectively prevent this sort of imputation of racism from the statistics in situations where evaluation is dependent on qualitative judgment when many no longer default to a good faith belief that people aren’t racist, short of doing what countries like France and the Dominican Republic do, which is to prohibit the collection of racial statistics. But given that the American trend over the past two decades to collect ever-and-ever more fine-grained data on race and for an ever-growing number of other affinity groups, I wouldn’t forecast this happening anytime soon.Here’s a good discussion from a law professor of this situation and the broader context of black students at American law schools, which also raises the (alarming) point that Prof. Batson seems to have gotten in trouble mostly because he bore a “bystander responsibility” and didn’t report Prof. Sellers’ remarks:https://reason.com/volokh/2021/03/11/adjunct-law-professor-fired-for-saying-to-colleague-a-lot-of-my-lower-graded-students-are-blacks/#more-8107877

Another reader:

Being fired for prohibited speech is bad enough, but now punished for omission of speech? That is clearly totalitarianism.

This might sound crazy, but what if a large group of professors–and I mean thousands–announced that they would give As to black students no matter what? No questions asked, automatic A. I wonder what would happen.

They would be praised for having granted reparations.Look:

Late Soviet society:

“Everyone knew it was fake, but… they just accepted this sense of total fakeness as normal.” pic.twitter.com/wl08SEKG4Y

— Echo Chamber (@echo_chamberz) March 11, 2021

Georgetown Law: “It’s HyperNormal To Live By Lies.”

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The Re-Barbarization Of California

Christopher Rufo is a national treasure. Someone leaked to him a draft of the new plan for the Ethnic Studies curriculum in California public schools. It will be voted on next week. What’s in the plan? According to Rufo:

R. Tolteka Cuauhtin, the original co-chair of the Ethnic Studies Model Curriculum, developed much of the material regarding early American history. In his book Rethinking Ethnic Studies, which is cited throughout the curriculum, Cuauhtin argues that the United States was founded on “Eurocentric, white supremacist (racist, anti-Black, anti-Indigenous), capitalist (classist), patriarchal (sexist and misogynistic), heteropatriarchal (homophobic), and anthropocentric paradigm brought from Europe.” The document claims that whites began “grabbing the land,” “hatching hierarchies,” and “developing for Europe/whiteness,” which created “excess wealth” that “became the basis for the capitalist economy.” Whites established a “hegemony” that continues to the present day, in which minorities are subjected to “socialization, domestication, and ‘zombification.’”

The religious narrative is even more disturbing. Cuauhtin developed a related “mandala” claiming that white Christians committed “theocide” against indigenous tribes, killing their gods and replacing them with Christianity. White settlers thus established a regime of “coloniality, dehumanization, and genocide,” characterized by the “explicit erasure and replacement of holistic Indigeneity and humanity.” The solution, according to Cuauhtin and the ethnic studies curriculum, is to “name, speak to, resist, and transform the hegemonic Eurocentric neocolonial condition” in a posture of “transformational resistance.” The ultimate goal is to “decolonize” American society and establish a new regime of “countergenocide” and “counterhegemony,” which will displace white Christian culture and lead to the “regeneration of indigenous epistemic and cultural futurity.”

This religious concept is fleshed out in the model curriculum’s official “ethnic studies community chant.” The curriculum recommends that teachers lead their students in a series of indigenous songs, chants, and affirmations, including the “In Lak Ech Affirmation,” which appeals directly to the Aztec gods. Students first clap and chant to the god Tezkatlipoka—whom the Aztecs traditionally worshipped with human sacrifice and cannibalism—asking him for the power to be “warriors” for “social justice.” Next, the students chant to the gods Quetzalcoatl, Huitzilopochtli, and Xipe Totek, seeking “healing epistemologies” and “a revolutionary spirit.” Huitzilopochtli, in particular, is the Aztec deity of war and inspired hundreds of thousands of human sacrifices during Aztec rule. Finally, the chant comes to a climax with a request for “liberation, transformation, [and] decolonization,” after which students shout “Panche beh! Panche beh!” in pursuit of ultimate “critical consciousness.”

The chants have a clear implication: the displacement of the Christian god, which is said to be an extension of white supremacist oppression, and the restoration of the indigenous gods to their rightful place in the social justice cosmology. It is, in a philosophical sense, a revenge of the gods.

Read it all. If you think Rufo is making it up or exaggerating, then look at his article. He’s quoting from and characterizing the actual documents. You need to understand what it being proposed here for the millions of public school students in California: not only will they be taught to hate whites, but they will also be led in chants to Aztec gods to whom human beings were once sacrificed.

The children will chant to Xipe Totec (Xipe Totek), who, according to Wikipedia’s lengthy and detailed article on human sacrifice in Aztec culture:

Xipe Totec, known as “Our Lord the Flayed One”, is the god of rebirth, agriculture, the seasons, and craftsmen.

Xipe Totec was worshipped extensively during the festival of Tlacaxipehualiztli, in which captured warriors and slaves were sacrificed in the ceremonial center of the city of Tenochtitlan. For forty days prior to their sacrifice one victim would be chosen from each ward of the city to act as ixiptla, dress and live as Xipe Totec. The victims were then taken to the Xipe Totec’s temple where their hearts would be removed, their bodies dismembered, and their body parts divided up to be later eaten. Prior to death and dismemberment the victim’s skin would be removed and worn by individuals who traveled throughout the city fighting battles and collecting gifts from the citizens.

California children will also be taught to chant to Huitzilopochtli, who, according to Wikipedia:

When the Aztecs sacrificed people to Huitzilopochtli (the god with warlike aspects) the victim would be placed on a sacrificial stone.  The priest would then cut through the abdomen with an obsidian or flint blade. The heart would be torn out still beating and held towards the sky in honor to the Sun-God. The body would then be pushed down the pyramid where the Coyolxauhqui stone could be found. The Coyolxauhqui Stone recreates the story of Coyolxauhqui, Huitzilopochtli’s sister who was dismembered at the base of a mountain, just as the sacrificial victims were.[33] The body would be carried away and either cremated or given to the warrior responsible for the capture of the victim. He would either cut the body in pieces and send them to important people as an offering, or use the pieces for ritual cannibalism. The warrior would thus ascend one step in the hierarchy of the Aztec social classes, a system that rewarded successful warriors.

During the festival of Panquetzaliztli, of which Huitzilopochtli was the patron, sacrificial victims were adorned in the manner of Huitzilopochtli’s costume and blue body paint, before their hearts would be sacrificially removed. Representations of Huitzilopochtli called teixiptla were also worshipped, the most significant being the one at the Templo Mayor which was made of dough mixed with sacrificial blood.

This is more or less the rite Mel Gibson recreated in his film Apocalypto. The natives in the film are Maya, not Aztecs, and the deity to whom they sacrificed (in the film) was Kukulcan, the Maya name for Quetzalcoatl. (See this link for more on Mayan human sacrifice; it appears that for the Aztecs, Quetzalcoatl was a god who did not require human sacrifice.) Here is a link to the Apocalypto clip. Do not watch this if you are squeamish, but you really should watch it so you will know what kind of gods the progressives in California propose that school children beseech for spiritual gifts.

Social-justice Marxists who want to teach millions of children in the state’s public schools to achieve liberation against the descendants of European colonists of 500 years ago by teaching them to chant to Aztec gods who required human sacrifice. How do you think this is going to end?

Wake up, folks, and read the signs of the times.

 

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Church Of The Dung Beetles

I would never, ever want to be on the wrong side of Catholic theologian Larry Chapp. He has just published straight fire. Excerpts:

There is a kind of bacterium and certain kinds of insects that live in, and feed off of, animal excrement.  This trait is described scientifically in the Latinate adjective “fimiculous.”  I can think of no better term to describe the current state of the Church, which seems intent on creating the conditions necessary for such creatures to not only live in the Church, but to thrive, and to predate on our young. My claim is that we are currently living in a fimiculous ecclesial era – – i.e. in an era of an actively living, parasitical, and aggressively consumptive rot.

My further claim is that the Church is currently fimiculous because it had already become feculent (filled with excrement) decades ago due to its alliance with the Mammon and Moloch of bourgeois modernity.  Dung beetles do not show up without cause and they would not be around were it not for the dung.  Remember that.  I will call it henceforth the “Chapp doctrine” which goes as follows:  If you do not want fimiculous entities in your home, then your home should not be feculent.

But like a mentally ill old lady who lives with 87 cats, the Church over the past century has grown accustomed to the stench of our ecclesial litter boxes and all too comfortable with its malodorous presence.  Indeed, for many, it apparently seems pleasant.  For the Church seems to attract fimiculous bottom feeders like disgraced bishops McCarrick and Bransfield who flourish in the Church’s humid and dark, fungal netherworld of rich donors and sexual deviancy. Indeed, as we now see with the elevation of a clerical dung beetle like Cardinal “nighty night baby” Tobin to the congregation for bishops, the Church actively promotes its worst quislings to high office.  And this follows on the heels of the equally troubling elevation of the Cardinal of cultural appeasement, Blaise Cupich, to the congregation for bishops.  McCarrick’s former housemate, Cardinal Kevin Farrell (yet another cultural appeaser) was elevated to a Vatican post years ago, despite being the Sergeant Schultz of the episcopacy: “I see nothing! Nothing!”

And now we have the revelation that the prissy and mendacious Cardinal Donald Wuerl has been receiving two million dollars a year from the coffers of the Archdiocese of Washington to continue his “ministry” (whatever that is) with the apparent blessing of Cardinal Wilton Gregory.  And all of these men – – Cupich, Tobin, Gregory, Farrell, Wuerl – – have about two degrees of separation from the perverted McCarrick and who nested in his poisonous tree with no apparent qualms of conscience.  Of course, they are now all dutifully “appalled” at his transgressions, which only goes to show that they are all, every one of them, duplicitous liars and manifest frauds.

Such are the men that Pope Francis has rewarded with high office and who are, apparently, the kind of bishops he wants in the American hierarchy, a fact that demolishes any hope that he truly understands the American Church and what it is up against culturally.  It also calls into question his pastoral wisdom since these appointments betray a tone deafness to the outrage American Catholics have over the McCarrick affair, a tone deafness already on display in the grand whitewash that was the Vatican’s so-called “report” on that scandal, wherein Francis was exonerated of any wrongdoing and most of the blame shifted to a long-deceased Pope who cannot defend himself.  The report also had the stench of political opportunism hanging around it since it is precisely the magisterial legacy of John Paul that many of the court jesters in the Francis papacy want destroyed.  If this is true, and I think it is, then the Vatican should be ashamed of itself for cynically using a real and serious scandal as a mere tool for undermining the influence of a previous pontiff.

And if all of this makes the rest of the American episcopacy uncomfortable you would never know it from their silence.  Most American bishops, true to their managerial class instincts to not rock the boat, prefer to act as if life in the Church is just business as usual, even as they pay lip-service to the pesky “tragedy of the sexual abuse crisis” – – a tragedy that they themselves created and for which they have never done any real public penance, even as they exempted themselves from canonical prosecution as well as their own absurd and useless “virtus” training that they demanded for the lay Church workers who were not the main source of the problem.  Sadly too, not only have they never done public penance for their sins, but they also continue to treat the sexual abuse crisis as a kind of idiosyncratic “one-off” event that they portray as the product of a unique set of cultural circumstances, now in the past, rather than for what it truly was:  the shocking irruption into full public view of the de facto atheism of the Church. An atheism that goes unaddressed even though it is the root cause of all of the crises we face. But this is what the “narrative of normalcy” demands and so the real crisis gets ignored, the real rot is merely covered over, like a band aid on a melanoma, and the flabby clericalism of the Church, with its culture of secrecy and its bourgeois epicureanism, continues unabated.

And he is just getting started! He goes on:

Can you tell that I am angry?  The fact is I am beyond angry and have moved into the realm of a thoroughly justified righteous indignation – – nay – – outrage at the feckless insouciance toward the crisis we face by those who currently run the Church.

Strap yourself in and read the whole thing. 

More power to Larry Chapp! Before I read this essay, this morning I recorded the next edition of The General Eclectic, the podcast I do with my Catholic pal Kale Zelden (and which is now at TAC, available through iTunes and on Spotify). We were talking about the sorry state of the American church in general (that is, not just the Catholic Church). I mentioned that it is past time for the laity to wait for the clerical class to ride in and save them. That’s not going to happen. I know good pastors and priests in various denominations who are worked to the bone. There are many more clergy, especially higher clergy, who may not suffer from the particular sins that Dr. Chapp identifies in the Catholic episcopacy, but who do suffer very much from a terror of rocking the boat, and who therefore content themselves with managing for decline.

We Americans, not just Catholics, live in what Chapp describes as “an era of an actively living, parasitical, and aggressively consumptive rot.” The churches, nearly all of them, are rotting too. They are in decline in terms of numbers. Discipleship is not happening (as the work of Christian Smith and his colleagues shows). And the small-o orthodox Christian churches — the ones who oppose the fast-rising tide of persecutorial social liberalism — are going to find themselves very soon under intense fire, not only from the state, but from other enemies. So are Christian schools and other institutions. So are Christian families, and individual Christians.

It’s not a case of “this might happen.” It’s happening now, and it’s going to get much worse. Again: don’t wait on church leaders to defend what the church is and teaches. But also don’t doubt your own ability to know the right thing and to do it. I spent a lot of time talking to Christian men and women of the Soviet bloc for Live Not By Lies, and the challenges they faced living out the faith under militant atheistic totalitarianism were much worse. This is not going to be easy, but it can be done, and it must be done. You can do it! We can do it!

The post Church Of The Dung Beetles appeared first on The American Conservative.

Our War Of Religion

Greetings from northern Alabama, where I just rolled in after eight hours on the road. I had assumed that the feelings behind last night’s grim “The Whale And The Net” post would dissipate in the sunlight, but they didn’t, and I don’t think they should, to be honest, because they’re based on something real and important. Our country really is falling apart, or rather, to be more honest, is being torn apart by elites. Read this urgent piece by Bari Weiss today about what the most economically elite high school students in the US are being taught. She starts out at a clandestine meeting of parents whose kids attend L.A.’s prestigious Harvard-Westlake school. They have to meet in secret, because if the school found out, there would be trouble. Excerpt:

By normal American standards, they are quite wealthy. By the standards of Harvard-Westlake, they are average. These are two-career couples who credit their own success not to family connections or inherited wealth but to their own education. So it strikes them as something more than ironic that a school that costs more than $40,000 a year—a school with Charlie Munger, Warren Buffett’s right hand, and Sarah Murdoch, wife of Lachlan and Rupert’s daughter-in-law, on its board—is teaching students that capitalism is evil.

For most parents, the demonization of capitalism is the least of it. They say that their children tell them they’re afraid to speak up in class. Most of all, they worry that the school’s new plan to become an “anti-racist institution”—unveiled this July, in a 20-page document—is making their kids fixate on race and attach importance to it in ways that strike them as grotesque.

“I grew up in L.A., and the Harvard School definitely struggled with diversity issues. The stories some have expressed since the summer seem totally legitimate,” says one of the fathers. He says he doesn’t have a problem with the school making greater efforts to redress past wrongs, including by bringing more minority voices into the curriculum. What he has a problem with is a movement that tells his children that America is a bad country and that they bear collective racial guilt.

“They are making my son feel like a racist because of the pigmentation of his skin,” one mother says. Another poses a question to the group: “How does focusing a spotlight on race fix how kids talk to one another? Why can’t they just all be Wolverines?” (Harvard-Westlake has declined to comment.)

More:

The parents in the backyard say that for every one of them, there are many more, too afraid to speak up. “I’ve talked to at least five couples who say: I get it. I think the way you do. I just don’t want the controversy right now,” related one mother. They are all eager for their story to be told—but not a single one would let me use their name. They worry about losing their jobs or hurting their children if their opposition to this ideology were known.

“The school can ask you to leave for any reason,” said one mother at Brentwood, another Los Angeles prep school. “Then you’ll be blacklisted from all the private schools and you’ll be known as a racist, which is worse than being called a murderer.”

One private school parent, born in a Communist nation, tells me: “I came to this country escaping the very same fear of retaliation that now my own child feels.” Another joked: “We need to feed our families. Oh, and pay $50,000 a year to have our children get indoctrinated.” A teacher in New York City put it most concisely: “To speak against this is to put all of your moral capital at risk.”

These parents — Weiss talks to parents whose kids go to elite prep schools on both coasts — won’t speak up is because they desperately want their kids to get into Ivy League colleges. More:

These are America’s elites—the families who can afford to pay some $50,000 a year for their children to be groomed for the eating clubs of Princeton and the secret societies of Yale, the glide path to becoming masters—sorry, masterx—of the universe. The ideas and values instilled in them influence the rest of us.

That is not the only reason this story matters. These schools are called prep schools because they prepare America’s princelings to take their place in what we’re told is our meritocracy. Nothing happens at a top prep school that is not a mirror of what happens at an elite college.

What does it say about the current state of that meritocracy, then, that it wants kids fluent in critical race theory and “white fragility,” even if such knowledge comes at the expense of Shakespeare? “The colleges want children—customers—that are going to be pre-aligned to certain ideologies that originally came out of those colleges,” says a STEM teacher at one of New York’s prestigious prep schools. “I call it woke-weening. And that’s the product schools like mine are offering.”

To say that “the ideas and values instilled” in students at Ivy League colleges “influence the rest of us” is to understate matters. When I moved to New York City in 1998 and worked in media there, I was surprised to find that the cliche about Ivy League elite networks running things really is close to accurate. The real value of an Ivy education is not what you learn, but who you meet. People who graduate from elite colleges, even non-Ivy elites colleges, are tomorrow’s American ruling class. You cannot afford to ignore that fact! As I write in Live Not By Lies:

In our populist era, politicians and talk-radio polemicists can rile up a crowd by denouncing elites. Nevertheless, in most societies, intellectual and cultural elites determine its long-term direction. “[T]he key actor in history is not individual genius but rather the network and the new institutions that are created out of those networks,” writes sociologist James Davison Hunter. Though a revolutionary idea might emerge from the masses, says Hunter, “it does not gain traction until it is embraced and propagated by elites” working through their “well-developed networks and powerful institutions.”

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

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

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

More Bari Weiss:

“I am in a cult. Well, that’s not exactly right. It’s that the cult is all around me and I am trying to save kids from becoming members.” He sounds like a Scientology defector, but he is a math teacher at one of the most elite high schools in New York City. He is not politically conservative. “I studied critical theory; I saw Derrida speak when I was in college,” he says, “so when this ideology arrived at our school over the past few years, I recognized the language and I knew what it was. But it was in a mutated form.”

This teacher is talking with me because he is alarmed by the toll this ideology is taking on his students. “I started seeing what was happening to the kids. And that’s what I couldn’t take. They are being educated in resentment and fear. It’s extremely dangerous.”

This is exactly the thing! The kids who are going to be running the country are being taught to resent Americans who don’t share their radical ideology, and to fear them. These kids are being prepared to use their power to wage war on their own countrymen. Weiss continues:

It’s not just Dalton, a school that has committed to being “visibly, vocally and structurally antiracist.” Bain & Company is tweeting about “Womxn’s History Month.” The Cartoon Network is imploring children to “see color.” Coca-Cola employees were recently instructed to “be less white.” You cannot buy or sell the newly problematic Dr. Seuss titles on eBay. This ideology isn’t speaking truth to power. It is the power.

Most alarmingly, the ideology is increasingly prevalent at the local public school. The incoming New York City schools chancellor is a vocal proponent of critical race theory. In Burbank, the school district just told middle- and high school teachers to stop teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and Of Mice and Men. The Sacramento school district is promoting racial segregation by way of “racial affinity groups,” where students can “cultivate racial solidarity and compassion and support each other in sitting with the discomfort, confusion, and numbness that often accompany white racial awakening.” The San Diego school district recently held a training in which white teachers were told that they “spirit murder” black children.

“I don’t mean to get emotional, I just feel helpless,” said one mother through tears. “I look at the public school and I am equally mortified. I can’t believe what they are doing to everybody. I’m too afraid. I’m too afraid to speak too loudly. I feel cowardly. I just make little waves.” Another tells me: “It’s fear of retribution. Would it cause our daughter to be ostracized? Would it cause people to ostracize us? It already has.”

Read it all. I cannot urge you strongly enough to do so, and to share it.

These woke totalitarians are doing the thing that all totalitarian regimes do: memory-holing a culture’s art and literature. This is not coming tomorrow; this is happening right now. And if it’s not happening where your kids go to school, hang on, it will. If this is not stopped, and stopped stone cold right now, we are going to have a civil war in America, or we will have techno-totalitarianism, in the Chinese social credit system style.

Earlier today, I urged you to read John McWhorter’s passionate and devastating attack on the woke militants, especially the people he calls “neoracists” (Kendi, DiAngelo, and the rest). McWhorter also calls them “the Elect,” highlighting the fact that these people are best understood as followers of a new religion. Wars of religion are the bloodiest wars, but this is what they are pushing the rest of us into. They are stoking race war from the Left. Beyond that, they are destroying classic American liberalism. Our tradition of free speech and freedom of religion, they hate. Our legal system’s focus on individual guilt or innocence — they despise it. They believe the color-blindness that generations of liberals, most especially Dr. Martin Luther King, fought for is in fact racist. They believe that the idea that everybody should be able to go as far as his or her talents and hard work can take them is bigotry. Excellence is bigotry too.

We are not going to recognize this country if these people aren’t stopped.

On the drive up today, I left my audiobook a couple of times to listen to NPR. So much oppression. It has become unlistenable now. I heard a report there that the Pentagon is extending the deployment of 2,300 National Guard troops around the US Capitol till May 23. Who are they protecting the Capitol from? That ridiculous January 6 mob is being rounded up and prosecuted, as well they should be. But 2,300 Guardsmen have to be away from their homes to militarize the US Capitol even now? What is this regime afraid of? The Pentagon says it’s a non-specified threat. Maybe so. They would know. But I don’t know that I trust the government to tell the truth on this. Remember how an earlier administration lied us into Iraq? This is the same US Government that has American soldiers still in Afghanistan, twenty years later, doing things like (according to official documents cited here by Richard Hanania) trying to teach a bunch of barely literate Muslim hill people to be good American feminists.

The regime — by which I mean the Biden administration, but also private power centers (academia, the media, corporate America, et al.) — are trying to teach us to fear and loathe each other by race. The regime is trying to convince our daughters that maybe they need to chop off their breasts and jack themselves up with male hormones, and our sons the opposite. They are trying to destroy any sense of normalcy. The propaganda never ends. And if you object — well, you’re a hater, and your family is going to pay the price.

What is it going to take for these wealthy parents to say screw it, my kids’ dignity and my kids’ souls are not worth going to a damn Ivy League school. What’s it going to take for them to decide that they don’t want to raise servile conformists? What’s it going to take to make them realize that they don’t want to be servile conformists either? If you read the Bari Weiss article, these parents know that these schools are warping their children, and they have every reason to believe that the Ivies will too. Why are they allowing these monsters to do this to their children?!

And not just the wealthy — what about all of us? What is it going to take to compel us to live as Havel’s greengrocer, and say that we’ll take whatever they throw at us, as long as we don’t have to live by these damned lies any longer? From Live Not By Lies:

Consider, [Vaclav Havel] said, the case of the greengrocer who posts a sign in his shop bearing the well-known slogan from the Communist Manifesto, “Workers of the world, unite!” He doesn’t believe in it. He hangs it in his shop as a signal of his own conformity. He just wants to be left alone. His action is not meaningless though: the greengrocer’s act not only confirms that this is what is expected of one in a communist society but also perpetuates the belief that this is what it means to be a good citizen.

Havel goes on:

Let us now imagine that one day something in our greengrocer snaps and he stops putting up the slogans merely to ingratiate himself. He stops voting in elections he knows are a farce. He begins to say what he really thinks at political meetings. And he even finds the strength in himself to express solidarity with those whom his conscience commands him to support. In this revolt the greengrocer steps out of living within the lie. He rejects the ritual and breaks the rules of the game. He discovers once more his suppressed identity and dignity. He gives his freedom a concrete significance. His revolt is an attempt to live within the truth.

This costs him. He loses his shop, his salary is cut, and he won’t be able to travel abroad. Maybe his children won’t be able to get into college. People persecute him and those around him—not necessarily because they oppose his stance but because they know that this is what they have to do to keep the authorities off their backs.

The poor little greengrocer, who testifies to the truth by refusing to mouth a lie, suffers. But there is a deeper meaning to his gesture.

By breaking the rules of the game, he has disrupted the game as such. He has exposed it as a mere game. He has shattered the world of appearances, the fundamental pillar of the system. He has upset the power structure by tearing apart what holds it together. He has demonstrated that living a lie is living a lie. He has broken through the exalted facade of the system and exposed the real, base foundations of power. He has said that the emperor is naked. And because the emperor is in fact naked, something extremely dangerous has happened: by his action, the greengrocer has addressed the world. He has enabled everyone to peer behind the curtain. He has shown everyone that it is possible to live within the truth. Living within the lie can constitute the system only if it is universal. The principle must embrace and permeate everything. There are no terms whatsoever on which it can co-exist with living within the truth, and therefore everyone who steps out of line denies it in principle and threatens it in its entirety.

It is not easy to do this, but it is never, ever going to be easier to do this than it is right now. 

Here’s something unsettling: a reader sent me this essay by someone called Lomez, titled “Our Generation’s War.” Check this part out:

When vast swaths of non-compliant Americans are declared domestic insurgents, it behooves us to conduct ourselves accordingly. This is not to say that whatever might broadly be called the ‘Dissident Right’ ought to assume a defensive crouch, or retreat into passive quietism until the regime exhausts itself. Though we may be in the midst of a 5th Generation war, some of the old rules still apply, and the insurgent, however diminished, however outgunned — metaphorically, of course — has certain advantages he can make use of.

Another war historian, David Gallula, describing the Cold War spasms breaking apart and reforming the global map after World War II, wrote in 1965 what has become the textbook on the nature of insurgencies. Gallula was a man of his time, and most of his examples are superficially outdated, Communist rebels from Greece to North Africa to Southeast Asia asserting themselves with greater and lesser effectiveness throughout the Third World. We are not Communists, and this is not the Cold War, no matter how much our State Department might wish it were so. Nonetheless, Gallula provides a few key insights that broadly apply to our fight, and that we ought to keep in mind as we ask the question of what comes next.

To begin, the site of contestation in the 5th Generation war against our decrepit regime is not firstly the halls of power, certainly not the Capitol building, and not even really the formal political arena at all. Borrowing from Yarvin, I’d echo that Republican electoral victories are not sufficient for breaking the regime until the Republican candidate sees himself as an outsider prepared to tell the regime that it must submit. Still, contra Yarvin, winning political fights is good, where we can get them, and there are ways of engaging in local politics, especially, that may achieve certain desired effects. But ultimately, political victories are downstream of a more fundamental fight, which is winning the support of what Gullala coarsely calls “the population.”

To put it in more accessible terms, the right will win if and only if it can infiltrate the mind of the ‘normie’ and exterminate the parasitic brainworms sucking the life from his better judgment and the resolve to do anything about his rapidly declining prospects.

His relative material comfort, despite the economic headwinds brought on by Corona and the ongoing outflow of resources from the middle-class, make this a difficult, though not impossible sell. The normie must be prodded. The normie must be pulled along. The normie must be given the opportunity and incentive to cross the rubicon into what for him is forbidden, and potentially hostile, intellectual and moral territory. He must be granted the license to self-consciously rebuke the epistemic authorities and expert class he has for a lifetime been conditioned to trust with his self-understanding. [Emphasis mine — RD]

That is, the normie must be given a cause. This cause must exist outside the political paradigm within which he has been accustomed to understanding these conflicts. Scott Alexander is not entirely wrong to propose that Republicans wage a “class conflict” against the strata of elite sense-makers who despise them. It is indeed a righteous cause, and an effective message. He is wrong however that Republicans, as such, ought to do this. No. This is not a partisan conflict against Democrats, though there is much overlap. This is a conflict of insurgents against a failing regime. That is the way it must be framed and its campaigns prosecuted.

I am cautiously optimistic that Americans understand this cause and the nature of their enemy instinctively. There is no denying the rot at the heart of American life, of Western life. There is no denying the ever-presence of the bugman and his sickly designs for us. The energy leaking out against this is everywhere in sight. However misdirected, however frenetic and decoupled from meaningful objectives, a spirit of disobedience obtains. They feel the quickening incursion of the public life into the private, no doubt accelerated by Zoom World and the bright eye of our screens watching and recording our every thought. Americans can feel caught in a straightjacket of preference falsification and coercive moral decrees, the stultifying HRization of their inner universe. What a bleak and limited existence!

And where they can’t feel it, we must guide them. We must articulate the shape of the enemy so he can see and understand its character. Human life versus pod life. This is an easy choice, but only once you understand it as the nature of the proposition before you.

More:

Finally, as Gullala observes, an insurgent movement in its infancy is necessarily small. It is necessarily weak. It needs time to build. It cannot on day one confront the regime on its turf and presume to use the regime’s own weapons against it. Again, this is not to advocate for quietism, but rather to recognize the limited usefulness of operating within the domains of social and political activity the regime already controls. You are not going to take back the universities or Hollywood or the news desk. Infiltrate these places and expose them for what they are, but to destroy them rather than to save them.

Before anything else, we must build a culture of our own. Any meaningful insurgency will be downstream from its capacity to imagine. Direct action politics will flail and follow, rather than lead, if it is not tethered to the kind of self-understanding that can only be achieved through art. The regime understands this, if only intuitively, and the ban waves and censorship are an attempt to tear apart the communities where this art can be cultivated and shared. But they are not yet omnipresent. They have not yet, as in Havel’s Czechoslovakia, managed to altogether “nihilize life.” There are cracks still to penetrate. There is, deep in the American soul, a resilience that is not yet extinguished. Build the communities, forge the relationships, online and off, where this resilience can manifest and triumph over the enemy and its machines.

This is how we win.

I would like to know more about that. In the meantime, we Christians have to start right now building the Kolakovic network, from Live Not By Lies. It’s not an either-or. Build a resistance for now, and one that is capable of supporting underground churches if the Regime cracks down, as it ultimately will. Remember, this is a War of Religion, whether you are religious or not.

UPDATE: A Romanian reader wrote to me today to say that today is the day his country celebrates the Orthodox saints of the Communist prisons. He sends this quote from one of them, the late Ioan Ionalide, who wrote this in 1985:

The sorrows of a detainee

The detainee feels that in the foreseeable future the communist power will be annihilated. And yet he is sad and worried. It is sad because he sees that those who have had the power of communization the country are shaping themselves as masters of the world to come.He is concerned that he understands that the prospects for an unprecedented and without opponents world tyranny are opening up. The golden calf, the ancient god, shows itself today as an all-powerful factory in the spirit of mankind. People worship the machine. It is a pseudo-religion of material dogmas, material meaning and unanticipated finality. The state that will have a monopoly on sophisticated weapons, genetic engineering and the technique of determining consciousness will be omnipotent and will destroy humanity. No one guarantees the freedom of the people in this civilization, no one can govern the technological forces in this civilization.That is why humanity lives on the heights of despair. All the problems of the world are in the Cross of Christ and of Christians, whenever we get lost or lazy on the way, let us go back to the Gospel and the Holy Spirit. The sufferings that are caused to us have the purpose of whipping our laziness and enlightening our minds.

That’s him on the second row, fifth from right, with the mustache. And that’s Constantin Oprisan (you’ll remember him from Live Not By Lies), third row, sixth from left:

 

The post Our War Of Religion appeared first on The American Conservative.

John McWhorter Flays The Elect

I have delayed my departure because there’s so much good stuff to read and to write about. This is the last thing I’m going to write before going to Alabama, I swear.

In Live Not By Lies, I said the best way to understand the Bolsheviks is as a new religion. Similarly, the best way to understand the Social Justice Warriors is as adherents of a new religion. I write:

Perhaps no public intellectual has thought so deeply about the fundamentally religious nature of these progressive militants than James A. Lindsay, an atheist and university mathematician.

Lindsay contends that social justice fulfills the same psychological and social needs that religion once filled but no longer can. And like conventional religions, it depends on axiomatic claims that cannot be falsified but only accepted as revealed truths. This is why arguments with these zealots are about as productive as theological disputation with a synod of Taliban divines. For the social justice inquisitors, “dialogue” is the process by which opponents confess their sins and submit in fear and trembling to the social justice creed.

Social justice warriors are members of what Lindsay calls an “ideologically motivated moral community.” Far from being moral relativists, SJWs truly are rigorists with a deep and abiding concern for purity, and they do not hesitate to enforce their sacrosanct beliefs. Those beliefs give meaning and direction to their lives and provide a sense of shared mission.

What are those beliefs? A rough catechism based on Lindsay’s analysis goes something like this.

The Central Fact of Human Existence Is Power and How It Is Used

Politics is the art and science of how power is distributed and exercised in a society. For SJWs, everything in life is understood through relationships of power. Social justice is the mission of reordering society to create more equitable (just) power relationships. Those who resist social justice are practicing “hate,” and cannot be reasoned with or in any way tolerated, only conquered.

There Is No Such Thing as Objective Truth; There Is Only Power

Who decides what is true and what is false? Those who hold power. Religious claims, philosophical arguments, political theories—all of these are veils concealing will to power. They are only rationalizations for oppressors to hold power over the oppressed. The value of truth claims depends on who is making them.

Identity Politics Sorts Oppressed from Oppressors

In classic Marxism, the bourgeoisie are the oppressor, and the proletariat are the oppressed. In the cult of social justice, the oppressors are generally white, male, heterosexual, and Christian. The oppressed are racial minorities, women, sexual minorities, and religious minorities. (Curiously, the poor are relatively low on the hierarchy of oppression. For example, a white Pentecostal man living on disability in a trailer park is an oppressor; a black lesbian Ivy League professor is oppressed.) Justice is not a matter of working out what is rightly due to an individual per se, but what is due to an individual as the bearer of a group identity.

Intersectionality Is Social Justice Ecumenism

People who bear identities within the so-called “matrix of oppression” link their identities to one another by way of intersectionality. The concept is that all those oppressed by the privileged classes—the patriarchy, whiteness, and so forth—are connected by virtue of their oppression and should challenge power as a united front. If one is not a member of an oppressed group, he or she can become an “ally” in the power struggle.

Language Creates Human Realities

Social justice warriors believe that human nature is constructed largely through the use of linguistic conventions. This is why they focus heavily on “discourses”—that is, the style and content of modes of speaking that, in their view, legitimize certain ways of being and delegitimize others. SJWs tightly police the spoken and written word, condemning speech that offends them as a form of violence.

Conservatives, old-fashioned liberals, and others who are outside the social justice movement frequently fail to grasp how to respond to the aggressive claims of its proponents. This is because they assume SJWs, who are typically not religious, operate under the established standards of secular liberal discourse, with its respect for discursive reasoning.

A memorable example is the 2015 Yale University clash between Professors Nicholas and Erika Christakis and enraged students from the residential college overseen by the faculty couple. Things went very badly for the Christakises, old-school liberals who erred by thinking that the students could be engaged with the tools and procedures of reason. Alas, the students were in the grip of the religion of social justice. As such, they considered their subjective beliefs to be a form of uncontestable knowledge, and disagreement as an attack on their identity.

Some conservatives think that SJWs should be countered with superior arguments and if conservatives stick with liberal proceduralism they will prevail. This is a fundamental error that blinds conservatives to the radical nature of the threat. You cannot know how to judge and act in the face of these challenges if you cannot see the social justice warriors for what they truly are—and where they do their work. It is easy to identify the shrieking student on the university quad, but it is more important to be able to spot the subversive presence of older SJWs and fellow travelers throughout institutional bureaucracies, where they exercise immense power.

Well, even bigger guns have come out. John McWhorter, the Columbia University linguist, is black, on the left, and an atheist. He absolutely flays the Critical Social Justice mob as “the Elect” — that is, he’s telling his readers that these people are adherents of a new religion, and must be understood in that context. McWhorter writes today, in the latest installment of his ongoing serial takedown of the Elect:

We are genuinely in Invasion of the Body Snatchers territory. They will insist that they are not religious, but impotently so, before the simple propositions of this chapter. Adoring their kids, poaching their salmon, strumming their ukuleles barefooted, savoring their Stones and Coldplay and Adele, they may seem unlike what we think of as “religious.”

Don’t be fooled. Religion knows no culture. Nor do all religions entail the worship of a God (The Elect lacks one), or even forgiveness (which The Elect do not seem to have exactly caught up with just yet). As Eric Hoffer put it, religions don’t need a God but they need a devil, and The Elect have that down quite comfortably. Superstition, clergy, sinfulness, a proselytizing impulse, a revulsion against the impure – it’s all there. They think of it all as logic incarnate.

McWhorter is not prepared to listen to people tell him that this is no big deal:

After insisting that what they are doing is about changing society rather than about virtue signalling, The Elect are especially given to claiming that what I am describing is not a serious problem. People like me warning against the pitchfork mob of Electness are just obsessing over a few crazy overstretches and pretending it means the sky is falling in. But this argument does not go through. Let’s go stepwise.

A. It’s just some college kids finding themselves.

But at Evergreen State, where just these sorts of kids hounded biology professor Bret Weinstein out of his job for refusing to vacate the campus on a day designated a “safe space” day for minority students, many faculty members chimed in with this ideology. A quarter of them signed a petition asking for his disciplining. And as to individual profs, I will only direct you to check out, on the web at the time, one Naima Lowe, from whom one heard re Weinstein and the supposedly racist administration who had been “harboring” him the insight that (to lend a quick sample) “You can’t see your way outta your own ass!”

Anyone with any familiarity with the Collegetown scene knows that The Elect are by no means only kids. Many of them are nearing retirement age and today enjoying a new sense of dominance. I first encountered The Elect – before they were becoming our national moral commanders — amidst the debate over discontinuing racial preferences in the University of California system in 1995. Many of them even then were graying at the temples and then some. This is not about kids.

B. It’s just something going on in some colleges and universities.

But Alison Roman works for a newspaper. This is not 2015’s issue, where the hot news was Charles Murray speaking at Middlebury being not only shouted down but hounded off of his platform by a crowd who jostled the car he and his assigned (left-leaning) interlocutor were in to such a degree that the interlocutor wound up in a neck brace. The ideology that drove that episode has jumped the rails in influence since, and especially in 2020 when this mindset was sanctioned as the sole one admissible as representing our nation’s “reckoning” on race.

C. But Roman only got suspended (i.e. “Why’d he open his book with that?”). She’ll keep her job.

But at the Washington Post, Sarah Shafer, the one who attended a party in blackface in mockery of a comment by Megan Kelly, was simply fired. As was Gary Garrels, as have been many others. In roughly 2015, that Roman would even have been suspended for what she said would have seemed about as likely as Donald Trump becoming President. Any who doubt that should consult a similar controversy over something Alessandra Stanley, employed by the same newspaper, said that offended some race-related sensibilities in 2014. She pushed back, a lot of people continued to hate her, but she stayed in her post for the duration and the episode was forgotten. Today it is reasonable to suppose that she would have been canned.

D. This is just a philosophical tempest in a teapot among the Acela Corridor elite; what really matters is real people suffering from day to day.

But if this is just about that bunch and their musings, then what about how Elect ideology is being presented as fundamental to child pedagogy in public and private schools nationwide? New York City’s former Schools Chancellor Richard Carranza superintended the teaching of his charges that the written word, objectivity, being on time, and individuality are “white things.” Yes, he was working in the Acela Corridor’s New York City, but the intent was to shape the minds of humble New York kids unlikely to ever ride the Acela anytime soon. Plus the same ideology is being foisted, as I write, as far away as the Pacific Northwest. This is a national issue, not one fetishized by a small bunch of Northeasterners frustrated by the New YorkTimes op-ed page.

Overall, if you are reading this you likely know that the stringent, anti-white, hyper-Elect tenets of White Fragility are being introduced into kiddie curricula nationwide. All of this is being done by worriedly smiling people sincerely under the impression that the national reckoning about race requires enshrining this Orwellian bizarrerie. Importantly, salute this one may – but it deep-sixes any claim that what I am writing about is merely something a few contrarians are getting their knickers in a twist about in a few Northeastern metropolises. If The Elect are reaching our children, then this is real. Anyone who smirks “What’s the big deal?” is either ignorant (possible), cynical (unlikely), too young to understand that the Overton Window – that which we think of as normal – is shifting (understandable) or, quite simply, religious without knowing it.

E. The real problem is the right-wing, racist zealots who stormed the Capitol Building calling for the blood of Mike Pence and Nancy Pelosi.

This claim is a debate-team feint. As scary as those protesters were, the question is: which institutions are they taking over with their views? The question is not whether conservatism, in a much broader sense, dominates certain institutions and even societal structures. The question is: which official institutions are bowing down to the ideology of the kind of people who battered police officers in the Capitol lobby? “It Could Happen Here” – okay, we must be wary, but in this case, where did “it” happen beyond one awful episode at the Capitol which, because now those assigned to defend it will be ever on guard for a repeat, is vanishingly unlikely to ever happen again?

Meanwhile, no one can deny that Elect ideology has a stranglehold on institutions that barely knew it just a few years ago. The Elect are changing America, or at least what much of America is comfortable presenting itself as when threatened with slander. The Capitol mob are changing nothing. Seeing their awfulness up so close felt like a change, but that was in us, not them. Novelty in our perception is a change within us as individuals; it is different from those we newly perceive actually penetrating institutions. That a mobbish contigent of the alt-right tried to threaten democracy is less important than that their attempt resonantly failed. The Elect are resonant successes in comparison, despite that their sense of self-definition as Speaking Truth to Power prevents them from acknowledging it directly.

I really want you to read the whole thing, especially if you are under the impression that this is just something that Very Online people like me are ginning up.

Here is a link to Chapter One of “The Elect.”

Here is a link to Chapter Two of “The Elect.”

Here is a link to Chapter Three of “The Elect.”

And here is a link to Chapter Four, from which I’ve excerpted the bit above.

You can subscribe to McWhorter’s Substack newsletter for free, and keep reading this serialization. The Woke have no enemy more courageous, intelligent, and as determined as John McWhorter. I thank the God in whom he does not believe for his work — and for James Lindsay too.

The post John McWhorter Flays The Elect appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Problem With Political Christianity

Writing in the New Yorker, Michael Luo ponders what he considers to be the wreckage of the minds of so many of his fellow Evangelicals in the Trump years. 

Falsehoods about a stolen election, retailed by Donald Trump and his allies, drove the Capitol invasion, but distorted visions of Christianity suffused it. One group carried a large wooden cross; there were banners that read “In God We Trust,” “Jesus Is My Savior / Trump Is My President,” and “Make America Godly Again”; some marchers blew shofars, ritual instruments made from ram’s horns that have become popular in certain conservative Christian circles, owing to its resonance with an account in the Book of Joshua in which Israelites sounded their trumpets and the walls of Jericho came tumbling down. The intermingling of religious faith, conspiratorial thinking, and misguided nationalism on display at the Capitol offered perhaps the most unequivocal evidence yet of the American church’s role in bringing the country to this dangerous moment.

A recent survey, conducted by the American Enterprise Institute, found that more than a quarter of white evangelicals believe that Donald Trump has been secretly battling “a group of child sex traffickers that include prominent Democrats and Hollywood elites,” a core tenet of the QAnon conspiracy theory. The data suggest a faith-based reality divide emerging within the Republican Party: nearly three-quarters of white evangelical Republicans believe widespread voter fraud took place in the 2020 election, compared with fifty-four per cent of non-evangelical Republicans; sixty per cent of white evangelical Republicans believe that Antifa, the antifascist group, was mostly responsible for the violence in the Capitol riot, compared with forty-two per cent of non-evangelical Republicans. Other surveys have found that white evangelicals are much more skeptical of the covid-19 vaccine and are less likely than other Americans to get it, potentially jeopardizing the country’s recovery from the pandemic.

How did the church in America––particularly, its white Protestant evangelical manifestation––end up here?

He tells a familiar story (familiar in large part from the work of Evangelical historian Mark Noll) of this being baked into the cake of the Evangelical mind since the First Great Awakening. I completely understand Luo’s focusing on Evangelicalism, not only because it’s his own tradition, but also because Evangelicals have certainly been at the forefront of all the crazy stuff surrounding Trump. The December march with the shofar, the pillow guy, and all that — it was led and dominated by Evangelicals.

But they weren’t the only ones there. Prominent Catholics — Archbishop Vigano and Bishop Strickland — participated with recorded messages, and there was at least one Catholic priest who spoke. There was an Orthodox speaker too. You don’t have to dig too deep in the Catholic and Orthodox online worlds to find plenty of support for the kind of things Evangelicals fronted. The first person I ever met who spoke to me favorably about QAnon was a fellow Orthodox Christian.

Besides, there are plenty of mainstream Evangelicals (and others), particularly intellectuals, who are embracing and promoting radical causes that are more socially respectable in New York Times world, but which strike many of us as bizarre and dangerous departures from Christian orthodoxy.

American Evangelicals have no monopoly on losing their minds politically. I’m reading right now Peter Seewald’s recently published first volume of his biography of Benedict XVI. I had not fully realized how anti-Nazi the Ratzinger family was, and how generally anti-Nazi German Catholics were, though some of the Catholic bishops eventually capitulated. Most German Protestants, though, went all-in for Hitler early on. German Protestants of the 1930s were not American Evangelicals. Some of the most intelligent and cultured German Christians of the era were seduced by Hitler.

Similarly, since the 1960s, some of the most intelligent and cultured American Christian leaders have been seduced by Third World communism, or other radical utopian causes. It’s just that a William Sloane Coffin type is clubbable, so to speak, whereas a Robert Jeffress is not. It’s easy to identify “the scandal of the Evangelical mind,” to use Mark Noll’s phrase, when we see it, but the kind of folks who point it out aren’t often looking for the scandal of the Progressive Christian mind, which is that they can be just as brainlessly caught up in enthusiasm for causes with little grounding in Scripture, Tradition, or reason, as a suburban conservative Evangelical.

You will recall that I wrote quite critically in this space of the December Jericho March. It was idolatry, and crazy, too. I wrote as someone who is a committed Christian, and both a theological and a political conservative who believes Christians should be engaged in the public square. But that, again, was rank idolatry. I am sadly aware of churches that are being torn apart by this kind of idolatry from the Right.

But I am also aware of churches that are being torn apart by an equal and opposite fanaticism from the Left. I know people whose churches — even conservative ones — are being ripped in two by Critical Social Justice, especially as it applies to race. What I’m hearing is that those minds have been set alight by this ideology are refusing to accept criticism; to oppose it is to show how racist, or otherwise socially unjust, you are. These apostles of enlightenment are every bit as fanatical and unquestioning, and intolerant of questioning, as the right-wing Christians who took the stage at the Jericho March. But they are behind a cause that is popular with elites, especially in the media, so their blind anger, intolerance, heterodoxy, and destruction looks “prophetic.”

All in all, I don’t see much to get excited about from political Christianity of either Left or Right. In my Jericho March column, I wrote:

For my sins, I guess, I watched all six hours of the Jericho March proceedings from Washington today, on the march webcast. I say for my sins, but in truth, I decided to watch it because I am interested in what the activist Christian Right is saying, and how they are thinking, in the wake of Donald Trump losing the election.

Except he didn’t lose the election, according to them. It was taken from him. This is an article of faith, not to be doubted. If you doubt, you are a traitor, a coward, in league with the Devil. I’m not exaggerating at all. I saw an interview that the influential Evangelical broadcaster Eric Metaxas gave to the populist activist Charlie Kirk this week, in which he boldly claimed that patriots must fight “to the last drop of blood” to preserve Trump’s presidency, and that those who disagree are the same as Germans who stood by and did nothing to stop Hitler (Metaxas is best known as a biographer of Dietrich Bonhoeffer). In the same interview — I wrote about it here, in “Eric Metaxas’s American Apocalypse” — Metaxas said it doesn’t matter what can or can’t be proven in court, he knows, and we know, that the election was stolen. When Kirk, who is very sympathetic to Metaxas, asked him what he thought of where the cases stood, Metaxas blithely claimed that he is “thrilled” to know nothing about them.

This knocked me flat. I have known Metaxas since 1998. He is one of the sweetest men you could hope to meet, gentle and kind, a pleasure to be around. Not a hater in the least. Though I have not supported his Trumpist politics, I would not have figured him for someone who would go as far as he did on the Kirk interview. What kind of person calls for spilling blood in defense of a political cause for which he does not care if any factual justification exists? What kind of person compares doubters to Nazi collaborators? A religious zealot, that’s the kind. The only way one can justify that hysterical stance is if one conflates religion with politics, and politics with religion.

Here’s the thing: the public square is full of progressive Christians who have as much unthinking passion  for their causes as Metaxas has for his. To doubt, or to tolerate doubt, or complexity, is a sign of false consciousness and a lack of commitment. Progressive Christianity adopts the Kafka trap articulated by people like Robin DiAngelo, who say that for white people to deny that they are guilty of the sins of racism is a sign of their guilt. It doesn’t matter what the facts are in individual causes — they know, they just know, that you are guilty.

The MAGA Christians had a rash and ineffective president on their side, but he’s gone now. Otherwise, the MAGA Christians are widely mocked, and largely powerless. By contrast, the Progressive Christians have on their side a committed president who is far more effective at governing than his hapless predecessor. They have the Democratic Party establishment, the news media, Hollywood, academia, and corporate America — all the power centers of American life.. Me, I was scandalized by the Jericho Marchers and what it said about conservative Christianity. But I am genuinely scared of what the Progressive Christians and their allies in power are going to do.

My point is not “neener-neener, they are worse than we are.” My point is that political Christianity has hit a dead end. Look, I know honorable Christians on both sides of the political spectrum who are involved in public life, and I’m not talking about them when I say this: But in general, the more political is a church or an individual Christian, the less likely that they are doing a bit of good for the Kingdom of God, or their own sanctification.

The post The Problem With Political Christianity appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Whale And The Net

CNN tells us the story of three heroes of the Sexual Revolution:

Meet Ian Jenkins and his partners, Alan and Jeremy.

They’re a “throuple”: a committed polyamorous relationship involving three people.And after a complicated and expensive court battle to all become legal parents, the trio are raising two toddlers in Southern California — and proving how families come in all forms.They’re part of a unique and very modern family that includes three dads, two surrogates and one egg donor. In a new book, “Three Dads and a Baby,” Jenkins chronicles their search for potential egg donors and a surrogate, and a fight to change a medical and legal system geared toward heterosexual couples.The three men have all been together for more than eight years. Jenkins says they fought to get all three of their names listed on the birth certificates to protect their parental rights and the rights of their children. The process was emotionally grueling.

“But we are hopeful that other people benefit from the experience we had,” he told CNN in a recent interview, “and that it’s easier, less expensive and less stressful for them.”

It’s a long story, but there is not a single line in it about the ramifications, legally, morally, and otherwise, of this. It’s all about how love wins. Seriously, this is how CNN ends the piece:

If he were to send a message to his teenage self, Jenkins says, he’d tell himself that life gets better.That however hopeless things may seem as a young gay man struggling to fit in, the world is changing. And that he’ll someday find more love under one roof than he ever imagined.

Meanwhile, Carl Trueman tells us about a new pastoral problem:

The problem my pastor friend faces is how to counsel parents of teenage girls who will not drink anything before going to school lest they have to use the bathrooms that, thanks to the stroke of President Biden’s pen, are now open to teenage boys who think—or claim—to have been born in the wrong bodies. It seems that anxiety and physical discomfort caused by the new bathroom policy will now be the new normal for young high school girls. Trans activists like to use the language of “safety” as a way of playing to the aesthetics of our therapeutic culture and delegitimizing their critics. Well, these biological women no longer feel safe. Their spaces, like their gender, have been stolen from them by men and for men. They now feel themselves to be in such danger that they cannot even hydrate before school lest they have to use the restroom during the day. America has had a number of presidents whose appetites meant that they arguably posed a danger to many women who crossed their physical paths; but the current president has out-performed them all. His policies have made him a danger to all women everywhere, even in high school restrooms.

A librarian who reads this blog sent me this shot he took from a new board book for little kids, We Are Little Feminists Families . This is a pregnant transman:You know that there are pretty much no guardrails left, right? Nothing short of a violent collapse is going to stop any of this. These people — we the people — destroy. If you read the CNN story, you’ll see that it involves technology, the contractualization of childbearing, and further abuse to the icon of mother and father — all of this to make some rich gay men happy. We are living out Justice Kennedy’s words: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”I don’t want to defend a country and a society that calls this stuff good. If this is the point that liberal democracy has brought us to, what’s the point? Look at this. Our soldiers have been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years. We have lost 2,300 US service members fighting, in part, to turn one of the most primitive countries in the world into a non-patriarchal democracy. And we have spent a fortune to impose our ideology on these unwilling people.

New report from the US gov on gender equality in Afghanistan. What are we still doing in Afghanistan, you ask? US has spent $787 million on gender programs, not including gender included in other programs. Hope to challenge stereotypes and patriarchy 1/n https://t.co/EVsvaPoY3i pic.twitter.com/uwDdxAZrdR

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) March 3, 2021

Read that whole Hanania Twitter thread; it’s infuriating. Maybe if we bombed them some more, and tripled our budget, we could convince Afghan women to become transmen so they too could be patriarchs.

My colleague Micah Meadowcroft has a powerful piece up on the site, urging conservatives to stop acting surprised by any of this anymore. He writes, in part:

The first step to recovery is to stop acting surprised. It’s past time for conservatives to admit that they are powerless, or at least that power is being wielded against them with little regard for what they thought were the rules. Our lives have become unmanageable because they are managed for us, by unelected bureaucrats in leviathan government agencies and the terms of services offices of corporate behemoths. We are in an abnormal situation, and your precious norms (and norms are indeed precious to those who share them) have been dumped and replaced. The powerful are happy to invite you to adopt the new norms, all of them; but if, nevertheless, you persist in resisting a few, have the self-respect to stop being shocked when you are treated as an enemy.

Stop acting surprised when Ryan T. Anderson’s careful and painfully polite book, When Harry Became Sally, which warns of the damage experiments in gender ideology are doing to children, is banned from Amazon. They kicked a president off their platforms, so don’t act confused when you find yourself off them, too. The laws have changed with or without Congress’s help for a long time. I use “acting” with regards to surprise on purpose, to give you the benefit of the doubt; perhaps you are not foolish, and deep down you knew this moment had arrived and was a long-time coming, but you think there’s a moral victory to be won with loud complaints and protest. Surely you can prick their conscience!

Or maybe you think there is a public out there watching, to which you can appeal with your feigned surprise? Perhaps there is a We greater than us that can restore sanity if only it is awakened to the danger? Do you hear yourself? “We the People” is us. The public is at the same mercy of the media, has the same task of sifting through propaganda and information and digital noise as you do. The public is you. The line between the conditioned and conditioners runs through every human heart.

So forget the court of public opinion, or of history and its flexible arc, and look for the other people who are no longer surprised. It’s time to ask yourself: Upon whom does responsibility for our world-embracing system fall? No matter how much our technical artifice improves, or how automatic things seem, there is still someone behind the curtain. Are you resigned to be ruled by people who deny what they do is governing, who claim they are only making sure that you are absolutely free? For what are you free?

You should be free for God, and doing His will give your life to His care. Consider now, your unsurprise at the banning of the Anderson book. You had to fake it. Transgenderism cannot be touched; not a child anymore, you don’t need to burn yourself to know what’s too hot for hands. You’re too prudent to call Rachel Dick in print. Ask yourself, and be honest, are you a coward?

It’s past time to pray for courage. The politics of virtue must be replaced by virtuous human beings. We must be willing to give up the comforts to which we have been made accustomed. May God remove my many defects, and give me the character necessary for the times. Ours is a constitutional republic, a politics of norms. If the norms are gone, or changed and as-yet unshared, then what we are has been attacked. The battle is already joined outside the Constitution and what we call the law; the algorithms and the moderators know this. Do you?

Read it all. 

Where is the leadership on the Right? Where is the followership? Don’t mention Trump to me — he changed next to nothing. It’s not like all of this rottenness began on January 20, when Biden became president. I’m grateful for the judges, mostly, but we are all sitting here watching the media and corporate oligarchs beginning effectively to ban books that challenge the Narrative, and watching the pioneering in custom and law of “throuples” legally parenting children, and watching little bitty children propagandized in libraries to watch a maimed woman with a beard who calls herself a man passed off as Pregnant Dad. And we just let it all pass.

What do I do about it? I write angry, despairing blog posts. I don’t know what else I can do. I’m feeling quite powerless and futile. I’m feeling about the country the way many of my Catholic friends are feeling about their Church: like the decadence is so deep, and the leadership class so rotten, that there’s nothing to do but burrow in and build shelters for my family and my friends, so we can withstand the coming collapse, and preserve enough of what’s good to seed the rebirth.

This despair feels wrong. I’m a Christian; I’m supposed to hope. And I do have hope, in that I believe God will not abandon us. But we as a people have abandoned Him, that much is certain. And hope that’s not based on a realistic assessment of where we are is Pollyanna optimism.

I have been living in a weird neutral space between those who want to defend liberal democracy, and those who have no faith in it anymore. I am afraid of what would replace it being tyrannical. In a country in which social and religious conservatives are a minority, if we lose the First Amendment, what will protect us?

But look at what is happening to us now, within liberal democracy: decadence of the sort that is going to be very hard to recover from. At least I can’t see how we recover from it. I think of John Adams’s words:

We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Our Constitution is the framework for liberal democracy. We are now a people who believes it is just and right to put girls in the position of not drinking water before school, so they don’t get stuck in the bathroom with boys who claim to be girls. We are now a people who call throuples who contract to manufacture babies from womb-renters “dads.” We are now a people who produce and stock on children’s library shelves picture books that show little kids freaks like that pregnant transman, and call it good and normal.

And we are supposed to be proud of all this? To be confident in the future of a country like this? To send our sons and daughters to die for this?

I don’t want to be in this slough of despond. I don’t want to be in the position of feeling a sense of responsibility to talk my 17 year old son, a good and strong kid who wants to go into the military, out of doing what was once a noble and selfless thing, because I don’t want him to be sent to die in some future Afghanistan in an attempt to turn those people into what we have become.

What does it mean to be a patriot these days, when your country’s leadership class attacks what is Good, and trains the people to call Evil Good? Seriously. You tell me.

I’m going to be traveling for most of the day on Tuesday, so please be patient with my approving comments.

UPDATE: Good morning. Yeah, I know, I can be almost comically dour when I post late at night … but seriously, there are no guardrails left, are there? At least none that you have reason to suspect are made of something other than balsa wood.

The post The Whale And The Net appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Netted Whale

CNN tells us the story of three heroes of the Sexual Revolution:

Meet Ian Jenkins and his partners, Alan and Jeremy.

They’re a “throuple”: a committed polyamorous relationship involving three people.And after a complicated and expensive court battle to all become legal parents, the trio are raising two toddlers in Southern California — and proving how families come in all forms.They’re part of a unique and very modern family that includes three dads, two surrogates and one egg donor. In a new book, “Three Dads and a Baby,” Jenkins chronicles their search for potential egg donors and a surrogate, and a fight to change a medical and legal system geared toward heterosexual couples.The three men have all been together for more than eight years. Jenkins says they fought to get all three of their names listed on the birth certificates to protect their parental rights and the rights of their children. The process was emotionally grueling.

“But we are hopeful that other people benefit from the experience we had,” he told CNN in a recent interview, “and that it’s easier, less expensive and less stressful for them.”

It’s a long story, but there is not a single line in it about the ramifications, legally, morally, and otherwise, of this. It’s all about how love wins. Seriously, this is how CNN ends the piece:

If he were to send a message to his teenage self, Jenkins says, he’d tell himself that life gets better.That however hopeless things may seem as a young gay man struggling to fit in, the world is changing. And that he’ll someday find more love under one roof than he ever imagined.

Meanwhile, Carl Trueman tells us about a new pastoral problem:

The problem my pastor friend faces is how to counsel parents of teenage girls who will not drink anything before going to school lest they have to use the bathrooms that, thanks to the stroke of President Biden’s pen, are now open to teenage boys who think—or claim—to have been born in the wrong bodies. It seems that anxiety and physical discomfort caused by the new bathroom policy will now be the new normal for young high school girls. Trans activists like to use the language of “safety” as a way of playing to the aesthetics of our therapeutic culture and delegitimizing their critics. Well, these biological women no longer feel safe. Their spaces, like their gender, have been stolen from them by men and for men. They now feel themselves to be in such danger that they cannot even hydrate before school lest they have to use the restroom during the day. America has had a number of presidents whose appetites meant that they arguably posed a danger to many women who crossed their physical paths; but the current president has out-performed them all. His policies have made him a danger to all women everywhere, even in high school restrooms.

A librarian who reads this blog sent me this shot he took from a new board book for little kids, We Are Little Feminists Families . This is a pregnant transman:You know that there are pretty much no guardrails left, right? Nothing short of a violent collapse is going to stop any of this. These people — we the people — destroy. If you read the CNN story, you’ll see that it involves technology, the contractualization of childbearing, and further abuse to the icon of mother and father — all of this to make some rich gay men happy. We are living out Justice Kennedy’s words: “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.”I don’t want to defend a country and a society that calls this stuff good. If this is the point that liberal democracy has brought us to, what’s the point? Look at this. Our soldiers have been in Afghanistan for almost 20 years. We have lost 2,300 US service members fighting, in part, to turn one of the most primitive countries in the world into a non-patriarchal democracy. And we have spent a fortune to impose our ideology on these unwilling people.

New report from the US gov on gender equality in Afghanistan. What are we still doing in Afghanistan, you ask? US has spent $787 million on gender programs, not including gender included in other programs. Hope to challenge stereotypes and patriarchy 1/n https://t.co/EVsvaPoY3i pic.twitter.com/uwDdxAZrdR

— Richard Hanania (@RichardHanania) March 3, 2021

Read that whole Hanania Twitter thread; it’s infuriating. Maybe if we bombed them some more, and tripled our budget, we could convince Afghan women to become transmen so they too could be patriarchs.

My colleague Micah Meadowcroft has a powerful piece up on the site, urging conservatives to stop acting surprised by any of this anymore. He writes, in part:

The first step to recovery is to stop acting surprised. It’s past time for conservatives to admit that they are powerless, or at least that power is being wielded against them with little regard for what they thought were the rules. Our lives have become unmanageable because they are managed for us, by unelected bureaucrats in leviathan government agencies and the terms of services offices of corporate behemoths. We are in an abnormal situation, and your precious norms (and norms are indeed precious to those who share them) have been dumped and replaced. The powerful are happy to invite you to adopt the new norms, all of them; but if, nevertheless, you persist in resisting a few, have the self-respect to stop being shocked when you are treated as an enemy.

Stop acting surprised when Ryan T. Anderson’s careful and painfully polite book, When Harry Became Sally, which warns of the damage experiments in gender ideology are doing to children, is banned from Amazon. They kicked a president off their platforms, so don’t act confused when you find yourself off them, too. The laws have changed with or without Congress’s help for a long time. I use “acting” with regards to surprise on purpose, to give you the benefit of the doubt; perhaps you are not foolish, and deep down you knew this moment had arrived and was a long-time coming, but you think there’s a moral victory to be won with loud complaints and protest. Surely you can prick their conscience!

Or maybe you think there is a public out there watching, to which you can appeal with your feigned surprise? Perhaps there is a We greater than us that can restore sanity if only it is awakened to the danger? Do you hear yourself? “We the People” is us. The public is at the same mercy of the media, has the same task of sifting through propaganda and information and digital noise as you do. The public is you. The line between the conditioned and conditioners runs through every human heart.

So forget the court of public opinion, or of history and its flexible arc, and look for the other people who are no longer surprised. It’s time to ask yourself: Upon whom does responsibility for our world-embracing system fall? No matter how much our technical artifice improves, or how automatic things seem, there is still someone behind the curtain. Are you resigned to be ruled by people who deny what they do is governing, who claim they are only making sure that you are absolutely free? For what are you free?

You should be free for God, and doing His will give your life to His care. Consider now, your unsurprise at the banning of the Anderson book. You had to fake it. Transgenderism cannot be touched; not a child anymore, you don’t need to burn yourself to know what’s too hot for hands. You’re too prudent to call Rachel Dick in print. Ask yourself, and be honest, are you a coward?

It’s past time to pray for courage. The politics of virtue must be replaced by virtuous human beings. We must be willing to give up the comforts to which we have been made accustomed. May God remove my many defects, and give me the character necessary for the times. Ours is a constitutional republic, a politics of norms. If the norms are gone, or changed and as-yet unshared, then what we are has been attacked. The battle is already joined outside the Constitution and what we call the law; the algorithms and the moderators know this. Do you?

Read it all. 

Where is the leadership on the Right? Where is the followership? Don’t mention Trump to me — he changed next to nothing. It’s not like all of this rottenness began on January 20, when Biden became president. I’m grateful for the judges, mostly, but we are all sitting here watching the media and corporate oligarchs beginning effectively to ban books that challenge the Narrative, and watching the pioneering in custom and law of “throuples” legally parenting children, and watching little bitty children propagandized in libraries to watch a maimed woman with a beard who calls herself a man passed off as Pregnant Dad. And we just let it all pass.

What do I do about it? I write angry, despairing blog posts. I don’t know what else I can do. I’m feeling quite powerless and futile. I’m feeling about the country the way many of my Catholic friends are feeling about their Church: like the decadence is so deep, and the leadership class so rotten, that there’s nothing to do but burrow in and build shelters for my family and my friends, so we can withstand the coming collapse, and preserve enough of what’s good to seed the rebirth.

This despair feels wrong. I’m a Christian; I’m supposed to hope. And I do have hope, in that I believe God will not abandon us. But we as a people have abandoned Him, that much is certain. And hope that’s not based on a realistic assessment of where we are is Pollyanna optimism.

I have been living in a weird neutral space between those who want to defend liberal democracy, and those who have no faith in it anymore. I am afraid of what would replace it being tyrannical. In a country in which social and religious conservatives are a minority, if we lose the First Amendment, what will protect us?

But look at what is happening to us now, within liberal democracy: decadence of the sort that is going to be very hard to recover from. At least I can’t see how we recover from it. I think of John Adams’s words:

We have no Government armed with Power capable of contending with human Passions unbridled by morality and Religion. Avarice, Ambition, Revenge or Galantry, would break the strongest Cords of our Constitution as a Whale goes through a Net. Our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious People. It is wholly inadequate to the government of any other.

Our Constitution is the framework for liberal democracy. We are now a people who believes it is just and right to put girls in the position of not drinking water before school, so they don’t get stuck in the bathroom with boys who claim to be girls. We are now a people who call throuples who contract to manufacture babies from womb-renters “dads.” We are now a people who produce and stock on children’s library shelves picture books that show little kids freaks like that pregnant transman, and call it good and normal.

And we are supposed to be proud of all this? To be confident in the future of a country like this? To send our sons and daughters to die for this?

I don’t want to be in this slough of despond. I don’t want to be in the position of feeling a sense of responsibility to talk my 17 year old son, a good and strong kid who wants to go into the military, out of doing what was once a noble and selfless thing, because I don’t want him to be sent to die in some future Afghanistan in an attempt to turn those people into what we have become.

What does it mean to be a patriot these days, when your country’s leadership class attacks what is Good, and trains the people to call Evil Good? Seriously. You tell me.

I’m going to be traveling for most of the day on Tuesday, so please be patient with my approving comments.

The post The Netted Whale appeared first on The American Conservative.

Why ‘When Harry Became Sally’ Matters

[Editor’s note: A physician of stellar credentials sent me this review of Ryan T. Anderson’s book to be published anonymously on this blog. I know who the physician is and can vouch for said credentials, but if I published this under his or her name, his or her career would be over. Having seen what Amazon did recently in delisting ‘When Harry Became Sally,’ the physician concluded that the public should understand what an important book it is, and why it’s a very big deal that Amazon spiked a book as carefully and as compassionately written as Anderson’s, apparently (because the retailing giant did not offer an explanation) because the book presents evidence that contradicts the progressive narrative on transgenderism. I am pleased to present the physician’s review here; I read Anderson’s book when it was first published, and agree with every word below. — RD]

By Anonymous, M.D.

In the late 20th century, American psychiatry suffered a schism over the idea of recovered memory. At the time, a number of patients, encouraged by their psychiatrists and psychotherapists, falsely accused their parents and teachers of sexually abusing them. According to their therapists, the patients had waited so long before making accusations because they had repressed their memories of sexual abuse; only with prolonged counseling were these memories “recovered.” After a number of scandals, a small group of skeptical psychiatrists challenged these claims, courts decided cases in favor of the accused, and the influence of recovered memory advocates waned. As critics pointed out, memory of traumatic events is not usually repressed–it remains, rather, percolating beneath the surface, haunting its victims. But much damage was done before the idea of “recovered memory” lost its authority, despite the absence of supporting evidence. It was a terrifying and consequential example of the false security of consensus.

The passionate adherence to a perspective, and the accompanying resistance to any challenges, resembles the insistent sure-footedness of the modern transgender movement. Once victims to a seemingly untreatable diagnosis, gender dysphoric patients who feel their gender identity differs from their biological gender, now have therapeutic options: reconstructive surgery and hormonal therapy for transitioning to the correct gender. Despite the potential side effects of these therapies—which may include but are not limited to increased red blood cell counts, increased plaque buildup in the arteries, reproductive sterility, infections, blood clots, failure of the surgery itself to create the properly functioning new genitalia, or abnormal connections between different organs in the abdomen due to the invasive nature of the surgical procedures–many transgender advocates, psychiatrists, pediatricians and surgeons believe that the benefits of these interventions outweigh the risks; that the well-being of transgender patients depends on supporting their sexual identity through such interventions. As Dr. Deanna Adkins, a professor at the Duke University School of Medicine and the director of the Duke Center for Child and Adolescent Gender Care argues, the “appropriate treatment for individuals who are transgender must focus on alleviating distress through supporting outward expressions of the person’s gender identity and bringing the body into alignment with that identity.”

And the number of patients bringing their bodies into alignment with that identity has dramatically increased: the number of patients referred to gender identity clinics to receive treatment for gender dysphoria, according to one Dutch study, increased 20-fold from 1980 to 2015. From 2000 to 2014, the number of gender-affirming surgeries to change one’s sex increased fourfold. In May 2014, Medicare ended its 33-year ban on transgender surgeries. Supporting this trend, in popular culture, transgenderism is more visible than ever before. Most notably Bruce Jenner, the former olympic athlete, transitioned to a woman, Caitlyn Jenner. Featured on the cover of Vanity Fair, Jenner won the Arthur Ashe Courage Award from ESPN and Woman of the Year award from Glamour magazine. We have reached a consensus, it seems, that the transition to one’s perceived gender is necessary for one’s health and thus worthy of celebration and encouragement.

This consensus, however, argues Ryan T. Anderson, President of the Ethics and Public Policy Center, in his book, When Harry Became Sally, is misguided and deleterious to those it is most meant to help. Anderson provides the reader with a clear-eyed picture of what gender identity activists believe and subsequently makes both philosophical and scientific arguments for why they are wrong and the potential dangers of their certainty. However, he does not insult or dismiss transgender patients. He explains, “We must be careful not to stigmatize those who are suffering….We must avoid adding to the pain experienced by people with gender dysphoria, while we present them with alternatives to transitioning.”  Nevertheless, according to Anderson, the scientific evidence for hormonal and surgical therapy as an effective treatment for gender dysphoria is wanting.

Initially, this assertion might be a bit shocking given the widespread and passionate convictions in favor of gender transition—shouldn’t treatment for transgender patients encourage the transition to the gender one is most comfortable with? And wouldn’t our modern ability to administer hormones and operate be the best solution for these patients? But the answers, Mr. Anderson suggests, are not straightforward. “Judging from the evidence available so far,” writes Anderson, “the psychological benefit” of sex reassignment procedures “is not very great.” In a chapter on this topic, Anderson quotes most heavily from a literature review in The New Atlantis in the Fall of 2016 by Dr. Paul McHugh, the University Distinguished Service Professor of Psychiatry at Johns Hopkins, and Dr. Lawrence Mayer, a physician and epidemiologist. According to their review of the literature, McHugh and Mayer write: “the scientific evidence summarized suggests we take a skeptical view toward the claim that sex-reassignment procedures provide the hoped-for benefits or resolve the underlying issues that contribute to elevated mental health risks among the transgender population.”

A close look at the primary literature from one of the most prominent researchers in the field does support Anderson’s skepticism about gender reassignment procedures. In a population-based matched cohort study in 2011, Dr. Cecilia Dhejne of the Karolinska Institute and her coauthors identified patients with gender identity disorder who underwent sex-reassignment surgery and matched them to two age-matched controls: people of the same biologic sex as the transsexual patient at birth and people of the same gender identity with which the transsexual patient identified. The “overall mortality” for sex-reassigned persons was higher during follow up, “particularly death from suicide.” Moreover, “sex-reassigned persons also had an increased risk for suicide attempts” and psychiatric inpatient care. To be sure, outcome variables were not evaluated before surgery and these patients may have done worse without the surgery. Because of the limitations, “the results should not be interpreted such as sex reassignment per se increases morbidity and mortality.” Nevertheless, this imperfect study questions the efficacy of gender reassignment surgeries.

On the other hand, in 2016, Dr. Dhejne and colleagues analyzed 38 studies describing outcomes in pre-and post-gender-confirming medical interventions for patients with gender dysphoria in the International Review of Psychiatry. Among their conclusions, the authors wrote: “Longitudinal studies investigating the same cohort of trans people pre- and post-interventions [gender confirming medical interventions] showed an overall improvement in psychopathology and psychiatric disorders post-treatment.” And yet, many of the studies they analyzed were methodologically weak; they demonstrated “selection bias” or were limited by patients who were lost-to-follow-up; or there was “lack of matching according to known risk factors for psychiatric disorders and psychopathology within the general population”; or trans people were included at different stages of treatment. In short, the studies Dhejne and her colleagues reviewed were not robust. Such flaws cast serious doubts, as Dhejne admits, on far-reaching conclusions from these studies: “Since most included only individuals attending transgender health-care services, the results are not generalizable to the overall trans population” and “it cannot be ruled out that it [the improvement in psychopathology and psychiatric disorders post-treatment] relates instead or as well to the benefits that accrue from being validated and accepted for treatment.” Another, more recent study from 2019 with results favoring gender-affirming surgery had significant weaknesses and its overreaching conclusions required correction.

In short, a dearth of definitive data exists to support using surgery and hormones for all gender dysphoric patients. If this alone were the case, it would be enough to approach such aggressive interventions with hesitancy. But there are other elements to the clinical situation which should give one even more pause.

If gender depends on the subjective feeling of the patient, it is not static but fluid. Thus, even after hormones and surgery, patients change their minds only to confront the irreversibility of some of the treatments. In the most powerful chapter of his book, Ryan Anderson gives voice to those who “detransitioned” back to their biological gender. Anderson quotes Cari Stella, a detransitioned 22-year-old woman: “When I was transitioning, no one in the medical or psychological field ever tried to dissuade me, to offer other options, to do really anything to stop me besides tell me I should wait till I was 18.” In an extensive and thorough essay for The Atlantic, Jesse Singal documented some of the same thoughtless pressure from medical professionals: “Many of these so-called detransitioners argue that their dysphoria was caused…by mental health problems, trauma…They say they were nudged toward physical interventions of hormones or surgery by peer pressure or by clinicians who overlooked other potential explanations for their distress.”

This societal pressure primarily harms patients; but it also harms and all too often attempts to silence the frank and productive debate necessary to evaluate any medical intervention. As Anderson documents, in October 2017, “the governor of California signed a new law that could send health-care workers to jail for failing to use a person’s chosen pronouns.” In February, 2018, the New York Times published a column by Jennifer Finney Boylan, claiming Ryan Anderson’s book “suggests that transgender people are crazy, and that what we deserve at every turn is scorn, contempt and belittlement.” No passage in the book even remotely implies this. Only a few years ago, Dr. Kenneth Zucker, a world-renowned psychological expert on gender dysphoria and gender identity development, was fired from the Child Youth and Family Gender Identity Clinic in Toronto, likely for taking a somewhat conservative approach to pre-pubescent children expressing gender dysphoria. His concern, that young patients might change their minds, led him to recommend a watchful and cautious approach rather than an aggressive medical approach to transition patients immediately. He was unceremoniously dismissed.

The coup de grâce came only last month when Amazon, a site responsible for 83% of books sold in the US, removed Ryan Anderson’s book from its site without any explanation and without any forewarning, a clear and disturbing instance of censoriousness. And yet, on Amazon, one can still purchase Adolf Hitler’s Mein Kampf, Josef Stalin’s Selected Works, and In Defense of Looting.

How can any academic participate in an honest discussion when a controversial idea or research finding results in potentially career-ending or damaging consequences? In this milieu, a simple book review like this one must be written under anonymously for fear of, to put it lightly, professional costs. But it is also for this reason that Ryan Anderson’s book, one of the few dissenting voices, is so important.

Oliver Wendell Holmes, a 19th century professor of anatomy at Harvard Medical School, once wrote, “The truth is, that medicine, professedly founded on observation, is as sensitive to outside influences, political, religious, philosophical, imaginative, as is the barometer to the changes of atmospheric density.” As with the memory wars of the past century, we now confront a precarious situation in medicine where outside influences push us beyond the realm of our scientific knowledge. Indeed, we presume to know much about transgenderism but in fact know little. Acknowledging this, Anderson barely mentions concrete, alternative treatment options for transgender patients in his conclusion. This is because of our paucity of knowledge about what leads to gender dysphoria and how to treat it. Our practices lack rigorous scientific evidence. Consequently, it is entirely possible Ryan Anderson is wrong about all this. It is possible more definitive research may quash the doubts he eloquently expresses about hormones and surgical treatment for transgender patients. But until that time, if it comes, we in the medical field ought to resist consensus based on external political and popular influences and search for what is best for our patients.

—

[Editor’s note: Walmart has joined Amazon in delisting Anderson’s book, but you can still purchase it from its publisher, Encounter Books — and you should. There’s a reason these corporate behemoths don’t want you to read “When Harry Became Sally” — and that’s why you should read it! It is a disgrace that the US has become a country in which a distinguished physician can only write approvingly about this book without using his or her name, but that’s what we have become. This is what the activist left, woke capitalists, and transgender activists, have done to our liberties. — RD]

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