Rod Dreher's Blog, page 81

Race, Police, And Innumeracy

Here’s a question for you: How many unarmed black men were killed by police in 2019? 

About 10About 100About 1,000About 10,000More than 10,000

Make your choice before you read further.

What did you say? I guess “about 100.” I was wrong. The correct answer is “about 10” — the much-lauded Washington Post database said 13 unarmed black men were killed by police that year. Another database, one maintained by data scientists and activists, says 27. Still both numbers are far closer to “about 10” than to any other number.

That question was asked in a study commissioned by Skeptic magazine, the results of which were tweeted by political scientist Zach Goldberg (who is a great follow on Twitter). This is mind-blowing:

 

You can read the entire piece here. 

Conservatives were by far the most accurate in their estimation. Forty percent of liberals thought the answer must be between 1,000 and more than 10,000 — a number that tops fifty percent for the “very liberal.” Only about one in five liberals, and one in six “very liberals,” got the correct answer. My own guess — about 100 — was the second-highest among conservatives, and on par with what liberals (not “very liberals”) and moderates guessed as their top choice.

Another question: Of those shot and killed by police in 2019, what percentage were black?

Don’t read any further until you have guessed?

I guessed about 50 percent.

I would have been very wrong. The real answer is 26.7 percent.

But then, everybody else was wrong too:

 

What’s the conclusion here? Race and racially-motivated police violence is a major driver of news and political conflict in this country. But most of us — even conservatives — are badly uninformed about it, and think that it’s a much worse problem than it is.

Where would we have gotten our information? The media.

George Floyd’s lawyer, writing last year in the Washington Post, said:

This cascade of recent cases — Ahmaud Arbery, jogging while black; Breonna Taylor, sleeping while black; and most recently, George Floyd, encountering police while black — has sharpened the focus of all Americans on two inescapable realities: Our society and its institutions place a perilously low value on black lives, and it’s inherently dangerous to be black in America.

More:

And then we hear that nagging thought that keeps coming back and demanding us to face it: How many more deaths have not been captured on video? How long has this been going on without witnesses or documentation? Is this an outlier or is this endemic? And it starts to feel like genocide.

Genocide! Genocide is defined by the Oxford English dictionary as “the deliberate killing of a large number of people from a particular nation or ethnic group with the aim of destroying that nation or group.”

There are more than 40 million black people in the United States. The killing of between 13 and 27 black people a year in police-involved shootings — not to say whether or not those particular shootings were justified — is not genocide. The idea that the Washington Post would allow a black lawyer to use that kind of incendiary language in an op-ed gives you an idea of why so many Americans think the problem is far worse than it really is.

Similarly, the Gallup poll has consistently found over the last two decades that Americans on average estimate that between one in four and one in five Americans are gay or lesbian. In fact, the number is more between four and five percent. Why the radical overestimation? Well, have you read the papers or magazines, or watched TV in the past 20 years?

UPDATE: Chris Rufo’s comment on these findings:

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Political Cultists Of Our Time

Well, I didn’t see this coming. One of my state’s US senators, Bill Cassidy, was one of seven GOP senators who voted for Trump’s impeachment. He has sustained severe blowback here in Louisiana. I wrote this letter to the editor of the Baton Rouge paper to support him:

As a conservative voter, I have never been a Never-Trumper and though I have also never been a Donald Trump fan, I recognize he brought a much-needed shake-up to the GOP.

But Trump’s grotesque post-election behavior made me realize that the Never-Trumpers were more correct than I previously thought. Trump’s words and actions regarding the Jan. 6 atrocity merited impeachment and conviction. It gives me no pleasure to conclude this, but had a Democratic president done the same things, I would feel the same way.

I am also proud of Sen. Bill Cassidy, R-Baton Rouge, for his vote to convict Trump. It was a brave call.

My most recent book, “Live Not By Lies,” is about the lessons contemporary Americans can learn from the experiences of Christian dissidents under Soviet rule. The most difficult thing, but the most necessary thing, was to stand up for the truth, no matter what it cost.

Relatively few people managed to do it, but they kept their honor. I think Cassidy took the true measure of Trump and delivered a truthful verdict. I hope he wears his censure by the Louisiana GOP as a badge of honor.

Attorney General Jeff Landry blamed Cassidy for falling into a “trap laid by Democrats to have Republicans attack Republicans.” I remind Landry that principle is more important than party and truth matters more than tribe.

Besides, the reason we have a Democratic-controlled Senate today is because Trump attacked Georgia Republicans and convinced enough of his voters to stay home in the runoff as a Trump loyalty test. Trump continues to hold the GOP hostage with his threats to start a third party. Trump is tearing apart the GOP, not Cassidy and the GOP senators who voted to hold him accountable.

I am glad Trump re-oriented the GOP towards an adversarial stance to China, started no new wars and opened the ideological doors to a more populist, pro-working-class economics. I am thrilled by his judicial appointments and his defense of unborn life.

But his inability to discipline himself and focus on policy made his presidency one of lost promise. I eagerly await the rise of Republican leaders who can build on the new directions pioneered by Trump.

It is ironic that for the best of Trumpism to succeed in the future, the GOP needs to cut itself off from Trump, an amoral narcissist who disgraced himself, the presidency and his party. I am confident history will vindicate the stance for truth and honor taken by Cassidy and the six other GOP senators.

I didn’t realize the letter was going to run at all, much less today. Until I woke up this morning and received the following e-mail from a friend of 40 years:

I’d like to just let this pass, but I can’t. Support for Trump and his policies is the last straw. I can’t see a way for us to stay friends. You have broken my heart.

Well, that letter makes me sad, but mostly it makes me angry and depressed about the country. Notice that my liberal friend ended our friendship — of four decades! — because in a letter to the editor supporting Trump’s impeachment, I did not express perfect hatred of the man, and everything he did.I’m still stunned by the fanaticism here. I wrote a letter to the editor supporting the Republican US senator who voted to impeach Trump, and my old liberal friend’s response to that is to end our friendship. Sen. Cassidy told Walter Isaacson the other day that he has lost some friends over his vote, but he was talking about Republican friends. I, however, lost a liberal friend because I didn’t support Cassidy’s impeachment vote in exactly the right way.What a lousy place this country is in. As I’ve said here many times, I cannot imagine throwing a friend overboard over politics, religion, or anything else. I can see being extremely disappointed in a friend’s behavior, and not wanting to be around them. But to sever the friendship? I would only do that if you insisted on talking about politics, religion, or whatever it is that separated us, in an abusive way. If you’re the kind of person who would not want to be my friend because of my political, religious, or other views, chances are we wouldn’t be good friends anyway. I was a young liberal when I first met this friend. I had not realized that her friendship was conditional on my politics being absolutely the same as hers.I mean, look, I have friends all over the political and religious spectrum. I have friends who think I’m a crazy liberal, and I have friends who think I’m two tics away from Tomas de Torquemada. If you have a basically good heart, and you like to laugh and tell stories, I’ll find room for you at my table. I quit talking politics with my mom because she’s a diehard Trump fan who thinks I’m too liberal, and we can’t have an exchange that doesn’t end up with us mad at each other. So we don’t talk politics — what’s the big deal? Our relationship is more important to both of us than politics. But not everybody is like that.I think what my now ex-friend did today was shameful. As I wrote here the other day, I think what Rep. Adam Kinzinger’s family did, casting him out because he voted to impeach Trump, was shameful. What the hell is wrong with people? In the case of the old friend who cut me off today, she believes herself to be a paragon of open-mindedness and tolerance. Many, many conservatives can tell you that some of the most intolerant people in the world are people like this.Yesterday in his newsletter, David French wrote about how hard it is to reach the Christian conspiracy theorist. Excerpts:

I fear that my early responses to questions about the conspiracy-committed have been too passive—too inadequate for the magnitude of the challenge. I’ve advised patience. Give the political moment a chance to calm. Give COVID a chance to pass. Let people come back to church, to attend the way they used to attend—in close contact with people they love.

Recreate the human connections we’ve all missed, and then let’s see if the challenge remains so urgent. Then let’s see if so many millions of Christians continue to flirt with QAnon, believe Antifa attacked the Capitol on January 6, or believe that widespread election fraud cost Trump the 2020 election. These beliefs don’t just undermine our civil society, they often exact great costs in the wrathful hearts of their adherents.

But the more I see the conspiracies play out in real life, the more concerned I grow. When large numbers of people hold beliefs with religious intensity, those beliefs not only provide them with a sense of enduring purpose, they also help them form enduring bonds of friendship and fellowship. The conspiracy isn’t just a set of intellectual convictions, it’s also a source of community. It’s the world in which they live.

Let’s put it another way: The conspiracy becomes part of their elephant.

This is a reference to a metaphor the social psychologist Jonathan Haidt uses to explain how we reason. The conscious mind, he says, is like the rider of an elephant. The elephant is the 99 percent of things going on in one’s subconscious mind, that conditions how the rider thinks. Here’s what French means:

So how does a conspiracy theory become part of the elephant? When it’s connected to the fabric of your identity, to your community, to your friendships, and to your faith.

Let’s think this through for a moment. Let’s suppose that you forward to your Aunt Edna the absolutely perfect fact check—in 900 words, her commitment to “stop the steal” crumbles into ash. Where does that leave her in her friendships? Where does that leave her in her sense of political purpose? Does it leave her disconnected from her friends in her Bible study? Does it impact her relationship with her husband? What about the online community that’s embraced her and helped her through the loneliness of the pandemic?

All of those consequences are exactly why most of the conspiracy-committed are beyond the reach of even the most potent acts of persuasion. You’re asking the rider to fight the elephant.

So, how do we persuade? We reach the elephant. If your role in another person’s life is (as you see it) the “teller of hard truths,” then you’re at an immense disadvantage when contending for a family member’s heart with the people who share the same lie, but also love them, accept them, and give them a sense of shared purpose.

Interestingly, I just finished last night the anthropologist T.M. Luhrmann’s great new book, which is about how gods become real to people. I’m going to do an epic post on it later today. She says that being embedded in a community in which theological claims are taken as real and valid is a key part of the process. It makes believing in the god more plausible.

French has some good advice for how to respond to Christian friends and family members who are caught up in this cult-like thinking. He ends with:

The longer I look at our bitter and divided culture, the more convinced I am that there are no shortcuts to cultural repair. Politics are important, but it’s relationships that will repair or destroy our land. Do we care enough about our angry relatives that we’re willing to love them back to spiritual health? The answer to that question will be more important than any media reform and any political contest. We simply cannot write off millions of Americans as beyond the reach of truth and hope.

Read the whole thing. I think French’s response is a deeply Christian one, and I don’t know of any better approach, but deep down, I think we’re probably too far gone at this point. One reason that I steered conversations with that liberal friend away from politics is because despite her intelligence and advanced education, she has always been temperamentally incapable of dealing with contrary arguments. She gets mad really fast, and stops listening. That’s regrettable, but it’s certainly possible for mature people to maintain a friendship without talking about politics, or religion, or whatever else might divide the friends.

What we have seen happen, though, on both the Left and the Right, is people lose their ability to see their opponents as human beings. People have lost their own sense of humility, and no longer consider that they might be wrong about something. As my longtime readers know, one of the most intellectually formative events for me was losing faith in the Iraq War, which I had supported without any serious doubts at all. Remembering how confident I was in my backing for the war was a bitter self-reproach. It changed me forever. I have endeavored since then to keep front to mind how fallible my own judgment — and anybody’s judgment — can be. None of us are omniscient, which means that we have to make decisions in time, based on partial information. Even the best informed of us, and the most clear-headed, can make mistakes. You had better not be arrogant in your own judgments, and merciless to those who erred, because the day will come when you will make a big mistake, and will need the mercy of those who were right when you were wrong.

As I write in Live Not By Lies, Hannah Arendt said that two signs of a pre-totalitarian society were 1) preferring lies that served one’s ideological biases to the truth, and 2) valuing loyalty over competence. We can see ample evidence of both factors on the Right and the Left today. You can argue over which side is more in thrall to these vices, but I don’t see how anyone can plausibly argue that this isn’t a widely shared problem with our public discourse — and private discourse too.

David French’s strategy only works in families and among friends who value relationships more than ideology. When you have reached a point, though, in which friends and family cut you off because they believe you are ideologically impure, how do you repair that? When you have reached point where you feel that you cannot be around certain friends and family because they will not stop ranting about their political views, and demanding that everybody agree with them, how do you fix that problem?

In 2018, David Blakenhorn wrote a piece explaining why we are so polarized. He said the fourteenth and final reason is the most important:

The growing influence of certain ways of thinking about each other. These polarizing habits of mind and heart include:

Favoring binary (either/or) thinking.

Absolutizing one’s preferred values.

Viewing uncertainty as a mark of weakness or sin.

Indulging in motivated reasoning (always and only looking for evidence that supports your side).

Relying on deductive logic (believing that general premises justify specific conclusions).

Assuming that one’s opponents are motivated by bad faith.

Permitting the desire for approval from an in-group (“my side”) to guide one’s thinking.

Succumbing intellectually and spiritually to the desire to dominate others (what Saint Augustine called libido dominandi).

Declining for oppositional reasons to agree on basic facts and on the meaning of evidence.

He’s right. If you think this is something that only the Other Side does, you are deluding yourself. I keep recommending the excellent 1980s-era Granada TV documentary series on the Spanish Civil War. I have cued the first episode to the point where a retired Army officer who joined the Nationalist side reflects on the state of the nation just before war broke out. Sounds familiar:

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Amazon Cancels Ryan T. Anderson Book

This is alarming news:

You can still buy the book directly from the publisher, and perhaps from other distributors.

I read the book in 2018, when it came out. It’s first-rate. Anderson is critical of gender ideology, but his book is well-argued and supported by scientific findings. If you don’t agree with him, fine, but give him a chance to make his argument. That’s what we do in a free society.

Amazon is a private business, and in a free society, that means it has the right to refuse to sell anything. Note well that it is selling a pro-trans book titled, Let Harry Become Sally. What’s more, Amazon is also currently selling Hitler’s Mein Kampf. 

That’s right: Jeff Bezos will sell you Hitler’s autobiography, because he correctly trusts readers to understand that malignant book. But he will not sell you a book by the head of a major American think tank, making an argument critical of gender ideology, because … why?

Last year, a coalition of US publishers, booksellers, and authors wrote to Congress to ask for anti-trust action to fight Amazon’s total dominance of the book industry. Their letter said, in part:

Amazon’s scale of operation and share of the market for book distribution has reached the point that no publisher can afford to be absent from its online store.

A year ago, The New York Times reported that Amazon controlled 50 percent of all book distribution, but for some industry suppliers, the actual figure may be much higher, with Amazon accounting for more than 70 or 80 percent of sales.  Whether it is the negative impact on booksellers of Amazon forcing publishers to predominantly use its platform, the hostile environment for booksellers on Amazon who see no choice but to sell there, or Amazon’s predatory pricing, the point is that Amazon’s concomitant market dominance allows it to engage in systematic below-cost pricing of books to squash competition in the book selling industry as a whole.

Remarkably, what this means is that even booksellers that avoid selling on Amazon cannot avoid suffering the consequences of Amazon’s market dominance.

The ongoing COVID-19 crisis is exacerbating the problem:  it continues to threaten the financial well-being of authors, publishers, and booksellers, some of whom will not survive the year.

Amazon, by contrast, with its ever-extensive operation and data network, has grown only more dominant, enjoying its largest-ever quarterly profits during April, May and June.

Amazon can’t claim it isn’t selling the book because there’s no demand for it. When it was first published, When Harry Became Sally made the bestseller lists. 

This is a nakedly political decision by Amazon, which is more afraid of Americans reading Ryan T. Anderson on gender ideology than they are of Americans reading Hitler on his Kampf.

Here’s what this decision means: given Amazon’s power, no publisher is going to publish future titles critical of gender ideology if they risk those titles being de-listed by Amazon. You can still buy Abigail Shrier’s bestselling Irreversible Damage: The Transgender Craze Seducing Our Daughters  on Amazon — but hurry, because it is probably just a matter of time before Bezos cancels it.

You may be a pro-trans person who is perfectly fine with Amazon doing this. You should think twice. A company with the power to prevent books on certain themes from being published, simply because of its might in the retail sphere, is not always going to make decisions of which you approve. It is time for Congress to take antitrust laws seriously in Amazon’s case.

The novelist and essayist Walter Kirn tweeted the other day that now is the time for people to start buying hard copies of books that might be “problematic” — that is, books that the progressive censors might want to disappear from the culture’s memory. He’s right. Make a list of books — classics, whatever — that might be endangered by the Woke, and start buying hard copies now, for yourself, for your kids, for the future. They will be precious before you know it.

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Jodi Shaw Lives Not By Lies, Pays Price

Jodi Shaw, the brave Smith College whistleblower I interviewed last year when she began speaking out about the racially hostile, anti-white atmosphere at the elite liberal arts school, has resigned her position there. Bari Weiss has the scoop. Here’s the letter Jodi sent to the school’s president:

Dear President McCartney:

I am writing to notify you that effective today, I am resigning from my position as Student Support Coordinator in the Department of Residence Life at Smith College. This has not been an easy decision, as I now face a deeply uncertain future. As a divorced mother of two, the economic uncertainty brought about by this resignation will impact my children as well. But I have no choice. The racially hostile environment that the college has subjected me to for the past two and a half years has left me physically and mentally debilitated. I can no longer work in this environment, nor can I remain silent about a matter so central to basic human dignity and freedom.

I graduated from Smith College in 1993. Those four years were among the best in my life. Naturally, I was over the moon when, years later, I had the opportunity to join Smith as a staff member. I loved my job and I loved being back at Smith.

But the climate — and my place at the college — changed dramatically when, in July 2018, the culture war arrived at our campus when a student accused a white staff member of calling campus security on her because of racial bias. The student, who is black, shared her account of this incident widely on social media, drawing a lot of attention to the college.

Before even investigating the facts of the incident, the college immediately issued a public apology to the student, placed the employee on leave, and announced its intention to create new initiatives, committees, workshops, trainings, and policies aimed at combating “systemic racism” on campus.

In spite of an independent investigation into the incident that found no evidence of racial bias, the college ramped up its initiatives aimed at dismantling the supposed racism that pervades the campus. This only served to support the now prevailing narrative that the incident had been racially motivated and that Smith staff are racist.

Allowing this narrative to dominate has had a profound impact on the Smith community and on me personally. For example, in August 2018, just days before I was to present a library orientation program into which I had poured a tremendous amount of time and effort, and which had previously been approved by my supervisors, I was told that I could not proceed with the planned program. Because it was going to be done in rap form and “because you are white,” as my supervisor told me, that could be viewed as “cultural appropriation.” My supervisor made clear he did not object to a rap in general, nor to the idea of using music to convey orientation information to students. The problem was my skin color.

I was up for a full-time position in the library at that time, and I was essentially informed that my candidacy for that position was dependent upon my ability, in a matter of days, to reinvent a program to which I had devoted months of time.

Humiliated, and knowing my candidacy for the full-time position was now dead in the water, I moved into my current, lower-paying position as Student Support Coordinator in the Department of Residence Life.

As it turned out, my experience in the library was just the beginning. In my new position, I was told on multiple occasions that discussing my personal thoughts and feelings about my skin color is a requirement of my job. I endured racially hostile comments, and was expected to participate in racially prejudicial behavior as a continued condition of my employment. I endured meetings in which another staff member violently banged his fist on the table, chanting “Rich, white women! Rich, white women!” in reference to Smith alumnae. I listened to my supervisor openly name preferred racial quotas for job openings in our department. I was given supplemental literature in which the world’s population was reduced to two categories — “dominant group members” and “subordinated group members” — based solely on characteristics like race.

Every day, I watch my colleagues manage student conflict through the lens of race, projecting rigid assumptions and stereotypes on students, thereby reducing them to the color of their skin. I am asked to do the same, as well as to support a curriculum for students that teaches them to project those same stereotypes and assumptions onto themselves and others. I believe such a curriculum is dehumanizing, prevents authentic connection, and undermines the moral agency of young people who are just beginning to find their way in the world.

Although I have spoken to many staff and faculty at the college who are deeply troubled by all of this, they are too terrified to speak out about it. This illustrates the deeply hostile and fearful culture that pervades Smith College.

The last straw came in January 2020, when I attended a mandatory Residence Life staff retreat focused on racial issues. The hired facilitators asked each member of the department to respond to various personal questions about race and racial identity. When it was my turn to respond, I said “I don’t feel comfortable talking about that.” I was the only person in the room to abstain.

Later, the facilitators told everyone present that a white person’s discomfort at discussing their race is a symptom of “white fragility.” They said that the white person may seem like they are in distress, but that it is actually a “power play.” In other words, because I am white, my genuine discomfort was framed as an act of aggression. I was shamed and humiliated in front of all of my colleagues.

I filed an internal complaint about the hostile environment, but throughout that process, over the course of almost six months, I felt like my complaint was taken less seriously because of my race. I was told that the civil rights law protections were not created to help people like me. And after I filed my complaint, I started to experience retaliatory behavior, like having important aspects of my job taken away without explanation.

Under the guise of racial progress, Smith College has created a racially hostile environment in which individual acts of discrimination and hostility flourish. In this environment, people’s worth as human beings, and the degree to which they deserve to be treated with dignity and respect, is determined by the color of their skin. It is an environment in which dissenting from the new critical race orthodoxy — or even failing to swear fealty to it like some kind of McCarthy-era loyalty oath — is grounds for public humiliation and professional retaliation.

I can no longer continue to work in an environment where I am constantly subjected to additional scrutiny because of my skin color. I can no longer work in an environment where I am told, publicly, that my personal feelings of discomfort under such scrutiny are not legitimate but instead are a manifestation of white supremacy. Perhaps most importantly, I can no longer work in an environment where I am expected to apply similar race-based stereotypes and assumptions to others, and where I am told — when I complain about having to engage in what I believe to be discriminatory practices — that there are “legitimate reasons for asking employees to consider race” in order to achieve the college’s “social justice objectives.”

What passes for “progressive” today at Smith and at so many other institutions is regressive. It taps into humanity’s worst instincts to break down into warring factions, and I fear this is rapidly leading us to a very twisted place. It terrifies me that others don’t seem to see that racial segregation and demonization are wrong and dangerous no matter what its victims look like. Being told that any disagreement or feelings of discomfort somehow upholds “white supremacy” is not just morally wrong. It is psychologically abusive.

Equally troubling are the many others who understand and know full well how damaging this is, but do not speak out due to fear of professional retaliation, social censure, and loss of their livelihood and reputation. I fear that by the time people see it, or those who see it manage to screw up the moral courage to speak out, it will be too late.

I wanted to change things at Smith. I hoped that by bringing an internal complaint, I could somehow get the administration to see that their capitulation to critical race orthodoxy was causing real, measurable harm. When that failed, I hoped that drawing public attention to these problems at Smith would finally awaken the administration to this reality. I have come to conclude, however, that the college is so deeply committed to this toxic ideology that the only way for me to escape the racially hostile climate is to resign. It is completely unacceptable that we are now living in a culture in which one must choose between remaining in a racially hostile, psychologically abusive environment or giving up their income.

As a proud Smith alum, I know what a critical role this institution has played in shaping my life and the lives of so many women for one hundred and fifty years. I want to see this institution be the force for good I know it can be. I will not give up fighting against the dangerous pall of orthodoxy that has descended over Smith and so many of our educational institutions.

This was an extremely difficult decision for me and comes at a deep personal cost. I make $45,000 a year; less than a year’s tuition for a Smith student. I was offered a settlement in exchange for my silence, but I turned it down. My need to tell the truth — and to be the kind of woman Smith taught me to be — makes it impossible for me to accept financial security at the expense of remaining silent about something I know is wrong. My children’s future, and indeed, our collective future as a free nation, depends on people having the courage to stand up to this dangerous and divisive ideology, no matter the cost.

Sincerely,

Jodi Shaw

Read it all for Bari’s commentary. 

Jodi Shaw says she is taking Smith to court over all this. I hope Shaw hits Smith’s administration so hard with a lawsuit upside the head it makes their teeth rattle. In the meantime, she has to pay the rent and feed herself and her two kids. Unlike Jodi, Smith has very, very deep pockets. If you can help Jodi now, here’s a link to her Go Fund Me. 

Please do! Shaw is extraordinarily brave, and she is fighting for many, many more people than herself. She refused a settlement offer from Smith to shut up and go away quietly.

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Cancelling Lee Chatfield

This is an important Live Not By Lies story, because it tells you where things are headed in this society: religious liberty is being seen by elites as nothing more than a cover for bigotry. Excerpt:

The Kalamazoo Community Foundation is the latest organization to end its membership investment with Southwest Michigan First, citing a misalignment of values and vision.

Southwest Michigan First has taken heavy criticism after the regional economic development nonprofit hired former Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield as its CEO last week.

Chatfield, who served as a Republican in the House for 6 years, has taken fire for his policy stances while in the legislature, including in 2019 when he said he would not allow civil rights legislation to come before the House because it would restrict religious freedom.

“We are proud to support the LGBTQ civil rights advocacy agenda,” the Kalamazoo Community Foundation said in a Thursday, Feb. 18 statement. “Our vision of Kalamazoo County as the most equitable place to live can only be realized by centering equity in all our community strategies including economic development.

“Southwest Michigan First’s values and vision for economic development do not align with the Kalamazoo Community Foundation. We have ended our membership investment with Southwest Michigan First effective immediately,” the statement continued.

Chatfield’s job at Southwest Michigan First is nonpartisan. The Kalamazoo Community Foundation is punishing Southwest Michigan First for stances its new CEO took in the legislature. Like this:

Chatfield said previously, during a 2019 media interview, that he would not support a change to the Elliott-Larsen Civil Rights Act expanding anti-discrimination laws to include sexual orientation and gender identity. The former lawmaker noted at the time he does not believe anyone should be discriminated against, but said he believed the proposed change would have infringed on religious beliefs.

Chatfield is right about that. What the Kalamazoo Community Foundation is saying is that religious liberty does not matter when it comes up against civil rights claims for sexual orientation and gender identity. The president of Western Michigan University has also denounced Chatfield’s hiring. 

The Kalamazoo City Commission has withdrawn its contribution to Southwest Michigan First, in protest of Chatfield’s hiring.

Lee Chatfield is the son of a conservative Bible church preacher. Again, he is absolutely correct to say that adding SOGI to civil rights law is going to adversely impact religious liberty. But his views on SOGI and religious liberty have nothing to do with the job he has taken now. This is 100 percent about punishing a Christian for his Biblically orthodox views on LGBT. What these intolerant elites in the region are doing is canceling him, making it impossible for him to work in the public sector because of the kind of Christian he is. They are saying that Lee Chatfield’s accomplishments in the legislature don’t matter. He will never be good enough to lead an economic development organization because of the value he places on religious liberty.

This is not happening in coastal blue America. It’s happening in Michigan. The message it sends is that people are going to have to decide whether their religious convictions matter more to them than worldly success. Again, Chatfield’s new job has nothing to do with LGBT rights. They are punishing him for his religious beliefs. Someone who holds Chatfield’s religious beliefs, and concern for religious liberty, is now not welcome in elite leadership positions.

Pastors, if you are not preparing your people for these realities in this world, you are doing them a disservice. Parents, if you are not preparing your children for the fact that they will be entering a world of employment in which their faith convictions will likely cause them to be discriminated against, and their career advancement checked because they cannot in good conscience sign off on certain principles, then you are failing them. Seriously, it’s coming. When a politician as accomplished as Lee Chatfield — who was Speaker of the Michigan House! — is deemed radioactive by the woke civic leadership class because of his Christian faith convictions, it is a sign of the times. For the people who run Kalamazoo, an elected representative who prizes religious liberty is nothing more than a bigot.

In Kalamazoo, anti-religious bigotry is a job requirement for elite leadership roles.

UPDATE: Well, well, well, now we know something about Lee Chatfield’s character:

Former Michigan House Speaker Lee Chatfield, a Republican who’s the new leader of a southwest Michigan economic development organization, says he will support expanding the state’s civil rights act to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation and gender identity.

The man he replaced in that role made over $720,000 per year.

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Wanda And The Minimum Wage

Ezra Klein writes about the Romney plan and GOP proposals to help working families:

Wanda Lavender lives in Milwaukee. She’s 39, with six children and one grandchild. She used to be a day care teacher and proud of the work. But after a decade, she was still making $9 an hour. She was a single mother by then, and the money wasn’t enough. So she began working at Popeyes, too. She did both jobs for a time, putting in more than 60 hours a week.

“It took a toll on my health,” she told me. “I have rheumatoid arthritis and sciatica. It degrades your body. It messes with your mental status. You never get to see your kids. You’re always working.”

Here’s the question: Were those years in which Lavender worked night and day barely seeing her children, feeling her body break under the labor, a success of American public policy or a failure?

Now, before I say anything about that, let me send you to Leah Libresco Sargeant’s NYT piece in support of the Romney plan and critical of the Lee-Rubio approach. Excerpt:

In contrast, the position of Mr. Lee and Mr. Rubio isn’t pro-family; it’s pro-employer. Their goal seems to be to fit parents to the needs of increasingly totalizing work, rather than expect jobs to accommodate the needs of families. It’s the same attitude lurking behind the proposal from Kamala Harris when she was a senator, to cover the gap between the ends of school days and workdays. She proposed extending the school day by three hours, rather than shortening the workday. When children and work come into conflict, work usually wins.

It’s almost as if some critics of the Romney plan are asking: How can we work around the demands children place on their parents? This is a shallow liberty that treats parents as equal only if they are equivalent to childless job candidates.

But parents are usually worse employees from their employer’s point of view. What employer prefers someone who could be chronically sleep deprived for months? All else being equal, who would pick the person whose children spend the winter working their way through every stomach bug at school? Pregnancy is a protected category in employment law, just as disability is, because an employer that views its employees simply as raw material will treat anyone facing physical challenges as dispensable.

For employers who see employees as short-term line items, the ideal worker is an unencumbered individual. No kids, no parents old enough to need care, no strong commitment to anyone outside themselves and their work.

I wish to associate myself with this position.

But the thing that struck me in reading the lede to Ezra Klein’s piece was: how do you get to be 39 years old, with six children and one grandchild, and no husband in the house? From The American Prospect magazine:

Lavender works two jobs, 60 to 70 hours per week, and neither job provides health care. One of her jobs is teaching at a day care—she’s worked there for 12 years and has always received $9 per hour. Her other job is at Popeye’s, where she fares no better. “I should be able to make $15 an hour and take care of my children,” she says. “I should be able to keep my gas and electricity paid and pay for child care if I need it. … You get in one of these [low-wage] jobs, and you’re stuck.”

From the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel:

Lavender keeps going back because she considers her co-workers family but also because she needs the money. She’s the main provider for her children — ages 8, 9, 11, 13, 16 and 19. Her 19-year-old daughter has a son. They all live with Lavender.

“I am the sole breadwinner for my family,” she said, though her daughter recently took a job also at Popeyes.

“I’ve gotten to the point where I’m working long hours and have to come home and homeschool my kids.”

OK, wait a minute. Wanda is clearly working very hard to support the family, but: why did Wanda have six children if she can’t support them? Nobody can raise six kids on low-wage work, with only one income. Is there a government policy shift that can make a radical difference in the lives of people like Wanda, and her children? If we are asking about the failure of public policy in Wanda’s life, shouldn’t we also ask about Wanda’s failures to the same public that she depends on to support her and her large family?

I don’t say this in a “punish the welfare queen” way. Most people who would be affected by a minimum wage increase aren’t raising six children as a single parent. And I don’t know the particular circumstances of Wanda’s life. Her six children and grandchild are growing up in a home without a father, and all of them are in part dependent on Wanda’s fast food worker salary. How can this not be important to the question of what to do about persistent poverty? The black scholar Glenn Loury, in 2018, gave an interview about this topic to the Institute of Family Studies at the University of Virginia. Excerpts:

IFS: To what do you attribute the persistent patterns of social inequality between African Americans and whites that we see today in the United States?

Glenn Loury: My lecture [at UVA] developed off of the contrast between what I call the bias narrative and the development narrative. The bias narrative calls attention to racial discrimination and exclusionary practices of American institutions—black Americans not being treated fairly. So, if the gap is in incarceration, the bias narrative calls attention to the behavior of police and the discriminatory ways in which laws are enforced and attributes the over-representation of blacks in the prisons to the unfair practices of the police and the way in which laws are formulated and enforced.

Agency is a fundamental issue when talking about how African Americans deal with our continued subordinate status in American society.

The development narrative, on the other hand, calls attention to the patterns of behavior and the acquisition of skills and discipline that are characteristic of the African American population. So, in the case of incarceration, the development narrative asks about the behavior of people who find themselves in trouble with the law and calls attention to the background conditions that either do or do not foster restraint on those lawbreaking behaviors. Now, the position that I take is that whereas at the middle of the twentieth century, 50 to 75 years ago, there could be no doubt that the main culprit in accounting for the disadvantage of African Americans was bias of many different kinds (bias in the economy, social relations, and in the political sphere), that is a less credible general account of African American disadvantage in the year 2018. And the development narrative—the one that puts some responsibility on we African Americans ourselves, and the one that wants to look to the processes that people undergo as they mature and become adults and ask whether or not those processes foster people achieving their full potential—that, I think, is a much more significant dimension of the problem today relative to bias than was the case 50 years ago.

I think it’s a combination of things. Opportunities have opened up, but bias hasn’t completely gone away. On the other hand, I think it’s very hard to maintain that bias hasn’t diminished significantly. And when I look at things like the gap in the academic performance of American students by race, or the extent to which the imposition of punishment for lawbreaking falls disproportionately by race, or when I look at the conditions under which children are being raised (and to the extent that those conditions are less than ideal) and the patterns of behavior that lie behind that, that is between parents or prospective parents and the responsibilities that they take for the raising of their children. These are dimensions that I think are relatively more important today and are questions about the behavior of African American people.

IFS: The media response to the latest Raj Chetty study seems to be an example of what you’ve described as the “deficient, accusatory or even dishonest” discourse surrounding our cultural discussion of racial inequality. One pundit said of Chetty’s new findings that “family structure doesn’t explain the racial mobility gap.” Yet, as Brad Wilcox recently wrote here, one underreported finding is “a strong positive association between black father presence [in the neighborhood] and black males’ income.” How important are present and involved black fathers to upward mobility in black communities, particularly for boys?

Glenn Loury: I agree with Brad Wilcox that this important finding and the implications it has for why father absence matters in a negative way for child development has been underplayed by the press. I haven’t done a systematic survey of all the press reports, but from what I’ve seen, they call attention to bias. They say, because the black boys are more likely to have downward mobility, it shows that they’re not facing the same opportunities in society. But of course, father absence is more prevalent in African American households, and to the extent that people congregate in neighborhoods that are relatively racially homogeneous, you’re going to have many more black boys growing up in areas where there are few fathers than you are white boys. And this is something that should be taken more seriously than it has been.

But I don’t think the data available to these researchers are finely gauged enough to permit answering the question that you’ve asked me, which is about the importance of fathers. Although it is suggestive that fathers matter at the level of the neighborhood, if not at the level of the individual household.

If you’re asking Glenn Loury—and this is not a scientific conclusion, it’s just an observation after being a student of these matters for decades—how could it not be true that fathers matter? They’re not the only thing that matters by any means, and a bad father—an abusive, drunken, unsupportive person in the household who happens to be male and may have contributed the genetic material to the production of a child—is certainly no panacea for any kind of social problem. But a neighborhood in which two-thirds of the households are women raising their children alone is a different neighborhood, it would appear, than one in which one-fifth or one-eighth of the households [are headed by lone mothers], and in which the patterns of behavior associated with responsible men who are working and caring for their families are modeled before the young men as a normal practice. But I don’t want to speculate about this because it’s a serious matter.

Now, having identified that it matters is not the same thing as knowing what to do about it. These things are not going to be flipped around by just pulling on a string and everything is going to be made right. These patterns are deep. They’ve been a long time in the making.

When Sen. Patrick Moynihan wrote that report 50 years ago, he was alarmed that it was a 25% or 23% out-of-wedlock birthrate amongst African Americans…Moynihan was very alarmed. He thought the world was coming to an end for black people…Well, those rates of non-marital birth that you saw amongst blacks in the 1960’s are now characteristic of whites broadly in the society. Norms and social practices change. The bottom has not fallen out, although if you believe people like Charles Murray in his book, Coming Apart, or Robert Putnam or J.D. Vance, there’s a whole lot of white people who are not doing so well, and instability in their family lives seems to be associated with that. Again, I’d stress this is the kind of thing that deserves to be studied with precision. But that’s one of the developmental issues that I try to encourage people that think about racial inequality to take more seriously: how we are raising our children and how are they being socialized?

There’s no substitute for the guidance and loving hand of structure, and the teaching and the infusion of norms and establishment of a sense of worth that’s happening inside the households where children are being raised.

School discipline is another area where you get higher suspension rates. And in the bias narrative embraced by the Obama education department in its efforts to get school districts to lower the racial disparity in suspension rates, it basically attributes a high rate of black suspensions in school to school districts being racially biased and not knowing how to handle misbehaving black kids. So, they suspend them, but white kids doing the same thing don’t get suspended.

I don’t find that at all persuasive…What I think is more likely to be the case is that these African American kids, those who end up getting suspended (and not all of them, for sure) are exhibiting patterns of behavior—whether it’s getting into fights or it’s using profanity with the teacher or insubordination—that are a reflection of the failures of their families to socialize them in a manner that instills the behavioral restraints associated with being able to function within that kind of environment. That’s a developmental issue—if the issue is the mother is stressed out, there’s not enough money to go around, or there’s a lot of time the kids are being unsupervised in their behavior. And it’s something that one shouldn’t just speculate about. But if the kids are really not getting the developmental experiences that are crucial to them being able to be effective adults, then that’s a serious problem. And it may actually have something to do with the adult incarceration rate inequality that we end up seeing.

It’s important to emphasize Loury’s point about the white rate of out-of-wedlock childbearing now reaching and maybe exceeding the black rate when the Moynihan Report came out. This is not just a black problem. It’s a vexing problem, though, because no decent society wants to punish children for the failures of their parents, but at the same time, no wise society wants to subsidize the behavior that causes people to be poor and remain poor.

I have a friend, a white male, who works in the inner city, which is to say, in the poor black part of the city where he lives. He grew up in a working poor family. I haven’t spoken with him in a while, but in the past, when we have discussed his work, he speaks as if he is living in a different country when he goes to work. He interacts with the people of that neighborhood every day. He’s a big-hearted man who has struggled to understand them, even as he serves them in his job. The thing that stands out most to him about the people he serves is how the idea of family structure is non-existent, at least compared to the American norm. He says it’s total chaos. He doesn’t say this in a hard-hearted way — in fact, just the opposite. He keeps trying to tell me that what people like me see as normal is light years away from what is normal where he works.

When we’ve talked about this stuff in the past, I’ve asked him: How do things change for the better for those folks? He just shakes his head. He has no idea.

I asked the same question of an older white man in my own city, a man who until recently lived in the poor black part of town, in a house that had been in his family for decades. He talked about how hard the grandparents who lived on his block worked to keep their grandchildren from sinking (the parents’ generation were in jail or strung out on drugs). The white man said that when the grandparent generation dies, only God knows what will happen to the young.

How do things change for the better for those folks? I asked. He doesn’t really know either, but he said that the change is going to have to come from within the black community, because “whites have no authority there.”

Look, it has been amply demonstrated by social scientists that there is an indisputable connection between persistent intergenerational poverty and family structure, and family culture. Glenn Loury talks about that in his interview. This is not just about black family structure, but family structure, period. There is no policy fix that is going to make it feasible for a 39-year-old woman with no husband to raise six kids and a grandchild on a fast-food worker’s salary. That is not an argument against raising the minimum wage — most people who make minimum wage aren’t living in Wanda’s circumstances — but it is frustrating how the foolishness of the choice’s Wanda has made in her life doesn’t seem to cross Ezra Klein’s mind. From his column:

Now, with both President Biden and Senator Mitt Romney proposing ambitious plans for cash grants to parents, irrespective of the parent’s work status, some conservatives are warning that these plans would lead to sloth and single parenthood. It is here that you see how the veneration of work, at any and all costs, has come to dominate conservative policy thinking: Even higher rates of child poverty are a price worth paying for more working mothers. Senators Mike Lee and Marco Rubio quickly dismissed Romney’s plan as “welfare assistance,” warning that “an essential part of being pro-family is being pro-work.”

Like I said, I’m more in line with Romney’s plan than with the standard conservative plan. Wanda’s kids aren’t abstractions — they are human beings, and I don’t want them to suffer because of decisions their mother made. Nevertheless, Lee and Rubio aren’t necessarily Scrooges for making their point. In their complaints I hear the voice of my late father, who worked long hours at his job, then came home to work his cows, all to make enough money to keep our family afloat in the 1970s. My mom drove a school bus. I did not realize until I was well into adulthood how close to the margins my family lived. My mom and dad kept it from us kids. I went through a crusading liberal period in college in which I held up my dad’s complaints, when I was a kid, about people in line ahead of him at the grocery store buying fine cuts of meat with food stamps, whereas he could only afford ground chuck, and cheaper cuts. This is why he, a Democrat, voted for Reagan. I thought of him as mean-spirited back then. Years later, when I realized how little extra money we had had, and how hard my dad hustled just to pay the bills, I understood that his resentment against the food stamps people was more complicated than I had thought. But you could not have convinced me of that when I was a college liberal. I considered anybody who thought like my dad did as racist.

Now, it is true that there have been massive structural changes in the US economy since the 1970s and 1980s. It’s a lot harder to support your family now. Ideas that made sense in the 1980s need updating today. That said, there will never be a time in which people without the means to support a large family can have such a family without living under serious economic duress. From Klein’s column:

These days, Lavender told me, she works full time at Popeyes. They promised her a promotion if she left her day care job, so now she makes $12 an hour, working 40 to 60 hours a week. I asked her how something like the Romney plan might change her life. “That means the opportunity to return to school, to open my own business. It could mean buying a house so I don’t need to catch the bus to work.”

I’d met Lavender because she’s organizing for a $15 minimum wage, and she said the experience had been transformative. She was considering running for alderwoman in Milwaukee so she could keep fighting for workers like herself. I wondered, as she said that, where she’d find the time. But that, too, is the kind of choice a child allowance could enable — it would give her breathing room to run for office so that in the future policy would be made by people like her, who trusted people like her.

We want Wanda to get elected to public office so she can pass laws that raise wages so that women can have six children with no husband in the house, and afford to buy a house? Where is that money going to come from? From the pockets of people who are more self-disciplined, that’s who. From people who don’t have six kids, even if they would like to have them, because they can’t afford them.

There’s no question that we need to have some serious structural adjustments to America’s economy to make it possible for more people to live stable lives. This is going to have to include redistributing some of the wealth away from the tip-top earners, within whose class it has become concentrated. Standard Reagan-era Republican shibboleths won’t do anymore. On the other hand, people who are busting their butts to work to support their families, and making hard choices to defer gratification for the greater good of the family, are going to wonder why they should subsidize the Wandas of the world, whether they are black, white, Latino, or whatever.

It is hard to build a meaningful sense of solidarity with the working poor if all the solidarity comes from one side. I have a friend who lives in the Baton Rouge area, a white friend, whose extended white family is one hot redneck mess. Lots of kids out of wedlock, divorces, drug and alcohol abuse, welfare fraud, you name it. My friend is just about the only one who works in that family. Everything “happens” to them — they have no sense of moral agency. They think that they are taken advantage of by the world, and the reason other people have stable and productive lives is because those other people are somehow cheating, or are otherwise favored by fortune. My friend excepted, this is a family of layabouts. They believe other people — “society” — ought to be supporting them, but that they have no particular obligation to society to live a certain way. These are white people, but I feel no solidarity with them as a white person. They are pothead mooches who are chiefly responsible for their own miserable situation. The idea that what holds them down can be solved by policymaking in Washington is risible. It royally ticks me off how they exploit my friend’s willingness to work hard, and to keep giving them all money, because my friend doesn’t want to see them suffer.

These people aren’t abstractions either. They are shiftless. They are undeserving. The children born into that clan don’t deserve to suffer either, but it’s hard to know what the morally correct thing to do here is. (And if any of those kids want to make a decent life for themselves, they are going to have to move far away from the clan.) I’m not saying Wanda is like them — Wanda clearly works very hard. But you see the point: poverty in America is not simply a matter of wages.

How do we fix that? Has anybody figured that out yet? Why doesn’t the moral choices Wanda has made concern Ezra Klein? It’s not about “why isn’t Klein shaming Wanda?”, but rather about whether or not the people who are going to be asked to help the world’s Wandas out by paying more for consumer goods to pay her a $15 minimum wage have a right to expect anything from them. We are supposed to pity Wanda for working so hard as the sole supporter of six kids, but can we not ask Wanda why she had six kids with no father in the home? Poverty is about wages, but it is also about culture.

We know that the Great Society doesn’t work. But what does?

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Travelin’ Ted, The Cancun Cruz

One of the most basic rules of being a competent politician is this: never leave town in a weather disaster. In the case of Texas Sen. Ted Cruz, nobody expects him to fix winter storm-related problems that are more the responsibility of the state’s governor, mayors, and Texas lawmakers. But they expect him to be around to share their suffering, and to be doing whatever he can at the federal level to help relieve it.

They don’t expect him to climb on a plane with his family and head for a resort in sunny Cancun. But that’s what he did. And he got caught. Now he has come back to Texas, but people are calling for his head. Given how much Texans are suffering from this week’s catastrophe, I don’t blame them for scapegoating him. He tweeted this late last year:

Hypocrites. Complete and utter hypocrites.

And don’t forget @MayorAdler who took a private jet with eight people to Cabo and WHILE IN CABO recorded a video telling Austinites to “stay home if you can…this is not the time to relax.” pic.twitter.com/KSvkiwxgga

— Ted Cruz (@tedcruz) December 2, 2020

My colleague Matt Purple has a good piece up today about shame. In it, he writes:

Therein lies another reality about shame, especially among we rebellious Westerners: It isn’t just a way to victimize the weak, but also to take the piss out of the powerful. It’s a kind of populist weapon, a way of tearing down those whom we judge to have gotten too big for their own good. There’s something viscerally satisfying about seeing a pompous leader stripped down to rags and paraded through the streets. All the more so if he’s guilty of hypocrisy, having fallen short of the same ethical code he was supposed to exemplify. Shame is thus a fundamentally moralistic thing, a way of signaling one’s superiority over another.

It probably is not to my credit, but I’m not sorry to see Texans warming themselves by roasting Ted Cruz’s backside. I’ve had a bone in my throat over Cruz since he showed up at a 2014 meeting of Middle Eastern Christians in Washington, a gathering to raise awareness about the persecution of their communities, and grandstanded about Israel, all to burnish his domestic political credentials, particularly with Evangelicals. It was cruel and manipulative political theater. I wrote about it here and here and here.

Ted Cruz in 2014 understood political theater, and had no moral compunction about having used and abused a room full of some of the most vulnerable Christians in the world to advance his political career. If he is being burnt at the political stake now for his ill-advised Mexican vacation, well, I hope that warms the hearts of Christians all the way over in Syria, Lebanon, Iraq, Egypt, and elsewhere in the region.

UPDATE: Ha!

First photo from #Perseverance Mars rover. pic.twitter.com/4HZ4MI8j9r

— Jon Gabriel (@exjon) February 18, 2021

UPDATE.2: The NYT has reviewed text messages in which Heidi Cruz invited neighbors to flee the cold and join them at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancun:

Text messages sent from Ms. Cruz to friends and Houston neighbors on Wednesday revealed a hastily planned trip. Their house was “FREEZING,” as Ms. Cruz put it — and she proposed a getaway until Sunday. Ms. Cruz invited others to join them at the Ritz-Carlton in Cancún, where they had stayed “many times,” noting the room price this week ($309 per night) and its good security. The text messages were provided to The New York Times and confirmed by a second person on the thread, who declined to be identified because of the private nature of the texts.

More:

In his statements, Mr. Cruz noted that the private school his daughters attend in Houston was closed this week. But some other parents at the school were incensed when they heard about his international trip because of the pandemic and school policies that have discouraged such travel abroad.

Two parents provided a copy of the written school policy for students not to return to classrooms for seven days after international travel, or to take a coronavirus test three to five days after returning, which would keep the Cruz children out of school for the following week. (Separately, an aide to Mr. Cruz said he had taken a virus test before his return flight on Thursday; the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention requires a negative result.)

When Ms. Cruz wrote to the group text chain of neighbors trying to weather the extreme conditions early Wednesday, she said the family had been staying with friends to keep warm, but quickly pivoted to offering an invitation to get away.

“Anyone can or want to leave for the week?” she wrote. “We may go to Cancún.” She teased a “direct flight” and “hotels w capacity. Seriously.” Ms. Cruz promptly shared details for a Wednesday afternoon departure, a Sunday return trip and a luxurious stay at the oceanfront Ritz-Carlton in the meantime.

 

The post Travelin’ Ted, The Cancun Cruz appeared first on The American Conservative.

Rush, Trump, & Cocaine Mitch

I was sorry to hear about Rush Limbaugh’s passing today. Having buried my sister, a victim of lung cancer, I know that it is an excruciating way to die. I hope his soul is at rest. I don’t have anything profound or interesting to say about his life and career. Rush wasn’t my thing. I don’t listen to talk radio. There were times when something he said offended me, but in all honesty, on the few occasions I listened to him over the years, he struck me as more amusing than the media’s characterizations of him had led me to believe. But I don’t have strong feelings about Rush Limbaugh one way or the other.

Even his enemies have to concede that his media career is one for the ages — that he was one of the most consequential broadcasting figures in American history. It is probably fair to say that without Limbaugh, there would have been no such thing as President Trump. It’s not that Limbaugh directly created Trump, but the Limbaugh populist-right style cultivated the ground that eventually produced Trump. Blame him or credit him, Limbaugh made that happen.

My feelings about Limbaugh are more in line with Michael Brendan Dougherty’s. MBD says Limbaugh was an obstacle to his becoming a conservative. I wouldn’t go that far, but I get it. MBD:

I had to overcome Rush Limbaugh to become a conservative. Or at least overcome that image of Rush Limbaugh, which was always exaggerated. Years later, I would tune in and Limbaugh was a more relaxed, more light-hearted, nimble-minded, and obviously happier person than the rabble-rouser he was accused of being. Still, I haven’t met anyone who didn’t say dumber or meaner things than normal when filling up the demanding content maw of broadcast media for hours a week.

I would find my conservatism in books and magazines, not on talk radio. My English teacher gave me George Orwell to read. Public-spirited liberal family members bought me subscriptions to The New Yorker and Harper’s. A book of the best political writing from the 1990s introduced me to people such as Andrew Ferguson, Christopher Caldwell, and Tucker Carlson in The Weekly Standard, and Thomas Fleming or Bill Kauffman at Chronicles. The first “contemporary” political book that really lit me up was Roger Scruton’s mostly neglected The Meaning of Conservatism. It was a supple text defending a primordial Tory veneration of a mixed civilizational inheritance. It amounted to an unsubtle conservative critique of Margaret Thatcher. Scruton saw markets replacing institutions as the object of right-wing veneration and he resisted it. He began that book with his terms: “Conservatism is a stance that may be defined without identifying it with the policies of any party. Indeed, it may be a stance that appeals to a person for whom the whole idea of party is distasteful.”

That’s how I came by my conservatism too. In 2009, John Derbyshire wrote an essay in TAC in which he praised Limbaugh and other right-wing radio talkers for good things they have accomplished, but he also lamented the down side:

Much as their blind loyalty discredited the Right, perhaps the worst effect of Limbaugh et al. has been their draining away of political energy from what might have been a much more worthwhile project: the fostering of a middlebrow conservatism. There is nothing wrong with lowbrow conservatism. It’s energizing and fun. What’s wrong is the impression fixed in the minds of too many Americans that conservatism is always lowbrow, an impression our enemies gleefully reinforce when the opportunity arises. Thus a liberal like E.J. Dionne can write, “The cause of Edmund Burke, Leo Strauss, Robert Nisbet and William F. Buckley Jr. is now in the hands of Rush Limbaugh, Sean Hannity. … Reason has been overwhelmed by propaganda, ideas by slogans.” Talk radio has contributed mightily to this development.

It does so by routinely descending into the ad hominem—Feminazis instead of feminism—and catering to reflex rather than thought. Where once conservatism had been about individualism, talk radio now rallies the mob. “Revolt against the masses?” asked Jeffrey Hart. “Limbaugh is the masses.”

In place of the permanent things, we get Happy Meal conservatism: cheap, childish, familiar. Gone are the internal tensions, the thought-provoking paradoxes, the ideological uneasiness that marked the early Right. But however much this dumbing down has damaged the conservative brand, it appeals to millions of Americans. McDonald’s profits rose 80 percent last year.

Here’s a good point by Derb:

If liberals can’t do populism, the converse is also true: conservatives are not much good at gentility. We don’t do affectless voices, it seems. There are genteel conservative events—I’ve been to about a million of them and have the NoDoz pharmacy receipts to prove it—but they preach to the converted. If anything, they reinforce the ghettoization of conservatism, of which talk radio’s echo chamber is the major symptom. We don’t know how to speak to that vast segment of the American middle class that lives sensibly—indeed, conservatively—wishes to be thought generous and good, finds everyday politics boring, and has a horror of strong opinions. This untapped constituency might be receptive to interesting radio programs with a conservative slant.

Even better than NPR as a listening experience is the BBC’s Radio 4. One of the few things I used to look forward to on my occasional visits to the mother country was Radio 4, which almost always had something interesting to say on the 90-minute drive from Heathrow to my hometown. One current feature is “America, Empire of Liberty,” a thumbnail history of the U.S. for British listeners. The show’s viewpoint is entirely conventional but pitched just right for a middlebrow radio audience. Why can’t conservatives do radio like that? Instead we have crude cheerleading for world-saving Wilsonianism, social utopianism, and a cloth-eared, moon-booted Republican administration.

Again, this was 2009, and Derb was complaining about how Limbaugh, Hannity, and the rest served as cheerleaders for George W. Bush. Former conservative radio talker Charlie Sykes is not wrong to say that Limbaugh ended his career by selling out principle to coddle Trump. Back in 2012, I wrote something critical of the way GOP leaders fall all over themselves to kiss Limbaugh’s ring. Rush was not a demi-god; he was a human being who sometimes said smart things, and sometimes said foolish things. But man, the power he had over Republican politicians was incredible.

Back to MBD: I agree with him when he says later in the essay that both the populist conservatives and the tweedy conservatives need each other. They might look at each other with disdain, but they can’t do without each other, whether they like it or not.

This is something that we are all about to learn in a very painful way. I would have seen Trump convicted by the Senate, and therefore forbidden to run for president again. This, not because I want to see a return to the pre-Trump status quo — I definitely do not — but because I want to see the rise of Republican leaders, including new blood in the House and Senate, who are capable of building on the good parts of Trumpism, and making it into an effective governing force that can also win elections by moving beyond the hardcore base. The GOP has to be able to appeal to middlebrows, to normies who are willing to vote Republican, but who will not vote for Donald Trump (certainly not after January 6).

Like I said, I would have seen Trump convicted to free the party to build its post-Trump future, but most Senate Republicans felt otherwise. Minority Leader Mitch McConnell led the votes to acquit Trump on grounds that the impeachment was unconstitutional, but he also gave a strong speech denouncing the former president’s conduct. Now Trump has started a civil war within the GOP against McConnell, one that threatens to keep Democrats in power for a long time. Politico writes:

McConnell, who voted to acquit Trump in the impeachment trial but lambasted his behavior surrounding the insurrection, has already threatened to wade into GOP primaries to fend off candidates he believes can’t win in a general election. In response, Trump, deplatformed on Twitter, released a lengthy statement Tuesday bashing McConnell and claiming that Republicans who stick with him should be prepared to lose.

It’s not an unfamiliar position for elected Republicans, who have had to deal with Trump’s diatribes against their colleagues and competing interests within the party for the past four years — including spending the two months before the Georgia runoffs claiming, falsely, that the November election was stolen from him. With Trump out of the White House and no longer trying to advance legislation through a McConnell-controlled Senate, it remains an open question whether the GOP can quell the in-fighting this time — or whether Trump even wants to.

More:

But Trump is making it harder for candidates to toe the line. Earlier Wednesday, while paying tribute to the late conservative radio host Rush Limbaugh on Fox News Channel, Trump repeated the false claim that he won the election and again went after Republicans for not backing him up.

Democrats looking to expand their incredibly narrow Senate majority in 2022 think they can benefit from the push-and-pull between Trump and McConnell, which they see as dividing the party in key battlegrounds where control of the chamber will be decided.

What an ingrate Trump is! The only reason anything got done in his Washington is because of Mitch McConnell. Trump knew nothing about making laws, and had to have his hand held by McConnell. One of Trump’s greatest accomplishments — three Supreme Court justices, plus a wealth of conservative appointments to the federal bench — were McConnell’s doing. Through his audacious maneuvering, McConnell held a court seat open (the one that might have gone to Merrick Garland) for a Republican president to fill. Democrats loathe McConnell for good reason: because he is very, very effective.

Trump cannot do squat without people like McConnell in his corner. To the extent that the Trump administration was effective, it was in spite of Trump, not because of him. All he knows how to do is to cause chaos and give speeches that fire up the hardcore. He doesn’t persuade. Trumpism could succeed in expanding the party and charting a new course for the post-Reagan GOP — if not for Trump constantly getting in his own way.

I personally know of a case in which the Republicans lost a winnable seat because the potential GOP primary candidate who stood a good chance of unseating the incumbent Democrat chose not to run, because he had said some things mildly critical of Trump, and that was enough to get him blackballed by the president. Trump blocked his entry into the campaign by endorsing a weak rival, who won the primary but had his head handed to him by the Democrat. Trump didn’t care. He doesn’t actually care if the Republican Party wins or loses. He only cares about Trump.

Though Republicans — thanks to Trump’s foolishness — lost the Senate, and are now out of power in Washington, Henry Olsen explained last week that they are poised for a big comeback. You watch: Trump is going to screw that up like he screwed the pooch in the Georgia Senate races. I cannot for the life of me understand why so many conservative voters think Trump is effective. Again, much of the substantive things Trump got done in Washington were made possible because of Mitch McConnell and other stalwart, capable Congressional Republicans who took their jobs seriously. If the Republican masses are going to toss them over to follow loser Trump down the rathole of narcissism and QAnon conspiracy, then they deserve to be ruled by President Kamala.

Moreover, as Angelo Codevilla wrote last month, Trump talked a good game about opposing the oligarchy that runs the US, but he did little or nothing to stop them:

He acted similarly with other agencies. His first secretary of state, secretary of defense, and national security advisor mocked him publicly. At their behest, in August 2017, he gave a nationally televised speech in which he effectively thanked them for showing him that he had been wrong in opposing ongoing war in the Middle East. He railed against Wall Street but left untouched the tax code’s “carried interest” provision that is the source of much unearned wealth. He railed against the legal loophole that lets Google, Facebook, and Twitter censor content without retribution, but did nothing to close it. Already by the end of January 2017, it was clear that no one in Washington needed to fear Trump. By the time he left office, Washington was laughing at him.

Nor did Trump protect his supporters. For example, he shared their resentment of being ordered to attend workplace sessions about their “racism.” But not until his last months in office did he ban the practice within the federal government. Never did he ban contracts with companies that require such sessions.

Thus, as the oligarchy set about negating the 2016 electorate’s attempt to stop its consolidation of power, Trump had assured them that they would neither be impeded as they did so nor pay a price. Donald Trump is not responsible for the oligarchy’s power. But he was indispensable to it.

Read all of Codevilla’s essay. I don’t agree with all of it, but it’s provocative and challenging. His main point is that the conditions that led to the rise of Trump are still in effect — but Trump was a disappointment. Codevilla doesn’t put it this way, but it’s clear to me that as long as we still have to deal with Donald Trump and his drama, the oligarchy is only going to get more powerful.

Anyway, may Rush Limbaugh’s soul rest in peace. May God help all those suffering from cancer, especially lung cancer.

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Is There A Military Double Standard For Whites?

I have been receiving e-mails occasionally from readers in the armed services who are concerned about the increasing influence of wokeness on military culture. This one arrived this week, and is typical:

I am a [age] white man with [number] kids and an Active Duty [service branch] Officer stationed in [base].  The bombardment against White America has been relentless since 2008.  My wife, family and friends, who are white, all express the same frustrations of racial libel when none of us are racist.  I would even add my coworkers, who are black and conservative-leaning, recognize the hypocrisy as well.  If the double standard was bad in 2018 when the article was written, it has taken on gargantuan proportions in 2020/2021.I recently attended a mandatory “Diversity, Inclusion, and Extremism” training and was struck by the timing of the order to receive this training.  While the world watched BLM burn down our cities and make attempts to erase our history, the DOD was essentially silent.  In fact, we received correspondence addressing the need to be even more tolerant, accepting, and inclusive. No “extremism” training was mandated at that time.Following the riots at the Capital building, the DOD apparently had deemed that occasion sufficiently “extreme” as to direct training and further indoctrination.  For the record, I do not, in any way, condone the breach of the Capital.  But it paled in comparison to the loss of life and property perpetuated by the BLM and ANTIFA mobs.During that training, we were asked to express our thoughts about inclusiveness and I remained silent, fearful that any comment I made about how I feel as a white person would be perceived as me being “out of touch,” “suffering from white privilege,” or worse “racist.”We were assured it was a “safe place” but I remained silent, believing there is no safe place for a white man to express his views about the disgusting double standard I must constantly swallow, or how I am to address this double standard with my children in order to prepare them for the work they are entering.Because I am Active Duty, I ask that my name not be included in any correspondence or writings you do in the future.  Anonymity is a new normal I fear I must get used to for the foreseeable future.

This story from Task & Purpose is about the military deciding that it needs to crack down on white supremacy and other forms of radical right extremism in the ranks. If the military is finding things like this among its personnel, then of course it has to fight them, no doubt about it. But how? To what extent is the military’s training using Critical Race Theory and adjacent categories? I completely understand this officer’s unwillingness to say anything in this training. I’ve been through these sorts of things in corporate America, and you would have to be a fool to say what you really think, no matter how benign, if it in any way contradicts the official narrative.If the armed forces become racially conscious in the same way institutions in civilian society are becoming, what does that do to cohesion? If white service members believe that the US Armed Forces considers them all to be racist by virtue of their skin color, and/or in need to being held to a double standard because of their race, why would they want to stay in the service? Why would any white person want to join?Last December, I published in this space a letter from a reader talking about this issue. Here it is again:

A few weeks ago, you mentioned a Twitter contrasting the styles of a Chinese military propaganda video and a U.S. Army recruiting advertisement.

Well, Tucker Carlson addressed the elephant in the room. His entire monologue is worth watching, but below are the key points:

What are the consequences of this kind of thinking? Over time, identity politics will destroy our country. No nation can remain unified for long if people are encouraged to think of themselves as members of competing ethnic groups first and citizens second. Countries need a reason to hang together; unity doesn’t happen by accident. The fixation on race that has seized our leadership class guarantees permanent disunity. It’s terrifying if you think about it, but it could be much worse.

The hatred for Tucker Carlson is mystifying. Is it because he’s really a spiteful demagogue? Or is it, I think, because he’s willing to point out distressing, yet blatantly obvious truths about our world? The fact is, America’s already at the stage described by Carlson, it’s just that most people are in denial. I love what he said about needing reason to hang together, because it’s so true. This country can remain a nation only so long as the number of people who think it’s worth fighting for and, if necessary, dying or killing for, outnumber those who either don’t care one way or the other or seek to dismantle and “transform” it.

[Carlson:] The U.S. military, for the record, has a very long history of treating everyone with respect and dignity because it was a meritocracy and a meritocracy is designed to treat people with respect and dignity on the basis of how they behave, not on the basis of how they look.

I’ll push back on this slightly, because the military is far from a perfect institution. It didn’t always treat everyone with respect and dignity and it still fails to do so today. However, it’s probably done as good a job as any institution out there could’ve done. This is beyond the scope of what we’re talking about here, but the U.S. military is somewhat unusual in its development compared to the professional militaries of say, Europe. But, I can attest from personal experience, that the military is by-and-large a meritocracy and that veterans themselves are largely proud of their service and say that it’s given them a leg up on life.

Part of the reason why the U.S. military is imperfect, however, is that it’s increasingly become a battlefield for the culture wars. Conventional wisdom holds that the U.S. military is often at the forefront of social change in this country and, in many ways, it’s true – Blacks and other racial minorities achieved equality in the services long before they achieved true equality in society. Unfortunately, this has translated into more radically-inclined forces into using the military almost exclusively as a vehicle for social change. I say exclusively, because they’re not in the least bit willing to entertain any other points of view or consider that the military may not be the best place for such practices. Unfortunately, many of these radicals serve in uniform or in a civilian capacity in national security. Perhaps they target the military because, unlike the rest of us, the military can’t really say, “no.”

In an essay for the Army War College in 1992, an Air Force lawyer named Charles Dunlap (you can read his blog here) wrote a controversial paper in which he described America 20 years from then as under the control of a military junta, but the military, ironically, “can’t fight,” in his words. This wasn’t a prediction on his part, but merely a crafty way of arguing against diverting the armed forces from its primary area of competency, which is warfighting, towards civilian functions better suited for non-martial institutions.

If only Charles Dunlap knew then that Wokeness, not civilian duties, would be what ailed the military over two decades down the road. While I don’t want to go as far as to say the military has lost all capability to fulfill its primary task (I have no way of knowing that), I can’t imagine that it’d be an effective fighting force if the same level of demoralization which ails American society afflicted the armed services also. Not only would the military be unable to fight, it’d be incapable of even enforcing a military dictatorship! Like the militaries of the ex-Communist countries, it’d collapse like a house of cards.

The conspiracy theorist in me says this is exactly what’s intended – weaken the institutions that defend and legitimize the country and make it easier to take down the country. But the more likely answer is that the Woke are merely doing what they feel to be justice. Once they take down the military or take over it, there isn’t much left for them to go after, except maybe religious institutions.

This is from the Tucker monologue the reader referenced:

This summer, the U.S. Army’s so-called Operation Inclusion instructed soldiers that the phrase “Make America Great Again” was a form of socially acceptable “covert White supremacy.” According to the Army, a presidential campaign slogan was White supremacy. No one did anything about that.

Now, according to the Army’s Equity and Inclusion Agency (yes, they have one), the phrase, “all lives matter”, American exceptionalism, and the celebration of Columbus Day are racist. Over the summer, the now-retired head of the Defense Intelligence Agency, Army Lt. Gen. Robert Ashley, encouraged his employees to read the lunatic tract “White Fragility” by Robin DiAngelo, a book that is both inherently bigoted and very stupid. Over the summer, Kaleth Wright, then the Chief Master Sergeant of the Air Force, proclaimed on Twitter that his greatest fear was that one of his airmen might be killed by a racist cop. Not killed by the Chinese military, but by American racism.

I would like to hear from readers of this blog who are in the military, or who have recently been in the military, to get your perspectives on this issue. I won’t use your name unless you specifically ask me to. As you know, I have strong views about the “Diversity, Inclusion, Equity” ideology, and I am confident that those views color the way I regard strategies for awakening the military. Am I wrong? Tell me about it. Am I right? Half-right? I want to know that too. Please answer in the comments, or write me at rod — at — amconmag — dot — com. Note well: All e-mails will be considered publishable unless you specifically say this is only on background. 

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Shame On The Kinzinger Family

When you let politics come between family, that’s a sure sign that you worship a false idol. I have been hard in this space on progressives who have publicly denounced family members for being pro-Trump, or for not being sufficiently woke. Now I see that Rep. Adam Kinzinger, an Illinois Republican who voted for Trump’s impeachment, has been disfellowshipped by some of his family. Excerpt:

Two days after Mr. Kinzinger called for removing Mr. Trump from office following the Jan. 6 riot at the Capitol, 11 members of his family sent him a handwritten two-page letter, saying he was in cahoots with “the devil’s army” for making a public break with the president.

“Oh my, what a disappointment you are to us and to God!” they wrote. “You have embarrassed the Kinzinger family name!”

The author of the letter was Karen Otto, Mr. Kinzinger’s cousin, who paid $7 to send it by certified mail to Mr. Kinzinger’s father — to make sure the congressman would see it, which he did. She also sent copies to Republicans across Illinois, including other members of the state’s congressional delegation.

“I wanted Adam to be shunned,” she said in an interview.

Here are excerpts from the actual letter:

More:

And:

 

Look, I don’t have any problem with people criticizing Adam Kinzinger. He’s a public figure who has taken a controversial stance. That comes with the territory. He’s not really my kind of Republican, though I think he voted correctly on Trump impeachment, and I admire his courage. But like I said, he’s a politician, and politicians get criticized.

But I am furious that family members would do such a thing — especially family members who purport to be conservative Christians. Raising my three children, I have told them all, explicitly and repeatedly, from the time they were small up even till today, that there is nothing they can do to lose the love of their father. I’ve told them that they may make me angry someday, and they may disappoint me in some way, but never, ever, ever will they lose my love.

I have a big family, and we do not all agree on politics. But I can’t imagine any of us writing a letter like that, much less publicizing it. There’s nothing wrong with them publicly opposing his views, but to cut him off from the family because he’s against Donald Trump? What is wrong with those people?! Readers of my books know that we have had trouble over the years in my family, and we are not as close as I would like us to be. Still, the idea that politics, of all things, would cause us to publicly denounce and disfellowship each other — it’s stunning, and disgusting, whether it comes from the woke Left or the Trump-cult Right.

 

 

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