Rod Dreher's Blog, page 82

Our Neo-Gnostic World

 “The whole world groaned, and was astonished to find itself Arian.” — St. Jerome.

Now the whole world groans, and is astonished to find itself Gnostic.

Over on my subscriber-only Substack (become a subscriber here), I’ve been talking about modern Gnosticism. I recently read an excellent thriller, Coyote Fork by James Wilson, in which a journalist, Robert Lovelace, is trying to solve the possible murders of a couple of people, connected to Global Village, a kind of Facebook, and its enigmatic founder Evan Bone. Bone was born and raised in a failed hippie commune called Coyote Fork. From one of my posts last week:

In Coyote Fork, Wilson shows why these communes failed: they were all founded on some form of the belief that man is born good, but society makes him evil. If they can recreate society to get rid of the things that make people bad, they will have regenerated paradise. In Wilson’s view, the techno-utopians are making the same mistakes, but this time, the entire world has to pay the price. For example, tech brought into existence social media mobs who drive cancel culture, and surveillance technology that makes it very hard to escape that mob. This plays a key role in Coyote Fork.

The philosophical heart of the book is its discussion of Gnosticism as the foundation of techno-utopianism. It comes up in Lovelace’s association with Ruth Halassian, a philosophy professor who knew Evan Bone at Stanford. Ruth is being harassed by woke students at her small Ohio liberal arts college because she challenges their wokeness on philosophical grounds. They call her a hater and a bigot, and are trying to run her out of town. Ruth explains to Rob Lovelace:

“It’s not that I’m totally unsympathetic,” she said, sitting down again. “They want to study other points of view, that’s great. But first they have to learn how to think, how to distinguish between a good idea and a bad one. And believing you can do that based simply on the gender or the skin color of the person who came up with it—that’s plain dumb.”

She paused.

“That’s what got me into trouble. I told a student what I thought. And it turned out she was recording the conversation. And she complained to the Dean that I’d called her dumb. And he backed her, and I was suspended.

Ruth and Rob go on talking. She recalls what Evan Bone was like in college.

“But that didn’t stop him having a philosophy. Without realizing it. He’s a Gnostic.”

She leaned forward, studying my face.

“The slack mouth. The glazed eyes. I’m losing you.”

I laughed. “I’m sorry.”

She shook her head.

“I’m always losing people. Especially men. They thought they were meeting for a drink and find they’ve signed up for a seminar.”

She hesitated. “OK, bees. Back in your bonnet.”

“It’s fine,” I said. “Just—” I opened a hand: Explain.

“Gnosticism?”

I nodded.

“The belief that the material world is evil. That it was made, not by God, but by a wicked demiurge called Rex mundi, who’s responsible for all the mess and contradiction of life.”

She glanced at the sink.

“The dirty dishes. The hairballs.”

She tweaked Aristotle’s tail.

“The cats.”

She rubbed her face against the soft fur.

“Especially the cats. So that’s the bad news. The good news is, each of us still has a little spark of the original divine spirit created by God. And—if we can get in touch with it, through esoteric knowledge—we’ll be saved. Throw off the shackles of the physical. Become pure spirit. For which, in the case of Evan Bone, read: Pure intellect.”

Thus the transhumanist dream of uploading human consciousness to the cloud as data. (This, by the way, is the philosophy at the heart of Paul Kingsnorth’s profoundly anti-Gnostic 2020 novel Alexandria.)

Rob asks Ruth if Evan Bone ever talked about colonizing Mars when he was in college.

“Not that I remember. But it would figure. You don’t like this world, so you leave it for another one, where you can plug yourself into some super-intelligence that will free you from your body. It’s the spirit of the age. The yearning for purity. The kids here are all the same.”

“They want to go to Mars?”

“They want to be perfect. The only difference is, their Rex Mundi isn’t the demiurge, it’s patriarchy. If we just stop teaching those dead white male philosophers, and purge our vocabulary of troublesome terms, then we can re-program ourselves to become pure thought. Literal. Transparent. Uniform.”

I nodded.

“And of course, they love Evan Bone. Because Global Village is the ultimate surveillance tool. If you think the way to reach perfection is to police what people are saying—what they’re thinking—it really doesn’t get better than that. So they all belong to their own little Village communities, where they trade dirt on heretics like me. And orchestrate online campaigns against us.”

You can see why I got so into this novel, can’t you?

Ten years ago, Benjamin Wiker published a short essay in Catholic World Report about “the new Gnosticism.” 

More recently, the philosopher Edward Feser published a lengthy but indispensable guide to our new Gnostic politics.

Megan Rials, a subscriber to my Substack (and a fellow Baton Rougean), e-mailed this letter, which I publish with her permission:

I am firmly convinced that God directs our reading in providential ways.  I read your newsletter on Gnosticism the other night only to read directly afterwards a piece that directly rebuts Gnosticism, even though Gnosticism is never explicitly mentioned.  The piece is a chapter in Beholding the Glory: Incarnation through the Arts, edited by Jeremy Begbie, and the chapter in question is by Malcolm Guite.  Guite focuses on incarnation through literature, and wow, what a rebuttal to the Gnostic tendency to reject the flesh and the material world.  Guite analyzes the poem “The Incarnate One” by Edwin Muir.  (Link to the text: https://www.poemhunter.com/poem/the-incarnate-one/ .)  Guite notes the following about the poem:

“Glib knowledge of bad theology has destroyed the mystery and taken away the poet’s sense of wonder and this leads him to plead for ‘not knowing’, for a restoration of ‘ignorant wonder’.  He wants us to see the Word made flesh in all the particular agony of the cross before we start to have any theories about it at all, and his poem helps us to do that.  He is not denying the truth of the incarnation, the staggering truth that ‘there a God suffered and died’, but he is trying to protect it from a too easy or abstract formulation in order to restore us to a ‘truer sight’….

Muir warns us against the denial of our flesh, the refusal of our own incarnateness, the flight from life into fleshless and bloodless words, a flight and refusal he characterizes as ‘abstract calamity’.  This is the fall and hell from which Christ in his incarnation saves us.  The salvation is not from the flesh, but of the flesh.  The danger is for the theologians and the theoreticians who are refusing Christ in his incarnation, preferring their own fleshless and bloodless versions of his saving work.  In this poem God’s incarnation is his point of contact with the flesh of all humanity.  We are called to live within our own flesh and to meet God there too….  

This last image [of the poem] makes the incarnation something which not only happened uniquely and fully in the birth and life of Christ, but, because he has never laid aside his humanity, it is something which in another sense is still happening as God in Christ journeys towards us, passing through the cold empire of our abstractions and the endless mirages our empty culture throws up, until at last, on the far side of the cross, his humanity touches ours.”

He goes on to note that “the arts are never discarnate” and explains that when we create a piece of literature, it is “a movement from the abstract to the concrete, from the timeless to time, from spirit to flesh.  It is, under its own analogy, a movement towards incarnation.  By struggling, as it were, to incarnate an abstract or momentary vision into the ambiguous medium of a living language, we are constrained to be particular, to give our vision flesh and blood, and are drawn away from the ‘abstract calamity’ of the fleshless, bloodless ‘ideological argument’.  Of course once we are engaged in this struggle we discover that, miraculously, the movement is also the other way—that the particularity, the ‘thisness’ of the medium with which we struggle, has something new to teach us about the ‘abstract truth’ we were in the first instance trying to embody.”

Guite is right that “glib knowledge of bad theology” can destroy the mystery of the Incarnation and how Jesus has met us in our own flesh.  The trouble with the current generations, however, is that they don’t even know theology at all—or at least, not through doctrine.  They’ve likely imbibed the idea that the material world is bad in part through the rise of the computer and technology, i.e., “virtual reality.”  Who wouldn’t want to live in a world where everything is for the instant creating and taking?  You can fashion a life for yourself that is tailored to your every preference.  You can become an instant professional-level athlete (maybe not instant, to be fair to die-hard gamers, but you can improve much faster than you would in real life).  You don’t have to reckon with your own bodily limitations or struggle physically in creating anything, whether it’s a garden or a work of art.  In short, you don’t need God because you’ve become the god of your own virtual world—one that is fleshless and bloodless, that is an “abstract calamity.”

We also have the problem of modern medicine rendering suffering as an evil problem that merely popping a pill can solve.  I don’t mean to suggest that modern medicine is all bad; my chronic migraines would have sentenced me to a miserable existence in a different era.  But the idea that any twinge of discomfort is an unspeakable evil of our bodies “trapping us” only serves to confirm further the idea that the body is bad and must be escaped.  (Personally, I’m thankful for the migraines, in a strange way, because they remind me of my need for God—and if my body right now can withstand the horrors of a migraine, how much glorious will my resurrected body be!)

All this to say, we’ve become alienated from our own bodies—no wonder, then, that when we encounter a feeling we don’t understand or don’t like, our first instinct is to say that reality must bend to our will and change accordingly.  We don’t demand that we rise to the occasion, or gain self-control, or submit our desires to a greater will than our own—as we do in our video games, we simply alter our surroundings to suit our whims!  Never mind that those whims are as fickle as the wind blows and that they might change; that’s tomorrow’s problem, and we’ll just click a few buttons to arrange our background accordingly.

In my generation’s preoccupation with self-expression might lie a partial answer to the road home to sanity.  Self-expression, of course, typically involves the arts.  Ironically, it seems to me that many in liberal movements use art to try to “express themselves”; I wonder if they even realize that the creation of art is itself a rejection of the Gnosticism they have embraced about their bodies—because, as you noted, transgenderism has its basis in the belief that the body is evil and we are what we feel we are.  I’m surprised they haven’t noticed that when you pour yourself into your art, there’s an engagement with the body that cannot be denied.  Even if it’s writing, which is my medium, and “only” typing, there’s a tremendous amount of bodily effort that goes into it.  My eyes tire, I start shifting in my seat, I turn phrases over and over in my head, I realize that what I said wasn’t what I really meant, I rewrite, I realize I need to reorganize…it’s like sculpting, trying to wrangle these words into line with my meaning.  That takes a physical toll on the mind and the body.  How can these progressive artists say that the work of their hands, which is supposed to be such an “expression” of themselves, is evil if their bodies played such a significant role in the creation of their art?

We need to be reminded that, as Guite puts it, our salvation is not from the flesh, but of the flesh.  And if we’re going to remind the current generation of Jesus’s saving work, then they must first be convinced that there’s a concrete reality here worth saving.  I realize that often, art is the stronghold of progressives in some fashion.  But if we can reclaim it—and not in a glib sense of the poorly made Christian movies such as “Fireproof” or the insipid books that pass for much of Christian fiction these days—then what a powerful tool it would be to show our society that in art, we are in fact moving toward an incarnation and creating a work of art, a material thing, that is good.  Have we forgotten that Jesus Himself was a carpenter who labored over His designs, sweated while He sanded wood, and built furniture with His own two hands, the same hands later pierced with nails on the cross?  Maybe then our society might begin to understand how God created the world, proclaimed it “good,” then chose to redeem it through His own Incarnation.  Maybe this is the “abstract truth” we gain from a sincere revival of the arts: to get past the “endless mirages” of virtual reality and the denial of the material that our culture has thrown at us to regain a sense of our own humanity.  Because if we aren’t in touch with that humanity, then of course what Jesus’s sacrifice can mean nothing to us.  His humanity cannot touch ours if we believe we don’t have a humanity in the first place.

What this kind of deep Christian revival of the arts would look like, I don’t know.  I’m not an educator, and I don’t know enough about each different kind of art to speak intelligently about it.  (I’ll only note that I use the term “art” broadly here; our artistic talents can take many different forms, far beyond the grade-school painting class the word typically conjures.)  But here’s something I have noticed.  I’ve dedicated my life to developing my writing ability, and my other passion is shooting, particularly archery.  I wondered why these two seemingly disparate activities appeal to me so deeply.  But there is a kind of strange similarity between writing and shooting a bow, one that Ray Bradbury discusses in his essay, “Zen in the Art of Writing.”  The title itself is a riff on a famous book entitled “Zen in the Art of Archery.”  He makes the point that writing and archery are similar in the repetitive demands they make of the body, and the “muscle memory” involved in crafting a good story and in recreating the perfect shot, every time you write or shoot.  (This comparison between writing and archery is particularly apt, by the way, because I can say from personal experience that 90% of archery is mental.)  We here in Louisiana glorify sports, and sports necessarily involve a discipline of the body—and the mind.  So, too, do the arts, and it’s time we started seeing that the dedication the arts also demand from our bodies and minds ground us in our enfleshed existence, in the flesh and blood God called good and Jesus came to redeem.

The post Our Neo-Gnostic World appeared first on The American Conservative.

Orwell’s Cookbook

This is how insane leftist culture is becoming in the US: Bon Appetit magazine and the recipe website Epicurious, which share the same parent company, are editing recipes in their archives to make them politically correct.

Politically correct recipes. You read that right. HuffPost wrote about the Archive Repair Project. Excerpts:

The bulk of Epicurious site traffic goes to the archive, mostly recipes but also articles and other editorial work, Tamarkin and Chopra said.

“Being such an old site, we’re full of a lot of ideas about American cooking that really go through a white lens,” Tamarkin said. “We know that American cooking is Mexican American cooking and Indian American cooking and Nigerian American cooking, that that’s the kind of cooking that’s really happening in this country every day.”

One of the first issues “repaired,” he said, was use of the word “exotic.”

“I can’t think of any situation where that word would be appropriate, and yet it’s all over the site,” Tamarkin said. “That’s painful for me and I’m sure others.”

“Painful”? This guy David Tamarkin finds the word “exotic” when used in a recipe to be hurtful? If I were so thin-skinned, I would be embarrassed to tell people about it. This is total neuroticism, but its progressive, so it’s ballyhooed.

What they’re doing is making the job of historians far more difficult. It is actually interesting to observe social history through the evolution of language used to write about food. It may be out of date to refer to this or that food as “exotic,” but the fact that what was exotic to the American palate in 1975 no longer is in 2021 tells a really interesting story. In my rural hometown, there’s a Chinese restaurant, a Mexican restaurant, and a Middle Eastern restaurant. When I was a kid, we had none of those things. I remember when the first pizzas were available in town, in the early 1970s. Pizza was exotic for us! This stupid project to edit out recipes and food stories to remove any words that cause thin-skinned 2021 progressives offense is a violation of the historical record. Do I even need to point out that this kind of thing — editing journalistic archives to reflect contemporary political policies — was Winston Smith’s job in Nineteen Eighty-Four?

More from the HuffPost story:

Since July, when Tamarkin outlined the project on Epicurious, he and his staff have fixed about 200 recipes and other work. Some repairs are more complicated than removing a single word, such as an entire story about the “ethnic” aisle at the grocery store.

“We have published recipes with headnotes that fail to properly credit the inspirations for the dish, or degrade the cuisine the dish belongs to. We have purported to make a recipe `better’ by making it faster, or swapping in ingredients that were assumed to be more familiar to American palates, or easier to find. We have inferred (and in some cases outright labeled) ingredients and techniques to be ‘surprising’ or `weird.’ And we have published terminology that was widely accepted in food writing at the time, and that we now recognize has always been racist,” Tamarkin wrote.

He noted: “Certainly there will be times when our edits do not go far enough; some of our repairs will need repairs.”

For Bon Appetit, that’s exactly what happened when an outcry among readers led it to make multiple changes including the headnote and references to Haiti on a pumpkin soup recipe put forth by Chef Marcus Samuelsson, a guest editor. The magazine referred to it as soup joumou, a beloved Haitian staple that symbolizes the country’s bloody liberation from its French colonizers.

It was not soup joumou, but was intended by Samuelsson as an homage. The magazine adapted an entry from one of his cookbooks, “The Rise: Black Cooks and the Soul of American Food.” Both Bon Appetit and Samuelsson, who is Black, apologized after calls of erasure and cultural appropriation.

Read it all, every insane word.

Here is the original piece that David Tamarkin wrote explaining to Epicurious readers what they were going to do and why they were going to do it. Excerpts:

To actually repair content that contains the racist language described above, we’re making edits. For example, when we come across a recipe with a reductive, racist title (i.e. Asian Noodle Salad), we’re looking closely at the recipe and its headnote and adding more specific and accurate language. That title may simply reflect the recipe’s ingredients (Cold Rice Noodle Salad), or, if we see that the recipe is actually a well-established dish, we will assign it its proper name. (Whenever possible, we are in communication with the recipe developer about their inspirations and the context for the recipe.)

Why the heck is that racist? If I were publishing a recipe site in southeast Asia, and I called a Waldorf salad “American salad,” so what? I applaud wanting to give dishes their proper names, but honestly, to think it’s racist to call a noodle salad of Asian origin “Asian noodle salad” is real princess-and-the-pea stuff. More Tamarkin:

It’s depressing, disheartening, and discouraging—for the Epi staff, but especially for our readers—that problematic recipes and stories are so easy to find on our site.

Really? The Epi staff is so fragile that they can’t handle something called “Asian Noodle Salad” without becoming depressed? Do they really think that readers give a rat’s ass?

Racist recipes. Let me remind you that this is a sign of a totalitarian mentality. A totalitarian society is one in which nearly every aspect of life is politicized. When a radical political consciousness causes the custodians of recipes to want to rewrite the historical record to reflect a contemporary line in cultural politics, you should know that we are living within a form of totalitarianism. And, having established that language used in past recipes can be so intolerable as to require erasure from the historical record, this project will be never-ending. The archives must be constantly assessed to keep them politically correct. I guess it’s make-work for Grievance Studies graduates, but are there really no people within Condé Nast capable of recognizing how crazy this is? Are there no cultural historians who can speak sense to these censors, and tell them that what they are doing is wrong, simply from the point of view of historical preservation?

It’s one thing to promulgate an editorial policy that uses different language in recipes going forward. But going back into the past and changing language in something as trivial as recipes, because it’s “painful” to encounter certain words there — that really does require a totalitarian mindset.

Look at how Bon Appetit re-edited a feature on how to make hamentaschen, the cookies from Jewish cuisine:

The Jewish newspaper The Algemeiner reported on this. Excerpt:

The article’s original headline “How to Make Actually Good Hamantaschen” was changed to “5 Steps to Really Good Hamantaschen.” Bon Appetit removed the sub-heading in which the article’s non-Jewish writer said in “full disclosure” that because she attended “roughly three Bar or Bat Mitzvahs a weekend during 1992” and cooks professionally, she thought she could “at least weigh in on the Jewish cookie department.”

Among other things changed in the article’s content was the description of the Jewish holiday of Purim. Writer Dawn Perry, who is also Bon Appetit‘s digital food editor, originally said “The story of Purim involves a bad guy, Haman, a nice Jewish lady, Esther, and her ultimate victory over his plot to destroy the Jewish people.”

Bon Appetit also deleted six sentences about Perry’s observation that Jews and non-Jews alike on the BA staff “could only call up childhood memories of dry and sandy hamantaschen that left your mouth coated with a weird film,” and her desire to “convert the haters … To create a hamantaschen that we could all enjoy, regardless of religious upbringing or tainted Hebrew School memories.”

I guess that counts as a “flippant” attitude about Jewish cookies. But you know, the hamentaschen I’ve had really are dry and sandy and not very good. If Jews and non-Jews don’t generally enjoy hamentaschen, are their tastes anti-Semitic? Seems that Bon Appetit thinks so.

Could there be a more Orwellian name for this than “Archive Repair Project”? The idea that things created in the past, and stored in an archive, are broken because they don’t match the cultural and political standards of Manhattanites in 2021, and therefore the past needs to be fixed — yeah, that’s totalitarian.

Take the novelist and essayist Walter Kirn seriously here.

Buy physical books now. Great ones, good ones, bad ones, ones you happen to like. Store them safely as you would treasures. They are. Some will become unavailable soon, I suspect, for reasons that may not be stated candidly. If I’m wrong, what have you lost?

We, the library

— Walter Kirn (@walterkirn) February 12, 2021

I have a lot of Kindle books. I buy e-books when I’m reading them as research for my own books, because Kindle makes it easy to highlight passages and send them to yourself electronically. But those e-books that I want to keep in my library I supplement with a paper version, because Amazon retains the right to go into the text and alter anything in the electronic version. It is not unthinkable that we will one day see something like a “Library Repair Project” to retroactively censor “problematic” books, to avoid causing pain. Therapeutic totalitarianism is our future. Along these lines, I’m happy when you buy Live Not By Lies in any form. But I recommend hardcover, which can’t be retroactively censored. Sure, a Library Repair Project would require abrogating copyright laws, but how can we allow something like copyright laws keep us from eliminating problematic texts that cause so much pain to institutional elites?

The post Orwell’s Cookbook appeared first on The American Conservative.

Dear Catholic President

We’ve seen lots of positive press on Joe Biden’s Catholicism. In this open letter, Mary Eberstadt, also a Catholic, appeals to Biden to stand up for fellow Catholics who are feeling the lash from liberals. Excerpts:

Mr. President, the election has emboldened your liberal and progressive allies to target for ostracism and punishment a new band of “deplorables”: your fellow Catholics.

Exhibit A: On January 24, 2021, Twitter locked the account of Catholic World Report, the online magazine of Ignatius Press. IP is the largest Catholic publishing house in the Anglosphere. It issues volumes by popes, cardinals, bishops and other men and women of the cloth, as well as lay authors (this one included). CWR is its news arm. Like other Ignatius Press publications, the site leans in toward history and scholarship. Its essay section recently featured one piece on the Gnostic heresy, another on the future of Western civilization and another comparing translations of St. Augustine’s Confessions.

Mr. President, the notion that cerebral CWR could run afoul of any “community standards” is prima facie risible. So how did this Catholic outlet find itself in the censorship crosshairs? Because of a news item reading as follows:

Biden plans to nominate Dr. Rachel Levine, a biological man identifying as a transgender woman who has served as Pennsylvania’s health secretary since 2017, to be HHS Assistant Secretary for Health. Levine is also a supporter of the contraceptive mandate.

Without further explanation, Twitter ruled that CWR had violated its rules “against hateful conduct.”

Days later, authorities relented and restored the account. But the message they sent was loud and menacing. If a cultural authority as established as Ignatius Press can be punished online for being Catholic, who will be spared?

More:

Exhibit F: Your election has not only emboldened progressive muscle-flexers on social media. It also appears to have encouraged what might be called anti-Catholic chic—the kind that emanates from your allies in liberal-Left journalism.

A recent essay in The New Republic about Catholic theologians and their supposedly nefarious influence over America’s judicial branch is a case in point. Its accompanying illustration features Justice Amy Coney Barrett in a bishop’s miter—an ugly visual trope that dates back to the anti-Catholic Know-Nothings of the 1850s and beyond. The piece speaks darkly of a “50-year saga of Catholic intellectual and theological penetration of the halls of power.”

Replace “Catholics” with any other religious affiliation, or any identity group, in that sentence, and you will understand just how bigoted such fillips sound.

Mr. President, you are the most visible Catholic political leader in the world. You have a unique opportunity, once again, to demonstrate your stated commitment to being president for all. It’s the bully pulpit. Call off the woke online haters stalking your fellow Christians. Call out the ugly, un-American tradition of which they are part. Tell your progressive allies, and everyone else, that prejudice remains prejudice—even when it is aimed against people who did not vote for you.

Read it all. 

 

The post Dear Catholic President appeared first on The American Conservative.

Revolt Of The Elites, New York Times Edition

Some people wonder why folks like me spend so much time thinking about The New York Times. Part of it is that we’re journalists, and it’s hard to overstate the influence on the journalism industry of that newspaper. Mostly, though, it’s because the Times is an arbiter of ruling class cultural trends. You might not care what the NYT publishes about anything, and that’s fine. But if you want to know what’s coming at you somewhere down the line, you need to read the Times for the same reason a Kremlinologist needed to read Pravda. Readers of the NYT knew that trans was going to be huge long before trans became huge, because the Times obsessed over it, and engaged in shameless advocacy journalism for transgenderism. The Times speaks to and for creative class people. You don’t read or care about the Times, but (for example) the kind of people who make the TV you watch and the books you read do. What’s happening at the Times, with left-wing ideologues transforming the institution, is a huge story for American culture for the same reason these stories happening at elite universities are. This is the way the ruling class thinks — and eventually, they will impress those values on all of us.

Ben Smith, the NYT media columnist, has a piece up about the firing of Don McNeil, the 67-year-old ace science reporter let go after the re-surfacing of complaints by high school students whose mommies and daddies paid over $5000, plus airfare, for them to accompany McNeil on a Times-sponsored trip to Peru. There are some fascinating details in it. For example:

On that trip, the reporter, Donald G. McNeil Jr., got into a series of heated arguments with students, none of them Black, on the charged question of race.

So these were rich white kids. More:

What happened in Peru, too, was a kind of collision between the old Times and the next generation of its core audience, the educated globally minded elite. The student at the center of this story is Sophie Shepherd, who isn’t among the teenagers who have spoken anonymously to other news organizations. She and two other students said she was the person who spoke the most to Mr. McNeil and spent the most time with him on their “student journey.”

She was 17 at the time, and had just finished her senior year at Phillips Academy Andover, a boarding school sometimes rated America’s best.

Andover costs $58,000 per year. This was one very rich white girl.

More:

At lunch that day, she said she sat down the table from Mr. McNeil at a cafe overlooking the town’s narrow streets, where he was talking to another student when he uttered the N-word, and used the word in the context of a discussion of racism. Some of the teenagers responded almost reflexively, she said, to object to his use of the word in any context.

“I’m very used to people — my grandparents or people’s parents — saying things they don’t mean that are insensitive,” another student, who was then 17 and is now attending an Ivy League college, told me. “You correct them, you tell them, ‘You’re not supposed to talk like that,’ and usually people are pretty apologetic and responsive to being corrected. And he was not.”

Man, that chaps my butt. What an arrogant little shit. You have the opportunity to go on this trip with one of the top journalists in his field, and he turns out to be crabby, and you are shocked that he doesn’t respond well to your attempt to correct him? The entitlement of these brats is off the charts! And this kid is now in an Ivy League school, on his or her way to joining the ruling class.

One more quote:

The Times will have to navigate its identity in tandem with the next generation of its audience — people like Ms. Shepherd, who said that she was most surprised by the gap between Mr. McNeil’s views and what she’d read in her favorite news outlet.

“That’s not what I would have expected from The Times,” she said. “You have the 1619 Project. You guys do all this amazing reporting on this, and you can say something like that?”

Miss Priss demands that the world reflect herself back to her. Look, maybe McNeil did say some things he shouldn’t have; Smith reports that McNeil was a cantankerous and not universally beloved figure in the newsroom. But good grief, when I was in high school, if I had had the opportunity to go on a trip like that with a NYT journalist, I would have approached it with the assumption that I had a lot to learn from him. Even if he came off as rude, I would still do my best to separate the good he had to teach me from the bad. I cannot fathom the arrogance of a 17-year-old child who thinks she and her generation are the pinnacle of human progress, and have the authority to stand in judgment of older, more experienced, more accomplished people.

She and her progressive allies at the Times ended up bringing the old white man down. The Times leadership has lost control of its own institution. Martin Gurri details the key events of the past few years that has caused the Times to flip to a “post-journalism” model. 

I’ve written about all, or almost all, of the Times ideological insanity that Gurri recollects in his excellent piece. Which is why I smirked at this bit from Ben Smith’s column:

The questions about The Times’s identity and political leanings are real; the differences inside the newsroom won’t be easily resolved. But the paper needs to figure out how to resolve these issues more clearly: Is The Times the leading newspaper for like-minded, left-leaning Americans? Or is it trying to hold what seems to be a disappearing center in a deeply divided country? Is it Elizabeth Warren or Joe Biden?

Who actually thinks that’s even a question? Of course it’s the leading newspaper for like-minded, left-leaning Americans. The Times doesn’t care to understand people unlike its own reporters. As Gurri points out, the younger journalists now running the show at the Times don’t believe in old-fashioned standards like fairness. That’s old school. They remind me of the line from Marx that is carved on his tombstone, which I’ll steal and modify like this: “The older journalists have only interpreted the world, in various ways. The point, however, is to change it.”

The younger Times journalists, it seems, come from the same culture as Sophie Shepherd: they think they know it all, and have nothing to learn from anyone. A recent internal survey at the Times found that about half of the paper’s employees feel that they cannot speak freely at the paper. I would love to know the age breakdown of that number.

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The GOP Senate Honor Roll

Sen. Ben Sasse, one of the seven Senate Republicans who voted to convict Donald Trump, issued the following statement:

An impeachment trial is a public declaration of what a president’s oath of office means and what behavior that oath demands of presidents in the future. But here’s the sad reality: If we were talking about a Democratic president, most Republicans and most Democrats would simply swap sides. Tribalism is a hell of a drug, but our oath to the Constitution means we’re constrained to the facts. Here are the three key points to this debate:

First, President Trump lied that he ‘won the election by a landslide.’ He lied about widespread voter fraud, spreading conspiracy theories despite losing 60 straight court challenges, many of his losses handed down by great judges he nominated. He tried to intimidate the Georgia secretary of state to ‘find votes’ and overturn that state’s election. He publicly and falsely declared that Vice President Pence could break his constitutional oath and simply declare a different outcome. The president repeated these lies when summoning his crowd — parts of which were widely known to be violent — to Capitol Hill to intimidate Vice President Pence and Congress into not fulfilling our constitutional duties. Those lies had consequences, endangering the life of the vice president and bringing us dangerously close to a bloody constitutional crisis. Each of these actions are violations of a president’s oath of office.

Second, political violence is evil whether it happens in Portland or at the United States Capitol. Violent mobs are always repugnant. Because many on the left ignored Portland’s violence, the former president and some of his allies have now given themselves permission to ignore the violence by those supposedly on ‘their side.’ No. The answer to an ugly double standard cannot be the elimination of all standards. If we allow tribalism to repeatedly blind us against defending our institutions, we will lose them.

Third, Congress is a weaker institution than the Founders intended, and it is likely to shrivel still smaller. A lot of Republicans talk about restoring Congress’ power from an already over-aggressive executive branch. Conservatives regularly denounce executive overreach – but we ought primarily to denounce legislative impotence. This trial is constitutional because the president abused his power while in office and the House of Representatives impeached him while he was still in office. If Congress cannot forcefully respond to an intimidation attack on Article I instigated by the head of Article II, our constitutional balance will be permanently tilted. A weak and timid Congress will increasingly submit to an emboldened and empowered presidency. That’s unacceptable. This institution needs to respect itself enough to tell the executive that some lines cannot be crossed.

On election night 2014, I promised Nebraskans I’d always vote my conscience even if it was against the partisan stream. In my first speech here in the Senate in November 2015, I promised to speak out when a president – even of my own party – exceeds his or her powers. I cannot go back on my word, and Congress cannot lower our standards on such a grave matter, simply because it is politically convenient. I must vote to convict.

I fully endorse this statement. I also believe Rep. Jaime Herrera-Beutler, the Washington Republican, was telling the truth when she relayed the contents of a heated conversation between House Minority Leader Kevin McCarthy and President Trump. In that exchange, which occurred while the mob was attacking the Capitol, McCarthy begged the president to call off the attackers, but Trump taunted him by saying that the mob cared more about the election that McCarthy did. Having been humiliated like that by Trump, in the process of Trump refusing to intervene to stop the violence, McCarthy still voted not to impeach him. As did almost all the House Republicans.

There is no honor in that.

There is honor in this statement today from Sen. Mitt Romney:

There is honor in this statement by Sen. Bill Cassidy, Republican of Louisiana:

Our Constitution and our country is more important than any one person. I voted to convict President Trump because he is guilty. pic.twitter.com/ute0xPc4BH

— U.S. Senator Bill Cassidy, M.D. (@SenBillCassidy) February 13, 2021

The others on the honor roll of Republican senators who voted to convict: Lisa Murkowski (Alaska), Pat Toomey (Pennsylvania), Richard Burr (North Carolina), and Susan Collins of Maine.

A conviction would have barred Trump from seeking office in the future. After today’s acquittal, though:

 

Good luck with that, Republican Party.

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Cosmopolitan Cannibals

“Hollywood has the best moral compass, because it has compassion.” — Harvey Weinstein, October 1, 2009, in an interview with the Los Angeles Times.

Maybe you have been following the sicko scandal involving the movie star Armie Hammer, who allegedly sent messages to one or more female sexual partners saying that he has a cannibal fetish — that is, he becomes sexually aroused by the thought of eating the flesh of his sexual partners.

Disgusting, right? Utterly horrible, deranged, degenerate, you name it. Well, Cosmopolitan magazine is here to tell you that you should not be judgmental. The magazine of sophisticated urban females consulted a pervert named Jet Setting Jasmine, described as a “master fetish educator,” to set us straight about cannibalism fetishes. From the interview:

Here’s what I’ve been seeing people get wrong in the conversation around Armie Hammer and the abuse allegations against him: His alleged cannibalism fetish itself isn’t the problem. The problem is, if the allegations are true, whether he used his power to groom these women into participating in a lifestyle they had truly not consented to.

A cannibalism fetish, or vorarephilia, is characterized by a person who fantasizes about consuming someone or being consumed. The key word there is “fantasy.” The fetish never goes so far as actually eating or killing someone, of course—that’d be illegal. Just having the conversation around eating someone, and being sexually stimulated by that, is considered a cannibalism fetish.

Once the allegations against Hammer blew up the internet, all the media attention zeroed in on the word “cannibalism.” We were totally titillated by the taboo. But I’d like to offer a different framework, one where we understand Hammer’s alleged behavior as troubled, but not necessarily because of the C-word. Well, because of the potential absence of another C-word. Consent.

Ah. Consent. Well, how would that work, Jasmine?

A *consensual* form of BDSM play featuring a cannibalism fetish would go something like this: Someone might say, “I know I can’t actually eat your hand off, but I can suck your fingers until you tell me to stop or nibble on you.” Blood play is another fetish called hematolagnia. And that can present as someone being turned on by any form of blood during sex from menstrual blood to needle play to biting until there is blood or spanking until there is blood.

I remind you that this is not from some dirty magazine you have to buy at a porn shop. This is from one of the biggest magazines in America, with a circulation of just over three million.

Cosmo’s fetish educator advises:

Instead of shaming people’s fetishes, we should be teaching them to share their interest in a way that doesn’t harm others.

So we need to learn how to beat people bloody for sexual sport without harming others. Got it.

This is a cosmopolitan — and a Cosmopolitan — value in the United States in 2021: promoting “safe” sexual activity involving drawing blood and fantasizing about eating human flesh.

This is Jessica Pels, the editor-in-chief of Cosmo. She is 34 years old:

Can you imagine this being your life’s work?

This is one of those things that makes you wonder: What kind of country are we? God help young women growing up in this cesspool. We are no light to the nations. We are becoming darkness visible.

UPDATE: Last year, Justin Lee wrote in First Things about the real-life case of a German cannibal, Arwin Meiwes, who murdered and ate his male lover, who, on video, clearly consented to it. Meiwes was convicted and sent to prison, but Lee questions the logic of that sentence given that Germany’s highest court issued an assisted suicide ruling:

A recent ruling of the Bundesverfassungsgericht (BVerfG), Germany’s highest court, has made death on demand a constitutional right. Wesley J. Smith summarizes the decision: “In Germany, autonomous people now have the absolute right to commit suicide and receive assistance in doing so for any reason or no identifiable reason at all.” The ruling guarantees this right “in all stages of a person’s existence.” Even children capable of autonomous decision-making may avail themselves of this liberty.

The ruling is a rather elegant reductio ad absurdum exposing the logical terminus of liberal individualism. No limiting principle may be applied to the exercise of the “autonomous” human will, and John Stuart Mill’s “harm principle” is worse than useless when harm is defined subjectively. “The individual’s decision to end their own life,” writes the BVerfG, “based on how they personally define quality of life and a meaningful existence, eludes any evaluation on the basis of general values, religious dogmas, societal norms for dealing with life and death, or considerations of objective rationality.” The individual’s subjective understanding of harm overrules considerations of objective rationality.

The German court’s language echoes that of U.S. Justice Anthony Kennedy in Planned Parenthood v. Casey (1992): “At the heart of liberty is the right to define one’s own concept of existence, of meaning, of the universe, and of the mystery of human life.” Germany’s BVerfG is applying the same concept of liberty; it’s just doing so more consistently and with considerably more intellectual integrity. “Where the protection of life runs counter to the protection of autonomy,” declares the BVerfG, “it contradicts the central understanding of a community which places human dignity at the core of its order of values and thus commits itself to respecting and protecting the freedom of human personality as the highest value of its Constitution.”

John Paul II called it a Culture of Death. He was right.

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Did Trump Refuse To Call Off Rioters?

If what CNN reports is true, my God:

In an expletive-laced phone call with House Republican leader Kevin McCarthy while the Capitol was under attack, then-President Donald Trump said the rioters cared more about the election results than McCarthy did.

“Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are,” Trump said, according to lawmakers who were briefed on the call afterward by McCarthy.McCarthy insisted that the rioters were Trump’s supporters and begged Trump to call them off.Trump’s comment set off what Republican lawmakers familiar with the call described as a shouting match between the two men. A furious McCarthy told the then-President the rioters were breaking into his office through the windows, and asked Trump, “Who the f–k do you think you are talking to?” according to a Republican lawmaker familiar with the call.The newly revealed details of the call, described to CNN by multiple Republicans briefed on it, provide critical insight into the President’s state of mind as rioters were overrunning the Capitol. The existence of the call and some of its details were first reported by Punchbowl News and discussed publicly by McCarthy.

The Republican members of Congress said the exchange showed Trump had no intention of calling off the rioters even as lawmakers were pleading with him to intervene. Several said it amounted to a dereliction of his presidential duty.“He is not a blameless observer, he was rooting for them,” a Republican member of Congress said. “On January 13, Kevin McCarthy said on the floor of the House that the President bears responsibility and he does.”

More:

Speaking to the President from inside the besieged Capitol, McCarthy pressed Trump to call off his supporters and engaged in a heated disagreement about who comprised the crowd. Trump’s comment about the would-be insurrectionists caring more about the election results than McCarthy did was first mentioned by Rep. Jaime Herrera Beutler, a Republican from Washington state, in a town hall earlier this week, and was confirmed to CNN by Herrera Beutler and other Republicans briefed on the conversation.“You have to look at what he did during the insurrection to confirm where his mind was at,” Herrera Beutler, one of 10 House Republicans who voted last month to impeach Trump, told CNN. “That line right there demonstrates to me that either he didn’t care, which is impeachable, because you cannot allow an attack on your soil, or he wanted it to happen and was OK with it, which makes me so angry.”“We should never stand for that, for any reason, under any party flag,” she added, voicing her extreme frustration: “I’m trying really hard not to say the F-word.”Herrera Beutler went a step further on Friday night, calling on others to speak up about any other details they might know regarding conversations Trump and Pence had on January 6.“To the patriots who were standing next to the former president as these conversations were happening, or even to the former vice president: if you have something to add here, now would be the time,” she said in a statement.

Read it all. Multiple Republican sources confirm this to CNN. Rep. Herrera Beutler did so on the record.This is the whole game, right here. Kevin McCarthy has to address this, now.If Trump said that, then if any Republican senators have any honor, they will vote to convict the former president. If any Republican senator believes that this is true, or has reason to believe that it is true, and refuses to vote to convict Donald Trump, he has shown himself to be an apparatchik who is willing to let a president of his party permit a mob to attack the US Capitol and threaten the lives of members of Congress to achieve his political will.If this is true, then Trump is a monster.If this is true, and McCarthy stays silent at this moment in our nation’s history, then he will have answered his own question to Trump. “Who the f–k do you think you are talking to?” McCarthy reportedly said. If McCarthy holds his tongue out of deference to Trump, or his own political career, we will all know who Trump was talking to: a punk.If this CNN report is not true, then McCarthy has an obligation to deny it across the board, and explain why all those Republican House members who are telling CNN that this conversation happened are lying.The Democratic senators are going to want to know the answer to this. Every Republican senator should want to know too. To not want to know is to be a coward.This can’t be walked back. If this is true — and I’m hoping that is not, because I don’t want to believe that any president of the United States would be that thuggish and immoral — and the Republican senators cannot muster enough votes to join the Democrats in convicting Donald Trump, then the GOP does not deserve the people’s trust. This will have been the final proof that Donald Trump beat the honor and dignity out of the Republican Party.We have to know if this conversation between Trump and McCarthy took place as reported. McCarthy has to testify before the Senate. He will be testifying before the nation, and history.On Friday, Trump’s lawyer Michael van der Veen said at the Senate trial:

He called the idea that Trump wanted to stir violence a ‘preposterous and monstrous lie,’ and said he was only asking his supporters to pursue legal political ends.

‘The reality is Mr. Trump was not in any way shape or form instructing these people to fight using physical violence,’ he said. ‘What he was instructing them to do was challenge their opponents in primary elections, to push for sweeping electoral reforms, to hold big tech responsible – all customary and legal ways to petition your government for redress of grievances.’

If the House Minority Leader had a phone conversation with Trump as the Capitol was under assault, and he asked Trump to call off the rioters, and Trump refused — then what Van der Veen said at the trial is essentially untrue. The president’s case collapses.McCarthy has to testify. There’s no getting around it. That Van der Veen is dishonest. From the NYT story summing up Friday’s trial:

Mr. van der Veen told the senators that “at no point was the president informed that the vice president was in any danger.” But in fact, Senator Tommy Tuberville, Republican of Alabama, told reporters this week that he spoke by telephone with Mr. Trump during the attack and told him that Mr. Pence had been rushed out of the chamber. Officials have said that Mr. Trump never called Mr. Pence to check on his safety and did not speak with him for days.

One more thing from the Times story (I quoted this above, from another account, but I want to repeat it here):

Representative Jaime Herrera Beutler, Republican of Washington, who voted to impeach last month, confirmed a report by CNN that when Representative Kevin McCarthy, the Republican leader, called Mr. Trump during the attack and pleaded with him to call off the riot, the president told him, “Well, Kevin, I guess these people are more upset about the election than you are.” A spokesman for Mr. McCarthy did not respond to a request for comment, but Ms. Herrera Beutler said he had relayed details of the conversation to her directly, and she issued a statement pleading with White House witnesses, potentially including Mr. Pence, to come forward and say what they knew.

Think about it. If Rep. Herrera Beutler is telling the truth here — and I believe her, because she has no incentive to lie — then there are a number of Republican men who know what really happened, but who are not coming forward to speak about it. If she’s not lying, then this 42-year-old Republican House member from Washington has more courage than an as yet unknown number of GOP House members and Trump White House staffers, who would rather keep their mouths shut and protect their political careers than see justice done.At least that’s one Republican who will come out of this with her honor intact.

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Natan Sharansky: The Power Of Truth

Man, I love Tablet magazine so much. Here’s a terrific essay in it by Natan Sharansky, the celebrated Soviet refusenik and dissident, talking about the double-mindedness that was necessary to live normally in the Soviet Union. Young Sharansky thought that if he entered the world of science, he would not have to live by the lies that most Soviet citizens did:

I spent my high school years as an academic grind, drowning in problem sets, working around the clock to amass five out of fives in mathematics and physics. Because I knew that I had to follow a very specific script to get the character reference I needed from the local Komsomol authorities, I also spouted the right slogans, participated in the right youth activities, and sang the right songs. Yet even after I fulfilled my young dreams and made it to MFTI—Moscow Institute of Physics and Technology, the Soviet equivalent of MIT—the scrutiny continued. We math and science students had to keep paying lip service to the Soviet gods, like everyone else. We kept taking tests on Marxist doctrine every semester, even when studying at the postdoctoral level. A few years later, I would be amused when, during my interrogations, I spied my KGB tormentors studying their Communist handbooks whenever they could. I liked knowing that these never-ending trials kept tormenting them.

Our professors subtly encouraged us to brush such annoyances aside. We were the elite, they kept telling us, racing toward a golden future. It was all worth it. I was luxuriating in the sanctuary of science, an asylum protected from the daily insanity the Soviets imposed on nearly everyone else. I decided that the deeper I was into my scientific career, the less stressful this double life would be.

It was a comforting illusion—until I read Andrei Sakharov’s manifesto.

Sakharov was our role model, the number one Soviet scientist sitting at the peak of the pyramid each of us was trying to climb so single-mindedly. In May 1968, this celebrity scientist circulated a ten-thousand-word manifesto that unleashed a wrecking ball which smashed my complacent life. “Intellectual freedom is essential to human society,” Sakharov declared. Bravely denouncing Soviet thought-control, he mocked “the ossified dogmatism of a bureaucratic oligarchy and its favorite weapon, ideological censorship.”

Sakharov warned that Soviet science was imperiled without “the search for truth.”

That did it for Sharansky. Sakharov exposed the lie that science was free. There was no escape from the life of lying — and that life meant that almost nothing the Soviets did was ever going to be as good as it was in the West, where people could tell the truth without being jailed, fired, or cancelled.

That’s when Sharansky became a refusenik and a dissident. He explains in moving prose how he found more freedom in prison for the truth than living “free” in the USSR, but bound by the shackles of lies. More:

Once I had done it, once I was no longer afraid, I realized what it was to be free. I could live in history, a real history, with ups and downs, fits and starts, not the bland, ever-changing history-like-putty dictated by the authorities. I could live with real people and enjoy real friendships, not the cautious, constricted conversations of winks and nods among fellow doublethinkers. Most important, I could live without that permanent self-censorship, that constant checking of what you are going to say to make sure it’s not what you want to say. Only then do you realize what a burden you’ve been carrying, how exhausting it is to say the right thing, do the right thing, while always fighting the fear of being outed for an errant thought, a wrong reaction, an idiosyncratic impulse.

Here Sharansky makes the same point I do in Live Not By Lies: that wokeness is imposing on us a totalitarianism that is not the same as the harshness of the Soviet version, but that forces more and more of us all to lie all the same:

Over the last three decades in freedom, I have noticed that—with apologies to Tolstoy—every dictatorship is oppressive in its own way, but the doublethinkers’ mental gymnastics are all alike. The feeling of release from the fear and giddy relief when crossing the line from doublethink to democratic dissent is also universal across cultures. This understanding prompted the Town Square Test I use to distinguish between free societies and fear societies: Can you express your individual views loudly, in public, without fear of being punished legally, formally, in any way? If yes, you live in a free society; if not, you’re in a fear society.

In the West today, the pressure to conform doesn’t come from the totalitarian top—our political leaders are not Stalinist dictators. Instead, it comes from the fanatics around us, in our neighborhoods, at school, at work, often using the prospect of Twitter-shaming to bully people into silence—or a fake, politically-correct compliance. Recent polls suggest that nearly two-thirds of Americans report self-censoring about politics at least occasionally, essentially becoming a nation of doublethinkers despite the magnificent constitutional protections for free thought and expression enshrined in the Bill of Rights

To preserve our integrity and our souls, the quality of our political debate and the creativity so essential to our cultural life, we need a Twitter Test challenging bottom-up cultural totalitarianism that is spreading throughout free societies. That test asks: In the democratic society in which you live, can you express your individual views loudly, in public and in private, on social media and at rallies, without fear of being shamed, excommunicated, or cancelled? Ultimately, whether you will live as a democratic doublethinker doesn’t depend on the authorities or on the corporations that run social media platforms: it depends on you. Each of us individually decides whether we want to submit to the crippling indignity of doublethink, or break the chains that keep us from expressing our own thoughts, and becoming whole.

Please read all of Sharansky’s essay.

It is adapted from his new memoir (with Gil Troy) Never Alone: Prison, Politics, And My People. He is one more living example of the freedom and integrity you can have if you are willing to suffer for the truth. We should all want to be a Natan Sharansky. When these little piss-ant commissars come around demanding that we say things we know are lies, may God give us the courage to do as Sharansky did. If you read this essay, you’ll learn the story of a Soviet-era writer who gained massive privileges by repeating the Communist Party line — but the toll it took on his soul was devastating.

This will happen to you too if you live by the lies it takes to get ahead in these woke institutions.

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The Ravi Zacharias Implosion

Well, the report is in on the late, beloved Evangelical apologist Ravi Zacharias. It turns out that he was a vile man. From Christianity Today, which has done exemplary reporting on this story:

A four-month investigation found the late Ravi Zacharias leveraged his reputation as a world-famous Christian apologist to abuse massage therapists in the United States and abroad over more than a decade while the ministry led by his family members and loyal allies failed to hold him accountable.

He used his need for massage and frequent overseas travel to hide his abusive behavior, luring victims by building trust through spiritual conversations and offering funds straight from his ministry.

A 12-page report released Thursday by Ravi Zacharias International Ministries (RZIM) confirms abuse by Zacharias at day spas he owned in Atlanta and uncovers five additional victims in the US, as well as evidence of sexual abuse in Thailand, India, and Malaysia.

Even a limited review of Zacharias’s old devices revealed contacts for more than 200 massage therapists in the US and Asia and hundreds of images of young women, including some that showed the women naked. Zacharias solicited and received photos until a few months before his death in May 2020 at age 74.

Zacharias used tens of thousands of dollars of ministry funds dedicated to a “humanitarian effort” to pay four massage therapists, providing them housing, schooling, and monthly support for extended periods of time, according to investigators.

One woman told the investigators that “after he arranged for the ministry to provide her with financial support, he required sex from her.” She called it rape.

She said Zacharias “made her pray with him to thank God for the ‘opportunity’ they both received” and, as with other victims, “called her his ‘reward’ for living a life of service to God,” the report says. Zacharias warned the woman—a fellow believer—if she ever spoke out against him, she would be responsible for millions of souls lost when his reputation was damaged.

Read it all, if you can stomach it. This is exactly what so many abusive Catholic priests did. This kind of evil observes no ecclesial boundaries. CT goes on to say that the Zacharias estate is still refusing complete cooperation with the investigation, including holding some of Zacharias’s victims to an NDA.

Do you know how this all came out? In part through the efforts of an atheist blogger. CT writes:

The secret of Zacharias’s abuse started to unravel the day of his funeral in May 2020. One of the massage therapists he groped, masturbated in front of, and asked for sexually explicit images watched in shock as the apologist was honored and celebrated on a livestream. Famous people, including Vice President Mike Pence and Christian football star Tim Tebow, spoke of Zacharias in glowing terms.

Has no one come forward? she thought. No one?

She worried about other women who might be out there, hurting. She prayed that something would happen.

The woman googled “Ravi Zacharias sex scandal” and found the blog RaviWatch, run by Steve Baughman, an atheist who had been tracking and reporting on Zacharias’s “fishy claims” since 2015. Baughman blogged on Zacharias’s false statements about academic credentials, the sexting allegations, and the subsequent lawsuit. When the woman read about what happened to Lori Anne Thompson, she recognized what had happened to that woman was what had happened to her.

Steve Baughman probably would refuse the compliment, but I believe he did the Lord’s work in this case. Thank you, Steve.

After all this time, I still find it hard to grasp what men like Ravi Zacharias, Ted McCarrick, and so many others whose names aren’t well known, did. How deep must your perversion be to think that you can get away with this stuff forever? The only way I can explain it is that either you must be psychotically double-minded, or you must not really believe in God.

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Factionalism: Why We Can’t Have Nice Things

A reader points me to this review of Live Not By Lies.  The reviewer seems to believe the book is good and useful, but he’s sour about it because:

No, these are not the problems with Dreher’s book. Instead, the problem lies in his bitter opposition to former President Donald Trump and many of his supporters.

The guy spends the rest of the column bitching about my complaints in this space about Donald Trump and his post-election behavior. Which, okay, fine — he thinks Trump is awesome, I don’t. He’s one of those people who thinks that the awfulness of Joe Biden somehow obviates the awfulness of Donald Trump. I don’t get these people. It’s as if they can’t understand that two things can be true at the same time.

The piece exemplifies a weird strain of magical thinking among a certain kind of Trump supporter. For example, he seems to blame me for Trump’s loss — this, even though in my pre-election writing, I encouraged people who live in purple states to hold their nose, think of the judges, and vote for Trump. (To be fair, after Trump’s post-election behavior, I stated my regret for that exhortation.) What’s strange and annoying is that Trump supporters like that guy seem to believe that Trump lost because of a failure of will on the part of the people who should have been supporting him. The conservative reader who tipped me off to the review remarks:

It concerns me that people still think Trump would’ve saved us. At best, he would’ve delayed the inevitable. The only way to convince people of the existential threat the Left poses to this country is by giving them power and letting the people see for themselves what they’re capable of.

Trump’s defenders don’t see just how off-putting he really was. They never once ask, “Why should anyone who isn’t a conservative vote for Trump?” We can say that Biden is a terrible person to lead this country while also saying that Trump was the last person we should ever be putting our hopes in. If people think we can’t do better than Trump, then I’m all out of words.

What worries me about the future is that there are still a lot of voters on the Right who believe that Trump is the answer. They are so locked into their own heads that they can’t imagine why any sane, decent person would not want to see Trump run again in 2024. This would be handing the White House over to Kamala Harris. As long as this fixation on Trump stays alive on the Right, it will not be possible for a more palatable figure to arise on the Right, one who believes in the things Trump said he believed in, but who doesn’t have Trump’s baggage.

Again: if you want to hand the White House to the Democrats for four more years in 2024, keep flying the Trump flag in your heart.

Moreover, re: the reviewer throwing Live Not By Lies out, even though he seems to think it’s a very good book, because he’s mad at me for not being all aboard the Trump Train, this kind of crack-brained factionalism is cutting off your nose to spite your face. A reader of this blog put up a nasty comment (which I spiked) today, accusing me of being the sort of person who would betray Mideast Christians — this, because I praised something Ben Shapiro said, and Ben Shapiro is, says this reader, “anti-Palestinian.” That reader also said I was a traitor and a sellout for defending Evangelicals. Apparently this guy is so fixated on Middle Eastern politics that he believes all American political discourse and strategizing should be carried out according to one’s felt loyalties there.

Look, if you are headed into the city for a job interview, and find yourself stuck on the side of the road with a flat tire, you had better be glad that somebody stops to help you out, no matter what that person’s politics are. If you really do prefer to miss the job interview and stay on the side of the road because you don’t want to accept help from someone you regard as a Bad Person, that’s on you — but then don’t complain when somebody else gets the job, and you are left behind.

Because the reviewer seemed to like Live Not By Lies, if not its author, I suggest that he go back to the parts where the former anti-communist dissidents advise us all that we need to learn how to work with people with whom we disagree, putting the broader interests of our mission first. The Bendas were the only Christians (they are Catholics) in the inner circle of the Prague dissidents around Vaclav Havel. Kamila Bendova told me that they were close to hippies and even a Trotskyist (Petr Uhl), because it was so rare to find people who had the courage to dissent publicly that you needed all the help you can get.

Similarly with us: if that cat can’t find it within himself to work with me because I am not a MAGAdox conservative, he’s never going to be able to work with brave people like the anti-woke center-left writer Bari Weiss, or the anti-woke secular leftists Bret Weinstein, Heather Heying, James Lindsay, Helen Pluckrose, and Peter Boghossian. Purity tests do nothing for us except help the enemy. And believing, against all evidence, that there is a viable future for the Right in a resurrected Trump presidency is self-sabotage. The reviewer’s headline is:

Living the MAGA dream today is to dwell in fantasy. It is to mistake tweeting and emotion for reality. How bonkers do you have to be to think that after the events of January 6, Donald Trump could be re-elected? There are a lot of people in this country who are not liberal Democrats, but who saw what happened that day with abject horror and disgust. It happened because of Donald Trump. The crowds chanted, “Fight for Trump! Fight for Trump!” It’s all on video. In the presentation from the House impeachment managers, there were clips of the protesters shouting at cops, “F–k the blue! F–k the blue!” That, to men who were standing there to protect the Capitol from the mob. A hardcore Trumpist friend of mine insists to this day that it was really Antifa. That’s how far into the dream world you have to go in order to believe that Trump offers the Right any future. Peggy Noonan writes in her column today:

Watching all the videotape, seeing all the posing of the rioters and holding up phones and live-streaming the event—there was something about it all that made you wonder if something about this age of hypermedia has made people less human, less natural, more like actors who operate at a remove from themselves, even in a passionate moment of insurrection. They acted as if the Senate was a movie set, and they took videos because they’re actors in a story called “Storming the Capitol.”

They dressed up in costumes, as if they’d ordered them up from Wardrobe for the big scene. They live-streamed like they were doing the long tracking shot from “Goodfellas.” There was a feeling of profound unreality about all this.

We are removing ourselves from ourselves. It’s all the image before your eyes and what you feel. There is no emphasis on thought, on reflection, on the meaning of things.

Amen.

UPDATE: A reader e-mails:

This review was published by a blog run by the same people who own Chronicles Magazine.  Some of the best paleoconservative thinkers in the country seriously thought that, because you dislike Trump, they should run a negative review of your book.  That was the sole grounds of the critique. Man, just when you think it couldn’t get more petty, more insane…!  They always find a way.

They do. I just watched an incredible new Russian movie, Dear Comrades, about the gradual disillusionment of a local Communist Party official after a 1962 massacre of workers in her regional city (it’s based on a true story). A major theme of the plot is the lies one has to tell oneself to keep believing in a bankrupt dream. Seems apt.

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