Rod Dreher's Blog, page 83

‘Mommy, What’s A Pansexual?’

A reader sends in this video from the longtime Nickelodeon children’s television staple “Blues Clues,” in which in teaching little bitties about the alphabet, Blue the Dog teaches them to acquaint themselves with the symbols of LGBT Pride.

Bet you thought you could set your preschooler down in front of “Blues Clues” and not have to worry about culture-war propaganda. Wrong! So, when your little one asks you, “Mommy, what do those flags mean?”, you’ll be ready to answer the query planted by “Blues Clues” if you familiarize yourself with this guide:

Starting from the top of the image above (the light blue, light pink, and white flag), going clockwise, we have:

Transgender pride

Bisexual pride

Lesbian pride

Bisexual pride

Non-Binary pride

Genderfluid pride

Intersex pride

Pansexual pride

Asexual pride

Now, what are you going to say when your four-year-old asks you what a pansexual is? A non-binary? Don’t expect me to do your homework for you!

When Peppa Pig goes to Pride, as she inevitably will, you will need to familiarize yourself with the many other emblems indicating sexual orientation and desire, so you can initiate your children into what pop culture producers hold to be useful knowledge for tots. Here are some helpful guides:

“Mommy, what’s Pony Pride? Do Ponies play with Bears?”

“Daddy, is Twink Pride for people who like Twinkies?”

“Grandma, is Leather Pride better than Rubber Pride?”

Oh, the fun you’ll have answering all these child questions! Thanks, “Blues Clues”! Thanks, Nickelodeon, and your parent company, Viacom CBS! Thanks, Hollywood! How would we ever raise kids without you?

(In all seriousness: withdraw, withdraw, withdraw. You can’t fight this stuff, only shield your kids from it as best you can. Benedict Option now!)

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The Racism Of Lucasfilm & Disney

In Woke World, you can be cancelled not for what you said, but for what left-wing people think you said. It happened to Don McNeil, and now it has happened to Mandalorian actress Gina Carano. Excerpt:

In the wake of Gina Carano’s controversial social media posts, Lucasfilm has released a statement Wednesday night, with a spokesperson saying “Gina Carano is not currently employed by Lucasfilm and there are no plans for her to be in the future. Nevertheless, her social media posts denigrating people based on their cultural and religious identities are abhorrent and unacceptable.”

Carano played bounty hunter Cara Dune on the first two seasons Lucasfilm and Disney+’s The Mandalorian, and it looked like we’d be seeing more of her. It appears not.

The actress shared a TikTok post comparing the current divided political climate in the U.S. to Nazi Germany.

“Jews were beaten in the streets, not by Nazi soldiers but by their neighbors…even by children. Because history is edited, most people today don’t realize that to get to the point where Nazi soldiers could easily round up thousands of Jews, the government first made their own neighbors hate them simply for being Jews. How is that any different from hating someone for their political views,” she wrote.

Her point was that Nazism didn’t come from nowhere. It was the culmination of a long campaign of demonizing Jews, one that pre-dated the Nazis. I first became aware of this at an exhibit on display at Yad Vashem, Israel’s Holocaust memorial, back in the year 2000. The exhibit showed how the German media began, in the early 20th century, to portray the German people as a body threatened by parasites. This coincided with the rise of eugenic thought in German (and, note well, American) medical and scientific circles. The Nazis built on what the German public had already been taught to believe. Gina Carano is absolutely correct to say that the Holocaust was prepared by a long campaign of demonization. Though I agree that it’s a shaky analogy — hating people for their race or religion is different from hating them for their ideas — her point is basically sound.

And for that, her career is over. Nobody in Hollywood will hire her now.

Contrast that to Krystina Arielle, a black woman recently hired as host of a Star Wars show, who has a history of aggressive racialist social media posting. For example:

And:

You know what? I find that kind of racist trash talk objectionable, but for the most part, I really don’t care what kind of obnoxious opinions a celebrity holds. We have to try to be tolerant, even of stupid people.

When Arielle was criticized for her neoracism, Star Wars stood by her:

At Lucasfilm and Disney, there is a double standard for white actors and black actors.

Pointing this out doesn’t do any good. If they were liberals, they would see the double standard, and change their ways. But they’re not liberals. They are bigots for the Left.

What can we do? I see that there are a number of conservatives on social media announcing that they are cancelling Disney Plus in solidarity with Gina Carano. What else?

Ben Shapiro has a good broadcast today about the Carano mess. He points out that millions of people — even some liberals — are afraid of cancel culture coming for them. People can relate to what happened to Carano. Shapiro, an Orthodox Jew, says he doesn’t generally like Holocaust comparisons, and says that Carano’s was “overwrought,” but in no way a fireable offense. Watch:

Guess what Shapiro found on the Twitter feed of Pedro Pascal, a woke co-star of Carano’s? This, from 2018:

So: it is fine for a woke Star Wars star to cite the Holocaust if he’s using the comparison to criticize Trump, but it is a fireable offense for a non-woke Star Wars star to cite the Holocaust if she’s doing so to criticize political demonization from the Left.

In his show, Ben Shapiro rightly says that there is a powerful troika of Media-Democratic Party-Corporations that define and institutionalize woke doctrines. This is the Empire. Time for a Rebel Alliance to fight them. Trump is obviously not the Luke Skywalker we need. But we need a Luke Skywalker.

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MAGA-tropolis, City Of The Future?

You might have thought Ali Alexander would go away after the January 6 calamity. Nope — he’s back with a new, even more radical proposal:

Ali Alexander says the free press should be abolished. He plans to build a MAGA Mega city for 10 million people. He’ll hold rallies again in march and “alot of people will end up rioting.” pic.twitter.com/xWykavJnGd

— Jared Pushner (@JaredPushner) February 11, 2021

There’s a subzero chance that I would want to live in the same city as the mob that invaded the Capitol. Anyway, Ali’s MAGA utopia will go nowhere, and the riots he says he will spark will do nothing but bring us all closer to the total surveillance state. If the Left wanted to create an undercover provocateur who would bring about its fantasy of smashing the Right, they could hardly do better than this reckless dude.

But I surprise myself with the amount of sympathy for his dream. Right after I saw that tweet with Alexander in it, I read this piece on The Federalist about how Snapchat propagandizes youth with its “news feed.” Excerpts:

What you probably haven’t heard much about is Snapchat. Why? Adults aren’t really on the app. A 2020 study found Snapchat is the most popular social media among U.S. teens (TikTok is a close second).

It is dominated by social media’s youngest users, and with its short-lived, disappearing content, parents have no way of keeping tabs on what their kids are looking at. For years, Snapchat has flown under the radar, yet they are arguably the most influential and dangerous app because of its solid grip on the next generation of Americans.

Parents tend to think Snapchat is just about sending photos and videos to your friends. Snapchat used to just offer one- to ten-second person-to-person photo and video sharing and “stories” of 24 hours of chronological content that all your Snapchat “friends” can view.

However, in 2015, Snapchat got into the brainwashing business when it introduced “Discover,” a feature for publishers like CNN, Complex, The New York Times, Mashable, People, Vice, and Vox to showcase short, ad-supported content. Snapchat also offers smaller brands and content creators a platform on Discover, like the famous left-wing podcast “Pod Save America” and “Hooked on the Look,” a documentary series focusing on people who go to extreme lengths to look a certain way.

Snapchat’s editorial team has complete control over Discover content. They carefully hand-select propaganda to be placed right before your child’s eyes. Here’s what I found after scrolling through my Snapchat Discover feed.

Here are some screen shots of Snapchat programming and news that the piece’s author, Evita Duffy, shared from her feed:

You get the idea. One of this blog’s Polish readers told me recently, reflecting on the cultural-left radicalization of the younger generations in his country, that there is no institution in Poland with more power over the minds of the young than global social media.

With each passing day, I grow more alienated from what is now the American mainstream, or at least the American mainstream as mediated to us. I don’t want to live in the same society at people who refuse to call a mother a mother, because they stand to offend a man who calls himself a woman. I want to live in a society where people use the right words for things. I want to secede from this sick and decadent society. That’s what the Benedict Option is, more or less — not calling for a separatist utopia, but calling on traditional Christians to form thick communities of practice capable of resisting the cultural tide, even as we live in the world.

Why not a separatist utopia? Because utopias don’t work. If Ali Alexander were to form his MAGA-tropolis, it would take about five minutes before human nature asserted itself, and it would reproduce some version of many of the problems on the outside, plus new ones particular to that community. I’m reading a really good mystery now, Coyote Fork, by James Wilson. It’s a metaphysical story about a failed northern California hippie commune that, in some way (I haven’t gotten to the end) has to do with the creation of an Internet dystopia. The kinds of things that Wilson’s protagonist, an English journalist named Robert Lovelace, discovers on his quest for answers about the disappearance of a woman are the kinds of problems that every utopian community has encountered. This novel is a good way to think through what it is about human nature that makes utopias impossible.

But if utopia is impossible, it does not follow that there is nothing at all we can do. I have a friend who lives in a small city out West, and who recently interviewed for a plum position in a major coastal city. He returned home certain that he didn’t want the job if offered. For one thing, it would involve having to work in a culture of intense wokeness. For another, the general culture of that city would have been a disaster, he judged, for his children. They will remain in the small city out West, where the cultural insanity hasn’t yet reached them. That’s something. It’s not an infallible escape, because the young people in that small city are still participating in Internet culture. But at least one is not considered a freak if one is conservative and Christian.

The world that the people who hate us are creating is one in which it will be impossible to escape, thanks to the Internet. Ali Alexander’s MAGAtropolis had better be able to live off the grid, because the day is coming when the social credit system will be inescapable. A more reasonable solution, it seems to me, would be for like-minded people to form physical communities — neighborhoods — where they live close to each other, and form thick attachments within which to raise their kids. There has to be a shared commitment among all the families to keep their kids off social media until a certain age. That has to be non-negotiable. Social media and the Internet are the pipelines that pump this contagion into homes and families and the minds of the young. If parents are going to have a shot at raising children who are willing to accept lower-paying, lower-status jobs within the system, as the price of living in truth, they are going to need all the help they can get from the community.

In The Benedict Option, I said that I’m not calling on people to head for the hills. This is in part because the Internet, and social media, make the idea of an impregnable geographical redoubt impossible. But over the last four years, since the book’s publication, I have come to believe that heading for the hills is not a bad idea at all, in a qualified sense. There are no utopias, true, but there are places where you can strengthen your hand, and your family’s hand. Places where words still mean what they say. It does you no good to go to, say, Bozeman, Montana, but let your kids have full access to Internet culture, and to let the vile Disney Channel raise them. But if you get out of New York City and move to Bozeman, and live a more disciplined life, especially regarding what you let into your home and into the heads of your children, and homeschool or put them in a private school where the garbage has not invaded the curriculum or the culture — then you have a much better shot.

There is no way I would ever move to Ali Alexander’s MAGAtropolis, and they wouldn’t want me anyway. But the fact that he’s thinking this way, and the fact that there’s a part of me that sympathizes with him, is a sign of how this country is coming apart. I think that secession is impossible in the 21st century, but that said, I’m finding it difficult to muster up any enthusiasm for keeping America together. A friend texted me this morning:

I’m struck by the general sense of helplessness many of us feel in the Specter of Wokeism.

I’m struck that this is a kind of historical pattern. We are being led by the psychopathic. I’m listening to a fascinating essay by Thomas Sowell about Germans and Jews before the Nazis. Clearly the Nazis were a genuine minority, yet they were able to capture a whole nation.

Along those lines, this tweet today:

The brutal fact is this: The average person living in a Western country increasingly has nothing to live for. He has little family, few friends, no neighborhood, no community, & certainly no Christ. He exists mostly as a ritual of economic activity, a number on a balance sheet.

— Ciarán (@DefenceOrthodox) February 10, 2021

Overstated, probably — Ciaran lives in Ireland, which is undergoing a more abrupt collapse of Christianity than the US — but that cuts awfully close. Me, I cannot understand why so few Americans are willing to stand up against Wokeness. Do people not care that the institutions in this society are trying to normalize children wishing to cut their breasts or their penises off? Do people really not care that we are all being forced to call males females, and females males? Does the neoracism of the Left, which identifies white people are uniquely evil, not trouble the masses? Do they somehow think that this is not going to affect them?

The election of Trump is said to have been a reaction against wokeness. Maybe so. But what good did it do? Is wokeness any weaker today for four years of Trump? No, not at all. His administration was at best a holding action, and at worse incentivized it. As I see it, the main problem with Trump was that he had no plan for fighting this garbage. To be fair, politics as a defense are limited, but even within those limits, Trump was not nearly as effective as someone more disciplined could have been. It amazes me that so few Republican politicians ever speak out against wokeness, or propose legislation to fight it (e.g., passing laws forbidding medical interventions — hormones and surgery — for minors). They are passive. And, if the only serious rebellion against the lunacy comes from the extremes — people who only know how to emote, not fight intelligently, and with discipline — it will never get anywhere.

I was just Skyping with a friend in France, who was telling me that they face the same kind of insanity there. He explained that the French left is taking up American woke themes, and condemning French institutions on the grounds that they are complicit in American crimes (“crimes”). He said, for example, that there was a group campaigning for the French president to abandon the Elysée Palace on grounds that it was built with slave labor. This is historically false, of course, but facts do not matter to the woke. It is insane, but so far, there is little effective resistance. He told me that in the French media, as in the US, there is only one side of the story presented. Parents who bring their transgender children onto national television are uniformly praised as “brave.” There is no criticism of any of this. The media are manufacturing consent for the destruction of the lives of children, and their bodies.

What we need in this country, and in every country of the West where wokeness is in power, is an intelligent, comprehensive, and effective counterattack. I still cannot believe that most Americans support this stuff. My French friend said that it’s not supported in France either, but most people remain passive because they are afraid of being cancelled.

So what do we do? Ali Alexander’s idea of a MAGAtropolis will go nowhere. If he really does succeed in sparking rioting around the country, that will only help the national security state, and further empower Woke Capitalism. I see people on the Right who are still in thrall to Trump as being the best friends the Left has.  Where are our sensible, non-crazy leaders who are able and willing to lead a sustained campaign against wokeness, on every front? What is the alternative? Passively accepting this left-radicalism as it destroys the country? Or proposing to replace it with groundless, incompetent right-wing emotivism which amounts to a Maginot Line easily evaded by institutionalized wokeness?

Resistance led by ideological mountebanks like Ali Alexander will accomplish nothing but destruction. Siding with the mob that attacked the Capitol conserves nothing, and builds nothing. People like him thrive in the absence of meaningful leadership from the more established Right. But who in the Republican Party is willing to step out and lead? Let’s hope that somebody has the guts to step forward. But whatever you do, do not place your hope in politics. Instead, use this time, and the freedoms we still have, to prepare for the long struggle ahead. It is a false choice to say that we can either fight through politics, or we can build private cells of resistance. We have to do both. But if your only resistance is political — if you vote conservative, but otherwise participate, and let your children participate, in the corrupted media-dominated culture — you are lying to yourself about what you are accomplishing.

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Trump Trial: The Disgust Of It All

Here is the 13-minute video the House impeachment manager played in the Senate impeachment trial of Donald Trump today:

I urge you to watch it, to be reminded of the sheer violence of that day. Every single conservative watching it, ask yourselves how you would feel if this was a Black Lives Matter mob. You know exactly what you would think, because I watched those mobs last summer and thought the same thing. One of the things I thought back then was that mobs were a Democratic thing, not a Republican thing. I was wrong. What you see in this video is a Trump mob, no doubt about it. Trump incited them to go up to the Capitol and “fight like hell” to stiffen the spines of “weak” Republicans who might not vote with Trump to overturn the election.

It is hard for any patriot to watch this video of what that scummy mob did and not be furious all over again. The impeachment managers included this Trump tweet, which the president sent out at the end of that horrible day:

 

I don’t care if Trump gets convicted. He’s not going to, because Republicans in the Senate won’t break ranks, but if Trump were to be convicted, that would be fine with me. I’m sick of what he represents: the fatmouthing idiocy, the mob spectacles, the utter incompetence. I was not a Never Trumper, and I even encouraged people living in purple states to vote for him last fall, but Trump’s behavior after the election made me regret that. He has tremendously damaged the Republican Party and prospects for conservatism. If his conviction results in him never being able to run for office again, good. The GOP has to cut him loose, and free itself from the idea that being emotionally demonstrative is any sort of substitute for getting things done.

Look at this story to see what is happening now; here’s the headline:

Fortunately for the Republicans, the Biden Administration is bound to go way too far on wokeness, and stop the Republican bleeding. But in a country split right down the middle between right and left, the Republicans can’t afford to lose 10 to 20 percent of their voters — especially with Generation Z, far more liberal, coming up to replace the dying Silents and Boomers.

Did you see the 45-minute rambling speech on the Senate floor by Trump’s lawyer yesterday? It made your average pothead’s discourse seem like a model of concision. The incompetence was just mind-blowing. Meanwhile, as a conservative political scientist friend keeps pointing out, Biden and his minions are marching through the bureaucracy, reshaping it in their image. This is the difference between having a president who is interested in governing, and one who is interested in tweeting. It makes you sick, the waste of the last four years. If Trump hadn’t had a hissy fit and lost Georgia for the Republican Senate candidates, chances are the GOP would still hold the Senate today, and be able to blunt at least some of what Biden is going to do.

Here in Louisiana, a lot of Republicans are mad at Sen. Bill Cassidy for actually having an independent mind when it comes to Trump. Cassidy is a very conservative Republican, but after that humiliatingly bad presentation by Trump’s lawyer, Cassidy was one of six GOP Senators who voted to let the trial proceed:

Senator Bill Cassidy of Louisiana did not just vote this week with Democrats to proceed with the impeachment trial of former President Donald J. Trump — he also effectively shamed his fellow Republican senators by voicing, and acting on, what many of them were surely thinking.

Mr. Cassidy blistered Mr. Trump’s lawyers as “disorganized” and seemingly “embarrassed by their arguments,” explaining that their poor performance and the compelling case by the Democratic House impeachment managers had persuaded him to break from his party’s attempt to dismiss the proceedings on constitutional grounds.

“If I’m an impartial juror, and one side is doing a great job, and the other side is doing a terrible job, on the issue at hand, as an impartial juror, I’m going to vote for the side that did the good job,” he told reporters on Tuesday. He did, though, emphasize on Wednesday that his view on constitutionality did not “predict my vote on anything else,” namely whether to convict Mr. Trump, saying only that he had an “open mind.”

By becoming the only Senate Republican to switch his position from the one he held last month on a similar question about the constitutionality of holding an impeachment trial for a person no longer in public office, however, Mr. Cassidy delighted Louisiana Democrats, angered Republicans in his home state and presented himself as a one-man testimony of why Mr. Trump’s eventual acquittal is all but inevitable.

“There is literally nothing that the Trump lawyers could do to change any of these other Republicans’ minds,” said Senator Brian Schatz, a Hawaii Democrat. “They couldn’t have tanked it on purpose any worse than they did, and they still only lost one.”

Well, to be fair, if a senator really does believe that it’s unconstitutional to try a former president on impeachment charges, then a piss-poor case made by a Trump lawyer doesn’t alter those facts. But I am proud of my senator for telling the truth about the incompetence of the president’s team, and for voting his own convictions instead of being a MAGA lemming.

The thing is, Republican lawmakers surely know that Trump, even out of office, has enough support on the Right to split the GOP, and make it where Republicans don’t win national elections for a long, long time.

All he had to do was accept the fact that he lost, and go gracefully. The Republicans would likely have kept the Senate, and would be looking forward to gains in 2022. But he couldn’t do that. Now look where conservatism is.

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Christian Life Under Total Surveillance

Hello — sorry to be away, but the Internet has been out here in the Baton Rouge bureau. I couldn’t write my Substack letter last night either; don’t worry, subscribers, you’ll be getting a make-up issue this weekend. I’ve been trying to post this for several hours, but Cox Cable says the system won’t be fully up till later today.

A reader sent in this cheering news from the world of surveillance technology:

Picture: military interrogators are talking to a local man they suspect of helping to emplace roadside bombs. The man denies it, even as they show him photos of his purported accomplices. But an antenna in the interrogation room is detecting the man’s heartbeat as he looks at the pictures. The data is fed to an AI, which concludes that his emotions do not match his words…

A UK research team is using radio waves to pick up subtle changes in heart rhythm and then, using an advanced AI called a neural network, understand what those signals mean — in other words, what the subject is feeling. It’s a breakthrough that one day might help, say, human-intelligence analysts in Afghanistan figure out who represents an insider threat.

The paper from a team out of Queen Mary University of London and published in the online journal PLOS ONE, demonstrates how to apply a neural network to decipher emotions gathered with transmitting radio antenna. A neural network functions in a manner somewhat similar to a human brain, with cells creating links to other cells in patterns that create memory, as opposed to more conventional methods such as machine learning, which employ straightforward statistical methods on data sets.

The team, led by Yang Hao, dean for research at the faculty of science and engineering, used a small transmitting antenna to bounce radio waves off subjects. They used the signals to put together a database of different heart rhythms as those subjects watched emotionally-charged videos that elicited relaxation, fright, disgust and joy. The team also connected the subjects to an electrocardiogram to make sure that the signals that the antenna were picking up were correct. The team ran their data through the deep neural network and found that their system accurately classified the subjects’ emotional state 71 percent of the time.

The same reader sent in this story from three years ago about a “smart classroom” in China, in which the school uses AI to monitor the students’ moods, based on their facial expressions. Here’s a video showing it in action:

Let’s imagine this technology deployed in a US corporate setting. Employees are seated in a room receiving Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion training. Do their faces betray anger, sadness, or any negative emotion? Mark that down and put it in the system — those are potential bigots. Don’t promote them. The software will be sold to companies under the guise of helping them build a stronger, more cohesive team by weeding out the troublemakers.

From Live Not By Lies:

Your smart refrigerator is sending data about your eating habits to someone. Your smart television is doing the same thing about what you’re watching. Your smart television will soon be watching you, literally. Zuboff reports on prizewinning research by a company called Realeyes that will use facial data recognition to make it possible for machines to analyze emotions using facial responses. When this technology becomes available, your smart TV (smartphone or laptop) will be able to monitor your involuntary response to commercials and other programming and report that information to outside sources. It doesn’t take a George Orwell to understand the danger posed by this all-but-inescapable technology.

“Sir, overnight data from the Smith home shows that four out of the five people watching the ’60 Minutes’ segment on transgendered male pregnancy registered disgust. I’ll forward that on to the Department of Diversity in Washington. This is not going to look good on their social credit rating.”

This will come as no surprise to many Evangelical readers, I guess, but it did surprise me: last week I learned that in ancient Rome, slaveholders marked their slaves with tattoos on their foreheads, hands, or elsewhere, to make it impossible for those slaves to escape. Wherever they went, everyone would know who they were, and would return them to their owner. That gave me insight into this famous passage from Revelation 13:

15 The second beast was given power to give breath to the image of the first beast, so that the image could speak and cause all who refused to worship the image to be killed. 16 It also forced all people, great and small, rich and poor, free and slave, to receive a mark on their right hands or on their foreheads, 17 so that they could not buy or sell unless they had the mark, which is the name of the beast or the number of its name.

What if “the mark of the beast” is not a literal mark, but a symbol of slavery to the totalitarian system? China is moving very quickly to a cashless system. If you live in a society where all economic transactions are electronic, you had better make sure that you stay on the good side of those who administer the system, or you will find yourself unable to buy or sell. The system they are building in China will also reward or punish companies based in part on the social credit ratings of their employees. People with low social credit scores — that includes non-conformists of all kinds — will find it hard to get good jobs. If these individuals become blacklisted, they will not be able to buy or sell. There is no way to escape monitoring in China, either.

We have much the same technology in the United States. What we lack — for now — is the political will to implement it. Watch for the national security state to begin manufacturing consent to increase monitoring of domestic extremists, with the stated goal of preventing another January 6. Look for media and corporations to support this, on grounds that it’s important to identify bigots, white supremacists, and other deplorables. The cultural groundwork has already been laid for this kind of policy among elites, who have accustomed themselves over the past decade (at least) to close monitoring of speech for “microaggressions” and suchlike, and implementing illiberal punishments for non-conformists.

(This, by the way, is why it really matters when The New York Times leadership allows itself to be bullied by woke militants within the paper, into firing a longtime employee with almost irreplaceable experience in a critical field: Don McNeil is one of the most valuable reporters on the planet regarding the Covid crisis. But not even his decades of loyalty to the Times, or his obvious value to the paper’s mission, was enough to save him when Nikole Hannah-Jones and the woke mob turned on him. You may not give a hoot about what happens at The New York Times, but things like this lay down markers for how elites behave within institutions. They matter. They matter a lot. And, given the paramount importance of the Times in driving the reporting agendas of media organizations throughout the US, the kind of people who decide what should go into the paper are making decisions that shape the national narrative. There’s a reason why the national media aren’t discussing the incredible story about the transgender cult’s takeover of schools, pediatrics, and other key institutions.)

Now, imagine a future in which China’s social credit system spreads to the entire industrialized world. Imagine a future in which the systems are integrated. Where would you go to hide? Borneo? How would you get there, if you can’t buy or sell, and all your movements are monitored?

For Christians with an eye on the End Times, there is also this from Revelation 13:

5 The beast was given a mouth to utter proud words and blasphemies and to exercise its authority for forty-two months. 6 It opened its mouth to blaspheme God, and to slander his name and his dwelling place and those who live in heaven. 7 It was given power to wage war against God’s holy people and to conquer them. And it was given authority over every tribe, people, language and nation. 8 All inhabitants of the earth will worship the beast—all whose names have not been written in the Lamb’s book of life, the Lamb who was slain from the creation of the world.[b]

9 Whoever has ears, let them hear.

10 “If anyone is to go into captivity,
into captivity they will go.
If anyone is to be killed with the sword,
with the sword they will be killed.”

This calls for patient endurance and faithfulness on the part of God’s people.

Emphasis mine. Some people have expressed to me, publicly and privately, frustration with both The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies, saying that both are counsels of defeat. Their argument is that both books, in complementary ways, address the challenges of living under defeat — in TBO’s case, in a post-Christian and even anti-Christian society, and in LNBL’s case, living under a form of totalitarianism that persecutes faithful Christians and other dissenters. Why don’t these books instead tell us how to keep the bad things from happening?

You might as well have gone to Father Tomislav Kolakovic in 1943, as he was putting together groups of faithful Catholics to prepare for the coming Communist persecution, and tell him that he would be better off teaching the young people how to fight to keep Communism from coming to their country. Father Kolakovic would have told you that you were very shortsighted. He could read the signs of the times, and he knew that the Red Army was going to be in control of Czechoslovakia when the war ended. He also understood the Communist mindset, and grasped that the Russians were going to make the nations of Eastern Europe into vassal states. It would be impossible, or at least extremely unlikely, to resist the Red Army’s force. To place all one’s hope in that far-fetched outcome would leave individuals and the churches vulnerable to wipeout.

So Father Kolakovic prepared his people to be faithful under persecution, and to practice patient endurance. His followers were not conformists — in the early 1950s, in the first wave of persecution — most of them went to prison, but they dedicated themselves to building the networks, structures, and internal spiritual practices that could help them hold on through the long Communist night.

In a similar way, in these two books of mine, I am trying to prepare the small-o orthodox churches, families, and individuals to live in a world of intensifying adversity for people who believe the things traditional Christians do. (Things will go well for progressives like this ELCA pastor who hated LNBL; the world now coming into being is made for them.) The Benedict Option is not focused much on persecution, but rather on the plain fact that we live in a world in which traditional Christianity is fast fading from our culture, in the same way that Roman paganism dissolved in the fourth century. Live Not By Lies is very much focused on persecution. There is nothing in it that directs people not to fight politically and otherwise to protect our religious liberties, and so forth. But in it, I make the case that we are facing something like the Red Army, with regard to the power of invasive technologies and the ideological capture of elite institutions by zealots who have no interest in tolerating those who disagree.

Ask yourself: what has the Republican Party done to stop this stuff? President Trump made some moves, but they were easily overturned by the new administration. Besides, a more irreligious nation — we have all seen the data on the Nones — is a nation whose people will be far less likely to comprehend the value of protecting religious liberty. What’s more, the Millennials and Generation Z are far less committed to defending classical liberal values regarding free speech and expression.

The bottom line: these are the signs of the times, and they point to the movement of tectonic forces through the culture — forces that cannot be stopped by politics alone. We have to believe that ultimately they will be turned back, but in the short term and in the near long term, the orthodox Christians, as well as Orthodox Jews, traditional Muslims, and other religious and social conservatives, are going to have to develop the skills to live under occupation, so to speak.

Americans don’t want to hear that. Which is why a lot of us in the conservative churches are going to be smashed flat by what’s coming.

The post Christian Life Under Total Surveillance appeared first on The American Conservative.

At Times, Don McNeil Scandal Deepens

This business over The New York Times pushing out veteran science journalist Donald G. McNeil, Jr., is shaping up to be deeply symbolic of the way wokeness has corrupted a major American institution. Seriously, the rot goes all the way to the top.

You will recall that publisher A.G. Sulzberger and editor-in-chief Dean Baquet pushed out McNeil, 67, who has over four decades of service to the Times, after the Daily Beast reported that a group of high school kids on a Times-sponsored field trip accused McNeil of using the N-word, and other offenses. It turns out that Baquet was aware of this, and had done an internal investigation, but clear McNeil after he (Baquet, who is black) became satisfied that McNeil had meant no harm. The Beast story made the issue public, and stirred up the Woke Mob within the Times. After a meeting in which Madame Defarge Nikole Hannah-Jones was present, and reportedly threatened Baquet by proposing to undertake her own investigation of what happened on that 2019 field trip, Baquet and Sulzberger reversed course, and showed McNeil the door. These are the statements that came out last week:

Unfortunately, McNeil abased himself before his persecutors:

So that’s why one of the world’s top Covid journalists was forced to resign? Because he used the N-word in characterizing a dilemma in which the students were discussing whether or not it is just to punish someone for the N-word?

It has been pointed out that contrary to Baquet’s line that the Times does not tolerate racist language regardless of intent, the Times uses the word quite a bit. A search I just did of the Times website reveals that the word has appeared in its pages 20 times in the past year. Try it yourself.

Here is how the word appears in a 2019 Times op-ed about school busing:

You know who wrote that op-ed? Nikole Hannah-Jones, who persecuted Don McNeil. When Dean Baquet says “we do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent,” he is lying. The only question is whether or not he’s also lying to himself.

Now, today Erik Wemple, the Washington Post‘s media columnist, wrote a piece in which he contacted some of the students who were on that 2019 field trip to Peru with McNeil, and who complained about him. The trip, by the way, cost over $5,000 per student; your parents would have had to be pretty well-off to send you on it. Here is what Wemple found:

Six students who participated in the trip told the Erik Wemple Blog a consistent story about McNeil’s comportment: He provided expertise about public health and science consistent with what the students had expected. When the structured discussions yielded to informal chatter about other topics, it was a different story. McNeil was brusque and difficult, they said, in keeping with his prickly reputation in the newsroom.

As for specifics:

Students largely confirmed in broad outlines McNeil’s account of the n-word fiasco. But they said that he uttered the epithet in a way that they perceived as casual, unnecessary or even gratuitous.In a discussion of cultural appropriation, McNeil scoffed. Though the term applies to people in Western countries adopting fashions or other items from other cultures, McNeil offered the example of people all over the world eating imported Italian tomatoes, according to a student in attendance. What’s the problem with that?Two students reported coming away with troubling impressions of McNeil’s view of white supremacy, with one of them claiming that he said it didn’t exist.Speaking about high incarceration rates of African Americans, McNeil argued that if they engage in criminal activity, that’s on them, and not on an oppressive and racist power structure, recalls a trip participant who said that the comments were “triggering” to the group. The participant, however, said that McNeil’s opinions didn’t disparage African Americans.

A caveat: There were about 20 students on the trip and many conversations. This is not a comprehensive inventory. But the tensions between McNeil and the students — a predominantly White group with progressive sensibilities — led some participants to withdraw from interacting with him as the trip wore on.

So these were rich liberal white kids. An older white man questioned their woke assumptions about “cultural appropriation,” and that hurt their feelings. The older white man supposedly said that high incarceration rates among black Americans might be a result of high black crime rates, and not racism. Hey maybe he’s wrong about that, but that’s a debatable proposition — though not to these rich white progressive snowflakes, who were “triggered.” I would very much doubt that a New York Times reporter would deny that white supremacy exists, but I would imagine such a figure saying that it is not as ubiquitous as these teenagers think it is.

Over nit-picky crap like this, the Times cashiered an irreplaceable resource of science reporting expertise. That newspaper doesn’t want to be a newspaper anymore; it wants to be a day-care center to coddle woke crybabies.

Aaron Sibarium of the Washington Free Beacon peeked in on a private Times employee Facebook group, and reports on infighting there:

The Washington Free Beacon reviewed a series of postings to a Facebook group for current and former Times staffers, where a tense debate is unfolding over McNeil’s exit. One camp argues that his dismissal was justified and another asserts it set a troubling precedent, which the New York Times union should have done more to prevent.

“What ever happened to the notion of worker solidarity … to giving a fellow worker the benefit of the doubt,” asked Steven Greenhouse, who spent three decades covering labor issues for the Times. “And why didn’t the NewsGuild do far more to defend and protect the job of a long-time Times employee, one who at times did tireless, heroic work on behalf of the Guild to help improve pay and conditions for all NYT employees?” McNeil had excoriated management’s attempts to freeze pension plans in 2012, calling those involved “belligerent idiots.”

Times crossword columnist Deb Amlen accused Greenhouse of an excessive focus on the “perpetrator,” arguing that he and others should shift their attention to the people McNeil had “harmed.”

“Why is it that the focus in discussions like this almost always [is] on ruining the perpetrator’s life, and not those who were harmed by [his actions],” she asked. Reached for comment, Amlen told the Free Beacon this is a “private group” and that she would “appreciate it if you do not use anything I said or wrote.”

“Harmed.” When Sibarium reached out to Nikole Hannah-Jones for comment, she doxxed him by releasing his phone number onto Twitter, in violation of Twitter’s policy. But we know that nobody will ever hold Hannah-Jones responsible for her actions. She’s untouchable. After all, she runs The New York Times, and tells Dean Baquet and A.G. Sulzberger what to do — including, it appears, to fire an old white man after 45 years of service to the Times, and who happens to be one of the most valuable science reporters in the nation, for spurious ideological reasons.

What does this say about the Times‘s commitment to serious journalism? To providing its readers with the best possible coverage on urgently important news (McNeil was the lead Covid-19 reporter)? It is clearly more important to the Times leadership mollify the zealously woke screaming meemies in the newsroom than it is to serve the readers who pay the salaries of the whole lot.

What is it going to take for sane, serious people to regain control of The New York Times? 

The post At Times, Don McNeil Scandal Deepens appeared first on The American Conservative.

Mary Hasson: Parents & Pastors, Wake Up

The journalist Abigail Shrier has a new Substack column out in which an anonymous source — a former Planned Parenthood worker — tells her how the organization allegedly handles young people who show up asking for cross-sex hormones. It’s eye-opening, to say the least. Most people do not realize that, as Shrier writes, “Planned Parenthood is now one of the largest providers in the United States of cross-sex hormones like testosterone to females seeking medical gender transition.” Excerpts:

The employee insisted (both on Twitter and during our interview) that she was reluctant to say anything critical of Planned Parenthood because she believes in its core mission.

“[T]hey still provide vital services for women,” she wrote on Twitter, and anti-abortion activists “will jump at any opportunity to smear them.” But she went on to write: “Having said that, their recent roles in trans activism are abhorrent, and they’re digging their own grave.”

The Planned Parenthood clinic where she worked was located in a small town of roughly 30,000. Abortions were the clinic’s “bread and butter,” something this employee fully supports. But, she noted, “trans identifying kids are cash cows, and they are kept on the hook for the foreseeable future in terms of follow-up appointments, bloodwork, meetings, etc., whereas abortions are (hopefully) a one-and-done situation.”

How significant is this revenue stream?  I’ve never been able to obtain numbers on that, though the Planned Parenthood website for Central and Western New York states that: “Nationally, Planned Parenthood is the second largest provider of Gender Affirming Hormone Care.” It seems reasonable to conclude that hormone treatments—pricey as they are—now contribute materially to Planned Parenthood’s bottom line.

According to the employee, based on her recollection, 1-2 new biologically female teen patients seeking testosterone would arrive per day.  A few reasonable assumptions and some arithmetic reveal that a shocking percentage of the town’s teen girls came through the clinic over just a few years.

There were no doctors at the clinic where she worked. Nurse practitioners were the professionals with the highest medical training, she said. The clinic employed a gender counselor who had “no actual professional credentials or formal training other than being MtF” (that is, a male-to-female transgender person). Adolescents would come and speak to this gender counselor and Planned Parenthood would then forward the counselor’s “notes to an actual licensed mental health professional somewhere off-site, and rubber stamp approve the patients to begin their transition. This is basically how they circumvented the requirement to speak to an actual counselor,” according to the employee’s Twitter post.

Adolescents! We live in a society in which school nurses won’t give students a Tylenol without explicit parental approval, but kids can walk into Planned Parenthood and start the process to get cross-sex hormones. More:

Each day, new teen girls would present at the clinic (sometimes with mom). They often arrived in groups of girlfriends, all claiming childhood histories of gender dysphoria and asking to be put on testosterone. Did she believe their testimonies? “I think they were telling what they perceived to be their authentic history to them at the time. Like, I was a 13 year old girl, you know. Everything is very dire, everything needs to be remedied immediately,” she said.

In any case, the script Planned Parenthood instructed her to read from didn’t grant much room for evaluation of patient histories. “The questions that we asked were like, very closed ended…It would be, ‘you know, at what age did this start’? Boom that is it. ‘What kinds of dysphoria do you feel’? Boom that’s it, you know? ‘What do you want out of your transition’? ‘Do you want top surgery?’ ‘Do you want bottom surgery’?”

In taking their histories, the employee did discover that these girls seemed to be suffering from a great deal of emotional pain. “A lot of them have serious emotional issues, a lot of them had a history of abuse and baggage.”

Putting girls at that age on testosterone could permanently alter their bodies, rendering them infertile. But kids are treating this like a previous generation regarded going to the shopping mall to get their ears pierced:

Most interesting to me was the fact that, according to the employee, the girls would often arrive to the clinic with a group of friends. (For what other medical treatments do girls arrive with peer group in tow?) It smacked more of the gleeful trips teen girls once took to the mall for ear piercings than the sober medical treatment of a genuine mental health disorder.

What was the mood in the waiting room among these friends? “Super cheerful, giggly. It’s a fun thing,” she said, a touch of cynicism whetting her tone.

I asked her if she and the other nurses and reproductive health assistants didn’t think there was something suspicious about girls’ showing up in groups of friends for treatment—whether it didn’t cross the employees’ minds that peer influence might be at play. “It’s kind of one of those things where you just roll your eyes.” She told me. “The extent of our intervention” was to grant “their requests to start the hormone therapy.”

Read the whole thing. It’s horrifying. Truly dystopian stuff. This ought to be illegal. Where are the Congressional hearings? What about state legislatures?

Mary Hasson, who directs the Catholic Women’s Forum at the Ethics & Public Policy Center, a Washington think tank, tells me that the medical industry is working hard to make it easy for minors to gender-transition. She sent me some slides from presentations last summer at a meeting of the American Academy of Pediatrics by Dr. Jo Olson-Kennedy, one of the country’s top medical transgender advocates. She is the Medical Director of The Center for Transyouth Health and Development at Children’s Hospital of Los Angeles. Olson-Kennedy is also married to a biological woman who presents as a transman. 

Hasson tells me that Dr. Olson-Kennedy gave two presentations at the conference. In the one titled “Conversations With LGBTQ Youth,” said Hasson, the doctor

advised pediatricians to be proactive in raising sex and gender questions — asking questions about whether kids like boys or girls or both, or whether they are comfortable in their bodies, etc — no matter whether a kid comes in for a sore throat, bee sting, or for a physical. (The parents is always shooed out of the room)   It is insidious and designed to sow self-doubt in kids, who can’t help wonder why the doc is always asking if the child is gay, etc.  Docs are told that their operating presumption should be that “any” child could be LGBTQ, so all kids should be addressed in a way to make it easy to “come out” or explore those identities.

Hasson points out that Dr. Olson-Kennedy, in an NIH-funded study, reported referring a 13-year-old girl for a double mastectomy, and starting puberty blockers on children as young as eight. “She has no concerns about a child regretting a transition,” says Hasson, “because she thinks it’s all part of the ‘gender journey’ — even though it might cost a teen her fertility.”“There is no ‘safe zone’ in our institutions anymore,” Hasson says. “Parents need to be on guard and they need the support of their faith communities.”This is a big problem. As far as I can tell, many parents are really clueless about the dangers of this culture. It’s not really their fault. The media are all-in on trans advocacy. You have to look for balanced information, and many parents don’t even know where to start. And, based on anecdotal data from readers of this blog around the country, their churches offer no guidance at all.

I’m excited, then, to point you to Person & Identity, a new web resource for parents, clergy, and parochial school teachers and administrators. It’s a project of the Catholic Women’s Forum, and is written by Catholics, for Catholics — though my perusal of its pages reveals that most of the information there is useful for all Christians. Not only useful, but a godsend. I interviewed Mary Hasson about Person & Identity:

RD:  I hear all the time from Christian parents who feel overwhelmed by gender ideology, and have no idea what to think of it. Now I have somewhere to send them. In my experience, most parents seem to think that this is just going to pass them by, that it can’t happen to their family. Are they wrong?

MH: Yes, 100% wrong. Gender ideology is already affecting them and their kids. From the classroom to the Internet and social media, to entertainment, sports, and corporate advertising—it’s inescapable.

The CDC reports about 3% of young people identify as trans, but this is the tip of the iceberg. Social contagion is at work, which means it’s more important to pay attention to your child’s immediate environment. A school with one “trans” child will soon have five, with a dozen more who are “questioning.” The adolescent world is flooded with images presenting “trans” as normal and healthy. Teens on social media face daily dilemmas – when a classmate (or a celebrity) “comes out” as “trans” or “non-binary” on Instagram, Snapchat, or TikTok, should they “like” the trans declaration or risk being tagged as a “hater”? Should they signal their wokeness by adding trans or rainbow flags to their profiles for Pride month or any of the dozens of LGBT-themed days?

It’s critically important to realize that even if a child is not personally confused about being male or female, it is deeply de-stabilizing to every child when authority figures outside the family normalize and validate the core beliefs of gender ideology—and they do, routinely. Teachers in public schools (and some private schools) teach gender identity concepts, “debunk” the binary, and affirm “trans” or “non-binary” students. Pediatricians ask adolescents privately about their gender identity or pronouns. Youth ministers, trying to be compassionate, affirm a troubled adolescent’s self-declared “non-binary” identity, and encourage the group to do so as well. The President of the United States has decreed that it is “discrimination” and “bigotry” to refuse to include, affirm, or validate a person’s self-declared “gender identity.” It’s hard for an adult to stand fast to the truth in the face of such opposition. Imagine the difficulty for our children.

Some kids are particularly vulnerable to trans ideology: adolescent girls, kids with autism, pre-existing mental health issues, histories of trauma or abuse, and those already have trouble fitting in or are socially isolated. Anecdotally, although more kids from progressive families might “come out” as trans (because they often encourage sex and “gender” experimentation or pride themselves on being “open”), I know of many kids from strong faith backgrounds who are seduced into the trans craze, including kids who were homeschooled, or attended solid Christian or Catholic schools. The culture is like a powerful riptide pulling our kids out to sea, and many of them are drowning.

RD: I also hear from Christians — Catholics and others — that they are getting no direction at all from their parishes. What should priests, pastors, and church personnel be doing?

MH: I hear the same. The silence of pastors, ministers, and pastoral teams is deadly in the face of the never-ending gender ideology soundtrack that plays in the background of our kids’ lives. Silence means the lies go unanswered, the believer’s pain is unrecognized, and their confusion unresolved. Faith communities need to act with urgency—because lives depend on it. Some specific suggestions:

Get up to speed now on gender ideology—the core deceptions, its destabilizing and destructive impact, the chief spreaders (schools, social media, the Internet, entertainment, counselors and medical professionals), and the dangerous idea of “transition.” Learn who is most vulnerable and why.Get the facts on “gender transition” so you can confidently speak the truth to families needing advice. Sex is immutable. “Transition” is a mirage, a false “solution” to deeper issues that need to be resolved.Know who your allies are—and aren’t–within the medical and mental health communities. Families want referrals. Find out who is trustworthy, e.g. professionals who accept biological reality and share the same anthropology. (Hint: “Gender” clinics and therapists are never the right choice—they are the fast-track to transition.)Face the ugly reality of transgender “medicine” so you will grasp, on a gut level, the evil of gender ideology and why it is never “compassionate” to affirm a person’s false belief in a “trans” identity. How? Read at least three stories of suffering parents who lost teens to the trans cult because other adults “affirmed” them as “transgender.” Browse the thousands of YouTube videos of teens “transitioning,” e.g. 16 year old girls showing off bloody mastectomy scars, discussing their mental health, etc. And visit the website of a “gender surgeon,” who is getting rich off the barbaric surgeries he performs on vulnerable young people. You must confront the evil in order to feel the urgency of speaking the truth and condemning the lies.Speak the truth boldly, and often. Be intentional about educating your staff and your congregation. The Person and Identity Project has resources and expertise to help.Openly acknowledge the pain of families whose children are caught up in the trans cult. Many parents are berated by “professionals” for not supporting a teen or young adult’s transition. Their extended families and the world at large tell them to support their child’s transition—which they know is destructive physically, spiritually, and emotionally—lest they drive their child to suicide (a lie). They may fear being blamed and shamed as “bad parents” by fellow believers. They need you to acknowledge their pain, speak the truth about the person, and support them in this difficult time.Pray, with confidence, but urgency. The Biden administration is ramping up the flow of trans propaganda. The human costs will be devastating.

RD: Person & Identity makes a claim that undergirds its reason for being: “Gender ideology is irreconcilable with Christian anthropology and Catholic teaching.” Explain why.

MH: A full explanation is on our website, but in brief: The Christian believes that we are created by God, male or female, and that we are called to accept our sexual identity as a gift. We are “embodied persons, a unity of soul and body, called to eternal life. Males and females are oriented to one another sexually, and their union brings forth new life—a family. A person’s happiness comes from living in accord with the Creator’s design (accepting our bodies, following the moral law). To manipulate, degrade, or destroy the body’s natural function in pursuit of an alternative “identity” is morally wrong.

Gender ideology views the person as material, autonomous, and self-defining; it rejects the idea of human nature and denies the significance of sexual difference. Thus, it champions the person’s supposed “right” to self-define on the basis of feelings. Gender ideology asserts it is possible to be “born in the wrong body” (a scientifically erroneous claim), that the body is merely a canvas for self-expression (a dualistic separation of will and body). It justifies medical interventions to modify the body according to the person’s desires as the legitimate expression of individual autonomy and a path towards authenticity.

RD: Catholic Women’s Forum has created this site for Catholics, but from what I can tell, most of what you all say about gender ideology is applicable to all Christians. What can concerned parents from other Christian confessions learn from Person & Identity?

MH: We hope that our website and expertise will assist people from all faith traditions. The Christian vision of the human person that we promote was—until recently—accepted by most Christian denominations as well as the wider secular world. Sound science—biological reality—is not a matter of faith. But God is the author of the created world, so it’s no surprise that science solidly supports the truth of the human person as explained by faith. Our website reflects the Catholic reliance on faith and reason, so our resources are drawn from the best secular and scientific sources as well as those within our faith tradition.

We encourage all faith communities to address this issue head on, because believers need the wisdom of faith, and clear teaching on the truth of the human person. They also need their leaders to call out the lies that are becoming woven into the law and our cultural institutions. We invite other faith leaders to be in touch with us—we are happy to serve in any way we can.

RD: I know you have read Abigail Shrier’s new piece about how Planned Parenthood is facilitating young teenagers’ attempts to transition. This phenomenon seems so clearly to be a matter of social contagion, especially among girls. Why is nobody stepping up to protect these kids?

MH: There are good legislators who are stepping up on the state level, proposing various bills to prevent medical interventions on minors and seeking to safeguard girls’ and women’s sports. But they are facing a negative media onslaught, big business (which bends to the will of the LGBTQ lobby), and the corruption of the medical establishment. (Harvard Medical School is piloting a program, funded by LGBTQ donors, to train physicians in trans-affirming medicine. The intent is to duplicate it in other medical schools.) Pharma is investing heavily in promoting the transgender phenomenon. Cancel culture is making it virtually impossible for people to stand up and speak the truth with boldness—unless a person is willing to face the substantial costs.

If the Church doesn’t stand up and speak the truth with confidence and boldness, then who will?

Please explore the website — trust me, you’ll learn something — and share the link to Person & Identity widely, especially with your pastor, and with other parents. This is urgently important. People need to know what’s going on, and how to resist it. The lies are overwhelming, and this ideology has captured the mainstream media, many in the medical profession, and the educational field. Parents need to step up to protect their children — and Christian parents deserve to have the Church behind them.

The post Mary Hasson: Parents & Pastors, Wake Up appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Religion Of Antiracism

Here’s an excerpt from the black linguist John McWhorter’s new essay, part of his serialized new book:

One can divide antiracism into three waves. First Wave Antiracism battled slavery and segregation. Second Wave Antiracism, in the 1970s and 1980s, battled racist attitudes and taught America that being racist was a flaw. Third Wave Antiracism, becoming mainstream in the 2010s, teaches that racism is baked into the structure of society, so whites’ “complicity” in living within it constitutes racism itself, while for black people, grappling with the racism surrounding them is the totality of experience and must condition exquisite sensitivity toward them, including a suspension of standards of achievement and conduct.

Third Wave Antiracist tenets, stated clearly and placed in simple oppositions, translate into nothing whatsoever:

When black people say you have insulted them, apologize with profound sincerity and guilt. But don’t put black people in a position where you expect them to forgive you. They have dealt with too much to be expected to.

Black people are a conglomeration of disparate individuals. “Black culture” is code for “pathological, primitive ghetto people.” But don’t expect black people to assimilate to “white” social norms because black people have a culture of their own.

Silence about racism is violence. But elevate the voices of the oppressed over your own.

You must strive eternally to understand the experiences of black people. But you can never understand what it is to be black, and if you think you do you’re a racist.

Show interest in multiculturalism. But do not culturally appropriate. What is not your culture is not for you, and you may not try it or do it. But—if you aren’t nevertheless interested in it, you are a racist.

Support black people in creating their own spaces and stay out of them. But seek to have black friends. If you don’t have any, you’re a racist. And if you claim any, they’d better be good friends—in their private spaces, you aren’t allowed in.

When whites move away from black neighborhoods, it’s white flight. But when whites move into black neighborhoods, it’s gentrification, even when they pay black residents generously for their houses.

If you’re white and only date white people, you’re a racist. But if you’re white and date a black person you are, if only deep down, exotifying an “other.”

Black people cannot be held accountable for everything every black person does. But all whites must acknowledge their personal complicity in the perfidy throughout history of “whiteness.”

Black students must be admitted to schools via adjusted grade and test score standards to ensure a representative number of them and foster a diversity of views in classrooms. But it is racist to assume a black student was admitted to a school via racial preferences, and racist to expect them to represent the “diverse” view in classroom discussions.

I suspect that deep down, most know that none of this catechism makes any sense. Less obvious is that it was not even composed with logic in mind. The self-contradiction of these tenets is crucial, in revealing that Third Wave Antiracism is not a philosophy but a religion.

The revelation of racism is, itself and alone, the point, the intention, of this curriculum. As such, the fact that if you think a little, the tenets cancel one another out, is considered trivial. That they serve their true purpose of revealing people as bigots is paramount—sacrosanct, as it were. Third Wave Antiracism’s needlepoint homily par excellence is the following:

Battling power relations and their discriminatory effects must be the central focus of all human endeavor, be it intellectual, moral, civic or artistic. Those who resist this focus, or even evidence insufficient adherence to it, must be sharply condemned, deprived of influence, and ostracized.

Read the whole thing. 

McWhorter explains that he’s not addressing conservatives, though he welcomes them to listen in. He’s addressing two audiences that he considers to be his people: New York Times-reading, NPR-listening people of any color who have accepted this new pseudo-religion of antiracism; and black people who have embraced victimhood as identity. He also says that he doesn’t expect to argue the religiously antiracist out of their creed, for the same reason he wouldn’t expect an atheist to succeed at arguing a church full of fundamentalists out of believing in God. What he does hope to do is to figure out how to live among these zealots without letting them suck all the air out of the room.

McWhorter’s list of the contradictory principles of the Antiracism religion boil down to this important dogma: if you’re white, you’re guilty. There is no way to get on the right side of the Elect (as he calls them). It’s not what you believe that counts; it’s your racial identity. In Live Not By Lies, I also call out the antiracists and other social justice extremists as being in a cult. From the book:

The reach of contemporary thoughtcrime expands constantly—homophobia, Islamophobia, transphobia, biphobia, fat-phobia, racism, ableism, and on and on—making it difficult to know when one is treading on safe ground or about to step on a land mine. Yet [Roger] Scruton is right: All of these thoughtcrimes derive from “doctrines”— his word—that are familiar to all of us. These doctrines inform the ideological thrust behind the soft totalitarianism of our own time as surely as Marxist doctrines of economic class struggle did the hard totalitarianism of the Soviet era.

One imagines an entry-level worker at a Fortune 500 firm, or an untenured university lecturer, suffering through the hundredth workshop on Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion and doing their very best not to be suspected of dissent. In fact, I don’t have to imagine it at all. As a journalist who writes about these issues, I often hear stories from people—always white-collar professionals like academics, doctors, lawyers, engineers—who live closeted lives as religious or social conservatives. They know that to dissent from the progressive regime in the workplace, or even to be suspected of dissent, would likely mean burning their careers at the stake.

For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship.The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool,and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

That is a soft form of totalitarianism. Here is the same logic laid down hard: in 1918, Lenin unleashed the Red Terror, a campaign of annihilation against those who resisted Bolshevik power. Martin Latsis, head of the secret police in Ukraine, instructed his agents as follows:

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

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

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

These cultists — the Elect, to use McWhorter’s preferred term — are making normal human relations, especially across racial lines, difficult to impossible. You never know if the person with whom you are talking is one of the Elect, and if something perfectly innocent you have said will earn you denunciation or worse. In normal social discourse, if one inadvertently offends another, one apologizes and asks for forgiveness, and the aggrieved party, if they believe the repentance is genuine, grants it. This is what makes social life possible. As McWhorter avers, though, among the Elect, mercy is not practiced. Only the fiercest condemnation. And we know all too well that this condemnation can easily include serious, career-ending penalties. Why risk that to make a new friend, especially given how fast the spread of what is considered to be bigoted is changing? You have to walk on eggshells, never knowing when one of them will turn out to be a landmine.

The dogma is inhuman, and it’s tearing us apart as a nation. I am so grateful for courageous men like Prof. McWhorter. Ten thousand white conservatives speaking out against this stuff won’t do remotely as much good as a single center-left black intellectual doing so. He is fighting for all of us who value free speech, fairness, and real intellectual debate and inquiry.

The post The Religion Of Antiracism appeared first on The American Conservative.

Barbarians At The Met

New York’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, one of the world’s greatest art museums, is considering selling off parts of its collection to pay bills. From the NYT:

Facing a potential shortfall of $150 million because of the pandemic, the Metropolitan Museum of Art has begun conversations with auction houses and its curators about selling some artworks to help pay for care of the collection.

“This is the time when we need to keep our options open,” said Max Hollein, the Met’s director, in an interview. “None of us have a full perspective on how the pandemic will play out. It would be inappropriate for us not to consider it, when we’re still in this foggy situation.”

Naturally, the museum still has the cash to participate in the Great Awokening:

Even as the Met is re-evaluating its collection for works to sell to pay for collections care, the museum is also trying to bulk up its holdings in neglected areas such as works by women and people of color.

In the wake of George Floyd’s killing and a reckoning around race nationwide, as well as inside the museum, the Met in July issued a letter committing to a fund of $3 million to $5 million “to support initiatives, exhibitions, and acquisitions in the area of diverse art histories.”

The Met also pledged to establish within the next 12 months acquisition endowments of $10 million to increase the number of works by artists of color “in our 20th- and 21st-century collections.”

There is always money for Diversity.

In the December issue of New Criterion, James Panero published a fantastic essay about how wokeness is unmaking the Metropolitan Museum. Panero loves the Met, and sings its fulsome praises. However:

If 2020 has revealed anything, it is the contingent nature of seemingly permanent things. The Met is an ocean liner of culture, one that conveys the world to America’s port. Over its history, the institution has more than proven its seaworthiness as a vessel that mostly stays true to course, not easily affected by prevailing winds or swamped by rogue waves. But even our mightiest institutions can take on water and list. Our institutions can also be easily scuttled from within, perhaps under the mistaken impression that they ride too high in the water, or simply that the ocean would be better off with a new addition to the sea floor.

More:

There has never been a moment of lower confidence in American museums than now. Against a backdrop of alarming cultural convulsions, the Met has not shown itself immune to political upheavals. In recent years our great public treasure house has presented its abundance as an embarrassment of riches. Now its hand-wringing, false confessions, and aesthetic effacements have begun to cast a pall over the very idea of its encyclopedic mission.

Panero writes about the history of the Met, and how difficult it was to build the museum’s collection. It has been the work of generations. But now, it is in peril, because of the fevered radicalism that has overtaken the world of culture. Until reading Panero’s piece, I had no idea how widespread the insanity had become at major museums. The Met’s leadership appears to be joining the mob.

One final episode well illustrates this danger. In June, Keith Christiansen, the museum’s chairman of European paintings, posted to his personal Instagram feed a print featuring Alexandre Lenoir, a figure who tried to save monuments during the French Revolution. “Alexandre Lenoir battling the revolutionary zealots bent on destroying the royal tombs in Saint Denis,’’ Christiansen wrote. “How many great works of art have been lost to the desire to rid ourselves of a past of which we don’t approve?”

The post came at a moment of national riots that had quickly moved beyond the dismantling of Confederate monuments to the indiscriminate destruction of any and all public works. “And how grateful we are to people like Lenoir,” Christiansen continued, “who realized that their value—both artistic and historical—extended beyond a defining moment of social and political upheaval and change.”

A member of the Metropolitan staff since 1977, Christiansen well understood that the encyclopedic museum, including his own, is the direct descendant of Lenoir. From the French Revolution, coming out of the American Civil War, on through the Monuments Men of the Second World War, collecting institutions have saved culture from the forces of destruction. “The losses that occur” when major works of art are destroyed by “war, iconoclasm, revolution, and intolerance,” as he explained, are the enemies of art history, diminishing our “fuller understanding of a complicated and sometimes ugly past.”

Christiansen was denounced for daring to compare Jacobin-like terror to the Jacobin Terror. This fall, he was among the 20 percent of Met staff to announce their retirement, to resign, or to be pushed out.

Read it all. 

It’s worth considering along with Damon Linker’s new column about the Princeton classics professor Dan-el Padilla Peralta, and his campaign to destroy the field of classics in the name of anti-racism. Linker correctly views Padilla’s crusade as anti-intellectual. Excerpt:

The saddest passage of the profile is the one where Padilla “cringes” at the memory of “his youthful desire to be transformed by the classical tradition,” a longing he now sees as nothing more than a craving to be assimilated into a “system of structural oppression.”

But the classical tradition is so much more than this. It is, for one thing, an enormously important window into the foundations of our civilization. Are there morally disturbing aspects of this civilization? Of course. (Has there ever been a civilization in human history about which we could say otherwise?) But there are good things about it, too. If we want to understand ourselves, good and bad and everything in between, ancient Greece and Rome is where we need to start, at the beginning of the long, immensely complicated story that eventually wends its way down to us. To cut us off from that story, or to reduce the image to just one thread in the tapestry, is to condemn us to ignorance about ourselves.

Talk of the dangers of ignorance raises the possibility of achieving its opposite — knowledge and wisdom. And that’s the second and arguably even more important case for studying the classics with an eye to more than compiling a list of moral crimes.

Homer, Aeschylus, Sophocles, Aristophanes, Socrates, Plato, Aristotle, Thucydides, Virgil, Ovid, Tacitus, Cicero, Livy — to become conversant in the writings of these authors and learn about the worlds in which they lived is to be placed into conversation with some of the greatest minds about some of the most monumental events in human history. It is to become culturally literate on the highest levels. It is an education in how to think, in how to achieve self-understanding and a salutary humility about our own vaunted superiority. It is to learn how to begin liberating ourselves from our own prejudices.

Whereas refusing to read these authors and learn about their worlds — or to do so merely in order to melt them down in the moral acids of our own unexamined certainties — is to close ourselves off both from our own past and from the possibility of living a fully self-aware life in the present.

That there are people in our time who see little value in the study of the classics is hardly surprising. There have always been those who care little for learning, or who value it only for its usefulness in advancing practical projects. But that such a crude form of philistinism has begun to gain a foothold in the very institutions tasked with preserving and passing on our classical inheritance is troubling. It’s a sign that present-day political concerns and obsessions have begun to intrude on and badly distort the work of the university.

Read it all. 

We are living through a period of convulsive iconoclasm, in which the men and women who have the responsibility to shepherd our cultural institutions are opening the gates of the city to barbarians, and joining them in sacking our collective heritage, our civilizational patrimony. The people with the power to save these institutions — our great universities and museums — from this sacking are the wealthy and influential. So where are they? Are they too backing the barbarians, as a way to process their felt guilt over their wealth and influence?

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From Dark Chamber To Baptismal River

Note: I posted this on Friday to paid subscribers to my Substack newsletter — you can subscribe to it here — but decided that the good news needs wider sharing. So, here it is:

Some very good news came today. Actually, it came to me weeks ago, but I have not been able to share it with anybody, until now. If you follow my blog, you’ll know that I’m a fan of English writer Paul Kingsnorth, about whom Aris Roussinos wrote last year:

What does it say about England that her greatest living writer lives in exile on the west coast of Ireland? For some years now, Paul Kingsnorth has lived in rural Galway, tending a small farm with his young family, cutting hay with a scythe, and alternating visionary works of fiction with doom-laden essays on environmental collapse and the totalitarian seductions of late modernity. He is, perhaps, the English equivalent of Michel Houellebecq (another former exile to Ireland’s bleak and rural western lands). But instead of submission, Kingsnorth urges retreat and then resistance. Whereas Houellebecq is fixated on the supermarkets and holiday villages of modern France, Kingsnorth’s imagination, like his life, takes him to the last wild places of the British isles, to the moors and fens, to the rain-lashed Atlantic coast, and to the mythical Dark Mountain after which he named his deep ecological writing collective.

I had lots of good things to say about his latest novel Alexandria, which is set thousands of years into a re-primitivized future. I published an interview with him about the novel.

Well, Kingsnorth has updated the FAQ page on his website. It now says this under, “What about religion?”

I have never been a scientific materialist. My suspicion that there is more to the world than modernity will allow for has informed my sensibility since I was a child, and was the backdrop to all my environmental activism and writing.

Over the last decade, I have been on an increasing determined search for Truth which – as for so many lost Western people – has taken me to all quarters. For five years I studied and practiced Zen Buddhism; I’m still grateful for the insights that accorded me, but there was something missing. In search of what that something might be, I explored Daoism, mythology, Sufism, traditionalism, Alexandrian Wicca and all sorts of other bits and pieces. They all taught me something, but not enough.

Then, in 2020, as the world was turned upside down, so was I. Unexpectedly, and initially against my will, I found myself being pulled determinedly towards Christianity. It’s a long story, which I might tell one day. Suffice it to say that I started the year as an eclectic eco-pagan with a long-held, unformed ache in my heart, and ended it a practicing Christian, the ache gone and replaced by the thing that, all along, I turned out to have been looking for. In January 2021 I was baptised and received into the Eastern Orthodox Church. I don’t know where the path leads from here, but at last I know how to walk it.

Paul was baptized on Theophany (January 6) in the cold waters of the River Shannon, near his home in rural western Ireland. He sent me a photo of the moment he came out of the water, and it is one of the most beautiful images I’ve ever seen. It is his image to share with the world, though, not mine. (Paul is a subscriber to this newsletter; if he gives me permission to share it, I will.)

I am always thrilled when someone has converted to Orthodox Christianity, but Paul’s conversion was special to me. I remember where I was — at my mom and dad’s house, sitting with my ailing father — when I first read online his 2014 essay “In The Black Chamber,” about going with his children into one of the prehistoric cave networks in the French Pyrenees. The piece begins like this:

It is a long walk, or it seems like one, especially if you are taking your small children with you. In reality, it is just over a kilometre; a journey which, on the surface, would take ten minutes or so. But we are not on the surface. We are several hundred feet below the slopes of a limestone mountain, and if we weren’t all carrying torches, the darkness would be entire and unending.

This is Grotte de Niaux – Niaux cave – in the French Pyrenees. The great rock overhang which marks the entrance is visible for miles along the river valley outside. The cave is a scribbled network of tunnels, most of them inaccessible now, at least to the public. As you move past the artificial entrance passage, through the thick steel door which is locked every night, your torchlight hits stalagmites three times the height of a human being, vast bulges and excrescences of rock on the ceiling and walls, dark crevices leading to chambers and side passages, icy black lakes and all the beauty and solidity to be found in the guts of an old mountain. It is cool, even and blacker than anything under the stars.

They enter the Black Chamber, a room where there are cave paintings of animals left here on the walls 15,000 years ago. Nobody ever lived in these deep caves, which are too wet. The people who painted these images came deep into the mountain, to this secret room, to create art. Paul goes on:

I’m overtaken by a number of emotions as I stand in the Black Chamber, but the one that proves impossible to shake off is a huge sense of awe: a physical sensation that I did not expect and don’t quite know how to handle. It is as if something age-old and darkly powerful has descended from the roof of the cavern and settled in me and will not leave. And as I look at the paintings, and take in the sensations of being in this place, I think that perhaps I begin to understand why people were here. I don’t know what they did, or who they were, but I can feel the power in the place, and it tells me why they might have come here.

It seems obvious to me – and I think the scant evidence bears it out – that whatever happened in the Black Chamber was not driven by utility. Whoever was here, and whatever they were doing, they were forging a connection to something way beyond everyday reality. These paintings are not expressions of economics or natural history. They surely sprung from the same sense of power and smallness and wonder and awe that I feel as I stand in the same place that the artists would have stood. This was a reaching out to, for, something way beyond human comprehension. This was a meeting with the sacred.

When I read those lines, I instantly thought of my more conventional theophany at the Chartres cathedral, which felt the very same way. I thought: whoever this Kingsnorth is, he is searching for God.

The essay goes on to talk about the sacred, and what it could possibly mean to someone raised in the modern world. Kingsnorth is English, and never had religion formally presented to him. He was a teenage atheist who thought Christianity was a matter of Victorian morality, nothing more. But as he writes, he began to feel a sense of the sacred in the natural world. Kingsnorth became a passionate environmental activist. More from the essay:

If the artists of the Black Chamber saw something sacred in the beasts they painted on the walls, I imagine that I see the same thing in what remains of the wild world today. A sense of the ‘sacred’, in other words, expresses itself to me in what Christians call Creation: in nature itself, in the self-willed places beyond the Pale of human control.

I don’t idealise this sense – or I try not to – and I don’t see it as necessarily a comforting thing. I realise that what I call ‘nature’ (an imperfect word, but I can never seem to find a better one) is really just another word for life; an ever-turning wheel of blood and shit and death and rebirth. Nature is fatal as often as it is beautiful, and sometimes it is both at once. But for me, that’s the point: it is the fear and the violence inherent in wild nature, as much as the beauty and the peace, that inspires in me the impulses which religions ask me to direct towards their human-shaped gods: humility, a sense of smallness, sometimes a fear, usually a desire to be part of something bigger than me and my kind. To lose myself; to lose my Self.

Here, perhaps, is one reason I remain haunted by what I experienced in the Black Chamber. I imagine – I can never know, and I am glad about that – that the people who created those works of art understood the sacred through the world beyond the human. I imagine that they saw something like what I see. I imagine that they saw something more than meat and sinew in the creatures that moved around them – creatures in which god, or the sacred, or whatever you want to call it this great, nameless thing, was immanent.

In much of the world even today, and certainly for the decisive majority of our human past, this sense of other-than-human nature as something thoroughly alive and intimately interwoven with human existence is and was the mainstream perception. A world without electric lights, a world without engines, is a different world entirely. It is a world that is alive. Our world of science and industry, of monocultures and monotheisms, marks a decisive shift in human seeing.

Our world is not alive; it is a machine, not an animal, and we have become starkly desensitised to the reality beyond the asphalt and the street lights. There are no mammoths outside the entrance to Niaux today, only a car park and a gift shop. We are here now, above the ground, and above the ground is where we must live.

In the essay, Kingsnorth discusses at length the de-sacralization of the world, and what it has done to us in modernity. More:

Perhaps that word – holy – is the key. The Old English word halig, remember, has the same root as the word ‘whole’. If you see the Earth as whole, entire of itself, interconnected, then you see yourself as part of a wider living thing. If, on the other hand, you see the Earth as a machine and all living things as separate parts, then you have no reason not to tinker with them to your own design. What you will end up with then is men playing with toys, only the toys are living creatures, whole species – eventually a planet. This is Earth-as-playground. And what will your ‘valid criticisms’ be then?

I wonder if there has been a society in history so uninterested in the sacred as ours; so little concerned with the life of the spirit, so contemptuous of the immeasurable, so dismissive of those who feel that these things are essential to human life. The rationalist vanguard would have us believe that this represents progress: that we are heading for a new Jerusalem, a real one this time, having sloughed off ‘superstition’. I am not so sure. I think we are missing something big. Most cultures in human history have maintained, or tried to maintain, some kind of balance between the material and the immaterial; between the temple and the marketplace. Ours is converting the temples into luxury apartments and worshipping in the marketplace instead. We are allergic to learning from the past, but I think we could learn something here.

There is so much more to this essay, so please, read the whole thing. It is particularly rich if you consider it a prelude to Paul’s baptism in the Shannon seven years later. In any case it was, I think, one of my first introductions to his written work. I had heard about the Dark Mountain Project, which he co-founded with fellow writer Dougald Hine. It struck me as a kind of environmentalist Benedict Option. Here is a link to the Manifesto that Kingsnorth and Hine wrote to launch the project. The basic idea is that the modern world is cracking apart. The climate crisis is the most powerful manifestation of a broader crisis. We are not going to do what we must to stop the world from overheating, because what is happening is part of the deep logic of modernity, of Progress. From the Manifesto:

Today, humanity is up to its neck in denial about what it has built, what it has become – and what it is in for. Ecological and economic collapse unfold before us and, if we acknowledge them at all, we act as if this were a temporary problem, a technical glitch. Centuries of hubris block our ears like wax plugs; we cannot hear the message which reality is screaming at us. For all our doubts and discontents, we are still wired to an idea of history in which the future will be an upgraded version of the present. The assumption remains that things must continue in their current direction: the sense of crisis only smudges the meaning of that ‘must’. No longer a natural inevitability, it becomes an urgent necessity: we must find a way to go on having supermarkets and superhighways. We cannot contemplate the alternative.

And so we find ourselves, all of us together, poised trembling on the edge of a change so massive that we have no way of gauging it. None of us knows where to look, but all of us know not to look down. Secretly, we all think we are doomed: even the politicians think this; even the environmentalists. Some of us deal with it by going shopping. Some deal with it by hoping it is true. Some give up in despair. Some work frantically to try and fend off the coming storm.

Our question is: what would happen if we looked down? Would it be as bad as we imagine? What might we see? Could it even be good for us?

We believe it is time to look down.

Dark Mountain believes that it is time for writers and artists to meet the moment with a radical commitment to telling different and better stories, to make humanity resilient in the face of what is to come. They call this process “uncivilization,” and base it on these statements:

THE EIGHT PRINCIPLES OF UNCIVILISATION
‘We must unhumanise our views a little, and become confident
As the rock and ocean that we were made from.’

We live in a time of social, economic and ecological unravelling. All around us are signs that our whole way of living is already passing into history. We will face this reality honestly and learn how to live with it.

We reject the faith which holds that the converging crises of our times can be reduced to a set of ‘problems’ in need of technological or political ‘solutions’.

We believe that the roots of these crises lie in the stories we have been telling ourselves. We intend to challenge the stories which underpin our civilisation: the myth of progress, the myth of human centrality, and the myth of our separation from ‘nature’. These myths are more dangerous for the fact that we have forgotten they are myths.

We will reassert the role of storytelling as more than mere entertainment. It is through stories that we weave reality.

Humans are not the point and purpose of the planet. Our art will begin with the attempt to step outside the human bubble. By careful attention, we will reengage with the non-human world.

We will celebrate writing and art which is grounded in a sense of place and of time. Our literature has been dominated for too long by those who inhabit the cosmopolitan citadels.

We will not lose ourselves in the elaboration of theories or ideologies. Our words will be elemental. We write with dirt under our fingernails.

The end of the world as we know it is not the end of the world full stop. Together, we will find the hope beyond hope, the paths which lead to the unknown world ahead of us.

If you know my book The Benedict Option, you can see why I found consonance with the Dark Mountaineers. Both projects are ultimately hopeful, if not optimistic — hopeful, because they are committed to the idea of building a human future, but recognize that mere optimism is not going to be enough. When I first read about Dark Mountain, I had already started talking about the Benedict Option in my blogging. In Dark Mountain terms, the Benedict Option is a response to the decline of Christian belief and the disenchantment of the world. It is a relatively radical program to build the kind of disciplines, structures, and outlooks that would help Christians keep the faith through the cataclysm unfolding around us, which most Christians (and our leaders) do not wish to see.

When I read Paul’s 2014 essay about the Black Chamber, I told my wife about it. I told her that I hope Paul Kingsnorth becomes a Christian some day, first because I believe he is searching for Christ, and second because he sees so deeply into the crisis of our time, and has so many gifts to bring to the worldwide church in this time of immense need. Kingsnorth is a wild man who seeks nothing short of the re-enchantment of the world.

A year ago, we connected on e-mail somehow, and Paul told me he had been doing a lot of exploring in Christianity. Knowing his sensibility, I encouraged him to read Kyriacos Markides’s book The Mountain Of Silence: A Search For Orthodox Spirituality. I was confident that the ancient Christianity kept alive by the monks of Mount Athos, and by ordinary Orthodox themselves, would speak deeply into the heart of Paul Kingsnorth.

Apparently, it did. This is Paul’s story to tell, so I will stop there. My only role in this story was minimal: to point this seeker, early in his journey, East towards home, by recommending a book about Orthodoxy I thought he would like.

I am confident that Paul will launch himself onto deep waters, with ancient Christian mysticism and the thought and practices of the patristic era. Only God knows what He is going to do inside Paul. But selfishly, I am eager to see what Paul writes going forward, from the experience of his conversion, and the illumination of his imagination.

There are only two novelists of our time that I consider visionary: Michel Houellebecq and Paul Kingsnorth. Houellebecq is also a kind of collapsitarian, but his vision is bleak and without redemption. What is useful in Houellebecq is that he sees through the pretenses of late modernity. Though he offers no hope, he at least tells the truth about the unsustainability of our bankrupt culture. He knows that only God can save us, but cannot himself believe.

Paul is different. He sees the emptiness of our mechanical civilization with much wiser and more searching eyes than Houellebecq, but he also has hope, because even before he was a Christian, Paul believed in the sacred. He sensed the presence of the divine immanent in nature. He only needed to make contact with the Source.

I have every faith that God is doing a mighty and profound work out there in a little house in rural Ireland, in the stout heart and fertile mind of one of the world’s newest Christians. This fills me with such hope! The Church universal needs artists and writers to remind us who we are, who God is, and what He has given us. The Russian novelist Evgeny Vodolazkin (also an Orthodox Christian) revealed an enchanted world in his masterpiece Laurus, about a medieval saint. I think whatever Paul Kingsnorth writes next will be an Anglo-Saxon Laurus. Just wait.

To learn more about Paul Kingsnorth, read this 2014 New York Times profile of him, and watch this short Dutch TV documentary about him (it’s in English). And visit his website, where you can read many of his essays, and learn about his novels.

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