Rod Dreher's Blog, page 84

Crackpot School Board Californicates History

By now you will have heard of the San Francisco Board of Education’s decision to rename 44 schools in the city, to scrub them of anything that might offend the woke. They went after people from Abraham Lincoln and Paul Revere down to Dianne Feinstein, the Democratic former mayor of the city and California’s senior senator. The board did not consult historians to verify the claims of racial offense they imputed to various historical figures; indeed, it has emerged that in some cases, the board’s conclusions were factually wrong.

I urge you to read the interview, because it reveals how mindless and fanatical these progressives are. Lopez cannot explain why they did what they did. Her answers are filled with empty social justice cant.

You’re talking about the learning of history and its importance. Did the committee want historians to testify? And why or why not?

So, it’s hard for me to answer that question without just pointing to [committee statements that] “they did not want to include historians.” I think that that’s not the process that they created. They included a diverse set of community members, people with a set of experiences that contribute to these discussions, people from different backgrounds who are also educated in their own rights. So I think that was the makeup of the committee.

One member of the committee said, about talking to historians, “What would be the point? History is written and documented pretty well across the board. And so we don’t need to belabor history in that regard. We’re not debating that. There’s no point in debating history in that regard. Either it happened or it didn’t.” What do you think of that?

I think I’m trying to understand your question, then. Are you thinking then there’s no allowing for there to be that process?

You were talking earlier about how, no matter whom we uplift, history needs to be taught. Since you’re highlighting the importance of history, I was curious if historians had testified. And it seems like they hadn’t.

Right. My work is in sharing with students this understanding of our history. I think that for me, it’s important to uplift. This does not cancel history. It’s a moment and an opportunity to uplift things that we normally aren’t uplifting in our public-school system, in our society. And that means other voices, other experiences of diverse community members that would bring pride to our student body, and that would allow for students to learn more about themselves. It’s really moving away from this idea that somehow in the taking away of these names, we’re also taking away the stories, and we’re taking away what happened. We can’t move on without that understanding. We can’t heal as a society without that understanding.

Education as social therapy. Who cares about facts? We need to uplift!

Chotiner presses the point with Lopez, trying to figure out whether she believes that historical truth matters here. He points out that some of the figures whose memory was damned by the board, and whose names will now come off of schools, were actually not guilty of the offenses for which the Board damned them. The exchange goes on with Chotiner trying to pin Lopez down on whether or not truth matters:

But that’s not something you’re concerned about?

No. I mean, I wouldn’t phrase it that way, either. I think it would just require more dialogue. I know the committee is still meeting, and they’re still open to that. So it’s not that it’s not a concern. I think it’s something that’s missing without a dialogue.

But the committee member said, essentially, “things are true or false.” And so it seems like if they’re false, then that doesn’t necessarily call for more dialogue; it calls for more accurate history.

I think anyone can agree with that.

Yeah.

So here’s my piece. The real issue is how we are challenged when we talk about racism. And how then the masses come out in order to combat this, when it’s an idea that harms what we’re used to. My current situation is sharing with people very simply that I don’t think it’s appropriate to have symbols of racism and white-supremacy culture. And we’re trying to have this discussion, and what I’ve seen throughout my time on the board, whenever issues like this come out or arise, people need to combat it and try to find any problems around what we’re discussing, because it’s not something that we should be open to having a discussion about. It’s something that people have a lot of issues with.

Word salad! Poor Chotiner labors on, trying to get a straight answer from Lopez:

I’m not quite sure what that means when we are talking about things that did or didn’t happen.

I think what you’re pointing to and what I keep hearing is you’re trying to undermine the work that has been done through this process. And I’m moving away from the idea that it was haphazard.

Ah! Now the interviewer is a villain because he keeps asking Lopez basic questions that she can’t answer.

There’s so much more. In an earlier interview, Lopez said that it’s not such a bad thing that San Francisco public school kids haven’t been in school forever, because of Covid:

“They are learning more about their families and their culture spending more time with each other. They’re just having different learning experiences than the ones we currently measure. And the loss is a comparison to a time when we were in a different space.”

Can you imagine being a parent of a San Francisco public school student, and hearing the president of the school board say such a thing? Chotiner asks Lopez about that too. You’ve really got to read it all.

This is a perfect example of the real and lasting damage that the Woke do when they gain control of institutions. This is anti-intellectual mindlessness, but nobody is stopping them. The San Francisco Chronicle published this column by a San Francisco public school teacher who insists that Bernie Sanders’s mittens are an example of “white privilege.” I kid you not. Excerpt:

And there, across all of our news and social media feeds, was Bernie: Bernie memes, Bernie sweatshirts, endless love for Bernie. I puzzled and fumed as an individual as I strove to be my best possible teacher. What did I see? What did I think my students should see? A wealthy, incredibly well-educated and -privileged white man, showing up for perhaps the most important ritual of the decade, in a puffy jacket and huge mittens.

I mean in no way to overstate the parallels. Sen. Sanders is no white supremacist insurrectionist. But he manifests privilege, white privilege, male privilege and class privilege, in ways that my students could see and feel.

“When you see privilege, you know it,” I’d told them weeks before. Yet, when they saw Sen. Bernie Sanders manifesting privilege, when seemingly no one else did, I struggled to explain that disparity. I am beyond puzzled as to why so many are loving the images of Bernie and his gloves. Sweet, yes, the gloves, knit by an educator. So “Bernie.”

Not so sweet? The blindness I see, of so many (Bernie included), to the privileges Bernie represents. I don’t know many poor, or working class, or female, or struggling-to-be-taken-seriously folk who would show up at the inauguration of our 46th president dressed like Bernie. Unless those same folk had privilege. Which they don’t.

This person, Ingrid Seyer-Ochi, actually teaches high school students in San Francisco. Can you imagine the poison she puts into their minds, teaching them to be offended by elderly socialist Bernie Sanders’s racist mittens?

Seriously, this is deranged cultishness. The White Man’s Mittens Menace. Here’s the thing, though: this is not funny when you consider what it means for the future when the woke cult seizes institutions. Joe Biden has named Cindy Marten, superintendent of San Diego’s public school system, as his choice for Deputy Secretary of Education. Last year, Marten welcomed with gushing compliments to a training meeting Bettina Love, a critical race theorist whose program included the claim that public schools “spirit murder” black and brown children.

Christopher Rufo reported further on things that Cindy Marten has overseen in San Diego schools. Excerpts:

According to new whistleblower documents, San Diego Unified held an even more radical training program featuring a speaker who believes American schools are guilty of the “spirit murdering of Black children.” The school district hired Bettina Love, a critical race theorist who believes that children learn better from teachers of the same race, for the keynote address at the August Principal Institute and for an additional district-wide training on how to “challenge the oppressive practices that live within the systems and structures of school organizations.”

Though the school district explicitly forbade attendees from recording the session, one whistleblower took detailed notes of the speech and captured screenshots of the presentation. According to these notes, Love began her presentation by claiming that “racism runs deep” in the United States and that blacks alone “know who America really is.” She argued that public schools in particular “don’t see [blacks] as human,” are guilty of systemic “anti-Blackness,” and “spirit murder babies” in the education system.

The concept of “spirit murder” is at the heart of Love’s teachings. In a recent article in Education Week, Love writes that public schools are guilty of “the spirit murdering of Black and Brown children,” which she defines as “a death that is built on racism and intended to reduce, humiliate, and destroy people of color.” During the presentation in San Diego, Love added that supporting Black Lives Matter is a “cheap symbolic” gesture that will not stop the spirit murder of minority children in schools.

At the end of her presentation, Love told the teachers that whites are directly responsible for the plight of “dark children.” In a slide labeled “Teacher Education Gap,” Love argued that “Whiteness reproduces poverty, failing schools, high unemployment, school closings, and trauma for people of color.” She insisted that “white educators must take responsibility” because they created and derive privileges from “white supremacy culture.”

Declaring that “reform will not work,” Love argues for “abolitionist teaching,” a pedagogy designed to “remove oppression from its roots.” Whites, according to Love, must make a special effort. During the presentation in San Diego, as part of a list of “abolitionist teacher’s demands,” Love told white attendees that they must undergo “antiracist therapy for White educators” in order to overcome their racism, ignorance, and history of harm. Once they have proven themselves, they can become “co-conspirators” in the campaign for “abolition.”

Under Cindy Marten’s exquisitely woke leadership, San Diego schools have abolished requirements to turn in homework on time, because that’s racist:

In the first semester of the 2019-20 school year, the San Diego Unified school district board discovered that 20% of black students had received a D or F grade. In comparison, 7% of white students earned the same failing marks. School officials decided that the 13% racial disparity was a function of systemic racism, requiring an “honest reckoning as a school district.”

In October, that “reckoning” led the San Diego board to vote unanimously to “interrupt these discriminatory grading practices.” Rather than attempt to replicate the factors empowering the 80% of black students who achieved passing grades, the board’s first action to “be an anti-racist school district” was to dumb down the grading system for all. Under the new protocols, all 106,000 San Diego students are no longer required to hand in their homework on time. Moreover, teachers are now prohibited from factoring a student’s classroom behavior when formulating an academic grade.

Now the woke wisdom of San Diego public schools will inform federal education policy at the senior level. This is what it means to have a Democratic president. When creating “antiracist” school systems, and renaming all the schools in California after woke heroes, fails to produce better grades for minorities, there will be even more radical measures tried. Wokeness cannot fail; it can only be failed. The woke live by ideological lies, and demand that the rest of us do too — or else. The Board responsible for overseeing San Francisco public schools has shown that truth does not matter to them, only woke uplift. We must all live by lies, or be denounced as racists.

We can point at the San Francisco school board and laugh at its crackpot antics while pitying what the students and families there are having to endure, but never forget: what happens in California rarely stays in California.

The post Crackpot School Board Californicates History appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Snowplow Test

Los Angeles Times columnist Virginia Heffernan, who lives in Brooklyn Heights but who lives somewhere rurally to escape Covid, recently had a dilemma: her Trump-loving neighbors did something nice for her. She doesn’t know what the right thing to do about it is.

Now, stop right there. Normal people don’t have this problem. Normal people think, aww, how nice, and start thinking of ways to return the kindness. But normal people are not Harvard-educated New York-based liberal journalists. Hence Heffernan’s revealing column. Excerpts:

Oh, heck no. The Trumpites next door to our pandemic getaway, who seem as devoted to the ex-president as you can get without being Q fans, just plowed our driveway without being asked and did a great job.

How am I going to resist demands for unity in the face of this act of aggressive niceness?

Of course, on some level, I realize I owe them thanks — and, man, it really looks like the guy back-dragged the driveway like a pro — but how much thanks?

These neighbors are staunch partisans of blue lives, and there aren’t a lot of anything other than white lives in neighborhood.

This is also kind of weird. Back in the city, people don’t sweep other people’s walkways for nothing.

It takes a New Yorker to be confronted with someone doing something nice for them, and get suspicious about the angle. More:

On Jan. 6, after the insurrection, Sen. Ben Sasse (R-Neb.) issued an aw-shucks plea for all Americans to love their neighbors. The United States, he said, “isn’t Hatfields and McCoys, this blood feud forever.” And, he added, “You can’t hate someone who shovels your driveway.”

At the time, I seethed; the Capitol had just been desecrated. But maybe my neighbor heard Sasse and was determined to make a bid for reconciliation.

So here’s my response to my plowed driveway, for now. Politely, but not profusely, I’ll acknowledge the Sassian move. With a wave and a thanks, a minimal start on building back trust. I’m not ready to knock on the door with a covered dish yet.

I also can’t give my neighbors absolution; it’s not mine to give. Free driveway work, as nice as it is, is just not the same currency as justice and truth. To pretend it is would be to lie, and they probably aren’t looking for absolution anyway.

:::::facepalm:::::

Let me tell you something, Virginia: your neighbors probably have no idea who Ben Sasse is, and isn’t looking to reconcile with you, much less receive your absolution. They just wanted to do something nice for you, because you are their neighbor, and that’s what neighbors do for each other. The fact that you assume there must be some politically aware motive behind the action says a lot about you. I grew up in the rural South, and trust me, nobody stopped to ask what one’s politics were before doing something nice for them. This is not how people live outside of Blue State Cosmopolises.

As for “absolution,” I kind of hope you do try to engage your Trumpist neighbors by descending from on high to tell them that you might be willing to wash their sins away with your pure milk of la-te-da liberal kindness. That would be fun to watch.

The neighbors might know perfectly well that you hate Trump, but if they are like normal people, they don’t care. You’re their neighbor, and your driveway needed plowing. It didn’t occur to them to think that they needed to know anything else about you. Honestly, this kind of “MAGA-heads In The Mist” take really does call for putting on “Sweet Home Alabama,” blasting it at top volume, and shouting these lines against judgmental liberal hypocrisy:

Now Watergate does not bother me.

Does your conscience bother you? Tell the truth.

No kidding, to people like Virginia Heffernan every check their own consciences? Do they believe that they are not sinners in need of forgiveness and mercy? Does Auden’s great command — “You shall love your crooked neighbour/With your crooked heart” — somehow not apply to them?

I know a Latino immigrant who moved to a small Louisiana town for work. Years ago, I was talking to him about what his life there is like. He mentioned how much he enjoyed playing poker with a group of men he’d fallen in with. One of the men had a familiar name from my Louisiana childhood, and then I remembered that decades ago, that man — now quite old — had been a KKK leader in this state. I asked the Latino guy if he knew that.

“Oh yeah,” he said. “But he’s really not a bad guy at all once you get to know him.”

I thought: that’s small town life for you. It’s like that in the town where I grew up too. You just cannot afford to be mean to and judgmental of people, even if they have sinned and fallen short of the glory of God, which, believe me, you have done too. The guy you’ll need to call to saw up the tree that fell across your driveway might have MAGA and NRA stickers on his truck. He might also do it for you for free, because he knows you’ve been sick and have medical bills. Many of my friends today back in my hometown are liberals, and I’m sure life is not as pleasant for them in some ways as it would be if they lived in a blue city. But then again, very few people back home talk about politics, and certainly wouldn’t use politics as a reason not to be neighborly. If you live out in the country, you can’t afford to be that way, and besides, it just doesn’t matter that much to us.

A story from St. Francisville, where I’m from: a liberal friend there told me that back in the late 1980s, a gay male couple moved to town. One of them was dying of AIDS, and wanted to live in the country for as long as his life was left. They started attending the local Episcopal church. My liberal friend said that nobody at the church flew rainbow flags (I speak metaphorically), but they also welcomed this couple, and cared for them with meals and chores and companionship, until the very end. If you had polled the congregation back then, you probably would have found very few who would have said much good about homosexuality. And back then, people were a lot more afraid of AIDS than they are today. But that did not matter. What mattered was that here, in front of us, in the flesh, were two people in need of our love and care. And that they received, because they were neighbors.

That doesn’t make St. Francisville paradise. But it does make it humane, and livable.

The local liberals may chafe at their minority status, but they’re nice people too. One of my best friends back home is super-liberal, and he wouldn’t think twice about rushing to help out a neighbor like Heffernan, whatever her politics. It just would not cross his mind to do anything else. This isn’t a left-right thing; it’s basic human decency. The lady who runs the coffee shop in my hometown is pretty liberal, and her clientele is no doubt mostly conservative, but nobody cares. Why should they care? Are you a kind person? Do you treat others with respect? Then you are welcome, even if your politics leave a lot to be desired, either way. I don’t know if it’s like this outside the South, but down here, it would be a sorry man who wouldn’t plow his neighbor’s driveway on account of she hates Trump.

This Heffernan column is so revealing. Is that really how urban media liberals see the rest of America: as a place full of people as bitter and as judgmental as themselves? Heffernan’s column is what happens when people who have extraordinary power to shape the media discourse live in a political monoculture. It’s like the WEIRD phenomenon, in which psychological research to determine what is normative for humans has been done solely on Westerners, whose psychological profiles are very different from those of people from around the world. The baseline of normal behavior is actually quite misleading, the theory goes, because the psychology of people formed in Western, Educated, Industrialized, Rich, Democratic cultures is meaningfully different.

A friend of mine lives in a country resort town that has been overrun during Covidtide with rich coastal liberals escaping the plague. He says that they have made life there miserable. They are snotty, entitled, and treat the locals as exotics to be patronized. He says they are bringing with them the same attitudes toward life that ruined California. I’d bet that Heffernan’s Trumpy neighbors are happy to help her, but they’ll also be happy to see the back of her too, carrying those high-and-mighty liberal attitudes back to New York.

Bless her heart, Virginia Heffernan doesn’t know any better. She is the product of elite colleges and urban liberal media culture, and doesn’t understand that one doesn’t politicize neighborliness. One doesn’t look at one’s neighbors and sort the decent from the indecent based on how they vote. If our big-city newsrooms had more people in them who had some sort of real understanding of and sympathy for people like Heffernan’s snowplowers, we might not be such a divided country. But we all know that when the papers hire for “diversity,” they really mean they want to get ten different flavors of liberal.

So, the Snowplow Test: Do you live in a place where people will plow your driveway without wanting something in return, because it’s the neighborly thing to do? If so, then that’s where you want to live. If not, well, better hope that when hard times come, you’ve made enough money to take care of yourself and your family, because you’re going to need it.

The post The Snowplow Test appeared first on The American Conservative.

NYT’s Anti-White Double Standard

From the official statement The New York Times editor-in-chief Dean Baquet and managing editor Joe Kahn released to its staff announcing it had parted ways with reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr., over his using the N-word in a discussion with a high school kid over whether or not it was racist to use the word in a particular context:

 

But I’m old enough to remember way back in 2018, when the Times hired Sarah Jeong for its editorial board, despite her public record of anti-white racism. Such as:

 

When people objected to the Times hiring this racist, the paper defended her by contextualizing her remarks:

Our statement in response to criticism of the hiring of Sarah Jeong. pic.twitter.com/WryIgbaoqg

— NYTimes Communications (@NYTimesPR) August 2, 2018

Jeong remained at the paper for a year, before leaving, perhaps in connection to a tweet she sent that some read as encouraging people to cancel subscriptions to the Times as a way to influence editorial policy. She remains a paid contributor.

It’s almost like the Times really doesn’t care if you’re racist towards white people — and if you are, there’s always context. They hired a Millennial white-hating bomb-thrower, knowing what she was, and explained it away by contextualizing it. But when an old white man who gave over 40 years of his life to the newspaper, and is one of the most valuable reporters in the world in covering and explaining Covid-19 uses the N-word in a discussion about racism, in a way that was acceptable until the day before yesterday — well, off with his head!

It’s going to be real interesting to see how the Times handles Ibram Kendi’s anti-trans remarks — if it covers them at all:

EXCLUSIVE CLIP.

January 25, 2021: Ibram X. Kendi openly discussed how “horrifying” it would be if his daughter were trans and how society must “protect” children from gender “ideas” coming from the trans community. pic.twitter.com/ExPbO4uY4i

— Radical Centrist, wrathful tantric deity (@RadCentrism) February 4, 2021

Kendi, who is a high priest of racial wokeness, happens to be correct here — almost nobody wants their little girl to come home from school saying “I want to be a boy” — and I hope nothing happens to him. But if somebody who shares the skin color of a Donald G. McNeil Jr. said this, that would be the end of his career in many places.

Then again, if the Times writes something negative about him, maybe Nikole Hannah-Jones will burst into Dean Baquet’s office and tell him who to fire. The Woke Godmother apparently has standing to discuss personnel decisions when it comes to matters racial (from the Daily Beast):

McNeil’s behavior on the trip had been hotly debated among Times staffers, including some who took part in a meeting with Baquet and assistant managing editor Carolyn Ryan last Friday. At that meeting, Pulitzer Prize-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones said she planned on calling the parents and students on the trip to determine what McNeil had said and in what context, according to people familiar with the situation.

The post NYT’s Anti-White Double Standard appeared first on The American Conservative.

Times Pushes Don McN-Word Out

This is one of the most shocking examples yet of cancel culture: The New York Times has parted ways with science correspondent Donald G. McNeil, Jr., over his use of the N-word on a student trip sponsored by the Times:

Nearly a half-century of work for the Times, gone. And on the way out, McNeil abased himself before his colleagues:

All this comes from a Daily Beast report that alleged:

After the excursion ended, according to multiple parents of students on the trip who spoke with The Daily Beast along with documents shared with the Times and reviewed by the Beast, many participants relayed a series of troubling accusations to the paper: McNeil repeatedly made racist and sexist remarks throughout the trip including, according to two complaints, using the “n-word.”

A photo from the trip showed that at least 26 students participated. Of that group, at least six students or their parents told the tour company that partnered with the Times that McNeil used racially insensitive or outright racist language while accompanying the participants on the trip, which according to the Times website typically costs nearly $5,500. Two students specifically alleged that the science reporter used the “n-word” and suggested he did not believe in the concept of white privilege; three other participants alleged that McNeil made racist comments and used stereotypes about Black teenagers.

McNeil conceded in his parting statement that he used the N-word, and explained the context. I think he’s wrong: I think that context is forgivable, if still poor judgment. If he doesn’t believe in the concept of white privilege, so what? One is not allowed to dissent from an ideological idea? As to using “stereotypes about Black teenagers,” what does that even mean?

From the Beast’s latest report:

McNeil’s behavior on the trip had been hotly debated among Times staffers, including some who took part in a meeting with executive editor Dean Baquet and assistant managing editor Carolyn Ryan last Friday. At that meeting, Pulitzer Prize-winner Nikole Hannah-Jones said she planned on calling the parents and students on the trip to determine what McNeil had said and in what context, according to people familiar with the situation.

Ah, so Nikole Hannah-Jones is now in the position of determining who does and does not get to stay at the paper. Useful to get that learned.

Remember Bari Weiss’s resignation letter? Remember this part?:

Twitter is not on the masthead of The New York Times. But Twitter has become its ultimate editor. As the ethics and mores of that platform have become those of the paper, the paper itself has increasingly become a kind of performance space. Stories are chosen and told in a way to satisfy the narrowest of audiences, rather than to allow a curious public to read about the world and then draw their own conclusions. I was always taught that journalists were charged with writing the first rough draft of history. Now, history itself is one more ephemeral thing molded to fit the needs of a predetermined narrative.

My own forays into Wrongthink have made me the subject of constant bullying by colleagues who disagree with my views. They have called me a Nazi and a racist; I have learned to brush off comments about how I’m “writing about the Jews again.” Several colleagues perceived to be friendly with me were badgered by coworkers. My work and my character are openly demeaned on company-wide Slack channels where masthead editors regularly weigh in. There, some coworkers insist I need to be rooted out if this company is to be a truly “inclusive” one, while others post ax emojis next to my name. Still other New York Times employees publicly smear me as a liar and a bigot on Twitter with no fear that harassing me will be met with appropriate action. They never are.

There are terms for all of this: unlawful discrimination, hostile work environment, and constructive discharge. I’m no legal expert. But I know that this is wrong.

I do not understand how you have allowed this kind of behavior to go on inside your company in full view of the paper’s entire staff and the public. And I certainly can’t square how you and other Times leaders have stood by while simultaneously praising me in private for my courage. Showing up for work as a centrist at an American newspaper should not require bravery.

If Weiss is telling the truth — and I believe her — then she was expected to put up with harassment like that from the Wokesters inside the Times, but they cut loose one of their most valuable and distinguished reporters for ill-advised (but not hatefully intended) comments made on a field trip. Who the hell would want to work at that paper? Nearly half a century of work for the Times, some of it award-winning, and being its lead reporter on one of the most important stories of the century, counted for nothing when the woke mob demanded his scalp.

Arendt said that in a pre-totalitarian society, loyalty is more important than expertise. Donald Trump famously prized loyalty from his subordinates above anything else, and said so at least once. But the Times, and institutions like it, now value loyalty to this harsh and unforgiving new ideology above expertise, and even above loyalty to the company itself.

You watch: the Times is okay for now, because it’s got a deep bench. But what happens when it starts driving other talented journalists out because they feel they can no longer work under conditions in which any little thing they might say could attract the attention of the mob, and Nikole Hannah-Jones gets to go to Dean Baquet’s office to threaten him about the journalist? If you don’t think things like this affect the kinds of stories that get proposed and written at the Times, you don’t know how newsrooms work. You might think that the impact of this will be for Times reporters in the future not to use the N-word on field trips with students. Well, yes, that is one result, and a good one. But the deeper fallout is that it reveals no one is safe from cancel culture at that newspaper, not even one of its most valuable reporter assets, not even a reporter who has loyally served there for decades, and not even if he apologizes for having said a word.

I am glad that none of my children want to follow their father’s footsteps into journalism. It is a rotten field, ruled by Jacobins, prisspots, overgrown children and zealots. Some of the most interesting journalists I’ve known in my career have been deeply flawed human beings. But they knew how to find a story, and they knew how to tell a story, and they had humanity. These are not commonly distributed gifts. If they failed in some minor way, there would be forgiveness for them, because people gave others grace then, especially if they were a valuable member of the team. There would be no place for men and women like this in what American journalism has become.

A friend asked the other day: why not start a magazine in which the most interesting writers — he mentioned Andrew Sullivan, Glenn Greenwald, Matt Taibbi, and Bari Weiss, but there are many others — who cannot work in contemporary newsrooms because they won’t kowtow to wokeness, write columns? Why not create a magazine, he said, that celebrates writers who are free-thinking, rough around the edges at times, but always interesting?

Good question. Greenwald, Taibbi, and Sullivan are all making a small fortune now on Substack, but if I were a billionaire, I would start that magazine, and screw the quivering mandarins of the journalism industry.

The Times sealed its fate when it committed itself to The 1619 Project — an ideological lie. Of course they’re going to send Donald McNeil packing when he offends Nikole Hannah-Jones and her newsroom mob, and given him no chance for redemption. McNeil won’t be the last one, either (I’m only sorry he didn’t go out with his head held high). This Twilight Zone episode surely captures what it’s like to work at the Times now:

UPDATE:

2/ "We do not tolerate racist language regardless of intent"

This suggests that "impact, not intent," an idea so morally broken and reactionary I've only associated it with 20-year-old Tumblr weirdos in the past, now holds sway at the New York Times.https://t.co/nCNbJ7aXAs

— Jesse Singal (@jessesingal) February 5, 2021

The NYT seems to have fired a man for stating the n-word in a non-derogatory context. This is a word that you can search the NYT archives for right now and find used frequently and recently. https://t.co/m7c8UPDpF7

— Katie Herzog (@kittypurrzog) February 5, 2021

So his intent was to help a student on a study abroad trip and he's getting fired from his job two years later because he, at 65, mistakenly thought the taboo was uttering the word as a slur–as it was for much of his life–rather than uttering it at all? https://t.co/owYa7FbEqh

— Conor Friedersdorf (@conor64) February 5, 2021

If you are an intelligent, curious, independent-thinking young person, think hard before choosing journalism as a career — or at least steer very clear of The New York Times. I wish I could say that the disease inside the Times was confined there, but it’s not. If it weren’t, the Washington Post or other top papers would be sending McNeil a contract right now.

UPDATE.2: Wes Yang understands the deeper meaning of this destructive totalitarian ideology:

One week ago, Dean Baquet thought intentions mattered

The ideological succession causes ideas at the foundation of our criminal justice system and moral psychology to evanesce upon contact with the first open letter alleging harm pic.twitter.com/JghUL3irGe

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) February 6, 2021

And Claire Lehmann, editor in chief of Quillette, shows why she’s the right woman in the right job:

One week ago, Dean Baquet thought intentions mattered

The ideological succession causes ideas at the foundation of our criminal justice system and moral psychology to evanesce upon contact with the first open letter alleging harm pic.twitter.com/JghUL3irGe

— Wesley Yang (@wesyang) February 6, 2021

The post Times Pushes Don McN-Word Out appeared first on The American Conservative.

How To Deal With The QAnon Qrazies?

Look at this:

Ben Collins is right. These people are dangerous. In 2017, a 28-year-old man pled guilty to invading a DC pizza parlor and firing three rounds from his AR-15 in response to his belief that the pizza parlor was at the center of a DC Democratic elite pedophile conspiracy. The QAnon cult did not exist at that time, but it absorbed the pizza conspiracy into itself.

We have just been through days of Capitol Hill drama over the status of Marjorie Taylor Green, a QAnon supporter who got herself elected to Congress. She is an Evangelical Christian, and promotes herself publicly as a Christian leader:

My message to Christians in this country. pic.twitter.com/VH6a18HkPR

— Marjorie Taylor Greene (@mtgreenee) February 5, 2021

Three years ago, she wrote on social media that California wildfires may be caused by Jewish-owned space lasers. No, really, she did. 

This week, the House, in a party line vote, kicked Greene off committees to punish her for her most outrageous statements, including twice endorsing the assassination of House Speaker Nancy Pelosi. (See that, and her other crackpot statements, here.) I agree with the House GOP that it sets a dangerous precedent for the party controlling the House to bar certain lawmakers from the opposition from holding committee assignments, but come on, the Republicans ought to have done this themselves. Greene gave a speech to House Republicans kinda sorta backing off from QAnon. If she’s serious, that’s great; she should have the chance to restore her reputation, but she needs to use her first term in Congress to show that she means it.

It is deeply worrying, though, that the Republican Party can’t bring itself to stand unambiguously against QAnon and its adjacent conspiracies. This poison cannot be mainstreamed into American political life. NPR interviewed a guy named Travis View, a podcaster who tracks QAnon and other conspiracy theories. Excerpt:

“They come to their conclusion first,” View says. “They decide what makes them feel best and then they construct conspiracy theories that help them convince themselves why that’s true.”

“It’s really kind of like an improvisational reality building,” he continues. “They don’t look to the outside world to try and figure out what is true and what is not, and as a consequence, sometimes have to face harsh truths such as the electoral victory of Joe Biden.

Last year, QAnon spread into the mainstream. As president, Trump repeatedly retweeted accounts tied to QAnon. Newly elected Republican Reps. Marjorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert have spoken openly in support of QAnon.

A significant number of Americans say they believe in QAnon conspiracy theories, even after the election. A December NPR/Ipsos poll found that 17% of adults believe that “a group of Satan-worshipping elites who run a child sex ring are trying to control our politics and media” — a foundational falsehood for the QAnon community — while 37% said they didn’t know whether the baseless allegation was true or not.

Try to wrap your mind around that: over half of Americans believe that the Satanic cabal story is either true, or could be true. 

This ought to set off alarms! As I write in Live Not By Lies, a nation prepares itself for totalitarianism by giving itself over to lies that make you feel good. Hannah Arendt wrote that in pre-totalitarian Germany and Russia, people hated the ruling elites so much that they were willing to believe any crazy thing for the sake of striking back at the people they believed oppressed them. When hating your enemies matters more than standing in truth, you have made a deal with the devil. In my book, I quote the memoir of Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, in which the author reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause:

It is not hard for a totalitarian regime to keep people ignorant. Once you relinquish your freedom for the sake of “understood necessity,” for Party discipline, for conformity with the regime, for the greatness and glory of the Fatherland, or for any of the substitutes that are so convincingly offered, you cede your claim to the truth. Slowly, drop by drop, your life begins to ooze away just as surely as if you had slashed your wrists; you have voluntarily condemned yourself to helplessness.

If the Republican Party leadership — and the GOP followership — really believe that it’s important to tolerate QAnon devotees in their ranks because the Right has to stand united against the Left, they condemn themselves to helplessness when this QAnon monster devours the party.

Ben Collins shows that QAnon are not simply weirdos, but are indulging in bloodlust. Why is it so hard for Republicans to repudiate them, and everything they stand for? What are they going to do if, God forbid, one of these lunatics actually kills somebody?

Elizabeth Neumann, a former top Trump Administration Homeland Security official who resigned in April 2020, tells Politico that the church — she’s speaking of Evangelicalism, as an Evangelical — has to do a much better job of teaching and discipling its members, far too many of whom are susceptible to QAnon and related conspiracies. Excerpt:

The authoritarian, fundamentalist nature of certain evangelical strands is a prominent theme in the places where you see the most ardent Trump supporters or the QAnon believers, because they’ve been told: “You don’t need to study [scripture]. We’re giving you the answer.” Then, when Rev. Robert Jeffress [a prominent conservative Baptist pastor in Dallas] says you’ve got to support Donald Trump, and makes some argument that sounds “churchy,” people go, “Well, I don’t like Trump’s language, but OK, that’s the right thing.” It creates people who are not critical thinkers. They’re not necessarily reading scripture for themselves. Or if they are, they’re reading it through the lens of one pastor, and they’re not necessarily open to hearing outside perspectives on what the text might say. It creates groupthink.

Another factor is Christian nationalism. That’s a huge theme throughout evangelical Christendom. It’s subtle: Like, you had the Christian flag and the American flag at the front of the church, and if you went to a Christian school, you pledged allegiance to the Christian flag and the American flag. There was this merger that was always there when I was growing up. And it was really there for the generation ahead of me, in the ’50s and ’60s. Some people interpreted it as: Love of country and love of our faith are the same thing. And for others, there’s an actual explicit theology.

There was this whole movement in the ’90s and 2000s among conservatives to explain how amazing [America’s] founding was: Our founding was inspired by God, and there’s no explanation for how we won the Revolutionary War except God, and, by the way, did you know that the founders made this covenant with God? It’s American exceptionalism but goes beyond that. It says that we are the next version of Israel from the Old Testament, that we are God’s chosen nation, and that is a special covenant — a two-way agreement with God. We can’t break it, and if we do, what happened to Israel will happen to us: We will be overrun by whatever the next Babylon is, taken into captivity, and He will remove His blessing from us.

What [threatens] that covenant? The moment we started taking prayer out of [public] schools and allowing various changes in our culture — [the legalization of] abortion is one of those moments; gay marriage is another. They see it in cataclysmic terms: This is the moment, and God’s going to judge us. They view the last 50 years of moral decline as us breaking our covenant, and that because of that, God’s going to remove His blessing. When you paint it in existential terms like that, a lot of people feel justified to carry out acts of violence in the name of their faith.

The elections in 2016 and 2020 were a fight in existential terms for believers of this teaching — meaning, if we allow Hillary Clinton or Joe Biden to be president, they are going to put the nail in the coffin [of the covenant], and the next thing we’re going to see is that Christianity is going to be outlawed, pastors will not be able to teach the Bible and Christians will become persecuted.

Now, here’s the caveat: Some of that fear is not out of thin air. There is a real “cancel culture,” where you see a mob mentality swarm on somebody who holds a biblically based viewpoint on, say, gay marriage, and you see someone forced out of a position or lose sponsorships or advertising. But they follow that to what they think is a logical conclusion — that eventually, pastors will not be able to preach against homosexuality or abortion, and if [they do], they’re going to end up arrested and unable to preach. I’ve heard that argument made multiple times over the last 10 years. The irrationality is the idea that there are no protections, that the courts wouldn’t step in and say, “No, the First Amendment applies to Christians as well.”

It tries to assert that they are losing power and must regain that power by any means necessary — which is why you can justify voting for Trump, so that we can, for God’s purposes, maintain this Christian nation. But that’s nowhere in scripture. Scripture, when it talks about what “Israel” is in the New Testament, it explains that it’s the church — which is not owned by any one nation; it’s a global church. And even if somehow you wanted to say that the American church is what [scripture is] referencing, [the Bible] tells us [to do] the exact opposite of what they’re talking about. We are told not to seek power. We’re told to be humble. We’re told to turn the other cheek. Jesus, in confronting Caesar’s representative at his trial, says, “My kingdom is not of this world.” “My fight is not here,” basically. Our purpose as believers is to be salt and light; it’s not to force everybody else to hold our beliefs.

To fix that, you really have to go back to scripture. You can’t just be like, “Christian nationalism is wrong.” You have to go back to what the Bible says, versus what you were taught as an American Christian, where it was so interwoven. It took me a while to even discover it. Once somebody pointed it out, [I was] like, “Oh, my gosh. I was taught that, and you’re right, that’s not correct.”

But it’s a very hard thing for people to [address], because it requires acknowledging that how you were raised or the people that you trusted either intentionally lied to you or were just wrong. It’s hard. It takes humility to go there. It’s a hard thing for people to recognize and escape from. But sadly, it’s a security issue that we have to address, because it has led to this.

Well, I probably have less faith in the First Amendment than Neumann does, but she’s generally correct here. As a non-Evangelical, I am often startled by how tightly some conservative Evangelicals tie the Kingdom of God to the USA. Reading Neumann’s interview brought to mind how shocked I was back in the mid-1980s to drive by a Southern Baptist church here in Baton Rouge, and to see a howitzer placed on the front lawn, with the church sign advertising an upcoming patriotic talk by Lt. Col. Oliver North, of the Iran-Contra scandal. For the members of this congregation, American military aggression and conservative politics were inextricable from the Gospel.

I defer to my Evangelical readers to educate us on this matter. I don’t believe, though, that QAnon is just an Evangelical thing at all. The first time I heard about it from someone who believed it, the QAnon guy was Orthodox. There is nothing particular about Orthodox Christianity (or Catholicism) that would predispose someone to believing in QAnon, but I can certainly see how a theologically-infused hypernationalism would leave one open to radical conspiracies. Certainly the idea that the United States of America is analogous to Biblical Israel in terms of having a special covenant with God — something that does not exist in Catholicism or Orthodoxy — would make ordinary politics have apocalyptic ramifications.

Anyway, back to the Politico interview with Neumann:

It sounds like you’re describing a reality for some evangelical Christians where their church is based more in culture than scripture — and that this makes them more susceptible to things like QAnon?

Oh, absolutely. Here’s the thing, and I will do my best to explain it from a secular perspective: There’s text in the New Testament where the Apostle Paul is admonishing a church he helped establish: “You should be mature adults now in your faith, but I’m still having to feed you with milk.” He’s basically saying, you should be 18, but you’re still nursing, and we need you to get it together.

There was a big movement in the ’90s called Seeker-Friendly Churches. Willow Creek [one of the most prominent of these churches] did a self-assessment about 10 or 15 years ago, and one of the things that they found is while they had converted people to Christians, there was a lack of growth in their faith. They were not learning the scriptures. They were not engaged in community. They were not discipling anybody. And [Willow Creek’s] assessment was: We failed. We baptized some people, but they’re not actually maturing.

One of my questions is: Are we seeing in the last four years one of the consequences of that failure? They didn’t mature [in their faith], and they’re very easily led astray by what scripture calls “false teachers.” My thesis here is that if we had a more scripturally based set of believers in this country — if everybody who calls themselves a “Christian” had actually read through, I don’t know, 80 percent of the Bible — they would not have been so easily deceived.

Read it all. 

I think she is spot on there, and not just about QAnon. There are other contemporary ideas and ideologies that too many Christians fall for because their churches have done such a poor job of discipling them. From The Benedict Option, this about the work of sociologist of religion Christian Smith:

As bleak as Christian Smith’s 2005 findings were, his follow-up research, a third installment of which was published in 2011, was even grimmer. Surveying the moral beliefs of 18-to-23-year-olds, Smith and his colleagues found that only 40 percent of young Christians surveyed said that their personal moral beliefs were grounded in the Bible or some other religious sensibility. Unfortunately, it’s unlikely that the beliefs of even these faithful are biblically coherent. Many of these “Christians” are actually committed moral individualists who neither know nor practice a coherent Bible-based morality.

An astonishing 61 percent of the emerging adults had no moral problem at all with materialism and consumerism. An added 30 percent expressed some qualms but figured it was not worth worrying about. In this view, say Smith and his team, “all that society is, apparently, is a collection of autonomous individuals out to enjoy life.”

To be clear, the 91 percent are not all self-identified Christians, but if only 40 percent of the Christians surveyed say their moral beliefs are grounded in the Bible or religion, it’s fair to say that the 91 percent number includes a huge number of 18-to-23-year-old Christians.

Those figures come from Smith’s 2011 book Lost In Transition. Here’s a segment from that section:

Marjorie Taylor Greene is a member of North Point Community Church, pastored by Andy Stanley. It is one of the biggest megachurches in America. It’s not fair to hold a pastor or a church responsible for everything said by one of its members, but it does call into question what kind of teaching and discipleship Marjorie Taylor Greene received in that church. I’m sure it’s not a QAnon church by any stretch, but is the kind of Christianity she received there the sort that would have given her some resilience against conspiracy theory? I’m not just picking on that church. I have heard from Orthodox friends telling me about QAnon in their own congregations. If our churches — Protestant, Catholic, Orthodox, whatever — are not teaching clearly, consistently, and strongly, in a countercultural way, then we should not be surprised when some of our people give themselves over to powerful ideologies, and try to incorporate them into Christianity.

After all, when Nazism came to the Blessed Franz Jägerstätter’s Austrian Alpine village, most everybody there attended Catholic mass, but the Jägerstätter family was the only one that resisted.

If we do not push back hard against extremist ideologies, we will find ourselves having to fight against totalitarianism. The Left has its Woke ideology, which is nuts, and has conquered many liberal institutions. The Right’s QAnon ideology is even crazier, but thankfully not as powerful. Still, we are called to live not by lies, period — not just progressive lies. The “no enemies to the Left” concept is destroying important institutions. As my colleague Curt Mills alludes to in a piece today, there is a chance that Rep. Greene’s enemies will make a martyr of her, and she will grow stronger. Still, the GOP cannot withstand adopting a “no enemies to the Right” mentality concerning QAnon.

UPDATE: Listen to this CSPAN qaller:

"We need women like [Marjorie Taylor-Greene] in there, otherwise these Democrats are gonna keep eating babies and cutting the faces off of them."https://t.co/zCxmLtcLN9 pic.twitter.com/LNAqlLSbV2

— Ben Collins (@oneunderscore__) February 4, 2021

UPDATE.2: News about Greene’s far-right militia campaign bodyguards:

The leader of a private paramilitary group that provided security for Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene said he has formed alliances with other far-right groups to advocate for Georgia’s secession from the union, following the arrests of participants in the Jan. 6 insurrection at the U.S. Capitol.

“The way patriots are now being hunted down and arrested by fellow men and women who have taken the same oath has disheartened any faith I had in the redemption or reformation of the USA as one entity,” Justin Thayer, head of the Georgia III% Martyrs, said in a text exchange with The Atlanta Journal-Constitution this week.

Thayer said the Martyrs have allied themselves with fellow “Three Percenter” militia the American Brotherhood of Patriots and American Patriots USA (APUSA), a north Georgia group headed by Chester Doles, a Dahlonega resident who belonged to various racist and neo-Nazi hate groups before forming the new group in 2019. The combined groups will advocate for Georgia’s secession from the union through an amendment to the U.S. Constitution or through “the collapse of the American experiment,” Thayer said.

“For the last 150 years, the Imperial Yankee culture of the northeast has been molding Georgia — and the South in general — into its ‘perfect’ image,” he said.

The post How To Deal With The QAnon Qrazies? appeared first on The American Conservative.

The N-Word & Wokeness In Power

We have two stories about the N-word making news this week.

The first has to do with a young country music star, Morgan Wallen, who has been dropped by his record label and overall cancelled because someone filmed him coming home apparently drunk after a night on the town, using the n-word to say goodbye to his friends. They were loaded and acting up; a neighbor recorded them, and leaked it to TMZ. You can watch and listen here. From TMZ:

The country star and a group of buddies had just spent a night out in Nashville. When they arrived at Morgan’s home at around midnight, they were extremely loud … honking horns and talking loudly … loud enough to piss off neighbors. One of the neighbors began recording the antics.

As Morgan appears to stumble toward his house, he tells someone to watch over a guy in his group. He says … “take care of this “p****-ass mother******” — and then goes on to say, “take care of this p****-ass n*****” … before finally heading in.

He apologized publicly for what he said, and he should have done. But Wokeness knows no mercy. From The Ringer:

The industry blowback to Wallen has been swift and severe. Big Loud, his record label and management company, announced that it had suspended his recording contract indefinitely. The radio conglomerates iHeartMedia and Entercom both pulled his songs from the airwaves in more than 150 stations, alongside fellow major outlets Cumulus and SiriusXM; cable-TV powerhouse CMT pulled his videos from all platforms, and the Academy of Country Music announced that it would “halt Morgan Wallen’s potential involvement and eligibility” in the ACM Awards scheduled for April. Spotify (which owns The Ringer) and Apple Music both pulled Wallen’s music from playlists, an especially significant blow given that much of his recent chart dominance owed to his popularity on streaming sites, a rarity within a county ecosystem still largely driven by CD sales and ticket bundles. If not for the pandemic, Wallen would very likely be headlining a blockbuster arena tour right now, and that tour would be in grave peril.

I know next to nothing about country music, but I have learned this morning that Wallen is the biggest new country music star on the scene right now. He is a 27 year old mullet-wearing white dude from Tennessee, the son of a Baptist pastor,  who has suddenly found superstardom. He got loaded and acted a fool, saying something ugly and wrong. He apologized for it. But now the Woke, and woke capitalists, are trying to ruin his career.Yeah, that’s the way to teach this young white man the error of his ways: don’t correct him and lift him up out of his sorrow and repentance, with grace, but destroy him for good.

I listened to some of Wallen’s music this morning. He’s really talented. He also got arrested for drunk and disorderly conduct last year outside a Nashville bar. He might have a drinking problem. I know, it’s shocking: a music star who drinks too much and gets rowdy, and gets ugly. Never heard of that before. This could be an opportunity for real repentance, redemption and restoration for that troubled young man, but Wokeness is not going to allow it.

He said an ugly word. That’s it. He hit no one, physically hurt no one, abused no one. It’s insane, the standards elites impose for what is beyond the pale. The super-successful Florida rapper XXXTentacion, who was murdered in 2018, cultivated an outlaw image with one violent act after another, including beating a pregnant girlfriend (read his Wikipedia; this guy was very bad news). From Wikipedia:

On October 23, 2018, Pitchfork released secretly recorded audio of 18-year old Onfroy talking with acquaintances around the time of his October 8, 2016, arrest. Pitchfork claimed that in the recording, he had allegedly confessed to domestic violence, and had described an incident in which he stabbed nine people. The tape was considered a confession by the prosecution and defense. An extended version of the audio later released included moments after when Onfroy clarified in regards to his ex-girlfriend, “I didn’t touch her. I forgave her.” One especially fraught conversation about Onfroy’s ex-girlfriend took place on the afternoon of October 26, 2016 when he told a woman, “I already got what I wanted, I already bashed her face—her face on the internet, bruh, I done made her look bad on the internet, bruh.” Later that day, an audio clip from the call was posted on Instagram of Onfroy saying he “bashed her face” without the hurried clarification.

That was just a single awful thing he did, out of many! Did XXXTentacion get cancelled? Of course he didn’t — he’s black, and the music industry and the media hold black artists to different standards. If he had not been permanently cancelled by the thief who shot him, this scumbag would have continued on with his career.

To be clear, I see no reason why Morgan Wallen shouldn’t suffer some consequences for what he said. But cancellation? Why is being drunk and using the N-word a career-killer for a white country artist, but black hip hop artists can get away with actual violence without hurting their careers? Fans of Wallen seem to be rallying to his side. Billboard reports that though his radio play has collapsed, sales of his albums are skyrocketing.

Good. Who made these wokescolds gatekeepers to artistic talent? What drunk-ass Morgan Wallen said was awful, and he deserved to apologize for it, and get his life in order. But the music industry and the media are trying to break a butterfly on a wheel here, and I’m glad fans are pushing back.

The other incident is going on at, where else, The New York Times, where one of the paper’s stars, the science reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr., is facing an internal pogrom over having used the N-word in a discussion about racial prejudice. The Washington Post reports:

Tempers are once again flaring between staff and management at the New York Times, this time over the publication’s handling of inappropriate comments allegedly made by high-profile science reporter Donald G. McNeil, Jr. during a trip to Peru for high school students in 2019.

In response to a letter from staffers “outraged” because they believe the paper didn’t take the McNeil incident seriously enough, top managers replied late Wednesday that they “largely agree” with staff sentiment and promised to “examine the way we manage behavioral problems among members of the staff,” according to an email obtained by The Washington Post.

“We are determined to learn the right lessons from this incident,” they wrote. “You will see results.”

Last week, following a damning report in the Daily Beast, the Times acknowledged that McNeil “had used bad judgment by repeating a racist slur in the context of a conversation about racist language” during the trip, on which he served as an expert and that managers had investigated and disciplined the writer.

Executive editor Dean Baquet said that he had determined that McNeil’s intentions were not “hateful or malicious” and that the reporter should be “given another chance.”

But that wasn’t enough for more than 150 staffers, who wrote to management on Wednesday saying they “feel disrespected” by McNeil’s actions. “The company has a responsibility to take that experience seriously,” they wrote. They said they want a further investigation of what happened and an apology from McNeil.

The Daily Beast, in reporting on the controversy:

In a note to staff following last week’s article, Baquet said that upon hearing the complaints, he was outraged and initially intended to fire McNeil. But while the top editor acknowledged that the award-winning science reporter had made offensive comments, he said that an investigation by the paper found the reporter did not act in a hateful manner.

“I authorized an investigation and concluded his remarks were offensive and that he showed extremely poor judgment, but it did not appear to me that his intentions were hateful or malicious,” Baquet wrote.

But the company’s conclusion about McNeil’s intent was “irrelevant,” the irate staffers wrote in the letter, adding that the paper’s own harassment training “makes clear that what matters is how an act makes the victims feel; Mr. McNeil’s victims weren’t shy about decrying his conduct on the trip.”

Signees called on the paper to study how racial biases affect pitches, editing, and sourcing, and reiterated a commitment to the paper’s existing non-discrimination and anti-harassment policies.

The letter also called on the Times to reinvestigate the 2019 trip as well as “any newly surfaced complaints,” noting that in the days since The Daily Beast’s article, current and former staffers have also said that McNeil had shown “bias against people of color in his work and in interactions with colleagues over a period of years.”

“Our community is outraged and in pain,” the signees wrote. “Despite The Times’s seeming commitment to diversity and inclusion, we have given a prominent platform—a critical beat covering a pandemic disproportionately affecting people of color—to someone who chose to use language that is offensive and unacceptable by any newsroom’s standards. He did so while acting as a representative for The Times, in front of high school students.”

We still don’t know precisely what McNeil said. If Baquet, who is black, is satisfied that McNeil did not intend to be hateful, and imposed disciplinary actions on him for his poor judgment, then that should be the end of it. It’s hard to imagine how any white person, even one in his late sixties, can fail to recognize that using the N-word is a bad idea. But last year, a white UCLA instructor was investigated by the university for using the N-word while reading aloud from Martin Luther King’s “Letter From A Birmingham Jail,” and for showing a documentary about the horrors of lynching, in which the narrator used the word.

King’s “Letter” is one of the greatest and most heroic documents in American history. Here is the offending passage:

We have waited for more than 340 years for our constitutional and God given rights. The nations of Asia and Africa are moving with jetlike speed toward gaining political independence, but we still creep at horse and buggy pace toward gaining a cup of coffee at a lunch counter. Perhaps it is easy for those who have never felt the stinging darts of segregation to say, “Wait.” But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and brothers at whim; when you have seen hate filled policemen curse, kick and even kill your black brothers and sisters; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six year old daughter why she can’t go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and see tears welling up in her eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see ominous clouds of inferiority beginning to form in her little mental sky, and see her beginning to distort her personality by developing an unconscious bitterness toward white people; when you have to concoct an answer for a five year old son who is asking: “Daddy, why do white people treat colored people so mean?”; when you take a cross county drive and find it necessary to sleep night after night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading “white” and “colored”; when your first name becomes “nigger,” your middle name becomes “boy” (however old you are) and your last name becomes “John,” and your wife and mother are never given the respected title “Mrs.”; when you are harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance, never quite knowing what to expect next, and are plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of “nobodiness”–then you will understand why we find it difficult to wait. There comes a time when the cup of endurance runs over, and men are no longer willing to be plunged into the abyss of despair. I hope, sirs, you can understand our legitimate and unavoidable impatience. You express a great deal of anxiety over our willingness to break laws. This is certainly a legitimate concern. Since we so diligently urge people to obey the Supreme Court’s decision of 1954 outlawing segregation in the public schools, at first glance it may seem rather paradoxical for us consciously to break laws. One may well ask: “How can you advocate breaking some laws and obeying others?” The answer lies in the fact that there are two types of laws: just and unjust. I would be the first to advocate obeying just laws. One has not only a legal but a moral responsibility to obey just laws. Conversely, one has a moral responsibility to disobey unjust laws. I would agree with St. Augustine that “an unjust law is no law at all.”

The ugliness of that word is necessary here, because it highlights how dehumanizing white supremacy was. You can see in King’s usage why it was so wrong for someone like Morgan Wallen to use that word. But to trash a white professor for quoting Martin Luther King?! It’s insane.

Again, we don’t know specifically the context in which McNeil used the word, but it is almost always a bad idea to use it while white. But the fact that Baquet intended to fire him, but relented after hearing his side of the story, indicates that context really mattered here.

None of that matters to the woke mob inside the Times. They are “outraged and in pain,” and underscore in their complaint that context doesn’t matter — what matters is how others felt, and feel about what the white journalist said.

For this, the Times leadership faces a call to cast aside one of the paper’s most distinguished science journalists, its top Covid expert, to satisfy the passions of the mob. If Baquet and Sulzberger do this, it will be yet another damning capitulation to Wokeness.

We had been living in a culture that, however poorly, attempted to live by a fundamentally Christian virtue of mercy. We know that everybody is susceptible to sin. We used to train ourselves to treat others as we would like to be treated — and that includes offering mercy and forgiveness to wrongdoers who are truly repentant, because we would want the same for ourselves. Any person with the slightest sense of moral awareness understands that the day is likely to come for them when they will have done a bad thing, and will need the mercy of others. There’s a shocking scene in the Apple TV comedy Ted Lasso in which a major character apologizes to sweet, corny Ted for having done him very wrong. He forgives this person unreservedly, explaining without any special flourish that he has suffered too, and he knows that when you’re in pain, you can do foolish things.

It’s shocking, because it is so wise and, well, Christian, even though faith is not part of the show. The joke is that Ted is a cheerful, Ned Flanders-like fool from the American Midwest who comes to England to coach a soccer team, and is set upon by cynical Brits — yet somehow keeps defeating them at their own game. Ted does this because of his Teflon naivete and inherent sweetness. His deepest motivation is to see others succeed. If he can help others be better by withstanding their contempt, and not letting it defeat him, and by offering forgiveness when his enemies lay prostrate at his feet, he’s going to do it, and he’s not even going to pat himself on the back for it. Ted figures that this is what decent people do.

Who actually wins if Morgan Wallen and Donald G. McNeil, Jr., go down here? Will America be a less racist place, one where people are reconciled, and live in respect for each other? Or will the merciless standards — including double standards — of the Woke drive us closer to violent conflict?

 

 

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Christopher Lasch & The Revolting Elites

Law & Liberty asked me to write a reflection on Christopher Lasch’s prophetic 1996 book The Revolt Of The Elites. Excerpts from my essay:

What did Lasch see coming?

His most important insight was the widening gulf between economic and cultural elites and the mainstream of American life, whose moral codes and traditions they hold in contempt. The book’s title refers to the Spanish philosopher Jose Ortega y Gasset’s The Revolt of the Masses, a 1930 volume analyzing the rise of mass democracy, and what he regarded as the decadence of the new personality type coming to dominate society. Ortega was no aristocrat; in fact, he was a leader among Spanish republicans. But he was also an intellectual who feared that mass man would create a society in which all cultural and ideational hierarchies would be replaced by mere appetite. “Barbarism is the absence of standards to which appeal can be made,” wrote Ortega.

Lasch inverted Ortega’s thesis, accusing American elites of rebelling against standards, and thus debilitating culture. Lasch’s targets were “upper middle class liberals” who, in his view, better exemplified the self-satisfaction, incuriosity, “radical ingratitude,” and hatred for anything not itself that Ortega found in mass man.

Lasch wrote the essays in Revolt near the beginning of the modern era of globalization, which can be dated to the end of the Cold War in 1989, the invention of the World Wide Web in 1991, and China’s growing presence as a global economic behemoth. The Clinton Administration, coming to power in 1992, made the Democratic Party’s peace with Reagan-era trade and economic liberalization. At the time, growing economic inequality troubled Lasch, who wrote, “People in the upper 20 percent of the income structure now control half the country’s wealth.”

Those were the days! According to a 2017 analysis by the Washington Post, the top 20 percent of Americans now control 90 percent of the country’s wealth. Both the decline of the working class thanks to post-1980s deindustrialization and the hollowing out of the middle class have been well documented.

So has the widening economic and moral chasm between what Charles Murray called the “New Upper Class” and the “New Lower Class.” The divide is not merely economic, but cultural. Lasch saw elites segregating themselves and their progeny into networks and institutions separate from the broader public. Unlike elites in past eras of US history, today’s elites feel less obligation to provide for the commonweal. Rather, they have seceded—socially, intellectually, and often into coastal liberal enclaves—from a country they do not understand and do not wish to understand, regarding it as a land of backward people “at once absurd and vaguely menacing.” Says Lasch, of these elites, “It is a question whether they think of themselves as Americans at all.” This has become so pronounced in the past quarter-century that it’s hard to feel the same sense of urgency Lasch brought to his discussion.

Elite discourse today—including media discourse—downplays or ignore class disparities, focusing instead on the advancement of racial and sexual minorities, and women. This is not new. In some of his book’s strongest passages, Lasch condemned intellectuals’ “eagerness to drag every conversation back to race,” and said that these partisans of “ideological fanaticism” behave as if “democracy can mean only one thing: the defense of what they call cultural diversity.” Our pluralist democracy, he says, cannot survive this “new tribalism.”

Get this:

In Lasch’s view, American elites have come to loathe their fellow Americans who do not share their rarefied progressive morality. What can any decent man (or woman, or Genderqueer-American) owe to a country and a people who are a stinking mass of bigotry? Revolt can be read as a defense of the white working-class Americans that would later come to be called “deplorables.” But it is also a defense of minorities, who, in Lasch’s view, are victimized by managerial elites in the name of kindness.

“Compassion has become the human face of contempt,” Lasch writes, denouncing the “cult of victimhood” as poisoning politics. Therapeutic-minded liberals think that imposing standards on minorities is unjust, but, says Lasch, “double standards mean second-class citizenship.”

He saw it all coming twenty-five years ago.

Lasch was a man of the Left, and a Midwesterner by birth. He believed that a kind of prairie populism based on solidarity was achievable in America. In the essay, I explain what he meant by that. But:

Lasch was right. Lasch is right. But I have bad news. In the Year of Our Lord 2021, Lasch’s vision sounds utterly utopian. My re-reading of Revolt dismayed me, because it compelled me to face how very long this process has been going on (it was interesting to see the passages I marked up in my copy 25 years ago), and how far beyond saving ourselves we have traveled over the last quarter century. The ship has sailed over the horizon, I fear, and can no longer see the shore. Here’s why.

Lasch’s vision does not work without virtue—which is to say, a shared sense of the common good, and a universal recognition that there are sound principles that limit individual will and desire for the sake of the whole. Yet a core Laschian theme is that Americans will not recognize natural limits. Jimmy Carter read Lasch’s A Culture of Narcissism, and invited him to the White House to talk about it. The result was Carter’s infamous “malaise” speech, which urged the nation to recognize limits, and to learn to live more modestly. If you have never read it, or haven’t read it in a long time, you should; it’s a shockingly conservative piece of oratory. But it bombed. Americans do not like being told that they can’t have what they want.

The examples are legion, but consider this one, which just flopped across my social-media transom. The New England Journal of Medicine published a paper in mid-December arguing that sex designations should be removed from birth certificates, as they discriminate against the genderfluid. The fact that this proposal is considered normative by editors of one of the world’s leading medical journals signals the triumph of ideology over science.

How are we going to persuade a nation that has come to believe that if a person wishes to change his or her sex, it is not only possible, thanks to technology, but it must be recognized in medical practice and (as Democratic politicians, including Joe Biden, demand) valid in civil rights law? Transgenderism has become a moral crusade for elites, who have propagandized so effectively for it that now, a substantial majority of Americans support transgender rights. And why not? The idea that there are no natural limits that should restrain human will is an old temptation, one to which few contemporary Americans seem to object. Philip Rieff, whom Lasch treats favorably in Revolt, wryly observed in his 1966 masterpiece The Triumph of the Therapeutic, that “difficult as the modern cultural condition may be, I doubt that Western men can be persuaded again to the Greek opinion that the secret of happiness is to have as few needs as possible.”

And:

It is telling that the only iteration of populism we have seen in our own time is the rise of Donald Trump. As satisfying as it has been to some of us to see the Republican Party mandarins toppled by the Great Unwashed, we deceive ourselves if we think that Trumpist populism is mostly a healthy manifestation of plebeian virtue, and not performative réssentiment.

How else are we to understand the passions of the pro-Trump mob after his failed re-election attempt, given that Trump failed to deliver on most of his populist promises (e.g., immigration reform, industrial policy favoring workers)? The one thing Trump unfailingly did was anger elites. That, apparently, was enough. What’s more, popular pro-Trump orators, purportedly in the name of defending the Constitution, have spent the last two months denouncing and attempting to delegitimize Constitutional processes and institutions, such as the federal courts, and helped create the conditions for the riot on Capitol Hill. This is not a populism that Kit Lasch would have condoned. What if the problem is not that the elites are corrupt, but that the rot has spread more generally?

Read it all — I talk also about what the fact of the Internet, something Lasch did not live long enough to see (Revolt was published posthumously), did to our political culture. And I talk about what a realistic attempt to advocate for a Laschian populism might look like today. I look forward to you readers engaging with the essay.

Oh, and by all means, read Revolt Of The Elites! By the way, back in 2007, Jeremy Beer wrote an excellent piece for TAC about Lasch.

The post Christopher Lasch & The Revolting Elites appeared first on The American Conservative.

Dreher Gives Schmemann Lecture

That’s me giving the 38th Annual Alexander Schmemann Lecture for St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary last weekend. Had to do it via Zoom, because of the You Know What. My thanks once again to the Seminary for resisting pressure from the woke Orthodox to cancel me for being a monster. As I say in my introduction, their failed campaign actually made my lecture’s point for me quite well.

In the lecture, I say at one point that there is no point in engaging in “dialogue” with the Orthodox progressives. As theological and moral conservatives in Mainline Protestant churches have learned, “dialogue” to that side is a tactic used to wear down conservatives in power. Once the left has taken power, the dialogue ends.

By the way, yeah, the books on the shelves behind me are laid horizontally. It’s a weird bookshelf; I think it was originally build for compact discs. We had to shelve books on their side. If you try to look closely at what’s on the shelf, you’ll find no rhyme or reason to the books. I really do need to organize all the books in our house.

Here’s are two excerpts from the lecture, which was about my book Live Not By Lies, and what the anti-communist Christian dissidents from the Soviet era have to say to us today about living our faith. Nota bene, I addressed my speech to the seminarians in the audience:

We can’t afford to assume that somehow, America will avoid this calamity. Solzhenitsyn warned that what happened in Russia could happen anywhere on earth, under the right conditions.

So, even as we pray and hope that this cup passes us, we should recognize that we are living in a Kolakovic Moment. We should see the threats on the horizon, and prepare ourselves, our families, and those around us to endure what may be coming.

How do we do that? Let me offer you five strategies that I discerned from my reading of dissident literature, and my interviews with Christian dissidents.

First, value truth over everything. You have to have a fundamental orientation towards life that prizes truth. “Live not by lies,” said Solzhenitsyn. By this he meant that one should never lower oneself to accept lies, or even to appear to accept lies, for the sake of getting along in society. Father Kirill Kaleda, an Orthodox priest in Moscow, told me that as a student in the Soviet era, his parents steered him away from the study of history, because they knew that he would have been contaminated by Soviet lies. Similarly, we have to accept that we cannot allow ourselves to be part of certain professions, or societies, or activities, because to do so would require us to lie. Yuri Sipko, a Russian Baptist, said it was taken for granted in his family that they were always going to be outsiders. In post-Christian America, that will be us Orthodox Christians. The only way we will find the strength to withstand what’s coming will be through total commitment to Christ in the Church. This is a purification. The half-hearted who do not want the full truth of Jesus Christ will be burned away.

Second, cultivate cultural memory.

Totalitarians of all kinds understand that if they are going to control a people, they need to control their cultural memory. “Cultural memory” refers to the stories that a people share in common that define them as a people, and tell them who they are. Shaping historical memory is an ongoing process renewed in each generation. The communists tried to erase from the collective memory of the peoples they ruled any narratives and facts that contradicted communist ideology. By depriving peoples of their cultural memories, they made it more difficult for them to have a basis on which to build resistance.

Cicero said that not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever. Children can be easily commanded. Under communism, people had to labor quietly to keep cultural memories alive. In Czechoslovakia, for example, some dissidents held private meetings in apartments, simply to talk about books, ideas, and culture – things they were not told in school — so they would not forget who they were.

We can see all around us how the past is under wholesale damnation by the culture-forming institutions. We have to do the same kind of thing that the dissidents did: formally pass our memories on to each other, and to our children, so that we are not forced to forget who we are.

Third, treat families as resistance cells.

In Prague, there is a large Catholic clan called the Bendas. The late Vaclav Benda and his wife Kamila were the only Christians inside Vaclav Havel’s inner circle of top dissidents. They had six children. The Bendas did not try to shield their children from the details of the struggle for freedom that their parents were part of. They taught them what was going on in the world, and how to discern truth from the official lies that were everywhere in the culture. They showed their kids why personal sanctity and personal heroism mattered (the film “High Noon” was a family favorite).

And they not only taught the kids how to identify and resist the enemy outside the home, but they also filled their moral imaginations with stories that illustrated the good, the true, and the beautiful.

Kamila told me that reading Tolkien was a particular pleasure. Why Tolkien? I asked. She looked me in the eye and said, “Because we knew that Mordor was real.”

Fourth, practice solidarity.

Totalitarianism triumphs when everyone feels divided against everyone else. One thing I learned from interviewing Christian dissidents is the importance of small communities. That was the big lesson of the underground church.

In Bratislava, I visited a hidden room underneath a Bratislava house. This room was accessible only via a secret tunnel. It’s where the underground church produced samizdat gospels and catechisms. They worked there for ten years without ever being discovered by the secret police.

Jan Simulčik, a historian who had been part of that operation as a college student, explained to me as we stood in that room why solidarity was so important to the underground church. He said,:

“When you were with your friends in these communities, you had freedom. You knew that when you went outside, there was totalitarianism. It controlled everything and oppressed you. People like me who wanted knowledge and freedom, and wanted to know more about our faith, depended on these small communities.”

When you tasted freedom within these small communities devoted to Christ, you gradually learned to want to fight for freedom for everyone. Everybody was afraid, but they learned courage from each other.

In 1970s Moscow, a disillusioned ex-Communist turned Christian named Alexander Ogorodnikov started a prayer meeting circle that drew other young people from around the city. Ogorodnikov, who served a harsh prison sentence for his faith, told me, “We had a really brotherly atmosphere in those seminars. Those seminars were like a bonfire where people could come and warm up their frozen Orthodox hearts. This was the blood that flowed in our veins. This was our confession of faith.”

Fifth, and most important of all, learn to receive suffering as a gift.

This, I discovered, was the key to everything that the underground church and the Christian dissidents did: they reconciled themselves to a life of hardship for the sake of Christ. This was the only way they got through it.

Jesus did not call admirers; he called disciples. You can only tell who is an admirer and who is a disciple when they have been tested by suffering. A Hungarian Christian dissident told me:

“Suffering is a part of every human’s life. We don’t know why we suffer. But your suffering is like a seal. If you put that seal on your actions, interestingly enough, people start to wonder about your truth—that maybe you are right about God. In one sense, it’s a mystery, because the Evil One wants to persuade us that there is a life without suffering. First you have to live through it, and then you try to pass on the value of suffering, because suffering has a value.”

Everything in our culture of hedonism and comfort testifies that suffering is always evil, and should be avoided. This is why so many Christians today will ultimately capitulate to the world. If we have not catechized ourselves about the gift of suffering, of the blessing of persecution, so will we.

More (and in this passage, note that the “Living Church” was the pseudo-church that the Soviets tried to create, one that was faithful to the government’s line):

Those are the most basic lessons that the Christian dissidents have to teach us. I have something else to add about living not by lies. You have heard it said that we in the Orthodox Church need to learn to be more open-minded, to compromise with the modern world. The church needs to cast aside her fidelity to the Bible’s teachings on human sexuality and the family, and to disregard her traditions. We must accommodate to the world in the name of compassion. We must seek to be relevant to the world.

About relevance, I think of something Father Alexander Schmemann wrote in his journal. He lamented that the Russian church was lost in nostalgia for the past, and did not notice that the world had changed, that history was on the move. He was right to lament. It is absolutely vital that we Orthodox remain true to our faith’s teachings, liturgies, and traditions, but if that fidelity mires us in a dream world, into which we can escape to pretend that history doesn’t exist, it is a bad thing.

But if the admirable desire to make the faith delivered once and for all comprehensible and attractive to people of this time and place causes us to abandon core teachings, truths that are not up for dialogue, then it is also a bad thing. Progressives within the Orthodox Church are nostalgic for the future. It would pretend to be a “living church,” one that accommodates itself to the spirit of the age, but in fact it would be a zombie church. Ask any Orthodox you know who found Orthodoxy while escaping from the ruins of Mainline Protestantism: they know where this kind of thing leads.

Do not seek what the “Living Churchmen” among us call “dialogue” about the future of Orthodoxy. This is a trap that the small-o orthodox parties within other churches know very well. It is a strategy to exhaust the orthodox until they surrender to the renovationists. When the renovationists take power, the dialogue ends, because, as they will say, one does not dialogue about basic human rights, or whatever misleading label they slap on their heretical beliefs.

Let me be more specific, and blunt. There is a reason why LGBT issues are the chief wedge cleaving the churches apart. It ultimately has to do with anthropology: that is, the question, “What is man?” The Bible gives us one image. The family is, in one sense, an icon of the Holy Trinity. God became incarnate as a son within a family. The fruitful love of husband and wife, united in holy marriage, mirrors the life of the Trinity, and also the Bridegroom Christ’s relationship to His church. These are not arbitrary symbols. They matter. They tell us, among other things, that we know who we are in rightly-ordered relationship to God and others.

The very successful campaign to normalize homosexuality succeeded in large part because gay campaigners and their allies appealed to the modern sense of what a human being is. This is a long story, and we don’t have time for it today. Let it suffice for me to say that the modern Self understands itself as self-defined, untethered by any connection to a cosmological or metaphysical framework. The Self is defined by its own desires. From this ideal, to deny the Self what it wants is to insist on disorder, which is to say, injustice.

It should be obvious why faithful Christians cannot agree with this. We cannot have meaningful dialogue with our contemporary Renovationists because we start from different metaphysical suppositions. Yes, we Orthodox can and should talk about how best to present the traditional teaching in the modern post-Christian world, but about the truth and the binding authority of this teaching, there can be no dialogue if by “dialogue” one means a dialectical process that results in a synthesis of both parts. The synthesis of truth and falsehood is still falsehood.

But the false anthropology of expressive individualism presents us with a deeper problem. The sociologist of religion Christian Smith has documented extensively how American Christians under 40 have been formed not according to Christian tradition, but by the culture. They have assimilated Christianity into the framework of expressive individualism. We have to understand that young people today – and in fact, Christians of at least the last 50 years – have been catechized and discipled by a cultural vision that places the sovereign Self at the center of their understanding. This has been at the heart of the human story since Adam and Eve, but we have built a post-Christian cultural matrix that calls self-worship good. Since the tumult of the 1960s, modern churches and modern families have done a terrible job of recognizing the radical challenge to Christianity from late modernity. We cannot change that past, but that past has created this crisis-ridden present into which you seminarians will be ministering.

I bring this up because you men will not only be responsible for forming and discipling a community in the face of outside persecution, but you will also have to wage an intense internal struggle to de-program your congregation from the false beliefs of post-Christian culture. You cannot fight something with nothing – and the harsh truth is that relatively few of us have the kind of knowledge of church teaching and discipleship that gives us what we need to resist this post-Christian juggernaut. We all need to practice repentance from our easygoing ignorance of the faith. It is not our fault that we were not given the fullness of our spiritual patrimony. But we have no excuse for not educating ourselves and our children better.

God gives the church in every age the saints that it needs. You men will need to be a combination of Solzhenitsyn and St. Benedict. You will need to be thundering prophets who say “No!” to lies, and who are prepared to suffer for the sake of the truth, and you will also need to be loving fathers who teach and guide your parish into a disciplined and resilient life of faith and witness.

The kind of Christians who will still be Christian in fifty years are those who have been prepared to suffer for the faith, in ways both small and big. They will be the kind of Christians who see in their religion truth claims that can withstand rejection by popular culture, and even persecution. They will be the kind of Christians who attend churches that demand something of them. They will be the kind of Christians who don’t compartmentalize their faith, taking religion out only for Sundays and holidays, but rather incorporate it into their daily lives.

This is the Orthodox way. Solzhenitsyn said that the catastrophe of Bolshevism came upon Russia because men had forgotten God. Our present and coming catastrophe here in America is upon us because men have forgotten God. Your great mission and calling – and the mission and calling of all Orthodox Christians – is to make the forgotten God brilliantly alive in the darkened minds of contemporary men.

It is an awesome privilege. Our civilization is going through a long Lent, but let us approach the crisis with the understanding that we are living in a time of “bright sadness.” In his book about Great Lent, Father Schmemann writes that the bright sadness of Lent transforms us if we allow it to. He writes that is “is as if we were reaching a place to which the noises and the fuss of life, of the street, of all that which usually fills our days and even nights, have no access – a place where they have no power. All that which seemed so tremendously important to us as to fill our mind, that state of anxiety which has virtually become our second nature, disappear somewhere and we begin to feel free, light, and happy.”

Here we enter into one of the profoundest mysteries of our faith. In “Live Not By Lies,” I tell the story of Timo Križka, a young Slovak Catholic who was only a toddler when Communism ended. He made a name for himself as a talented photographer and filmmaker, and has enjoyed freedom and success in ways that his parents’ and grandparents’ generation could only dream of. A few years ago, Timo started a project to photograph and interview elderly Catholics in his country who had been imprisoned by the communists for their faith. Many of them were living out their old age in poverty. Speaking to them, though, and making their portraits converted this young man. He heard them testify, again and again, that having suffered for Christ in prison turned out to be among the most joyful times of their lives. Why? Because everything was torn away from them. All they had was Christ. That was when they knew finally who they were, and who He was.

Timo told me: “It seemed that the less they were able to change the world around them, the stronger they had become. These people completely changed my understanding of freedom. My project changed from looking for victims to finding heroes. I stopped building a monument to the unjust past. I began to look for a message for us, the free people.”

The message he found was this: The secular liberal ideal of freedom so popular in the West, and among many in his postcommunist generation, is a lie. That is, the concept that real freedom is found by liberating the self from all binding commitments (to God, to marriage, to family), and by increasing worldly comforts—that is a road that leads to hell. Križka observed that the only force in society standing in the middle of that wide road yelling “Stop!” were the traditional Christian churches.

And then it hit him. Under communism, his parents and grandparents were told that Christianity was the enemy, was the thing that stood between them and having a better life. It was a lie. Today, under consumerist liberal democracy, his generation is told that Christianity is the thing that stands between them and having a better life. It is still a lie.

The secret, he discovered, was the same thing that Solzhenitsyn learned in the gulag, and that the Christian dissidents of the Soviet period have to teach us today: Accepting suffering is the beginning of our liberation.

Timo told me:

“Suffering can be the source of great strength. It gives us the power to resist. It is a gift from God that invites us to change. To start a revolution against the oppression. But for me, the oppressor was no longer the totalitarian communist regime. It’s not even the progressive liberal state. Meeting these hidden heroes started a revolution against the greatest totalitarian ruler of all: myself.”

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Transgender ‘Equality’ = Uterus Transplants

Did you know that uterus transplants were a thing? They’ve done about 50 of them, but they’re still an experimental procedure. They offer the possibility that infertile women can have children. Seven years ago, a child was born in Sweden to a mom with a transplanted womb.

Now, though, comes this news from the Journal of the American Medical Association:

More:

Did you see the part about how having “a transplanted, functioning vagina” is something these male-to-female transsexuals want to have, to improve their sexual experience?

Taking vaginas of cadavers and sewing them into biological men so they can have sex with it. How many women will remove themselves as organ donors if biological males will use their reproductive system in this way?

This world is mad. In The Benedict Option, I quote a prominent Catholic physician saying that he would not want his children to go into medicine, because the field is changing so fast, via wokeness, to mainstream forms of care that traditional Christians would deem immoral. He said he feared his kids would end up having to choose between having to quit their jobs and suffer bankruptcy from medical school debt, or violating their consciences.

Along these lines, Spain’s left-wing coalition government is considering letting people change their genders in law with a simple bureaucratic procedure:

People in Spain wishing to change their official gender will no longer have to undergo medical and psychological exams or years of hormone treatment if a bill from the Equality Ministry on Wednesday is taken up by the government and becomes law.

Spain currently requires transgender people to have hormone treatment for two years before they can change their gender on administrative records, a precondition criticised by the European Court of Human Rights.

An official at the Equality Ministry, which is run by the far-left party Unidad Podemos, said the state should not “submit trans people to blackmail” in this way.

And, a chaplain at Fort Hood in Texas is in trouble for not bowing down to the trans god:

A Facebook post in which Maj. Andrew Calvert, the unit chaplain for Fort Hood’s 3rd Security Force Assistance Brigade, criticized President Joe Biden’s executive order lifting a ban on transgender troops is under investigation, the unit’s spokesman, Maj. Jefferson T. Grimes, confirmed to the Army Times.

“How is rejecting reality (biology) not evidence that a person is mentally unfit (ill), and thus making that person unqualified to serve,” Calvert wrote in the post Monday on the Army Times Facebook page.

“There is little difference in this than over those who believe and argue for a ‘flat earth,’ despite the overwhelming evidence to the contrary,” he wrote.

“The motivation is different, but the argument is the same. This person is a MedBoard for Mental Wellness waiting to happen. What a waste of military resources and funding!” he wrote.

Grimes told the Army Times in an email the unit is aware of the post and said “the matter is currently under investigation.”

So much for living not by lies in the US military. I had a phone conversation today with an old friend, a Catholic who was in the Navy for 13 years. I brought this story up. He said, “I am a patriot, and I am proud of my service, but I would not advise any Christian to go into the military today.”

He explained that he had talked a young family member into going into the service, and now regrets it. From what the young man tells him, wokeness is everywhere there. We talked about how President Biden had rescinded President Trump’s ban on transgender troops. My Navy vet friend said, “Imagine having to call your commanding officer who is really a female ‘Sir.’ I couldn’t do it. I couldn’t lie like that.”

 

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Suicide Of The Humanities

This NYT profile of Dan-el Padilla Peralta, a radical Princeton Classics scholar, epitomizes what is wrong with the academic humanities in this radical era, and how dangerous the radicalization is to all of us.

Dan-el Padilla Peralta is a black Dominican Classics scholar at Princeton. He is also the leading figure in a move to tear down the field of Classics, which is the study of Ancient Greece and Rome. He came to this country as a small child when his mother required medical treatment in New York for complications related to the impending birth of his younger brother. After the brother was born, the family decided to stay in the US illegally. Eventually the father went back to the Dominican Republic; the mother and the children remained in the US, trying to regularize their immigration status.

As a nine-year-old boy living in a Chinatown homeless shelter, Padilla started reading about history. A child’s textbook about the Classical world lit a fire in his mind. An older New Yorker saw the child reading a big book about Napoleon Bonaparte, and decided to help him get a good education. Padilla went to an excellent school in New York, on scholarship, and excelled. Then:

Years passed before Padilla started to question the way the textbook had presented the classical world to him. He was accepted on a full scholarship to Princeton, where he was often the only Black person in his Latin and Greek courses. “The hardest thing for me as I was making my way into the discipline as a college student was appreciating how lonely I might be,” Padilla told me. In his sophomore year, when it came time to select a major, the most forceful resistance to his choice came from his close friends, many of whom were also immigrants or the children of immigrants. They asked Padilla questions he felt unprepared to answer. What are you doing with this blanquito stuff? How is this going to help us? Padilla argued that he and others shouldn’t shun certain pursuits just because the world said they weren’t for Black and brown people. There was a special joy and vindication in upending their expectations, but he found he wasn’t completely satisfied by his own arguments. The question of classics’ utility was not a trivial one. How could he take his education in Latin and Greek and make it into something liberatory? “That became the most urgent question that guided me through my undergraduate years and beyond,” Padilla said.

OK, this is interesting. In order to justify his devotion to Classics in the eyes of these intellectual bullies, who challenged his own loyalty to the tribe, he decided to instrumentalize his scholarship.

I want you to imagine that an Evangelical Christian undergraduate at Princeton being approached by other Evangelical Christian students, and asked to explain why he is studying all this Pagan stuff. How is this going to lead people to Christ? And imagine that he deals with that inner shame and guilt by deciding to instrumentalize his scholarship, to turn the Classics into a field that is not studied for its own sake, but for how it can be used to advance something extraneous to itself.

What would you think of a person like that, and his personal Christian crusade, becoming one of the most influential scholars in that academic field? What if, in part because of his work, and a religious Awakening among American academia, Classics became a field that had to be understood through an Evangelical Christian lens — and that those who disagreed stood accused of defending Paganism, and being infidels?

You would recognize it as a corruption of the field. Well, that’s what’s happening here, in terms of ideology, with Dan-el Padilla Peralta as a prophet of the Great Awokening!

The story goes on to talk about how Padilla became interested in Roman slavery. Certainly a worthy topic! But over time:

Padilla began to feel that he had lost something in devoting himself to the classical tradition. As James Baldwin observed 35 years before, there was a price to the ticket. His earlier work on the Roman senatorial classes, which earned him a reputation as one of the best Roman historians of his generation, no longer moved him in the same way. Padilla sensed that his pursuit of classics had displaced other parts of his identity, just as classics and “Western civilization” had displaced other cultures and forms of knowledge. Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the white-supremacist framework in which both he and classics had become trapped. “I had to actively engage in the decolonization of my mind,” he told me. He revisited books by Frantz Fanon, Orlando Patterson and others working in the traditions of Afro-pessimism and psychoanalysis, Caribbean and Black studies. He also gravitated toward contemporary scholars like José Esteban Muñoz, Lorgia García Peña and Saidiya Hartman, who speak of race not as a physical fact but as a ghostly system of power relations that produces certain gestures, moods, emotions and states of being. They helped him think in more sophisticated terms about the workings of power in the ancient world, and in his own life.

The emphasis on the boldfaced line above was my own. Notice how the story’s author, Rachel Poser, assumes the truth of the rather radical claim that Classics is white supremacist. This kind of thing is why I read journalism about cultural matters these days with a skeptical eye. Again, let’s imagine that Padilla was an Evangelical Christian, and was conducting his crusade against the Classics as a religious act, within an academic world that was becoming much more Evangelical. Now, imagine that Rachel Poser, a contributing writer to The New York Times, was also an Evangelical Christian. Would she have written the line, “Recovering them would be essential to dismantling the anti-Christian framework in which both he and classics had become trapped”? Would editors at The New York Times have published that line? Journalism today just accepts these highly contestable claims about race as if they were revealed truths.

If Padilla sought to use aspects of his own racial identity to illuminate new approaches to Classics, this could be promising. But one would need to be careful to guard against one’s own subjectivity corrupting the work. Many times I have written in this space about the lecture I heard Dame Gillian Beard give at Cambridge in 2009, in which she explained how various factions in Victorian society appropriated Darwin’s findings as scientific justification for their favored causes. British imperialists asserted that Darwin showed why imperialism is scientifically sound, as the strong must rightly dominate the weak. Abolitionists, on the other hand, claimed that Darwin’s science showed why slavery should be abolished, as all men are the same, deep down. And so forth. What Padilla is doing, and what is catching on in the Classics field, is the capture of it by ideological antagonists.

The Times piece shows how influential Padilla has been, including at his own university:

That initiative, and the draw of Padilla as a mentor, has contributed to making Princeton’s graduate cohort one of the most diverse in the country. Pria Jackson, a Black predoctoral fellow who is the daughter of a mortician from New Mexico, told me that before she came to Princeton, she doubted that she could square her interest in classics with her commitment to social justice. “I didn’t think that I could do classics and make a difference in the world the way that I wanted to,” she said. “My perception of what it could do has changed.”

So he is teaching others to instrumentalize their scholarship, to make it serve ideological ends. This is intellectually corrupt. In the Soviet period, scholarship had to be made to fit the Marxist metanarrative. One former Soviet citizen I interviewed told me that history was taught as an anticipation of Marx’s revelation — that the Marxist interpretive framework was applied to everything, as if to make all of history before and after Marx center on Marx’s work. I am reading a good book now, Destiny Denied: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, by Tamim Ansary. In it, the author talks about how the Islamic world really was advanced in scholarship, until a crisis in 12th century was resolved on the side of religion. That is, leaders in the Muslim world decided that all knowledge should be subordinated to Koranic studies, and must be seen as a branch of religion. That was the intellectual death of the Muslim world, in Ansary’s telling.

This Great Awokening will be the intellectual death of the Western world too, if we let it. Some people in the Classics field understand that the efforts by Padilla and others to dismantle Classics is suicidal:

Privately, even some sympathetic classicists worry that Padilla’s approach will only hasten the field’s decline. “I’ve spoken to undergrad majors who say that they feel ashamed to tell their friends they’re studying classics,” Denis Feeney, Padilla’s colleague at Princeton, told me. “I think it’s sad.” He noted that the classical tradition has often been put to radical and disruptive uses. Civil rights movements and marginalized groups across the world have drawn inspiration from ancient texts in their fights for equality, from African-Americans to Irish Republicans to Haitian revolutionaries, who viewed their leader, Toussaint L’Ouverture, as a Black Spartacus. The heroines of Greek tragedy — untamed, righteous, destructive women like Euripides’ Medea — became symbols of patriarchal resistance for feminists like Simone de Beauvoir, and the descriptions of same-sex love in the poetry of Sappho and in the Platonic dialogues gave hope and solace to gay writers like Oscar Wilde.

“I very much admire Dan-el’s work, and like him, I deplore the lack of diversity in the classical profession,” Mary Beard told me via email. But “to ‘condemn’ classical culture would be as simplistic as to offer it unconditional admiration.” She went on: “My line has always been that the duty of the academic is to make things seem more complicated.” In a 2019 talk, Beard argued that “although classics may become politicized, it doesn’t actually have a politics,” meaning that, like the Bible, the classical tradition is a language of authority — a vocabulary that can be used for good or ill by would-be emancipators and oppressors alike. Over the centuries, classical civilization has acted as a model for people of many backgrounds, who turned it into a matrix through which they formed and debated ideas about beauty, ethics, power, nature, selfhood, citizenship and, of course, race. Anthony Grafton, the great Renaissance scholar, put it this way in his preface to “The Classical Tradition”: “An exhaustive exposition of the ways in which the world has defined itself with regard to Greco-Roman antiquity would be nothing less than a comprehensive history of the world.”

A few years ago, I gave a talk about how discovering Dante led me out of a deep personal crisis, and gave me new eyes with which to see myself and the world. In the Q&A period, a young woman who looked to be the age of a graduate student stood and asked me how I could actually believe that a white European male living in a time of oppression of women and minorities could have anything to say to us today. I thought she was kidding at first, and I’m afraid my answer was not the best it could have been. After the session ended, a professor in the audience approached me to say that that young woman’s point of view is standard in academia today. That really hit me hard, knowing well how the study of the past, and of the art and wisdom of figures very different from me set me free from some of the mind-forg’d manacles of my own making. This is the same thing as pompous white people saying that we have nothing to learn from non-white cultures, or Westerners thinking that non-Western thought and practice is without value. The woke have just turned these prejudices around, and see their bigotry as liberation.

What they are doing, though, is closing the door to future generations. More from the Times piece:

To see classics the way Padilla sees it means breaking the mirror; it means condemning the classical legacy as one of the most harmful stories we’ve told ourselves. Padilla is wary of colleagues who cite the radical uses of classics as a way to forestall change; he believes that such examples have been outmatched by the field’s long alliance with the forces of dominance and oppression. Classics and whiteness are the bones and sinew of the same body; they grew strong together, and they may have to die together. Classics deserves to survive only if it can become “a site of contestation” for the communities who have been denigrated by it in the past. This past semester, he co-taught a course, with the Activist Graduate School, called “Rupturing Tradition,” which pairs ancient texts with critical race theory and strategies for organizing. “I think that the politics of the living are what constitute classics as a site for productive inquiry,” he told me. “When folks think of classics, I would want them to think about folks of color.” But if classics fails his test, Padilla and others are ready to give it up. “I would get rid of classics altogether,” Walter Scheidel, another of Padilla’s former advisers at Stanford, told me. “I don’t think it should exist as an academic field.”

If this doesn’t terrify you, you’re not seeing it for what it is. These scholars believe that the Classics field should exist only for the sake of its own destruction! It is completely perverse. My kids attend a school where everybody studies Latin, and there’s a lot of reading in the Greeks and the Romans. If any of my children fell in love with the Classics and wanted to study them, I would have to discourage them from going into the field, which is committing suicide.

More:

Amy Richlin, a feminist scholar at the University of California, Los Angeles, who helped lead the turn toward the study of women in the Roman world, laughed when I mentioned the idea of breaking up classics departments in the Ivy League. “Good luck getting rid of them,” she said. “These departments have endowments, and they’re not going to voluntarily dissolve themselves.” But when I pressed her on whether it was desirable, if not achievable, she became contemplative. Some in the discipline, particularly graduate students and untenured faculty members, worry that administrators at small colleges and public universities will simply use the changes as an excuse to cut programs. “One of the dubious successes of my generation is that it did break the canon,” Richlin told me. “I don’t think we could believe at the time that we would be putting ourselves out of business, but we did.” She added: “If they blew up the classics departments, that would really be the end.”

Exactly! You leftist scholars have worked so hard to denigrate your own fields of study as oppressive and wicked, so you shouldn’t be surprised when the bean-counters in university administration decide that they no longer want to support programs that perpetuate evil. Honestly, though, what is the point of a university supporting a department whose scholars think is worthless except for the opportunity it gives them to sit around talking about how worthless it is?

Here is how radicalism has damaged Padilla. He sees the door that opened to him through that book in the Chinatown shelter as a bad thing:

Padilla has said that he “cringes” when he remembers his youthful desire to be transformed by the classical tradition. Today he describes his discovery of the textbook at the Chinatown shelter as a sinister encounter, as though the book had been lying in wait for him. He compares the experience to a scene in one of Frederick Douglass’s autobiographies, when Mr. Auld, Douglass’s owner in Baltimore, chastises his wife for helping Douglass learn to read: “ ‘Now,’ said he, ‘if you teach that nigger (speaking of myself) how to read, there would be no keeping him. It would forever unfit him to be a slave.’” In that moment, Douglass says he understood that literacy was what separated white men from Black — “a new and special revelation, explaining dark and mysterious things.” “I would at times feel that learning to read had been a curse rather than a blessing,” Douglass writes. “It had given me a view of my wretched condition, without the remedy.” Learning the secret only deepened his sense of exclusion.

Padilla, like Douglass, now sees the moment of absorption into the classical, literary tradition as simultaneous with his apprehension of racial difference; he can no longer find pride or comfort in having used it to bring himself out of poverty. He permits himself no such relief. “Claiming dignity within this system of structural oppression,” Padilla has said, “requires full buy-in into its logic of valuation.” He refuses to “praise the architects of that trauma as having done right by you at the end.”

This man, Padilla, is poisoning the minds of the next generation. He is teaching those who should be carriers of the tradition to despise it. That Princeton employs an open saboteur in its Classics department is a sign of its death wish.

Finally, the story mentions last summer’s campus uproar when Padilla and sympathetic leftist scholars at Princeton (300 of them) came out with a reform proposal to fight “anti-Blackness” on campus — including one to establish a committee that would  “oversee the investigation and discipline of racist behaviors, incidents, research and publication.” In other words, it would be a body that would seek to police academic discourse to punish those who offended against the True Religion. From the Times piece:

Punishing people for doing research that other people think is racist just does not seem like the right response.” But Padilla believes that the uproar over free speech is misguided. “I don’t see things like free speech or the exchange of ideas as ends in themselves,” he told me. “I have to be honest about that. I see them as a means to the end of human flourishing.”

There we are again: the instrumentalization of scholarship and academic pursuits. In Padilla’s world, you can only speak and think in ways that conform to his narrow idea of “human flourishing.” This is not just the death of Classics, but the death of the university.

Read it all. 

There has to be some action now to save the humanities. Clearly the rot has spread very deeply into the institutions. There is not likely to be any reconquista of humanities faculties in the near term. What we need is a Benedict Option for the humanities — for the creation of academic monasteries within whose walls the tradition can survive this new Dark Age. Roger Scruton, Charles Taylor, Jacques Derrida and other scholars helped establish an underground degree-granting university in communist Czechoslovakia, so true scholarship could continue to live under the Marxist yoke, whose universities had been enslaved by ideology.

What would that look like here? What if alumni who cared about the humanities withdrew their donations from Princeton and all other woke citadels, and used them to build up a new, defiantly traditional college? Or, to massively strengthen and expand the few colleges and universities that still stand? And start new academic magazines to publish their work, and so forth?

It’s time. It really is. There are so many graduates of classical Christian schools now who are eager to learn in the old-fashioned way. Where can they go?

UPDATE: You can never, ever make the Woke happy. “Distressing” and “triggering”:

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