Rod Dreher's Blog, page 85

That Crazy Trump White House Night

A conservative friend who was not a Never Trumper sent me this Axios story, about a wild and crazy night (December 18, 2020) in the White House, and said:

I don’t know how you read this and are not glad, at some level, no matter your politics, that Trump lost.

It’s really true.  This is a very detailed account of a surprise meeting in the White House one night between the president and Sidney Powell, Gen. Mike Flynn, a minor former Trump staffer named Emily Newman, and former Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne (who tells much the same story on his blog). As Axios reports, the four bluffed their way into the White House — think about that for a second — and then bluffed their way into the Oval Office, where they told the president that his staff was selling him out, and that they had a secret plan to keep him in office. Excerpts:

The hours to come would pit the insurgent conspiracists against a handful of White House lawyers and advisers determined to keep the president from giving in to temptation to invoke emergency national security powers, seize voting machines and disable the primary levers of American democracy.

More:

She proposed declaring a national security emergency, grantingher and her cabal top-secret security clearances and using the U.S. government to seize Dominion’s voting machines.

“Hold on a minute, Sidney,” [White House senior adviser Eric] Herschmann interrupted from the back of the Oval. “You’re part of the Rudy team, right? Is your theory that the Democrats got together and changed the rules, or is it that there was foreign interference in our election?”

Giuliani’s legal efforts, while replete with debunked claims about voter fraud, had largely focused on allegations of misconduct by corrupt Democrats and election officials.

“It’s foreign interference,” Powell insisted, then added: “Rudy hasn’t understood what this case is about until just now.”

In disbelief, Herschmann yelled out to an aide in the outer Oval Office. “Get Pat down here immediately!” Several minutes later, White House counsel Pat Cipollone walked into the Oval. He looked at Byrne and said, “Who are you?”

The meeting was already getting heated.

White House staff had spent weeks poring over the evidence underlying hundreds of affidavits and other claims of fraud promoted by Trump allies like Powell. The team had done the due diligence and knew the specific details of what was being alleged better than anybody. Time and time again, they found, Powell’s allegations fell apart under basic scrutiny.

But Powell, fixing on Trump, continued to elaborate on a fantastical election narrative involving Venezuela, Iran, China and others. She named a county in Georgia where she claimed she could prove that Dominion had illegally flipped the vote.

Herschmann interrupted to point out that Trump had actually won the Georgia county in question: “So your theory is that Dominion intentionally flipped the votes so we could win that county?”

As for Powell’s larger claims, he demanded she provide evidence for what — if true — would amount to the greatest national security breach in American history. They needed to dial in one of the campaign’s lawyers, Herschmann said, and Trump campaign lawyer Matt Morgan was patched in via speakerphone.

By now, people were yelling and cursing.

And it was just getting started! More:

At one point, with Flynn shouting, Byrne raised his hand to talk. He stood up and turned around to face Herschmann. “You’re a quitter,” he said. “You’ve been interfering with everything. You’ve been cutting us off.”

“Do you even know who the fuck I am, you idiot?” Herschmann snapped back.

“Yeah, you’re Patrick Cipollone,” Byrne said.

“Wrong! Wrong, you idiot!”

Read it all. It goes on and on. These people … there are no words. This actually happened in the inner sanctum at the pinnacle of the United States government.

(And before you say, “Fake news!”, you should know that the level of detail in the piece, and all the names attached to it, means that Axios has a recording of that meeting. Someone there must have turned on his smartphone, got it all down, and played it for the Axios reporter. If they published that without proof, attributing quotes to people, they would be hit with a libel suit.)

It was a classic case of Trump doing that thing Trump does, in which he winds everybody up around him, and watches the chaos play out. Reading the Axios piece brought to mind something a DC friend told me in 2017, a couple of months after the Inauguration. He said he had been into the Oval Office for some reason connected with his job (he was not on the White House staff), and saw total chaos. He said Steve Bannon, Kellyanne Conway, Reince Priebus, and other senior staffers were swirling around Trump, trying to get his attention, while eyeballing each other, afraid of being stabbed in the back. Meanwhile, the new President of the United States was sitting in the eye of the storm, with a remote control in his hand, watching cable news. My friend, who was a Trump supporter, was shocked. That was two months in.

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How Smartphones Can Help You Become Trans

Do you want your cross-sex hormones delivered by mail, without the hassle of having to see a doctor? Would you like a letter giving you medical permission to have your breasts or penis removed? Plume is your online portal to getting radical medical interventions without ever having to be examined by a physician.

The reader who sent me the link says:

Basically, this startup appears to offer access to hormone replacement therapy without the patient ever having to physically see a doctor. It’s a way of exploiting the telehealth turn accelerated by COVID to take traditional clinical care judgments out of the picture entirely.

Also note that through this service, a “medical letter of support” for gender reassignment surgery can be flat-out purchased for $150. Whatever the patient wants, the patient gets. And since it’s all handled through smartphones, it’s highly likely teens can do this quietly without their families ever knowing about it.

Absolutely nuts. This really takes the issue to the next level.

According to the Plume website, the service is only for those 18 and older. How do they verify this, I wonder? Still, this is really berserk. Hormones, surgeries, and sex transitions are massive medical and psychological events. But this is a medical service that allows people to go online and get whatever they want. From the site:

“Cheering you on” — you don’t want medical providers to cheer you on. You want them to tell you the truth.

Plume is based in Denver. This is all you have to do to be assessed, via video, by a Plume doctor:

How is this even legal? How is it reasonable? Where is the extensive psychological evaluation that ought to be standard for someone considering a radical undertaking?

A couple of years ago, I interviewed a physician on staff at a major urban hospital for my book Live Not By Lies. He mentioned that at his hospital, the policy came down from its corporate leadership that going forward, doctors were to provide patients who presented themselves as transgender, and wanting cross-sex hormones, surgery, or any other trans intervention, with what they asked for — no questions asked. Even if a doctor believed that transition was not the right thing for a particular patient, he was not permitted, as a matter of hospital policy, to say so.

This is out of control. Organizations like Plume — and frankly, that well-established and large hospital — are making medical decisions — irreversible ones! — based on cultural politics and ideology. Where is Congress? State legislatures?

Eighteen year old men and women who believe themselves to be transgender are not old enough to buy a legal beer, but they are old enough to go online, pay the fee, get “examined” by a trans-positive doctor, and then get hormone prescriptions and certification for surgical interventions, including irreversible mastectomies and penectomies.

And they’re not even old enough to buy a drink.

Lawmakers are abdicating their responsibilities to regulate this stuff. Why? Are they so afraid of the LGBT lobby, and the media? Is there any other medical procedure of this degree of seriousness that can be ratified and executed over a video call?

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To Be A Pastor In Covidtide

My friend the Rev. Daniel French, an Anglican vicar in a seaside parish in southern England, is struggling to serve his people during lockdown. He’s not the only one. Father French writes in The Spectator:

A year of living through a pandemic has taken its toll on the best of us. Vicars like me are no exception.

As a healthy and normally upbeat 52-year-old, this feeling of gloom is frighteningly new. Anecdotal stories from clergy friends tell a similar story to my own: the urge is to curl up and mask the misery with binge marathons of Netflix box sets. But this brings only short-term relief. A cursory look at social media posts show that a good number of vicars are struggling to keep it together.

The pressures on vicars come from every quarter. Some vicars have been landed with the impossible task of maintaining empty churches as elderly volunteers withdraw to shield or isolate. I know one vicar who seems to have doubled up as a cleaner, flower captain, gardener, painter and a handyman, up ladders fixing broken windows. The likelihood is that community projects in some churches, food banks for example, are being carried by the incumbent alone. This is a recipe for burnout.

The liturgical and worship element of our vocation is also vastly reduced. Even those of us who are keen on keeping public worship going know that the majority of our flock are reluctant to leave home. An enormous amount of energy in committee meetings was given last year to make churches and worship Covid compliant to the gold standard. These hallowed places are more sterile than any Silicon Valley microchip factory. Yet despite churches being relatively safe, attendance remains low. I don’t blame those who would rather stay at home, of course. But it’s still disheartening to see so few turn up.

The pressures on vicars come from every quarter.

For many vicars like me, morale is further dented by a suspicion that theological absolutes – those things that make up the core beliefs of a Christian – are being forgotten in response to the pandemic. I grew up being told that Holy Communion contained a supernatural presence like nothing on earth. When Covid arrived at our shores, the deeper magic (to paraphrase C S Lewis) of the Eucharist seemed to count for nothing. I have been told that even giving the Last Rites could be a safety issue. Gone also is the notion that our churches are ‘thin places’ that straddle this world and the next. The drive to make our churches clean is understandable. Yet I fear the metaphysics of the Christian faith have been lost. Hardly anyone seems to care. I could cry.

What an interesting concept: that the metaphysics of the Christian faith have been lost in Covid. Father French goes on to write about how hard it is to be a priest and to want to go out and help people who are suffering in Covid, but to not be able to do so. Read the whole thing. 

And, if you’re on Twitter, follow Father French @holydisrupter.

Any clergy or church personnel reading this, what has your experience been? Please go to the comments section to help us understand what you’re going through. Readers, this thread is going to be for clergy and other church personnel. If you wish to submit a comment anyway, I’ll consider it if you’re writing strictly about the experience of churchgoing and church life during Covid, but I’m going to moderate this thread with a heavier than usual hand, simply for the sake of keeping it focused on the experience of parish priests, pastors, and those who help them.

UPDATE: A reader e-mails:

I’d rather not post using Disqus for privacy concerns. I’m a vicar (part-time) at an LCMS church in [state]. I can’t agree more with Vicar French’s comment that “The church should be doing much more to reach these people by speaking emphatically and positively about death as a part of life.” We are seeing this in our congregation, but in a departure from Vicar French’s experience it is many of our younger members (mostly educated urban couples with kids) who have withdrawn from church. I think it hints at what he says about the positivity of death. Our older members get this, but the younger ones don’t. Couple that with a younger member’s attachment to and proficiency with platforms like Zoom, then we shouldn’t be surprised at low attendance rates – even in the theologically conservative denominations like ours that hold onto the sacraments as a means of grace and forgiveness that should be of consolation in times like this.

The one thing we cannot discount in this discussion is the fear of being perceived as some kind of social monster because you don’t conform to the world’s views about life and death. That’s one of the worst aspects of this — that Christians are afraid of being shunned in a social group instead of being afraid of losing their faith.

Covid is a terrible winnower.

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Barstool Conservatism

Matthew Walther writes that the conservative movement, as we have known it, is dead. What is the post-Trump Right going to look like?

What Trump recognized was that there are millions of Americans who do not oppose or even care about abortion or same-sex marriage, much less stem-cell research or any of the other causes that had animated traditional social conservatives. Instead he correctly intuited that the new culture war would be fought over very different (and more nebulous) issues: vague concerns about political correctness and “SJWs,” opposition to the popularization of so-called critical race theory, sentimentality about the American flag and the military, the rights of male undergraduates to engage in fornication while intoxicated without fear of the Title IX mafia. Whatever their opinions might have been 20 years ago, in 2021 these are people who, with varying degrees of enthusiasm, accept pornography, homosexuality, drug use, legalized gambling, and whatever GamerGate was about. On economic questions their views are a curious and at times incoherent mixture of standard libertarian talking points and pseudo-populism, embracing lower taxes on the one hand and stimulus checks and stricter regulation of social media platforms on the other.

I have come to think of the people who answer to the above description as “Barstool conservatives,” in reference to the popular sports website, especially its founder and CEO, Dave Portnoy.

Walther explains what he thinks “Barstool conservatism” means. There is no future for social and religious conservatives in it, but Walther (who is a conservative Catholic) suspects that “a majority of them will gladly make their peace with the new order of things.” Why?

This is in part because while Barstool conservatives might regard, say, homeschooling families of 10 as freaks, they do not regard them with loathing, much less consider their very existence a threat to the American way of life as they understand it. Social conservatives themselves have largely accepted that, with the possible exception of abortion, the great battles have been lost for good. Obergefell will never be overturned even with nine votes on the Supreme Court. Instead the best that can be hoped for is a kind of recusancy, a limited accommodation for a few hundred thousand families who cling to traditions that in the decades to come will appear as bizarre as those of the Pennsylvania Dutch.

Read the whole thing.

I wish I didn’t think Matthew Walther was probably right here, but I think he’s probably right here. This is a post-Christian nation, in the sense that despite the presence of tens of millions of churchgoers, ours is not a country that looks to the Bible to tell itself who it is and what it should do. Last year, writing in Tablet, Matthew Schmitz said that the zealots of Wokeism are bringing together unlikely allies to

Wokeism imagines a utopian world, one ruled without force, unbound by borders, freed from biology. We must “defund the police,” “abolish ICE,” and affirm that “trans women are women.” Heresy on the cardinal issues of race, the nation, and sex is not tolerated. James Bennet, opinion editor of The New York Times, was forced to resign after running afoul of the new orthodoxy. He joins a growing list of people that includes prominent media and cultural figures alongside ordinary citizens who have lost their jobs or otherwise been punished for alleged ideological infractions. “Wokeism” is not merely an idle belief system—increasingly it is the official philosophy of the American ruling class, employed to justify the exercise of coercive power. Governmental authorities and corporations now coordinate in enforcing the dictates of the new secular progressive faith, often at the cost of protecting the constitutional liberties of traditional religions.

Schmitz foresees a possible alliance between “trads” (religious conservatives) and unwoke seculars:

Despite their differences, an alliance could form between “trads” and the true “nones” who reject religion but may well see it as less of a threat than the growth of woke government power. Trads have all-encompassing beliefs that offend liberal and secular sensibilities. But they affirm the reality of biological differences between the sexes. They believe that your deeds and beliefs are more important than your race. Even when they reject the political formulations of liberalism, most still believe in the virtue of liberality and tolerance. Because they believe in the fallenness of man, they uphold the possibility of forgiveness. Like the “nones,” most “trads” are not utopians. Unlike the woke, they can tolerate those with fundamentally different beliefs. Trads and nones will never agree, but they can ally.

Signs of a none-trad alliance can already be seen in the growing connections between the relatively secular “Intellectual Dark Web” and conservative religious intellectuals. Last year, Bishop Robert Barron—one of the most intellectually sophisticated and technologically savvy leaders of the Catholic Church—appeared on the podcast of Jordan Peterson, whose work he has praised. Bret Weinstein and Heather Heying—atheists who supported Bernie Sanders—recently became visiting fellows at Princeton University’s James Madison Program, an organization run by the conservative Catholic thinker Robert P. George.

Wokeism could well become America’s established faith. If that outcome is to be prevented, the more skeptical, scientific, rationalist opponents of wokeism will need to join with people who have different reasons for opposing its utopian claims. Liberals who stress the provisional nature of knowledge, resist all-encompassing political claims, and seek space for public error and disagreement, have grounds for agreement with Jews, Christians, and others who believe that men are sinful and fallen. Leftists who are committed to the working class and focused on material progress above cultural symbolism, should be open to the moral and religious views held by many of its members.

Read it all. 

Last year, Bari Weiss, who is a center-left Jewish lesbian, found herself oddly standing with, um, me, because despite our very real differences, we both see the same problems coming from the woke zealots. Bari has a great column in today’s New York Post, offering Ten Ways To Fight Back Against Woke Culture. Among them:

5. If you don’t like it, leave it.
A class in college, a job, anything. Get out and do your own thing. I fully understand the impulse to want to change things from within. And by all means: Try as hard as you can. But if the leopard is currently eating the face of the person at the cubicle next to yours, I promise it’s not going to refrain from eating yours if you post the black square on Instagram.

6. Become more self-reliant.
If you can learn to use a power drill, do it. If you’ve always wanted an outdoor solar hot tub, make one. Learn to poach an egg or shoot a gun. Most importantly: Get it in your head that platforms are not neutral. If you don’t believe me, look at Parler and look at Robinhood. To the extent that you can build your life to be self-reliant and not 100 percent reliant on the Web, it’s a good thing. It will make you feel competent and powerful. Which you are.

7. Worship God more than Yale.
In other words, do not lose sight of what is essential. Professional prestige is not essential. Being popular is not essential. Getting your child into an elite preschool is not essential. Doing the right thing is essential. Telling the truth is essential. Protecting your kids is essential.

8. Make like-minded friends.
Then stand up for them. Two good tests: Are they willing to tell the truth even if it hurts their own side? And do they think that humor should never be a casualty, no matter how bleak the circumstances? These people are increasingly rare. When you find them, hold on tight.

Amen to that last one especially. It brings to mind this passage from Live Not By Lies:

As important as it is for Christians to strengthen their ties to one another, they should not neglect to nurture friendships with people of goodwill outside the churches. In the Czech part of Czechoslovakia, Christian dissidents had to maintain close contact with secular dissidents because there were so few believers within resistance circles.

As [Slovak dissident] lawyer Ján Čarnigurský puts it, “There weren’t many people in general who wanted to stand up to communism. You have to take allies where you could. The secret police tried to keep secular liberals and Christians apart, and they wanted to keep Czechs and Slovaks divided. They did not succeed because the leaders of the movement had become friends with leaders in other circles.”

In the Slovak region, František Mikloško reached out to liberals not because he had to but because he genuinely wanted to.

“To this day, communicating with the secular liberal world really enriches my views,” he says. “It is important for me to have my home and to be aware that I know where I stand. I know my values. But I have to stay in contact with the liberal world, because otherwise there is the danger of degeneration.”

Mikloško’s close association with secular liberal writers and artists helped him to understand the world beyond church circles and to think critically about himself and other Christian activists. And, he says, liberal artists were able to perceive and describe the essence of communism better than Christians—a skill that helped them all survive, even thrive, under oppression.

For someone like me, a non-Christian cultural liberal like Bari Weiss who has the guts to stand up against the Woke juggernaut is worth 10,000 Christians who believe the same things I do, but who are too timid to do anything about it. We trad Christians have to realize that the Leave Us Alone Coalition is probably the best thing we can hope for, given how much American culture has changed.

I don’t know to what extent conservative Christians believe in this idea that you used to hear among old-school Evangelicals: that we can “take back America for God.” This, usually stated as part of a political appeal. If there is anybody left in this country who believes that, please, stop. It’s just not possible through political means, and believing that it is blinds you to the realistic possibilities of constructive political allyship with those who don’t share Christian conservative views, but who at least don’t hate conservative Christians and therefore seek to destroy our institutions.

Take a guy like the podcaster Joe Rogan. Not a Christian, or even a social conservative by the conventional measure. He might not be a conservative at all; he endorsed Bernie Sanders for president. But he’s a likable everyman who hates wokeness and seems to be more or less possessed of common sense. Whatever differences on moral matters I have with Joe Rogan, I would not fear him as an enemy planning to use the power of the state to smash my kids’ Christian school, or force my daughter’s sports team to accept a biological male presenting as a female, et cetera. The future for Christians in post-Christian America might well depend on the rise of “conservatives” like Joe Rogan and Dave Portnoy of Barstool Sports. Seriously.

 

 

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Another Year (Or More) Of Covid?

The Covid news could hardly be much worse today:

Mutated versions of the coronavirus threaten to prolong the pandemic, perhaps for years — killing more people and deepening the global economic crisis in the process.

The big picture: The U.S. and the world are in a race to control the virus before these variants can gain a bigger foothold. But many experts say they already expect things to get worse before they get better. And that also means an end to the pandemic may be getting further away.

“It may take four to five years before we finally see the end of the pandemic and the start of a post-COVID normal,” Singapore’s education minister said last week, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Where it stands: “There are essentially two separate COVID-19 epidemics,” Dutch officials said recently, referring to the original strain of COVID-19 and the burgeoning threat from mutated versions of the virus.

There’s light at the end of the tunnel for the first epidemic. Although the virus is still spreading uncontrolled across the U.S. and much of the world, cases and hospitalizations are down from their peak, and vaccinations are steadily increasing.But the next iteration, fueled by variants of the virus, is already taking hold.

What’s next: A British variant of the coronavirus will likely become the dominant strain within the U.S. pretty soon, experts say. It’s significantly more contagious than the virus we’ve been dealing with so far, and some researchers believe it may also be about 30% more deadly.

“That hurricane’s coming,” Michael Osterholm, an infectious disease expert at the University of Minnesota and Biden transition adviser, said Sunday on “Meet the Press.”A more contagious and more lethal strain of the virus could easily send cases, hospitalizations and deaths soaring right back to record levels, even as vaccinations continue to ramp up.

“We are going to see something like we have not seen yet in this country,” Osterholm said.

It’s already happening in the U.K., where skyrocketing hospitalizations prompted another round of lockdown measures — and pushback against those restrictions.

Vaccines work against the British variant, and they will help control its spread, just as they’ll help control the pandemic overall.

But vaccinations can only ramp up so quickly. The Biden administration is trying to push doses out the door as fast as it can, but there’s a very good chance the more contagious virus is moving faster.The existing vaccines don’t appear to work as well against some other variants, including a particularly troubling one first identified in South Africa. They do work, and they appear to prevent serious illness and death, which are the most important things — but they may not prevent as many infections overall.Vaccine makers can rework their recipes and come up with booster shots to help address more resistant strains, but that will take time.

How it works: All of these problems stem from the same underlying problem — the unchecked spread of the virus.

More cases mean more hospitalizations and more death. Bigger outbreaks also provide more opportunities for mutations to arise, and to spread.A more transmissible virus means that a greater share of the population — maybe as much as 85% — would have to get vaccinated in order to reach herd immunity. That’ll be a stretch, given the widespread vaccine hesitancy across the country.

Because vaccine production is still scaling up, getting things under control well enough to head off a second phase of the pandemic would have to rely heavily on social distancing and mask-wearing.

That’s not a very promising position to be in, especially for a country like the U.S.

The bottom line: Vaccines work, and they are still the key to ending this pandemic. But leaning on them almost exclusively only makes the job harder and will likely prolong this pandemic for years.

Read more here.

I spoke on the phone earlier today to a friend who just went through it — his whole family had it — and it was gruesome. Still doesn’t have his taste and smell back, and doesn’t know if he ever will. I e-mailed with a friend from Hungary who said he and his wife had it, and it was really bad. They’re young and fit, too.

What if we have another year like 2020? Things will start to come apart. Douthat’s column over the weekend was about how the Covid year fed into radicalism of the Left and the Right. He says that the insane school re-naming project that radical elites in San Francisco have undertaken is something that Covid has allowed to happen:

It is precisely because the city’s public school classrooms are closed, precisely because normal educational tasks and interactions have been suspended, that radical projects find themselves more easily and naturally fast-tracked. If there’s anything we’ve learned about pandemic life, it’s that suspense of ordinary life creates a vacuum that ideology rushes in to fill.

For the last month, we’ve been focused on the particularly poisonous way that’s happened on the American right: how the online drama of QAnon and its stepchild #StoptheSteal became powerful enough and immersive enough to help inspire a riot at the U.S. Capitol. Yes, QAnon predated the pandemic and Trump would have claimed voter fraud no matter what. But the pandemic months still felt like they worked a fundamental change on many conservatives’ relationship to political reality, pushing normal people deeper into certain kinds of very-online fantasy.

What’s happened on the far left is somewhat different. The right’s pandemic-era dreamscape reflects a fear of growing powerlessness, with paranoia about malignant and all-powerful elites coupled with a fantasy of eucatastrophic victory. The left’s pandemic ambitions, though, are all about using newfound power to transform institutions in which their influence has been increasing. That makes them utopian but not fantastical, extreme but not a fever dream.

For instance, the San Francisco school board’s grasp of history may be shaky and its history-erasing ambitions radical, but it really does have the power to carry out a school-renaming project or a dramatic curricular review or any other step deemed necessary to instantiate the new era of awokened liberalism.

That’s a very good insight in that third paragraph, one that explains why I have been far less worried about far-right radicalism than far left radicalism. As I’ve confessed here before, I ought to have been paying more attention to QAnon and MAGA extremism. Had I been, I would likely not have been caught off guard by January 6. But I still maintain that there is no contest between the two extremisms, because the Woke Left holds power in almost all American institutions and elite networks — and that is how you get things done in this country (and in any country).

Put another way, as shocking and as appalling as the attack on the Capitol was, there is no chance at all that the mob could have overturned the US government. None. The far-right mob is largely powerless to do anything other than make mischief. Even though Trump was president for four years, Wokeness hardly broke its stride in marching through the institutions.

Douthat makes the same point in a different way: the Left really does have the power to transform the country and its institutions to fit its vision. If we have another year of Covid, you watch: Biden and the Democratic Congress will attempt to build the rudiments of a social credit system as a way of getting people to behave in ways that will slow the spread of the virus, and to control the outbreak of civil unrest. And a lot of Americans, desperate for life to return to normal, will accept it.

Along those lines, a friend I spoke with today who hasn’t gotten his taste and smell back told me that where he lives, there are still lots of people who are living life as if Covid didn’t exist. They are having slumber parties for kids, and things like that. For whatever reason or reasons, they want to believe that they shouldn’t have to change their lives at all for this disease. This is why we can’t have nice things. And this is part of the reason why we are inviting the surveillance state into existence.

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Razib Khan, Anti-Woke Mage Of Old Religion

Razib Khan is one of the most interesting people to follow on Twitter (@razibkhan). His Substack, Razib Khan’s Unsupervised Learning, is compulsively readable, especially if you care about science, which is his main focus (Khan is a geneticist). This most recent post, about 15 books that changed him, is a good introduction to the mind of Razib Khan. Khan is on the cultural and political right, which has caused him some grief within liberal academic circles, but he is fearless. I like fearlessness.

I follow him on Twitter, and was surprised recently to see him refer to someone as “Pagan,” in distinction from “Christians” — but it didn’t really sound like he was talking about actual Pagans and actual Christians, either historically or in a contemporary sense. When I contacted him about it, he explained that these were his code words to identify the non-woke (Pagans) from the woke (Christians). As Khan sees it, we are living through a time analogous to the triumph of Christianity, in which the paganism was smashed by the creed of the new god, and infidels (the pagans) had to live under the rule of followers of a jealous deity.

As we talked, Khan told me that because he is an out and proud “Pagan” — that is, someone who is identified as a follower of the rationality and science — a number of fellow “Pagans” throughout science, academia, and elsewhere, reach out to him constantly for sympathy and advice for how to live out their beliefs under the new woke dispensation. I told him he sounds like a mage of the Old Religion, and that he should write a short book of advice for beleaguered “Pagans,” in the Khan sense (of which I, a practicing Orthodox Christian, would be one).

Khan agreed to do this short interview via e-mail.

RD: On Twitter, you often talk about “Pagans” and “Christians” in conflict, but you aren’t really talking about actual Pagans and actual Christians. What do you mean?

RK: Academics in the 20th century came to their maturity in a pagan world. A world which valued truth, independence, and liberty of thought, in the ideal if not practice. There was an objective world out there, and
no matter how hypocritical scholars were, they acknowledged that at the end of the day that was the measure of all things. Reality would judge their hypocrisy. They could not escape its all-seeing-eye.

True, in the 20th century prophets like Michel Foucault preached to the unsaved heathen a new message, a message of power, of the bending of reality to will. To him, this was “good news,” with the human mind
ruling over nature. Whereas the Confucian rectification of names aligned the names to reality so that reality might be well-ordered in our minds, the new deployment of names resembles ancient magical powers. The names themselves shape reality. The law of gravity exists because we say it exists. It does not exist outside of our will.

This is the great inversion. A reversal of Copernicanism. Man, who was removed from the center of the universe, becomes the creator of the cosmos once more! In the late 20th century, and into the 21st, there
were early flare-ups between the prophets of inversion and those who held to the old ways. During the “Science Wars” of yore the heralds of inversion were turned back, even laughed at. After all, only cretins thought to bend reality to their will!

But various forces in 21st century culture resulted in the triumph of the inversion, of the subordination of reality to will.

First, there was the ideological and cultural polarization, which impacted the whole spectrum. The development of the liberal “reality based community” in the 2000s reflects a natural reaction to a certain strand in right-wing political practice which emphasized rhetoric, framing, and information manipulation. George W. Bush’s administration aimed to wield physical and informational power. Initially, the reaction on the left was a flight to objectivity, even scientism. Richard Dawkin’s espousal of “New Atheism” in the period
between 2005-2010 reflects this.

But in the years after 2010 the old ways collapsed on the left. One might conjecture that these currents were unleashed due to the Great Disappointment of Barack Obama’s presidency when his election did not
usher in an era of utopian racial and religious harmony. On the contrary, Obama’s first term was characterized by cautious center-left neoliberalism.

The rise of the new religion, of the woke, comes out of the sense of betrayal and disappointment. Their victory came not due to their delusional epistemology, but because they saw in the subordination of reality to their will the path out of the cold world which rejects their utopianism. Human flourishing is no longer constrained by nature in any manner, but only limited by imagination. The idea that any non-representative distribution in any field by race, sex, or sexual orientation, might have to do with preexisting aptitudes or preferences is rejected in favor of the idea that this is the outcome of a malevolent will. Systemic racism, systemic sexism, systemic heteronormativity. Demons. Anti-Christs.

Just as the early Christians were radical cultists who were on fire for their savior, so the early wokists espouses views that were mocked and dismissed by the pagans all around them. But where the early Christians found their Constantine, the woke have captured and scaled every major institution in American society: the academy, journalism, and industry.

In the academy, the new religion was long restricted to a few departments. But over the past ten years, it has marched from strength to strength. Men and women who five years ago scoffed at the idea of a “sexual spectrum” privately now speak of it reverently in public. Are they frauds? Or do they now sincerely believe in the new order? Does it matter?

First comes false words. Then public practice. Finally, private sincere belief. Read 1984 and its conclusion. This is what I have seen.

 Tell me more about why you see this conflict as essentially religious? 

Though I am personally an atheist and have always been so, I have come to the belief that humans, on the whole, are fundamentally religious. I do not believe that religion is a thing “out there.” Rather, I believe it is a thing “in there,” in our minds, and in our social practice. I believe “religion nerds”, believers or atheists, need to be careful not to reduce it to one thing. It is a multitude. A belief in powers in the universe. A sense of community. Adherence to rituals which order one’s life and give it meaning. A metaphysical and metaethical framework to bind together a society into a civilization.

Religion as a social force rises and falls. But it is also there as a potential. Always.

Communism and Nazism were labeled “political religions,” and they had many aspects of traditional religion. But traditional religion has outlasted both these ideologies. It turns out that the old systems were more robust. Stalin died. God does not. But the political religions nevertheless can burn brightly for a time.

We old pagans adhere to simple views. Some of us are believers in the old religions. Others are believers in no religion and live in a starkly material world of coldness from which most would shrink in horror. We believe in an objective reality. Also, most of us have tacitly accepted the Calvinist position that there is no magic in the
world, even if we disagree on whether God exists.

The new “Christians”, the believers in the woke sect, are on fire to convert to the world. They see that it will be reshaped in the image of their wills. And they see in the recalcitrant stubborn beliefs of the old pagans the greatest barrier to the redemption of this world, of the attainment of cosmic justice. Our disbelief is an abomination to them, for that disbelief disorders reality. Racism, sexism, and the overall marginalization of many groups emerges out of our disbelief in the power of will, in the primacy of feelings, and the necessity to
“read the room.”

We reject the power of the “room”, and assert there is a world beyond the room whose dictates we will never escape.

You say that younger people in science often come to you looking for help. Do you consider yourself a kind of mage of the Old Religion?

I reject the power of will in public repeatedly and without hesitation. The rejection of the power of will is privately a common, likely dominant belief, but the believers in objective reality are not fanatics. Their enemies are. The aim of science, the aim of scholarship, is knowledge. Its aim is not justice, for there is no justice or injustice in the cold dark universe. The universe is.

I refuse to say the words that they demand, and that is becoming far less common.

There are many who agree with me. Multitudes. But they are silent. But through various channels, they reach out to me and tell me that they hold true in their hearts to the old ways. Because of their silence, they don’t know the names of the others. But I do. So if they are at the same institution, I tell them. There has even been an occasion that pagans are found in the same laboratory, but presume that the other is a new “Christian.” Sometimes this belief is a consequence of a false profession of faith.

What are some of the problems your correspondents have? What do you tell them?

White males in particular are asked to self-flagellate in a ritual fashion. This is done in such a practiced manner that this is not a great discomfort for most, but the hypocrisy grates at some. Additionally, white males cannot express any dissenting opinion without bringing attention to themselves, leading to suspicion that
they are a crypto-pagan.

You can imagine the standard professional consequences, but I will give you a concrete example to illustrate the reach and sensitivity. University departments are removing the Graduate Record Examination in the interests of social justice. Some academics believe this will have an opposing effect. Here they are expressing the old pagan belief that objective truths should be measured, and removal of the measurement instrument does not change the truth. A friend of mine who tacitly supported this view “liked” a tweet from someone pointing out this pagan belief. My friend’s spouse was asked about this act by a colleague in the department in a negative manner.

The point being that punctilious adherence to belief and practice is necessary. My own belief based on watching the evolution of many friends over the years is that the easiest way to resolve cognitive dissonance is to accept the new savior in your heart, accept its truth as your truth, and denounce your own pagan colleagues as devil-worshippers. Doing this out of sincerity is much more psychologically satisfying than doing this out of self-interest.

You mentioned earlier to me that there are a lot of people embedded within the system who are not believers in the New Religion, but who don’t say anything. How do you feel about this? Do you think they should speak up, or are there instances in which it wouldn’t be worth it, and they could be more helpful to the cause by remaining silent? I think about this kind of thing a lot because Solzhenitsyn and Havel both said that the system of lies that they fought existed because most people were too afraid of the consequences of living in truth.

Most humans are sheep. They will bend before power. So I am not surprised. The hearts of men are weak, and the time of wolves is at hand! More seriously, Simon Peter was a good person, but he betrayed one who believed to be his savior. Should we be surprised that common human beings will be silent to protect their jobs? Their families? It’s human nature. The problem is systemic. I have seen the hardest of men crack and cave before the new dispensation.

I believe some being silent and quiet is useful. Perhaps the time will come for them to speak? They will find courage when courage is not required! Again, they are good people. But they are truly cowards, so if the new religion collapses of its own weight, they will come back to the fold without shame, for it is their nature to bend like the reed in the wind. Many of the Orthodox Christian politicians in Russia were once ostensibly zealous atheist persecutors. They are what they’ve always been.

In regards to Havel and Solzhenitsyn. I grew up in the 1980s and had a certain view of the people in the Eastern Bloc due to what we were taught. That view was not a high one. But now I see that they were no
different than we are. Americans have done great things, but we should attribute it less to who we are than our circumstances.

Back to the mage thing. What qualities does a mage of the Old Religion like yourself need to have? What kind of vocation does he or she have towards the community of anti-woke infidels struggling within science today?

I assume my own nature is a combination of “nature and nurture.” I was a brown-skinned atheist who grew up in Northeast Oregon, so I was used to being different. I was used to arguing with whole rooms of people
who believed I was going to hell. This is probably partly just by nature, I’m extremely disagreeable, and perhaps a bit egotistical. I dislike backing down and don’t have a taste to bow low before people who I perceive to be my inferiors. Many of the people who lie and grovel in front of woke inquisitors are brilliant and capable human beings who are abasing themselves before those who are as nothing. This act of degradation is itself an inversion of what should be the order of things. Those who open God’s book bow down before the blind.

I have spent much of my life exploring what I thought were true things. Reading books. Analyzing data. I refuse to deny what I’ve learned and lie so that the priests of the new religion won’t persecute me. So far I have managed to make a go of it in the world. I will tell you I was physically assaulted twice at scientific conferences, so the hostility can get pretty intense from those who believe they have the crowd behind them (I’m not a pacifist, I fight back). And of course, there are periodic denunciations of me, as well as attempts to “cancel” me.

But, at the end of the day, this will end. Lies always do. Pagans need to survive. History is on their side. Reality is.

Don’t forget to check out Razib Khan’s Substack.

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The Hillbilly Thomists Are Back

The Hillbilly Thomists are a bluegrass band composed of Catholic priests of the Dominican order (formally, the Order of Preachers, which is why you see the initials “O.P.” after a Dominican priest’s name). Their first album, 2018’s The Hillbilly Thomists, was received to great surprise (because who knew Dominicans could play bluegrass?) and even greater acclaim (these Dominican boys really can play and sing!).

Last week, the Hillbilly Thomists released their follow-up album, the exhilarating Living For The Other Side, which, if the first album didn’t convince you, proves beyond a shadow of a doubt that these preachers are not a novelty act, but true artists and evangelists via the medium of American folk music.

The band agreed to do an interview with me via e-mail. It follows:

ROD DREHER: For those who don’t know the band, explain the origin of the name Hillbilly Thomists. 

FR. AUSTIN LITKE, O.P.:The name comes from a passage in the letters of Flannery O’Connor where in 1955 she wrote: “Everybody who has read Wise Blood thinks I’m a hillbilly nihilist, whereas . . . I’m a hillbilly Thomist” (Letter to Robie Macauley of 18 May 1955, in The Habit of Being, p. 81). In the mid-2000s, Fr. Thomas Joseph White, a Georgia native, and Fr. Austin Litke, who hails from Kentucky, started playing Bluegrass music as a hobby in an effort to consolidate their Southern backgrounds having found themselves on the East Coast of the USA. They would play for small groups of people in Washington, D.C., or New York, and people would ask them to give a name to their group. They thought Hillbilly Thomists caught the combination of Dominicans and Bluegrass music well.

FR. JONAH TELLER, O.P.: The second iteration of the group came along when the rest of us entered the Order and started playing music amongst ourselves. When we had the opportunity to do a couple of small shows, the name “The Hillbilly Thomists” was too good to pass up, and Frs. Austin and Thomas Joseph were gracious enough to let us crash their party. Things developed from there.

Why did you choose to focus on bluegrass, and not a more contemporary form of music?

FR. AUSTIN LITKE, O.P.: It was more occasional than a conscious decision. The thing about Bluegrass music and “Roots music”/”Americana” in general, though, is that it is easy to have lots of people and lots of different instrumentation come together, which is ideal for a group of friars wanting to make music together.

FR. JONAH TELLER, O.P.: I think Fr. Austin’s right. All this mostly grew out of our getting together in the priory simply to play music with each other. It’s more a matter of having a song you want to play, sharing it, then another guy having a song he wants to play, and so on. The genre sort of follows the group’s tendencies, I guess. This album’s pretty eclectic, too. I don’t know that any of us were ready for how rockabilly “Chasing Money No More” turned out!

Fr. Brad Elliot, O.P., is a friar from the Western Province Dominicans out there in California. He was a studio drummer in L.A. before joining the Order, and he happened to be in D.C. when we were recording our first album in 2017, so he sat in on a couple of tracks. After one particularly raucous take, Fr. Brad sat back, smiled, then said, “That’s not bluegrass, that’s truegrass.” That seemed an inspired moment. We also want to be clear (for all the bluegrass purists out there) that we don’t try to label ourselves as a bluegrass band. We’re much more Americana, but bluegrass is what got attached to us, and it’s stuck for the time being. But yeah, truegrass is nearer the mark…

Something that really comes through in the singing, no matter which of you handles lead vocals, is your youth. I hear the deep yearning and strength of young men in these songs. How old are you guys anyway, and do you think your youth has anything to do with your approach to this music?

FR. JOSEPH HAGAN, O.P.: Our actual ages range from just thirty to almost fifty. For the youthfulness of our voices and songs, maybe it’s the hope undergirding our music. So many of our songs are about looking forward to heaven and trusting that Jesus will lead us there. That desire for heaven keeps us young. Another thought: though we’re singing about the last things, there’s also something lighthearted in the music itself. We take study and preaching very seriously, but music is a chance for brotherly communion and encouragement. There was a lot of laughter and banter during our recording sessions. Certainly, we try to hone our musical skills, but we know it’s not the height of our vocation. Once your hands are consecrated to hold the Eucharist, spoon clapping and washboard scrubbing remain as youthful as they were always meant to be (I’m the drummer, if you couldn’t guess . . .).

One of my favorite tracks, “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed,” exhorts the listener to be ready for the Lord’s coming. Listening to it, I thought, “These guys aren’t just performing — they’re preaching. They really believe this stuff, and they want us to know it.” How does preaching intersect with performance in the Hillbilly Thomists’ work?

FR. JUSTIN BOLGER, O.P.: The lyrics to “Keep Your Lamps Trimmed” are right from Scripture. In preaching we share the fruits of our contemplation. Songwriting is another mode of this fundamental Dominican activity. One can pray with the Word and write a song as well as a sermon. We preach and sing the Word. In this I think we follow St. Dominic who loved to sing and pray and encouraged his brothers to do the same.

The lyrical tropes you use are typically associated with low-church Protestantism, not with Catholicism. What do you think Catholics (and others) can learn from the kind of folk Protestantism associated with bluegrass?

FR. JONAH TELLER, O.P.: I think we should really say that we’re all indebted to all those people—mostly Protestants—who developed such a strong, really glorious culture of music in this country. I’m all for Gregorian chant in a church building, but outside, around the fire, you need something else. “Jacob’s Ladder” (one of the few covers we do on this album) was absolutely, hands-down our favorite song to record together. Fr. Thomas Joseph was of the opinion that it was physically impossible to listen to the song without raising your hands in the air at some point.

So what can we learn? Maybe that, after the liturgy’s done, it’s also good to also go outside and talk or sing to God in the simple, repetitive words that come to you when there’s a banjo around.

You have a Covid-19 song, the chorus of which is, “When it’s a question of love and survival/Bourbon, bluegrass, and the Bible.” What do you mean?

FR. THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, O.P.: Songs are kind of like characters in a book in that you have to ask what you think the song means or interpret it as you see fit. Maybe those lyrics mean that the Bible, bluegrass, and bourbon help you make it through. Maybe it means, in crisis you have to settle on the essentials. Or maybe it’s a kind of redneck creed, something you put on a camouflage trucker hat.

In your song “Heaven Or Tennessee,” you seem to be positing the rural South as a more virtuous, or at least realistic, place than the urban coastal regions. Is that a fair reading? If so, what makes you so sure of the South’s superiority?

FR. THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, O.P.: I’m not sure that’s it. The song is really about Tennessee, its mythology, and the character sees it as an antechamber of heaven. If there are certitudes in that song, they are aesthetic and religious. Of course a certitude does not have to be vertical since many people have subjective certainties they are in fact mistaken about, but like characters in a novel we can still learn from them. Perhaps the certitude of this song is that all of geographical space can be mapped by its distance from the Ryman Auditorium. And perhaps that’s in fact objectively true. But really the song is about pilgrimage and the end of the world.

Your song “Chasing Money No More” is about turning away from the world in search of something more truthful to live for. It’s a lovely song, but it takes on a deeper meaning when you understand that it’s being sung by young men who have joined a celibate religious order. How does your experience as Dominicans inform that song?

FR. JONAH TELLER, O.P.: Man, I love that song! I have to say, after almost every time we finished a take on one of the songs, someone in the group would say, “That’s the best song on the album,” and everyone would be inclined to agree. We just had so much fun with this album.

But to your question – Fr. Thomas Joseph puts it well in that song:

Well they dressed me in the ancient cloak,
and let me tell you that it ain’t no joke.
I spend as much time alone with angels as with common folk.
But it’s a life of sweet confection,
supernatural connection,
and as far as I can tell, it’s headed in the proper direction.

I guess part of the drive of that song for us as Dominicans is that we’re headed in the proper direction, following St. Dominic following Christ, going home . . . living for the other side (thanks, by the way, to Fr. Paul Clarke, O.P., who did the album design, for coming up with that album title at the very last second; we were all set to go with just Volume II).

To me, the most haunting song on the album is “Weight Of Eternal Glory,” in which the narrator meets people who say they are “suffering under the weight of eternal glory” — and that in this is their salvation. What an un-American, non-Moralistic-Therapeutic-Deism thing to say! Can you explain what it means?

FR. THOMAS JOSEPH WHITE, O.P.: The characters in that song understand that life entails some suffering and are concerned with how to suffer well and how to hope in God in the midst of suffering, in view of something beyond. They also think that their lives matter and that human suffering, despite the limitations and burdens it entails, can present them with a way to grow closer to God. They pass the baton of hope to one another in the midst of this situation. It’s realistic to accept that we suffer and that we will die, but even as we do this we need to think about why our lives matter in this world and in the next, and we need to pledge to others our hope in future glory. Interpreted this way, melancholy in this passing world can be the flip side of hope in the next.

Are there any Hillbilly Thomist live performances scheduled for this year, or does everything still depend on Covid going away?

FR. JONAH TELLER, O.P.: In years past, we’ve usually played a set at the Appaloosa Roots Music Festival in Front Royal, VA. It’d be great to be able to do that this year; we’ll see. Also, we’ve been trying to make something work with The Angelico Project in Cincinnati for a couple of years, so that’s high on our list of places to go in 2021, if we can. Maybe something in August; like I said, we’ll see. Covid certainly makes things difficult to predict. Another factor is trying to coordinate all of our schedules and geographic locations. But without a doubt we are looking forward to playing for a crowd again!

Order the Hillbilly Thomists’ new album ‘Living For The Other Side’ from their website. Go there to order from Amazon, iTunes, or to stream it from Spotify. Here’s the band’s video for, “Our Help Is In The Name Of The Lord”:

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Sextortion E-Mails

I received two e-mails with the exact wording today, in my personal e-mail address’s spam folder. They both read like this:

I know [one of my old passwords from many years ago; haven’t used it in ages] is one of your password on day of hack..

Lets get directly to the point.

Not one person has paid me to check about you.
You do not know me and you’re probably thinking why you are getting this email?

in fact, i actually placed a malware on the adult vids (adult porn) website and you know what, you visited this site to experience fun (you know what i mean).

When you were viewing videos, your browser started out operating as a RDP having a key logger which provided me with accessibility to your display and web cam.
immediately after that, my malware obtained every one of your contacts from your Messenger, FB, as well as email account.

after that i created a double-screen video. 1st part shows the video you were viewing (you have a nice taste omg), and 2nd part displays the recording of your cam, and its you.

Best solution would be to pay me $6836.

We are going to refer to it as a donation. in this situation, i most certainly will without delay remove your video.

My -BTC -address : 1CfV5DiUVzE7Sm4pBi5ge1dHqH7hUNoq3o

[case SeNSiTiVe, copy & paste it]

You could go on your life like this never happened and you will not ever hear back again from me.

You’ll make the payment via Bitcoin (if you do not know this, search ‘how to buy bitcoin’ in Google).

if you are planning on going to the law, surely, this e-mail can not be traced back to me, because it’s hacked too.

I have taken care of my actions. i am not looking to ask you for a lot, i simply want to be paid.
if i do not receive the bitcoin;, i definitely will send out your video recording to all of your contacts including friends and family, co-workers, and so on.

Nevertheless, if i do get paid, i will destroy the recording immediately.

If you need proof, reply with Yeah then i will send out your video recording to your 8 friends.

it’s a nonnegotiable offer and thus please don’t waste mine time & yours by replying to this message.

Now, I know this is fake because though I have some vices, watching porn is not one of them. In fact, I have never been to a porn site. But just think of how many people do have this vice, and who, after seeing a familiar password, might really think these creeps hacked their computer and filmed them masturbating while watching a dirty movie. Think how afraid these people would be.

If you are one of these unfortunate souls, take it from your non-porn-watching blogger friend: these hackers are lying. Don’t send them anything. Don’t worry about it. But do quit watching porn, and go to confession.

It turns out this is a common scam. This BBC report shows one way it works. This guy below explains what happened to me. Your passwords — old ones, maybe — have probably, at some point, been exposed in a data breach. (This is why it’s important to change your passwords!) You don’t have to worry that the sextortionists have video of you in a compromising position. Watch this short clip so you’ll know what to do — and what not to do (e.g., don’t reply to the email or click on any links within it).

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Is America An Enemy Of Christianity?

Though the US has separation of church and state, we have long been accustomed to American Christianity being consonant with American patriotism. But close Christian observers of American life have wondered for the last couple of decades — at least in my experience — if and when the day will come when being a faithful Christian will require one to oppose the US government and the American system. As America de-Christianizes, what was once unthinkable by conservative Christians is now fast moving from the fringes to the mainstream of our thinking.

Catholic World Report has published a blockbuster interview with Cardinal Gerhard Müller, formerly the head of the Catholic Church’s doctrinal office (before the more liberal Pope Francis dismissed him), in which Müller has shocking but important things to say about this.  The cardinal said:

“Now the U.S., with its conglomerated political, media and economic power, stands at the head of the most subtly brutal campaign to de-Christianize Western culture in the last one hundred years.”

That quote comes from a response the cardinal gave when asked for his view on Joe Biden presenting himself as a faithful Catholic, despite his long record of being in favor of unrestricted abortion:

Cardinal Müller: There are good Catholics even in the highest Vatican positions who, in their blind anti-Trump sentiments, put up with everything or play down what is now being unleashed in the U.S.A. against Christians and all people of good will.

Now the United States, with its conglomerated political, media and economic power, stands at the head of the most subtly brutal campaign to de-Christianize Western culture in the last one hundred years. They play down the lives of millions of children, who now fall victim to the worldwide, organized abortion campaign under the euphemism of “right to reproductive health”, by referring to Trump’s character faults.

An otherwise highly respected confrere reproached me, saying that I must not fixate on abortion. For now that Trump has been voted out, this eliminates the much greater danger that that madman might push the nuclear button. I am convinced, however, that individual and social ethics has priority over politics. It crosses a line when faith and morals are reckoned by a political calculus. I cannot support a pro-abortion politician just because he builds public housing, as though I had to put up with what is absolutely evil on account of something relatively good.

More:

Kath.net: Given the pro-abortion positions of the new President, can and should American Catholics simply and obligingly go along with his calls for “unity” and the healing of wounds?

Cardinal Müller: Reconciliation is the gift that God has given us through Jesus Christ. Precisely for Christians in politics this should also be a standard for their speech and actions. But an ideological rift in society is not overcome when one side marginalizes, criminalizes and destroys the other, so that in the end all institutions from the media to the international firms are now ruled only by representatives of the capital-socialist mainstream.

In the United States, as in Spain now, the Catholic schools, hospitals and other non-profit institutions supported with public funding are being compelled to implement immoral policies; if they refuse they are closed. Even the most naive must be able to tell by now whether the talk about reconciliation in society was meant seriously or was only a propaganda trick.

The very same ones who talk about it at the top of their lungs should examine themselves critically about their own contribution to the division. The slogan, “If you won’t be my pal, I’ll smash in your skull,” is not the right path to reconciliation and mutual respect.

Read the whole thing.

Cardinal Müller is right about the phony reconciliation offered by the Left. It’s typically, “Submit to us, and then you will have peace.” This is why conservatives who object to whatever progressives say is the next radical change they want to make to society stand condemned as aggressors in the culture war. It’s not aggression if you’re defending yourself!

We can see now the beginnings of a campaign underway to define conservative Christianity as “Christian nationalist” in the media. Let’s be clear: they are not entirely wrong to point to the destructive parts of this movement. I wrote in this space last month my strong criticism of the Jericho March, which was aggressively Christian-nationalist. I oppose uniting American national identity with Christianity. It’s bad for the Church, and it’s bad for the country.

That said, what the Left is pushing for, and is getting, in an American version of the French policy of laïcité — a hard secularism that pushes religion hard to the margins of public life. The only kind of Christianity that is going to be tolerated is Joe Biden’s kind: the sort that doesn’t contradict anything that secular progressives want. There’s a reason why our media, which heretofore furrowed its collective brow over the religious beliefs of Trump administration appointees, are falling all over themselves to highlight Biden’s Catholicism. They know Biden is tame. And they know that Biden gives cover to the anti-Christian policies that they advocate.

What does the cardinal mean when he says that the US, “with its conglomerated political, media and economic power, stands at the head of the most subtly brutal campaign to de-Christianize Western culture in the last one hundred years”? He is talking about how the power-holders in the United States, which is still the most powerful nation in the world, collaborate on policies that accelerate the eradication of the ancestral religion of the West, and the culture built on them.

We are losing — and having taken from us — the sanctity of life. It’s not only abortion. It’s genetic engineering too.

We are losing — and having taken from us — the truth that male and female are innately part of what it means to be human. That humanness is a given, made in the image of God. We are being told that we can create ourselves.

We are losing — and having taken from us — the truth that sex is part of the cosmic order, and inseparable from Christian anthropology (that is, the Biblical view of what a human being is).

We are losing — and having taken from us — the transcendental dimension of life. The sure confidence that there is something beyond this life, and that we will be judged in the next life by how we lived in this one. Instead, we are taught that today is the only thing that matters, and that satisfying the sovereign Self is the greatest good.

We are losing — and having taken from us — the ideal that all men are created in the image of God, and that means schemes to divide us along racial lines are dehumanizing.

There is no question that we are losing Christianity in the West. Europe is virtually a museum of the faith, and we in the US are headed in the same direction. (It is quite frustrating to me that so many of my fellow conservative Christians have long poured their passions into politics, even as the faith itself crumbles within the churches.) But we are not going to get the paradise that seculars expect. As the historian Tom Holland documents so vividly in his great book Dominion, most of the things that secular liberals love about Western civilization are products of Christianity.

What Cardinal Müller means, I think, is that all the major power-holders in the United States are equally committed to creating a world in which all are “liberated” from the chains of tradition, of religion, of biology, of history, of national feeling, and are turned into a herd of consuming individuals eager to be controlled by elites. They want Brave New World. The “subtle brutality” of which the German cardinal speaks is what I mean by “soft totalitarianism.” They aren’t going to smash the windows of your shop or burn it down, as the Nazis did. They are just going to make it impossible for Christian dissenters to do business.

Here’s a pertinent example. Catholic World Report, which published the Müller interview, has been suspended from Twitter since January 23, for posting a link to a news brief on Rachel Levine, the transgender Biden nominee to a position in the federal health department. From a story CWR just posted on the situation, the tweet that got CWR in trouble:

 

You cannot say that Rachel Levine is biologically male on Twitter, without being suspended on grounds of “hate”. CWR can have it’s Twitter account back if it deletes the tweet above. CWR reports:

It seems evident that Twitter’s focus is the descriptive of Levine as “a biological man identifying as a transgender woman…”

Since Levine is “transgendered”, it’s curious why Twitter would think it harmful or hateful to note what Levine is “trans-gendering” from or to.

Twitter is clearly indicating that unless CWR and other outlets jump through arbitrary and constantly-changing rhetorical and ideological hoops, they cannot use Twitter. Just as bad, Twitter is implicitly making CWR admit to hateful or bigoted language, even though such was never the case. Not only is such an approach subjective in nature, it is an overtly biased, unfair, and discriminatory approach that both stifles free speech and undermines CWR’s right to report on current events.

“Subtly brutal”: you have to live by lies if you want to participate on Twitter. Imagine a magazine, especially one with an online presence, trying to do so without being able to promote your work on Twitter. Maybe Facebook will do the same thing. CWR called Levine what Levine is: a biological male who identifies as a transgender woman. That neutral description is called “hate” by Twitter. Soon it will be impossible to say what is factually true without losing the ability to participate in the online marketplace. Because people will need to feed their families, they will live by lies. Soon enough, people will forget what it was to be a man, or a woman.

This is a small thing, maybe, but it’s what Cardinal Müller was talking about. So Christians in the near future — and even now — are going to be asking ourselves what kind of social order, and country, are we expected to defend? This is why I wrote Live Not By Lies — and why I hope you will read it, and not just read it, but do something about what’s happening.

The post Is America An Enemy Of Christianity? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Big Tech Vs. Christians

The Catholic Diocese of Brooklyn can’t figure out why Facebook won’t let it livestream the mass from a church there.

José San Juan has worked in technology for 30 years, and he says he’s never seen anything like this: Sacred Heart-St. Stephens Mass, live streamed daily to hundreds, was ripped off from the web on January 22. The parish still remains blocked from broadcasting by Facebook.

Why? Their pastor, Monsignor Guy Massie, isn’t so sure.

“It was needless to say a little bit annoying and my question was, what did we do wrong to get ourselves into this situation,” he asked.

The livestream began as a simple and seamless solution to the pandemic. DeSales Media, the communication and technology arm of the diocese of Brooklyn that operates NET-TV, came in to install several new cameras that allowed people to hear the Word of God in just a click.

“They allowed us through DeSales’ program to stream simultaneously through Facebook Live, YouTube and our website,” José said.

But all that effort was gone in an instant when big tech blocked every single one of the parish’s accounts from live streaming.

“It’s taken away from our parishioners who have found this connection with religion, with God and they’ve already had so much taken away from them in the past year,” José explained.

Meanwhile, Jonathan Cahn, a very popular New Jersey pastor, had one of his messages apparently shadowbanned this week by YouTube. On Monday, Cahn posted a video of himself giving what he labeled “Prophetic Message To Joe Biden.” Here is a link to the video. If you don’t have time to watch it, here is the transcript:

Two hundred and thirty-two years ago, in the first ever presidential Inauguration, the nation’s first president addressed a jubilant multitude and a nation united in shared values and a common hope in the nation’s future.  In the first ever presidential address, George Washington, gave the newborn nation a prophetic warning.  He said: ‘The propitious smiles of heaven cannot be expected on a nation that disregards the eternal rules of order and right that heaven itself has ordained.’  In other words, if America followed the ways of God, the eternal rules of order and right, the blessings of God would remain upon it.  But if America should ever depart from the ways of God, then His blessings would be removed from the land.

And now, January 20, 2021, another presidential inauguration takes place and the nation’s capital city, named after its first president, has become a military zone.  For the first time in American history, a presidential inauguration is devoid of people.  Instead of a jubilant crowd, 25,000 American troops stand guard over a National Mall in which flags stand in for the missing crowds, and barbed wire surrounds the halls of American government.

There is no war.  There is no overt threat from beyond its border.  Rather, the threat comes from within.  Division infects the land – as does a plague that has kept its inhabitants masked and locked in their houses as the nation’s functioning has been in large part paralyzed.  For months, the nation’s cities have seen protests and riots, and doors and windows shuttered, and buildings set on fire.  And the nation’s most revered edifice of government, the Capitol Building was taken over by an angry mob with the nation’s leaders fleeing for safety.

As the prophetic warning given on day of the nation’s first presidential inauguration, ‘the smiles of heaven’ are being removed from the land.

And so the question must be asked, have we then disregarded the eternal rules of order and right that heaven itself has ordained.”

As did ancient Israel so America, at the height of its prosperity, has turned away from God.  We have driven him out of our public squares, the schools of our children, our culture, and our lives.  And as did ancient Israel, in place of his absence, we have let in other gods and served them.  We have rejected his ways and embraced the ways of immorality.  We have called evil good and good evil.  And as did ancient Israel, we have lifted up the most innocent among us, our babies, and shed their blood.  Israel sacrificed thousands.  We have sacrificed tens of millions, unborn children who are not here this day of inauguration, because we took their lives.  And their silent screams ascent to heaven and their blood is on our hands.  We have passed down rulings from Washington, D.C. that war against the eternal laws of heaven on human life, human nature, gender, and marriage.  We have indoctrinated our children against the ways of God.  We have done as we were warned not to do and then we wonder why the blessings of heaven are being removed from our land.

When judgment came to ancient Israel, it manifested in the form of an enemy attack a strike on the land, a wake-up call.  It came to America on September 11, 2001 – and it came to the very place where George Washington stood and prayed on the day of America’s first presidential inauguration.   The biblical template of national judgment then ordains a period of years in which the nation is given the chance to return to God, or else head to judgment.  In the case of Jerusalem, that period, from that first enemy strike to the year when the greater shakings began – was 19 years.   From the strike on American soil in 2001 to the 19th year, brings us to the year 2020, the year when the great shakings began.  The danger that this window of time is drawing to an end, is now upon us.  We stand in a most critical moment.

Mr. President, you have called for unity and peace.   But how can a nation have unity and peace when it wars against the very foundation on which it stands?  How can a nation have unity and peace when it has turned against the God who brought it into existence?  And it has turned.  The nation that once led its school children in prayer and taught them of His Word now declares such prayers and teachings as forbidden and instead instructs its children against the ways of God.  How can that nation have unity and peace?  How can we have unity and peace in America if we have no unity and peace with God.  We are a house divided against itself.  And a house divided against itself cannot stand.

Mr. President, how can you place your left hand on the Bible, the Word of God, and with your right hand, sign laws into existence that war against the Word of God.   How can you place one hand on the Word that ordains human life as sacred and in the image of God from conception, and then with the other, sign laws into existence that will promulgate the killing of that human life?   How can you invoke the name of God in your oath and lay your hand upon His word and then implement laws that will suppress the going forth of His word, that will censor His word, and those who advance it?

You plan to enact laws that will disregard the distinction between male and female.  Did not the warning of our first president involve that very thing – if we disregard the eternal rules of order that heaven itself has ordained… You plan to enact laws that will specifically neutralize the protection of religious freedom.  You plan to strike down the Hyde Amendment, so that more children will be murdered and those Americans who recognize abortion as murder, will be forced to support the act of murder with their taxes.  And you plan to empower the act of killing unborn children not only within the borders of America but throughout the world to the end that yet more rivers of blood will flow.

How does one do such things and name oneself as a believer in God and a follower of Jesus?  How does one sign the sign of the cross and then sign decrees that rage against what God has so clearly set forth in His Word concerning life and death, holiness and sin, righteousness and immorality, good and evil?  To you, Mr. President, and all who have joined you in this agenda, from the Vice President to the leaders of the Senate and the House, and all who sit in halls of power and have embraced this agenda, heed this warning:  this day will pass, the applause will fade, this administration will inevitably be over, this world will pass away, but you will stand before God and give account.  For it is written, that we will each stand before God and give account.  And on that day all the power you once wielded will be gone, all of the world’s approval and praises will have faded away, and all the fame and glory you received will amount to nothing.  In the day when the book of history is closed and the Book of Life is opened, none of that will matter.  It will be you and Him.  And you will be required to give account: Did you follow the will and word of God?  Or did you not?   If you pursue these things, then you did not, and the blood of children will be on your hands.  And then will come eternal life or eternal judgment.   The voice of God calls out to you to turn and follow Him with all your heart who gave all His heart and life that you might be saved.

As for America, the problem is not social or economic or cultural or political.  The problem is spiritual.  And so must be the answer.  America has turned away from God.   And its only hope is that it return.  Choose true greatness and lead in that return.  Or continue its departure from God to destruction and judgment.

And for those of you who love this nation and are burdened and fearful for its future, America’s only hope is revival.  Without it, the nation is lost.  And revival only comes through repentance and return.  It’s time to pray as never before that that return and revival would come.  But it’s time to not only pray for revival but to choose revival, to choose to live in revival now.  And for that we must each commit to return to God, to put away from our lives that which must be put away and take up that which must be taken up, and to walk in His ways and live in His Spirit as we have never done before.  For the eyes of the Lord search to and fro throughout the earth for the one whose heart is completely His – to show Himself mighty on their behalf.  Let us be that people, and revival will come.

And if the darkness must come, whether by persecution, or disorder and disintegration, or apostasy, do not fear.  For God is still on the throne.  And the darkness cannot overcome the light but only magnify it.  And if the darkness should grow darker, then it’s time for the lights of God to shine even brighter.  For it is no longer the time for the candle in the day.  It is now time for the candle in the night.  We are now the candle in the night that shines against the darkness and lights up the world with its radiance.

We pray that the civilization that was established and consecrated to be a city on a hill, America, would once again shine with the light that once illumined it.  But whether or not it does, it is time that each of us shine with the light of His glory.   It is time to live unhindered, uncompromised, unbound, bold and all out, on fire, and mighty in the power of the Living God.  For thus says the Lord, “Arise and Shine for your Light has come and the glory of the Lord has risen upon you.  Deep darkness shall cover the earth, but the glory of God shall rise upon you.”  In the name above every name that is named, the name of Yeshua Ha Mashiach, Jesus the Messiah, the Way, the Truth, and the Life, the King above all kings, the Lord of all, the Hope of the ages, and the answer to every life, the Star of Jacob, the Prince of Life, the Glory of Israel, the Lion of the tribe of Judah, the name that will remain when all is passed away, Yeshua, Jesus, the same yesterday, today, and forever.  Amen.

Maybe that is not your rhetorical cup of tea, but it is well within mainstream Christian thought. I certainly agree with it, and I’m pretty far away from Cahn, a Messianic Jew, on the US Christian spectrum. Cahn posted it on Monday, and it went viral. Even though YouTube gave it a label saying “Joe Biden is the President of the United States” — which Cahn’s clip in no way challenges — by the end of the day, it had been seen half a million times. By the next day, it broke a million. As of this writing, it has 1.3 million views.

That’s when strange things began happening. I’m told by someone who attends Cahn’s church that when they Googled the video that afternoon, it no longer appeared. It still existed, but you couldn’t find it through Google. But by then, others had posted the video to their sites, and they got around the apparent ban. Though Cahn’s message remained on YouTube, as far as Google was concerned, it did not exist.

My source tells me that the pastor’s video was also delisted on YouTube search. Other videos from the church appeared, but not the “Prophetic Message To Joe Biden.” (For what it’s worth, it appeared just now on YouTube search at the top of the results, but I could only find it on Google posted by other accounts.)

What Cahn’s team experienced was what is called “shadow banning.” In this case, it leaves a video in place, but blocks standard access to it via search engine. In the case of a shadow ban, you have to know exactly how to find the video you want to see; search engines that have shadow banned you will not take people to the clip.

It’s comparable to Christians holding a service in a church building and thinking all was fine. The authorities had not harmed the church in any noticeable way. The problem was the church was largely empty. They had no idea that the authorities had blocked off all roads leading to the church, had removed all street signs needed to find the church, and had eliminated the church on all maps and directions. The believers thought all was normal, but they didn’t realize that they had been cancelled.

I was told by my source that searching for the Cahn prophetic message via other search engines was fine. It delivered the result. Google and YouTube did not (though again, I just tested both here on Friday afternoon; Google still doesn’t take you to Cahn’s website, but YouTube does). The problem is that Google controls the search engine market. As of last summer, 86.6 percent of all searches take place through Google. If Google decides to shadow ban something, it is very hard to find it. Cahn was lucky that his message was seen so many times, and reposted elsewhere, before the shadow ban kicked in.

How many Christians, conservatives, and others that Google’s West Coast team find to be deplorable are also being shadow-banned? And how many don’t even know what’s happening to them? What does this suggest about the future of free speech for those whom the Big Tech overlords don’t like?

Second, even though Cahn’s message has nothing at all to do with Donald Trump, or challenging the election results, YouTube slapped a warning on it. It is just a vigorous spiritual exhortation, completely within the bounds of Christian preaching. But Big Tech unfairly categorizes his message to Biden as being somehow an emanation of the election-contesting Christian cohort.

Are we all going to be shadow-banned and/or mislabeled by Big Tech, smeared as insurrectionists or insurrection-adjacent because we are YouTubing While Christian, or similar? How will we know if we are being denied fair access to the online public square by Google? Many of you might think that Sen. Josh Hawley has blown up his career by his association with January 6, but I’m telling you, on Capitol Hill, Hawley is Big Tech’s worst nightmare, and we are going to need him to stand firm and keep fighting for our free speech.

Meanwhile, here are two chuckleheads of much less renown and popularity than Jonathan Cahn, emanating their fourth General Eclectic video podcast from the penumbra of their own genius. Enjoy, and hope Kale and I don’t get shadow-banned:

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