Rod Dreher's Blog, page 86
January 28, 2021
‘Progress!’ Said The Neo-Segregationists
I find it hard to understand how this is legal let alone healthy or productive. pic.twitter.com/ZTzqeoE31A
— Erika Sanzi (@esanzi) January 28, 2021
Brentwood is a fancy Los Angeles neighborhood. O.J. Simpson lived there. This is happening at the Brentwood School, a private, very expensive school in the neighborhood. As it is private, what they’re doing is probably legal. But it’s utterly fascinating to see how the cutting edge of progressivism is the rebirth of segregation.
Erika Sanzi writes on her Substack:
There is increasing evidence that what the now billion dollar industry of DEI (Diversity, Equity and Inclusion) has been hijacked by people whose goal is not to build community or increase understanding but to stoke division and bring us back to a time where people were judged and sorted by race. And creed. And sexual orientation. Known by people in the biz as affinity groups, this sorting based on immutable characteristics is not new in this country. But what is unfathomable is that people would want to return and replicate one of the greatest stains on our nation’s history—and pay gobs of money to do it.
A billion-dollar industry devoted to making us fear and loathe each other along racial lines. And it calls itslef progressive. More:
Anyone who has followed my work for any length of time knows that my heart has been in school choice for advocacy for a decade. I have always believed that parents, regardless of income or zip code, deserve the self determination that comes with having options. That children have all kinds of different needs and that no one school or school district can ever be a fit for all children.
But the more I see evidence of schools diving head first into gender theory, critical race theory and queer theory, the more urgent the issue of school choice becomes. No parent should be zoned to a school that shames and sorts children based on their immutable characteristics. Period.
Between schools that haven’t opened in ten months and curriculum that forces children to grapple with complex topics in a completely reductive way, parents need educational life-boats. I personally know people who want this in their children’s schools — great, they can have it (at least until lawsuits shut it down.) But parents who see this as not only inappropriate and harmful but also racist, sexist and bigoted need an escape hatch and access to it cannot be dependent on income.
Historians will look back on this period with complete bafflement. How was it that a nation fought its way out of the sin of racial segregation, only for the most progressive forces — the same ones who, in previous generations, fought to dismantle legal segregation and racial hatred — to champion re-segregation for the sake of progress.
This is madness. Who actually wants their children to grow up thinking of people primarily in terms of race, sexuality, and so forth? Why can’t people be, you know, people, with all the good and the bad qualities that each of us has, regardless of our race or other particulars? How did it end up with conservatives championing old-fashioned liberalism against identity politics?
I wonder what the old folks in my Southern hometown would say. When I was a little kid, I would overhear from time to time older white people, whose worldview was formed by segregation, condemn “integration,” and say it would be the downfall of our society. Their idea was that whites and blacks were so different that they could not possibly mix, and that the white race would be corrupted by contact with blacks. I went to school with black kids in our local public school, and I knew from experience that they were wrong. But that’s how they thought. I imagine that there are still some people alive back home who recall segregation, and who, whatever their position on it, have vivid memories of how hard American society had to fight — and still has to fight in many cases — to exorcise its legacy.
And now, we are all being told by our progressive betters that all of that was wrong, that King’s dream was foolish, that segregation was right after all.
These people are bullsh*t artists, and they are destroying America. We cannot let them. Fight them if you can, and flee them if you cannot.
Why is it so hard for the Republican Party to take this garbage on unambiguously? It is the most un-American claptrap ever.
The post ‘Progress!’ Said The Neo-Segregationists appeared first on The American Conservative.
US Military & Liberal Society
A reader writes:
I want to address one aspect of your blog entry titled “The Tyranny Of Tech & Trans,” specifically concerning the permitting of transgenders to serve in the military.
Before going any further, it’s important to note that the U.S. has been something of an outlier when it comes to LGBT service in the military. Most Western European countries permit transgenders to serve openly, though this isn’t the same as the “unwritten rules” that dictate military life on a day-to-day basis. Also, based on available, the presence of transgenders alone hasn’t proven to be much of a problem according to the data, though one could argue that transgenders, already a minority among minorities in society, probably aren’t joining the military en masse to begin with. Though, there might be more of them in the military than you think – a 2016 survey revealed 9,000 servicemembers considered themselves transgender, but, again, 9,000 over well north of a million servicemembers is still a negligible percentage.
The concern, of course, is that lifting the ban would encourage more transgenders to serve in the military, but, again, given how few of them there are in society, I don’t see a huge increase coming to the point that it’d cause a major disruption. I’d venture to guess most transgenders would prefer to serve quietly and not rock the boat, though there are always drama kings and queens in every lot.
However, the military’s push for diversity and inclusiveness gets at something deeper and more problematic about the military – a lack of professionalism. Now, by professionalism, I’m going by the late political scientist Samuel P. Huntington’s definition of it, which comes down to expertise, responsibility, and corporateness. It’s corporateness I want to focus on. Basically, it’s an identity and in Huntington’s mind, a professional military doesn’t just have full-time soldiers, but they live an entirely different lifestyle from the society they serve. In some cases, they live apart from said society, basically out of necessity, given the nature of the profession of arms.
Huntington’s thesis was controversial in 1957 when it first came out and it still is, now. I think a part of this is because today’s “professional,” standing U.S. military is still a recent creation, whose legacy and lineage really began in 1945. Prior to then, however, the U.S. never adhered to Huntington’s standard of military professionalism, which was more European in character. To put it charitably, the U.S. is still figuring out what “military professionalism” means to itself.
I think what you’ve seen since 1945 is a gradual de-professionalization of the military, in large part by eroding the military’s corporateness. Yes, servicemembers still wear uniform, live by a different culture, are judged by a different legal system, and still have less freedom than the average citizen. But, instead of allowing the military to forge its own distinct identity, the military has been forced to become more like the liberal society it defends.
The reasons for doing this aren’t entirely nefarious. For one, the military is under civilian control. Ensuring the military has a healthy relationship with its civilian masters means the military can’t feel like it exists in a separate world. Going with that is that the military should never feel “above” or “superior” to the society it defends. One way to do that is to make sure the military not only adopts values similar to civil society, but also comes to look like society. This is where “diversity” and “inclusion” enter the picture.
The trade-off, however, has been that the military’s become an arena for fixing America’s social problems. I guess this is what happens when the U.S. spends 20 years waging counter-insurgencies and half-hearted wars around the world, because in a war where troops are face high-intensity combat against a determined, skilled, and well-armed adversary, while operating in conditions more austere than the forward operating bases of Afghanistan and Iraq, you can’t really worry about all these extraneous issues. The brave and strong really do survive and no accommodation will be given, because it can’t be given. This means that people who have more “complicated” or special needs will suffer even more in a high-intensity war, or find that they’re actually in the wrong line of work.
Another example of the military’s loss of identity can be seen in how the nature of the profession has changed. As a civil-military scholar I once posed the question to explained, there isn’t a distinct “military professional,” but they all fall under a broader umbrella of “national security professional.” Many of these people are civilians, but they work so closely alongside uniformed personnel, so the lines between the two have become more blurred. A large number of these civilians and servicemembers, at least the ones active on social media, are also very left-leaning and openly ascribe to Woke ideology.
Finally, this civil-military scholar told me:
Virtually all professions have become more specialized and diverse over time. I don’t think this increased inclusiveness necessarily indicates a loss of corporateness except among the most inflexible personnel.
I disagree with this. Having a distinct identity isn’t just about outward appearances. It’s also about culture and values. If the U.S. military is basically civilian society with uniforms, a different legal system, and a chain-of-command, then it’s merely functionally distinct. If the military is expected to reflect America’s liberal values, then the military has no distinct identity and it’s questionable that it’s a military at all, since a military is, by its nature, an illiberal institution.
I expect this trend to accelerate under the Biden administration, just as it did under the Obama administration. The question is, will the dominance of Woke ideology prevent open and frank debate to take place regarding this issue? During the Obama years, people like Jim Mattis expressed concerns about the “liberalization” of the military and he continued to raise these concerns as Secretary of Defense. Now, I’m not sure even he has the space to say such things.
My dark and dreary prediction is that the U.S. military will become something akin to a Communist military – large and unable to fight, but good at getting a diverse range of Americans killed. Oh yeah, and protect the Biden-Harris administration.
Thoughts, readers?
The post US Military & Liberal Society appeared first on The American Conservative.
January 27, 2021
Progressive Mommies Are Big Babies
One Rebecca Jennings, a reporter for the liberal media site Vox, brings terrible news to and about the liberal parents of America. Here’s the headline:
Wait a minute: there are people in this country who would freak out over the fact that a woman who taught desperate parents how to get their babies to sleep voted for Donald Trump? As the father of three children who were once sleepless babies, I have to say that if somebody could have helped us crack that code, I wouldn’t care if they had been Stalin’s favorite torturer. Seriously, who cares about that crap? Anxious progressive women, that’s who. From the story about Cara Dumaplin, who, along with her husband, donated $2,000 to Trump’s re-election campaign:
Taking Cara Babies’ star has risen directly alongside the importance of Facebook groups for new parents. For the many new parents who’d paid to take her online sleep courses, which range from $179 to $319, the Trump donation news came as devastating. “We put our trust in her when we were at our lowest and vulnerable,” says Katelyn Esmonde, a postdoctoral fellow at Johns Hopkins and mother to a 12-week-old. “She made me feel like not getting my baby to sleep perfectly was okay. Being a mom is to feel like you are constantly failing, and she made me feel like I was doing a good job.”
Esmonde had signed up for her online newborn class, which cost around $75, and says the techniques helped her daughter’s sleep schedule significantly. “In my house, I can say something about what ‘Cara’ says and my husband knows exactly what I’m talking about,” she adds. But now, “it’s really hard for me to separate what I know about her now from the sleep advice that she gives. I can’t square that with a person who puts children in cages.”
More:
Preti has seen several of her own Facebook groups struggle to deal with how to approach potentially divisive conversations. “A lot of criticism in mom groups, when someone posts something political, is like, ‘We’re here to talk about breastfeeding, not politics.’ But motherhood is political. You’re building a path for children to have a future,” she says.
Oh, vomit. This is the point where I remind you that a totalitarian society is one in which everything is politicized.
Who could bear to be around those people? Seriously, how privileged do you have to be to be able to fall out with the red ass over your Baby Whisperer’s political donations?
Actually, I don’t at all agree with Dumaplin’s technique, which is based on the Ferber method, which is why I wouldn’t recommend her. But if she is good at what she does, who cares who she votes for?
Back in 1999, when we had our firstborn, he was having a lot of trouble learning how to nurse. We heard that Freda Rosenfeld, a Hasidic Jewish woman from Brooklyn, was an excellent lactation consultant. We called her, she came over, and she was great (she’s still doing it too, according to this story from the NYT). We were so very grateful to her for the help she gave two desperate parents. I literally cannot imagine the kind of terrible person you would have to be to spite someone who helped you like that, over who they gave money to in a political campaign.
Are normal people like this? Or just progressives? All progressives? If you were a Trump supporter, and found out your baby whisperer was a donor to liberal causes, would you freak out? Maybe you would. Maybe this world is a lot crazier than I thought.
This brings to mind the Great Park Slope Parents Blue Hat War of 2006. The Brooklyn neighborhood Park Slope is progressive yuppie central. Back in ’06, a mom who participated on the Park Slope Parents listserv posted this:
Shots fired! Gawker collected the neurotic e-mails that followed from other Park Slope moms — read them here.
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Trans Militant Comes For UD Prof
The University of Dallas is a Catholic university widely understood to teach with fidelity to the Magisterium of the Catholic Church. Now one of its top professors is being attacked for having expressed his views on transgenderism on his private Facebook page. The letter was sent to me as a PDF, but I could not get it to transfer cleanly to this blog. So, I screenshot it in pieces. Look:
Beeler repeated the text in Dr. Upham’s post, then added:
In short, they are trying to get Prof. Upham fired.
Bethany Beeler is quite an interesting person. Go to Bethany’s Medium page to see a not-at-all-unstable person’s writing. From Bethany’s memoir (available on Amazon).
Not too sure about Bethany’s standing to tell a Catholic institution what to do:
Anyway, a group has started a counterpetition. They say:
An Open Letter to the University of Dallas Board of Trustees, the Bishop Chancellor, the Faculty Senate, the Office of the President, and the Office of the Provost Regarding the Letter Demanding the Removal of Dr. David Upham
We are called to write this letter for two reasons. First, we seek to defend an honest educator, a charitable mentor, and a good Catholic man. Second, we seek to defend the University of Dallas from those who claim to love her yet strive to change her.
Dr. David Upham has served the UD community for many years. He is a hardworking, kind, joyful man, who openly loves our school, our country, and our Lord. He courageously and respectfully discusses and defends what he loves in the classroom and in the public square. There are times when Dr. Upham’s opinions may anger those who disagree with him, and we are living in an age where those who disagree with him increasingly feel that they have every right to silence him as well as anyone who holds similar opinions.
The letter calling for Dr. Upham’s termination is proof of this sad truth. We will not respond to the letter in question point by point, for we know your time is limited, and we trust that you do not need any help unraveling such tenuous arguments. We will, however, briefly list some troubling observations.
We must first point out that Dr. Upham’s post was wholly consistent with the Church’s teaching that God created human beings in His image, that He created them male and female, that He created each person as an embodied soul (i.e. as a union of body and soul).
We must clearly state that Dr. Upham was in no way inciting violence against anyone or “espousing hate out of fear of difference.” He was merely warning that the incoming Biden administration poses a real threat to religious liberty. A reasonable person may disagree with Dr. Upham’s assessment, but only an unreasonable and intolerant person would see Dr. Upham’s assessment as grounds for dismissal and ostracism.
We must also note that the letter, full of twisted logic and calumnious insinuations, attempts to shame not only Dr. Upham but also the university for failing to live in accordance with the brave new rules of secular morality. It is written with the assumption that the demands of this new secular morality hold more weight than the requirements of traditional Catholic morality.
These observations, combined with the other controversies that have erupted at UD this school year, indicate that there are people within and without the institution that wish to see UD embrace political teachings at odds with the teachings of the Catholic Faith.
We believe that UD has been targeted because it is one of the few academic institutions that welcomes teachers who call their students to love and seek the eternal verities of truth and justice rather than conforming to the popular opinions of our age: “Veritatem, justitiam diligite.” We believe that Dr. Upham has been targeted because he is just such a teacher, one who stands up for our motto by seeking the truth in philosophic discourse and by fostering the love of justice through disciplined study. If the University of Dallas does not stand with professors like Dr. Upham, what will it stand for? We triumphantly call UD “a Catholic university for independent thinkers.” The call to dismiss Dr. Upham—for the crime of voicing Catholic teaching and warning about the potential loss of religious liberty—shows that if we do not stand up for independent thought, we will soon cease to be a Catholic university.
The letter calling for the removal of Dr. Upham ends: “Reassure our faith in the Western intellectual and theological tradition by providing no haven or pulpit for those espousing hate out of fear of difference. Be a beacon of Truth, Beauty, and, most of all, Love.” There are two substantial mistakes here.
Firstly, anyone who accepts transgenderism cannot have an overly steadfast faith in the Western intellectual and theological tradition, for gender ideology seeks to undermine and eventually rewrite the Western intellectual and theological tradition.
Secondly, the letter invokes two of the three transcendentals (i.e. truth and beauty) but tellingly replaces goodness with love. This specious love is not God’s love. To love as God loves involves seeing the good in each person and also wanting the good for each person. The good for each person is nothing other than perfect communion with God, and this is only possible when a person is free from all sin and error. Thus, Love calls us to reach out to and to pray for people who are enslaved to sin and error, but Love can never justly call us to accept sin and error for any reason but especially out of a mistaken sense of compassion.
To love as God loves is far from easy. We are all sinners, and we all fall. May God give us the grace to love Him and our neighbor as we ought and to recognize when we fail so that we may improve. And May God bless the University of Dallas and preserve her as a beacon of “[a]cademic excellence embodied in a rigorous Catholic education dedicated to a lifelong pursuit of wisdom, truth and virtue.”
Therefore, we ask that you give unqualified support to Dr. Upham and reaffirm the University of Dallas’s commitment to its mission statement.
With humility and hope,
The undersigned:
I don’t know who started this letter, but the person is asking for signatures to be sent to DefendUD — at — yahoo — dot — com.
Now would be a very good time for UD alumni to come to the aid of Prof. Upham.
Now would be a very good time for small-o orthodox Christians to understand that there is no place to hide — that these militants will find you, and try to ruin you. If we don’t start standing up for each other, they will destroy our institutions.
UPDATE: I heard just now from one of the people behind the petition to defend Dr. Upham. The person writes:
Within about 48 hours of its being distributed, the letter in support of Dr. Upham had received 500+ signatures from members of the UD Community, from alumni, to faculty, to current students and parents of students. The letter was delivered in hardcopy to the current president, the provost (who has been named as the incoming president, to take office July 1), as well as the chair of the faculty senate, the Bishop of Dallas, and the Chair of the Board of Trustees, all of whom were addressed by the original open letter calling for Dr. Upham’s termination. As of 5 pm today, the letter has reached over 600 signatures in support of Dr. Upham, calling the administration to reaffirm the University’s commitment to its mission statement, which entails both fidelity to the Catholic tradition and natural reason’s pursuit of the truth. We have good reason to believe they will not disappoint us.
My correspondent says that there is not a public place that the pro-Upham letter has appeared, other than this blog. The correspondent advises:
If anyone wants to sign, they can just email defendUD@yahoo.com with their name and a statement affirming they want to sign the letter.
The post Trans Militant Comes For UD Prof appeared first on The American Conservative.
The Tyranny Of Tech & Trans
Robert A.J. Gagnon is a prominent Biblical scholar, and a social conservative. On Facebook recently, he wrote something opposed to gender ideology. This is what he wrote:
My friend Laurie Higgins has been suspended for 7 days, for making an accurate and witty satirical post, by left-wing FB overlords who seek to squash all dissent on the issue of transgenderism, no doubt emboldened by the Biden/Harris administration. There’s nothing inaccurate about this post.
Biden’s lifting of Trump’s transgender military ban will indeed put women military personnel in the awful position of having to shower with biological males.
Trans-promoters aren’t content with having men invade the domain of women’s sports and shelters.
“Transgender” ideology is indeed a pseudo-science, compelling people to reject basic biological facts.
Promoters of “transgenderism” do indeed exhibit traits of a religious cult in their mind-numbing, science-denying conformity. The censoring and suspending of Laurie Higgins rather proves the point, doesn’t it?
And this, according to a story about it on PJ Media, is what happened to him:
You get that? Simply dissenting against transgender ideology is “violence and incitement.” You must conform. As I wrote in this space yesterday, a mob of woke students at Baylor University is trying to get an instructor cancelled because she tweeted something critical of trans ideology.
I don’t think most Americans have any real understanding of how vicious these wokesters are, and how much their ideology stands to change American life. They have conquered corporate America, and the Democratic Party. Joe Biden has said that passing the Equality Act will be a priority for his administration. It passed the Democratic House, but was not taken up by the GOP-controlled Senate. Now, thanks in large part to Trump’s post-election tantrum, the Democrats will control the Senate. The only thing stopping passage of the Equality Act now is Biden’s whim.
Kenneth Craycraft explains what the Equality Act would mean. Excerpts:
The Equality Act would amend the Civil Rights Act to forbid discrimination on the basis of sexual orientation and gender identity, but it would also fulfill the abortion industry’s long-fought desire to establish abortion as “health care” officially and legally by outlawing “pregnancy discrimination.” It requires that access to “treatment” for pregnancy must not be any different from access to any other kind of health care treatment for any other “physical condition.” But this is all code language for implementation of a vigorous national policy of abortion on demand for any or no reason.
By making abortion health care and declaring that no person shall be discriminated against in access to such care, the Equality Act would make opposing abortion access morally equivalent to opposing dialysis, chemotherapy, stitching a wound, or setting a fractured arm; if there is no morally serious argument to be made against setting fractures, neither can there be a morally serious argument against providing an abortion. On the anniversary of Roe v. Wade, President Biden called abortion “health care” and repeated that he intends to make Roe v. Wade the law of the land, removing any doubt about his commitment to the Equality Act.
The Equality Act would also outlaw certain kinds of psychological or psychiatric treatment, including any treatment for gender dysphoria that does not conform chapter and verse to extreme gender-identity ideology. Gender “confirmation” hormone therapy and mutilating surgery will also be protected “health care,” under the same analysis as abortion above. And the Act would force schools and athletic conferences to allow biological males to compete against biological females in athletic competitions. On the first day of his presidency, Biden issued an executive order instructing all applicable administrative agencies to enforce just such an agenda.
While even the Obama-era Affordable Care Act contained conscience or refusal provisions for religious believers (albeit largely inadequate ones), the Equality Act expressly denies such exceptions. It explicitly provides that the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act shall not provide a claim concerning, or a defense to a claim under” the Act, nor “provide a basis for challenging the application or enforcement” of the Act.
Craycraft says the companion Do No Harm Act, of which Sen. Kamala Harris was a vigorous sponsor, would complete the coup against religious liberty by effectively negating the Religious Freedom Restoration Act. If — more like when — these bills pass, the only hope for religious and social conservatives, and for women who, religious or not, do not want male-to-female transgenders invading women’s athletics and women-only spaces, is the US Supreme Court.
Read it all. You need to know what’s coming.
Leaving aside the laws, there is nothing that can prevent Facebook from enforcing whatever standards it wishes to on its platform. Seventy percent of Americans use Facebook. If Facebook regards resistance to gender ideology — not abuse of transgendered people, but merely dissenting from gender ideology — as an incitement to violence, and therefore worthy of a ban from its public square, that is a very big deal.
Sen. Josh Hawley is in the doghouse with a lot of people now for his role in objecting to election certification, and its connection to the January 6 violence. I think his move was ill-considered, but that he is being unfairly dogpiled over it. He lost his Simon & Schuster book deal over it (his book, The Tyranny Of Big Tech, will be published instead by Regnery). Losing a book deal is not tyranny — all publishers have an opt-out in contracts — but it’s not nothing either. Whatever we think of the prudence of Sen. Hawley’s move prior to January 6, we need to hear him when he talks about the tyranny of tech. Here’s something he wrote in a NY Post op-ed this week:
The alliance of leftists and woke capitalists hopes to regulate the innermost thoughts of every American, from school age to retirement. And they’ve trained enforcers of the woke orthodoxy to monitor dissent or misbehavior. A “Karen” who cuts the wrong person off in traffic gets followed home on a livestream and shamed into crying for mercy as her license plate is broadcast to an online horde eager to hound her out of a job.
Everyone knows it can happen to them, so everyone shuts down. The circle of trust narrows. Conversations — too easily recorded — shift to encrypted messaging apps. For now. Until those get banned too for interfering in efficient social credit markets.
For some time, conservatives, recognizing that we’re now the counterculture, indulged in the delusion that we could opt out of all this. We’d send our kids to schools that don’t teach all the woke stuff. We’d make our friends at church, not at work, and take comfort that trust and openness were still possible in communities of shared purpose. We’d vote our conscience, because the ballot box was something no election could take from us.
And if ever our political organizing were impeded by censorship — say, by the big tech giants — we could build our own platforms.
But the left and the corporations are challenging all of this now. Your “conservative” social platform isn’t worth much when Amazon can shut it down. Your vote may still be yours, but if your party is denied the means to effectively organize by corporate monopolies, it’s not going to win. Your church, well, you can still attend for now, but go to the wrong church and you may not have a job in a few years.
He’s 100 percent right about that. Contrary to the beliefs of people who have never read The Benedict Option, I advise readers in the book to stay involved in politics, if only to protect religious liberty and other basic freedoms under assault from the Left. The problem is that simply protecting those freedoms in law isn’t enough. People who are taught by Facebook and other culture-forming institutions that objecting to the trans juggernaut marks one out as evil may choose to leave church, either because they are truly convinced that their communities are wicked, or they just do not want to be hassled for their membership in such communities. We need to fight politically and build up resilient communities of resistance. Retaining the legal right to have these communities doesn’t mean much when people leave them because they have been stigmatized.
Finally, Miranda Newsom offers stunning visual evidence of the injustice of transwomen (= male-to-female transsexuals) in women’s sport. Here’s how her thread starts:
Read the whole thread — while Twitter still allows it to be seen.
UPDATE: Robert A.J. Gagnon emails to say he’s out of Facebook jail now, and to share with me his latest comment (published on FB):
I am now out of Facebook’s unjust 24-hour suspension, where FB overlords used the absurd pretext that I was “inciting to violence” when I defended the accuracy of FB friend Laurie Higgins’ comment regarding Biden’s imposition of Transgender Tyranny on the military, for which Laurie received (and is still under) a 7-day suspension.If critique is an incitement to violence, then FB’s own censoring as “hateful” those people who hold positions that the Lord Jesus Christ himself held (and holds) are inciting people to violence. Every critique by the Left of the orthodox Christian stance on transgenderism would be inciting to violence. This is absurd.Censorious, left-wing FB administrators, emboldened by the hard left-wing Biden-Harris administration are using the false charge of incitement to violence as a pretext for canceling anyone who doesn’t celebrate transgenderism. They are the book-burners of the present day. Lacking a defensible argument (apparently) they cannot allow a full public discussion of the controversial promotion of other-sex pseudo-transformation.I abhor violence against any person (of course), including those who suffer from gender dysphoria delusion. I also recognize the fact that claiming a sex other than one’s biological sex is a delusion for which people need compassionate therapeutic help (and Christ).I have shown from a careful reading of Scripture that Jesus and the Scriptures generally view(ed) identifications with the opposite sex, and any mutilation of the body that goes with such an identification, as an abhorrent rebellion against the Creator. This is the one and only orthodox perspective of the true Church, since any deviation from Jesus’ understanding of the foundation of sexual ethics is by definition not orthodox.It is also clear that there is a trans-cult that denies the scientific reality and logic of body-based sex (gender), seeks to punish all who dissent from their unreality, and promotes invading opposite-sex private spaces and sports that does harm against women. As I noted in the original post for which I was suspended, heavy-handed censorship by FB administrators confirms, rather than denies, this point. They are cyber-bullies.I thank many friends for posting on my behalf. I make special mention of Tyler O’Neil of PJ Media for writing up and publishing my situation (see article link in comments below and prior postings by others); to Rod Dreher who just now posted an article on this for The American Conservative; and to Princeton’s Robert George for posting on my behalf early on. Please forgive me for not mentioning everyone by name for whom I am grateful. I know who you are and, most importantly, the Lord knows who you are.As with the early church, let us pray to the Lord for greater boldness of speech, recognizing God’s sovereign rule over the “principalities and powers” that stand behind those who would abuse our civil liberties through coercive imposition of immorality against our conscience, religion, and reason.
The post The Tyranny Of Tech & Trans appeared first on The American Conservative.
January 26, 2021
America’s Woke Elite Monoculture
Michael Lind is emerging as one of the most important voices of our current political and social moment, and Tablet, which has been publishing him, as one of the most important magazines. Here’s a new piece he’s done on the new national American elite — something that has never before existed, in Lind’s telling. In past eras of US history, elites have been regional. No more. Lind’s take on how elitism has worked in US history is interesting, and worth a read in itself. Here is one conclusion he draws about our present elite:
Membership in the multiracial, post-ethnic national overclass depends chiefly on graduation with a diploma—preferably a graduate or professional degree—from an Ivy League school or a selective state university, which makes the Ivy League the new social register. But a diploma from the Ivy League or a top-ranked state university by itself is not sufficient for admission to the new national overclass. Like all ruling classes, the new American overclass uses cues like dialect, religion, and values to distinguish insiders from outsiders.
Read it all. Dialect is something you can change without violating your conscience. Religion and values are something else. What is a person who holds religious beliefs, or moral values, that contradict the woke code supposed to do? Until the day before yesterday, an unwoke person could get hired at a company without having to affirm a code of values that violated his conscience. Companies generally didn’t care what an employee thought, as long as he did his work diligently, and got along well with others in the workplace.True story: I have a friend who is a very conservative Catholic, and who believes that what the Catholic Church teaches about homosexuality is true. He is a senior manager at a US-based multinational. He has — or had; it’s been a while since I’ve spoken with him — a number of gay and lesbian employees working in his department. He says they have no idea what he really thinks, because he does not bring his religious views into the workplace. Moreover, as a matter of professionalism, he treats those workers the same as he treats everybody else. He believed his own honor was at stake. Besides, he’s a charismatic guy who gets along with everybody.As I said, we haven’t talked in a few years, but when we were in closer touch, he was afraid that the day was going to come when the HR department would force him to swear public allegiance to Pride. This he could not do. He earned a real estate license so he could have a back-up gig in case it came down to choosing between his conscience or his corporate career. I don’t know how things are going with him now, though I did just look him up online, and he’s still with the corporation.But this man is so high up in the corporate hierarchy now that I imagine he has options that a lower-level employee does not. That is, he might be so valuable to the company that his bosses would not be willing to fir him over his refusal to fly a Pride flag on his desk. I don’t know — it’s just a guess. It’s not easy to get executives as talented as he is at that level.But what about people who are still young in their careers, or who are just starting out? As I see it, you have three basic options.The Small Business Solution. Work for a small company or firm, one that is run by someone you trust, and who won’t hassle you about wokeness. You cannot expect to have the same level of success, including monetary reward, but you will be able to do your work with a clear conscience. This will not work for people whose professional licensing requires some profession of allegiance to wokeness.The Noble Suffering Solution. This is the hard one, the one that calls on you to sacrifice your career or professional ambitions for the sake of conscience. This was forced on people in the Soviet bloc who ran afoul of the commissars, and who would not sign or say something they didn’t believe, not even to save their jobs. This is how Tomas, the physician in Kundera’s novel The Unbearable Lightness of Being, became a window-washer. You can solve your problem by taking a job in a non-woke field — probably one with less prestige, though.
Dialect. You may have been at the top of your class in Harvard business school, but if you pronounce thirty-third “toidy-toid” or have a Southern drawl, you might consider speech therapy.
Religion. You may have edited the Yale Law Review, but if you tell interviewers that you recently accepted Jesus Christ as your personal savior, or fondle a rosary during the interview, don’t expect a job at a prestige firm.
Values. This is the trickiest test, because the ruling class is constantly changing its shibboleths—in order to distinguish true members of the inner circle from vulgar impostors who are trying to break into the elite. A decade ago, as a member of the American overclass you could get away with saying, along with Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, “I believe that marriage is between a man and a woman, but I strongly support civil unions for gay men and lesbians.” In 2020 you are expected to say, “I strongly support trans rights.” You will flunk the interview if you start going on about civil unions.
More and more Americans are figuring out that “wokeness” functions in the new, centralized American elite as a device to exclude working-class Americans of all races, along with backward remnants of the old regional elites. In effect, the new national oligarchy changes the codes and the passwords every six months or so, and notifies its members through the universities and the prestige media and Twitter. America’s working-class majority of all races pays far less attention than the elite to the media, and is highly unlikely to have a kid at Harvard or Yale to clue them in. And non-college-educated Americans spend very little time on Facebook and Twitter, the latter of which they are unlikely to be able to identify—which, among other things, proves the idiocy of the “Russiagate” theory that Vladimir Putin brainwashed white working-class Americans into voting for Trump by memes in social media which they are the least likely American voters to see.
Constantly replacing old terms with new terms known only to the oligarchs is a brilliant strategy of social exclusion. The rationale is supposed to be that this shows greater respect for particular groups. But there was no grassroots working-class movement among Black Americans demanding the use of “enslaved persons” instead of “slaves” and the overwhelming majority of Americans of Latin American descent—a wildly homogenizing category created by the U.S. Census Bureau—reject the weird term “Latinx.” Woke speech is simply a ruling-class dialect, which must be updated frequently to keep the lower orders from breaking the code and successfully imitating their betters.
The Ketman Solution. Ketman is a Persian concept that the Polish dissident writer Czeslaw Milosz introduced in his 1953 book The Captive Mind. He said it’s a strategy that people who weren’t true believers in communism, but who wanted to keep their positions within the system, practiced. I explain it like this in Live Not By Lies:
You become an actor, says Miłosz. You learn the practice of ketman. This is the Persian word for the practice of maintaining an outward appearance of Islamic orthodoxy while inwardly dissenting. Ketman was the strategy everyone who wasn’t a true believer in communism had to adopt to stay out of trouble. It is a form of mental self-defense.
What is the difference between ketman and plain old hypocrisy? As Miłosz explains, having to be “on” all the time inevitably changes a person. An actor who inhabits his role around the clock eventually becomes the character he plays. Ketman is worse than hypocrisy, because living by it all the time corrupts your character and ultimately everything in society.
Miłosz identified eight different types of ketman under communism. For example, “professional ketman” is when you convince yourself that it’s okay to live a lie in the workplace, because that’s what you have to do to have the freedom to do good work. “Metaphysical ketman” is the deepest form of the strategy, a defense against “total degradation.” It consists of convincing yourself that it really is possible for you to be a loyal opponent of the new regime while working with it. Christians who collaborated with communist regimes were guilty of metaphysical ketman [because it required them to live as if their religious beliefs were not true]. In fact, says Miłosz, it represents the ultimate victory of the Big Lie over the individual’s soul.
Under the emerging tyranny of wokeness, conservatives, including conservative Christians, learn to practice one or more forms of ketman. The ones who are most deeply deceived are those who convince themselves that they can live honestly within woke systems by outwardly conforming and learning how to adapt their convictions to the new order. Miłosz had their number: “They swindle the devil who thinks he is swindling them. But the devil knows what they think and is satisfied.”
In other words, your boss may really know that you don’t believe in wokeness, and are just mouthing the words to keep your job, but he may not care. Outward compliance is all that he cares about. Whatever strategies you employ to numb your conscience are your business.
I expect that most Americans will opt for some form of ketman, because they cannot stand the idea of surrendering success for principle, nor can they abide the idea that they have sold out their principles (or their faith) for professional achievement, monetary reward, and social advantage. As such, they will become the most enthusiastic persecutors of those who refuse the Ketman Solution, because those people remind them of who and what they really are.
There may be hacks around this in some particular situations, but in the main, I believe that these are, or will soon be, the only choices facing most of us.
On the Masculinist blog, an anonymous writer offers a list of six strategies traditional Christians should employ to protect themselves in the office culture of a woke post-Christian world. For example:
Tip #6: Spend much less money thank you make. Read Masc #46 with good suggestions on how to do this. Be frugal and prepare to be canceled if the time comes when you have to make a stand. Learn every aspect of the job, become valuable, and aim to be ready with the knowledge to start your own business if you can last three years.
The thing to get straight in your head now is what your personal lines in the sand are — that is, issues on which you cannot compromise, and must be prepared to resign or be fired. If you are married, talk with your spouse about this. You can’t let yourself be caught cold, because the pressure to conform and practice ketman will be very strong if you haven’t thought about it, and especially if you haven’t built an escape option.
You also need to bear in mind that you and your family may be shunned by elites because of your religious or moral convictions. If being part of elite culture in your city, or in this country, matters to you, then you will be tempted to practice ketman, thinking that you can shore up the ruins of the Imperium (to use MacIntyre’s concept) and live as you’d like to live. But this is a losing strategy. You will have to face the fact that the faith you tender in your heart makes you unacceptable to the ruling class.
Can you live with that? Depends on who you really worship.
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Woke Witch Hunt At Baylor
Dr. Christina Crenshaw, a recurring lecturer for the English department, tweeted transphobic content on Jan. 21 in response to Daniel Darling’s tweet referring to President Joe Biden’s new policies involving transgender rights as “anti-science.”
The original quote retweet written by Crenshaw caused Baylor students to report her message to Title IX, BU Equity, Baylor NAACP and It’s On Us BU. It has since been deleted.
“But what if I don’t want my biological sons in the bathroom with my biological daughters? Do the 99% of us who do not wrestle with gender dysphoria have a voice? No? What if I told you Title IX was never meant to apply to >1% of the students over the 99%? Doesn’t matter? OK. Cool,” Crenshaw quote retweeted.
Crenshaw also left a comment on Darling’s tweet similar to her quote retweet that has not been deleted.
“What if I don’t want biological boys in the bathroom with my biological daughter? Do the 99% of us who do not struggle with gender dysphoria have a voice? No? Cool,” Crenshaw commented.
Crenshaw also retweeted transphobic content condemning Biden’s Executive Order on Preventing and Combating Discrimination on the Basis of Gender Identity or Sexual Orientation.
Baylor representative Lori Fogleman said Crenshaw is not on faculty this spring.
“We have confirmed that she is not teaching any classes this spring,” Fogleman said. “The online directory has not been updated at this time to reflect this fact.”
Baylor declined to comment further.
Dr. Kevin Gardner, english professor and department chair, said in an email Crenshaw isn’t teaching this semester, but they plan to ask for her back.
“Dr. Crenshaw is a temporary lecturer in the English department,” Gardner said. “She has been teaching for us off and on for several years, and she has proven to be one of our most accomplished instructors of ENG 1310.”
Round Rock senior Ashley Nitsche, secretary and treasurer of Gamma Alpha Upsilon [an unofficial LGBT organization on campus — RD], said she had Crenshaw as an English professor in Spring 2020.
“I was upset because it eliminates another professor as one of our allies, because we have been searching for potential allies and professors for the past 10 years,” Nitsche said. “More recently, the board and I have been talking about different ways to talk to these professors to get them in touch with our students so that our students know that they are safe with these professors if an issue comes up. Honestly, it’s really disappointing to see Dr. Crenshaw leave that list. I feel confused and conflicted about all of it. I’m very worried about if any other professors at Baylor align with these ideals as well because that just means more and more supporters falling away.”
So: simply objecting to transgender ideology is “transphobic,” according to the Baylor student newspaper, and enough to get an instructor at a Baptist college reported to the Title IX coordinator, and denounced in the campus paper. A single tweet of dissent.
I hope Baylor will stand by this professor. I find it hard to believe that everyone on that campus accepts trans claims to have a right to participate in women’s sports (if you are a biological male who identifies as female), and to have biological males invading women’s spaces. If you are such a dissenter, it is time to speak up against this witch hunt.
Along these lines, here’s good news from LSU, my alma mater. Yesterday the Faculty Senate tabled a bill that would have made taking a course on “anti-racism” and fighting “anti-blackness” mandatory for graduation.
Last year I wrote about this controversy when it arose.
The Reveille, LSU’s campus paper, wrote recently that the “spark” for the course mandate came from student athletes. It still boggles my mind that student athletes would assert the power to order the professoriat to teach certain courses. Good for the faculty for rejecting this. I suppose now we can expect student protests. The faculty, alumni, and donors to the university should stand firm. Similarly at Baylor: now is the time for alumni and donors to Baylor to contact the Baylor Board of Regents to express support for Dr. Crenshaw against the student-led witch hunt.
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January 25, 2021
How To Prepare For Coming Crackdown
Lieutenant Colonel (USA, Ret) Alexander Braszko served the country for 22 years as a Military Intelligence and Space Operations officer. He has extensive experience integrating space, cyberspace and information operations capabilities into Army and Joint operations. He deployed to South Korea, Kosovo, and Iraq during his career. After leaving the Army, he became Kansas City, Missouri’s Chief Innovation Officer, where he used his insights into emerging technologies to improve municipal operations. He helped create an Emerging Technology Board in the city, charged with fostering a system of collaboration between city departments, law enforcement, and community representatives on controversial emerging technology initiatives including ShotSpotter, facial recognition software, autonomous drones, and autonomous vehicles.
In other words, the man knows what he’s talking about. He’s also a practicing Orthodox Christian, husband and father to 5 children, and describes himself as “an ardent supporter of data privacy and preserving our Constitutional freedoms.”
Alex BraszkoAlex Braszko agreed to do a written interview with me, via e-mail. The following responses are his personal answers and in no way reflect official policies of any organization. The emphases in the text below are all in the original text.
Rod Dreher: Thanks for your kind words about my book. Given your background and expertise, what are its most important lessons for Christians?
Alex Braszko: Rod, the most important lessons I garnered from your book are:
1. That we need to remain vigilant to the academic, corporate, and political efforts within our country seeking to fundamentally change and inhibit our rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.
2. That there are very real machinations ongoing in our country that mimic some of what we saw in Eastern European and Asian countries prior to their falling under the yoke of Communism.
3. That there are specific things we can be doing as Christians to preserve our faith, our traditions, and our values as individuals attempt to take away the rights and freedoms we enjoy as Christian Americans.
4. That we need to be willing to live a life apart from the crowd, but that there are many, many individuals and families like ours, sharing the same sets of values and beliefs we cherish.
5. Finally, we need to be willing to, “Be watchful, stand firm in the faith, act like men, be strong!” (1 Cor 16:13) We need to support our brothers and sisters in Christ as they struggle with persecution from today’s secular world.
It is clear that after the January 6 assault on the Capitol, we will all be living in a very different security environment. I don’t want to put you in the position of saying whether that is good, bad, or otherwise. What I would like to know is what specifically should political and religious conservatives be doing now to accommodate ourselves to this new reality?
First, we must understand that the witch hunt we see taking place today against conservative Americans by politicians and mainstream media will continue for the foreseeable future. Dealing with doxing and public criticism for ascribing to our beliefs is something we should all expect. Hacks into our online accounts, monitoring of our online activities are all realities of the world we live in today. If we have been guilty in the past of sinning against our brother or sister, expressing hate or discord ourselves, we need to repent of those sins and ask God and others for forgiveness of our transgressions and then do them no more.
We need to prepare now for how we will respond when politically motivated and unpleasant events occur in our lives. An important part of that preparation comes from praying beforehand for God’s guidance, patience, and wisdom in dealing with those that literally hate us, want to publicly ridicule us, and physically injure us for our faith. Acknowledge that persecution is coming, begin praying for God’s strength to endure now.
We also need to commit to speaking and living in Truth. Not being bullied into compliance or intimidated for believing what we believe. The next few years will really separate the wheat from the chaff in our churches, and we need to resolve to remain strong in our faith.
From a technology perspective, from a practical perspective, we need to realize we lived without social media platforms in the past, and we can live happily without them in the future. Anything we post on social media must be something we are willing to account for publicly, as if it was getting printed for public record, because that’s exactly what our online and social media comments, posts, blogs are: Public Record. As we witnessed with Parler, no platform or app should be considered private — not Signal, not ProtonMail, despite them being advertised as encrypted. Again, if there’s something you need to say that you don’t want a public record of, you should not be using any means of technology to communicate it.
Also, if we haven’t learned it by now, our smartphones, their cameras and microphones, are windows into our most private spaces, into our very personal lives. While I personally believe my posts, my pictures and videos should be my data, even when posted in a public facing forum, that’s obviously not the case. If I take a picture and hold it up in the middle of a city, that picture in my hand is still my personal property. I believe the same should hold true in our online forums, but that’s not the case.
If your computer, or Smart TV, occupies a central part of your house where you have honest and potentially controversial conversations, you may look at moving it to a more remote location. If you don’t have a RFID or Faraday box for your phones when you have conversations around the dinner table, you might consider getting one, and practice using it now. If you don’t have a small RFID or Faraday case for your smartphone, for when you’re driving around and shopping, you might consider getting one. But whatever you do, you have to practice something akin to what we in the military call OPSEC, Operational Security, to preserve your data privacy. Don’t go to the wrong or compromising sites, don’t assume your phone can’t be interrogated or collected on… don’t assume your photos are private or secure, because they’re not. Even on airplane mode. Even when you think they’re turned off. You’re still being watched on Privacy Mode. You can never truly erase your search history. If you’ve got kids, teach them the value of cyber anonymity, the dangers of posting political rhetoric online.
Can you live without Facebook? Great, get rid of it! Can you live without Twitter? Great, get rid of it. Do you have to use Amazon or for a little extra inconvenience can you support local businesses? Great, then get rid of or limit your Amazon purchases and buy local. Big Tech has been collecting, selling, and profiting from your personal information for years, and you’re getting nothing for it. Why continue to support them as if your lives depended on it? Why act like an addict that can’t let go of social media platforms? Surveillance Capitalism is alive and well; let’s not play into Big Tech’s hands.
Pay attention to how the 6 January Capitol Hill activities transpired. Pay attention to how those conducting criminal activities were caught. Press reports their phones’ IMEIs and IMSIs were collected and geographically located and attributed to individuals as they connected to nearby cell towers. We saw individual photos, videos and comments were posted online to social media and then captured by hackers. Even after people tried to delete their accounts, that information was already recorded in time and space and attributed to those individuals’ names. Do not assume your phone, your computer, your smart tv, your Fitbit are private and controlled solely by you. They are not.
You are a churchgoing man. What should we be doing spiritually to adjust?
As mentioned above, we need to be repenting for our sins, praying for strength, patience, wisdom and God’s guidance in the challenges we face.We need to be reading our Bible and writing its truths on our heart. We also need to be praying for our brothers and sisters in Christ, and especially for our leaders. Church leadership and government leaders. We need to fearlessly teach our children, loved ones, friends the Truth, the Good News, to hold firm to their faith while the world around them feeds them political half-truths and outright lies. We need to be able to practice our faith at home, read the stories of the martyrs, and remind ourselves how the early Church survived persecution. Also, a good friend of mine reminded me recently that we need to “show real love in every instance, every encounter, every scenario we face.” He hit the nail on the head, and that love goes hand in hand with God’s Truth.
What lifestyle changes should we be making? For example, should people head for the hills? What would that even mean in a networked world?
So, the Benedict Option is a viable option in my opinion! As is moving out to the country, as my wife and I did many years ago. It feels safer out here, surrounded on all sides by friends and family, where we know the local government officials, sheriff’s deputies, and highway patrolmen. We feel we can more easily protect ourselves, provide for ourselves from a survival perspective, and our neighbors notice strangers and let us know when they see them! Honestly, there’s a lot to be said for living in the country. If you can live 30-45 minutes outside a major metropolitan area, in my opinion, that’s the sweet spot.
But it can also be lonely out in the country, which is why living around an Orthodox community, church or monastery, in my mind, makes sense. There is strength in numbers, and it’s comforting to live amongst folks that share the same values and beliefs you do. As Orthodox Christians, we have to drive anywhere from an hour to an hour and a half to get to an Orthodox Church. It’s worth it, in our opinion, but it takes commitment.
What does it mean when we live in a networked world? Well, when we visited my in-laws roughly two decades ago, the country was a different world. I don’t believe they even had dial up back then. And if they had cell phones, and that was a big “if”, they were dumb phones. Today, folks around here get fed the same propaganda from mainstream media we all do; it’s the same in the country as in the city. The same sort of conversations are taking place in the boonies as they are in the cities, only with a different slant to the responses, of course. Living in the country is no guarantee that you won’t face persecution in your online forums, online posts and interactions — unfortunately. What it does mean is that you can live without that sort of influence in your life if you’d like, if you choose, without so many leftist individuals getting in your face and in your business.
What role does trust play in this new and fast-onrushing world?
Trust? Trust what, who? I trust God. I trust my wife, my family. I trust a few close friends we have developed over the years and a few neighbors around us. I trust my priest. That’s about it. I don’t trust mainstream media. I don’t trust “scientific experts” who have values different from my own. I trust scientific experts that share my philosophies on life and who share my faith. I don’t trust political parties, which is why I’m registered as an Independent. I certainly don’t trust politicians. I definitely don’t trust China or Russia! I also don’t trust my devices, my apps, my computer, my phone, my iPad, my smart TV. I know Big Tech does not have my best interests in mind when they censor my comments, sell my data, and force their political opinions into my online experiences. As Christians, we’ve learned we can’t trust a simple Google Search, or Wikipedia, as they’re redefining things to fit their narratives.
Bottom line, I don’t put my hope and trust in Pharaoh, in men, in princes, in government and political leaders.
What would you say to people who believe the things you and I are talking about here are alarmist?
My grandfather had a typing business in Russia. In 1917, on a dark and rainy night, my grandfather returned home late in the evening from work. Through the rain, he saw the lights on in his house, but noticed men surrounding it and men inside the house. He witnessed some terrible things being done to his family that night by Bolsheviks as he hid in the shadows, the full details of which he discovered much later, and learned that those men were after him, a White Russian, to “give him the bayonet” because of his political leanings and the fact he was a business owner. One of his children was killed that night, and atrocities committed against his wife and daughter. Communists shattered his world. He returned a few years later after escaping Russia with a group of Cossacks to fight the Soviets. People told him he was being alarmist in the beginning, too. Nothing but the grace of God prevents those same things from happening in our own country today. So, no, I don’t think I’m being alarmist. I think we’re being vigilant, I think we’re being observant, thinking critically about what happened historically in many other countries, looking at similarities taking place in our own country today. And it’s really not good what we’re witnessing.
It’s much easier to stick our heads in the sand, to divert our eyes from Truth and turn to the ease and conveniences offered up to us. We like to tell ourselves, “If we just trust our political leaders, buy into mainstream narratives and secular dogma we hear every single day, things will be easier!.” But we know our hope is in our Savior, in Christ Jesus. As much as he suffered for us, buying into the lies the world feeds us is an insult to His sacrifice and love for us. We need to fight the good fight and run the race for our salvation, because in the end, that’s what truly matters.
There’s a lot more in Live Not By Lies. If you haven’t read it yet, please do. Here is a link to a free, downloadable study guide for the book. It meant a lot to me to have a Christian with a career’s worth of experience in the intelligence field tell me that all the material in my book about surveillance capitalism, and surveillance itself, is dead on target.
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Christianity In Public Life OK Again
Gosh, it seems like just yesterday that the dogma was living loud within orthodox, conservative Christians, which made them a threat to American public life. Now, though, the media tells us that public Christianity is good again, because liberal Catholic Joe Biden is in the White House.
The New York Times reports on how liberal Catholicism is the big thing now:
Mr. Biden, perhaps the most religiously observant commander in chief in half a century, regularly attends Mass and speaks of how his Catholic faith grounds his life and his policies.
And with Mr. Biden, a different, more liberal Christianity is ascendant: less focused on sexual politics and more on combating poverty, climate change and racial inequality.
More:
Mr. Biden’s leadership is a repudiation of the claim by many conservative leaders that Democrats are inherently anti-Christian.
His rise comes as fewer registered Democrats identify as Christian. Nearly half are religiously unaffiliated or believers of other faiths, a share that has grown significantly in recent years, according to the Pew Research Center; about 80 percent of registered Republicans are Christian.
Well, hold on. Democrats are not anti-Christian when the Christianity does not challenge their political and cultural priorities. Joe Biden is pro-choice and a maximalist on LGBT rights. He even (civilly) married a gay couple in his office when he was vice president. Biden is no opponent of the Sexual Revolution; in fact, his purpose, as we see in stories like this one, is to institutionalize it, both in fact and in cultural perception.
There is no way small-o orthodox, biblical Christianity can be reconciled with abortion rights or with the redefinition of the family, and the negation of male and female. Liberal Christians disagree; I believe they are wrong. Many liberal Christians are also willing to see orthodox Christians and their institutions persecuted by the state for standing on orthodoxy.
If Biden were to advocate for immigrants, poverty relief, and other priorities of the Religious Left, and also advocate for the other side of Catholic social teaching (on family, on the right to life, against gender ideology), there would be some religious conservatives who opposed him, but I think he would be pretty much in the political center of American life. Personally, I would happily take a Democratic president who followed the full spectrum of Catholic social teaching, not just the parts that make the Left happy. But that’s not what’s on offer.
I suspect there is a thrill running up the leg of mainstream media journalists, thinking that finally a Religious Left guy is in the White House, and that’s going to turn things around. Note well that the Democratic Party is rapidly secularizing. It makes room for religious people whose religious views do not threaten the Sexual Revolution.
Of course, Biden faces harsh opposition, not least from other Catholics. The morning of the Inauguration, as Biden went to St. Matthew the Apostle, the Catholic cathedral in the capital, for a Mass attended by Speaker Pelosi and other government figures, the Catholic bishops released a long missive by their conference president, Archbishop Jose Gomez, of Los Angeles, expressing an eagerness to work with the new President, but upbraiding him for holding positions “in the areas of abortion, contraception, marriage, and gender” that “would advance moral evils and threaten human life and dignity,” and implying that Biden’s approach to Catholicism posed a threat to religious freedom. The same Catholic traditionalists who detest Pope Francis detest the new President, and spiteful right-wing resistance may block any progressive initiative from Biden, as it has blocked those of Francis in Rome.
In this moment, it’s strange to think of Joe Biden, for so long a workhorse legislator in a blue blazer, as a redemptive figure. It’s strange that progressives, who are generally leery of Vatican authority, are frankly hoping that American politics will be inspired by the Pope—and hoping that a Pope might move a Democratic President further to the left. It’s strange that a Church whose followers have been harmed and angered by decades of negligence on clerical sexual abuse can still be seen as a source of civic healing. And yet the second Catholic President can hardly afford not to draw on his religion; with the country wracked by a pandemic, a recession, and political violence, he is going to need every source of reconciliation and moral authority available to him.
It’s strange, because Biden’s version of Catholicism really does pose a threat to religious freedom, when it clashes with LGBT rights. Biden’s party famously holds “religious liberty” to be a dog whistle for gay hatred — this, even though staunch gay rights advocate Chai Feldblum, a Georgetown law professor, conceded in this 2006 interview with Maggie Gallagher that there is an irreconcilable conflict between religious liberty and gay rights (Feldblum thinks in these cases, gay rights should prevail). Archbishop Gomez is factually correct.
It’s also strange, because it’s all about projection. Elie writes, “The hope is that the Biden Administration will invigorate American Catholicism, and vice versa.” Well, let me ask: did the Trump administration invigorate American Christianity, and vice versa? I am grateful for the good things Trump did to protect unborn life and religious liberty — and note well that Trump, who is barely a Christian, did these things, while churchgoing Biden is reversing them — but it would be hard for anybody to say honestly that Christianity is in a better position in America in 2021 than it was in 2017, when Trump took office.
Some of that is Trump’s fault, but mostly it’s because there are deep secularizing trends in American culture that are more powerful than any president of either party. Left-wing Catholics and other Christians who put their religious hopes in a political figure are going to be sorely disappointed — as anybody could have told right-wing Christians regarding Trump.
Religion is rapidly declining in the United States, across the board. But the decline is much stronger among people who identify as Democrats, according to Pew data:
Pew adds:
The religious profile of white Democrats is very different from the religious profile of racial and ethnic minorities within the Democratic Party. Today, fewer than half of white Democrats describe themselves as Christians, and just three-in-ten say they regularly attend religious services. More than four-in-ten white Democrats are religious “nones,” and fully seven-in-ten white Democrats say they attend religious services no more than a few times a year. Black and Hispanic Democrats are far more likely than white Democrats to describe themselves as Christians and to say they attend religious services regularly, though all three groups are becoming less Christian.
Joe Biden is an outlier in his own party. I wonder how many of Biden’s grandchildren go to mass regularly. I don’t say that to be mean, but to ask how Grampa Joe’s “devout Catholicism,” as his press secretary called it, has been passed down to the next generations in the Biden family. That’s the story — a story that I believe is reflected in this other observation from a different Pew study:
Catholicism has experienced a greater net loss due to religious switching than has any other religious tradition in the U.S. Overall, 13% of all U.S. adults are former Catholics – people who say they were raised in the faith, but now identify as religious “nones,” as Protestants, or with another religion. By contrast, 2% of U.S. adults are converts to Catholicism – people who now identify as Catholic after having been raised in another religion (or no religion). This means that there are 6.5 former Catholics in the U.S. for every convert to the faith. No other religious group analyzed in the 2014 Religious Landscape Study has experienced anything close to this ratio of losses to gains via religious switching.
What sense does it make for Catholics of either political side to look to a secular figure to reverse their religious fortunes? American Catholicism is doing a poor job of keeping its children in the faith, period — though the numbers indicate that the loss among liberal Catholics is much greater. That’s not much for conservative Catholics to crow about, mind you, but it tells you something about the kind of people who remain religiously devout in this era of de-Christianization. Again, it tells us very little about Catholicism’s future in America to look to a 78-year-old liberal Catholic. Look to the 18-29 year old Catholics — of whom there are many fewer than one would like.
This is not hard to understand, at least not in principle. Religions that make demands on their followers will be more resilient than religions that do not. Why go to church if all your church asks of you is to conform to whatever is popular in secular culture? And, drawing on the research of sociologist of religion Christian Smith and his teams of scholars over the years — he’s the Moralistic Therapeutic Deism guy — we know that the overwhelming majority of Americans under 40 have no strong religious beliefs. I wrote about this in The Benedict Option. Excerpt:
Even more troubling, many of the churches that do stay open will have been hollowed out by a sneaky kind of secularism to the point where the “Christianity” taught there is devoid of power and life. It has already happened in most of them. In 2005, sociologists Christian Smith and Melinda Lundquist Denton examined the religious and spiritual lives of American teenagers from a wide variety of backgrounds. What they found was that in most cases, teenagers adhered to a mushy pseudoreligion the researchers deemed Moralistic Therapeutic Deism (MTD).
MTD has five basic tenets:
• A God exists who created and orders the world and watches over human life on earth.
• God wants people to be good, nice, and fair to each other, as taught in the Bible and by most world religions.
• The central goal of life is to be happy and to feel good about oneself.
• God does not need to be particularly involved in one’s life except when he is needed to resolve a problem.
• Good people go to heaven when they die.
This creed, they found, is especially prominent among Catholic and Mainline Protestant teenagers. Evangelical teenagers fared measurably better but were still far from historic biblical orthodoxy. Smith and Denton claimed that MTD is colonizing existing Christian churches, destroying biblical Christianity from within, and replacing it with a pseudo-Christianity that is “only tenuously connected to the actual historical Christian tradition.”
MTD is not entirely wrong. After all, God does exist, and He does want us to be good. The problem with MTD, in both its progressive and its conservative versions, is that it’s mostly about improving one’s self-esteem and subjective happiness and getting along well with others. It has little to do with the Christianity of Scripture and tradition, which teaches repentance, self-sacrificial love, and purity of heart, and commends suffering—the Way of the Cross—as the pathway to God. Though superficially Christian, MTD is the natural religion of a culture that worships the Self and material comfort.
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.”
These are not bad people. Rather, they are young adults who have been terribly failed by family, church, and the other institutions that formed—or rather, failed to form—their consciences and their imaginations.
MTD is the de facto religion not simply of American teenagers but also of American adults. To a remarkable degree, teenagers have adopted the religious attitudes of their parents. We have been an MTD nation for some time now, though that may have been disguised.
“America has lived a long time off its thin Christian veneer, partly necessitated by the Cold War,” Smith told me in an interview. “That is all finally being stripped away by the combination of mass consumer capitalism and liberal individualism.”
The data from Smith and other researchers make clear what so many of us are desperate to deny: the flood is rising to the rafters in the American church. Every single congregation in America must ask itself if it has compromised so much with the world that it has been compromised in its faithfulness. Is the Christianity we have been living out in our families, congregations, and communities a means of deeper conversion, or does it function as a vaccination against taking faith with the seriousness the Gospel demands?
Nobody but the most deluded of the old-school Religious Right believes that this cultural revolution can be turned back. The wave cannot be stopped, only ridden. With a few exceptions, conservative Christian political activists are as ineffective as White Russian exiles, drinking tea from samovars in their Paris drawing rooms, plotting the restoration of the monarchy.
These same liberal Catholics looked for a “Francis effect” — for the accession of a progressive Catholic pope to invigorate liberal Catholicism by attracting more people, especially the young. Didn’t happen, and it’s not going to happen. But conservative Catholics had better not make the mistake of thinking that a more politicized Catholicism, to the Right, is going to do them any good. I get e-mails from faithful orthodox Catholics who are driven to despair by the fact that their parishes are more interested in the emanations from the Trumposphere, and the latest pronouncements of Archbishop Vigano, than they are about the basics of the faith. That’s a dead end too. Struggling to transform the Catholic Church into the Democratic Party at Prayer, or Team Trump at Prayer, will at best distract Catholics from doing the real work of shoring up the church for the hard times coming.
Calling a form of religion “liberal” can mean two different things: On the one hand, a theological liberalism, which seeks an evolution in doctrine to adapt to modern needs; on the other, support for policies and parties of the center-left. In practice, though, the two tend to be conjoined: The American Catholic Church as an institution is caught between the two political coalitions, but most prominent Catholic Democrats are liberals in theology and politics alike.
But more than a set of ideas, liberal Catholicism is a culture, recognizable in its institutions and tropes, its iconography and allusions — to Pope John XXIII and Jesuit universities, to the “seamless garment” of Catholic teaching and the “spirit” of the Second Vatican Council, to the works of Thomas Merton and hymns like “On Eagle’s Wings” (which Biden quoted in his victory speech).
And, of course, invocations of Pope Francis. A decade ago it was a commonplace to regard liberal Catholicism as a tradition in decline. Its period of maximal influence, the late 1960s and 1970s, had been an era of institutional crisis for the church, which gave way to the conservative pontificates of John Paul II and Benedict XVI. Conservative Catholics felt that liberal ideas had been tried and failed, liberal Catholics felt that they had been suppressed.
But then Francis gave the liberal tendency new life, reopening controversies that conservatives assumed were closed and tilting the Vatican toward cooperation with the liberal establishment and away from associations with conservatism.
Here’s something interesting: in their teachings on economic and environmental matters, Popes John Paul II and Benedict were unquestionably more on the Left, at least on the US political spectrum. The media tagged them as conservatives because those popes held the line on matters pertaining to the Sexual Revolution. That is the thing that matters above all to most Democratic partisans and their allies in the media.
More Douthat:
On the other hand, liberal Catholicism sometimes achieves its feeling of universality by simply claiming for itself the whole Catholic-influenced world — sure, he’s no longer a practicing Catholic, but did you know that Dr. Anthony Fauci was educated by Jesuits? — without regard to whether that influence actually amounts to much more than a vague spirituality, a generic humanitarianism.
Which means that the liberal Catholic worldview is constantly in danger of simply being subsumed into political liberalism, with all religious distinctives shorn away — as Joe Biden’s past pro-life positions have now been entirely subsumed, for instance, by his party’s orthodoxy on abortion. Or alternatively, it’s in danger of being effectively taken over from within by rival forms of faith, like the new progressive orthodoxies that are likely to set our Catholic president’s agenda on the social questions of the day.
This is a struggle that is going to take place — and is likely already taking place — within nearly all American churches. White Evangelicalism, especially at the institutional level, is at the moment being shaken by Critical Race Theory, a conflict fueled in part by anger over the Trump legacy within Evangelical culture. There will also be arguments over sexuality and race in other churches, including the Orthodox churches. On Saturday, I am giving a prominent lecture via Zoom, under the auspices of St. Vladimir’s Orthodox Theological Seminary. I will talk about Live Not By Lies, The Benedict Option, and the challenges facing Orthodox Christians in the post-Christian era.
I will speak as an Orthodox, to an Orthodox audience, but believe me, the things I will talk about are universal within American Christianity. Some prominent progressive Orthodox Christians went all-out to try to get my talk cancelled — these are the same people who gas on about the importance of “dialogue” — but SVOTS held firm. My lecture will be at 2pm Eastern on Saturday, via Zoom. You have to register in advance, though, and space is limited.
To conclude, my advice is that the eye-rolling celebrations in the media of Biden’s Christianity should neither surprise us nor distract us. Again, the media are happy to celebrate forms of Christianity, and prominent Christians, who conform to progressive beliefs. Of course they’re hypocrites, but this is not news. What we theological and moral conservatives should not do is allow ourselves to get distracted by political fighting. I’m not at all saying to be quietist about politics, but I am saying to give politics its proper place. The extraordinary challenges facing Christianity in this de-Christianizing era cannot be met adequately with politics alone. If you are a Christian who is more passionate about Joe Biden or Donald Trump than you are about whether or not you and your family are living the faith in ways that run counter to our consumerist, relativist, online-dominated culture, your priorities are wrong.
What good does it do a Christian to have his favorite politician win the White House, but to lose his children or grandchildren to the faith? I think that so many US Christians — liberals and conservatives alike — focus so intensely on politics because it offers a measure of success. You either win or you lose elections. We like to believe that our religious faction has won when we get a president we like, because it gives us a boost. If I were a liberal Catholic, I would be happy that one of my tribe is now POTUS, but I hope I would have the sense to understand that this is not going to do much of anything to stanch the hemorrhaging out of young people, both from the Catholic Church and the Mainline Protestant churches, which have heavily bought in on religious progressivism. This alarming fact will be covered by what Douthat sees as the strategy of claiming that anybody who identifies in any way as Catholic is Catholic, though it doesn’t actually mean much in the real world. (For example, my parents’ generation is filled with Christians who call themselves devout, but who weren’t big churchgoers, and who didn’t perceive the threat from de-Christianization. You can see the effects of this in their children’s and grandchildren’s generation.)
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.
I don’t believe that what we call “progressive Christianity” today will make it, because the distortions of Scripture and Tradition that progressives have to make in order to affirm the Sexual Revolution are so great that you’re left wondering what, if anything, is binding about a religion whose doctrines and disciplines are nothing but Silly Putty. But a conservative Christianity that does nothing but find ways to sanctify what Republicans or Trumpists believe is not going to have the strength to endure either.
The post Christianity In Public Life OK Again appeared first on The American Conservative.
January 23, 2021
Saturday Potpourri
Well, we are at the end of what for me was a tough week. Below, a bunch of little things worth noting:
Manufacturing EnthusiasmI work at a small company in the software industry. We provide our services to various organizations to help them meet government and regulatory requirements, including how the companies they hire for services pose a risk to their business. I work for a fairly conservative company, and the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion ideology has not taken hold publicly in management, nor has there been anything in online company chat groups.
Below is an article that addresses a consistent thread throughout Live Not by Lies, as well as your reporting over the past several years: the influence of the power holders on culture. It is from the Credit Union Times, discussing “DEI in 2021:Gender Affirmation Benefits Find More Support Among Employers.” As described, employers, or those in white collar positions of power, are those pushing to have these services provided to employees. There is no indication this is a desired service for anyone other than the employers. And they do their due diligence of course, by quoting the Human Rights Campaign (sarcasm).
A stark quote jumped out to me that seems to demonstrate the utterly contradictory nature of the DEI movement: “Employers want to create a culture where employees feel no one is being treated differently.” Haven’t we heard over the past year’s worth of protests and riots that to treat people the same is to be a racist? It seems the white collar power holders are not listening to their credentialed overlords in the academy, nor their own rhetoric when they put out press releases to support the protests / riots, or their ketman in not rocking the boat.
News From The Monks Of NorciaThey have restored the ruined church on the mountain! Here’s a screenshot from their latest newsletter:
They also sent out a sampling of the texts they listened to during meals last year, as is the Benedictine tradition. Very small-c catholic!
My podcast partner Kale Zelden and I are getting better at this, though the video on my end was scruffy. Here’s our third episode. It’s going to move to TAC soon:
Kamala Harris Explains ‘Equity’Some readers of this blog say that my criticism of the Biden executive order demanding “equity” in federal employment was too negative. All Biden said is that there should be racial impartiality in hiring, they say. What these readers don’t understand is that “equity” does not mean “impartiality in hiring.” It means that any outcomes that do not reflect ethnic proportionality are understood by that fact to have been racist. We are talking about the difference between equality of opportunity, and equality of outcome. Harris herself posted this short video during the campaign to make clear what they mean:
Biden’s Pro-Trans Executive Order
There’s a big difference between equality and equity. pic.twitter.com/n3XfQyjLNe
— Kamala Harris (@KamalaHarris) November 1, 2020
The president’s executive order this week compels schools that receive federal funding to allow males who identify as females to compete in athletics as women. A reader who is an athlete writes:
Bari Weiss’s Substack Newsletter
The Boston Marathon was not run last year because of Covid-19, but the time I ran at a marathon earlier in 2020 would have put me in 277th place in my age group at the 2019 Boston Marathon.
In the same age group for women, I would have been in the top 10.
They better get ready for the fast broad with the beard, because here they come.
I’ve subscribed to it. Here’s a link to the new one (it’s free for now). Excerpt:
The truth is that Joe Biden is a fig leaf. He is a fig leaf for the deep problems that roil our country, for the totalizing ideologies spreading through the nation like wildfire, and for the dramatic political realignment that we are living through.
I understand people breathing a sigh of relief. I did. But the Joe Biden presidency will require a different kind of attentiveness. The maladies of the Trump era were painfully obvious, sometimes dangerous, and often clownish. QAnon is not exactly subtle. Leaving aside Majorie Taylor Greene and Lauren Boebert, Trumpian forces don’t hold much power in American life. But the fringe ideologues on the left are savvy, smart, and organized, with purchase at every level of American culture and politics.
Consider the fact that Hillary Clinton recorded a podcast with Nancy Pelosi this week in which she said of Trump: “I would love to see his phone records to see whether he was talking to Putin the day that the insurgents invaded our Capitol.” And the speaker of the House responded: “All roads lead to Putin.”
Really? That’s still the play after four years?
The group that fell for Russiagate has long owned the culture. Now it’s won the presidency and controls Congress. What will happen?
I’ll leave it to the rest of the press to compete over who can signal the most outrage over a Vogue cover of Kamala Harris:
Opinion | Vogue’s Kamala Harris cover shows that diminishing powerful Black women is still in fashion https://t.co/Q0jKtmB9NH
— Karen Attiah (@KarenAttiah) January 14, 2021
Or how to properly praise the Biden administration’s pyrotechnic aesthetic:
This team truly understands optics. These images will inspire our friends and shake our foes. pic.twitter.com/8i6qjUiJC5
— Matt Dornic (@mdornic) January 21, 2021
Navalny Protests
I’ll be focusing on topics where the mainstream media gets . . . confused. Remember this summer, when it decided that anyone who did not want to defund the police was considered a right-winger? Or that to use national guardsmen to keep the peace was considered unthinkable on June 6, but by January 6 was bipartisan national policy? Or that Big Tech’s power was terrifying and evil, until it was used to put down Parler? Or that anyone who violated the lockdowns denied science, unless they were marching for the right political cause?
Today there have been mass protests all over Russia in support of the courageous anti-Putin dissident Alexei Navalny, who survived a secret police attempt to murder him with poison, and who flew back to Russia after he recovered in Germany. Putin’s police arrested him at the airport; Navalny is now in prison. Now people are marching for his liberty all over Russia, and being beaten by police. Good for them — brave Russian people!
Will Wilkinson’s Firing
Hundreds of videos like this coming out of Russia today. Putin has spent 20 years building up the security forces and looting the country while Russia stagnates. They come out to support Navalny and their own future. https://t.co/kvuRjHQutq
— Garry Kasparov (@Kasparov63) January 23, 2021
Will Wilkinson is a really smart, kind of libertarian, leftish think-tanker who got fired from the Niskanen Center for an ill-advised tweet, for which he quickly apologized. But because we live in a cancel culture, and because some right-wingers believe it’s okay for them to play that vicious game as long as the enemy is someone on the left, Wilkinson lost his job. Will Wilkinson and I are on the opposite sides of most issues, but still, this is nuts. He’s a contributing columnist to The New York Times, but now they say they are considering firing him. Glenn Greenwald does not like Will Wilkinson, but he hates cancel culture even more, writing:
So a completely ordinary and unassuming liberal commentator is in jeopardy of having his career destroyed because of a tweet that no person in good faith could possibly believe was actually advocating violence and which, at worst, could be said to be irresponsibly worded. And this is happening even though everyone knows it is all based on a totally fictitious understanding of what he said. Why?
More:
Defending Fran Lebowitz
Those who have crafted a society in which mob anger, no matter how invalid, results in ostracization and reputation-destruction have exploited these impulses. If you are a think tank executive in Washington or a New York Times editor, why would you want to endure the attacks on you for “sanctioning violence” or “inciting assassinations” just to save Will Wilkinson? The prevailing culture vests so much weight in these sorts of outrage mobs that it is almost always easier to appease them than resist them.
The recent extraordinary removal of the social media platform Parler from the internet was clearly driven by these dynamics. It is inconceivable that Tim Cook, Jeff Bezos and Google executives believe that Parler is some neo-Nazi site that played anywhere near the role in planning and advocating for the Capitol riot as Facebook and YouTube did. But they know that significant chunks of liberal elite culture believe this (or at least claim to), and they thus calculate — not irrationally, even if cowardly — that they will have to endure a large social and reputational hit for refusing mob demands to destroy Parler. Like the Niskanen and Times bosses with Wilkinson, they had to decide how much pain they were willing to accept to defend Parler, and — as is usually the case — it turned out the answer was not much. Thus was Parler destroyed, with nowhere near the number of important liberal friends that Wilkinson has.
The perception that this is some sort of exclusively left-wing tactic is untrue. Recall in 2003, in the lead-up to the U.S. invasion of Iraq, when the lead singer for the Dixie Chicks, Natalie Maines, uttered this utterly benign political comment at a concert in London: “Just so you know, we’re on the good side with y’all. We do not want this war, this violence. And we’re ashamed the President of the United States is from Texas.” In response, millions joined a boycott of their music, radio stations refused to play their songs, Bush supporters burned their albums, and country star Toby Keith performed in front of a gigantic image of Maines standing next to Saddam Hussein, as though her opposition to the war meant she admired the Iraqi dictator.
But two recent trends have greatly intensified this mania. Social media is one of the most powerful generators of group-think ever invented in human history, enabling a small number of people to make decision-makers feel besieged with scorn and threatened with ostracization if they do not obey mob demands. The other is that the liberal-left has gained cultural hegemony in the most significant institutions — from academia and journalism to entertainment, sports, music and art — and this weapon, which they most certainly did not invent, is now vested squarely in their hands.
But all weapons, once unleashed onto the world, will be copied and wielded by opposing tribes. …
This week on my subscriber-only Daily Dreher newsletter, I wrote something about the new Martin Scorsese series on Netflix, “Pretend It’s A City,” in which he interviews the iconic Manhattan curmudgeon Fran Lebowitz about life in the city. I distributed today a free version of the Best Of my newsletter from the past week, in which you can read my praise of the show, and of Lebowitz, and how the series is a Proustian madeleine reminding me of how much I loved living in New York as a young married guy, which were probably the happiest five years of my life. Read the whole thing here — and please consider subscribing; it costs only a quarter per day, five days a week, and contains stuff that I’ve seen that makes me happy, and hopeful. Never politics, and never culture war stuff.
Though “Pretend It’s a City’’ was shot before the pandemic, Ms. Lebowitz seemed completely at ease, as late as the end of the second decade of the 21st century, to apply her vaudevillian-mode of grievance to hick tourists (will they ever learn how to look where they are going?), Times Square, the subway.
Is the deterioration of the city’s transit system funny? At the risk of seeming like a killjoy, I might have laughed a lot harder 15 years ago, when it wasn’t on the verge of bankruptcy.
Because of her ingenious facility with an epigram, Ms. Lebowitz is often compared to Dorothy Parker, but she could not live more differently, far from the sewage of booze and romantic chaos. She has been sober for 50 years. Still, the efficient offend her.
“Pretend It’s a City’’ includes a long riff about fitness: the dull habits of the terminally basic, going to the gym before sunrise. “Now we have something I really cannot tolerate: wellness,’’ she exclaims. “We didn’t used to have wellness, and I think, What is wellness? It is like extra health.” People carrying around yoga mats is a problem; it wasn’t always like this.
At the end of it all, she determines that wellness must be an idea exported from — and here is the moment to clutch your bagels — “California.”
On the occasions when her tastes are not predictable, they can seem confounding. Ms. Lebowitz is irked by the existence of a small Manhattan institution devoted to the history of immigration in New York City. Really, you say? Indeed. “Now there’s something on the Lower East Side called the Tenement Museum,’’ she begins, referring to a place that has been around for more than 30 years. “The Tenement Museum! What’s in there, a tuberculosis epidemic?”
When my son was in kindergarten, I accompanied his class on a trip there and watched 20 privileged children gawk at the recreation of tiny turn-of-the-century apartments where a family of 12 might have shared a single bathtub in the middle of a kitchen. But Ms. Lebowitz doesn’t see the point.
Oh good lord have mercy. FRAN LEBOWITZ IS A HUMORIST! Humorists make fun of things. Ever seen Larry David on his show Curb Your Enthusiasm? He’s a mouthy curmudgeon. You are not supposed to admire him — he is often shown as a fool. You are supposed to find amusing the sparks that fly when his anxious personality clashes with the world, and he flies off the handle about little things. Fran Lebowitz is like that. She’s an ultra-liberal in her politics, but at 70, she’s a relic of a time when liberals actually gave themselves permission to laugh. Am I supposed to be offended because Fran Lebowitz says in the series that she thinks people who go on vacations are morons? What’s funny is that Fran Lebowitz is the kind of New Yorker who thinks leaving the city for pleasure is a bad thing to do. I live in Baton Rouge, and am in no way offended when Ignatius Reilly describes leaving New Orleans for Baton Rouge on a Greyhound bus in terms Dante reserved for his journey through the Inferno.
Fran Lebowitz has scarcely written anything for over 30 years, and has made a career out of being a personality. People will pay to hear her talk because she’s funny, and because she is an extreme version of a New York type: kvetchy, Jewish, a hilarious observer of life. It happens to be a New York type I cherish, but I guess I can understand why she gets on some people’s nerves. These are people who didn’t understand Mad magazine, so what can you do?
Look, you’re not expected to agree with Fran Lebowitz, who gripes about everything. You’re supposed to find it funny that she’s an old lady who gets unnerved in humorous ways by everyday things. Ginia Bellafante probably needed a Seinfeld whisperer to explain to her why a show about nothing is funny. As a child, Ginia Bellafante’s mother probably had to explain to her why the anvil could fall on the coyote’s head, and it was funny, not cruelty to animals.
I would like to blame Ginia Bellafante’s humorlessness on her generation, but I looked her up, and she’s a year or two older than I am. She’s probably the kind of person who thought that the New Yorker‘s witless, cloddish cartoons mocking Trump were funny, even though they were as painfully obvious as what you would expect to see in Izvestia under High Brezhnevism. Look, I can get not enjoying Fran Lebowitz. I introduced my wife and daughter to the series, after one episode of which our kid said, “I think you and Mom like this because it reminds you of New York.” That’s a fair comment, because I honestly can’t separate how I feel about Fran Lebowitz’s humor from the nostalgia it gives me for Jewish New York. It is a metaphysical certainty that Fran Lebowitz has no regard for right-wing Orthodox Christians like me, but I will beat up anybody who speaks ill of Fran Lebowitz, because I adore curmudgeons.
Anyway, watch Fran Lebowitz! Here’s the trailer for the show:
The post Saturday Potpourri appeared first on The American Conservative.
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