Rod Dreher's Blog, page 87

Biden’s Culture War Blitzkrieg

Today is the anniversary of the Roe v. Wade ruling, which gave unrestricted right to women to abort their unborn children. Over 60 million Americans have died at the hands of an abortionist since then. Yesterday, a reporter asked White House press secretary Jen Psaki about Joe Biden’s pro-abortion views, related to his Catholic faith. 

Psaki’s comments came during her first press conference Wednesday, where an EWTN Global Catholic Network reporter asked her about “two big concerns for pro-life Americans” — the Hyde Amendment and Mexico City Policy. The former bars the use of federal funds to pay for abortion under most circumstances, while the latter restricts taxpayer funding of abortion abroad. “What is President Biden doing on those two items right now?” reporter Owen Jensen asked.

Psaki responded that the administration would have more to say on the Mexico City Policy, adding: “I will just take the opportunity to remind all of you that he is a devout Catholic and somebody who attends church regularly. He started his day attending church with his family this morning but I don’t have anything more for you on that.”

Here’s what the devoutly Catholic’s White House said today in a press release:

In the past four years, reproductive health, including the right to choose, has been under relentless and extreme attack.  We are deeply committed to making sure everyone has access to care – including reproductive health care – regardless of income, race, zip code, health insurance status, or immigration status.

The Biden-Harris Administration is committed to codifying Roe v. Wade and appointing judges that respect foundational precedents like Roe.  We are also committed to ensuring that we work to eliminate maternal and infant health disparities, increase access to contraception, and support families economically so that all parents can raise their families with dignity.  This commitment extends to our critical work on health outcomes around the world.

As the Biden-Harris Administration begins in this critical moment, now is the time to rededicate ourselves to ensuring that all individuals have access to the health care they need.

See, this is why many devout Catholics preferred the barely-Christian Presbyterian Donald Trump to the churchgoing Catholic Joe Biden: one was committed to policies that saved the lives of the unborn, the other is committed to policies that make it possible to exterminate them. Such is the devotion of many Baby Boomer Catholics: an attachment to the Church, except when it interferes with the Sexual Revolution.

It’s not surprising that a Democratic administration is all-in on abortion rights. It is appalling that a Catholic president who presents himself as a “devout Catholic” is.

Today, Andrew Sullivan writes about how needlessly antagonistic Biden is being on culture war issues. Excerpts:

How do we know when “equity” has been achieved? That’s a very good question. It seems to me that the only definition of “equity” that works is that all groups are represented in federal policies in proportion to their share of the population, or more so — since equity can also require over-representation of these groups to make up for the past. The fact that an individual born, say, in the early 21st Century, has no personal or moral connection to slavery or segregation (au contraire), is irrelevant. She must pay for the past sins of her race.

Biden is therefore enforcing the Ibram X. Kendi view that “the only remedy to past discrimination is present discrimination.” And he’s enforcing it across the entire federal government and any institution the federal government funds. To show he’s serious, he’s appointed Susan Rice to enforce equity in a “whole-of-government” approach. America is no longer about individual freedom; it’s about identity group power, and its constant management by government.

More:

Biden’s executive order on “LGBTQ+” is also taken directly from critical gender and queer theory. Take the trans question. Most decent people support laws that protect transgender people from discrimination — which, after the Bostock decision, is already the law of the land. But this is not enough for Biden. He takes the view that the law should go further and insist that trans women are absolutely indistinguishable from biological women — which erases any means of enforcing laws that defend biological women as a class. If your sex is merely what you say it is, without any reference to biological reality, then it is no longer sex at all. It’s gender, period. It’s socially constructed all the way down.

Most of the time, you can ignore this insanity and celebrate greater visibility and protection for trans people. But in a few areas, biology matters. Some traumatized women who have been abused by men do not want to be around biological males in prison or shelters, even if they identify as women. I think these women should be accommodated. There are also places where we segregate by sex — like showers, locker rooms — for reasons of privacy. I think that allowing naked biological men and boys to be in the same showers as naked biological women and girls is asking for trouble — especially among teens. But for Biden, this is non-negotiable, and all objections are a function of bigotry.

And in sports, the difference between the physiology of men and women makes a big difference. That’s the entire point of having separate male and female sports, in the first place. Sure, you can suppress or enhance hormones. But you will never overcome the inherited, permanent effects of estrogen and testosterone in childhood and adolescence. Male and female bodies are radically different, because without that difference, our entire species would not exist. Replacing sex with gender threatens women’s sports for that simple reason.

For good measure, Biden also pledges to remove any protection for orthodox religious freedom and individual conscience in “LGBTQ+” areas in his proposed Equality Act, which repeals the relevant sections of Biden’s own Religious Freedom Restoration Act, and also makes sex indistinguishable from gender.

I wonder if Joe Biden even knows what critical theory is. But he doesn’t have to. It is the successor ideology to liberalism among elites, a now-mandatory ideology if you want to keep your job. But Biden’s emphatic backing of this illiberal, discriminatory project on his first day is relevant. He has decided to encourage “unity” by immediately pursuing policies that inflame Republicans and conservatives and normies more than any others.

Read it all. 

The thing about lefties and the culture war is that they consider any objection or resistance to what they want to do to be an act of aggression. Biden is undertaking a culture war Blitzkrieg here, but nobody in the media will notice. The rest of us had better.

The post Biden’s Culture War Blitzkrieg appeared first on The American Conservative.

Quotas Are Back

President Biden issued an executive order mandating “racial equity” in all government agencies. 

If you think that this means he’s asking managers to make sure racial discrimination is not happening in their agency, you’re mostly wrong. All decent people would want to see racial discrimination eliminated in government agencies — but that’s not what “equity” means. You may not understand that “equity,” in Wokish, is not the same thing as “equality.” As the always-useful Translations From The Wokish glossary explains, in its entry on Equity, equity is the word progressives use to describe equal outcomes. If there are racial imbalances in a system — that is, if a disproportionate number of white people are in its management — then that is taken as proof of “systemic racism.” No other explanation is possible. The glossary adds:

Because of the blank slatism and simplistic ideas of power and identity found within Critical Social Justice worldviews, all imbalances of representation in desirable areas of work are held to be caused by these perceived power dynamics. Equity is the intended remedy to this problem, and it is made applicable only (and especially) to positions of status and influence. For example, there is no equity program that attempts to increase the number of female sanitation workers, though there are equity programs that seek to increase the number of female doctors and politicians, and these endure even in high-status positions that employ more women than men. Of particular concern are positions that have influence where power is concerned, including in terms of shaping the discourses of society.

I could be wrong about this, but I feel confident that the equity assessors will never find a system in which there are not enough white people in management. But let’s say it did happen. I would find it demeaning if I had reason to believe that I had been chosen for a job over a better qualified candidate of color, only because my employer had a quota to fill. I would be ashamed, frankly. The only way I could get over that shame and do my job would to be convince myself that the racial-spoils ideology of progressivism were somehow just. But then I would be a liar.

From Live Not By Lies:

It is difficult for people raised in the free world to grasp the breadth and the depth of lying required simply to exist under communism. All the lies, and lies about lies, that formed the communist order were built on the basis of this foundational lie: the communist state is the sole source of truth. Orwell expressed this truth in Nineteen Eighty-Four: “The Party told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

Under the dictatorship of Big Brother, the Party understands that by changing language—Newspeak is the Party’s word for the jargon it imposes on society—it controls the categories in which people think. “Freedom” is slavery, “truth” is falsehood, and so forth. Doublethink—“holding two contradictory beliefs in one’s mind simultaneously, and accepting both of them”—is how people learn to submit their minds to the Party’s ideology.

If the Party says 2 + 2 = 5, then 2 + 2 = 5. The goal is to convince the person that all truth exists within the mind, and the rightly ordered mind believes whatever the Party says is true.

Orwell writes:

It was as though some huge force were pressing down upon you—something that penetrated inside your skull, battering against your brain, frightening you out of your beliefs, persuading you, almost, to deny the evidence of your senses. In the end the Party would announce that two and two made five, and you would have to believe it. It was inevitable that they should make that claim sooner or later: the logic of their position demanded it. Not merely the validity of experience but the very existence of external reality was tacitly denied by their philosophy. The heresy of heresies was common sense.

In our time, we do not have an all-powerful state forcing this on us. Under soft totalitarianism, the media, academia, corporate America, and other institutions are practicing Newspeak and compelling the rest of us to engage in doublethink every day. Men have periods. The woman standing in front of you is to be called “he.” Diversity and inclusion means excluding those who object to ideological uniformity. Equity means treating persons unequally, regardless of their skills and achievements, to achieve an ideologically correct result.

To update an Orwell line to our own situation: “The Office of Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion told you to reject the evidence of your eyes and ears. It was their final, most essential command.”

It really is the same logic as communism: that all human complexity must be flattened to make reality fit theory. More Live Not By Lies:

For example, an American academic who has studied Russian communism told me about being present at the meeting in which his humanities department decided to require from job applicants a formal statement of loyalty to the ideology of diversity—even though this has nothing to do with teaching ability or scholarship.

The professor characterized this as a McCarthyite way of eliminating dissenters from the employment pool, and putting those already on staff on notice that they will be monitored for deviation from the social-justice party line.

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

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

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

So now our federal bureaucracy is going to be run by a racialist lie, and everyone who works within that bureaucracy is going to be compelled to affirm the lie or be considered a racist.

Here’s an example of how progressives think. Two writers at the Five Thirty-Eight site complain that it will be hard for Biden to make a dent in the Mighty-Whitey federal bench that Trump has given us. Excerpts:

During most of Donald Trump’s presidency, Congress was in a state of persistent deadlock, passing relatively few big pieces of legislation. But the Republican-controlled Senate stayed humming, nonetheless — thanks to a steady stream of judicial nominees from the White House.

After only one term, Trump filled 28 percent of vacant seats on the federal bench, including 27 percent of active federal district court judges and 30 percent of active appeals court judges, not to mention three Supreme Court justices. This figure is far higher than for other recent presidents in their first terms — by January 2013, for instance, Barack Obama had appointed just 17 percent of the vacant federal judge spots, and at the end of his first term, George W. Bush had appointed 21 percent. In fact, Obama was able to appoint only a slightly larger share of the federal bench in his eight years in office (31 percent) than Trump managed to do in his one term.

More:

Trump also managed to radically alter the makeup of the courts. His appointees are not only far more conservative than other presidents’ picks but far less racially and ethnically diverse. They’re also fairly young — the median age for Trump’s appellate judges at confirmation is 47 — so given that the median retirement age for appellate judges is 67, these appointees could end up serving for decades to come. And even though Democrats now maintain narrow control of the Senate, putting President Biden in a much better position to make his own stamp on the judiciary than if Republicans still held the majority, Trump’s effect on the courts could be difficult to undo.

Thank you, Trump! As a conservative, I want a more conservative federal judiciary. If achieving that meant nominating a slate of judges that were 100 percent non-white, I would be for it (as long as race wasn’t a criterion for selection). That’s because I care about the convictions of judges, not the color of their skin. Trump understandably outsourced his judicial picks to the Federalist Society, the organization for conservatives in the law. How many persons of color are also legal conservatives?

For that matter, how do progressives treat legal conservatives of color? Ask Clarence Thomas. How do progressives treat people of color who express conservative views at all? Answer: as race traitors.

Listen, I expect Joe Biden’s nominees to the federal bench will be philosophical liberals. Why not? Elections have consequences. About half of America is conservative, more or less, but I don’t believe it’s fair to expect a Democratic president to make half his judges conservative, so that the federal judiciary “thinks like America.” But progressives don’t care about how you think; they care about how you look. They assume that No True Black Person (or Hispanic, or Asian, etc.) would have conservative views. To be a progressive requires having to do so many contortions about these things. Wouldn’t it simply be easier to promote people based on their relevant record and experience, not according to skin color, sexual orientation, and other characteristics worshipped by progressives?

Well, yes, but these are the people now in charge of the executive branch, so we have to live by lies — including the lie that instituting policies that divide and reward Americans on the basis of racial identity is an act of “unity.” Biden reinstated Critical Race Theory training in federal agencies, overturning a Trump executive order. But Christopher Rufo is leading a campaign to fight back against CRT everywhere, especially at the state level. He discusses it here:

President Biden has reinstated critical race theory in the federal government. In response, we have launched a campaign to file lawsuits against schools, corporations, and government agencies that teach the principles of race essentialism, collective guilt, and neo-segregation. pic.twitter.com/KautgNGIIB

— Christopher F. Rufo (@realchrisrufo) January 22, 2021

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Here Come The Soft Totalitarians

Listen to what Obama’s former CIA director has to say in this cheerful clip from Inauguration Day:

.@JohnBrennan: Biden intel community “are moving in laser-like fashion to try to uncover as much as they can about” the pro-Trump “insurgency” that harbors “religious extremists, authoritarians, fascists, bigots, racists, nativists, even libertarians” pic.twitter.com/SjVXWhPhR8

— Tom Elliott (@tomselliott) January 20, 2021

Even libertarians. Mercy. I don’t have to think too hard to figure out that John Brennan’s idea of “religious extremists” is broad enough to include just about anybody to the right of Father James Martin, SJ (never heard of him? Ye shall know them by their recent tweets:)

The LGBT community has few images like this. So it is not surprising that they would add their own symbol, the rainbow, in a respectful way, to a beloved image of their mother.

How appropriate that she is weeping, for it her son who suffers whenever an LGBT person is persecuted pic.twitter.com/BlpYTMMBp8

— James Martin, SJ (@JamesMartinSJ) January 19, 2021

 

It will not surprise you to hear that sales of Live Not By Lies are once again rising. People know something bad is coming. I would be honored that Father Dwight Longenecker, the prolific orthodox Catholic priest and writer, gave a strong endorsement to my book at anytime — but these days, when traditional Christians need to understand what’s about to hit us and prepare, I’m especially grateful for his rave. Excerpts from his review:

Rod Dreher’s new book Live Not By Lies: A Manual for Christian Dissidents functions like a prophecy in our time. The book’s basic emphasis is, like the message of all prophets–“Wake up people. See what is happening all around you. Destruction is at hand.”

More:

I have written about the “people of the lie” and the inner dynamic of deceit in Immortal Combat and the things I observed there echo through Rod’s prophetic account. The fact that this year has brought about a disastrous presidential election is something Dreher could not have predicted precisely, but the results of the election have swept in Rod’s warnings big time as a fulfillment of his prophecies. No matter what you believe about the legality of Joe Biden’s election, the fact remains that half the country believe Donald Trump and his Trump army were planning a coup. The other half of the country believe Joe Biden accomplished a coup through a rigged election.

Again, no matter what the facts are–the result is that the Joe Biden presidency appears to be propped up by military might. Calling up 25,000 troops to Washington this week was not just for “security”. It was clearly a show of strength by the winning side. It was a display of military might to remind the other half of America who won and who is in charge. Rod Dreher’s prophecy of a soft totalitarianism was perhaps too tame. Soft totalitarianism is a subtle, creeping control of the powers that be. The military display in Washington wasn’t creeping. It was creepy. Suddenly the soft totalitarianism seems to be hardening.

And:

Finally he gives the strong encouragement that family and faith are the bedrock of resistance. There is no room for organized violence or zealous plots to overthrow governments. Instead to be a dissident is simply to follow one’s faith and live a life according to the truths revealed in religion. To live a quiet life, teaching the faith and living the faith even in troubled times–especially in troubled times!

Read the whole thing. The second half of the review is strong praise for a new book by Ralph Martin about the crisis in the Catholic Church.

If you think that simply following your faith and living according to the truths of your religion is quietism, buddy, I have some people you need to meet. The Benda family, which pretty much owns the chapter of my book about the family as bedrock of resistance, explicitly rejected the bargain that many Czechoslovak Catholics of the communist era made: living quietly so they would be left alone by the state. The Bendas believed that doing so would be a betrayal of their God-given duties as Christians. But they also knew that it was pointless to try to mount any kind of violent rebellion against the totalitarian police state. So they rebelled in nonviolent ways, ways that were constructive. Dr. Vaclav Benda ended up in prison for four years for his antigovernment protests in favor of human rights. Their entire flat was bugged (Dr. Benda’s widow, Kamila, showed me the scars on the wall where she and her late husband pulled the wires out after the fall of Communism.) The family and all their friends really suffered for their convictions.

But they won. Even if communism were somehow still in power there, they still would have triumphed over the dictatorship of lies, because they refused to yield to it.

These men and women have something to teach us Americans, now more than ever.

 

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Covid Cultishness Destroyed Their Fellowship

Did you see Garth Brooks’s walk-off at yesterday’s Inaugural ceremony? The maskless Brooks hugged all the presidents gathered there. They were wearing masks; he wasn’t. If you’re like me, you thought, “Oh no, he wasn’t wearing a mask.” But you might have thought, “Good for him, not wearing a mask.”

It’s not a big deal, what happened yesterday. But it did bring to mind something I’ve been wanting to write about. I have been hearing for weeks now from conservative readers who report that this last Covid year has split their friend groups, and churches. Because I can’t remember who said I could use their letter or conversation, and who said I couldn’t, I am going to do a mash-up that captures the themes I’ve been hearing:

We were all so close, then the pandemic hit. Then some of my friends got into QAnon and related conspiracies, including believing that the Covid vaccine contains a microchip. They have been enraged about masks, and refuse to wear them. My child and I are seriously immunocompromised, so we can’t be around people who don’t take it seriously, because Covid could put us in the hospital. Some of our formerly close group of friends left our church in anger over mask requirements. Those who stayed ended up driving our pastor off because he insisted on masks to make it possible for elderly and immunocompromised people to come to church without fear. Our friends now treat our family like the enemy because we wear masks,  look forward to the vaccine, and in other ways violate what they have decided the correct Christian conservative narrative is. This year has shattered our family’s ability to trust the people with whom we were closest. I wonder if we will be friends after all this.

Again, that is not an actual letter, but a boiling-down of e-mails and conversations I’ve been having in the past couple of months. I know a pastor who was run out of his church over MAGA and mask policies, and was so traumatized by it that he left the ministry entirely.

Is this cult behavior? That seems like an extreme statement. But it did come to mind reading this Spectator piece by Mary Wakefield, about how culty people have gotten lately. Excerpt:

‘How are you? How’s it all been? I asked the owner as she passed a cappuccino across the COVID-secure takeaway table. ‘Yeah, you know these are crazy times,’ she replied. ‘But at least everything makes sense now.’ What did she mean? ‘It was all explained to me over the summer, and it’s just mad how much sense it makes! Capitalism, democracy… I just can’t understand how I ever fell for it. The patriarchy have deceived us all. But change will come!’ She laughed, and there it was: the knowing, elated look of the chosen. ‘I’m not sure communism did many people any favors,’ I said. She gave a tight smile, said ‘Yeah. You need to have your eyes opened’, and turned away. When I looked over the road at the estate opposite, the racing clouds made it appear as if the tower blocks were toppling.

If there’s more cult thinking about, the usual explanation for it is the internet. We live in information bubbles, it’s said, constantly reinforcing our own beliefs, each group member egging the others on to more extreme views. But I’m not sure the internet is the real villain here. In fact, it is often the way out of a cult. Steven Hassan, author of The Cult of Trump, is doing the talk show rounds right now, comparing Trump with Sun Myung Moon and David Koresh. Hassan was himself a Moonie for many years, and only escaped, he says, after Google gave him the means to question Mr Moon’s True Way.

The best cult recruiting tool, I think, is simply the terrible global sense of unease. Thanks to the virus, all our carefully constructed ideas of the future are crumbling. We crave certainty, and certainty is what cults do best. If there’s a distinction between a cult and a religion, it’s that certainty is not the same thing as faith. Faith acknowledges doubt and struggles on nonetheless. Certainty is madness.

For the gold-standard crazy cultic certainty, go to YouTube and search for a video made by the Scientologists starring Tom Cruise, in which Tom explains his religion to new recruits, with the Mission: Impossible music in the background. Towards the end of the nine-minute clip, Cruise begins to talk about Scientology’s critics, or Suppressive Persons. ‘SPs?’ Cruise laughs maniacally. ‘Wow. SPs, one day they’ll just read about them in the history books.’ The contempt in which he holds non-believers is astonishing.

And that’s why you can never crack a cultist with argument. The more you argue, the more you try to show them that their thinking might be awry, the more obvious it is to them that you’re part of the diabolical opposition — and that they’re being tested. Persecution only proves the point.

Read it all. 

None of my correspondents or interlocutors accused their friends of being culty about all this, but I do detect a feeling of shock and deep sorrow. One, a Christian, said that this past year has been an apocalypse in that she has been forced to learn that the people she thought would be with her through thick and thin actually pushed her out of their fellowship because she believes in mask-wearing.

Are you dealing with this in your life? If so, what are you doing about it?

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Goodbye, Women’s Sports

And so, on the first full day of a Biden presidency, female school athletics is sacrificed to wokeness. From an executive order sent down from on high today:

Every person should be treated with respect and dignity and should be able to live without fear, no matter who they are or whom they love.  Children should be able to learn without worrying about whether they will be denied access to the restroom, the locker room, or school sports. [Emphasis mine — RD] Adults should be able to earn a living and pursue a vocation knowing that they will not be fired, demoted, or mistreated because of whom they go home to or because how they dress does not conform to sex-based stereotypes.  People should be able to access healthcare and secure a roof over their heads without being subjected to sex discrimination.  All persons should receive equal treatment under the law, no matter their gender identity or sexual orientation.

This means that schools that get federal funding have to treat biological males who identify as female as if they were female. With this order, the federal government declares that the biological advantage that male bodies have over female bodies, in terms of strength and endurance, does not matter — at least not in schools that receive federal funding. This now vaults males who identify as females to the head of the line for places on girls high school and college teams, and for girls college athletic scholarships.

Among the Democrats, wokeness will always defeat science. This is our new political reality. Also our new political reality: the Democratic Party is the party of science.

A new British medical study found that male-to-female transgendered athletes maintain a biological advantage over biological females, even after being on female hormones for a year:

A new study suggests transgender women maintain an athletic advantage over their cisgender peers even after a year on hormone therapy.

The results, published last month in the British Journal of Sports Medicine, could mean the current one-year waiting period for Olympic athletes who are transitioning is inadequate.

“For the Olympic level, the elite level, I’d say probably two years is more realistic than one year,” said the study’s lead author, Dr. Timothy Roberts, a pediatrician and the director of the adolescent medicine training program at Children’s Mercy Hospital in Kansas City, Missouri. “At one year, the trans women on average still have an advantage over the cis women,” he said, referring to cisgender, or nontransgender, women.

Roberts began investigating the athletic performance of transgender men and women while in the Air Force, working under co-author and physician Lt. Col. Joshua Smalley at a clinic coordinating care for airmen beginning or continuing their gender transition.

Active duty service members are required to take a physical readiness test every six to 12 months. Roberts, Smalley and another co-author, Dr. Dale Ahrendt, realized they had access to robust data on service members before, during and after they started hormone replacement treatment.

The three physicians conducted a retrospective review of medical records and fitness tests for 29 transgender men and 46 transgender women from 2013 to 2018. The Air Force’s fitness assessment includes the number of pushups and situps performed in a minute, and the time required to run 1.5 miles.

They also had records on when the subjects started testosterone or estrogen, the type of hormone used and the number of days from when treatment began to when their hormone levels reached the normal adult range for a cisgender person.

For the first two years after starting hormones, the trans women in their review were able to do 10 percent more pushups and 6 percent more situps than their cisgender female counterparts. After two years, Roberts told NBC News, “they were fairly equivalent to the cisgender women.”

Their running times declined as well, but two years on, trans women were still 12 percent faster on the 1.5 mile-run than their cisgender peers.

Men win again! Funny how this works.

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The Curse Of Ambien

You might have forgotten that I have a paid daily newsletter, Daily Dreher (see info on how to subscribe here).

In the newsletter, I focus on uplifting things, in which I include things that give meaning to life. I wrote last night about my struggle this week to kick my dependence on the sleep drug Ambien. Why would I put it on a newsletter focusing on positive things? Because it’s an example of me putting into action the words I’ve been preaching for a while now about accepting suffering in a spirit that allows us to turn it into a means of becoming holier people, or at least stronger. I don’t think being dependent on a prescription sleep medication has anything to do with holiness one way or the other, but I do believe that kicking the habit is a good thing to do.

I wrote about it last night for my subscribers. One of my readers said that I should republish it here, on my blog, because it might educate and inspire others to avoid the drug, or to get off of it. I am reluctant to make content that people paid for available for free, but I will make an exception in this case, on the grounds that it might give hope and conviction to others who are caught in the same Ambien trap:

I have something kind of serious to talk about tonight, though I like to think of it as hopeful, because I’m taking my own advice about suffering.

Around 2008, I think it was, I was having a lot of trouble sleeping because of anxiety over a family medical issue. My doctor at the time prescribed Ambien, a widely-prescribed sleep aid that was supposed to have none of the addictive properties of benzodiazepine drugs (e.g., Valium, Halcion, Xanax). It was a wonder drug, let me tell you. It was like sliding down a silky chute to a bed made of pink clouds, having a cheerful swarm of Tinkerbells tuck you in under a goosedown comforter, and Burl Ives singing lullabies as you drifted off to sleep. It was not at all like the over-the-counter sleep aids (Unisom, for example) that left me feeling groggy in the morning. Those were like being beaned by a mallet; Ambien was like being bonked ever so gently by a marshmallow hammerhead.

I loved Ambien, as you can tell. If you have ever had difficulty getting to sleep, well, Ambien was here to solve all your problems. Taking an overnight flight abroad? Ambien helps you sleep on the plane. There were no sleep problems that Ambien couldn’t solve.

Then one day, I realized that I couldn’t get to sleep without it. This alarmed me, a bit, but there are bigger things in the world to be concerned about than being dependent on a sleeping pill, so I didn’t really worry about it. It has been many years since I experienced Ambien use as a pleasurable journey to sleepytime. Now, it has to happen if I’m going to sleep at all.

I tried to quit it several times over the years, but the misery was pretty intense. Ambien works by slowing down the brain, making it easier to sleep. Years ago, on one of my aborted attempts to wean myself from the drug, I described a night without Ambien to a friend as like trying to land a plane, but always bouncing back up just before touchdown. It was so difficult, and left me so completely wrecked the next day, that I always just gave up and started taking it again.

As you may recall, I’ve been living in a back bedroom suite at my house, quarantining while awaiting the Covid test results from my wife and daughter, who were both exposed to the virus, and have been feeling under the weather. Three nights ago, I noticed that my bottle of Ambien was missing. I turned the room upside down looking for it, with no success. This was a problem, because not only can I not sleep without Ambien, my brain races like crazy without it. There was a bottle of Advil PM in the bathroom, so I tried that.

It was like trying to gain liftoff in a Cessna powered by a lawnmower engine. I had a truly awful night. I described it to my wife like this: imagine that you are stuck in the cab of a 4WD pick-up truck, stuck in the mud, with the gas pedal also stuck to the floor. Your wheels are spinning at maximum speed, but you can’t go anywhere. Imagine too that your radio is on a station you hate, but the knob is broken, so you can’t change channels, and the volume knob is also broken, stuck at 11. And the electric windows and door locks are not working, so you’re bound to be there until somebody finds you.

That was my Sunday night. On Monday morning, I searched again for the Ambien, without luck. Then I decided that maybe I should take a lesson from what I’ve been saying over and over in this space, about accepting suffering as a way to grow: I decided that I was going to go cold turkey on Ambien, and beat this dependence once and for all.

This is not advised medically, the cold turkey thing. Though Ambien is not as addictive as benzos, it is chemically similar, and withdrawal can be bad. I thought about poor Jordan Peterson, who became addicted to benzos in a similar way: a doctor prescribed them for his anxiety. He nearly died coming off of them. The Internet medical sites say that the smartest thing to do is to work with your doctor to transition to smaller doses, and eventually to go off them entirely in a gradual process. I would have loved to have done that, but as Ambien is a controlled substance, it might have been difficult to get a new scrip for it with the old one only half-done.

I decided to stick with the cold turkey strategy. Last night — Monday night — was almost as bad as Sunday, but a little bit better. I didn’t get to sleep until around four a.m., and when I woke up at 10:30, I had been so restless that all my blankets were on the floor. After I finished the coffee my wife brought to me, I picked up the blankets and started making the bed … and there was the lost bottle of Ambien. It had apparently gotten lost in the folds of one of the blankets when I was making the bed up after the first night.

No more excruciating sleepless nights, with my brain going berserk! All I would have to do is take the little blue pill, and back to sleep I would go.

On the other hand, I have never made it through two and a half days of no Ambien, not in twelve years. Now I had. The worst days of Ambien withdrawal are days three and four, say medical websites. Today was day three. Tonight promises to be a bad night too. But if I can power through tonight, and maybe tomorrow night, I think I can be free of this stuff.

So that’s what I’ve committed to doing. I’m going to give my wife the Ambien when she brings me my supper, and tell her to keep it away from me. I can’t allow the suffering of these past three days and nights be in vain.

I guess this sounds like a big drama concocted out of nothing, but if I’m honest, it has given me more compassion for addicts. I don’t know that I would properly be called an “addict” — from what I read, doctors recognize a difference between “dependence” and “addiction.” Someone who is dependent on a drug treats it like I treated Ambien: as something I need to live a normal life. An addict, on the other hand, will wreck his life, and the lives of others, in pursuit of the drug, and will seek to ingest greater quantities of it to achieve the same high. All addicts are dependents, but not all dependents are addicts.

I can see the meaningful distinction there, and it’s certainly true that taking Ambien doesn’t affect my life in ways that, say, being addicted to opioids, or being an alcoholic would. Nevertheless, I don’t want to be dependent on a drug to get to sleep, and it’s scary to me that ceasing to use a drug causes such extraordinarily miserable effects that I have always gone back to using it rather than suffer through a second night of buzzsaw sleeplessness. So, cold turkey it is.

In talking over the years with other long-term Ambien users, I’ve found that every one of us wish we had never taken the drug. Part of the problem, I think, was that people don’t think of sleeping pills as something to which you can become dependent. I know I didn’t, at least. It seemed like a minor thing when the doctor first prescribed them. This was a category error: I assumed that the dangerous drugs, regarding risk of dependence, were opioids, benzos, and amphetamines. What is Ambien other than a professional-grade Sominex? Turns out that it’s a more powerful drug than I imagined. Now I tell everybody: never, ever start taking these sleep drugs. If I had known when I first started taking Ambien how hard it would be to stop taking it, I never would have tried it.

Why am I bringing all this up in this newsletter? For a couple of reasons.

First, I wanted to talk about how I am attempting to apply lessons I talk about at lot in this space to something in my own life. I wouldn’t consider it a significant moral failure if I went back to taking Ambien, but I will consider it a moral victory if I can make it to the end of this week free of Ambien, because by then, they say, it’s been flushed from your body. This has been a very hard thing to beat, and rather than panic when I lost the pills, I chose to frame this as an opportunity to do something I’ve wanted to do for many years: beat this dependence. The smart thing to have done would have been to talk to my doctor, lower my prescription dosage, and gradually taper off. Circumstances, however, threw me into the cold turkey situation — not ideal, but I accepted it.

Second, I wanted to express compassion for people struggling with dependencies and addictions. When Jordan Peterson’s dependence on benzodiazepine became public, some people made fun of him for being supposedly weak in character. This was cruel on its face, but especially cruel because Peterson was using the drug as prescribed, and didn’t seek to use them for pleasure. (Many who have become not just dependent on opioids, but addicted to them, started when they were prescribed them for pain.) I don’t think that I have ever actually had a conversation with someone who has been through detox and rehab about their experiences, specifically about the difficulty of withdrawal. To be honest, until now, I never really thought about what withdrawing from a substance would be like — except, of course, after a single night without Ambien, which was enough to put the question out of mind for years.

I’m thinking now about a friend who became an alcoholic — not a bad drunk, but still a drunk. I wasn’t around him a lot, but I know that all of us in his circle worried about him. I had a couple of talks with him, asking him to please get help. He wouldn’t admit he had a problem, though. He eventually died of something unrelated, but now I am thinking about how little I understood what I was asking of him. I regarded his drunkenness as a failure of character, in a come on, man, pull yourself together, you don’t want to be like this way. I resist the total medicalization of addiction, because thinking back to my friend’s life, there were times when he made a choice to lean into alcohol to deal with setbacks, rather than take them on in a more constructive way.

On the other hand, I learned from that same friend once that alcoholism runs in his family — as, alas, it does in mine. Over this past gloomy year, there have been a number of times when I was so bored, sad, and anxious that I would have done just about anything to escape this mood. I have a cabinet full of liquor, but over the past six or seven years, I have lost the ability to have more than one, maybe two, drinks at a time. Anything more and I feel physically bad — like having a hangover, without first having had the pleasure of being tipsy. If I’m honest, it is only the prospect of feeling like crap from even a little drink that has kept me from seeking relief in the bottle in my own bouts with the blues this last year. I thought about this last summer, and my poor buddy, the genial drunk who couldn’t handle his sorrows without booze, and thought for the first time in an alcohol context, There but for the grace of God go I.

I hope I’m not making too much of this. It’s just that as I get older, and see up close how it doesn’t take much for things to go wrong in a life, I find it easier to have compassion for others. I mean, look, being dependent on Ambien is not that big a deal, but lying there last night, desperate to sleep, with an alien in my brain spinning plates, I thought about how much courage it takes for someone who has a serious addiction to commit to detox. If my relatively piddly problem with Ambien is this hard, what must it be like for people hooked on harder stuff?

And I’ll tell you this too: after this experience, I will never let a doctor prescribe an anti-anxiety drug for me, except for one-off uses (like the dental work I had done recently).

Well, last night was another awful night, one in which I don’t think I drifted off till 4 am, and in which I had a nightmare about a nuclear meltdown. But it was a less awful night than the previous two, and I believe tonight will be less awful than last night. According to medical websites, the stuff should be out of my system a week or so after my last dose.

One weird thing about coming off of it is that waking hours are also kind of freaky. You feel not at home in your body, and have periods of fogginess. The good news, though, is that today I started to realize that my perception was clearer, and crisper — which tells me that in twelve years of continuous Ambien use, I had assumed that the thin fog it cast over everything was normal.

This is one of the hardest things I’ve ever done, but I’m really glad I committed to it. A physician friend who subscribes to my newsletter e-mailed me about it this morning. He called Ambien “poison — not for all, but for many,” and added:

It is an unnatural and dangerous drug due to selective neurologic manipulation–I truly think the drugs it was intended to replace–benzos and barbiturates–are less psychologically dangerous because they are general, rather than selective, depressants and modulators.And Ambien–like Oxycontin–is certainly addictive, despite the sales pitches from attractive pharmaceutical sales reps at their unveiling.

Yep. Like I said in last night’s newsletter, every single person I’ve met over the years and talked to about Ambien has said the same thing: they want to be free of it, but can’t, because it’s too hard to come off of it. The withdrawal has been so awful that if I had had any idea that I would easily become dependent on it, and that getting off the stuff was so difficult, I would have refused it when my Dallas doctor first prescribed it. I cannot urge you readers strongly enough never, ever to use a prescription sleep drug, or use it for more than one or two nights. I was so naive, thinking that it was just a sleep aid, and the doctor said it would help, so what could it hurt? To be clear, I never abused Ambien, and used it only as prescribed. And I still got dependent on it.

When I posted that newsletter last night, I still had hours ahead of me until I could finally get to sleep, if “sleep” is what you call what I had. As I struggled to calm my racing brain down, I thought over and over about poor Jordan Peterson, and what he dealt with. I wish I had prayed more often for him when news first broke about what he was dealing with. He started taking prescription benzodiazepine to help him deal with intense anxiety after his wife was diagnosed with cancer. Had I been in his position, I would probably have asked my doctor for the same medication. You might have done so too. I can’t get it out of my head how easy it was to walk into the Ambien trap. I really was tormented by anxiety back then (like Peterson, one of my family members had had a terrible diagnosis), and Ambien came as blessed relief. If I had stopped using it after two weeks, maybe I would have been fine, but nobody told me about the possibility of dependence or addiction, and even if the doctor had, I probably would have ignored him, thinking that dependence or addiction is something that happens to other people.

Again, I don’t want to make too big a deal about this. I just want to leave you with two things:

Be merciful to those who are trying to kick a chemical dependence or addiction — to booze, to pills, to cigarettes, etc. — because they’re fighting a huge battle, the difficulty of which you may not appreciate until you find yourself having to do it; andNever, ever, ever start using Ambien! It is awesome at first, but it will own you.

 

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The Biden Era Begins

I woke up this morning too late to see Biden’s swearing-in. (This week I’ve gone cold turkey off of Ambien, the sleep drug, more about which later; this week, because of it, I haven’t been able to get to sleep until about an hour before dawn.) I caught the last part of his speech. My first reaction: what a relief to have a president who talks like a normal human being. I didn’t vote for the guy, but I’m grateful to hear a presidential speech that doesn’t make me mad — mad, either because I’m angry at the president for what he said or how he said it, or mad with the president at the people or thing he was attacking.

The TV people covering it were startlingly enthusiastic about all of this. I say “startlingly” because I didn’t expect that they would allow their feelings to show quite like this. But they did. This rubbed me the wrong way, not because I’m shocked to discover that journalists are liberal, but because it made me think that this is how press coverage of the Biden administration is likely to be, at least at the beginning: fawning and filled with relief that Orange Man Bad is gone. I was watching ABC, but turned it off because I couldn’t take the gushy tone. I missed this:

ABC News just referred to Biden as “Papa in Chief.”

The media simping is unreal.

— Kassy Dillon (@KassyDillon) January 20, 2021

Gross. Embarrassing. But I kind of get it. Like I said, I didn’t vote for Biden, but after the way Trump and his minions behaved post-election, culminating in the January 6 attack on the Capitol, I am relieved to see the back of him. It’s so exhausting to be wound up constantly. Trump thrived off of anger and conflict. When I saw these tweets about how the Q cultists are melting down, I thought, “Great, now maybe we can be done with them.”

Mood on QAnon forums right now pic.twitter.com/EouHCXOOxL

— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) January 20, 2021

Mood on QAnon forums right now pic.twitter.com/EouHCXOOxL

— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) January 20, 2021

Incredible – the longtime admin of QAnon’s online home, who propped up mass conspiracies for years, basically goes ‘maybe the real Q was the friends we made along the way, ok well stay tuned for my next project!’ https://t.co/F01RUMUNJN

— Vera Bergengruen (@VeraMBergen) January 20, 2021

Watching Biden’s speech, I was surprised by the amount of relief I felt that the Trump drama is over. Don’t get me wrong: I think Biden’s policies will be bad for America, especially for social and religious conservatives. But I was surprised by the sense of relief precisely because I think that things are going to be pretty dark for people like me. How to account for it?

This letter from a conservative Catholic reader helped me understand it better:

Well today Trump is gone.  I also perused a number of your postings as I had unplugged from much of my political reading for a time.  It’s interesting to read what others are saying, what I am hearing at my church and what I am feeling.  There does seem to be an overall sentiment of exhaustion and desire for, well, just less political engagement.My sense is still that we are seeing the scapegoat mechanism in regard to Trump.  He has been defeated and sent away in shame and the hope and desire of people is now bringing about some kind of peace and normalcy.  I think most people, even on the fringes whether BLM or MAGA, want peace or they at least want pacification.  Already we are seeing with Biden the march of liberal ideas with his Executive Orders.  Two of those EO’s will be manifestly anti-life; the Mexico City protocol and opening up about $60 million a year for Planned Parenthood again.  The reality is we have a man who solidly identifies himself as a Catholic but will probably be ushering in the most anti-Catholic policies in history.  And the bishops?  Already the Cardinal of Washington is getting center stage, the USCCB is pledging to work with Biden.  (No doubt they should say that, but there is precious little resistance to Biden’s excommunication worthy actions.)  If any of us did what he is doing our bishop would tell us we needed to go to confession, at the least.  This is one reason Catholics don’t trust their bishops any more, because they won’t stand for anything.  They cannot even be unified on protecting the unborn.Anyway, here’s my prediction.  People are exhausted, not just by Trump, but by the constant attacking of Trump and by a year of Covid.  Here is the fatal mistake people very well may make: they will place Biden on the pedestal of the one who saved the nation and given him and his administration about as much power as they want.  In essence, for four years we heard that Trump was dangerous because he had too much power.  Just watch as Biden ends up being far more dictatorial than Trump ever was.  He’s doing it all in the name of idealistic pursuits and I don’t think there is much will to stop him.I don’t foresee any kind of conflict or fight on the part of most people.  What I see is the prime opportunity for a Huxleyan revolution and people are going to welcome it, not just because their attitudes have changed, but because people just want the madness to stop.  They think they got rid of the dictator, now they are about to lay down and let the real dictator take over.  America is about to be remade.

Though I wouldn’t use the word “dictator” to describe either Trump or Biden, I think this is right. It highlights the real gift that the January 6 insurrectionists gave to Joe Biden and the Democrats. Most Americans don’t want to live in a country in which things like that happen, instigated by the President of the United States. As long as Biden can keep talking in a calm, normal, irenic way — his speech was good at that — he will be able to get a lot of what he wants. He’s got the press corps in his back pocket. And, as the Catholic reader pointed out, the policies Biden is going to push for in some areas are quite bad.I find myself this afternoon pretty sour about what Trump and his followers did. Had Trump not acted like a lunatic at the first presidential debate, he might have had a second term. Had he been just a little bit different, and more normal, in dealing with Covid, same deal. Had Trump not told Georgia Republican voters to stay home in the Senate runoff, we probably would still have a Republican Senate to restrain Biden. Had Trump not been a lunatic about the election result, we wouldn’t have had a mob storming the Capitol.The past year of Trump’s presidency, especially the past two months, has been one massive own goal. I’m really sick and tired of the QAnon garbage, and all the stupid distractions we on the Right have created for ourselves, that have only ended up helping the other side, in part by sending the Right down so many idiotic rabbit holes. As if the only choice was between Zombie Reaganism or MAGA-Q. Somebody the other day, maybe on Twitter, said that Trump has reduced all conservative politics down to the question of how you feel about him. Nothing else matters to his most ardent followers.We on the Right have a lot of rebuilding to do. What I want to see is not a return to the pre-Trump GOP status quo — that way is death, and besides, it’s not even possible — but for the party going forward to find a way to turn populism into a constructive and appealing governing philosophy. Think about where we would be today if Trump had actually cared about the things he ran on enough to see them through. Let us never again think, though, that character doesn’t matter. Our side is going to have its hands full opposing Biden, but we won’t gain power again without a positive vision. Nor will we gain power again as long as Donald Trump is the main factor in GOP politics.I saw this from the liberal writer Matt Yglesias yesterday, and it gave me hope:

I know it won’t happen, but it would help the country a lot for conservatives to take some time pondering the fact that their main concerns at the moment are all things that aren’t remediable through electoral politics.

— Matthew Yglesias (@mattyglesias) January 19, 2021

I’m not sure what Yglesias has in mind, but here are some things that I do, as a social and religious conservative.

First, we are a nation that has forgotten God — and not just people on the Left. There is ample evidence that many of us on the Right have done so. There is no legislative or executive action that can call us to repentance for that. Only our pastors, and ourselves.

Second, the falling-apart of our families is not the fault of the government. The state is not forcing us to give our children smartphones. It’s not the government’s fault that many of them use the smartphones to discover hardcore porn. I would welcome laws restricting or (ideally) banning porn, but we do not have to wait on that to do the right thing. We do not have to have the nanny state teach us how to be faithful spouses, and good moms and dads.

Third, the collapse of community spirit is not the government’s fault. In The Benedict Option, I wrote about how the anti-communist dissident Vaclav Benda responded to the political powerlessness of his side by realizing that politics is more than state action. Caring for the common good can be done by everyone, even those outside of political power. It is an impoverished vision of politics that sees it as only what happens in legislatures, or arguments carried out on social media.

Fourth, the loss of cultural memory is a hugely important thing to conservatives, or ought to be. We are forgetting who we are, in part because our institutions want to re-program us (I write about how this works in Live Not By Lies. ). There is no electoral solution to our universities, our news media, and Hollywood having embraced wokeness. The good news is that we have it within our power to resist this. Benda and other dissidents held classes and seminars where they taught real history, and real literature to those who wanted to know the truth. They did this under a communist dictatorship, in the face of an education system that propagandized the young constantly; what’s our excuse? If you have the means to put your kids into classical schools, or to start one, now is the time to do so. Now is the time to support classical education, with your donations, too. Our greatest obstacle now is our imagination, our lack of creativity.

There are more issues, I’m sure. The point is this: I wish we did not have a liberal Democratic president, but that liberal Democratic president is not preventing us from being better servants of God. That liberal Democratic president is not preventing us from taking better care of our families. He is not preventing us from being better neighbors, and is not preventing us from educating ourselves and our children to understand who we really are as men, as women, and as Americans. Did Donald Trump make anybody a better Christian, a better parent, a better neighbor, or a better steward of our cultural inheritance? Really?

It is not the case that we can either be good at conventional politics or we can be good at these other things. We have to be both. But it is more important to be better at the other things, because any political victory is hollow without them. Trump accomplished some good things in his four years, but to the extent that he convinced a lot of us that his holding power meant meaningful change, it was Pyrrhic. He does not leave the churches stronger, or families closer, or community spirit more resilient, or our culture in better shape — but it’s not really the job of a president to do those things. A president can give us things, but he can’t give us meaning.

Make no mistake, these next four years are going to be hard for religious and social conservatives. But if you ever placed hope in the princes and sons of men, you were wrong, and now you — and I — have the chance to turn away from that, and build a creditable resistance to the spirit of the age. Had Trump been re-elected, a lot of us on the Right would have been lulled into a false sense of security, as Woke Capitalism and the other institutions continued to institute soft totalitarian tactics and policies, but the Republican-voting masses wrongly believed that all was well because Trump was in the White House. Time to go back to the real world. We on the Right cannot keep ripping ourselves apart over Donald Trump. The Senate was a gift to the Democrats; do we want more of this? Besides, there will be more real power in being out of political power, if it compels us to get serious about living faithfully in a post-Christian age. Look back at how much culture-changing power the Left accrued, and exercised, despite Trump being in office and the Congress being Republican for half of his term. We can’t hope to match that, but we can do a lot more than we think, if we get off our butts and get to work.

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Remember What Snowden Told Us

So there was this interview yesterday on PBS News Hour with Sue Gordon, a former senior intelligence official, who said:

I think domestic extremism is a particularly challenging issue, number one, from an intelligence perspective.

Remember, our intelligence community doesn’t typically or statutorily look at U.S. citizens, so you don’t have the advantage of that craft in the way you might for other threats, to just our Constitution, the rights of citizens.

And then, if law enforcement is the lead, law enforcement needs some sort of predicate. You have to have done something. And so if nothing is manifest, it’s difficult.

Do I think that we need a moment of considering how we’re going to deal with this threat that looks like it’s going to be with us for awhile? Yes, I think you almost need a 9/11 Commission kind of activity. It’s got to be a combination of FBI. It has to include DHS. And you have got to find a way to bring intelligence or the craft of intelligence into it.

And I done think that’s in one organization right now. You know, as an old intelligence hand, there are elements of this that remind me of the rise of Islamic extremism and what it looks like. And there are probably a fair number of lessons that we learned in the fight against foreign terrorism that can be applied here and some lessons that we probably don’t want to apply.

Now would be a very good time for everybody to go back and reacquaint themselves with what Edward Snowden revealed about US intelligence and surveillance capabilities. Here is a short list. 

Every one of us should be aware that nothing we do electronically — not our phone calls, not our e-mails, not our non-cash transactions, not our texts, nothing — is private. In Citizenfour, the documentary Laura Poitras made about Snowden, All of it is scooped up by the NSA and stored for future mining using artificial intelligence. It may never be accessed, but it’s there if they feel the need to get at it.

“We are building the biggest weapon for oppression in the history of mankind,” Snowden says, in the movie. And:

Know that every border you cross, every purchase you make, every call you dial, every cellphone tower you pass, friend you keep, site you visit and subject line you type is in the hands of a system whose reach is unlimited but whose safeguards are not.

This is not science fiction. It’s our reality. In Live Not By Lies, I refer to Snowden:

In his 2019 memoir, Permanent Record, Snowden writes of learning that the US government was developing the capacity of an eternal law-enforcement agency.

At any time, the government could dig through the past communications of anyone it wanted to victimize in search of a crime (and everybody’s communications contain evidence of something). At any point, for all perpetuity, any new administration—any future rogue head of the NSA—could just show up to work and, as easily as flicking a switch, instantly track everybody with a phone or a computer, know who they were, where they were, what they were doing with whom, and what they had ever done in the past.

Snowden writes about a public speech that the Central Intelligence Agency’s chief technology officer, Gus Hunt, gave to a tech group in 2013 that caused barely a ripple. Only the Huffington Post covered it. In the speech, Hunt said, “It is really very nearly within our grasp to be able to compute on all human-generated information.” He added that after the CIA masters capturing that data, it intends to develop the capability of saving and analyzing it.

Understand what this means: your private digital life belongs to the State, and always will. For the time being, we have laws and practices that prevent the government from using that information against individuals, unless it suspects they are involved in terrorism, criminal activity, or espionage. But over and over dissidents told me that the law is not a reliable refuge: if the government is determined to take you out, it will manufacture a crime from the data it has captured, or otherwise deploy it to destroy your reputation.

As repulsive as the insurrectionists and right-wing extremists are, Americans should ask themselves if they really want to further empower the State to turn this Eye of Sauron onto this country and its people. I remember what it was like back in the early 2000s, about how easy it was to allow fear and loathing of Islamic terrorists to override any suspicion one had of government power.

Joe Biden has said that he wants to pass a “domestic terrorism” bill.  Based on Biden’s long Senate record of supporting surveillance legislation, the left-wing magazine Jacobin raises the alarm:

Given this history, and recent events, Biden’s purported plan to introduce a new domestic terrorism law gives us plenty of reason to worry. As in 2001, the ground currently looks fertile for such legislation to find a big (and potentially bipartisan) constituency even if its contents prove repressive or heavy-handed. The Trump era, with its incessant valorizing of security and intelligence officials and general atmosphere of emergency, has worryingly seemed to lay the groundwork for something resembling a second Patriot Act to find support among liberals — especially if they’re encouraged to believe its sole targets will be figures associated with the likes of QAnon. Against this backdrop, the deep (and understandable) sense of shock in the wake of this month’s Capitol storming will probably act like gasoline poured on an open flame.

However such legislation may be justified with liberal-sounding language, there’s absolutely no reason to believe authorities wouldn’t use new powers to target groups that have nothing to do with Donald Trump or Trumpism. Police almost certainly infiltrated Black Lives Matter protests last summer, and American law enforcement has a long and ignominious history of targeting progressive groups — not to mention socialists, trade unions, and civil rights activists. As this history suggests, the premise behind any new anti-terrorism law will also be wrong on its face: the American state hardly faces excessive restrictions on its capacity to surveil, discipline, and punish. (The FBI, to take an obvious example, already possesses considerable power to investigate groups suspected of extremist activity.)

And, while there is seldom a good time to restrict civil liberties, the aftermath of a bloody riot in the Capitol that raises serious questions about police conduct, and about the presence of far-right forces inside law enforcement, seems like a particularly bad moment to do so.

After the September 11 attacks, Congress hastily approved a sweeping and Orwellian piece of legislation that drew heavily on a bill written by Joe Biden. With Biden about to enter office amid a climate of social instability and deep public anxiety, there’s an all-too-real risk that history will repeat itself.

There’s a line in Citizenfour from a young civil rights lawyer, who points out that what we now call “privacy” we used to call “liberty.” There’s a direct connection, he explains, between liberty and privacy. In that sense, Americans had better learn to love liberty more than they hate their enemies.

UPDATE: Must-read latest from Glenn Greenwald. Excerpt:

Continuing to process Washington debates of this sort primarily through the prism of “Democrat v. Republican” or even “left v. right” is a sure ticket to the destruction of core rights. There are times when powers of repression and censorship are aimed more at the left and times when they are aimed more at the right, but it is neither inherently a left-wing nor a right-wing tactic. It is a ruling class tactic, and it will be deployed against anyone perceived to be a dissident to ruling class interests and orthodoxies no matter where on the ideological spectrum they reside.

The last several months of politician-and-journalist-demanded Silicon Valley censorship has targeted the right, but prior to that and simultaneously it has often targeted those perceived as on the left. The government has frequently declared right-wing domestic groups “terrorists,” while in the 1960s and 1970s it was left-wing groups devoted to anti-war activism which bore that designation. In 2011, British police designated the London version of Occupy Wall Street a “terrorist” group. In the 1980s, the African National Congress was so designated. “Terrorism” is an amorphous term that was created, and will always be used, to outlaw formidable dissent no matter its source or ideology.

If you identify as a conservative and continue to believe that your prime enemies are ordinary leftists, or you identify as a leftist and believe your prime enemies are Republican citizens, you will fall perfectly into the trap set for you. Namely, you will ignore your real enemies, the ones who actually wield power at your expense: ruling class elites, who really do not care about “right v. left” and most definitely do not care about “Republican v. Democrat” — as evidenced by the fact that they fund both parties — but instead care only about one thing: stability, or preservation of the prevailing neoliberal order.

Unlike so many ordinary citizens addicted to trivial partisan warfare, these ruling class elites know who their real enemies are: anyone who steps outside the limits and rules of the game they have crafted and who seeks to disrupt the system that preserves their prerogatives and status.

 

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Christian Conservative On Knife’s Edge

I received a version of this letter from a reader today. I asked him if he would rewrite it to take some specific identifying information out (to protect himself and his family), so I could publish it. He did, and so I share it with you. I think it’s very powerful:

I live what many would call the American Dream. Not only do I fly Old Glory from the front porch of the house I own, I own my own small business as well. I am a married man and father who serves his church regularly in a leadership position. I also sit on the board of a local school where my children attend. On top of all of that, I serve my country in the military reserves. I own guns, live in the Bible belt, and grew up without social media but am young enough to follow them and appreciate constantly changing technology.

I have been conservative since my college years when I felt that my country was headed in the wrong direction. My conservatism led me to vote conservative and argue for conservative ideology. I received my bachelor’s degree, and will soon have my master’s from seminary.

In 2016, I had my reservations about Trump. I voted for Cruz in the primaries but in the general election I gladly voted for Trump. I did so because I was American and I wanted my country to put back on the right track. I believed Clinton was the worst choice for that. I didn’t want Democrats running this great country further into the ground. I even began to like Trump; I laughed at his gloating and mic-drop moments in the debates. I thought that he was the strong man who could put on our country on a better path. I gladly supported him in office for his conservative judges, tax cuts, strong immigration policy, etc.

However, I never put a Trump sign in my yard nor wore a MAGA hat. I never jumped into the “MAGA river”, I just sat on the shore with my feet in the water. I didn’t think wrong of someone in the river, floating down the MAGA current with Trump, I just didn’t want to put myself in there. But over the last two years, I began to slowly pull my feet out of the water. It’s not that I didn’t support Trump, nor would vote for him in the upcoming election, but I couldn’t be as infatuated with him as others. I began to slow down on my political posting online, and wouldn’t throw facts and truth at liberals to garner some tears so I could gloat in my conservative superiority. I still supported Trump on policy, but I could not bring myself to celebrate the man.

Last year, I began to see something that I had not seen before. This came after I read your book, Live Not by Lies. I saw that the church in America was not faithfully serving God like she claimed, but rather serving a country. I also saw the other side where the church began to serve “wokeness” in the name of compassion only to find that “compassion” whiplashed with societal whims.

Then January 6th happened, and my whole American dream came crashing down. I saw a pastor I knew post online his praise for the raiding/occupation of the Capitol Building. I saw other professing Christians on social media, many whom I know in person, calling for states that voted for Trump to cut ties with states that did not. I saw the title “demoncrat” again and again, calling those on the other side of the political aisle “enemies” and “evil” as if it were some sort of war.

My own friend, mentor, and pastor called Vice President Mike Pence a traitor — a traitor — on social media for not pulling some magical string to keep Trump president. I am still in shock about it because this was not like him.

After all of this I have realized something: I am stuck in the middle. I cannot and will not align myself with these professing Christians who sound like they are the “conserva-woke” who replace “white oppression” with “deep state” and “every negative incident against a black person is proof of systemic racism” with “every negative incident against Trump or a supporter is proof of the pedophile deep state that wants to bring the new world order.” But I also cannot and will not align myself with the “woke” church who does just as much damage, if not more, to the Gospel than the conservative church by bowing to cultural desires and lusts. While I support conservative policies and believe that progressive policies and ideology hurt everyone, I cannot join with these friends, acquaintances, and ministers I know who claim the name of Christ, yet clearly proclaim allegiance to the tribe of Trump.

I feel alone. I feel like I am no longer part of this country that I loved, that I still serve, and that I want the best for. But I feel like this is the most real place I can be. I believe like this is what it actually feels like to be a follower of Christ: set apart, in the world but not of the world. Oh, it hurts a lot, don’t get me wrong. Daily, I battle depression over this. I get angry and impatient because I’m watching what I thought was the city on a hill crumble around me, but then I realize all of this does one thing; it puts me in the position to fully rely on Jesus Christ.

The most alive I have ever felt was when I knew I had absolutely no control over my circumstances; death was a mere second away if it would come. I have been in multiple circumstances, by choice, that if one minor misstep happened, I would die and there would be nothing I could do about it. Yet in those times, I felt the most alive.

I am beginning to believe that this is where I, as well as many others, are headed. And while it is scary, I am beginning to feel that life again. Christ followers will not have any power; either it will be taken by the “woke” left because we do not align with their ideology, or it will not be given by the “woke” right because we do not fall lock-step in with the “pseudo-conservative” marching orders of supporting Trump, or whomever.

 

I have begun to study church history, and I wonder if this is how the early church felt: separated, in the middle, not part of any tribe. I see more of Paul’s letters in this light, and their meaning has become more clear.

Thank you for showing me the truth of what is happening right now and warning me of what might come. I have begun to live my life with the possibility that myself and my children will live in a country where we are looked down upon, scorned, persecuted, and given no merit because of our faith in Christ. I am trying to get my church and other churches in my area to see that the church is not part of this country but rather part of the Kingdom of God and that our battle is against spiritual forces, not people. I want the American church to see that she is to be set apart, in this world but not of it. Yes, we can work toward the betterment of our country, but we cannot put our hope in it. Our hope should be, must be, placed in Christ alone.

One final thought, and this one is hard to say but I say it with sincerity and humbleness; I am beginning to believe that Biden as President is a judgement from God; not on America but onto the church in America. I say this because the church has lost our first love, Him, and like He did to His chosen people when they would stray, God might be doing it to His bride now. It is not that America needs to repent, it is that the American church needs to repent. We have for too long let American ideology be the lens in which to live out the scriptures instead of scripture being the lens in which to live our lives.

A friend told me the other day, “The problem is that you are in the middle, but the middle has shrunk to the size of a knife’s edge, which is why it’s so painful.”

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A New Civil War Test Case

Michael Vlahos, who teaches at SAIS, sees one of three outcomes for America. Excerpt:

1-Secession: Some agreed — whether polite or desperate — coming apart of the old Union into local, state, or other-based constitutional entities, perhaps still federated, if more loosely than a nation. While this arrangement is increasingly acknowledged by commentators as potentially avoiding the worst of civil war, its realization nonetheless requires a form of civil war. There is no avoiding war.

2-Blue triumph: The ultimate subjugation of Red by main force, achieved by the preponderance of wealth, ruling institutional leverage, and military power. A social revolution as well as a political transformation: The full outcome must likely reconstitute our constitutional order in ways unrecognizable to us today.

3-Thermidorian Reaction: Exhausted by civil conflict, American society takes a modest counter-revolutionary turn, in which repudiated old traditions are [at least partly] reinstated, and a measure of political toleration and overall equipoise returns to national life, along with constitutional accommodations and firewalls to forestall another descent into civil strife.

You’ll want to read the whole thing. 

Vlahos says that the third would be the least bad to his conservative mind. Mine too, but I think it is also unlikely, though not as unlikely as the first. The idea of Red and Blue America on a map distorts the reality that in “Red America,” the cities are usually Blue, and in “Blue America,” the countryside is often Red. This is not like the Civil War.

I see no future other than No. 2: Blue Triumph. I wish — I devoutly wish — it were not so, and I am eager to hear feasible, realistic ways to avoid it. I have no patience for the “you’re a defeatist!” loudmouths. What do you people actually propose to do? Take your militia down to blow up a Hardee’s to get rid of the pedophiles hiding in the Dumpster? Seriously, until and unless you can come up with an achievable plan that would not make things much worse — such as, turning American into Northern Ireland, circa 1969-98 — keep your performative fantasies to yourselves. Now would be a very good time for Republican Party and conservative leaders to come up with a plan that might actually work to keep the State and Surveillance Capitalism off our backs, and for right-wing followers to put aside the crazy Q talk and to understand that the threats to our liberties and the things we value are serious, and require a serious, intelligent response.

Prof. Vlahos says, correctly, that the Blue Triumph outcome would require some form of totalitarianism — meaning, I suppose, constant surveillance, and policing of dissident opinion. You don’t need the author of Live Not By Lies to tell you once again how this can easily be accomplished using “soft” methods.

Here’s a good test case. As you’ll recall, Simon & Schuster dropped Sen. Josh Hawley’s planned book The Tyranny of Big Tech after Hawley became radioactive as a result of his advocacy of election-challenging. Hawley issued a press release saying it was an “Orwellian” move by S&S, which is a rhetorical exaggeration. All publishers retain the right to cancel books. This isn’t the state ordering them to cease and desist. Hawley was free to find another publisher. But what if no other publisher would take his book? The pressure within the publishing industry to conform to anti-Trump norms would be overwhelming. Remember last year how Hachette dropped Woody Allen’s memoir after an in-house protest? We do not live in an era of literary courage. I recognize Simon & Schuster’s right to drop Josh Hawley, but I wish they had not done it.

Which is why I send up three cheers for my friend Tom Spence, who runs Regnery. Tom has decided to publish Hawley’s book. Whether or not you like Josh Hawley or approve of his behavior during the Late Unpleasantness, he has been saying important things for some time now about the power of Big Tech. For me, one of the great tragedies of Hawley’s poor political judgment lately has been how it has hobbled Big Tech’s most vocal opponent in the Senate. I want to read what Josh Hawley has to say about the tyranny of Big Tech — and now, thanks to Regnery, I’ll get to.

In today’s Wall Street Journal, Tom Spence explains why he’s publishing Hawley. Excerpts:

I am an independent book publisher, and in recent days I have been taking calls from journalists asking which authors I would refuse to publish. That’s an odd question to ask an American publisher, but suddenly it seems to be on everyone’s mind in our industry. Some 250 self-described “publishing professionals”—mostly junior employees of major houses—have issued a statement titled “No Book Deals for Traitors,” a category in which they include any “participant” in the Trump administration.

Readiness to silence someone because of who he is or whom he associates with is often called the “cancel culture,” but I prefer an older term—blacklisting—whose historical associations expose the ugliness of what is going on. Not so long ago, publishing professionals would have been horrified to be accused of it. Today they compete to see who can proclaim his blacklist with the fiercest invective.

Indeed! The eagerness with which the younger generation wishes to censor is alarming. More:

An independent publisher is vulnerable to today’s Jacobins in many ways, for it relies on large partners to print, distribute and sell its books. Now that dissent from the latest version of progressive orthodoxy is equated with violence and treason, my colleagues and I know we could be next. But we choose to fight back.

We’re proud to publish Mr. Hawley’s book, which his original publisher has made more important than ever. We don’t have to agree with everything—or anything—Mr. Hawley does. We ask only if his book is well-crafted and has something true and worthwhile to say. The answer is yes.

This move by Tom Spence is brave, and deserves support. I believe that Sen. Hawley was wrong to contest the election, but I am very interested in what he has to say about Big Tech. And I am extremely interested in supporting publishers who defy the de facto blacklist emerging in the industry. So should you be. As Tom says, there is a difference between whether one approves of Hawley’s political acts, and whether or not he has something true and worthwhile to say in his book.

When the book comes out on May 4, it will be an important test of our system. As the WSJ reports, Simon & Schuster distributes Regnery books in the US. Will it distribute this one? Will bookstores sell it? Will Amazon? This is the kind of battle that conservatives ought to be focused on, not b.s. fantasies. Tom Spence is doing a brave thing here. Let’s all be more like him, and defy the blacklisters. It’s the American thing to do. If, however, Amazon and other big companies refuse to handle the book, it will be a massively important sign about where we are as a nation: on the way to soft totalitarianism. I remind you that a totalitarian society is one in which everything is politicized. If all major companies involved in the publishing industry come together to prevent a book being published and distributed because they despise the politics of its author, then we are living in a soft version of totalitarianism even if they are within their legal rights to do it.

UPDATE: Here is a link to a pro-blacklist letter signed by a number of publishing people, whose names are important only because they show who would be eager to enforce a blacklist, being patriotic 100 percent Americans and all.

UPDATE.2: A published writer who reads this blog writes (and asks me to keep his name private):

I took at look at that pro-blacklist letter to which you referred in your TAC blog post about Josh Hawley’s book. I suppose you can imagine how gut-punched I felt when I spotted the signatures of two of my friends and fellow authors — reasonable people once, with whom I’ve shared drinks & meals & cordial conversation, they being in the same nook of literary endeavor as I am. It’s rather as though I’d been sitting in a Berlin cafe in 1934, and two of my friends had come in wearing swastika armbands, and they cheerfully said, “We just signed up with the Reichsministerium für Volksaufklärung und Propaganda! Wanna come to the book burning tonight?”

And these are two writers who are known for a pretty rebellious, edgy, anti-authoritarian type of popular fiction — and here I see them signing up for the Man’s goon squad. Especially depressing after seeing Powell’s Books in Portland, where I’d spent many a happy hour toting armfuls of books to the cash register, kowtowing to the local antifa & taking Andy Ngo’s book off the shelves.

If ever I regarded your dark-tinged warnings as hyperbole, I’m now feeling sick as I revise that opinion. That bit from Orwell about the future being a boot stamping on a human face? He left out the part about the crowd standing around, watching & applauding.

That writer and I are old enough to remember when it was the noble and righteous thing to stand up to the ayatollahs who tried to keep Salman Rushdie’s book off the shelves. It was not a matter of defending what Rushdie wrote, or what he said, but rather defending the right of him to write it, and for people who want to read it to be able to do so without being harassed or killed.

And now writers and publishers are signing a call for blacklisting. Shame!

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