Rod Dreher's Blog, page 88

Reality Vs. Pseudo-Realities

Here is a recent shot of the black sportscaster and media personality Jemele Hill, from her Instagram account:

 

 

This is all a big game to the Left. Ha ha! Jemele is keepin’ it real, or whatever. You would think that if people were starting to talk seriously about the possibility of some kind of American civil war, people would be a lot less likely to be provocative in this way. But that’s not how the game is played. On that same Instagram thread, a white reader objected:

Jemele Hill replied:

Duly chastened, the white guy accepts the antiwhite racism, and thanks Hill for correcting him:

So here’s how that went down, in three acts:

Act 1: reasonable objection on basic liberal principles.

Act 2: pushback with patent exaggeration and unfalsifiable platitudes from a race bully.

Act 3: white persons cared of being called a racist, retreats to pathetic submission to ideological bully.

From my point of view, Chosen_Rosen22 ought to be ashamed of himself. He has allowed someone to demean him on racial grounds, and accepted that he deserves to be. More broadly, Jemele Hill and Chosen_Rosen22, as well as the business executives who make Hill’s career possible, are building a culture in which antiwhite racism is not only tolerated, but celebrated. A culture in which people are taught to take pleasure in the racial humiliation of others.

They must believe there will be no backlash here, that all white people are going to respond like the tame Chosen_Rosen22 will. I guess that’s because how all the white people in their circles do.

But that’s not the whole country.

I am on record here saying that QAnon is psychotic, that extreme MAGA is bonkers, that Trump deserved his second impeachment, and that everybody who invaded the Capitol ought to go to jail. Read my latest here. 

But I have to say that you Woke people — the ones in charge of institutions, in particular media institutions — you are making the conflict much worse. 

You amplify racist antiwhite voices and messages, and you expect that this will have no effect? You expect every white person in the world to react to their demonization and dispossession meekly, accepting the place in the world that you have assigned for them?

Not going to happen. I’ve been saying for years in this space that the Woke Left is awakening demons that it cannot control. If you are on the Left, and you can’t see this, then you are as deluded as the QAnon crackpots who live in their own reality.

What the mainstreaming of antiwhite racism does is completely discredit classically liberal voices on the Right that criticize racism, and try to convince other whites to treat everyone not by the color of their skin, but by the content of their character. I try to be one of those people, because I believe it’s morally right, and because I see it as my duty as a follower of Christ. Christians are not permitted to respond to the race hatred of a Jemele Hill with hatred. But I can tell you that I get emails and comments (which I spike) from white racialists who call me and other Christians pathetic weaklings who ought to be preparing for violent conflict.

If these white nationalist types have any kind of Christian faith, there is some common ground that people like me can use to talk them out of it. But most of these people are not Christians, or have such a weak and sketchy background in Christianity that it’s useless. And they don’t believe — or no longer believe — in color-blind liberalism, because they see that nobody in power believes in it anymore. It’s all “smash whiteness”. These people decline to go meekly to their own smashing.

Jemele Hill and other leftists, and and the corporate and media people (e.g., The Atlantic, which runs her columns) — they are complete idiots if they don’t think there will be a backlash. I’ve read commentators calling the January 6 thing a “white nationalist uprising,” or something similar. I don’t know how true that is (though there was no doubt an element of that present), but if there is anything to it, well, what do you expect? That all white people are going to be Chosen_Rosen22, and be grateful for their humiliation? Or that they’re going to be a Christians and lean into our religious duty to fight back against any temptation to hate those who hate us and our families because of the color of our skin, or our politics?

People on the Left and the Right should both be asking, before the shooting starts: Do we want to live in peace? Because if we do, then garbage like Jemele Hill’s performative antiwhite racism needs to go away, and go away fast. The fact that she can do this, and nobody in power notices or cares (in fact, she is rewarded for it), whereas any white person who came within a thousand million miles of mocking “black tears” or any such thing, would find himself cast into outer employment darkness — it tells you something about power in contemporary America. It tells you something that liberals and progressives cannot see, because they are as caught up in their own pseudo-reality as any QAnon crackpot is in his.

Let’s talk about pseudo-realities. James Lindsay has a great essay on them. It begins like this:

Pseudo-realities, being false and unreal, will always generate tragedy and evil on a scale that is at least proportional to the reach of their grip on power—which is their chief interest—whether social, cultural, economic, political, or (particularly) a combination of several or all of these. So important to the development and tragedies of societies are these pseudo-realities when they arise and take root that it is worth outlining their basic properties and structure so that they can be identified and properly resisted before they result in sociopolitical calamities—up to and including war, genocide, and even civilizational collapse, all of which can take many millions of lives and can ruin many millions more in the vain pursuit of a fiction whose believers are, or are made, sufficiently intolerant.

More:

Pseudo-realities are, simply put, false constructions of reality. It is hopefully obvious that among the features of pseudo-realities is that they must present a plausible but deliberately wrong understanding of reality. They are cult “realities” in the sense that they are the way that members of cults experience and interpret the world—both social and material—around them. We should immediately recognize that these deliberately incorrect interpretations of reality serve two related functions. First, they are meant to mold the world to accommodate small proportions of people who suffer pathological limitations on their abilities to cope with reality as it is. Second, they are designed to replace all other analyses and motivations with power, which these essentially or functionally psychopathic individuals will contort and deform to their permanent advantage so long as their pseudo-real regime can last.

Pseudo-realities are always social fictions, which, in light of the above, means political fictions. That is, they are maintained not because they are true, in the sense that they correspond to reality, either material or human, but because a sufficient quantity of people in the society they attack either believe them or refuse to challenge them. This implies that pseudo-realities are linguistic phenomena above all else, and where power-granting linguistic distortions are present, it is likely that they are there to create and prop up some pseudo-reality. This also means that they require power, coercion, manipulation, and eventually force to keep them in place. Thus, they are the natural playground of psychopaths, and they are enabled by cowards and rationalizers. Most importantly, pseudo-realities do not attempt to describe reality as it is but rather as it “should be,” as determined by the relatively small fraction of the population who cannot bear living in reality unless it is bent to enable their own psychopathologies, which will be projected upon their enemies, which means all normal people.

Normal people do not accept pseudo-reality and interpret reality more or less accurately, granting the usual biases and limitations of human perspective. Their common heuristic is called common sense, though much more refined forms exist in the uncorrupted sciences. In reality, both of these are handmaidens of power, but in pseudo-realities, this is inverted. In pseudo-reality, common sense is denigrated as bias or some kind of false consciousness, and science is replaced by a scientism that is a tool of power itself. For all his faults and the faults of his philosophy (which enable much ideological pseudo-reality), Michel Foucault warned us about this abuse quite cogently, especially under the labels “biopower” and “biopolitics.” These accusations of bias and false consciousness are, of course, projections of the ideological pseudo-realist, who, by sheer force of rhetoric, transforms limitations on power into applications of power and thus his own applications of power into liberation from it. Foucault, for any insight he provided, is also guilty of this charge.

Notice this:

It must be observed that people who accept pseudo-realities as though they are “real” are no longer normal people. They perceive pseudo-reality in place of reality, and the more thoroughly they take on this delusional position, the more functional psychopathy they necessarily exhibit and thus the less normal they become. Importantly, normal people consistently and consequentially fail to realize this about their reprogrammed neighbors. Perceiving them as normal people when they are not, normal people will reliably misunderstand the motivations of ideological pseudo-realists—power and the universal installation of their own ideology so that everyone lives in a pseudo-reality that enables their pathologies—usually until it is far too late.

And:

Pseudo-realities may have any degree of plausibility in their distorted descriptions of reality, and thus may recruit different numbers of adherents. They are often said to be accessible only by applying a “theoretical lens,” awakening a specialized “consciousness,” or by means of some pathological form of faith. Whether by “lens,” “consciousness,” or “faith,” these intellectual constructs exist to make the pseudo-reality seem more plausible, to drag people into participating in it against their will, and to distinguish those who “can see,” “are awake,” or “believe” from those who cannot or, as it always eventually goes, will not. That is, they are the pretext to tell people who inhabit reality instead of pseudo-reality that they’re not looking at “reality” correctly, which means as pseudo-reality. This will typically be characterized as a kind of willful ignorance of the pseudo-reality, which will subsequently be described paradoxically as unconsciously maintained. Notice that this puts the burden of epistemic and moral responsibility on the person inhabiting reality, not the person positing its replacement with an absurd pseudo-reality. This is a key functional manipulation of pseudo-realists that must be understood. The ability to recognize this phenomenon when it occurs and to resist it is, at scale, the life and death of civilizations.

This is what so many of us on the normie Right failed to grasp about QAnon’s pervasiveness among our side. This is also what the Left is failing to perceive about Wokeness. Lindsay goes on:

[T]he pseudo-reality is always constructed such that it structurally advantages those who accept it over those who do not, frequently by overt double standards and through moral-linguistic traps. Double standards in this regard will always favor those who accept pseudo-reality as reality and will always disfavor those who seek the truth. … [M]any normal people will fail to realize the pseudo-reality is false because they cannot see outside of the frame of normality that they charitably extend to all people, whether normal or not.

You can see that play out in a crude way in the exchange between Hill and her interlocutor.

Lindsay says that liberalism — by which he means classical liberalism — has a bias against pseudo-reality because it contains within it the means to test propositions and reject them. Ideologies based on pseudo-reality — QAnon, Wokeness — depend on capturing powerful, intelligent people, who use their power and intelligence to compel the masses to believe pseudo-real claims. Lindsay:

The trend toward puritan-style pietism, authoritarianism, and eventually totalitarianism in application of this paramorality is a virtual certainty of acceptance of an ideological pseudo-reality, and these abuses will be visited not only on every participant in the constructed fictional reality but also to everyone who can be found or placed within its shadow (which can come to include entire nations or peoples or, in fact, everyone, even those who reject it). Again, this is the true alchemy of the pseudo-realist program; it transforms normal, moral people into immoral agents who must perpetrate evil to feel good and perceive as evil those who do good.

Lindsay explains that fellow travelers in cult ideologies end up thinking that the non-cultists are the crazy ones who have to be suppressed. “This represents a complete reversal of sanity, and the conversion of normal to ideologically psychopathic is, by that point, complete,” writes Lindsay. “These people, as many have learned the hard way throughout history, are the otherwise good people who are capable of perpetrating genocides.”

Lindsay’s is a very sophisticated analysis that I attempted to make in more basic, general terms in Live Not By Lies. The book is an attempt to do what Lindsay says is the first step in resisting pseudo-reality: understand how it works, and refuse to live your life as if it is true. Lindsay warns — as do I, as does the experience of anti-Soviet dissidents — that this is going to be costly:

 The paralogic will interpret direct dissent as stupid or crazy, and the paramorality will characterize it as evil (or motivated by evil intentions, even if unconscious ones outside of the dissenter’s awareness). The courage to bear these outrageous insults and slander, and to bear its unjust social consequences, is therefore a necessary precondition to putting a halt to totalitarianism. It is understandable why most will not choose this path, but be warned: the longer one waits, the worse this gets. … The challenging part is that you, who dares resist their games and who eludes their trap, becomes the target of their psychopathic ire, and many sympathizers who you would usually count as friends will take sides against you (there is no neutral in the paramorality). The earlier one enters this fight, the more courage it takes and yet the more valuable it is.

Read the whole Lindsay essay. It’s dense, but brilliant, and necessary if you want to understand our current moment, and resist it. Lindsay does not offer a five-point plan for defeating pseudo-reality, because there isn’t one available to us yet. Whatever forms resistance may take, it must start by first understanding how pseudo-reality works, and second by refusing to live by it, no matter what it costs, and thus showing the world that it is possible to live in truth (Vaclav Havel’s phrase).

Fighting the pseudo-reality of Wokeness requires a commitment to struggling to see and to hold on to reality. QAnon and extreme MAGA-ism are potent pseudo-realities that arose in part as a form of resistance to Wokeness. We are no better off using one set of lies to fight another. 

We see now, more clearly, how the pseudo-reality of Trumpworld, especially QAnon, works, and the destruction that it causes. We have to be very clear, though, that surrendering to Wokeness amounts to trading one pseudo-reality for another. And vice versa.

One danger that all of us face is that an enemy mob may come for us, and we will be defenseless. This, I think, is when the temptation to surrender to pseudo-reality based on tribal affiliation is strongest. Prisoners are often compelled to affiliate with racial gangs within prisons as a matter of self-protection. You may not be a white supremacist (or black supremacist, or Latino supremacist), but to keep yourself from being beaten or killed, you may feel compelled to affirm the tribe’s lies. Post-liberal America is going to increasingly represent a prison in this respect. When the law does not protect you — when there is no relatively impartial structure governing your world by force — then you are thrown into a world in which accepting pseudo-reality appears to be the only way you can survive.

But the cost will be your soul.

I would no more want to live in a country and a society governed by QAnon’s principles than I would live in a country and a society governed by Wokeness’s principles. Because the Right has been so bad at resisting, on classical liberal principles, the march of Wokeness through the institutions, a shocking number of right-wing people are going over to QAnon/MAGA ideology. In the ideal world, the Republican Party and its leaders would have been speaking out aggressively against Wokeness, and fighting for laws and policies to refute it and disempower it. This has not happened. In the ideal world, left-wing liberals would have been doing the same. This has not happened either — in fact, left-liberals have embraced Woke pseudo-reality. In the wake of the MAGA attack on the Capitol, Wokeness in power is going to use that power, through the State, the Media, and Corporations, empowered by Tech, to crush all forms of resistance to Wokeness. As Lindsay understands, the Woke perceive any and all resistance to its pseudo-real claims as immoral and even evil.

The immense challenge to conservatives, and to traditional Christians, is going to be resisting this ideological insanity without surrendering our hearts, minds, and souls to right-wing pseudo-reality. If you haven’t yet seen Terrence Malick’s film A Hidden Life, about a real-life Catholic farmer martyred for resisting Hitler, you really should. Imagine what it was like to be Franz Jägerstätter, living in a village in which everybody around him, even his church friends, had surrendered to the pseudo-reality of the Nazi cult.

Alasdair MacIntyre saw it all coming in After Virtue, published in 1981. He grasped that we were becoming unmoored from any sense of reality, and coming to believe that what we feel is truth. I had an argument not long ago with an old friend who has fully accepted the QAnon/MAGA discourse, and tried to engage this person with logic. I might as well have been trying to fight a dragon with a marshmallow broadsword. My interlocutor kept saying that they “feel” that this is true. I kept saying that feeling something is true doesn’t make it true. I got nowhere. My interlocutor is convinced that Trump won the election, and that Antifa stormed the Capitol.

I pointed out how Trump’s rhetoric and actions are mostly performative, and have accomplished nothing tangible in the world that could not have been accomplished by normal Republicans with more creative and disciplined leadership. I pointed out that Trump gives his followers the feeling that “he fights,” but in fact he has made things objectively worse for conservatives. Half the people who invaded the Capitol were filming themselves doing it to share on the Internet — as if a display of transgression would be effective in advancing their cause. In fact, they have only succeeded in making themselves easy for the FBI to find, and in discrediting them, and everybody else on the Right.

None of this mattered one bit to my interlocutor. I might as well have been talking gibberish. This friend is living in an impenetrable pseudo-reality. My friend is a retiree, and as such does not live in a world in which there is a palpable cost to living in that pseudo-reality. Meanwhile, the rest of us who are living in the working world, or in school, or are in any way vulnerable to the punitive power of the Woke — who, again, control nearly all the institutions — are going to suffer greatly.

To be fair, my friend can see tangible evidence of how the Woke pseudo-reality moves from triumph to triumph. My friend is an older Southerner, and has lived long enough — as I have — to see how American culture has moved from one based on liberal principles that defeated white supremacy (something we both agree was a great victory) to one based on illiberal leftism, which is now instituting a racialist caste system in the name of progress. I had to decide that I can’t talk to my hardcore MAGA friends about any of this these days, because we only end up furious and talking past each other. My friend is not wrong to see the immorality, even the evil, in all this. Where my friend errs is in thinking that QAnon/MAGA is a just, moral, effective, or even sane response to it.

One reason I believe — and I am a small minority on the Right in this — that Trump has to be fully repudiated is that it will be impossible to fight effectively what the Left is planning for us if we do not live in reality. Those on the Right who have given themselves over to QAnon/MAGA pseudo-reality are useful idiots for the Woke Left, which has incomparably more power through the State, through Big Business, through Big Tech, and so forth. Under the dictatorship of Wokeness, people like Jemele Hill have the privilege to be race-baiting provocateurs and be rewarded for it. Let this be a lesson.

Even more seriously for us traditional Christians, we might get so focused on fighting the lies of the Left that we risk losing our very souls to lies of the Right. Look:

 

I’ll leave you with this quote from Live Not By Lies:

We cannot hope to resist the coming soft totalitarianism if we do not have our spiritual lives in order. This is the message of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great anti-communist dissident, Nobel laureate, and Orthodox Christian. He believed the core of the crisis that created and sustained communism was not political but spiritual.

After the publication of his Gulag Archipelago exposed the rottenness of Soviet totalitarianism and made Solzhenitsyn a global hero, Moscow finally expelled him to the West. On the eve of his forced exile, Solzhenitsyn published a final message to the Soviet people, titled, “Live Not by Lies!” In the essay, Solzhenitsyn challenged the claim that the totalitarian system was so powerful that the ordinary man and woman cannot change it.

Nonsense, he said. The foundation of totalitarianism is an ideology made of lies. The system depends for its existence on a people’s fear of challenging the lies. Said the writer, “Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies!”You may not have the strength to stand up in public and say what you really believe, but you can at least refuse to affirm what you do not believe. You may not be able to overthrow totalitarianism, but you can find within yourself and your community the means to live in the dignity of truth. If we must live under the dictatorship of lies, the writer said, then our response must be: “Let their rule hold not through me!”

All of us, no matter where we fall on the political spectrum, had better put the question to ourselves, and answer it as honestly as we can: Is it more important to live in power, or to live in truth?

UPDATE: Here’s a warning to readers: I’m going to moderate this thread more closely than other threads. Either say something interesting that advances the discussion, or don’t say it at all. Having just done a first moderation, and gotten rid of a series of “whatabout” remarks, I’m in an irksome mood.

The post Reality Vs. Pseudo-Realities appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Drag ‘Em Out’

Here is a video timeline put together by the Washington Post, explaining what happened at the siege of the Capitol. Even though we are ten days from that event, this still has the power to shock and appall:

It is horrifying that things have reached this point in the United States. Every single person identifiable in these videos needs to be jailed. They have brought everlasting shame on themselves and their cause. And so has Donald Trump. There is no going back from what happened there, on that day. It ought to sicken every patriotic American.

Here is Jenna Ryan, one of the Trumpists who invaded the Capitol. She flew to the rally from Texas in her private plane. She now has the gall to demand a presidential pardon. May the courts show this arrogant woman no mercy at her sentencing. I cannot believe they did this to our country. Our country!

UPDATE: This just in from a reader. I am keeping his name out for obvious reasons. He is going to serve his country, to protect the peaceful transfer of power, and his own family is turning on him:

As I’ve read your articles since the Capitol siege, I find myself echoing the voices of your other readers who have lost their families and friends to this right wing Q-anon / Trumpism garbage. I write to you after having a conversation with my dad and brother that has left me broken hearted. I’m a soldier in the National Guard and just found out I’m getting activated. I went over to my parents’ house to say goodbye, but got sucked into a political conversation by my dad and teenage brother. I try to avoid those conversations as much as I can, but felt like I had to speak some truth to combat the lies they believe. They think – contrary to the truth – that I’m getting called up because Trump is going to enact martial law and overturn the “fraudulent election.” I tried to communicate my understanding of the situation as best as I could: the FBI is tracking some threat from the right (who knows if that’s the real reason, I admit things seem off to me) and the National Guard is being mobilized to ensure a peaceful transition of power.

I also mentioned how, constitutionally, there is no way forward for Trump to win. It would be tyrannical for him to try to use military might to overthrow the results of an election that he has exhausted all lawful means of challenging to no avail. Was there fraud? Sure, probably a lot considering this was an almost entirely absentee election. Does that mean Trump is the winner? No. He had his chance in court, and he didn’t bring the goods. To this, my dad and brother accused me of being on the enemy’s side. That was their language. You must understand how painful this is to hear from my own family. I love my country. I joined the Guard because I care enough about the Constitution to put my life on the line to defend it from all enemies – foreign and domestic. In the eyes of my family, however, I’m no different than the communist regime they believe Joe Biden’s inauguration will welcome in.

The conversation with my dad ended there. He told me he was offended by me then went upstairs to his room. I never felt heard. I listened to my dad and brother repeat conspiracies about election fraud, all Trump supporters getting thrown in gulags, and the end of America. Don’t get me wrong, I think some of the things they fear are on the horizon actually are: the further censorship and marginalization of conservative and Christian voices by Big Tech and now the Democrat-controlled State, progressive wokeism continuing to put the US in a stranglehold, and more government corruption. But they think the solution is political. Specifically, the solution is Donald Trump seizing power and creating an American utopia. If he fails, America is doomed. There are no other options, in their view. For me to suggest, as I did, that the solution isn’t political – at least not in the long run – and that the culture war is essentially lost, puts me on the side of the enemy, according to them. It’s sad because I see where things are headed – and am worried about it – but by speaking what I believe to be the truth I am labeled a traitor.

I think I wanted to write this to you because I feel (almost) alone in what I see. I want my family to see what I see — that the only way forward is the Cross. Politics, violence, all of that will only further divide and wound our nation. But my voice is drowned out by this right wing mania that has overtaken my family. Ironically, the things they believe are coming – communism, gulags, civil war, etc. – may come as a self-fulfilling prophecy. If enough people on the right believe that the only path forward now that we’ve had (in their view) an illegitimate election is violence, they may end up attracting the heavy hand of government. I hope not, but I don’t know how else this ends.

He is not alone. Pray for him and the others who are protecting our democracy, even at the cost of their families turning their backs on them.

UPDATE.2: Take a look at this seven-minute interview with Leo Kelly, one of the men who breached the Capitol. It’s worth watching till the end:

He is obviously sincere. He says that he and his fellow mob members might have done something wrong, but he repeatedly asserts that they had no choice. Nobody would listen to them, he said — not Congress, not the judiciary, no one. And, he adds, Congress belongs to the people — meaning, him and his fellow insurrectionists.

The obvious response is that the system did listen to you all, but concluded that you were wrong. This is what is so unnerving about the Kelly video: little to no sense at all that they were bound by the law, and that they might have been mistaken in what they believed. The interview appears to have been recorded hours after the incursion. Several times Kelly says that they had no choice, that they were compelled by history to do what they did. He speaks about how he and others prayed in the Senate chamber. He clearly believes they were on a mission from God.

The damage Christians like him are doing to the church and its witness is hard to calculate. Nobody broke into the Capitol in protest of the legal killing of the unborn, or any other terrible thing happening in this country (and they should not have done that!). It was only out of outrage over Donald Trump that led them to break the law, and to commit a shameful crime without precedent in our history. Only for Trump.

Conservatives know — we must know — that when law and order breaks down, nothing good comes of it. Yet here these supposed conservatives were, attacking the core institution of American democracy, despite the fact that the system worked (even though it did not give them the outcome they wanted). In Georgia, enough of them listened to Trump and boycotted the Senate runoff that the Democratic Party will now control the Senate, and be able to give the new president whatever he wants. They might have engaged in mass peaceful protests, or might have redoubled their activism to recruit candidates and work within the system to see their views represented, and even prevail. But that’s not what they did, and as a result, they will have set off a massive suppression of right-of-center people and voices.

Note well that this man, Leo Kelly, for all his sincerity, dismisses everyone who does not take Trump’s side as somehow not “the people” — this, by saying that the Capitol belongs to “us”. The Capitol belongs to the American people, who are a nation of laws, not mob rule. Leo Kelly comes across as a sincere and decent Christian man, but he has given himself over to mob psychosis. And now, it will have consequences he will suffer for the rest of his life.

The post ‘Drag ‘Em Out’ appeared first on The American Conservative.

What Is ‘White Christianity’ Anyway?

While MAGA/QAnon ideology is ravaging the Evangelical churches from one side, Critical Race Theory is ravaging it from the other. In First Things, Carl Trueman writes a calm evisceration of CRT and its march through Evangelical institutions. Excerpts:

Trueman — whose new book The Rise and Triumph of the Modern Self is magisterial on these matters — explains that CRT depends on the premise, common in modern thinking, that all problems can be solved with the right application of intelligence and willpower. If a problem persists, then it must be because somebody doesn’t want it to be solved, or are preventing it from being solved by holding to old ways of thinking. This, says Trueman, is a very modern way of approaching the problem of evil. Racism is an evil. If you oppose CRT’s plan for eradicating racism, then you are on the side of the racists, plainly. Trueman:

Trueman quotes a New York Times review of the book White Too Long, about the white church and racism. The reviewer is the black Evangelical pastor Jemar Tisby , in which Tisby says:

White Christians have to face the possibility that everything they have learned about how to practice their faith has been designed to explicitly or implicitly reinforce a racist structure. In the end, “White Too Long” seems to present a stark choice: Hold onto white Christianity or hold onto Jesus. It cannot be both.

I would add this from Tisby’s review:

“White Too Long” is part of a dynamic and growing field of contemporary nonfiction that calls the white church to task for its failings when it comes to racism. Recent works that pair well with this one include “Jesus and John Wayne,” by Kristin Kobes Du Mez, “Taking America Back for God,” by Andrew L. Whitehead and Samuel L. Perry, and “Reconstructing the Gospel,” by Jonathan Wilson-Hartgrove. These books reflect what may be a critical pivot point in the direction of white Christianity in the United States.

You know what those three books have in common? They are all about white Protestantism, especially white Evangelicalism. They equate “white Christianity” with Protestantism and its subcategory Evangelicalism. As if there weren’t a lot of Catholics in this country! There is a complex history of how the Catholic Church in America handled race — a lot of it ugly, at least here in the South. Orthodox Christianity is tiny on the American scene, and populated almost 100 percent by people who would be classified as white. Is Orthodox Christianity — as distinct from Orthodox Christians — also so guilty as to present Tisby’s “stark choice”: to abandon our traditions, or abandon Christ?

The question is ridiculous, but shows how parochial this discussion is among Evangelicals like Tisby. Side note: when I was Catholic, I once went to speak at an Evangelical institution. Knowing nothing about Evangelicalism, I found myself in conversation with a small group of Evangelical college students. I said something about Pope John Paul II. One of the student said, “Wait, isn’t he a communist? Doesn’t he come from a communist country?” She honestly had no idea. Granted, she was only about 18 or 19, but the truth is, I didn’t know a lot more about the important figures in her world than she knew about the important figures in mine. I don’t say this to make fun of her, but simply to say that we really do live within our own silos.

Carl Trueman, who, along with his wife, is an immigrant to the US from the UK, speaks to that point in his piece. Excerpt:

See how that works? It’s an astonishingly hostile and offensive claim to make. Trueman goes on to cite this article at The Gospel Coalition by a black pastor named K. Edward Copeland, about last summer’s Kenosha, Wisconsin shooting of the black man Jacob Blake, who was resisting arrest. Copeland writes:

If your default impulse is to try to justify the seven or eight bullet holes in Jacob Blake’s body—He’s no angel; What was in his system? He was probably reaching for a weapon; He should have complied; We don’t have all the facts—just consider the facts we actually do know about Kyle. He took lives in front of physical and digital witnesses. He’s alive. No bullet holes in his body. He will be charged and tried in court, not on the streets, as it should be in a just society.

The inconsistency between how these two bodies were treated in Kenosha reinforces my childhood suspicions. Those who claim my same convictions about Christ will be the first and loudest to castigate me for these observations. They’ll be the most proficient at finding some excuse for Rittenhouse, the most cavalier in discounting my trauma, the most eager to somehow find a “Marxist” or “Critical Race Theory” connection in my reflections. And that hurts my heart, literally and profoundly.

Well, guess what? Jacob Blake this week admitted that he was in fact carrying a knife when police shot him as he was resisting arrest. His father and his lawyers had previously claimed Blake was unarmed. He had three felony warrants out for his arrest at the time police tried to apprehend him. The unanswered questions in this shooting did not stop Pastor Copeland from applying his racialist theories to explain the differences between the Kyle Rittenhouse situation and the Jacob Blake one. In fact, the two had very little in common. But why let a thing like facts get in the way of Narrative?

Trueman goes on to talk about how sympathetic white Evangelical leaders are using Critical Race Theory as a stick with which to beat their conservative white Evangelical opponents — as usual, with progressives, the call for “dialogue” really means “you stand there, conservative, and listen quietly while we berate you” — and in turn making gross generalizations about “white Christianity” that could not possibly apply to, say, Russian Orthodox Christians in Moscow, or Finnish Lutherans in Helsinki, all of whom are white, and all of whom are Christian. Plus, Trueman says, the prestige organs of Evangelical opinion are not opening themselves up to actual dialogue among Evangelicals about CRT; they are only publishing the progressive side of the argument.

If they normalize CRT, warns Trueman, then they open the door to LGBTs using critical theory to tear down the church’s teachings on sexuality.

Read it all. It’s such an important piece. Seems to me that this battle royal has actually little to do with “black Christianity” or “white Christianity” (where are Asian and Latino Christians in it, by the way?), and everything to do with power struggles within American Evangelicalism.

The post What Is ‘White Christianity’ Anyway? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Red-State Scare: The Blacklist Arrives

If you’re not part of Twitter, and media Twitter at that, you will be blessedly ignorant of a HUGE controversy today. The political news and commentary website Politico asked conservative commentator Ben Shapiro to guest-edit today’s edition of its morning Playbook feature. Shapiro is completely within the conservative mainstream, but that did not stop the Politico staff from freaking out. Erik Wemple is the Washington Post media columnist:

I said “blessedly ignorant,” but really, you should be aware of stuff like this. This is the new world that we live in.

First, this shows that we live in a world in which left-dominated institutions (e.g., media) are so intolerant that they believe they should not have to have anything to do with conservatives in their line of work.

Second, it shows that their rage suppresses internal dissent (nobody will give a tinker’s damn about the Politico staffers who have been intimidated into silence).

Third, depending on how Politico‘s management reacts, it might reveal that staff have veto power over editorial decisions — in other words, that, as in events last year at The New York Times and the Philadelphia Inquirer, the staff mob effectively runs the paper.

If you think this is going to be confined to media, you are very wrong. In other institutions dominated by the Left — including companies whose Human Resources departments are — conservatives are going to have a hard time getting in the door. There’s a move underway by faculty and students at the University of Michigan to get a Republican regent of the system dismissed not because of anything he said, but because of what he has not said (that the presidential election wasn’t stolen). If you have been active in the College Republicans or any other conservative group in college, better not put that on your resume. We are well on our way to an actual blacklist. It won’t simply be conservatives, but leftists who fail to be radical enough. News reached me that a Democratic political professional I follow on social media was fired this week because as a progressive who values free speech, he voiced concern over giving corporations the right to punish people for political dissident (I reached out to him, and he confirmed the firing).

You want to hear something even crazier? Tech Crunch reports on a new Stanford University study:

Researchers have created a machine learning system that they claim can determine a person’s political party, with reasonable accuracy, based only on their face. The study, from a group that also showed that sexual preference can seemingly be inferred this way, candidly addresses and carefully avoids the pitfalls of “modern phrenology,” leading to the uncomfortable conclusion that our appearance may express more personal information that we think.

The study, which appeared this week in the Nature journal Scientific Reports, was conducted by Stanford University’s Michal Kosinski. Kosinski made headlines in 2017 with work that found that a person’s sexual preference could be predicted from facial data.

You might think this is nuts — twenty-first century phrenology! — but Kosinski’s team found that its software could guess correctly nearly three out of four times. Far from perfect, true, but it turns out humans guess correctly only 55 percent of the time. The algorithms are seeing something that is really there. Scientists working on the project don’t yet know what variables are the key ones. But getting this result does not require investing in sophisticated software:

The algorithm itself is not some hyper-advanced technology. Kosinski’s paper describes a fairly ordinary process of feeding a machine learning system images of more than a million faces, collected from dating sites in the U.S., Canada and the U.K., as well as American Facebook users. The people whose faces were used identified as politically conservative or liberal as part of the site’s questionnaire.

The algorithm was based on open-source facial recognition software, and after basic processing to crop to just the face (that way no background items creep in as factors), the faces are reduced to 2,048 scores representing various features — as with other face recognition algorithms, these aren’t necessary intuitive things like “eyebrow color” and “nose type” but more computer-native concepts.

What is to keep a corporation in the future from running a facial image of employees or applicants through this algorithm to make sure no conservatives are hired or promoted? All for the sake of making the workplace a safe space, of course.

We have had a Red Scare in this country’s history. Now we are going to have a Red State Scare. On his webcast today, Ben Shapiro quoted CNN’s Don Lemon saying that all Trump voters — 70 million of his fellow Americans — are in league with the KKK and the Nazis. Lemon really said that — the clip is there.

Here’s a really good essay by Alana Newhouse, the editor-in-chief of Tablet, called “Everything Is Broken.” Excerpts:

The internet tycoons used the ideology of flatness to hoover up the value from local businesses, national retailers, the whole newspaper industry, etc.—and no one seemed to care. This heist—by which a small group of people, using the wiring of flatness, could transfer to themselves enormous assets without any political, legal or social pushback—enabled progressive activists and their oligarchic funders to pull off a heist of their own, using the same wiring. They seized on the fact that the entire world was already adapting to a life of practical flatness in order to push their ideology of political flatness—what they call social justice, but which has historically meant the transfer of enormous amounts of power and wealth to a select few.

Because this cohort insists on sameness and purity, they have turned the once-independent parts of the American cultural complex into a mutually validating pipeline for conformists with approved viewpoints—who then credential, promote and marry each other. A young Ivy League student gets A’s by parroting intersectional gospel, which in turn means that he is recommended by his professors for an entry-level job at a Washington think tank or publication that is also devoted to these ideas. His ability to widely promote those viewpoints on social media is likely to attract the approval of his next possible boss or the reader of his graduate school application or future mates. His success in clearing those bars will in turn open future opportunities for love and employment. Doing the opposite has an inverse effect, which is nearly impossible to avoid given how tightly this system is now woven. A person who is determined to forgo such worldly enticements—because they are especially smart, or rich, or stubborn—will see only examples of even more talented and accomplished people who have seen their careers crushed and reputations destroyed for daring to stick a toe over the ever multiplying maze of red lines.

So, instead of reflecting the diversity of a large country, these institutions have now been repurposed as instruments to instill and enforce the narrow and rigid agenda of one cohort of people, forbidding exploration or deviation—a regime that has ironically left homeless many, if not most, of the country’s best thinkers and creators. Anyone actually concerned with solving deep-rooted social and economic problems, or God forbid with creating something unique or beautiful—a process that is inevitably messy and often involves exploring heresies and making mistakes—will hit a wall. If they are young and remotely ambitious they will simply snuff out that part of themselves early on, strangling the voice that they know will get them in trouble before they’ve ever had the chance to really hear it sing.

More:

This disconnect between culturally mandated politics and the actual demonstrated preferences of most Americans has created an enormous reserve of unmet needs—and a generational opportunity. Build new things! Create great art! Understand and accept that sensory information is the brain’s food, and that Silicon Valley is systematically starving us of it. Avoid going entirely tree-blind. Make a friend and don’t talk politics with them. Do things that generate love and attention from three people you actually know instead of hundreds you don’t. Abandon the blighted Ivy League, please, I beg of you. Start a publishing house that puts out books that anger, surprise and delight people and which make them want to read. Be brave enough to make film and TV that appeals to actual audiences and not 14 people on Twitter. Establish a newspaper, one people can see themselves in and hold in their hands. Go back to a house of worship—every week. Give up on our current institutions; they already gave up on us.

Read it all. These two quotes cannot do it justice.

Events in the past week are making it clear that there is no achievable future for most conservatives within mainstream institutions. In The Benedict Option, I wrote that the day is coming when religious conservatives were going to have to depend on their own networks for employment and sustenance, or take up careers in which one’s political and religious beliefs don’t matter. That day is now here for some people, and the number of those under its shadow is rapidly accelerating.

As Alana Newhouse says, this creates great opportunity. But we don’t want to create a right-wing mirror version of the same fanatical conformity we see on leftist-dominated institutions. Along those lines, here’s an e-mail I received today. I am withholding the name of the author at his request:

Your article on diabolical forces really hit home.  A while back, I wrote you about election fraud.  I’m not going to go on record about the specific place or people because I’ve worked hard to gain the trust of several people in this story, and they are in a delicate state right now.  I want to protect them personally and minister to them truthfully and lovingly and public shame will do nothing good.

Some friends of friends had witnessed some raw and astounding election improprieties at a major city during their time as observers.  I was initially wary since my friend was a hard-core Trumpist.  Like many of Trump’s diehard supporters, he had become socially isolated for a long time, was deeply unhappy, and was increasingly political.  Politics did give him a sense of meaning and purpose in his life.  Nevertheless, I became convinced of some of the fraud allegations when key details of his friends’ stories were being corroborated not just by other Trumpists (I talked with at least seven different primary witnesses), but through video that was released after I had finished interviewing them that confirmed several surprising claims.

I couldn’t ignore that data, and so I began to investigate their claims.  Many of their claims of fraud were legitimate, but extracting the truth was a slow and grueling process.  The reason wasn’t because these witnesses to fraud were lying; it was because many of them were held captive by conspiracy theories and believed their lies.  When I would interview them, I would have to constantly make a distinction between what they witnessed and what was rumor.  To them, the conspiracy theory narrative had become more important than the actual evidence of election fraud they possessed.

We eventually had some success in getting the message of legitimate fraud to the proper authorities, and even some of the witnesses were covered by Fox and other right wing sources–but many of those witnesses didn’t do themselves any favors.  Rather than control their conspiracy impulses, many mixed truth with conspiracy theory in their testimony to make themselves look ridiculous.  The bit of fraud they observed falsely confirmed every conspiracy theory they held dear.

While the article I wrote showed there was a clear and massive fraud, it didn’t show there was enough significant conclusive fraud to change the election’s outcome (I do believe Biden was the legitimate winner of the election).  That was too hard for most of these witnesses to swallow, and they resolved a seeming cognitive dissonance by going further down the rabbit hole of conspiracy theory.  Lately, they have been sending me insane stories—officials being killed or captured in CIA raids in Germany, Trump arresting Biden for treason, crackpot tricks to usurp a democratic election, and lately a conspiracy theory regarding a military coup.  The stories are getting more and more extreme, and given the polls you recently released, we are headed toward a violent and disturbing future.

We must persuade our brothers and sisters on the right to come to their senses and avoid violence, but history says that the prospect of us succeeding will be low.  Nevertheless, now is the time to continue to build up our institutions.  I am fortunate to be part of a church that has been faithful in these evil times and has identified and resisted such evil on the left and right.

If nothing else, we must rejoice that the idolatry of power for people like us has been mostly destroyed.  Though oppression will likely come to us, we are free to love a fallen world and stand as a witness for the gospel.  That is our hope, and that is our joy.

Going forward, living not by lies of the Left or the Right is going to be one of the hardest things for any of us to do. But what choice do we have?

The post Red-State Scare: The Blacklist Arrives appeared first on The American Conservative.

Divided, Weimar America Is Falling

Well.

The same poll shows:

64% of Republicans said they support Trump’s recent behavior.57% of Republicans said Trump should be the 2024 GOP candidate.Only 17% think he should be removed from office.

House and Senate Republicans tell me they strongly believe Trump will remain a force in the party’s 2022 and 2024 races — even if he were to be convicted in the forthcoming Senate trial, and barred from holding federal office himself.

Read it all. 

I, for once, am speechless. It is all happening so fast. I cannot in any way support, condone, or appear to condone the way Donald Trump has behaved recently. I think he should be removed from office, and barred ever from running again. I support populist conservatism, and do not want a return to the pre-Trump GOP status quo. But Trump has to go. If that puts me on the other side of my crowd, then fine, it puts me on the other side of my crowd.

Yet I have every confidence that the Democrats, understandably outraged by all this, will massively overreach, and further radicalize the Right. We’re not talking about a minority here, the pro-Trump Right. We’re talking about tens of millions of people. The Democrats will control both the presidency and the legislative branch. They also have on their side the media, universities, Big Tech, and corporate America. This Establishment will deploy all its resources to suppress and control the Right, and to protect the state. As I have been predicting, a social credit system — informal at first — will be instituted as an indirect means of controlling and suppressing right-wing dissent.

What do I mean? Under present laws, or perhaps a new domestic terrorism law passed by a Democratic Congress and signed by a Democratic president, everyone’s Web history will be constantly accessed and assessed by artificial intelligence algorithms. Do you now or have you ever frequented pro-Trump websites? Have you ever been to a pro-Trump rally (GPS coordinates from your phone, and photographs from street cameras and social media photos uploaded into the cloud will get the once-over by facial recognition software). Who are your friends and contacts? Does your spouse or adult child have MAGA contacts?

And on and on. I was going to write a long post about this, but I have written about this in my most recent book. It is amazing to me how many people still don’t understand how pervasive and invasive technology is. As I explain in Live Not By Lies, the technology already exists to do all this surveillance on us. I spoke earlier this week with someone in the tech field who read the book and reached out to tell me that it is spot on in what it predicts coming. Excerpts from the book:

Should totalitarianism, hard or soft, come to America, the police state would not have to establish a web of informants to keep tabs on the private lives of the people. The system we have now already does this—and most Americans are scarcely aware of its thoroughness and ubiquity.

The rapidly growing power of information technology and its ubiquitous presence in daily life immensely magnifies the ability of those who control institutions to shape society in according to their ideals. Throughout the past two decades, economic and technological changes—changes that occurred under liberal democratic capitalism—have given both the state and corporations surveillance capabilities of which Lenin and Stalin could only have dreamed. In East Germany, the populace accustomed itself to total surveillance and made snitching normal behavior—this, as part of the development of what the state called the “socialist personality,” which considered privacy to be harmful.

In our time and place, the willingness of people to disclose deeply personal data about themselves—either actively, on platforms like Facebook, or passively, through online data harvesting—is creating a new kind of person: the “social media personality,” who cannot imagine why privacy matters at all.

More:

Why should corporations and institutions not use the information they harvest to manufacture consent to some beliefs and ideologies and to manipulate the public into rejecting others?

In recent years, the most obvious interventions have come from social media companies deplatforming users for violating terms of service. Twitter and Facebook routinely boot users who violate its standards, such as promoting violence, sharing pornography, and the like. YouTube, which has two billion active users, has demonetized users who made money from their channels but who crossed the line with content YouTube deemed offensive. To be fair to these platform managers, there really are vile people who want to use these networks to advocate for evil things.

But who decides what crosses the line? Facebook bans what it calls “expression that . . . has the potential to intimidate, exclude or silence others.” To call that a capacious definition is an understatement. Twitter boots users who “misgender” or “deadname” transgendered people. Calling Caitlyn Jenner “Bruce,” or using masculine pronouns when referring to the transgendered celebrity, is grounds for removal.

To be sure, being kicked off of social media isn’t like being sent to Siberia. But companies like PayPal have used the guidance of the far-left Southern Poverty Law Center to make it impossible for certain right-of-center individuals and organizations—including the mainstream religious-liberty law advocates Alliance Defending Freedom—to use its services. Though the bank issued a general denial when asked, JPMorgan Chase has been credibly accused of closing the accounts of an activist it associates with the alt-right.7 In 2018, Citigroup and Bank of America announced plans to stop doing some business with gun manufacturers.

It is not at all difficult to imagine that banks, retailers, and service providers that have access to the kind of consumer data extracted by surveillance capitalists would decide to punish individuals affiliated with political, religious, or cultural groups those firms deem to be antisocial. Silicon Valley is well known to be far to the left on social and cultural issues, a veritable mecca of the cult of social justice. Social justice warriors are known for the spiteful disdain they hold for classically liberal values like free speech, freedom of association, and religious liberty. These are the kinds of people who will be making decisions about access to digital life and to commerce.

The rising generation of corporate leaders take pride in their progressive awareness and activism. Twenty-first century capitalism is not only all in for surveillance, it is also very woke.

Nor is it hard to foresee these powerful corporate interests using that data to manipulate individuals into thinking and acting in certain ways. Zuboff quotes an unnamed Silicon Valley bigwig saying, “Conditioning at scale is essential to the new science of massively engineered human behavior.” He believes that by close analysis of the behavior of app users, his company will eventually be able to “change how lots of people are making their day-to-day decisions.”

Maybe they will just try to steer users into buying certain products and not others. But what happens when the products are politicians or ideologies? And how will people know when they are being manipulated?

If a corporation with access to private data decides that progress requires suppressing dissenting opinions, it will be easy to identify the dissidents, even if they have said not one word publicly.

A friend who reads this blog wrote to me just now:

I get to your blog via google. The blog used to be the #1 result for “Dreher.” Yesterday it was 3 or 4, and now it’s down to #7. Less popular than the high school and the brewery and the state park.

See how that works? I’m a conservative who has been adamantly and publicly opposed to the way Trump and his advocates have behaved post-election. Doesn’t matter to Google. Being pushed more to the margins on a search engine isn’t Siberia, but it does affect my livelihood, and it’s a small sign of what is coming for all of us on the Right. Corporations — tech and otherwise — are going to be making decisions that affect our lives, with no democratic accountability.

This too is true. I had a long conversation with a former intel guy who verified this part of Live Not By Lies:

What is holding the government back from doing the same thing? It’s not from a lack of technological capacity. In 2013, Edward Snowden, the renegade National Security Agency analyst, revealed that the US federal government’s spying was vastly greater than previously known. 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.

Last week, we saw a contingent of right-wing radicals invade the US Capitol en masse, some of whom apparently had the intention of taking hostage members of Congress, and some of whom shouted threats of deadly violence — “Hang Mike Pence!” — with Mike Pence in the vicinity. The president was complicit in this, but it hasn’t really hurt him with Republican voters.

The state really was under direct attack, at the heart of the government, by Americans. There is no way that it is going to sit back and let something like that happen again. As Prof. Nicholas Grossman wrote, the national security state is going to kick into action aggressively to defend itself. This is just a fact. If you are not making provisions for that in your own thinking, you are being foolish.

But if you don’t also understand that corporations and the media are going to go pedal-to-the-metal on the wokeness that was already in place, you are going to be roadkill, and you won’t even have seen it coming. The Left cannot resist racializing the attack. For example, today NYT columnist Farhad Manjoo describes it as “a big tent of whiteness”. Imagine what would have happened had a journalist described any of last summer’s BLM riots as “a big tent of blackness.” Never would have happened, of course. We know the double standard has been there for a while. Left-of-center journalists and institutional leaders are going to use the criminal attack on the Capitol as an excuse to further attack and stigmatize the people they hate, along racial and other identity-politics lines. It’s already happening.

Look at what a reader just sent me:

 

Progressive women catfishing conservative men to turn them in to the FBI. They think it’s a game. Politics justifies everything, right? What could possibly go wrong?

To return to where we started: Four out of five Americans believe that America is falling apart. They’re right. For faithful Christians, the Benedict Option is rapidly ceasing to be an option, but a mandate.

UPDATE: From a reader:

I am a conservative Catholic millennial living in one of the most liberal areas of the country. I have been insulated by my conservative family within the liberal bubble where I live, and I have noticed a couple of strange things. Your recent blogs have struck a nerve on some thoughts I have had in recent times.

The past 4 years have given rise to 2 movements – MAGA and #Resist – where we were forced to pick a team. Any time someone said anything negative about President Trump the #Resist team would celebrate him or her, only to completely move on and look for new members the next day. The MAGA people supported their hero every step of the way and grew louder as time went on. Living with my Day 1 MAGA father in the middle of #Resist country has opened my eyes to the fact that objectivity has seemingly vanished and the fight for reality is all that matters right now.

For years I was a Never Trumper because he violated my Catholic sensibilities in every way possible, and I could not understand why my father adored him. I eventually gave in because I saw my left-leaning friends lose their minds over Trump to the point where they believed every conspiracy about him – Russian collusion hoax, misrepresenting his “very fine people” quote about Charlottesville, etc. I was surrounded by Trump Derangement Syndrome (TDS) every day and I could not believe that my previously normal friends believed these lies. I became convinced that the crazy billionaire was telling the truth and that the media was lying about him, especially because his policies were fairly moderate and productive despite his rhetoric. I felt like I was the sane person in the room even though I stopped acknowledging the possibility that CNN does report a lot of honest news, including stories about Trump.

I noticed in 2018 that my father starting making comments about military tribunals, sealed indictments, and the evil tyranny of “the establishment”. He is a lifelong Republican and Catholic convert who is painfully pragmatic and logical, yet has always been prone to conspiracy. I will add he is quite Evangelical in his theology as he reads the entire Bible literally, which as you know Catholics do not do. Post-election I have seen a new side to my father – he has boycotted his formerly beloved Fox News because they “betrayed” Trump, believes that Antifa stormed the Capitol, and says that Mike Pence is a traitor. He still thinks that Trump will be inaugurated next week and will serve an additional two terms (yes, two). I see now that the QAnon people have gotten to him, and I am distraught. He is convinced that the Senate races in Georgia were stolen, and does not care because “once the fraud all comes out” those races will be overturned too. It is not hard to see that Trump told his followers to stay home, so of course they lost. But my father will not listen.

I recognize my story is anecdotal but it is largely congruent with what you have been writing about. The MAGA people have disregarded the media to the point where they only listen to Trump or pro-Trump people – so of course QAnon has become widespread. On the flip side the #Resist people have been told that everything Trump says is a lie, so naturally they see him as a tyrant. The difference is that the #Resist people have been told tamer lies by mainstream sources, but they too have left themselves vulnerable to a different conspiracy – wokeness. I believe that BLM is essentially a purity test for white people to separate the believers from the deniers of systemic racism – what better way to identify allies and targets for the social credit system you talk about?

I will conclude by noting how spiritual these movements and conspiracies are. Sports rivalries and religious tensions have seemingly disappeared in favor of the fight between MAGA and #Resist the last 4 years. Outside of practicing Catholics, every Christian I know has let politics and their view on Trump be the guiding force in their lives. Evangelical church-goers are decked out in Trump apparel, MAGA hats are seen everywhere at the March For Life, and every liberal church has a BLM sign out front. The king of branding has put his stamp on every facet of our daily discourse. I fear now that the Georgia runoffs were a test of his influence on the GOP, and in future elections he will tell his voters to stay home if the Republican running for election is not loyal to him. Forget DC statehood, the Democrats will easily pad their numbers in 2022 because Trump will use his voters to make Republicans dependent on him. Unless there is a Biden-Sanders style agreement where the GOP adopts Trump’s American First policies (which I wholly support) then we are in for a long decade. In the meantime please keep doing your thing Rod, we need to restore trust in journalism to fight the conspiracy of “reality”.

UPDATE.2: Trump supporter Curt Schilling lost his insurance because of his opinion. I’m not kidding:

Baseball star Curt Schilling has claimed his insurance policy has been canceled by AIG after the Donald Trump fan tweeted in support of the Capitol rioters.

The Red Sox legend tweeted: ‘We will be just fine, but wanted to let Americans know that @AIGinsurance canceled our insurance due to my ‘Social Media profile’.’

Schilling – who goes by ‘President Elect Curt Schilling’ on Twitter – had last week shared his thoughts on the siege at the Capitol, saying the rioters started ‘confrontation for sh*t that matters’.

He tweeted: ‘You cowards sat on your hands, did nothing while liberal trash looted rioted and burned for air Jordan’s and big screens, sit back, stfu, and watch folks start a confrontation for s**t that matters like rights, democracy and the end of govt corruption. #itshappening.’

After some followers questioned his claims about AIG Tuesday, Schilling replied with a screenshot of his alleged correspondence with the company. He later said he was a ‘AAA customer with zero claims in our 17 years with them’.

The screenshot read in part that canceling Schilling’s insurance plan was ‘a management decision that was made collectively between underwriting and marketing teams that could not be overturned.’

Do you think people should have their insurance cancelled because of their obnoxious opinions? What about their electricity cut off — you for that too?

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General Eclectic II: Electric Boogaloo

Behold, Kale Zelden and I have Episode #2 of our new video podcast, The General Eclectic. Have mercy on us — we’re new at this, and are getting better. Kale is a Catholic displaced Southerner living in New England. I am a theologian and geometrician who, when he has wearied of his labors, makes an occasional cheese dip.

I love where YouTube cued this video to below. It looks like I have smoked a bong and am eager for the Domino’s man to show up.

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Something Demonic Is In The Air

I wrote last night that “something demonic is in the air.” A reader e-mailed to say:

Man, that’s the truth. That’s this whole year in a nutshell. All summer long my wife and I watched with horror as family and friends were sucked into the Critical Race Theory vortex. Her family is Evangelical, mine is a mix of mainline liberal and nones, and we are Orthodox. But we watched people we loved in all those camps become consumed — almost possessed it seemed — with the progressive CRT mantras. My cousin, an academic dean at a Midwest university, has gone aggressively all in on CRT stuff and won’t talk with me now. My wife’s youngest sister and husband on the West coast are also all-in with that stuff. There were old Evangelical friends, some of whom I’ve known since college days for nearly 20 years who suddenly I couldn’t text anymore because they couldn’t do anything but rant about race and a pox on you if you weren’t willing to raise high your fist and the banner of BLM. We watched as several friends in our Orthodox parish became just as consumed on that front. A close friend from the parish who had organized our women’s retreat for years declined to do so this past year when several other women — people who’d literally been friends of hers for years, gone to parties regularly at her home and had her and her family regularly over to theirs — vehemently turned on her and told her they’d try and keep others from attending any retreat she organized. Why? Because she was not supportive of BLM.And then, post election, we have watched with equal horror as more friends and family not on the Left have gone down the election fraud black hole. My birth mother (I’m adopted, but have a long-standing relationship with my biological mother) spent all November and December at Stop The Steal rallies. She sends me QAnon texts. She says she would’ve been in DC if she could’ve gotten the time off. My mother in law is convinced Trump won the election and won’t hear talk otherwise. Several of our closest Orthodox friends have suddenly become obsessed since the election with ranting about the conspiracy theories and some of the Q stuff. One will inundate me with texts about it. He insists that the whole Capitol riot was planned by Antifa and that everyone there were Antifa people in disguise. Ashli Babbitt’s social media history of pro-Trump and Q stuff? The pro-Trump and Q-supportive social media histories of other people arrested? Oh, that was all falsified by deep state supporters of Antifa. Or they targeted those people and used look-alikes. I’ve tried reasoning with him. Nothing doing. I even sent him several of your recent posts since he was a fan of your BenOp and LNBL books. “So sad they’ve tricked Rod or gotten to him too” was the reply. What does one say to that?

There is lots of media coverage of the QAnon demonic insanity now, but we must not forget that the Left’s demonic theories are being institutionalized. Christopher Rufo continues to do stellar work exposing this evil. In his latest, Rufo writes about a Cupertino elementary school that was teaching little children the basics of racial hatred, in the name of progress. Excerpts:

An elementary school in Cupertino, California—a Silicon Valley community with a median home price of $2.3 million—recently forced a class of third-graders to deconstruct their racial identities, then rank themselves according to their “power and privilege.”

Based on whistleblower documents and parents familiar with the session, a third-grade teacher at R.I. Meyerholz Elementary School began the lesson on “social identities” during a math class. The teacher asked all students to create an “identity map,” listing their race, class, gender, religion, family structure, and other characteristics. The teacher explained that the students live in a “dominant culture” of “white, middle class, cisgender, educated, able-bodied, Christian, English speaker[s],” who, according to the lesson, “created and maintained” this culture in order “to hold power and stay in power.”

This school is 94 percent nonwhite, and majority Asian-American. More:

One parent told me that critical race theory was reminiscent of the Chinese Cultural Revolution. “[It divides society between] the oppressor and the oppressed, and since these identities are inborn characteristics people cannot change, the only way to change it is via violent revolution,” the parent said. “Growing up in China, I had learned it many times. The outcome is the family will be ripped apart; husband hates wife, children hate parents. I think it is already happening here.”

Read the whole piece. Rufo reports that Asian-Americans in California are organizing against this garbage politically. This is the right thing to do: band together and stand up peacefully, with determination. You don’t fight one set of demonic lies by embracing a rival set, and acting like thugs.About the demonic spirit inflaming many on the Right, the Southern Baptist pastor Russell Moore nails it this post, especially here:

The sight of “Jesus Saves” and “God Bless America” signs by those violently storming the Capitol is about more than just inconsistency. It is about a picture of Jesus Christ and of his gospel that is satanic. The mixing of the Christian religion with crazed and counter-biblical cults such as Q-Anon is telling the outside world that this is what the gospel is. That’s a lie, and it is blasphemous against a holy God.

Look around us, five years into this experiment. Every family I know is divided over this personality. Every church I know is too. Friendships are broken, for almost everyone I know. And, most importantly, every survey shows that the church is hemorrhaging the next generation because they believe that evangelicalism is a means to an end to this political movement. You may say, “Well, we can’t make decisions based on what people want”: true. If I were speaking every week to people who are leaving because they reject the Trinity or the Incarnation or the bodily resurrection or sexual morality or whatever, I would agree with you.

But if people are walking away not because we believe too much for them, but because they don’t think we believe what we say we believe, what then? How can the witness of the church be rebuilt? What are the consequences? A start—a small but necessary start—is for the church to say, clearly, conspiracy theories and insurrections and riots and murders and incitement are out of step with the Word of God and we will not—not one of us—spend one second hemming or hawing about that.

Do you know what the opposite of “symbolic” is? “Diabolic.” In the Greek etymology, a “symbol” is something that gathers what is separated and creates something meaningful with the parts; a “diabolical” force is one that separates. “Symbol” means integration; “diabol” means distintegration.

Back in 2015, I wrote about this entry from a dating website (which has since gone behind a private wall) in which the author quotes from a bestselling 2004 book The Art of Seduction, by Robert Greene. From the website:

In the book, Greene talks about the importance of language in seducing someone. Seduction, as you know, is a matter of how and what you communicate to your target, and is thus, extremely important in your interactions.

Greene makes the distinction between two types of languages — symbolic and diabolic language. To quote him here:

“Most people employ symbolic language—their words stand for something real, the feelings, ideas, and beliefs they really have. Or they stand for concrete things in the real world. (The origin of the word “symbolic” lies in a Greek word meaning “to bring things together”—in this case, a word and something real.)

“As a seducer you are using the opposite: diabolic language. Your words do not stand for anything real; their sound, and the feelings they evoke, are more important than what they are supposed to stand for. (The word “diabolic” ultimately means to separate, to throw things apart—here, words and reality.) The more you make people focus on your sweet-sounding language, and on the illusions and fantasies it conjures, the more you diminish their contact with reality. You lead them into the clouds, where it is hard to distinguish truth from untruth, real from unreal.”

As an indirect seducer, you must focus on using diabolic rather than symbolic language. Your goal is to stimulate your target’s imagination, enveloping her into your spirit. Do this, and she will not be able to resist you.

This spirit is everywhere today! On the Left, on the Right, and everywhere in between. The diabolic attacks are not coming from one side alone. They are all over. From my book Live Not By Lies:

We cannot hope to resist the coming soft totalitarianism if we do not have our spiritual lives in order. This is the message of Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, the great anti-communist dissident, Nobel laureate, and Orthodox Christian. He believed the core of the crisis that created and sustained communism was not political but spiritual.

After the publication of his Gulag Archipelago exposed the rottenness of Soviet totalitarianism and made Solzhenitsyn a global hero, Moscow finally expelled him to the West. On the eve of his forced exile, Solzhenitsyn published a final message to the Soviet people, titled, “Live Not by Lies!” In the essay, Solzhenitsyn challenged the claim that the totalitarian system was so powerful that the ordinary man and woman cannot change it.

Nonsense, he said. The foundation of totalitarianism is an ideology made of lies. The system depends for its existence on a people’s fear of challenging the lies. Said the writer, “Our way must be: Never knowingly support lies!” You may not have the strength to stand up in public and say what you really believe, but you can at least refuse to affirm what you do not believe. You may not be able to overthrow totalitarianism, but you can find within yourself and your community the means to live in the dignity of truth. If we must live under the dictatorship of lies, the writer said, then our response must be: “Let their rule hold not through me!”

A devil is no less a devil if the lie he tells flatters you and stands to help you defeat your enemies and achieve power. In my Substack newsletter tonight (subscribers only), I published a letter that a Christian friend who spent twenty years in the occult sent to me, and gave me permission to share. In it, she writes:

I’m not into woo-woo. I approach all notions of miracles, angels, demons, with a deep sense of skepticism. In two decades in the occult, I became adept at not rolling my eyes when people talked about energy, faeries, and other nonsense. And that skepticism and tolerance spiritually numbed me, because now I realize I don’t react to blasphemy or spiritually unhealthy environments. I’m working on that, with the help of my spiritual father. But yeah, I don’t see ghosts and demons lurking in every dark corner.

So what do I mean when I talk about demons? I don’t like talking about this, but maybe I should talk about it. It’s inviting something in, and that something is dark and has a heaviness to it. It’s something that sits and lurks, like the spiritual equivalent of an oil slick. It’s scary, especially the first time, but often it isn’t as scary as whatever very real need you have that drove you to this. It feels benignly malevolent, as if it isn’t particularly interested in you, but doesn’t exactly mean you well either. And it’s easier the second time, and the third, etc… You romanticize it, like a spiritual drug that offers you the illusion of control. It doesn’t really bring you what you want, but you cling to any small perceived success as vindication. Your life becomes more confusing, more filled with lies and cognitive dissonance. Everything feels like an illusion. Your relationships suffer. You realize the ritual and the “magic” isn’t doing anything so you seek a relationship with the demon, but the demon doesn’t want a relationship. It wants to consume you.

The demon doesn’t want a relationship. It wants to consume you.

With some distance, I now believe that the real goal of demons is to drive you to suicide, so you are theirs forever.

We are committing suicide as a nation by allowing these demons to rule us — the QAnon conspiracies and the Critical Theory malice, I mean. The only antidote to the diabolic is to stand firm in reality — and to stand firm with others. Those Chinese Americans in California, with personal memories of what the communist Cultural Revolution did to their families and their nation — listen to them! 

UPDATE: From the Dallas Morning News. Diabolical:

Days after President Donald Trump incited supporters to attack the U.S. Capitol in an effort to overturn the election, an evangelical pastor in Frisco told his congregation they have an “executive order” to keep Trump in office.

Brandon Burden, the pastor at KingdomLife, is a former Frisco City Council candidate and member of the Frisco Conservative Coalition, a political action committee. …

As Burden stood at the pulpit Sunday, he shouted in tongues while a woman at the altar waved a large American flag in front of him. The pastor cited “prophetic voices” who have said God told them Trump would be president for eight years.

“We have an executive order — not from Congress or D.C., but from the desk of the CEO of heaven, the boss of the planet,” Burden said. “He said from his desk in heaven, this is my will; Trump will be in for eight years.”

He said it’s the responsibility of his congregation and other Christians to execute God’s order and alluded to the Battle of Jericho, leading church members in a march.

Go to the livestream from the charismatic church’s service on Sunday, embedded in the DMN story. Go to the 46:30 part, and listen to what this pastor says. He says, praying to God, “Father, we loose the sound of war!” On Washington, DC, he means. The Jericho March they do around the church is led by congregants carrying a US flag, and Israeli flag, and a Texas flag.

What kind of pseudo-Christian craziness is this? Loosing war on the nation’s capitol, all in the name of God and Trump? Demonic, all of it.

 

The post Something Demonic Is In The Air appeared first on The American Conservative.

Letter To A Young Man In Despair

Recently I received a letter from a reader, a young man in his twenties. He asked for advice. I asked him if, after I’ve thought about how to answer him, I could publish his letter and my advice. He said yes.

Here is the letter:

I’ve been a long time reader of your blog now and while I haven’t always agreed with you on everything, you’ve always fascinated me with your insight into current events and predictions for the future based on such insight. As I wrote in the title, I’m currently 25 years old. I’m an engineer new to working life and just society in general. I was raised as a strong Catholic (former weekly mass attendant and volunteer), but I’m very uncertain as to whether I really believe anymore or even if my family believes either. We try not to talk about it or we occasionally say some religious platitudes to each other to reassure everyone around that we are a family with faith, but I’ve come to suspect that it’s all empty deception, to ourselves and everyone around us. Year after year we talk less about our faith or even about God. Every conversation, even occasional comments or prayers, seem forced out of our mouths. I don’t know when it started but we just started going to church less until we no longer bothered. We kept in touch with our church friends and our relationship is still great but it’s awkward, especially since I know some of our family friends have also stopped going.

We looked at all the scandals that happened and to be honest we never talked about it. We just briefly mentioned it and some comments about how the majority of priests are good people (our local priests certainly were and are), and how our faith is not dependent on the church hierarchy, but I think it was the breaking point. While we had been sliding away from Christianity for a long time, that might have been the time from which point we did not take Christianity seriously at all. We never pray anymore, and we try to avoid religious topics completely. I think that the scales just completely fell from our eyes and we could no longer take that leap of faith anymore that’s required to believe. The apologetics and books I read were comforting for a while but they did not help in the long run because I cannot force myself to believe. I am living a lie, and I suspect many people are too, especially considering what we saw at the the Capitol Wednesday. 

I can’t recall what article it was exactly, maybe it was from David French, but it was a piece I read in National Review showing that self-identified evangelicals who don’t go to church often are far more likely to vote for Trump. I’ve also seen multiple studies, including ones you posted, that shows that Republicans are also losing their faith. I think this is part of the phenomenon we saw from the Trump supporters on Wednesday. Many who support Trump self-identify as Christian (and many do not of course), but I can’t help but wonder how many are like me, people living a lie where they pretend to believe just to defend what they see as their way of life, their culture, or just so that they can keep a sense of meaning in their lives. They adore Trump beyond all logical sense, ignore every immoral and non-Christian act he does or everything he says to the same effect, but could it perhaps be because, as you have said, they see him as a bulwark protecting them from what they believe will be the end of the culture and way of life that they lead? Maybe without them realizing it, this need to fight against perceived cultural threats has completely replaced their faith altogether in the same way wokeness or extreme social justice has replaced any faith and/or belief in free society that many on the left used to have. Perhaps the reason they ignore everything non-Christian about Trump is because they do not care about Christianity as anything other than a cultural feature or a way to find meaning. Maybe one day many of them will wake up and realize that they no longer believe either. I don’t think the QShaman does. 

To be honest, I both do and do not want to confront my parents about our possible shared lack of belief. I realize when I look deep into my thoughts that I want God to exist and I want Christianity to be true because it would validate the devoted lives that so many people have lived as Christians throughout the centuries and around the world. It would allow for higher meaning to be found in life instead of just the transient and empty meaning provided by secular creeds. I tried and I have found that I just can’t find meaning in secular philosophies but no matter what I want to believe, I can’t convince myself that Christianity is true anymore. Any testimonies or stories I subconsciously call into question, thinking that there could be all kinds of reasonable and material explanations that don’t depend on the supernatural. So I am left without higher meaning in life, and I suspect that if I really forced my parents to confront their own thoughts, they might also be left without higher meaning. I suspect my sister no longer cares and probably now finds meaning in far-left wokeness instead (looking at her Facebook from the last year was eye-opening). 

Now I am not saying that I am unable to live my life or anything like that, but I do feel a sort of existential despair clawing at me, and there is nothing to fill that void in my heart. I have never been a Trump supporter and to be honest I’m not even much of a conservative, especially not a social conservative, but I believe in free speech (both legal and cultural), freedom of association, compassion, and in being tolerant of differences in opinion with my fellow citizens. I support gay marriage and equality but I am an unbeliever when it comes to the sexuality spectrum (plethora of genders). I am just very afraid right now.

 After seeing the disgraceful storming of the Capitol I am very afraid for the future of the country and for my own future and that of my family. There are tens of millions of Americans who believe in crazy and dangerous conspiracy theories like how the election was stolen, QAnon, etc. These people will not be convinced to see reality after what happened and what is likely to happen going forward. They could very well resort to violence again. Then there’s the left who are going to take power and who will feel very emboldened (reasonably so) to take away many of the civil liberties we currently enjoy. Corporations, especially Big Tech, will gladly help them and even one up them by silencing any dissidents of anything that happens from here on out. People who I disagree with for having supported this nonsensical protest, and who have reasonably denounced the violence, are being denounced as Nazis and racists by their own friends and families when they are neither (seriously, most Trump supporters are not). I could never support someone like Trump and I have always vehemently disagreed with those who do, but with the exception of those who commit and advocate violence, I do not want my fellow Americans being treated as Nazis and having their lives destroyed for having different political opinions. People can change for the better, but our culture of canceling and witch hunts is unrelenting and unforgiving. I also vehemently disagreed with the violent riots associated with the BLM protests while recognizing that most protesters were nonviolent (as was the case on Wednesday going by the numbers).

I do not want to live in a country full of hatred. My fellow Americans hate each other and wish violence on one another, but I want no part of it. Many of my right wing co-workers are still convinced Trump won (with the accompanying conspiracy theories), and some of my left wing coworkers even wished that all the protesters and rioters had been killed. One co-worker said that those ‘animals’ should have been slaughtered and then another ‘joked’ that he would have paid to see that. Too many people agreed and laughed. Or there were others that were caught in a mindless rage and just regurgitated how much they hated the right and all of its supporters. It terrifies me that most people in my age group are like the latter and that a significant minority still supports Trump and are full of the same hatred for the left. I can’t relate to any of them. I may not count as a Christian or even as much of a conservative, but this country feels so utterly alien to me. I have always been a fan of American history and a patriot while recognizing our countries shortcomings and progress, but I just can’t see myself living here happily anymore. I don’t want to get married here (if I can even find a wife), I don’t want to raise children in this environment, and I don’t want to be a professional in corporate America. I can’t see the American Dream anymore.

Asian culture may be seen as generally reserved and the corporate environment as strict, but it’s becoming a very attractive long term option for me. Maybe I won’t find meaning, a sense of belonging with fellow citizens, a fulfilling career, or anything like that but I can’t help but be tempted by an escape to Japan or Korea. It might be running away, but is there a free country left fo fight for anymore? Is there worthwhile meaning left in this country, whether cultural, religious, or otherwise. 

And here is my response. I shared the letter last week with subscribers to my Substack newsletter, asking for their advice for me, regarding what to say to him. I am grateful to them for their help:

Thank you for your letter. As painful as it was for me to read, I know it must have been infinitely more painful to write.

You are not wrong to see so much emptiness, vanity, and rage in American society. You mention both the Left and the Right. What we are all seeing is the death throes of a culture that has forgotten God. The people who have given their minds over to ideology are people who are afraid, who are desperate for meaning, and who are fanatically trying to fill the God-shaped hole in their souls. That many of these people are professing Christians greatly confuses matters.

I’m not going to talk to you about politics. You know where I stand politically, but I think that the crisis you’re talking about is not ultimately political. Whether someone espouses left-wing or right-wing ideology as their creed, it’s all pseudo-religion. However, I can’t pretend that religion is something that exists completely free of political passions. In his journals, Father Alexander Schmemann, an Orthodox priest of the Russian diaspora, wrote about his friendship with Solzhenitsyn after the heroic dissident’s expulsion from the Soviet Union. Nobody can doubt Solzhenitsyn’s greatness, and certainly Father Schmemann did not. But he did express private concern over how the fate of Russia dominated Solzhenitsyn’s mind, and perhaps distorted his religious vision. I bring that up here only to say that even the best of us are subject to the gravity of political passion. Solzhenitsyn was both deeply religious and deeply patriotic, but the two great commitments of his life sometimes conflicted within him.

My point is that Christian faith will not offer you an escape from politics, though it should give you a perspective from which to judge political claims. As desperate and faithless as you sound in your letter, I think you are in a much better place than the confident zealots in your life. You may not see the truth clearly yet, but you have fewer illusions to trick your inner eye.

Your letter sent me to an essay by the biographer Joseph Pearce that appears in a recently published collection titled Solzhenitsyn And American Culture (Notre Dame Press). In it, Pearce writes about an interview he did with Solzhenitsyn in Moscow, in 1998. Pearce, who had written a biography of J.R.R. Tolkien, writes:

[beginning of quote]

Encouraged by Solzhenitsyn’s ready acceptance of the affinity between his own creative vision and that of Tolkien, I ventured to read him two quotes from Tolkien which appeared to encapsulate the spirit of his own work:

The essence of a fallen world is that the best cannot be attained by free enjoyment, or what is called “Self-realization” (usually a nice name for self-indulgence, wholly inimical to the realization of other selves); but by denial, by suffering.

“Absolutely … absolutely,” Solzhenitsyn whispered.

Out of the darkness of my life, so much frustrated, I put before you the one great thing to love on earth: the Blessed Sacrament. … There you will find romance, glory, honour, fidelity, and the true way of all your loves on earth, and more than that: Death: by the divine paradox, that which ends life, and demands the surrender of all, and yet by the taste (or foretaste) of which alone can what you seek in your earthly relationships (love, faithfulness, joy) be maintained, or take on the complexion of reality, of eternal endurance, which every man’s heart desires.

“Is that Tolkien?” Solzhenitsyn asked, eyes widening in surprise. “Yes, again correct.”

[end of quote]

The point here is that both Christian writers believed that suffering, even death, was necessary to life. That hard times make strong souls. This is why I insist on saying that I am not optimistic today, but I am hopeful — hopeful, because I know that the Lord can bring good out of this pain, if we unite ourselves to Him, and allow ourselves to be sharpened spiritually by contact with suffering.

Your own spiritual suffering now, struggling with faith, is not in vain. Reading your letter, I thought that no ordinary middle-class Christianity, either progressive or conservative, will rescue you. No kidding, this is a blessing. It might feel like defeat now, but you at least have the good fortune not to be subject to falling into the delusion of Christified bourgeois comfort. It is not lost on me that I write this to you from the comfort of my couch, my feet warmed by a hobbity fire. These modest comforts could all be taken from me at a stroke, and then what would I be left with? If my faith in Christ depends on comfort, it is not going to endure.

Over the past year, I have found myself struggling a great deal with a sense of loss and disorder, because things in my personal life have not gone as I wanted them to. I don’t want bad things — I want good things! But for reasons beyond my control, I can’t have them. Deep inside me, I have been praying that God would give me those things, and I have not been able to feel right about anything absent these things. It is one thing to lecture others about how they should accept suffering, but it’s quite another to be you, tossing and turning in bed after midnight, your mind racing, praying to a God you aren’t sure is even listening, asking him to take this Cross from you.

Nobody escapes it. Nobody. It is better to be freed of the illusion that there can be any such thing as Christianity without tears. Only in the past few days, thanks to a letter from a reader of my Substack, did things that God has been trying to tell me, in answer to my prayers, suddenly click. I don’t know if God will remove my crosses, but I know that whether He does or doesn’t, He remains God, and He is calling me to Himself. My error was wanting Christ plus the good things that I crave, but for some reason aren’t given to me. As my confessor told me, God is not letting me have these things for the sake of my salvation. I don’t understand this, but I believe it, and am going to act on that belief. This has been a purification for me, one that has come with real tears.

Those tears, for you, are tears of unbelief. You say that you can’t believe, but if your mind was truly settled on it, you wouldn’t have written to me. I am not going to tell you that you can think your way into faith. Maybe some can, but I don’t really believe it. What I would ask you to consider is that men far greater than you and I — men like Tolkien and Solzhenitsyn — believed in God, and committed their lives to Jesus Christ. That does not prove that God is real and Christ is the messiah, but it ought to turn your mind to the possibility that these things are true. When I was not much younger than you are now, and was just as uncertain about God’s existence, I was struck by how many of the writers and thinkers I most admired in history were serous Christians. Was Kierkegaard a fool? Was Dostoevsky? Was I so certain that I, an undergraduate living in late 20th century America, knew better than they did?

In Dante’s Divine Comedy, God sends the shade of the poet Virgil to rescue the pilgrim Dante, lost in a dark wood. Come with me if you want to live, says Virgil. Dante isn’t sure that he wants to do this, or if the offer is real, but in the end, he goes, because he trusts Virgil. It turns out that Virgil could see things that Dante, in his brokenness, could not. The pilgrim Dante’s journey through Hell, Purgatory, and Heaven is a journey of recovering sight. You too are lost in a dark wood. There are Virgils all around who can help you. You say you can’t believe in God now, but can’t you believe in Virgil (so to speak)? If you can begin to train your eyes to see as Tolkien saw, as Solzhenitsyn saw, as Dostoevsky, C.S. Lewis, Kierkegaard, Flannery O’Connor, and so many others saw, you may wake up one day to find that the world does not look so Christ-haunted — that God is not a ghost, but an ever-present reality.

That’s how it was for me. And I would add: do your best to get out of your head. My confessor always tells me that this is my downfall. He’s not anti-intellectual, but he’s trying to get me to understand that what I seek is not likely to be found in books. What I seek is communion with God. You say that apologetics are not working for you. Fine — then put them down for now. Your intellect may not be able to perceive the Lord at the moment. There are other ways to know Him. Do you know any Christians whom you admire, who seem like good people? Draw close to them. If not, do you know where you might meet some of them? Then go there. Ask God to lead you to them.

You may never fully free yourself from doubt. That’s normal, and no reason to stay away from God. I lean heavily into talking about getting out of your head, and not basing your faith too heavily on intellectual grounds, because this was what I wish I had known when I was your age. But in sharing your letter with some readers, one man said that for him, it was the intellectual richness of the faith that drew him in. He was raised in a form of Christianity that wholly emphasized feeling the Holy Spirit. He felt nothing, and thought something was wrong with him.

He says that when he met Catholics at age 18, they explained the faith to him, and he was bowled over to discover that Christianity wasn’t only about touchy-feely subjective stuff. As he matured in the Christian faith, he explored the intellectual side by reading philosophers who argued for the existence of God. They made deism rationally plausible. That, plus prayer and worship, drew him more firmly into the faith. He said (this is for you):

So the point is that intellectualism and rational argumentation were what helped me to believe.  I don’t know if that would help the despairer at all, but he does say that he wants God to exist, and he wants Christianity to be true.  One justification for believing something is that we have good reasons to believe it.  Now as you’ve pointed out, quite well, I think, rational argument isn’t enough to sustain a life of faith; we need grace, action, prayer, community, liturgy, and a host of other things.  But it can be a start for some people.  

Another reader, this one also young, makes an interesting distinction between “truth” and “meaning.” She writes, addressing you:

Maybe instead of obsessing over the truth and falsity of Christianity, you should look for its meaning instead.  As C.S. Lewis said in “Bluspels and Flalansferes,” meaning is the antecedent condition of truth and falsehood.  Perhaps instead of your endless search for truth, you should also search for meaning–which can only be found in the practice of faith.  You’re not going to find it on the outside looking in.  If you find meaning, you’ll also find the truth. 

That has been my experience as well.  I gain nothing from simply knowing about God: I must know Jesus personally.  Scripture indicates that even the demons know of Jesus’s status as the Son of God, but clearly that simple knowledge is not enough to save them.  You must also know Him, and He is not to be reduced to a math equation to be solved.  He’s fully God and fully Man, and He wants a relationship with you, not just your mere intellectual assent. 

That’s very good. Meaning is found in the way we appropriate the truth inwardly, and communally. At the risk of being repetitive, reader, let me once again say that it would probably help you to think of your search for God not as the search for a golden, pristine, crisp set of propositional truths to which you can assent, as if closing a business deal, but rather to think about it as falling in love. When I think about how I fell in love with my wife, I remember the weekend me met, the trip to the monastery, the anxiety in my stomach as we shopped at Waterloo Records (“Do I tell her I’m really into her?”), our first kiss by the side of my car. I remember a trip we took during our engagement, and the time she came to visit me in south Florida, and we went for drinks on South Beach. I recall my proposal of marriage, and eating chips and salsa and drinking Veuve Clicquot in her little apartment in Austin, and calling all our friends to tell them the news.

All of these things were part of what helped us both to discover the truth of our love for each other, and its meaning. Similarly, I can point to stages along my way of pilgrimage to Christian faith — people, events, and moments that revealed God to me, and called me forward on the path to falling in love with Him. This is how it will be for you too. Waiting for the moment of perfect clarity is a deception.

She adds:

I understand your gloom over the state of the world, but your letter reminded me of the Dwarfs in Lewis’s The Last Battle.  They are so afraid of being taken in by unreal happiness that they cannot allow themselves to be taken out of their real unhappiness, as Michael Ward puts in his book, Planet Narnia.  They cannot see that they’ve reached Aslan’s land and stay locked in their gloom–they’re in Paradise but blind themselves to its reality.  Ward points out that Lewis makes a similar point in “Meditation in a Toolshed” that we are also guilty of the same thing: we’re so weary of being deceived by “looking along the beam” that we think we should trust only what we look at.  But Lewis points out that the only answer is to “yet open once again your heart.”   Despairer, I think the Kingdom is within your sight and your reach, but you have to open yourself to it in ways that you haven’t been doing up till now.  Immerse yourself in the faith.  Find other believers, even ones not your age, who are living a good life in Christ.  Pray and go to church.  Read the Bible and study it.  And most of all, don’t be discouraged by a denomination that you think doesn’t have all the answers.  I’m an evangelical, and one of the things that annoys me about my denomination is the pervasive anti-intellectualism.  It’s a flaw, yes, but the fact of the matter is, the only person who practiced Christianity perfectly is Jesus: don’t judge the faith by the foibles of its followers. Above all, don’t let the gloom of this age blind you to the reality of the goodness of God and His kingdom.  As Lewis points out in The Great Divorce, the ultimate deception of Hell is to disguise Heaven’s joy.  It’s a lie that many have fallen for.  I pray you will see beyond it.

This is really helpful. I could not have put it so well. Her words are a reminder that you, my despairing reader, should rely on the help of others to see and experience God. Pope Benedict XVI said that the best arguments for the faith are Christian art and Christian saints. What he meant was that the works of Christian imagination, and the incarnate goodness of those who live by the faith, open up the hearts and minds of doubters in ways that rational argumentation may not. They don’t deny reason, but they may open the door to it.

I have written many times how an unexpected encounter with shocking beauty — the medieval cathedral of Chartres — awakened within me an awareness of God’s reality, and a hunger to know Him. I was 17 years old at the time, and thought I knew all there was to know, basically, about what it meant to be a Christian — and I knew it wasn’t for me. But there, in that cathedral, which I had entered as a teenage tourist, I was shocked into an awareness of how very little I, a young man born and raised in late 20th century America — knew about the faith at all. Now, hundreds of thousands of people pass through that same cathedral every year. Probably nothing happens to them, spiritually. But it happened to me. There is something else out there in the world that can speak to you — and will, if you open your mind and your heart.

You say that you and your family stopped praying, and that that was a milestone on the road to unbelief. You’re right about that. Marshall McLuhan said that all those he knew who had lost their faith began by ceasing to pray. Get a prayer rope for yourself — here’s a link to an Orthodox monastery where they make them, but you can find them all over — and teach yourself to say the Jesus Prayer. Lord Jesus Christ, Son of the living God, have mercy on me, a sinner. It doesn’t matter if you’re Orthodox, Catholic, or Protestant. Give yourself over to that prayer discipline. Breathe deeply, rhythmically while doing it. It takes time to get this right. It’s not magic, but what it does is clear inner space for the Holy Spirit to work. It does clear your mind so that you can hear the voice of God. The protagonist of the Tarkovsky movie “Nostalghia” is a writer who is so caught up in his head, brooding over the things he has lost, that he can’t see or hear God. At one point, the writer is walking across the nave of a ruined abbey, and we hear the voice of a woman — the Virgin, one imagines — asking God to speak to the poor lost writer, or to somehow show Himself to the man. God answers that He does this, but the man can neither hear nor see.

That is me most of the time. Is that you? Seekers want God to make things clear to us, but in truth we want Him to say what we already believe. Do your very best to open yourself to signs of His love and presence. I don’t say be gullible, but I do say resist the hypercritical spirit, which is just as destructive to perceiving the truth as the mindset that believes everything.

Do your best to go to church, even if you don’t believe. That’s where the Christians are. Pray for the gift of faith. Don’t idealize other Christians; a few of us might be saints (those who are will be the last to think that of themselves), but all of us are your companions in shipwreck.

The fact that you “do not want to live in a country full of hatred” is a powerful sign that you are on the right path. So many people today find vindication in hatred, and regard it as proof of their virtue. We live in an information ecosystem that rewards hatred, and builds entire structures of lies and inhumanity on top of that hatred. St. Augustine says that we are what we desire, and you, friend, are a better man than most of us because you desire to love, and to live in peace. Follow that, and begin to train your heart to desire the good, the true, and the beautiful. Read what is good and time-tested, not what is fashionable. Listen to beautiful, life-giving music (including sacred music: Ancient Faith Radio plays Orthodox chant all day long online). Immerse yourself in visual beauty. And, above all, pray, even if you aren’t sure God is listening, or that there is any God there to listen.

Cultivate patience, and the ability to watch and wait. St. Seraphim of Sarov, a 19th century Russian Orthodox mystic and hermit, counseled the faithful to “acquire the spirit of peace, and thousands around you will be saved.” He meant that people are drawn to those from whom light and peace radiates. The saint also said:

You cannot be too gentle, too kind. Shun even to appear harsh in your treatment of each other. Joy, radiant joy, streams from the face of him who gives and kindles joy in the heart of him who receives.

This is not who I am, I am ashamed to confess. But this is who I want to be. This is who you, and I, and everybody can be, if we open our hearts and commit our lives to walking with Christ.

I have to tell you, though, that when I was your age, I wanted to believe, but I wanted to understand it all first. It doesn’t work that way. When you meet the person you want to marry, it is unreasonable to expect that you can know everything there is to know about marriage, and about what it would be like to spend your life with that person. You start with the experience of love, and if, after discernment, you believe that this person is trustworthy, and your feelings for her are not an illusion, then you commit yourself to her in trust. It is like that with God too. Faith is not the sum total of doctrines, or the conclusion of a lengthy syllogism. It is more like a poem, but even that doesn’t fully capture it. It is a living relationship, a lifelong pilgrimage. To believe is to suffer — but not to believe is also to suffer. The difference is that the suffering believer endures all things with hope.

I wish I could tell you more. You are much closer to the Kingdom than you think. About Asia, please do not think that there is a geographical cure for what’s upon us all. Wherever there is WiFi, there is modernity. I do believe that some places are better than others, in terms of living among sane, good people, but ultimately, we are all going to have to strengthen ourselves internally, and within small communities. If you can, watch the Terrence Malick film A Hidden Life, about the life and death of Franz Jägerstätter, an Austrian Catholic farmer who died a martyr in a Nazi prison. He and his family lived in a tiny Alpine village, yet Nazism even found them all there. The mystery here — and it is a profound one — is that Franz, though he was persecuted in the village for his resistance, and ultimately executed for it, was blessed in death, while all those who conformed, and who survived, were cursed by their servile lives.

Dietrich Bonhoeffer, another Christian martyr of the Nazis, famously said, “When Christ calls a man, he bids him come and die.” Not very cheerful, that, but I can tell you with confidence, from the other side of the line between believers and unbelievers, that this is what it means to live.

Finally, let me leave you with this summary of your letter, shared with me by a reader of my newsletter, with whom I shared it (don’t worry, I kept your name out of it):

I can’t convince myself that Christianity is true anymore. I also cannot convince myself that any philosophy or religion is true. I want people to be kind to each other. (Which also means, I don’t want others to suffer.)  I want to live in a good world. (Which also means, I don’t want to suffer, myself, either.) I can’t orient myself in the world because it’s cultural meaning systems are disintegrating and I have no belief system of my own to hang onto. (Which means, I don’t have a way to make sense of suffering.) I am afraid.

Is this fair, Despairing Reader? If so, is anything I have written here helpful to you? I am eager to hear from you. I have been where you are once. There is hope. There really is.

I am sending the link to this blog post to the Despairing Reader. He may not wish to respond, or may wish to respond in the comments, or send something to me in an e-mail. If he chooses the latter, I will post his response only with his permission. Thanks again to my Substack newsletter readers. If you haven’t seen my Substack, here’s a free post I put up today to show folks who don’t subscribe what they’ve been missing these past two weeks. Daily Dreher is a newsletter that focuses on culture and spirituality, with a bias towards finding hope and meaning.

The post Letter To A Young Man In Despair appeared first on The American Conservative.

White Riot

The Times columnist Tom Edsall called a bunch of academics to ask them for their take on why last Wednesday’s insurrection at the Capitol happened. His column about it is here. Excerpts:

There is evidence that many non-college white Americans who have been undergoing what psychiatrists call “involuntary subordination” or “involuntary defeat” both resent and mourn their loss of centrality and what they perceive as their growing invisibility.

Andrew Cherlin, a sociologist at Johns Hopkins University, wrote by email:

They fear a loss of attention. A loss of validation. These are people who have always had racial privilege but have never had much else. Many feel passed over, ignored. Trump listened to them and spoke their language when few other politicians did. He felt their pain and was diabolical enough to encourage their tendency to racialize that pain. They fear becoming faceless again if a Democrat, or even a conventional Republican, were to take office.

Cherlin pointed to the assertion of a 67-year-old retired landscaper from North Carolina who joined the Trump loyalists on Jan. 6 on the steps of the Capitol: “We are here. See us! Notice us! Pay attention!”

There is a learning opportunity here. Remember all you on the Left who said that the riots last summer meant that the rest of us needed to listen to black America talk about its sense of pain and grievance over racism? Well, apply that logic to this. (And remember all of us here on the Right who were told that by the Left last summer? If what this white working class man is quoted saying resonates with you, then should we not revisit what the Left was saying about black grievance?)

The point is not that grievances — held by black people, white people, or any group — are objectively true. They might be, or might not be, or somewhere in the middle. The point is that if members of the group experience them as real and true, then they will act on that belief — and there could be violence.

More Edsall:

Dacher Keltner, a professor of psychology at Berkeley, agrees in large part with Anderson, describing the fury and disappointment contributing to the takeover of Congress as concentrated among whites who see their position in the social order on a downward path. In an email, Keltner wrote:

The population of U.S. Citizens who’ve lost the most power in the past 40 years, who aren’t competing well to get into college or get high paying jobs, whose marital prospects have dimmed, and who are outraged, are those I believe were most likely to be in on the attack.

When pressed to give up power, he added, “these types of individuals will resort to violence, and to refashioning history to suggest they did not lose.”

This is a useful analysis, but here, from the same column, is an example of it taken too far by the Left:

Jane Yunhee Junn, a professor of political science at the University of Southern California, was outspoken in her view:

People of color in political office, women controlling their fertility, L.G.B.T.Q. people getting married, using their bathrooms, and having children go against the state of nature defined by white heteropatriarchy. This is a domain in which men and white men in particular stand at the apex of power, holding their “rightful position” over women, nonwhites, perhaps non-Christians (in the U.S.), and of course, in their view, sexual deviants such as gay people.

This is what the riot looked like purely through the eyes of hardcore identity politics. Framed that way, the rioting whites have no moral standing, and are nothing other than menaces to the moral community. One of the less hotheaded academics pointed out that the almost entirely white DC mob attacked Congress, a predominantly white institution. (In fact, some were going through the Capitol chanting not “Hang AOC!” but “Hang Mike Pence!”, a white-haired white guy who is the creme filling of the whiteness Twinkie.

Here’s the thing: it really is true that whites, especially white men of the working class, really are losing power and status (you might say, with Chris Arnade, “dignity”), relative to their fathers and grandfathers, and relative to non-white groups. There is a temptation among people on the Left to say “suck it up, whiner, you had your day in the sun” — which ignores the fact that such a statement is unjust. (I grew up in the rural South, where white intergenerational poverty is a real thing.) To be fair, when non-whites complain about low power and status, many of us whites on the Right are often quick to dismiss their concerns as unfounded. Anyway, this is a social fact, one that has to be dealt with if we want to live in a peaceful society.

These white men — and all whites, especially the working classes — are bombarded constantly with the message that they are bearers of privilege by virtue of their “whiteness”. As I wrote here recently, in the San Diego public schools, all the teachers are being put through a propaganda course that compels white teachers to confess their whiteness, and to commit to teaching about the wickedness of white people (e.g., how white people “spirit murder” black and brown people). This kind of thing is normalized in liberal discourse now. What do you expect white people to think?

Don’t get me wrong: the Capitol Hill riot was absolutely wrong; those who broke into the Capitol should be punished to the full extent of the law, Trump should be impeached for his role in this, etc. Many of those people gave their minds over to insane conspiracy theories — something that is their own fault. But in our effort to deplore the Deplorables, we don’t dare forget that Trump, bad as he is, came from somewhere — that he came to power because he was responding to something real. As I wrote in that piece last week:

I was texting with a Democratic friend earlier this week. We were talking about the massive demographic changes America is now undergoing, and how conservative whites really are losing power relative to other demographic groups. The UK political scientist Eric Kaufmann talks about this in his book Whiteshift. He did an interview last year with Isaac Chotiner of the New Yorker about his thesis. Excerpts:

You write, “If politics in the West is ever to return to normal rather than becoming even more polarized, white interests will need to be discussed. I realize this is very controversial for left-modernists. Yet not only is white group self-interest legitimate, but I maintain that in an era of unprecedented white demographic decline it is absolutely vital for it to have a democratic outlet.” Can you say a little bit more about what specifically you’re arguing for?

Yes. Part of this comes from a view that what’s ultimately behind the rise of right-wing populism are these ethnic-majority grievances, particularly around their decline, and that ultimately this is about nostalgia and attachment to a way of life or to a particular traditional ethnic composition of a nation. Wanting for that not to erode too quickly is the motivation. I think the survey data show that it’s much more about that than about material things, for example, or even fears. It’s about attachment to one’s own group rather than hatred of other groups. This is an important distinction. The survey data from the American National Elections Study show that whites who feel very warmly toward whites are not any more cold toward, say, African-Americans, than whites who aren’t very warm toward whites.

When you say that “white interests” will need to be discussed in politics, I presume you acknowledge that the interests of white people are generally taken into account as much as any group, if not more than other groups. Do you mean explicitly discussed?

There should be an equal treatment of groups in the cultural sphere. There’s no question whites are advantaged economically, politically. I’m not going to dispute that. But in the cultural sphere, on immigration, the group whose numbers have declined, or who experienced a more rapid sense of change and loss due to migration, are the white majority. If, for example, they’re saying, “We would like to have a slower rate of change to enable assimilation to take place,” I think that’s actually a legitimate cultural interest. It doesn’t mean that it should drive policy. I think a moderate group self-interest is fine.

This is seen as toxic, as expressed by a majority group, but when minorities express these interests, that’s seen as quite normal. I think that when it comes to white liberals, there tends to be a double standard, as there is with white conservatives, by the way, when it comes to groups expressing their self-interest.

Are you saying that it is in the “self-interest” of white people to have lower immigration rates, or are you saying that if white people perceive that it’s in their interest, they should be able to express that without being shamed for being racist? Or both?

I’m saying that for the conservative members of the white majority who are attached to their group and its historic presence, I think that sense of loss and wanting to slow down that sense of loss is an understandable motivation. The problem is when you bar that from the discussion. It then gets sublimated and expressed in what I think actually are more negative ways, when it comes to racism. I think it’s not very different from African-Americans in Harlem not wanting Harlem to lose its African-American character. It’s a similar cultural loss-protection argument, which is actually not that different from wanting to preserve historic buildings or ways of life. The problem is that then they go toward fear of criminals and terrorism, and immigrants putting pressure on services, and all the things which there’s very little evidence for, and I think are more negative because they actually stigmatize an out-group, which is closer to the definition of racism than simply being attached to one’s own group. Not that that doesn’t carry some risks as well, but I think that it’s more problematic to suppress it for the majority and not for minorities. I think that’s creating a quite negative situation.

In his column today, Edsall speaks generally to this fact in this excerpt:

Bernard Grofman, a political scientist at the University of California, Irvine, put it this way in an email:

We would not have Trump as president if the Democrats had remained the party of the working class. The decline of labor unions proceeded at the same rate when Democrats were president as when Republicans were president; the same is, I believe, true of loss of manufacturing jobs as plants moved overseas.

President Obama, Grofman wrote,

responded to the housing crisis with bailouts of the lenders and interlinked financial institutions, not of the folks losing their homes. And the stagnation of wages and income for the middle and bottom of the income distribution continued under Obama. And the various Covid aid packages, while they include payments to the unemployed, are also helping big businesses more than the small businesses that have been and will be permanently going out of business due to the lockdowns (and they include various forms of pork.

The result, according to Grofman, was that “white less well-educated voters didn’t desert the Democratic Party, the Democratic Party deserted them.”

At the same time, though, and here I will quote Grofman at length:

More religious and less well-educated whites see Donald Trump as one of their own despite his being so obviously a child of privilege. He defends America as a Christian nation. He defends English as our national language. He is unashamed in stating that the loyalty of any government should be to its own citizens — both in terms of how we should deal with noncitizens here and how our foreign policy should be based on the doctrine of “America First.”

He speaks in a language that ordinary people can understand. He makes fun of the elites who look down on his supporters as a “basket of deplorables” and who think it is a good idea to defund the police who protect them and to prioritize snail darters over jobs. He appoints judges and justices who are true conservatives. He believes more in gun rights than in gay rights. He rejects political correctness and the language-police and woke ideology as un-American. And he promises to reclaim the jobs that previous presidents (of both parties) allowed to be shipped abroad. In sum, he offers a relatively coherent set of beliefs and policies that are attractive to many voters and which he has been better at seeing implemented than any previous Republican president. What Trump supporters who rioted in D.C. share are the beliefs that Trump is their hero, regardless of his flaws, and that defeating Democrats is a holy war to be waged by any means necessary.

It seems to me that if we really wanted to defuse this bomb, we would cease and desist with the identity politics, across the board, return to speaking the language of old-fashioned classical liberalism, and figure out a politics of doing more to ameliorate class differences. Having major corporations now double down on declaring white grievances absolutely null, and punishing those who have any sympathy with them, is only going to fuel the bonfire of rage.

The fact is that working-class white people know that among liberals — including liberal whites — it is permissible to say anything you want about them with impunity. They know that there are double standards in this country. They know how the predominantly black riots of last summer were framed. They know that the professions of shock over how the Trump mob treated lawmakers were not heard last summer when a hostile BLM mob surrounded Republican Sen. Rand Paul on the streets of DC. They know where they stand in this culture, vis-à-vis elite discourse and practices. That is not going away. The Capitol Hill insurrection, and Trump’s big fat mouth, only makes it vastly harder for these people with genuine grievances to get a hearing.

It is not a popular thing to say right now, a week after the shocking violence, but here it is: there are plenty of white people who are hurting and confused, and who don’t support that riot. What about them? Are they bad too? There are plenty of white people who have been seduced by the lies of QAnon and the MAGA extremists — people who aren’t bad, but who have been misled. What do we do with them? This is a moment in which they might be pulled back from radicalism — or driven more deeply into it.

The choice is theirs, above all. But it’s also ours. Both parties have to do more to reduce income inequality and increase opportunity. The Democrats have to surrender the language and policies of identity politics, in favor of old-school liberalism. Yet politics alone can’t solve the problems of decay and dissolution. This is a problem of church and culture. That’s another story… .

UPDATE: Here’s one example of double standards. Writing in today’s Wall Street Journal, TAC’s Helen Andrews recalls how a left-wing riot meant to disrupt the 1968 Democratic Convention has been lionized by the Left. Excerpt:

The Chicago Seven were countercultural heroes in the 1960s. They thumbed their noses through one of the country’s most notorious political trials, taunting the judge and making a mockery of the proceedings with flippant courtroom pranks. Aaron Sorkin wrote and directed a movie about them last year, “The Trial of the Chicago 7,” which will probably win a few Oscars.

One thing people forget about the Chicago Seven is that most of them were guilty. Jerry Rubin admitted as much later: “We wanted disruption. We planned it. . . . We were guilty as hell. Guilty as charged.”

The crime they were accused of was crossing state lines to incite a riot. The defendants believed that Vice President Hubert Humphrey’s 1968 nomination for presidency was illegitimate. Nominations in those days were decided not by primaries but by backroom deals among party power brokers. The antiwar movement believed that a more democratic process would have produced a candidate opposed to the Vietnam War.

The question was whether the violent clashes between protesters and police outside the 1968 Democratic National Convention in Chicago were an unfortunate consequence of peaceful marching that got out of hand, or whether the organizers intended for things to get violent.

In February 1970, a jury convicted the five ringleaders—Rubin, Abbie Hoffman, Tom Hayden, David Dellinger and Rennie Davis. Peaceful protest is one thing, but attempting to disrupt a legitimate election procedure by violent intimidation is never acceptable. After last week’s incursion at the Capitol, can the rest of us finally agree?

If we can’t, then we are going to continue to have violence … unless the Establishment can suppress it with force and a social credit system.

The post White Riot appeared first on The American Conservative.

Impeachment As Exorcism

The president is not one bit sorry:

President Donald Trump on Tuesday defended as “totally appropriate” the speech he made at a rally last week that was followed by his supporters launching a deadly siege of the Capitol.

In his first live remarks since the violence last Wednesday, Trump deflected blame and sought to highlight other politicians’ comments last summer about protests against racial injustice and police brutality.

“If you read my speech — and many people have done it, and I’ve seen it both in the papers and in the media, on television — it’s been analyzed, and people thought that what I said was totally appropriate,” Trump told reporters at Joint Base Andrews, en route to Alamo, Texas.

“And if you look at what other people have said — politicians at a high level — about the riots during the summer, the horrible riots in Portland and Seattle and various other places, that was a real problem, what they said,” Trump continued.

“But they’ve analyzed my speech and my words and my final paragraph, my final sentence, and everybody — to the tee — thought it was totally appropriate.”

This man deserves the most forceful repudiation possible. More than that, this country needs to know that its leadership, in both parties, regards this kind of behavior as utterly disqualifying for public office, or respect. A bright red line must be drawn and defended. Liz Cheney, the No. 3 in the House GOP leadership, has come out for impeachment. The Times reports that Sen. Mitch McConnell is saying that he would favor it, to make it easier for the GOP to purge itself of Trumpism:

Yet as they tried to balance the affection their core voters have for Mr. Trump with the now undeniable political and constitutional threat he posed, Republican congressional leaders who have loyally backed the president for four years were still stepping delicately. Their refusal to demand the president’s resignation and quiet plotting about how to address his conduct highlighted the gnawing uncertainty that they and many other Republicans have about whether they would pay more of a political price for abandoning him or for continuing to enable him after he incited a mob to storm the seat of government.

I find that dishonorable — worrying about whether or not you’ll pay a greater political price for abandoning Trump. Of course many of them will. But it’s the right thing to do. How about showing some leadership, for once? If the price of winning your next primary is remaining silent on the question of Trump and his post-election behavior, which culminated in the storming of the Capitol by a “Hang Mike Pence!” mob, then you have lost your priorities. If you cannot explain to voters why they are wrong to give a pass to a president who behaved as Trump has done, and what it means to have a president who fouls American democracy by rousing the rabble to break down the doors of the Capitol and shout for lynching the vice president, then why are you in public service? If that’s what it takes to keep your job, why would you even want a job like that? Honestly, I do not get it.

Ross Douthat discusses how Trump may well have destroyed the Republican Party. Excerpts:

Here’s how it could happen. First, the party’s non-Trumpist faction — embodied by senators like Mitt Romney and Lisa Murkowski, various purple- and blue-state governors and most of the remaining Acela corridor conservatives, from lawyers and judges to lobbyists and staffers — pushes for a full repudiation of Trump and all his works, extending beyond impeachment to encompass support for social-media bans, F.B.I. surveillance of the MAGA universe and more.

At the same time, precisely those measures further radicalize portions of the party’s base, offering apparent proof that Trump was right — that the system isn’t merely consolidating against but actively persecuting them. With this sense of persecution in the background and the Trump family posturing as party leaders, the voter-fraud mythology becomes a litmus test in many congressional elections, and baroque conspiracy theories pervade primary campaigns.

In this scenario, what remains of the center-right suburban vote and the G.O.P. establishment becomes at least as NeverTrump as Romney, if not the Lincoln Project; meanwhile, the core of Trump’s support becomes as paranoid as Q devotees. Maybe this leads to more empty acts of violence, further radicalizing the center right against the right, or maybe it just leads to Republican primaries producing a lot more candidates like Marjorie Taylor Greene of Georgia, to the point where a big chunk of the House G.O.P. occupies not just a different tactical reality from the party’s elite but a completely different universe.

Either way, under these conditions that party could really collapse or really break. The collapse would happen if Trumpists with a dolchstoss [stabbed-in-the-back] narrative and a strong Q vibe start winning nominations for Senate seats and governorships in states that right now only lean Republican. A party made insane and radioactive by conspiracy theories could keep on winning deep-red districts, but if its corporate support bailed, its remaining technocrats jumped ship and suburban professionals regarded it as the party of insurrection, it could easily become a consistent loser in 30 states or more.

Alternatively, a party dominated by the Trump family at the grassroots level, with Greene-like figures as its foot soldiers, could become genuinely untenable as a home for centrist and non-Trumpist politicians. So after the renomination of Trump himself or the nomination of Don Jr. in 2024, a cluster of figures (senators like Romney and Susan Collins, blue-state governors like Maryland’s Larry Hogan) might simply jump ship to form an independent mini-party, leaving the G.O.P. as a 35 percent proposition, a heartland rump.

Read it all. 

I don’t see how the GOP avoids this fate. As Douthat points out early in his column, the Republicans have had to hold together during the Trump years by depending on having enough people who are able to tolerate Trump’s excesses for the good things his presidency has meant for them, even if it’s only keeping liberalism at bay. That’s blown sky-high now.

He’s talking about people like me. As bad as Trump was on many things, and even though I didn’t vote for him, I found him tolerable, mostly because the alternative from an increasingly woke Democratic Party and liberal establishment was even worse. Besides, though Trump was a particularly flawed messenger, the populism that he brought to the Republican mainstream was on balance good for a party that could not seem to break free of zombie Reaganism.

So, when, on Election Night, Sen. Josh Hawley — for me, a real hope for the conservative future — tweeted out that the GOP is now a working-class party, I saw that as good news. Trump might lose, but the track he put the Republican Party on was a good one, I thought.

But then he started up with the Stop The Steal garbage, and disparaging election officials. He trash-talked Georgia election officials, and ended up costing the GOP the Senate, and giving the Democrats unified control of Washington. Then came January 6.

There is no way I will have anything to do with a QAnon party. None. What the MAGA mob did last week was vile and extremely unpatriotic, and if a party of the Right cannot condemn it meaningfully, then that party has not the slightest appeal to me. I don’t understand how anybody can claim to love this country and support what that mob did, or even dismiss it as not so bad.

Even though I really do believe Sen. Romney has acted with honor and courage in this crisis, I don’t have any interest in a Romneyite breakaway party that would attempt to restore the pre-Trump status quo. The problem with Trumpism was Trump, not populism.

No doubt people like me are the smallest sliver in the conservative voter coalition, and we don’t matter much anyway. Most Republican voters would be able to make a choice between the two right-of-center parties, I suspect. But such a split would mean a long-term era of Democratic dominance has arrived.

Whether or not he is impeached and convicted, it seems unavoidable that Donald Trump will leave Washington having destroyed the Republican Party. If he had behaved just a bit more normally last year, he might have won re-election. Had he accepted his defeat like a normal person, he would have remained a kingmaker in the GOP, and could have been satisfied that he changed the Republican Party in his own image.

But that’s not the choice he made. After the once-unthinkable damage that man has done to the Republican Party, to political conservatism, and to American democracy, he deserves total repudiation. Politicians that cannot muster the wherewithal to issue a rebuke to this president, or any president who behaves as Trump has done, is not one that is going to command respect, loyalty, or votes outside of the hardcore Trumpists.

I had an extremely frustrating conversation this evening with a friend who believes all of this was invented by the Left to discredit the president. The narrative is unfalsifiable. It’s not a question of a political disagreement; it’s about living outside of reality. All day long I’ve been getting e-mails from people who are really suffering because beloved friends and family members — even elderly parents — are completely lost in this toxic unreality of paranoia and conspiracy. I’ve never seen anything like it in my life, aside from woke militants. Something demonic is in the air. We might not need an impeachment and conviction so much as we need an exorcism.

If you think I’m overreacting with the demonic stuff, take a look at this interview with Arieh Kovler, an Israeli analyst who follows the pro-Trump Internet, and warned on December 21 that a MAGA mob on January 6 was going to try to storm the Capitol. Excerpt:

What did they think they were being called on to do?

They thought, “This is the thing we have been asked to do. Trump is telling us to do this, so we have to do it.” But more than that, it must be important enough, the key to his winning. Because why would he ask us to come to Washington if it wasn’t part of the plan? It wouldn’t make any sense. There’s a trend among the Trump fans—it’s almost religious—to see him as basically infallible and any mistakes are caused by bad people around him. He wouldn’t be calling us to Washington unless there was a purpose that would ultimately end in him winning the election.

So they saw that, and are convinced they’re coming in order to win the election. Or perhaps they’re going to be an army. You can see the discussions around this: “Why has he asked us to come? Surely there’s a reason.” They would say, “Should we bring guns? Is he asking us to bring guns? But maybe he doesn’t want us to be armed because if we’re armed we’ll get in trouble, and we need to be there.”

The other part of it this is that since the late summer, when Trump was falling in polls and Biden was polling thoroughly ahead, the one thing I picked up from all parts of Trump World—from the QAnon-ish to the MAGA-ish to fairly moderate conservatives—is: Trump’s gonna win. You didn’t see that from people supporting Biden. You saw, you really hope he wins. The Trump people thought: Trump’s going to win and not only is he going to win, you smug liberals, you’re going to have the smile wiped off your face. This ideology really took hold and a lot of people really believed it. Trump was continually telling them everything was in the bag and he was massively ahead and we’re going to win California and it’s going to be a landslide.

Come Election Day, he doesn’t win. So all these people go, “Wait, it can’t be. How could Trump possibly lose an election that everyone I know knew he was going to win?” I could just see a certain reality catching up with [them], and it would have to be on that day [of the certification]. And once they saw Trump saying to his supporters, come to DC on that day, I could see it going the wrong way.

You could see the discussion become less abstract. By last week, these people were sharing maps of D.C. They were talking about having enough of them that they would be able to erect basically their own cadre around the entire area of Congress. They had a map of the tunnels [in the basement of the Capitol], and they were talking about how they’re going to be able to stop Congress from leaving. They imagined that this was the day there were going to be mass executions of Congressmen.

But a lot of them also just imagined they were going to be there for this historic time when Trump pulled away the curtain and revealed that all of Congress were traitors and then took his just and equal revenge. There were a variety of characters: people who were there to watch Trump gain control and people who thought Trump would win, but only by activating the military, [with] a proper military coup that they supported. They thought they were there to go and purge Congress. They were there to stop the certification. They were there to punish those who went against Trump. When you put them all together, you get this explosive mixture.

The only thing that surprised me was that it was not the army I expected it to be.

By that Kovler means that he thought they would be armed. Read it all. 

The conservative Catholic writer John Jalsevac explains why he’s so angry right now. Excerpts:

Nothing, absolutely nothing, has disturbed me more over the past four years, than the weird misuse of Christian religious language, spirituality and mysticism in service of the Trumpist political agenda. I’ve written about this elsewhere, and so I won’t repeat myself here.

However, I will add that I hope the day will come when I will see other alleged Trumpist “prophets,” or the people who spread their prophesies, apologizing for misleading the faithful, as Christian leader Jeremiah Johnson recently did (And has since received death threats for so doing.)

The effect of these alleged prophesies has been to endow political loyalties with a degree of religious fervor and conviction that rightly belong only to God. Clad in the certitude of total faith, Trumpist true believers have breezily rejected every inconvenient fact or event or piece of evidence as a diabolical deception. After all, what do your “facts” matter, when God Himself has told us the truth? Eric Metaxas even stated that he didn’t need evidence that the election had been stolen; he knew that Trump had been re-elected, because God was on Trump’s side.

In reality, this was the diabolical deception: the complete confusion of spiritual and political loyalties; the rejection of reason and fact in favor of credulous belief in unproven and untested “prophesies” that amounted to little more than wish fulfillment fantasies rubberstamped with divine endorsement.

In the world of Trumpism, religious principles were rewritten to accommodate Trump, rather than Trump being measured according to religious principles. The mere fact that Trump openly used religious language and imagery and made overt gestures to a religious demographic was taken as a de facto triumph, indisputable evidence that the President was bringing the United States back to God, that his faith was sincere, that he was God’s instrument doing God’s work.

And if you doubted this, it was because you lacked faith.

The result was a weird, perverse form of Christian nationalism. As Russell Moore wrote this week:

The sight of “Jesus Saves” and “God Bless America” signs by those violently storming the Capitol is about more than just inconsistency. It is about a picture of Jesus Christ and of his gospel that is satanic. The mixing of the Christian religion with crazed and counter-biblical cults such as Q-Anon is telling the outside world that this is what the gospel is. That’s a lie, and it is blasphemous against a holy God.

Trump has not brought the country back to God. He and his grifter friends have infiltrated and perverted the Church, exploiting Christians’ spiritual loyalties to serve his personal ambitions, recreating the church in MAGA’s image, and luring us away from our core religious, ethical and political principles.

So yeah, I’m angry.

More:

I have said since the first day of Trump’s presidency, that the primary result of his presidency would be to foment a backlash from the left that would not only erase whatever conservative gains he pursued in the meantime, but would ensure that conservatives were ultimately far worse off than if he had never been president.

It is hard to deny that this is where we find ourselves now: Most of Trump’s accomplishments were accomplished through personnel changes or executive orders. All of this will be wiped out on the first day of the Biden administration. Meanwhile, MAGA has descended into a rat’s nest of violence, conspiracy theorizing, and cultish thinking, culminating in a horrific attack on the seat of democracy that has given the tech giants the excuse and public support they need to conduct a purge, silencing and marginalizing conservative voices. Meanwhile, the whole GOP is weakened by this internal civil war, the conservative movement divided and rendered ineffectual by ferocious disagreements over the personality who has dominated our every waking hour for the past five years.

The right’s response right now is to blame everything on the left. No doubt, the left bears a great deal of the blame. I can recite the litany of leftist crimes of the past four years as well as anybody else. But I have lost all patience with whataboutism. I have lost all patience with the mental habit of eschewing responsibility by responding to all criticism or internal self-doubt by reciting the litany of grievances against the left.

All we had to do, was stay true our principles: Truth matters. Character matters. Charity, decency, honesty, the rule of law, love for our enemies, humility, goodness – all of these matter.

Some conservatives have been asking me why I’m directing so much of my anger at “our side,” when the “other side” has done so many horrible things. The short answer? Because I’m not responsible for the other side. I can’t change them. I have no influence over them. I am not surprised when my enemies do things I disagree with. It doesn’t make me angry, because I never expected anything different.

But when my own side abandons its own principles willy-nilly, and then girds itself in the impregnable armour of puerile whataboutism (“Ok, so we did riot a little. But what about all those BLM riots over the summer, huh? Why didn’t the media get as angry about those!”), then I get angry.

Read it all. I’m sick of it too. Today I spoke to someone who — how shall I put this? — is in a professional position to know what the capabilities of surveillance are, and what it likely to happen next. This person reached out to me to say they had read Live Not By Lies, and that all of it is spot on — except that it’s actually worse than I say in the book. This person said that because of what happened in Washington on January 6, all the soft-totalitarian things that I write about in the book are going to come at Christians and conservatives much faster.

I’m open to hearing arguments in the comments section for why Congress should not impeach and convict Trump. But I’m weary of hearing I told you so from the Left, and whatabout and traitor! from the Right. If you have something substantive and meaningful to say about this, comment away. If you just want to shout, taunt, or troll, save it, because I’ll spike your comment.

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