Rod Dreher's Blog, page 89

Defending Ignatius Reilly

Above you can see Self, in the attractive Ignatian millinery, with S. Frederick Starr and, on the right, the infamous New Orleans boulevardier Ken Bickford. Fred is an academic, jazz clarinetist, author, and the owner of Lombard Plantation, an 1825 house and small property that he and his wife bought and restored in the New Orleans Bywater neighborhood. Fred is also a devotee of A Confederacy Of Dunces, and was delighted that when I visited him on Sunday night, I recognized the bottle of Ignatius’s favorite tipple. Fred told Ken and me that many years ago, Thelma Toole, the mother of Confederacy author John Kennedy Toole, has given him a personal tour of all the sites in town that her son, who died a suicide before his novel was published, used in his book. Can you imagine? It’s like Dante’s poet pal Guido Cavalcanti squiring a fellow around Florence.

Well, my valve slammed shut when I read the new essay in The New Yorker by Tom Bissell, in which he concluded that ACOD is overrated. 

I first read “A Confederacy of Dunces” when I was in my early twenties. Of that reading I can recall only a vivid, tingling antipathy, akin to walking into a party and realizing instantly that you want to leave. The book, which has become a classic of Southern literature and a mainstay on college syllabi, is entertaining—by any metric, the work of a hugely promising young writer. It’s also repetitive and numbingly antic. Shorn of its unusual publishing history and its author’s heartbreaking fate, it’s hard to imagine it receiving anything resembling the acclaim that occasioned its 1980 publication, much less the Pulitzer Prize that it was awarded, by a jury eager to tweak the New York publishing leviathan. Toole would almost certainly have published better novels had he been given the opportunity to write them.

Still, as I settled into the book again, twenty-three years later, I was surprised by how much I enjoyed it. For one, there is its impish spirit; Toole’s jolly novel of New Orleans remains somewhat anomalous in the Southern canon, especially in how it skewers that canon’s presiding deity. “Veneration of Mark Twain is one of the roots of our current intellectual stalemate,” Ignatius asserts at one point. At another, he refers to Twain as a “dreary fraud” and announces, “I have never seen cotton growing and have no desire to do so.” “A Confederacy of Dunces” might be the only novel ever written about New Orleans in which jazz is described as “obscene.”

One of the novel’s particular virtues is its screwball dialogue, the closest approximation of which might be that of the Coen brothers’ great comedic films: “The Big Lebowski,” “Raising Arizona.” Of the writers of his era, Toole most closely resembles Joseph Heller, William Gaddis, and Stanley Elkin, all of whom were partial to dialogue-heavy novels. But Toole’s characters don’t use human speech to exchange useful information. Although they argue constantly, they never do anything so banal as change their minds. They’re more akin to musicians, each waiting for a chance to solo. Early in the novel, Ignatius stands outside a department store with his mother while a dim-witted police officer named Mancuso attempts to arrest him:

“How old is he?” the policeman asked Mrs. Reilly.

“I am thirty,” Ignatius said condescendingly.

“You got a job?”

“Ignatius hasta help me at home,” Mrs. Reilly said. . . . “I got terrible arthuritis.”

“I dust a bit,” Ignatius told the policeman. “In addition, I am at the moment writing a lengthy indictment against our century. When my brain begins to reel from my literary labors, I make an occasional cheese dip.”

“Ignatius makes delicious cheese dips,” Mrs. Reilly said.

This confrontation sets the novel in motion, for, shortly after Ignatius and Irene make their escape, Irene smashes her car into a building, causes a thousand dollars in damage, and forces Ignatius to go to work to help pay off her debts.

OK, stop there. I know people who can’t stand ACOD, and know it from near the beginning. It has to do with the fact that Ignatius Reilly is a grotesque. He is slovenly, arrogant, gross, flatulent, rude — just an awful person. There are some folks in this world who cannot stand the thought of reading a book about such a character. He makes them nervous. The whole world Toole brings vividly to life makes some people nervous. I’m not exactly sure why — I think it has to do with the fact that it’s hard to put the characters into neat boxes; this is something that people who aren’t from the South often find hard to figure out about the South. Anyway, I think Bissell is being true to his own instincts. Tom Bissell is from Michigan. Everybody from New Orleans who has read ACOD recognizes instantly how realistic the characters are. People really are like that down here! I don’t want to say, “He’s a Yankee, he wouldn’t understand,” because that’s a crude judgment to make. On the other hand, I have seen ACOD have that effect on people who come from cultures that recoil from grotesques.

My wife, for example, raised in suburban Dallas within a middle-class Southern Baptist world. She finds Ignatius awful, and nothing about him and his world interesting. She reads far more widely in fiction than I do, and has better taste in it. Her response to ACOD is something like my response when I tried to read Henry Miller in my early 20s: there is nothing about him or his world that I find interesting, or at least the things that are interesting are inaccessible because the world Miller creates is so repulsive.

Back to Bissell and ACOD. He didn’t like the book when he first read it, so why would he read it again? Maybe to see if he was wrong the first time? Fair enough. Lo, he finds Ignatius just as disgusting this time around:

These antics, so jarring to modern sensibilities, can nevertheless be hilarious. (The Levy Pants sequence especially is a comedic tour de force.) But Ignatius simply is not compelling enough to make lovable the repulsive qualities that his creator takes immense pains to describe, such as the smell of his body (“old tea bags,” we’re told), his filthy bedsheets, or his volcanic flatulence. By the time I hit page 241, which finds Ignatius feeling “worse and worse” and describes how “great belches tipped out of the gas pockets of his stomach and tore through his digestive tract,” I suddenly recalled why I found the novel so repellent the first time I read it. It’s not that I “don’t like” or “can’t relate” to Ignatius; no serious reader should care about such things. It’s more that, at every turn, Ignatius is exactly the character you expect him to be. Late in the novel, one character asks him, “Don’t you ever shut up?” He doesn’t. That’s the problem.

This is the first time I’ve ever encountered anyone complaining that Ignatius is not lovable. Of course he’s not lovable! You aren’t expected to see him as some farty Ewok. Do you think Flannery O’Connor’s characters are lovable, in the conventional sense? It’s silly to expect characters in film or fiction to be lovable; we only have a right to expect them to be interesting.

And Ignatius is that. He’s an intelligent, educated man who is so alienated from the world around him that he exists in a constant state of rebellion against it. But he is also lonely and a stranger to himself. He doesn’t recognize his own vices, which, after the laughter of his antics dies down, make him a tragic figure. It is an old story that professional comedians are often really sad people who developed an acute comic sense to cope with their sense of outsiderness. I used to know a guy — not a comedian — who is very, very funny, and who denounces with Ignatian ferocity and (in his case, knowingly comic) pomposity about What’s Wrong With The World. He used that humor as a coping strategy. Deep down, he was never comfortable in the world. Maybe he was a man out of time. Ignatius certainly is.

What makes Ignatius so amusing is that he is captive to his own reality, the disjunction of which with the real world is inherently funny. What makes him so tragic is that he can’t deliver himself from that world. The novel ends with him escaping New Orleans. The idea is maybe living in a crazy city made him crazy, so finding a new place to live could mean a new start for him. But the reader (well, this reader) is sure that wherever Ignatius goes, he will not be able to escape himself.

I love this book in part because I am fascinated by grotesques, and because I know the world Toole writes about is real. I didn’t grow up in New Orleans, but these people in the book have their close analogues all over south Louisiana. I also love it because though I am a much nicer and far less flatulent man than Ignatius Reilly, I share his quixotic sense of being at odds with modernity. Maybe one difference is that I understand myself enough to laugh at myself, I dunno. The guy who wrote a book talking of the virtues of a key figure of the early Middle Ages, and what they have to teach us living in the ruins of modernity, is naturally going to find a sense of affinity with Ignatius. After all, Boethius, Ignatius’s philosophical lodestar, was a contemporary of St. Benedict’s.

Anyway, it will not surprise you to learn that Bissell does not care for the novel because it is politically incorrect by 2021 standards (as it was by the standards of the early 1980s, when it was published, but we used to be more sophisticated and less puritanical than we are now):

MacLauchlin, Toole was influenced by Cervantes, Dickens, and Evelyn Waugh. From Cervantes, he likely inherited his love of episodic, picaresque narrative; from Dickens, his fondness for grotesque yet effective characterization; from Waugh, his taste for mock-heroic snobbery. “With the breakdown of the Medieval system,” Ignatius writes, in one of his treatises, “the gods of Chaos, Lunacy, and Bad Taste gained ascendency.” That Toole might have been only half kidding when giving voice to such pronouncements was suggested forty years ago, by the critic Jonathan Rosenbaum. “A fair amount of the author’s ridicule and venom is reserved for female liberals and liberationists,” Rosenbaum noted, while the book’s “ostensible right-wingers” (such as Mancuso, the moronic police officer in desperate search of someone to arrest) are usually depicted “as lovably harmless and ineffectual creatures.” Rosenbaum, who admired the novel, nevertheless judged it to be “reactionary.” Well, there’s reactionary and there’s reactionary. Ignatius doesn’t want to go back to the nineteen-fifties, or even the eighteen-fifties. He wants to go back to the thirteen-fifties.

Well, yes — and that’s why it’s funny! What kind of puritanical mindset casts a suspicious glance at ACOD because it makes fun of the Freud-obsessed feminist Myrna Minkoff? Claude Robichaux, the suitor of Ignatius’s mother Irene, is always ranting about the “communiss” — Toole’s obvious mockery of right-wing conspiracy thinking. It requires motivated reasoning to see Claude and Patrolman Mancuso as “lovably harmless” but think that Toole is unfairly trashing feminists and liberationists (I guess by that he means the Crusade for Moorish Dignity that Ignatius organizes).

Also:

This might account for [editor Robert] Gottlieb’s complaint that “Dunces” wasn’t “about anything.” In one sense, the critique is well founded. Toole’s characters seem bizarrely determined—even proud—to learn nothing from their choices, other people, or the world around them.

Yes, and that is the point! More:

Toole either didn’t care about or couldn’t achieve a traditionally satisfying narrative. What did interest him? Character, mainly, though a peculiarly prescribed form of it. Over and over in “Dunces,” Toole launches his obdurately one-dimensional creations into predicaments that they are comically incapable of understanding, and then mercilessly records the results. Artistically speaking, this is the book’s core problem: the thing that makes it interesting is also the thing that makes it unsatisfying.

But character is everything in that novel! Everyone in that book is a lesser version of Ignatius — everyone except Jones, the black janitor, whose shuck-and-jive mannerisms are the mask he wears. Jones, ostensibly the Fool, is the only one in the novel who has everybody’s number.

I honestly don’t understand complaining about a novel in which nobody Learns Valuable Lessons, at least not when that novel is A Confederacy Of Dunces. We’re not talking War And Peace here. P.G. Wodehouse wrote eleven uproarious comic novels about Jeeves and Wooster. Nobody ever learns anything from the comic adventures of the characters. They all remain more or less the same. Those novels are comic masterpieces. Has any critic ever raised an objection to them because Bertie Wooster never learns from his mistakes, or Aunt Dahlia fails to become a nicer person, etc.?

What a weird essay Bissell has written. But one that is sadly true to our time. We have forgotten how to laugh at ourselves. We have forgotten how to laugh. We can’t just sit back and smile at the folly of humankind. No sir, we have to be Serious, and sternly moral. I guess we are all Yankees now. Ignatius’s absurd reactionary crusades are all about trying to create utopia (as are those of his former girlfriend, leftist Myrna Minkoff), but you cannot build a pavilion in Paradise with the crooked timber of humanity. One of the genius themes of this book is to reveal the ridiculousness of utopia. Ignatius, a very lonely man, can only see others as projects (again, as does Myrna). He doesn’t see them in their humanity. The scenes in the Prytania Theater, when he rages at the actors on screen, reveal a profound darkness in his soul. He’s not just a world-class eccentric, but like some other utopians, he actually hates people, because he hates himself.

What a glorious book! Don’t let clueless Yankee moralism ruin it for you.

The other night, sitting around with Fred and Ken talking over pizza, and telling funny stories about characters we’ve known, Fred said, “Isn’t this what life is about? Enjoying food and wine, and talking pleasantly about the world around us?” Of course it is. Fred Starr is not from New Orleans (he was born in Cincinnati), and he lives most of the time in Washington now, but he told me that he was drawn to New Orleans is because it is so humane in its eccentricities. You can gallivant all over the city and meet people today who are a lot like all the characters in A Confederacy of Dunces. Not too many people are going to hold you to high account for morally improving yourself. They will judge you, though, on your gumbo. After leaving Fred and Ken, and the best evening I have had in almost a year of lockdown, to drive back to Baton Rouge, I thought, “O Fortuna, why don’t I live in this town?”

Conor Friedersdorf, Ignatius, and me, on Canal Street

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Who Is The MLK Of The Deplorables?

This is blowing up on the right-wing Internets this morning. It’s a Project Veritas undercover compilation of the chief legal counsel for PBS letting it all hang out regarding his opinions of conservatives:

BREAKING: @PBS Principal Counsel Michael Beller Incites Political Violence In Radical Left-Wing Agenda

“Go to the White House & throw Molotov cocktails…”

“Even if Biden wins, we go for all the Republican voters, Homeland Security will take their children away…”#ExposePBS pic.twitter.com/OzBLeCP8YH

— James O’Keefe (@JamesOKeefeIII) January 12, 2021

You should watch the whole thing. You might say that they took these quotes out of context. But listen to the whole thing — there is no way any of that sounds any better in any context.

I am utterly confident that this man, Michael Beller, means what he says. I heard that same kind of hatred from time to time when I moved in circles that included elites like him. So many of you readers have over the years reported the same kind of extreme spite within the media, academic, and corporate circles where you work.

People like Beller really do hate us. He is a powerful man. They are all powerful, within their own spheres. Here’s the thing, though: when people on the Right do things like give themselves over to quixotic quests like “Stop The Steal,” show up at big public rallies with guns (even legally brandished), and, I dunno, stage an insurrection on the US Capitol and stomp around the halls chanting, “Hang Mike Pence!” — things like that only increase and solidify the power of people like Michael Beller.

They do so because they confirm the views of those people, and also of liberals and moderates who don’t share Beller’s hatred, but fear the right-wing mob more than they loathe Beller’s bitchy snobbery.

Here’s a thought experiment. Imagine that it’s 1957, and a young civil rights activist secretly records a high-level Washington bureaucrat — someone of Beller’s station — making the same kind of vicious remarks about black civil rights advocates. What would be the smarter move?

For civil rights leaders and activists to stage marches, including violent marches, and embrace violent rhetoric; orFor those same leaders and activists to embrace peaceful rhetoric and actions, including civil disobedience, to gain sympathy for their cause?

The answer is obvious. The civil rights leaders knew that they were badly outnumbered, and that if they were going to prevail, they had to win a majority of Americans to their cause. They did this through non-violence. Can you imagine how hard it was for King and the others to take beatings and abuse, year after year, without fighting back?

But that’s how they won! That, and having concrete goals.

You will remember that the Democratic data scientist David Shor lost his job last summer for posting this data. The loony young left within the Democratic party professional establishment despised him for casting a shadow of a doubt over whether or not the BLM protests and riots were anything but splendid:

Post-MLK-assasination race riots reduced Democratic vote share in surrounding counties by 2%, which was enough to tip the 1968 election to Nixon. Non-violent protests *increase* Dem vote, mainly by encouraging warm elite discourse and media coverage. https://t.co/S8VZSuaz3G. pic.twitter.com/VRUwnRFuVW

— (((David Shor))) (@davidshor) May 28, 2020

Take the same logic and apply it to our situation on the Right. After the Washington insurrection, do you really think that the share of Republican vote will increase because of that?

In the year of race riots, Antifa, “All Cops Are Bastards,” and so forth, had Donald Trump had been only a bit more normal, he would have been re-elected and the Senate would still be Republican. But that’s not how it shook out.

The Right has to understand that it has the Michael Beller class firmly against us — and they hold the power in this society. Violent radicalism, and the language of violent radicalism, only increases their power. Trump pulled off an extraordinary thing, getting elected, and showed the power of populist ideas. But he did not govern with discipline or intelligence, or by principle, and thus squandered a golden opportunity. It is going to be hard to get that opportunity back. Inevitably the hatred the the Belleristas will cause them to overplay their hand, in the same way the passions of the MAGA mob drove it to do the same thing. But we can’t count on that.

We need serious strategy. We need serious leadership: moral, disciplined, driven by love, not hate. The question is this: Who is the Martin Luther King of the Deplorables?

Do we even have the culture on the Right — especially in the churches — capable of producing  an MLK of the Deplorables?

UPDATE: Michael Beller resigned. 

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Leviathan Vs. Kraken

ABC News reports:

Starting this week and running through at least Inauguration Day, armed protests are being planned at all 50 state capitols and at the U.S. Capitol, according to an internal FBI bulletin obtained by ABC News.

The FBI has also received information in recent days on a group calling for “storming” state, local and federal government courthouses and administrative buildings in the event President Donald Trump is removed from office prior to Inauguration Day. The group is also planning to “storm” government offices in every state the day President-elect Joe Biden will be inaugurated, regardless of whether the states certified electoral votes for Biden or Trump.

“The FBI received information about an identified armed group intending to travel to Washington, DC on 16 January,” the bulletin read. “They have warned that if Congress attempts to remove POTUS via the 25th Amendment, a huge uprising will occur.”

Along those lines, this is going around on right-wing social media:

 

What do these fools hope to accomplish? “Demand freedom”? “End the corruption”? Empty words. Are they coming out with their guns to frighten people? What they’re going to do is draw down the full weight of the state onto them — and for what?

There is nothing good, pure, noble, heroic, patriotic, or godly about any of this. And among other things, it’s dumb as hell. Here’s a great piece by Nicholas Grossman, a professor who teaches about national security.

Grossman write, addressing “the QAnon community, and others involved in storming the Capitol”:

You cheered on lawyers who said they’d release the Kraken. But now you’ve poked Leviathan.

What does he mean? Excerpts:

The Deep State is real, but it’s not what you think. The Deep State you worry about is mostly made up; a fiction, a lie, a product of active imaginations, grifter manipulations, and the internet. I’m telling you this now because storming the Capitol building has drawn the attention of the real Deep State — the national security bureaucracy — and it’s important you understand what that means.

You attacked America. Maybe you think it was justified — as a response to a stolen election, or a cabal of child-trafficking pedophiles, or whatever — but it was still a violent attack on the United States. No matter how you describe it, that’s how the real Deep State is going to treat it.

The impact of that will make everything else feel like a LARP.

More:

U.S. code defines “sedition” as using “force to prevent, hinder, or delay the execution of any law of the United States.” That’s what you did. And the legal process you tried to stop is one of the most important in American democracy.

Five people are dead, and it could’ve easily been more. You beat a police officer to death and injured others. You set up a gallows and chanted “hang Mike Pence.” While some goofy attention-seekers attracted the most focus at first, it’s increasingly clear that some who stormed the Capitol, likely members of far right militias, were searching for Vice President Pence, Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi, Senate Minority Leader Chuck Schumer, and other national leaders, and would’ve killed them if they had the chance. That’s terrorism, fortunately thwarted by Capitol security and luck.

Compare that to, for example, riots this past summer. Looting is bad, but it’s a problem for police and insurance companies. Trying to burn down a police station or courthouse is worse, but that too is a law enforcement problem, perhaps one requiring federal assistance. Storming the Capitol, forcefully hindering the execution of U.S. law, and trying to kill top elected officials is a national security problem.

What you did was on another level, and the reaction will be too.

You really do need to read the whole thing — especially if you or anyone you care about is involved with QAnon or adjacent movements. People are going to destroy their lives. This is not a game.

Look at this guy:

People who broke into the Capitol Wednesday are now learning they are on No-Fly lists pending the full investigation. They are not happy about this. pic.twitter.com/5GfHo1eVU8

— Ray [REDACTED] (@RayRedacted) January 10, 2021

He’s crying like a baby because — surprise! — he’s on the no-fly list. He wails that they’re trying to ruin his life. This is coming. You know how I talk about us getting a Chinese-style social credit system here? This is part of it. What happens when everyone associated with QAnon or one of these protests gets put on the no-fly list? In China, if you behave like what the government considers to be a bad citizen, you get put on things like no-fly lists, and can’t go anywhere that you can’t get to by car.

They can do many, many other things to you. You can be shut out of whole areas of the economy. Hey, if you are only on the no-fly list, that means you cannot get a job that requires you to fly. Maybe a company looking to hire you — a firm more sophisticated than Bubba’s Bait Stand — does a background check on you, and finds that you’re on the no-fly list. They call you in to explain that — if you’re lucky. They’ll probably end up just throwing your CV in the trash can, because who wants to take a chance on a guy who ended up on the no-fly list by being part of a seditious action.

Nicholas Grossman is trying to tell y’all to wake up and understand what the Trump insurrectionists have done to anyone active in that movement. He says in his piece that the entire government system set up to fight Al Qaeda is going to turn on domestic terrorism. Because everything is connected in this wired world, you could end up in a world of hurt — again, in an American social credit system (except in China’s social credit system, you can earn your way out of a low rating; that’s not going to happen to those involved with seditious and violent activities).

In the UK, far-right figures who have not been involved in any crimes have lost their banking privileges — not by state action, but because their bank did not want to do business with them anymore. There’s no law forcing a bank to do business with you. I think there should be, as a protection for all people from politically motivated punishment by banks. But I’m fairly certain that in the US, that law does not exist now, so if a bank verified that you are on some sort of list of political extremists, they have the right to cut you off. There are lots of banks in the US, so you might be okay. But what if credit card companies refuse to issue you a card through your local bank?

You see how this might work? The state doesn’t have to move against you in any serious way for you to have your life radically changed by your involvement with QAnon and other groups like it.

The day may come when simply being a conservative or a particular kind of Christian will land you inside the informal social credit system. If that is the price of practicing my faith or standing up for my political convictions, I hope I have the courage to withstand the punishment. But if it should come to that, then I hope I will have taken a stand for something that matters, and not because I lost my damn mind to a crazypants political cult, or wanted to take my gun to the State Capitol to make some sort of statement on behalf of Donald Freaking Trump.

Let’s say you take your gun to your State Capitol, and because you live in an open-carry state, it’s legal. What happens if some excitable demonstrator starts shooting? Even if you get out of there alive, you can be quite sure that your face will have been captured on video by law enforcement, as well as Internet activists who will be eager to dox you and make sure your employer knows that you were part of that crowd. And then what?

The point is, last Wednesday was a bright red line. There’s no going back from it. And there will be no mercy for those who live the QAnon/seditionist lies going forward. You LARPers are putting the liberties and the livelihoods of all of us people on the Right at risk, for no good reason.

UPDATE: Reader Jonah R. left a good comment on the Lost MAGA/QAnon souls thread, but I’m afraid y’all won’t see it if I don’t publish it here. It fits:

I’m not a Republican, I’m only moderately conservative, I’ve considered Trump a con man from day one, and I don’t at all believe the election was stolen. I’m furious at those fools who stormed the Capitol last week and I look forward to their criminal sentences.

That said, I’m not surprised that people have been pushed toward insane ideas, because our media is a mess, Democratic politicians are hypocrites, and the standards for both decorum and truth change by the nanosecond.

In the District of Columbia, the city government endorsed Black Lives Matter and gave them their own special plaza, where they had massive demonstrations and street parties, sometimes with thousands of people, during a pandemic where we’re all supposed to be socially distant. Meanwhile, DC churches had to sue the government simply to hold small outdoor services, which didn’t happen until October, seven months into the pandemic.

We’ve had TV journalists literally standing in front of burning buildings insisting that demonstrations are peaceful. There’s been no federal manhunt for “riot tourists” who fly from Portland to DC on a whim to burn and break things. And nobody has criticized Antifa for bullying and threatening journalists who try to cover them, which has been happening for years.

And then there’s Governor Cuomo, who’s done a lousy job during COVID but somehow gets praise and a book deal. Leaders in cities all across the country tell us not to go to restaurants, not to leave our homes at Thanksgiving and Christmas, but they’re traveling, ignoring their own quarantine restrictions, getting special service at restaurants and hair salons, visiting family, and apparently living pretty normally.

Joe Biden, a political punchline since the ’80s, gets the presidential nomination even though he’s clearly past his prime. His VP choice is as tough on crime as a “Contract with America” Republican–but she makes dance videos and is brown and went to Howard, so all is forgiven.

And then there’s the Covington schoolkid who did nothing wrong except stand there wearing a hat he bought at a tourist stand, and the entire media jumps him.

And let’s not forget the governor of Virginia, who wore blackface and/or dressed as a Klansman in medical school, long after he should have known better. He doesn’t get hounded out of office because doing so might put a Republican in office. He goes on with his life. Roseanne Barr, who holds no power over anyone’s government or life, cracks a nasty joke about a black woman and her career is over.

Then you turn on the TV looking for same late-night laughs, and all of the shows have turned into recitations of Democratic talking points. One night back in the spring, all four of Jimmy Kimmel’s guests were Democratic politicians or pundits. You’re dying for someone to lob a softball at a Democrat, even a feeble joke about how Joe Biden looks like one of Jeff Dunham’s ventriloquism dummies.

And those are just the examples off the top of my head. Imagine turning on the TV, seeing this stuff, and wondering: Why isn’t anyone stating the obvious? Why aren’t these people consistent with their stated beliefs?

The QAnon stuff is asinine and leadership on the pro-Trump right is a clusterfudge of con men, blowhards, and loonies, but is it any wonder that there were people and groups waiting to tell the Trumpers they weren’t crazy for seeing what they plainly saw? Who’s more ripe to be conned by a cult than people who already know they’re being conned by someone else but aren’t sophisticated enough to grope toward the truth on their own?

All true! But are we on the Right really going to let the Democrats and the media get away with that by turning ourselves into crazy, violent people?

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Introducing ‘The General Eclectic’

My friend Kale Zelden finally talked me into doing a video podcast. We call it The General Eclectic. Kale’s a small-o orthodox Catholic, a teacher of literature, a fellow Louisiana guy, and a conservative. I think we talk well together, though I hate the sound of my own voice. The first episode is above. My audio was a bit off, but we’re going to fix that for the next edition. We recorded this one last Tuesday, the evening before the Washington MAGA insurrection. We record the second episode tomorrow.

What do you think? How could we improve?

UPDATE: Forgot to say that we’re both Southern guys who are religious conservatives, and really interested in religion and culture. But we are also eclectic, so we’re not going to only talk about religion and culture and politics.

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The Lost Souls Of MAGA & QAnon

This blog has been chronicling over the years the takeover of the progressive mind by the cult of Woke. Because the world I live in is predominantly an intellectual one, I am more in touch with conservatives who work and move within institutions like media, academia, and corporate America. The cult of Wokeness is very real to me, because of what my friends and contacts report. What this cult has done to the minds of those who have given themselves over to it is horrifying.

But in the past few days I am realizing that I did not know how far the Trump cult had gone into conquering the minds of its adherents. I mentioned that over the weekend, I spoke with a friend who completely believes that the MAGA riot on Capitol Hill was actually an Antifa operation, and, of course, that Trump obviously won the election in a landslide. Nothing anyone can say can falsify what this friend believes.

Well, this letter came in from a reader just now:

I’ve been talking with friends who are Trump supporters and I’m genuinely disturbed by the stuff they’ve been saying. So much so, I had to delete many of the messages because it was like reading the texts of some ancient Satanic cult or something. I’m not being facetious, either – the delusion has set in and it’s consumed them.They really believe this election was stolen. They really believe that Trump won by a landslide. They believe any judge who ruled against Trump, doesn’t agree with Trump’s version of events, even if they’re dyed-in-the-wool conservatives, is in on the fix, a liar, traitor, what have you. I mean, how can Trump be telling the truth 100% time, anyway?But, the worst part of all, they think what happened at the Capitol wasn’t only understandable, but legitimate, going as far as to say they should’ve seized and occupied the building! I really can’t say any more than that – it’s all crazy talk and, as much as I want to share what they said, in the principle of honor, I still want to protect their identities.However, it absolutely crushes me that these people, who just a year or two ago, were some of the most clear-headed, insightful, knowledgeable, and sober-minded thinkers, have succumbed to this madness. One person went from predicting Trump would lose the 2020 election to winning it for sure, with no clear linkage on how they got from point ‘A’ to ‘Z.’ Nothing I say can get them to see reason. They continue to insist this isn’t about Trump, but about the nation. Yet, if that were truly the case, why are they throwing their whole weight behind Trump, as opposed to some platform or principle? These people are doing and saying things they would’ve never otherwise if Trump didn’t put them up to it. They can’t or won’t see the damage he’s done to conservatism, the nation, and the republic, yet he’s still the hill they want to die on.Strangely, the radical right and the left have become unified on one principle — this country’s damaged beyond repair and a revolution’s the only thing that can bring deliverance to the country. Because it won the election, the left will, at least in the near term, utilize legitimate means to impose what they consider necessary change on the country. This also means the right will resort to increasingly illegitimate means to force change. We may begin to see large-scale, violent protests become as ubiquitous of a strategy on the right as it is on the left. But the right’s protests will be met with counter-protests on the left, as we saw in Pacific Beach, San Diego over the weekend. This sort of thing will intensify and repeat itself over and over and the authorities will be largely powerless to prevent it.When history judges these events, I think there’s no way to do so without strongly factoring in COVID and the associated lockdowns. The pandemic and the economic crisis that was inflicted de-stabilized society in ways that still haven’t become entirely obvious to many, particularly in elite circles. I told you before that extremists cannot prevail in stable societies. They also cannot prevail in stable economies. People are just too busy to indulge in such fantasies, even if they might talk about this stuff at home over a beer. I don’t know how many people in MAGA-land are unemployed or underemployed, but I think COVID, the lockdowns, and the George Floyd protests had a catastrophic impact on the way they viewed their country and the world. It’s very possible they came to believe that their country was crashing down around them and it drove them mad. Trump’s irresponsible actions and rhetoric, combined with the Democrats delivering an equally catastrophic political defeat, only accentuated that point.As if that wasn’t bad enough already, look at what Gov. Cuomo said earlier today:We simply cannot stay closed until the vaccine hits critical mass. The cost is too high. We will have nothing left to open. We must reopen the economy, but we must do it smartly and safely.https://twitter.com/NYGovCuomo/status/1348673192609591296If anyone thinks this is a good move on his part, they’re sadly mistaken. This contradicts the narrative that we’re in the midst of fierce “second wave” that’s got no end in sight. The damage done to the economy already also means that you can’t just open things back up and expect things to return to normal. More relevant to the point, MAGA will use this as evidence that the lockdowns were entirely motivated by politics. Now that Trump’s out of office, the Democrats are changing their tune on the lockdowns, hoping the economy will recover, and it’ll cement their political power for at least the next two election cycles.I don’t believe either will happen. The economy will continue to suffer and this sort of move will breed cynicism and resentment on the right that’ll only add fuel to an already raging inferno.

The other day, a different reader wrote to me this letter, which I have slightly edited to protect him and his parents:

I have never been particularly enthusiastic about the fact that I am an American, which is not to say that I have ever been antagonistic about it, but rather that it never really factored into my view of self or the world. At most, it rose to the level of embarrassment, as it is all too easy to see how the American way of life openly and proudly conflicts with one’s Christian faith (simpler times): war-like, materialistic, and generally godless. The events of the past week have shown me just how much more I valued this American order than I realized.I am writing from the living room of my parents house. Why do I mention that? I mention it because they are Qanon’ers. That is a charge I do not level lightly. In fact, I rejected it for the longest time. Right-winger? Clearly. Trump supporters? Without hesitation. A touch on the radical side? One could say so. It has, however, accelerated over the last year. When they left their church in the town in which they live to begin attending [an Evangelical megachurch pastored by a celebrity preacher associated with Trump], I began to worry. Then, my sister shared with me the full extent of the abomination, and they are in the tank. As it turns out, the reason they have shielded my from it is because, according to my sister paraphrasing my mother, “I am just not going to listen,” to what they have to say. Pardon my language, but you’re g*ddamned right I’m not going to listen. I give heresy no quarter.My field is mental health, and what I see is mass psychosis, perhaps some sort of stress-induced schizophrenia. Schizophrenia is characterized by the individual essentially occupying two worlds: the physical world of reality, and the much darker and more terrifying world of their own imagining. Let it be known, I know a few people who spent their careers in military intelligence, so I have learned, to the extent that a civilian can be told, just how dark and dangerous the world is. For instance, one such person into whose hands I would entrust my life, has told me that the CIA makes the KGB look like a collection of “pre-pubescent choir boys”. I have been told, with a twinkle in this person’s eye, that, “Accidents happen every day.” The world is a dark and dangerous place, but at its worst it does not approach the everyday delusions of this disturbing (and growing) rabble.In a sense, it is understandable to see how an individual might come to this low mental place. If they had spent the last decade obsessively watching Fox News, listening to Rush Limbaugh and his much louder counterpart Mark Levin, it’s only reasonable that before long they would be in a state of immense emotional duress, perhaps even to the level of existential crisis. When the media you watch is curated to promote the belief that a monster lurks under every bed and around every corner, and that only by watching the next segment after a series of “Buy gold!” and My Pillow commercials, you are going to be frayed, particularly if you do not have an adequate spiritual counterweight. To that end, our churches — some more so than others — bear some responsibility for this disaster.When your entire religious foundation is built on the slogan, “Jesus is all I need!”, then when you are met with an overwhelming worldly darkness, suddenly you are left wanting. If Jesus was all that I needed, then why does it feel like I am drowning? By removing the value and unavoidable reality of suffering from our sermons, by preaching a watered down, emotive gospel where one’s feeling is the only arbiter of truth, we have set up our congregations for exactly this shit. If “Jesus is enough!”, and a strongman like Trump comes along, well, maybe Trump is Jesus’ chosen one. Brilliant! Were Solzhenitsyn to give his Harvard Address today, he would be killed before exiting the stage from which he spoke.This lunatic Right is, in large part, a reaction to the lunatic Left. Now that elements of that Left are about to assume the full authority of government, they are going to push their boundaries to an obscene distance. We all know that this will only motivate the Right to move even further to their respective boundaries. Have you every tried stretching a rubber band to your full wingspan? It snaps, and is no longer functional. What do we think will happen as society continues its march to either extreme? If history has taught us one single lesson, it is that no society is invincible (interestingly, and I say this as an unapologetic monarchist (that’s right), the British Monarchy, for all the reduction in global influence felt over the last two centuries, has nonetheless been more or less stable for a very long time. Something to think about).It was Plato who said that oligarchy turns into democracy. In a democracy, Plato said, freedom is the supreme good, but also the slave master. Because man is free to do as he so desires, any semblance of social cohesion or unity eventually degenerates. My desires become the highest good, and society must conform to them, because I am an individual, and we know for a fact society exists to promote individual freedom. Now, multiply such selfish sentiments by 329,000,000. Plato goes on to say that once freedom (selfishness) hits critical mass, it further devolves into tyranny. No one possesses any real sense of discipline, and all falls into chaos. Democracy is taken over the the desire for freedom, power must be seized to maintain control, a champion will come along and experience power, and will become a tyrant.What we saw in the Capitol Insurrection — and insurrection is clearly was, if words hold any meaning anymore — was the first public step into true, verifiable, chaotic tyranny.I am a great admirer of Prof. Jordan Peterson (and am grateful that he is now well on his way back to health after a harrowing 18-month bout with benzo withdrawal), and one of the cornerstones of his program is that meaning is the antithesis and antidote for chaos. Conversely, a lack of meaning will lead to chaos. His teaching focuses on the individual level, but it’s easy enough to expand outward. How does one find meaning, then? The commonly accepted answer is through the fulfillment and exercise of our rights. Bullshit, Peterson says. Rights, rights, rights is all we hear, and look where we are because of it. Rights do not exist without another R-word: responsibility. One of Peterson’s “rules” is to set your own life in order before setting out to change the world. This is where his whole, “Make your bed” thing comes into play: if you cannot be so bothered as to attend to the least responsibilities in your life, why should you be entrusted with anything greater? To go to the Gospels, “Unto whomsoever much is given, of him much shall be required; and to whom they have committed much, of him they will demand the more.” (Lk. 12.48).Why do I bring this up? Because those who bear the responsibility are being given cover. Ashli Babbitt is a martyr! She was just a peaceful protester and was murdered in cold blood! Actually, no. She was part of a violent mob, a mob which has killed at least one Capitol police officer, and at the moment she was shot, she was actively climbing through a broken window in an effort to further storm into the House Chamber. That sounds like criminal trespassing to me, and the fact that she was one of dozens at that particular scene only adds to the justification of the use of force. Capitol Police, Secret Service, etc. have one single job: to protect the U.S. government. You cannot attack the government — its servants or its buildings — and not expect to be met with equal or greater force. My point, though, is that no one is taking responsibility for this. That mob wasn’t MAGA, or even Qanon, the Right says. No, it was Antifa, obviously, because false flag and deep state and pedophilia and good Lord give me a break from this garbage.Because of Covid, I have been unable to find a new job (though I am close to a couple). As a result, at the end of this month, I am going to have to — temporarily — move in with my parents. Me, a Catholic, mental health professional Dead Head who loves mindfulness, reading, writing, and playing guitar, will lay my head at night 50-60 feet from two people who, despite our close physical proximity, no longer occupy the same confines of reality. It’s heartbreaking and, if I am being perfectly honest, more than a little concerning. My parents are good, decent, hard working people, but I have seen their winds warped to such a radical, previously unthinkable degree. Where will they be in a year? I fear for their safety.

It is clear to me now that the United States is in much deeper trouble than I realized even a week ago. In Live Not By Lies , I write about how closely the US today resembles Hannah Arendt’s portrait of a pre-totalitarian society. I focused on the ideology that the progressive Left believes, and is putting into place in the institutions where they dominate. The mainstream media don’t see this, because they are part of it. But it’s real, and it’s happening.However, as I’ve said here in the past few days, and as I repeat again, the depth of the ideological capture of the Right by a parallel insanity is becoming clearer to me. It troubles me not because I think these people have any chance at taking and exercising power — remember, Trump, for all his bluster, did not change much — but because in their willingness to live by lies, they not only can mount no effective defense against the much more powerful Left, but they also will act to give that same Left — which controls the infrastructure of the United States — reasons to lean more heavily into soft totalitarianism. From Live Not By Lies :

To grasp the threat of totalitarianism, it’s important to understand the difference between it and simple authoritarianism. Authoritarianism is what you have when the state monopolizes political control. That is mere dictatorship—bad, certainly, but totalitarianism is much worse. According to Hannah Arendt, the foremost scholar of totalitarianism, a totalitarian society is one in which an ideology seeks to displace all prior traditions and institutions, with the goal of bringing all aspects of society under control of that ideology. A totalitarian state is one that aspires to nothing less than defining and controlling reality. Truth is whatever the rulers decide it is. As Arendt has written, wherever totalitarianism has ruled, “[I]t has begun to destroy the essence of man.”

This is what the two readers above are talking about with the QAnon/MAGA-ists in their circles. They have given themselves over to an ideology that seeks to define and control reality. Wokeness is the same kind of thing. As a conservative, and as a more or less normal person, I no more want to be ruled by QAnon/MAGA loonies than I want to be ruled by the Woke. But you see the totalitarian temptation on both sides.

Arendt wrote, in The Origins of Totalitarianism (quoted in Live Not By Lies):

What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world, is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience of the ever-growing masses of our century.

With reference to the first reader’s observation that both the radicalized Left and the radicalized Right have united themselves on the view that America is beyond repair, here’s a clip from Live Not By Lies:

Americans’ loss of faith in institutions and hierarchies began in the 1960s. In Europe, though, it started in the immediate aftermath of World War I. Surveying the political scene in Germany during the 1920s, Arendt noted a “terrifying negative solidarity” among people from diverse classes, united in their belief that all political parties were populated by fools.

I want to point out one more thing that Arendt saw as pre-totalitarian: the desire to transgress. I cited it in Live Not By Lies to talk about how liberal elites are willing to tolerate the total transgression of liberal norms of free speech, fair play, and so forth, for the sake of so-called “social justice.” The justification by conservatives — not necessarily elites, but any conservative — of transgressing the Capitol for the sake of Trump, shows how deeply the rot has gone on our side too. In LNBL, I wrote:

Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it. 

The Left has been doing this for years now, in slow motion, throughout institutions. This is what the capitulation of university presidents and editors-in-chief to new illiberal norms means. But let’s be honest: Can we not now say that far too many conservatives do not object to paying a price — the destruction of our democracy and its norms — for the fun of seeing how the Deplorables forced themselves into the Capitol?

I am sorry to keep quoting my own book here — it’s in poor taste, I know — but I want to help readers understand how serious the situation is, and how events of the past week have revealed the corruption of the mind of the Right in a new way, at least to me. From Live Not By Lies:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

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

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.” For example, many who didn’t really accept Marx’s revisionist take on history—that it is a manifestation of class struggle—were willing to affirm it because it was a useful tool to punish those they despised.

I have written an entire book explaining how this exists and works on the contemporary Left, and within the institutions under its cultural domination (again, including corporate America). Now, though, we see that so many people on the Right — the parents of the second letter writer, and the friends of the first — are willing to relinquish their moral responsibility by surrendering to conspiracy theories. They hate the Left, and enemies of Donald Trump (on the Right as well) more than they love the truth. If you missed The Atlantic‘s long piece about QAnon last May, by all means read it now. 

Dark days are here. Get ready. One of the hardest things ahead for all of us, no matter where we come down on the political spectrum, is going to be keeping a clear head and a clean heart.

UPDATE: A reader writes:

I’m reading Carl Trueman’s book right now–amazing book–and what’s mind-blowing (and depressing) is how his book describes EVERYBODY.  The history it traces is leftist history: Rousseau to the English Romantics to Nietzsche/ Marx/ Darwin to Freud and on down to the proponents of intersectionality, etc.  But what the last few years have shown me–distilled into the last few days most potently–is how all of this stuff applies to the right as well.  The therapeutic, feelings as fact culture is not just the province of activists and intersectionality scholars.

Look at the language of the therapeutic, the language of feelings–so much of the talk of election conspiracies, theft, etc., is rooted in the language of feelings.  Most infamously is Metaxas’ take on how he doesn’t need any evidence because he KNOWS in his heart that this steal happened, but I feel–haha–like I’m seeing this kind of language more and more from conservatives in every area.  And look at some of the more craven responses to the events of last week.  I have a strong, solid evangelical friend who sort of engaged in a pro forma “yeah, this was bad, these guys should go to jail” but then started going off on “well, you can only push people so far and if you tell them they’re bigots for calling a she a she sooner or later they’ll punch back.”  I have seen this a lot—these people believe the election is being stolen, they don’t have a voice, blah blah blah.Leaving aside that they believe this because in many cases they’ve been lied to and exploited (I know that sounds patronizing but it’s true), that is the argument of a CHILD.  “I had a bad day at school and Johnny picked on me and Mrs. Smith called ME out for talking instead of him so I threw my papers across the room!”  John Lewis got his skull bashed in and he ran for congress.  The Black marchers in the civil rights era, who endured about a million times worse than their preferred social media site being kicked off line, marched and organized and rallied.  These guys believe that because the rest of society isn’t respecting what they FEEL to be true, that they’re perfectly justified in smashing up the capital, beating up people, rioting, vandalizing–tell me how this is ANY different from the things the left got up to in May.  Except it’s worse because 1) the capitol is not some courthouse in Portland or a liquor store, 2) they were attempting to attack a building WHILE THE LEGISLATURE WAS IN IT, and 3) they beat a cop to death!Now here I can hear people say “whoa whoa.  These guys aren’t “the right.”  These guys are the crazies.  Yeah–crazies who were egged on, summoned, and endorsed by literally the president of the United States of America.  And if we want to go that way, we have to be fair and allow that most of “the left” isn’t antifa.  It’s human nature to see the other side as a monolithic block of evil and your own as more nuanced and graded, but it’s also wrong and our duty as Christians, if that’s what we are, to push back against that.This has gotten far afield–sorry.  The point isn’t to engage in whatabouttery or fruitless comparison, but to say that this culture of insulting my feelings equals attacking me, and I’m entitled to a universe that treats what I BELIEVE and FEEL as reality–that’s exactly, EXACTLY what this MAGA/ election steal/ riot/ anti-elite stuff is.  This is the world of liquid modernity and the therapeutic self, as Trueman says, and fundamentally, for all intents and purposes, the right lives in it as much as the left, and boy does last week show that in spades.Also–have you ever thought about designing a course around your thought from the last few years?  I’ve been making a lot of connections through it and I bet some Christian college would love to have you teach a class virtually.  Like you’ve got BenOp and Live not by Lies, but all this ties into the things Trueman writes about (Rieff/ Taylor), the post-liberal thinkers (Deneen/ Legutko), and contemporary political conservatism and its internal and external critics (stuff like Carney, Arnade).  Might be cool.  The more I read the news, the more I feel like BenOp is your most important work here–the last year has revealed that the failure of the church to be the church and develop itself has paved the way for both pathologies of the right and left.  Seeing this in my own tradition is INCREDIBLY depressing.  We’ve got churches going full MAGA/Q, we’ve got churches going full SJW, we’ve got not that many churches just preaching the gospel and the ones that are are struggling with members that are far more animated by MAGA/Q or SJW/ BLM.

Carl Trueman’s fantastic book, The Rise And Triumph Of The Modern Self, is only $7.99 on Kindle today.UPDATE.2: Reader EVW, who is an Evangelical, posted an interesting comment:

Does Christian Smith mention the long-term effects of Moralistic Therapeutic Deism? This may be what we’re seeing, which oddly has overlap with Critical Theory of all types. Both philosophies are me-oriented, and MTD easily becomes victim-oriented like CRT when God doesn’t give me what I want. MTD states that if I’m good, God will give me what I want. If the world is going to hell in a hand-basket and I want change, God certainly must want that for me. And if I can’t get it, God must be blessing my fight to demand it.

I know it’s important for the David Frenches and Russell Moores of the evangelical world to write their vociferous denunciations of the acts at the Capitol. They are public figures and need to distance themselves as much as possible from all the crosses and Jesus signs and loud Christian music blaring on the mall. But I actually think they need to be exceedingly brief on the subject. Their denunciations are falling on very angry, deaf ears. Despite the similarities and shared experiences (like, say, their home church pew), they do not share the same faith with many of the people in their orbit. In fact, their denunciations will probably fan the flames. I wonder why the Frenches and Moores, who were quick to reach across the aisle for the BLM issue, are not doing the same with these conservatives. My guess is they erroneously think they’re on the same side. They aren’t.

I’m actually surprised to see that most of the people speaking about reaching across the aisle and building unity and trust are coming from secular liberals, not Christians. It’s very disconcerting because while I agree that we are better equipped to admonish our own “people”, we bridging the gap (where I thought Moore and French might fall) are also the best to help in the unity-building. But the lectures will only make that harder.

I listened to a podcast in which a journalist described going into the capitol with the rioters. This is a secular liberal who has been following the BLM protests and getting to know both Proud Boy members as well as Antifa. One of his main take-aways was that people are so desperate to be heard that they’re taking matters into their own hands. BLM at least has the media who will listen. This rabble on Wednesday does not. Having people supposedly from their side lecturing them will not be viewed as an admonition. It will just be a call to arms to try it again.

The post The Lost Souls Of MAGA & QAnon appeared first on The American Conservative.

Anarcho-Tyranny And Infrastructure

An academic friend has been stressing over the weekend in private messages to me that Trump’s Twitter and Facebook bans aren’t the real story. The real story, he says, is “infrastructure” — that is, the means by which all of us do business. If those who control the infrastructure choose to punish conservatives, it’s a much more serious thing. For example, it’s probably bad if publishers decide that Author X is blacklisted, but it’s infinitely worse if Amazon, which sells the overwhelming majority of books in America today, decides that books by Publisher X will no longer be sold by Amazon. You see the difference?

We have a shocking example today, said the professor. He texts:

The number one thing driving innovation in software the last 15 years has been the servicization of everything. You might have heard of “software as a service” (the business model). What that means is that rather than code my own email system, login system, marketing analytics, etc, I pay another company to do this and just insert their code into my website. There are tons of benefits to this but also a number of downsides.

Such as, he writes, today’s massive hack of the rightist website Parler. From the story:

Parler, which claims to have over 10 million users, has lax rules over content, making the platform very attractive to far-right groups. Google and Apple removed Parler’s smartphone app from their app stores, claiming that the platform allowed posting that seeks to “incite ongoing violence in the U.S..” Amazon took similar measures, removing Parler from its hosting service.

Reddit users claim that the scrape was made possible due Twilio, an American cloud communications platform that provided the platform with phone number verification services, cutting ties with Parler.

In a press release announcing the decision, Twilio revealed which services Parler was using. This information allowed hackers to deduct that it was possible to create users and verified accounts without actual verification.

With this type of access, newly minted users were able to get behind the login box API used for content delivery. That allowed them to see which users had moderator rights and this in turn allowed them to reset passwords of existing users with simple “forgot password” function. Since Twilio no longer authenticated emails, hackers were able to access admin accounts with ease.

These hackers will have enough information now to dox everyone. This, I am told, “is a version of what some on the online right have dubbed anarcho-tyranny: actions of a private company create a space for illegal actors to do things for which no one will be punished by the state for ideological reasons.”

As far as I can tell, the term “anarcho-tyranny” was coined by the late far-right writer Samuel Francis. In this 1994 essay, he explains:

In the United States today, the government performs many of its functions more or less effectively. The mail is delivered (sometimes); the population, or at least part of it, is counted (sort of); and taxes are collected (you bet). You can accuse the federal leviathan of many things—corruption, incompetence, waste, bureaucratic strangulation—but mere anarchy, the lack of effective government, is not one of them. Yet at the same time, the state does not perform effectively or justly its basic duty of enforcing order and punishing criminals, and in this respect its failures do bring the country, or important parts of it, close to a state of anarchy. But that semblance of anarchy is coupled with many of the characteristics of tyranny, under which innocent and law-abiding citizens are punished by the state or suffer gross violations of their rights and liberty at the hands of the state. The result is what seems to be the first society in history in which elements of both anarchy and tyranny pertain at the same time and seem to be closely connected with each other and to constitute, more or less, opposite sides of the same coin.

This condition, which in some of my columns I have called “anarcho-tyranny,” is essentially a kind of Hegelian synthesis of what appear to be dialectical opposites: the combination of oppressive government power against the innocent and the law-abiding and, simultaneously, a grotesque paralysis of the ability or the will to use that power to carry out basic public duties such as protection or public safety. And, it is characteristic of anarcho-tyranny that it not only fails to punish criminals and enforce legitimate order but also criminalizes the innocent.

Francis cites as an example Keith Jacobson, a farmer in the Midwest who was a pedophile (though the farmer claimed that he never acted on his perverted urges), who was arrested in a government sting operation in which he was induced to buy mail-order child porn (this was before the Internet era). The Supreme Court eventually exonerated him, but his life was destroyed. Francis writes that the laws against child pornography are certainly justified, but it does not follow that because the state cannot get at the overseas producers of the stuff, it should entrap American citizens with it. Francis goes on:

The Jacobson case is particularly important because, in a way, it was a kind of prototype for the later cases of David Koresh and Randy Weaver, and it may reflect a deliberate strategy by which admittedly bizarre people are selected for persecution. Few people can be expected to rush to the defense of a religious crackpot like Koresh, a white separatist like Weaver, or a pedophile like Jacobson when their rights are threatened. And, conservatives in particular can be expected to overlook the procedural irregularities in these cases if they disapprove of, or condemn, the substance of what the targets are doing. But, once these cases become precedents, citizens who are considerably less bizarre in their personal habits and beliefs than many conservatives will be safe for the anarcho-tyrants to hit.

The definition of “anarcho-tyranny” that my correspondent uses seems to have developed into something a bit different from, but obviously related to, what Sam Francis said back then. The Urban Dictionary defines it as:

Anarcho-tyranny is a concept, where the state is argued to be more interested in controlling citizens so that they do not oppose the managerial class (tyranny) rather than controlling real criminals (causing anarchy). Laws are argued to be enforced only selectively, depending on what is perceived to be beneficial for the ruling elite.

Anyway, something to think about.

What the forthcoming doxing of Parler users will do is foment civil war. Not just this particular instance, but the habit of doxing. I know of a person in Washington who is a Trump appointee working in the federal bureaucracy, nobody you or anybody else would have heard of. I looked up the person’s job title, and it is about as benign as you can imagine. This person is in the process of getting their family out of Washington, anticipating hackers, Antifa, or some other actors putting the family’s home address online, and left-wing ragemonkeys showing up at their house to teach “collaborators” a lesson. Is this person paranoid, or prudent? What would you do if you worked in Washington for the administration? Do you think your low level and your relative anonymity would protect you and your family — not from the state, but from these rogue actors.

The far right is going to start doing it back to people on the Left who are not involved at any high level in the state, or in corporations (but I repeat myself). If you were in management at Amazon Web Services now — AWS booted Parler — or at Twilio: how safe would you feel from doxxing? Could you protect your family if armed right-wing extremists showed up on your doorstep? What if some Antifa monsters, using the information they gathered from the Parler hack, show up at someone’s house and burn it down, or harm them or their family? What if they get the Parler person fired, and put him and his family into poverty? You think people are just going to sit back and take it?

And vice versa: people on the Left are not going to sit back and take being threatened by right-wing extremists.

This is how we are going to end up with an American version of China’s social credit system, as a means to control violence. I don’t anticipate that the state will implement it, as in China. I believe it will be instituted — and is now in the process of being instituted — by corporate America, led by Big Tech. Everyone who lives any part of his or her life online — and that’s most of us — is part of the network, and is traceable. There are going to be penalties for being associated with anybody connected to Trump or the Trumposphere. I’m not saying there should be; I’m saying that it’s coming, and that they’re going to do it legally, under the American framework. If you can be found online linked to any “problematic” people, well, you may not be able to shop on Amazon, or your shopping will be limited. You may not be able to get access to the infrastructure that makes the economy run. Maybe the Right will build an alternative institution — but how will those alt-builders get access to the infrastructure? If you were a young techie, how willing would you be to make yourself unemployable by helping Deplorables build networks within which they can shop, and find employment?

You see how this works? The government doesn’t have to get involved at all. It only cares about Evangelical Christians who won’t make wedding cakes for gay couples. It doesn’t care if Amazon decides to cut off problematic publishers or people from the electronic economy. Under our system, if Amazon (or any company) is not cutting you off for civil rights reasons — that is, for being a person of color, a woman, LGBT, etc. — then, broadly speaking, they can do it with impunity. This is what was annoying about Sen. Hawley’s denunciation of Simon & Schuster for dropping his book deal the other day. It wasn’t “Orwellian,” as he claimed, nor was it illegal. It’s perfectly legal. Whether it should be legal is an interesting question, but the plain fact is, corporate America has that power. The way it’s exercising it now, and will be doing in the days and weeks to come, is why I call it soft totalitarianism.

Conservatives are about to find out what it means when the power of corporate America is turned against us. Ask yourself: what would you do if your church found itself unable to participate fully in the economy because some of your parishioners had been on Parler, and companies that service your church found this out, either because someone doxxed them and made the connections, or the companies found out on their own? Would you stand by those parishioners, even though it imposed a cost on your church? These are the kinds of dilemmas we are going to be facing. The stuff I talk about in Live Not By Lies — it’s going to be very real here, starting right now. Watch the infrastructure.

The post Anarcho-Tyranny And Infrastructure appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Road Out Of Nowhere

Some things I thought about today, relating to last week’s attack on the US Capitol.

1. Trump has to be impeached. We need a clean break with him and what he represents. No more excuses. What happened last week at the Capitol, and the president’s role in it, must be firmly repudiated by Congress, even if Trump is out of office by the time the House sends the impeachment to the Senate for trial. It is possible that it might be unconstitutional to try a president who is no longer in office, but we should get a ruling from the Supreme Court on that. There should be no ambiguity going forward about Donald Trump’s conduct leading up to this appalling event, and how intolerable it was, and is, and always will be in this country. And Congress should make it impossible for him ever again to run for president.

2. Along those lines, I owe the Never Trumpers an apology. They were right all along. I was not a pro-Trumper, but I believed — and still believe — that the Republican Party needed to be shaken up badly because of its many failures in the past — the Iraq War most of all — and because of its failure to attend to serious structural problems with the economy, and within our culture. I did not vote for Trump, but I was pleased to see conservative populism rising within the party, and was grateful for the federal judges Trump gave us. The president was frequently embarrassing and foolish, but I figured that if the only choices were Trump, the old-line GOP, or the increasingly extreme Democratic Party, then we could tolerate his boobery. The system was strong enough to contain him, I figured. Besides, he was far too indisciplined and narcissistic to become the dictator that the Left feared.

I was right about a lot of that. The system did, in the end, hold. Trump was too weak and scatterbrained to become any real threat to the status quo. But what I did not recognize until last Wednesday was how crazy Trump and Trumpism had made a lot of people in this country. Bellingcat has a fascinating piece detailing the radicalization of Ashli Babbitt, the woman shot by Capitol Police as she vaulted through the smashed glass of a door leading into an anteroom of the House chamber. She went from being an Obama voter to throwing her life away in a quixotic MAGA crusade. How did that happen?

The Wall Street Journal has a profile of a 58-year-old man who was arrested inside the Capitol last week. He became radicalized during the Trump years, such that his own grown children grieve over his fanaticism. From the piece:

He professes a series of beliefs about the powerful manipulating the world in ways visible only to those able to see through the deception. He knows he is one of them.

“There are so many people walking around half asleep,” he says. “They don’t know what’s going on.”

In Mr. Sweet’s world of false conspiracies, financier George Soros is both a Nazi and a Communist who pays leftist activists to burn and loot American cities. QAnon, a conspiracy-theory group that believes Mr. Trump is under assault by devil worshipers, speaks the truth. A Washington pizza parlor serves pies made of children’s blood to Satanists who know to order off-menu. The U.S. military invaded Afghanistan to seize control of the heroin trade. Former Secretary of State Hillary Clinton and House Speaker Pelosi drink children’s blood in a quest for eternal youth.

“I’m not going to go open a court case saying [Ms. Clinton] eats children,” Mr. Sweet says. “But I can believe that she might eat children.”

How in the hell does a 58-year-old man come to believe insane things like that? More:

A friend drove Mr. Sweet back to Virginia, where he returned to splitting wood and pondering the conspiracies around him. He says that on reflection, he’s quite sure that it was antifa, the radical left, who broke into the Capitol and started the violence to make Trump supporters look bad.

Law-enforcement officials have found no indication of such a left-wing provocation, a federal prosecutor said Friday.

Mr. Sweet remains unconvinced. “They weren’t acting like characteristic American patriots in there,” he says.

The cognitive dissonance! This cat was arrested with a mob that broke inside the Capitol, but he has convinced himself that it was really Antifa’s fault! It’s not just him, though. Over the weekend, I got into an argument with a Trump diehard who believes the exact same thing. Said this person, “I just feel like that’s what happened.”

One last thing from the Journal piece:

He says he and Ms. Fitchett walked up stairs on the Mall side of the Capitol, where he found the doors open.

He says he hesitated. He says he felt the need to go inside to share his views with Congress but wanted to consult God first. He prayed aloud: “Lord, is this the right thing to do? Is this what I need to do?” He says he felt God’s hand on his back, pushing him forward.

“I checked with the Lord,” he says. “I checked with Him three times. I never heard a ‘No.’”

Ah. God didn’t tell him not to go in, so he went in. You will remember my long piece criticizing the Jericho March from December, in which I pointed out how wrong it was for all these Christians to keep saying that God told them this or that. Here’s that passage; “Eric” is Eric Metaxas, the emcee of the event, with whom I’ve been friends since 1998:

Eric told the crowd that a particular man had a vision of the Jericho March a few days ago, and that we would be meeting that man onstage soon. “When God gives you a vision, you don’t need to know anything else,” said Eric, who then asked people to use the price code ERIC when they buy a MyPillow.com product. The company’s founder, Mike Lindell, would soon be speaking too.

That line — “When God gives you a vision, you don’t need to know anything else” — turns out to be the main key to understanding all of this. Over two decades ago, when I was getting to know Eric, we had a friendly argument over something theological, as we walked around Manhattan. When I challenged something Eric said, he replied that God had told him it was the thing to do. “How do you know that?” I asked. Because he did. The argument went nowhere. I remember it so clearly because that was the first time I had ever had a conversation with someone who asserted that something was true not because God said it — all Christians must believe that, or throw out Scripture — but because God had said it to them personally. 

I had been a practicing Christian for only five or six years at that point, and I was a Catholic. I had been intrigued by Catholics claiming to have had visions, but knew very well that the Catholic Church warns its people not to accept anything like that without testing them against authoritative teachings of the Church, at least. I had never spoken to a Christian who believed without questioning it that God spoke to them. When I got home, I mentioned that to my wife, who had been Southern Baptist for most of her life.

“You didn’t grow up in the Evangelical subculture,” she said. “That is totally normal.”

It’s one thing to claim that God told you to change churches, or something like that. It’s another thing to claim, especially if you have a national microphone, that God told you that the election was stolen, and that people need to prepare themselves to fight to the last drop of blood — an actual quote — to keep the libs from taking the presidency away from Trump. Watching the Jericho March, I saw that what I encountered for the first time in conversation with my friend over two decades ago is actually pretty common. Most of the Jericho March speakers, in one way or another, asserted their certainty about the election’s theft. The fact that courts keep throwing these Trump lawsuits out only proves how deep the corruption goes.

See how that works? They are willing to tear down the country for a belief that they cannot prove, but that they will not believe is disprovable.

Next came the MyPillow king, Mike Lindell. He spoke about all the prophetic visions and dreams he had about Donald Trump. Never “I believe I had a vision” — there’s never the slightest doubt with these people. I say that as a Christian who believes God really does speak to people directly at times, that he really does send visions sometimes. But we have to be extremely careful about these claimed private revelations. Back in the 1990s, a Catholic priest I knew told me that his parish was deeply divided over claims of a member that she was having private visions. I remember him telling me how frustrated it was that so many people in his congregation had little interest in ordinary Catholic discipleship. They were suckers for spiritual fireworks, and often looked down on fellow Catholics who were skeptical, thinking them to be lacking in faith.

Anyway, Lindell told the crowd that one day, God arranged for him to meet Donald Trump at Trump Tower. Isn’t God amazing? said Lindell. Here was another theme that was constant throughout the day: that God was directing every little thing. Trump is God’s instrument. It doesn’t seem to have occurred to any of them that God’s purposes are not man’s purposes. The Old Testament tells us that God allowed his people, Israel, to fall into captivity as punishment for their sins. How do we know that God isn’t allowing something like that to happen now? How can we be certain that Trump is God’s favored?

We can’t. But don’t try telling these folks that.

I began to think that all of this is the right-wing Christian version of Critical Race Theory, and various doctrines held by the woke Left. For example, if you look at the evidence, and you find the claim of endemic white supremacy to be lacking, well, that just goes to show how deep the corruption within you goes. If a woman claims to be a man, then you must believe her, and to fail to do so only shows your bigotry. And so forth. I don’t need to go into detail on that here. I have spent the past few years documenting this destructive insanity, and make it one of the foci of my new book. This ideology has conquered so many institutions in this society, and few on the Left dare to stand against it. All the passion on the Left belongs to the irrational zealots of critical theory, and their minions.

I wish I could add a new chapter about how we conservatives are allowing ourselves to be conquered by the same kind of unreality. We can’t look away from it, or fall back on whataboutism.

I did not appreciate how much pro-Trump radicalism corrupted people’s minds. I thought it was just a fringe. I was wrong. By the way, despite the fact that actual blood has been shed because of Trump’s mania, Eric, who one month ago said, about the Stop The Steal cause, “We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it, tweeted today:

What I did not foresee is that Trump would normalize cult thinking on the Right. Donald Trump did not make people lose their minds. Nobody held a gun to people’s head and force them to espouse crazy things on Trump’s behalf. But a lot of people did go that far. I regret not taking the Never Trump folks more seriously back in the day. I am not saying that the Republican Party should return to the status quo — it couldn’t if it wanted to, but it shouldn’t want to — but I am saying that the things that the Never Trumpers said about not making a deal with this devil were true, or at the very least more truthful than I gave them credit for at the time. And for that, I am sorry.

3. So many people today have no ability to grasp that multiple things can be true simultaneously. It can be true that the Trump side has become extremist in crazy, destructive ways, and also be true that the Left has done the same thing. In fact, it is true. In this space I have documented a lot of what the Left has done, and is doing. None of that suddenly became sane or just because the Trump mob invaded the Capitol any more than the Trump mob’s insurrection is somehow justified or lessened in gravity by what the Left has done and is doing within institutions. Principled conservatives should not stop objecting to these things, should not stop fighting them, should not allow themselves to be intimidated into living by lies.

What we are now seeing, and will continue to see, is the emergence of a Narrative about what happened on Capitol Hill, to suit left-wing goals. NPR was at it this afternoon on All Things Considered, with a story about how students of color see what happened through racialized lenses. A high school student says in the piece:

This is the system upon which America was built — for white people, especially the white man, to be the only one to wield the power of the democratic republic. And once that is upsetted [sic], all hell breaks loose.

Visit the NPR site and you’ll see at least three stories in that vein (as of this writing). I’ve seen this in other mainstream media too: the racialization of the narrative. The pro-Trump crowd was predominantly white, therefore this must have been a white supremacy event (the logic goes). But did you know that before the Trump protests, the (black, female, Democratic) mayor of DC sent formal notification to the Pentagon and the Justice Department saying that the city would not be requesting federal assistance to handle the planned Trump protests. You can read the letter she sent in this story from January 5. 

Mayor Muriel Bowser said she would not be requesting the federal officers because of concerns she had about federal law enforcement’s activities during last year’s Black Lives Matter protests in DC. Look:

To be clear, the District of Columbia is not requesting other federal law enforcement personnel and discourages any additional deployment without immediate notification to, and consultation with, MPD if such plans are underway. pic.twitter.com/FhnNe1dWeJ

— Mayor Muriel Bowser (@MayorBowser) January 5, 2021

What happened at the Capitol was clearly a massive security failure; the NYT has a detailed story about how the DC police, the Capitol Police, and other agencies screwed it up. But our media cannot help themselves: they have to make this racial, and further inflame racial tensions in this country. I give it till midweek before we start to see stories about how the Trump insurrection was somehow an attack on LGBT Americans. Anything to fit the Narrative.

Live not by lies, even if the consequences of the lies of the MAGA mob makes that a million times harder to do.

4. And those MAGA mob lies do. The Left wouldn’t have anything to work with, though, had there not been an actual insurrection by a fanatical mob of Trump supporters. Think about where we would be today had Donald Trump conceded the election like a grown-up, and not carried on this hysterical campaign to convince people that the election was stolen, even after his legal team lost hearing after hearing, even in front of Republican-appointed judges. Think where we would be had he not disparaged Georgia Republican officials for not doing his bidding, and had not discouraged Georgia Republican voters from turning out for the Senate race. The prospects for conservatism will be dim for some time because of the shame, the fear, and the loathing that Trump and his mob brought forth. We really did see Republican senators and Republican House members who no doubt knew that the election was not fraudulent, carry on with this charade, encouraging people to believe that somehow the result could be changed. These are facts. No matter how much the Left overreacts in an attempt to punish the Right — and they will! — we on the Right cannot deny that it happened.

I remember in the days, weeks, and months following 9/11, Muslim voices amplified by the media denied that the terrorist attacks had anything to do with Islam. “Islam means ‘peace,'” they would say. It wasn’t true. They said it because it was a noble lie intended to short-circuit bigoted attacks on innocent Muslims. Looking back, it was probably the right thing to say in the days immediately following 9/11, but this refusal to be honest about the reason for the attacks of that day stayed with us, especially in the media. I’m reading now a good book, Destiny Disrupted: A History of the World Through Islamic Eyes, by Tamim Ansary. I’m learning a lot from it. One thing Ansary, who is a Muslim, writes is that well-meaning liberal Western discourse about Islam (including from liberal Muslims) is misleading at best. For example, he says, the claim that “jihad” is really about inner struggle ignores sacred writings and Islamic history.

I believe that on the Right, we are going to have to struggle against the eagerness to be defensive against bigoted and unjust attacks on us by Leftists seeking advantage. What we cannot do is slip into denial about what happened. There are already plenty of people on the Right eager to live by self-exonerating lies. If this Trump experience has taught us anything, it’s the danger of living by right-wing lies. We can and we must fight the lies that the Left is telling, and will tell, about us in an effort to smear all conservatives, but we can’t lie to ourselves about what happened, and why it happened, and who made it happen.

5. Whether you are on the Left, the Right, or somewhere in the middle, I urge you to remember what it felt like after 9/11. I recall the terror and the rage in the face of those acts. Of course what happened on 9/11 was incomparably worse than what happened last week, but the sense of shock over the assault on the Capitol is like nothing I recall since that time. Back then, it was very easy to give in to those who said that we needed to do this or that thing to punish the evildoers and make the homeland safer. I hardly need to recite from the historical record here.

But I’ll tell you readers what this afternoon I told my son, who was a toddler when all that happened: fight hard to keep your head. There will be angry people — people who have a right to be angry! — who are going to appeal to anger to justify new laws, repressive policies, and identifying people to hate because they are associated, however tangentially, with the Enemy. You will be tempted to think that strong action must be taken now, and that those who stand up to say wait a minute, is this really necessary and right? are weaklings who don’t see the clear and present danger in front of us. Don’t fall for it! It got us into a war last time, and further empowered the national security state. This time, it could draw us close to some sort of civil war, and is already starting to empower Big Tech and corporations as political agents.

Yes, government authorities and many others ought to have taken Islamic radicalism more seriously before 9/11. Yes, government authorities and many others ought to have taken the dangers of right-wing radicalism more seriously before the Capitol insurrection. But the overcorrection can be incredibly destructive of things we ought to be defending. 

It was hard to be antiwar after 9/11. This magazine, The American Conservative, was founded by members of the small and hated minority of antiwar conservatives. It is going to be hard to stand up for free speech for conservatives (or, by the time they get through with us, for anything conservative) now and in the time to come. But it’s important to do so. Not every American of the Right stormed the Capitol. For that matter, only a small number of people at the big Trump rally stormed the Capitol. I think the people who demonstrated for Trump at that rally were wrong. But unless they broke into the Capitol, they were my fellow Americans who were peacefully exercising their First Amendment right to be wrong. If we treat everyone who voted for Trump as if he or she were the same as the thugs who invaded the Capitol, we are only going to radicalize them. And if we seize this opportunity to trample over common sense and civil liberties for the sake of punishing the wicked and making America into one big Safe Space, we are going to do terrible damage to this country — as we did the last time radical violence goaded us into overreacting.

UPDATE: Just saw this on Twitter. So if you are a small business owner who is on the ropes because of Covid, and you happen to be a white man, gosh, sucks to be you under this new administration:

"Our priority will be Black, Latino, Asian, and Native American owned small businesses, women-owned businesses, and finally having equal access to resources needed to reopen and rebuild." — President-elect Biden pic.twitter.com/pIyDuhf5pH

— Biden-Harris Presidential Transition (@Transition46) January 10, 2021

If the GOP can get free of Trump, there will be lots of people still willing to vote Republican, because of racist liberal garbage like this from Biden.

The post The Road Out Of Nowhere appeared first on The American Conservative.

Information And The Cultural Revolution

Samuel Culper, an analyst at a website called Forward Observer, which is staffed by former military intel officers who try to make sense of what they believe is coming conflict here, posted something really interesting. I will only quote a bit of it, because they charge a subscription fee for this information, and I think they are entitled to earn a living providing the analysis. (A subscriber of theirs forwarded it to me.) You might want to start subscribing now that things have gotten so hot. It’s basically Stratfor, but for domestic instability.

Anyway, Culper says that this past year in American has been a Cultural Revolution carried out as “Fourth Generation Warfare … where the moral and mental planes are the primary battlefields and information is the primary weapon. This is the key to understanding current events and the immediate future of low intensity conflict.”

Culper says:

Nowhere has 4GW been more apparent than what happened after Wednesday’s protest. Over the past two days, politicians on both sides of the aisle, as well as political pundits, have unequivocally and universally denounced the protest. In the corporate world, Disney, UPS, Chase, Bank of America, Coca-Cola, the National Association of Manufacturers, and a host of other organizations released statements condemning Wednesday’s protest as an assault on democracy. (I’ve repeatedly pointed to corporations and their officers blurring the lines between commerce and politics to support ideological causes, which is part of the main effort in the ongoing conflict. The Cultural Revolution has weaponized commercial entities.) There’s been widespread and consistent repudiation of the protest and violence that ensued on Wednesday.

Compare this week’s reaction to that of Floyd’s Rebellion last summer, where the same corporations, Democratic politicians, and political pundits ignored, excused, justified, or encouraged behavior that included far greater destruction and violence. Yet much of society defended that behavior because social justice activists have spent considerable time and resources to develop political, social, and commercial influence. Victimhood is the primary tool used to build a moral position in 4GW. And through the exploitation of victimhood, the social justice movement has been able to reshape the information environment, especially through social media. Ironically, social media is the primary vehicle for shaping the information environment, yet the Trump administration has done very little over the past four years to diminish that strategic advantage. For all the claims of being fascist, the Trump administration has done virtually nothing to stifle the speech and influence of the Cultural Revolution.

Culper goes on to say that everyone associated with Trump will be demonized across society because the Left controls the information battlefield. More:

This is not to say that these reactions are true, objective, or shared by every member of society. Yet the ability to popularize the idea that these individuals are fascists, domestic terrorists, and “threats to democracy” will further isolate Trump supporters’s ability to compete in the information environment. And that’s going to be a characteristic of at least the next two years of low intensity conflict.

Yesterday we saw a coordinated movement of Big Tech against Trump and his closest supporters. Trump himself has been cut off from nearly all forms of social media, and even his e-mail provider cut him off. Big Tech is moving against Parler, the right-wing alternative to Twitter. This is just the beginning. As Culper observes, the culture-war weaponization of corporate America has given the Left a massive advantage. As I have written in The Benedict Option and Live Not By Lies, in a country like ours, when Big Business takes sides in the culture war, the advantage is overwhelming.

(A reader e-mailed last night to say that my commentary in this space this week has featured too much “I told you so,” which I guess is a fair comment, but I would just respond by saying that you, reader, may not realize the extent to which I deal with fellow Christians saying that I’m being “alarmist,” that it’s not really as bad as all that. I’m not trying to take any kind of victory lap here — it’s not a fun position to be in to be vindicated at the cost of your country going to hell — but I am trying to say, “See! I’ve been trying to tell you this was coming. Let’s act!”)

I have been very clear in this space that what the MAGA mob did in Washington was absolutely unacceptable, and that everyone who participated in it should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law. I want to see this president impeached, even though he is leaving office later this month, because what he has done must be formally repudiated by Congress. I have been hard on religious conservatives who, after the election, went all-in on “Stop The Steal,” saying that this was madness. It’s all there on the record. These people have brought disgrace to themselves and to our country.

That said, it is instructive to compare, as Culper does, the reaction of the Establishment (my catch-all term for figures in the state, corporate America, universities, media, and other institutions that make up what the neoreactionaries call “the Cathedral”) to last year’s race rioting and Wednesday’s MAGA riot. It was entirely predictable. Last year’s rioters were widely characterized in the media and among the Establishment as victims, ultimately. Nobody sees the MAGA people as victims, only as Deplorables. In my view, rioters, whether white or black, left-wing or right-wing, are deplorable. Violence must be rejected, full stop.

But that’s not how things work in this country.

Universities, media, and corporations responded to last year’s violence as if they had an urgent moral responsibility to embrace a form of de-Nazification regarding race — as if institutions where previously racism was minimal to non-existent had awakened to find themselves all to be harboring aggressive bigotries that must be stamped out. Recently, the National Association of Realtors, a professional organization with 1.4 million members, announced a plan to suppress “hate speech” by monitoring all aspects of its members’ lives. As Real Clear investigations reports:

In what some consider one of the most far-reaching social policy moves in the corporate world, the National Association of Realtors, called the nation’s largest trade organization, has revised its professional ethics code to ban “hate speech and harassing speech” by its 1.4 million members.

The sweeping prohibition applies to association members 24/7, covering all communication, private and professional, written and spoken, online and off. Punishment could top out at a maximum fine of $15,000 and expulsion from the organization.

More:

NAR’s decision, allowing any member of the public to file a complaint, has alarmed other real estate agents, and also some legal and ethics experts, who say the hate speech ban’s vagueness is an invitation to censor controversial political opinions, especially on race and gender. While that’s not the association’s stated intention, the skeptics say their fears are justified by the hyperactive “cancel culture” online that has jettisoned hapless workers for posting “all lives matter” and objecting to gay marriage.

“The dam has broken and other organizations will look at this,” predicted Robert Föehl, a professor of business ethics and business law at Ohio University.

“If this is good for real estate agents, why not attorneys, why not doctors?” Föehl said. “They’re going to be pressured to do what NAR has done. And that pressure is going to be very real, because what organization wants to argue they should allow hate speech by their members?”

And:

Among those caught up in the uncertainty are real estate agents who are Christian preachers or Sunday school teachers, or anyone who expresses traditional religious views on gender and sexuality that are out of vogue in some circles today.

“We’re getting a lot of people asking about whether or not they can say that they are against gay marriage,” NAR staffer Diane Mosley said during an online training session on Nov. 30. “Specifically, if they can back it up with Scriptures, or say it in a sermon.”

Read it all.This amounts to a blacklist. The Woke NAR’s campaign against Evil is so intense that it even wants to hold its members responsible for private speech. We have to hope that it doesn’t hold up in court, but we should expect this kind of thing to sweep across the professions. The Reichstag fire that happened at the Capitol on Wednesday is going to give far more impetus to these measures. Any Realtor who has ever said anything favorable about Donald Trump online ought to be worried about his or her job now. What organization wants to argue that its members should be allowed to express support for the people who invaded the Capitol?

All of this was foreseeable, by the way. I was writing about it in this space as far back as 2015, when Big Business smashed the Indiana Religious Freedom Restoration Act. I’m not a seer of any sort, but I knew back then — and wrote in this space — that the liberty of people, religious or not, to dissent from progressive beliefs on homosexuality was suddenly in danger from corporations.

And Republicans did nothing.  Neither did Donald Trump.

When he came into office, he had a Republican Congress behind him for two years. Where was the legislation to protect speech and religious liberty in the face of corporate policies? When did he even talk about it in any meaningful way? Well, he’s going now, and on the way out, he arranged for the Democrats to take over Congress, and he and his followers have given the Left carte blanche to treat all of us as hostes humani generis — enemies of the human race. I get the phrase from Justice Scalia’s Windsor dissent:

To defend traditional marriage is not to condemn, demean, or humiliate those who would prefer other arrangements, any more than to defend the Constitution of the United States is to condemn, demean, or humiliate other constitutions. To hurl such accusations so casually demeans this institution. In the majority’s judgment, any resistance to its holding is beyond the pale of reasoned disagreement. To question its high-handed invalidation of a presumptively valid statute is to act (the majority is sure) with the purpose to “disparage,” “injure,” “degrade,” “demean,” and “humiliate” our fellow human beings, our fellow citizens, who are homosexual. All that, simply for supporting an Act that did no more than codify an aspect of marriage that had been unquestioned in our society for most of its existence— indeed, had been unquestioned in virtually all societies for virtually all of human history. It is one thing for a society to elect change; it is another for a court of law to impose change by adjudging those who oppose it hostes humani generis, enemies of the human race.

At this point, it’s meaningless to focus on the woulda-coulda-shoulda. We are past that now. I received this e-mail overnight from a professor who is a Christian. I slightly edited it to protect the reader’s identity:

I’m [a science and technology] professor at a research intensive university.  The soft totalitarianism of which you speak is spot on. It is not a far-away possibility but a movement that already has most of our institutions in its grip. It is here.  Although I should be getting my tenure in a few months, I doubt even it will protect me should I question the EDI religion, the rapid decline in standards, the harm we are actually inflicting on students by validating their every grievance. I’ve peered behind the curtain in my own field.  Are they true believers in today’s societal delusions? Some definitely are.  Many are careerists, who will say and do whatever is necessary.  Most operate out of fear.  They are terrified of students, of bad publicity.  And as we acquiesce, the woke mob gains more and more ground.  None of this will be easily reversed, if ever.

The sad thing is, we are stuck between a rock and a hard place.  We want to fight back, but the conservative movement has become as toxic, identitarian and, frankly, idiotic as the woke left.  I am not willing to give up reason and truth so that I can defeat my enemies.  And what if this cohort of the New Right wins and becomes our cultural icons? Is this really what we want? Emotion-driven, culturally illiterate, ahistorical blowhards? The cure is nearly as bad as the disease.

I fear for our future.  I have three children.  I am pretty convinced that my two boys will not have the same opportunities as those growing up one or two generations ago.  I worry any one of them will fall into the nihilistic, deconstructionist world view that is brainwashing most young people today.  It is not out of the question that our governments may institute a social credit system, making me choose between my conscience and more freedom/opportunity for my children.  I see this authoritarianism coming from a newfound love for control amidst the Covid-19 pandemic (I am NOT a denier) and an overreaction to the tumultuous Trump years.  My wife and I want to take our family and run for the hills.

The man is right — but there is no place to hide, not really. There are places where we can be safer, and live more normal lives, but given how networked everything in modernity is, they will be able to find us and control us wherever we are. I’ve been saying for a while in this space that the American version of the social credit system is going to come about to allow the Establishment to control political dissent, and that it would be implemented with the excuse that it is required to keep the civil peace. What happened Wednesday is exactly the excuse they need.

Some people have said that the MAGA riot at the Capitol shows a blind spot in Live Not By Lies — my ignoring the power of the Right living by lies. That’s fair, but only to a point. When the paperback edition of the book comes out, I’m going to talk about this in a new chapter. There was, and remains, a big difference between the MAGA crowd living by lies, and the Woke crowd. The MAGA people have had far less power to remake broad social institutions according to their lies. Yes, they elected a president, but it is remarkable how little actual power that president exercised to remake the world according to his vision. The Trump presidency was primarily performative. “He fights!” his followers said, but they never focus on how foolishly he fought, and how few of those battles he actually won. The chief long-term impact of Trumpism, I think, is going to be the demonization of the Right in popular culture and within institutions. There was never any chance at all that the MAGA mob was going to change the election result. What they did was utterly shocking, but ultimately an act of impotence. Compare the long-term outcome of the George Floyd riots to the long-term outcome of the MAGA riot. The MAGA lies were not without consequence, and would have been consequential (at least within the GOP, conservative churches, and right-of-center institutions; the Republican National Committee national retreat this week was psychotically divorced from the real world in this way) even if the Wednesday riot had not happened. The radicalization of Obama voter Ashli Babbitt into the kind of QAnon lunatic who lost her life trying to climb through a smashed door to get to the House chamber (a Capitol Police officer shot her) reveals how consequential those lies were. But no Big Tech entity an no corporation is going to change its policies to be more sympathetic to the views of the Ashli Babbitts of the world. There never was the slightest danger that a buffoon like Trump would attempt to institute a social credit system to marginalize and punish anti-MAGA Americans.

Anyway, I anticipate that rightist radicals will now begin to undertake campaigns of low-level violent actions — bombings and other forms of domestic terrorism. It won’t amount to anything, but it will give the Establishment (= not just the state, but corporations too) even more excuses to crack down. Do you go to a church where they preach “bigotry,” and where cars with Trump bumper stickers have been spotted in the parking lot, and publicized by activists on social media? Then you’ve got a problem.

Yesterday a leftist young woman outed members of her family on social media, posting their names and calling them Trump supporters — something that seems to be true, but which opens them up to mob reprisals in this environment. Naturally the people on social media cheered her on for her courageous act of virtue. Ratting your own family out to the mob — this is where we are now. You cannot be sure that your own children are trustworthy. After all, if they have been educated by schools where the things their parents believe are demonized, why shouldn’t they be loyal, virtuous citizens, and inform on their families?

Do you see now why the people who grew up under Soviet communism have been so alarmed by what we have been building here? This week has been the unveiling.

Not for one second do I defend the MAGA mob and what it has done. President Trump and his followers have played right into the hands of the leftist controllers. They are now beside the point, though. What is to be done?

First and foremost, read the signs of the times. Don’t be afraid to be seen as “alarmist.” America in this past year — first with the race riots and aftermath, and now with the MAGA riot in the Capitol, and its aftermath — crossed a big line.

Second, traditional Christians and other dissidents from the emerging regime must begin to form groups and networks of mutual support, like Father Kolakovic’s followers in pre-communist Slovakia.

Third, it is absolutely vital that people within these groups and networks think as clearly as they possibly can about where we are, and where we are going. The QAnon lies, and the other lies associated with MAGA world, can only confuse us, and lead us into traps. Right-wing lies are no more acceptable than left-wing lies. In Live Not By Lies, I wrote about Father Kolakovic, and how he prepared Slovak Christians for what he saw coming:

[H]e understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.

“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.

QAnon will not carry any of us through what’s coming. Neither will anything to do with Donald Trump, or racial identity politics, or political radicalism. Many church circles have been contaminated by hatred and paranoia. Refuse and reject that right now. If you make room in your heart and mind for it, it will take you down, and take down all those that follow you. What is upon us now, and what is coming very fast at us, is going to require the dissident church to be steadfast, clear-thinking, and willing to suffer. Paranoids and haters make us weak and vulnerable, and will turn us into the same monsters we are trying to resist.

For you who have read, or will read, Live Not By Lies , here is a link to the Study Guide I wrote, with lots of questions for you and the groups with which you read it. I am eager to hear from you readers who have more concrete ideas for how we can organize right now.

The post Information And The Cultural Revolution appeared first on The American Conservative.

The Left’s Reichstag Fire

In 1933, shortly after Adolf Hitler took power, a Dutch communist allegedly started a fire in the German Reichstag building. Hitler used this act as a pretext to begin seizing dictatorial powers. The term “Reichstag fire” in popular culture refers to an event, possibly a false flag (historians can’t agree on whether or not the Reichstag fire was started by a lone communist, a communist acting with others, or was a false flag by the Nazis) that serves as a pretext for repression.

If you are only just now coming to this blog via social media, you should know that I have been a sharp critic of the Stop The Steal movement from the beginning — you can look it up on this site — and that I am disgusted and appalled by what happened on Capitol Hill yesterday. Yesterday, I predicted that the Left and the liberal Establishment would use the failed Beer Belly Putsch as an opportunity to begin to implement the rudiments of a social credit system, and to otherwise marginalize and suppress right-of-center discourse and people.

Well, here we go. Here’s commentary by Oliver D’Arcy at CNN. Excerpt:

“Fox and Newsmax, both delivered to my home by your company, are complicit,” NJ state Assemblyman Paul Moriarty texted a Comcast executive on Thursday. “What are you going to do???”

“You feed this garbage, lies and all,” Moriarty added to the executive, according to a screen grab of the texts he provided me. Moriarty was referring to the fact that Comcast’s cable brand, Xfinity, provides a platform to right-wing cable networks that have for weeks been disseminating disinformation about the November election results to audiences of millions.

Moriarty has a point. We regularly discuss what the Big Tech companies have done to poison the public conversation by providing large platforms to bad-faith actors who lie, mislead, and promote conspiracy theories. But what about TV companies that provide platforms to networks such as Newsmax, One America News — and, yes, Fox News?

Somehow, these companies have escaped scrutiny and entirely dodged this conversation. That should not be the case anymore. After Wednesday’s incident of domestic terrorism on Capitol Hill, it is time TV carriers face questions for lending their platforms to dishonest companies that profit off of disinformation and conspiracy theories. After all, it was the very lies that Fox, Newsmax, and OAN spread that helped prime President Trump’s supporters into not believing the truth: that he lost an honest and fair election.

Yes, Sean Hannity and Tucker Carlson and Mark Levin and others are responsible for the lies they peddle to their audiences. But the TV companies that beam them into millions of homes around the country also bear some responsibility. And yet we rarely, if ever, talk about them.

When Black Lives Matter protests turned into mass riots, where were the calls to suppress CNN, The New York Times, and other media that constantly repeated the BLM message, and the general message that America is a bastion of white supremacy, whose regime lacks legitimacy? They didn’t exist. They didn’t exist because this is a free country. I read the Times every day, and on some issues, it’s more or less a propaganda sheet (its Pulitzer-winning 1619 Project is clearly intended to delegitimize the American founding). But the state and any other authority had better keep its hands off the Times, and all other left-wing media.

The idea that a journalist, Oliver D’Arcy, is calling for a discussion on whether to deplatform and suppress other journalists — including a direct competitor — is chilling. But I am certain that it is a sign of things to come.

Yesterday Simon & Schuster cancelled a deal with Sen. Josh Hawley, who was under contract to pen a book about the tyranny of Big Tech. I was bothered by this, because I don’t like to see anybody lose a book deal, and because I think Big Tech deserves a hell of a lot of scrutiny by Congress. But then Hawley issued a statement calling it “Orwellian” and a violation of the First Amendment, and I decided not to participate in defending Hawley’s book deal. It is not “Orwellian” or a violation of the First Amendment. All publishers retain the right in their contracts with authors to cancel books pre-publication (trust me on this; I’ve written five books). Whether or not it is morally correct for a publisher to do so is a different question. I stood up for Woody Allen in his fight with his publisher last year over this issue. Hawley is free to shop his manuscript around, and any other publisher is free to buy it and publish it. To call this “Orwellian” and unconstitutional is cynical, manipulative hype. While I wish S&S had stuck by its commitment to publish what I expect will be an important book, the fact is that Josh Hawley, by his own actions post-Election Day, has made himself a uniquely controversial figure, one central to one of the most shameful events in American political history. What Simon & Schuster did was regrettable, from my point of view, but within the bounds of reason.

I bring this up to say that not every attempt to marginalize a dissident-right voice is unjustified. Take too the case of Paul Davis, a Texas corporate lawyer who Instagrammed a photo of himself on Capitol Hill, at the riot:

His company fired him. I can’t blame them. He is a lawyer, and he participated in a riot. To be fair, if he did not enter into the Capitol, I would have given him the benefit of the doubt. But the fact that he was tear-gassed means he was at least very close to the action. The event itself was a shameful act, and I can’t blame a company for wanting to separate itself from one of its house lawyers, especially one stupid enough to put evidence of his participation in it on social media.

That said, will it stop with Paul Davis? I doubt it. I expect many companies to pink-slip employees who were photographed at the Trump event, even if they were nowhere near the invasion of the Capitol. If it happens, it will be extremely unjust, and dangerous. If photographic or other hard evidence existed of an employee participating in one of last year’s race riots existed, a company would be justified in firing that employee. But not everybody who marched in those protests intended to riot, or be at all tied to criminal activity. There would be no grounds to fire them.

Nevertheless, I expect corporate America, goosed by left-wing activists, to undertake a purge of any employees who publicly expressed sympathy, on their private social media channels or anywhere, with Trump, MAGA, or the election protest. This has already been happening in some hospitals over gender ideology. As I write in Live Not By Lies:

Beyond cancel culture, which is reactive, institutions are embedding within their systems ideological tests to weed out dissenters. At universities within the University of California system, for example, teachers who want to apply for tenure-track positions have to affirm their commitment to “equity, diversity, and inclusion”—and to have demonstrated it, even if it has nothing to do with their field. Similar politically correct loyalty oaths are required at leading public and private schools.

De facto loyalty tests to diversity ideology are common in corporate America. … A Soviet-born US physician told me—after I agreed not to use his name—that he never posts anything remotely controversial on social media, because he knows that the human resources department at his hospital monitors employee accounts for evidence of disloyalty to the progressive “diversity and inclusion” creed.

That same doctor disclosed that social justice ideology is forcing physicians like him to ignore their medical training and judgment when it comes to transgender health. He said it is not permissible within his institution to advise gender dysphoric patients against treatments they desire, even when a physician believes it is not in that particular patient’s health interest.

Do not think that your many years of service or your expertise will save you if your company or institution’s HR department finds evidence that you are now or ever were a sympathizer with MAGA. We are about to enter into a full-blown political and moral panic, led by the institutional power-holders. Glenn Greenwald is a man of the Left, but yesterday spoke out courageously against the coming repression. Excerpt:

There are other, more important historical lessons to draw not only from the 9/11 attack but subsequent terrorism on U.S. soil. One is the importance of resisting the coercive framework that demands everyone choose one of two extremes: that the incident is either (a) insignificant or even justifiable, or (b) is an earth-shattering, radically transformative event that demands radical, transformative state responses.

This reductive, binary framework is anti-intellectual and dangerous. One can condemn a particular act while resisting the attempt to inflate the dangers it poses. One can acknowledge the very real existence of a threat while also warning of the harms, often far greater, from proposed solutions. One can reject maximalist, inflammatory rhetoric about an attack (a War of Civilizations, an attempted coup, an insurrection, sedition) without being fairly accused of indifference toward or sympathy for the attackers.

Indeed, the primary focus of the first decade of my journalism was the U.S. War on Terror — in particular, the relentless erosions of civil liberties and the endless militarization of American society in the name of waging it. To make the case that those trends should be opposed, I frequently argued that the threat posed by Islamic radicalism to U.S. citizens was being deliberately exaggerated, inflated and melodramatized.

I argued that not because I believed the threat was nonexistent or trivial: I lived in New York City on 9/11 and remember to this day the excruciating horror from the smell and smoke emanating throughout Lower Manhattan and the haunting “missing” posters appended by desperate families, unwilling to accept the obvious reality of their loved ones’ deaths, to every lamp post on every street corner. I shared the same disgust and sadness as most other Americans from the Pulse massacre, the subway bombings in London and Madrid, the workplace mass shooting in San Bernardino.

My insistence that we look at the other side of the ledger — the costs and dangers not only from such attacks but also the “solutions” implemented in the name of the stopping them — did not come from indifference towards those deaths or a naive views of those responsible for them. It was instead driven by my simultaneous recognition of the dangers from rights-eroding, authoritarian reactions imposed by the state, particularly in the immediate aftermath of a traumatic event. One need not engage in denialism or minimization of a threat to rationally resist fear-driven fanaticism — as Barbara Lee so eloquently insisted on September 14, 2001.

I hope we listen to Greenwald, but I doubt we will. The disgusting assault on the US Capitol, and on the constitutional process of certifying an election, by Trump fanatics was a great gift to the authoritarian, repressive Left. After last year’s riots, the Establishment accelerated the implementation of race-radicalism as re-education within US schools, universities, and other institutions. And now, that same Establishment can be expected to accelerate even stronger ideological measures to suppress anything it regards as dissent — and that will eventually mean the expression of ordinary social, religious, and political conservatism, even by people who never liked Donald Trump.

This is what it means to live in a pre-totalitarian society.

But turning to the Right, you know what it also means to live in a pre-totalitarian society? Read Declan Leary’s TAC account of being at the MAGA rally on Capitol Hill when it went off on Wednesday. Excerpts:

Another chant begins, though I can’t tell if it’s the same woman. Whoever it is, she calls out, “Where we go one…”—more than a moment’s pause as she waits for a reply—”…we go all.” As the day goes on the chant becomes a staple, and as the crowd becomes familiar the pauses disappear. It’s a slogan closely associated with QAnon.

As I approach the Capitol I see a big man standing at an empty wheelchair, snapping pictures of the scene; I wonder if I narrowly missed a miracle. Just past him a young black man with a bullhorn and a carefully groomed Afro chants “Biden loves minors” over and over as the crowd streams by. A young redhead—with a nose ring, a mustache, and black clothes adorned with a subdued American flag—is the first person I see who looks ready for a fight.

There’s scaffolding set up for the planned inauguration, and protestors have already climbed it in one spot, a narrow stand facing the building in line with the police barricade. There’s a rainbow flag up there, and I wonder if it’s the same one I saw earlier, or if they’re scattered through the crowd. An old man is dressed as Uncle Sam; the climb up a chained ladder can’t have been easy for him.

The crowd is packed in tight, and a cacophony of competing shouts merges into a stereophonic roar. I pick out bits and pieces. To my left I hear “We don’t need Gitmo,” and I’m not quite sure what’s meant by it. From the same general area comes “I’ll donate a vaccination—.223 hollow point.” A little less ambiguous. Somebody with a megaphone is in the middle of a speech: “If you stand for nothing, you gotta stand for something.” Close enough. A young woman with a bullhorn of her own lets out a lone motherfucker. An older man looks at me with a smile and asks if she kisses her mother with that mouth. A few seconds later the same voice drones at nobody in particular: Pussy, pussyyyyy, pussy, pusssaaaaaaayyyyyy.

More:

While thousands leave, at least as many linger. Though Pence has been gone for quite a while—he evacuated when Congress did—one of those who stays is taunting him in a singsong voice: “Mikey, I’ve heard rumors about you.” Chatter in the crowd indicates it’s an accusation of pedophilia—a running theme among the gathered demonstrators.

On the train ride home—the car packed for the first time in months—one woman tells an attentive audience that she’s seen video online of John Roberts raping a young girl then shooting her in the head. Meanwhile, another—well-dressed, in her 60s, and sitting with her husband—reads aloud from Facebook on her phone. The rioters who invaded the Capitol building were not Trump supporters at all, she says. They were Antifa and BLM infiltrators, each and every one of them. Nothing violent or illegal was done by any of the thousands whose indignation was so clear, so forceful all around the building. This can’t have been us. We should not believe anything to the contrary.

Read it all.  Leary says that

When Congress reconvenes at night, the establishment will be openly hardened against the right-wing resistance that boiled over today. Some will declare it dead, banished from the GOP. But there is something here that will not go away.

He’s no doubt correct. I’ve been looking at the social and other media of some of the people involved in the fanatical Jericho March, and there is not the least contrition or second thoughts about what they have done. To take an especially sad case (for me, personally), here is a piece I did about the hysterical post-election rhetoric from Eric Metaxas. Excerpts:

“It’s like stealing the heart and soul of America. It’s like holding a rusty knife to the throat of Lady Liberty,” Eric says, of the election.”

“You might as well spit on the grave of George Washington,” he says.

“This is evil,” he says. And: “It’s like somebody has been raped or murdered. … This is like that times a thousand.”

This. Is. Hysterical. But there’s more.

“This is trying to kill the American people. This is everything.” And he says to believe otherwise is listening to “the voice of the Devil.”

Think about that. An Evangelical broadcaster is saying that Donald Trump’s election loss is a thousand times worse than rape and murder, equivalent to the murder of a nation. And if you don’t believe it? You are demonized.

And then this:

“Everybody who is not hopped up about this … you are the Germans that looked the other way when Hitler was preparing to do what he was preparing to do. Unfortunately, I don’t see how you can see it any other way.”

More from that December post of mine:

Eric Metaxas doesn’t care what the courts have said. In a clip that starts right here, he says,

“So who cares what I can prove in the courts? This is right. This happened, and I am going to do anything I can to uncover this horror, this evil.”

Evidence, or the lack of it, does not matter. He is declaring as a matter of faith that Donald Trump won the election. How can you argue with that? You can’t. It is a statement of faith.

So, when he talks about doing “anything” he can to fight this thing that is a thousand times worse than rape and murder, what does he mean? Quote:

“We need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.”

There is no way around it, and it grieves me to say it: Eric Metaxas is calling for violent bloodshed to defend Donald Trump’s presidency, and he doesn’t care that Trump’s lawyers have not been able to prove in court that Trump had the election stolen from him. He told Charlie Kirk that he is willing to kill or be killed for a political cause for which there is not enough evidence to advance a court case, even among friendly judges.

This is fanaticism. But according to Eric, to disagree with him is to be under the sway of the Devil. Actual quotes:

“This is sacred. … Every American should say I really don’t care what it takes, we will not let this happen in America.”

“The fact that Republicans would shrug, it’s just despicable, it’s very clarifying, and I just believe God is in this, what can I say?”

“I still feel that those of us who know this is massive fraud, we have no choice but to fight.”

He knows because … he just knows, is all. God is in it, after all. It’s holy war. He says too:

“Everything’s at stake. America’s at stake.”

“If we don’t get our people in … we go over the cliff, and we don’t come back.”

If you really believed that, then of course you would be willing to kill and be killed for the cause. My God.

You can hear and see Eric say all these things in this Charlie Kirk interview from December 9. 

Well, now five people are dead, including Trump fanatic Ashli Babbitt, who was as rabid about Trump as Eric Metaxas was. Here’s a link to a New York Post story about Babbitt, including a barking-mad video she posted about Kamala Harris. You should watch it, and consider whether you want this country to be ruled by people like that. I went back to read her Twitter feed from early December until now. It’s full of QAnon garbage, such as:

And so forth. Lots of this stuff. And, of course, this:

The Washington Post has published video from one of the protesters, showing the shooting of Ashli Babbitt. You really should watch this. She was at the forefront of an angry mob that had reached the doors of the Speakers Lobby, which, had they gotten in, would have given them access to the House Chamber. The WaPo has this map:

That’s how close the mob was to the Chamber. At the start of the video, you can see, behind the closed doors, members of Congress. Police are trying to keep the mob from going through the doors, but the mob chants, “F–k the blue! F–k the blue!”, and starts bashing the glass on the doors. Eventually the police move away, and the crowd keeps bashing. The doors begin to give way. An officer inside the door points a gun at the mob. Someone yells that he has a gun. The mob does nothing. Then the police officer fires. A bullet hits Ashli Babbitt, who later died.

The only person responsible for Ashli Babbitt’s death is Ashli Babbitt. The officer who shot her was doing his duty. But there is on MAGA media talk about how she is a martyr, and was assassinated by the Deep State, etc. Such rot.

See, though, Eric Metaxas spoke openly about how “we need to fight to the death, to the last drop of blood, because it’s worth it.” And now this lunatic woman, hopped up on this kind of rhetoric, died assaulting the US House of Representatives. For what? This is how her life ended. She alone is responsible for her death, but I wish that people like Eric, who juiced up their listeners with talk about the necessity to shed blood to defend Donald Trump, would feel even the slightest bit of remorse for their rash rhetoric.

Not gonna happen. Not yet, anyway. He’s doubling down on the MAGA-mob mentality:

He is not the only one. As I said, this is painful to me, because Eric is a longtime friend. He has given over his fine mind and sweet spirit to madness — madness that has now resulted in the same bloodshed that he was telling his listeners they needed to be prepared to submit to as recently as last month. Notice, though, in this tweet of his from Thursday, he is already deflecting blame for the event onto Antifa. This is all over MAGA social media, this idea. Nope, couldn’t be them. All this bad stuff was surely Antifa. Friends and readers report hearing this from their own social networks, and family members.

Listen, if you have been a regular reader of this blog for a while, you know that I have been hell on the ideological Left for pushing its fanatical theories. My book Live Not By Lies goes into detail about how the identity-politics Left is laying the groundwork for a form of totalitarianism. That has not changed one bit as the result of events this week — in fact, as I claim in this post, these events have almost certainly accelerated the Left’s plans.

But no honest person can deny that Donald Trump and his MAGA devotees have also accelerated it by their actions. And they too are going along the totalitarian path. In Live Not By Lies, I have a chapter on Hannah Arendt and her study of how Nazi and Communist totalitarianism came to power. A sign that totalitarianism is at hand is the willingness of large numbers of people to quit caring about the truth, and to prefer ideology. Excerpt:

Heda Margolius Kovály, a disillusioned Czech communist whose husband was executed after a 1952 show trial, reflects on the willingness of people to turn their backs on the truth for the sake of an ideological cause.

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

You can surrender your moral responsibility to be honest out of misplaced idealism. You can also surrender it by hating others more than you love truth. In pre-totalitarian states, Arendt writes, hating “respectable society” was so narcotic, that elites were willing to accept “monstrous forgeries in historiography” for the sake of striking back at those who, in their view, had “excluded the underprivileged and oppressed from the memory of mankind.”

Add “for Donald Trump” and “for ‘Make America Great Again'” to Kovaly’s list. This is not a left-vs-right thing. This is about the power of ideological narrative to conquer hearts and minds — and nations. Ashli Babbitt’s road to her own violent death began when she opened her mind up to the lies of QAnon and Donald Trump.

As you watch that video on the Post’s site — the one of the events leading up to Babbitt’s shooting — think of this passage from Live Not By Lies:

The post-World War I generation of writers and artists were marked by their embrace and celebration of anti-cultural philosophies and acts as a way of demonstrating contempt for established hierarchies, institutions, and ways of thinking. Arendt said of some writers who glorified the will to power, “They read not Darwin but the Marquis de Sade.”

Her point was that these authors did not avail themselves of respectable intellectual theories to justify their transgressiveness. They immersed themselves in what is basest in human nature and regarded doing so as acts of liberation. Arendt’s judgment of the postwar elites who recklessly thumbed their noses at respectability could easily apply to those of our own day who shove aside liberal principles like fair play, race neutrality, free speech, and free association as obstacles to equality. Arendt wrote:

The members of the elite did not object at all to paying a price, the destruction of civilization, for the fun of seeing how those who had been excluded unjustly in the past forced their way into it.

Or maybe because they saw in these mobs a wave that they could surf to political power. This, I think, explains Sen. Hawley and Sen. Ted Cruz. You read Declan Leary’s account of embedding himself in that MAGA mob on Wednesday, and you will see examples of baseness masquerading as liberation.

This has long been a facet of the Left. It is now undeniably a facet of the Right. I have long complained in this space that responsible liberals have allowed totalitarians to thrive on the Left because they lack the courage, the wisdom, or the conviction to stand up to them. It is now undeniably true on the Right as well.

The difference is this: Trump and his fanatics have been unmasked. We know where their brand of ideological madness leads: to a mob attacking the US Capitol in an attempt to stop the constitutionally mandated certification of an election. The Establishment will now use everything in its power to suppress anything related to Trumpism — including plain old conservatism. Because the left-wing extremists have honeycombed Establishment institutions with their sympathizers, the Left will now benefit from popular disgust with Trump’s legacy, and use this moment to consolidate power.

The social credit system is coming. Repression is coming. Guilt by association is coming. I hope I’m wrong about this, but I feel sure that any real opportunity the Right had to stop it was trampled underfoot by Donald Trump and his mob, who were willing to throw everything away to live by the lies of QAnon, Stop The Steal, and late-period MAGA. We on the Right who were not part of this movement are going to have to pay a steep price for what they have done. Don’t misread me: we have to fight it as hard as we can, and hope we can prevail.

To my Christian readers, I say again: read the signs of the times. We are in a Kolakovic Moment. Father Tomislav Kolakovic, the Croatian priest to whom I dedicate Live Not By Lies, escaped the Nazis and hid out in Slovakia, in 1943. He immediately set himself to preparing the Slovak church for the persecution he knew was coming. From my book:

By the time Father Kolaković reached Bratislava, it was clear that Czechoslovakia would eventually be liberated by the Red Army. In fact, in 1944, the Czech government in exile made a formal agreement with Stalin, guaranteeing that after driving the Nazis out, the Soviets would give the nation its freedom.

Because he knows how the Soviets thought, Father Kolaković knew this was a lie. He warned Slovak Catholics that when the war ended, Czechoslovakia would fall to the rule of a Soviet puppet government. He dedicated himself to preparing them for persecution.

Father Kolaković knew that the clericalism and passivity of traditional Slovak Catholicism would be no match for communism. For one thing, he correctly foresaw that the communists would try to control the church by subduing the clergy. For another, he understood that the spiritual trials awaiting believers under communism would put them to an extreme test. The charismatic pastor preached that only a total life commitment to Christ would enable them to withstand the coming trial.

“Give yourself totally to Christ, throw all your worries and desires on him, for he has a wide back, and you will witness miracles,” the priest said, in the recollection of one disciple.

Giving oneself totally to Christ was not an abstraction or a pious thought. It needed to be concrete, and it needed to be communal. … The refugee priest taught the young Slovak believers that every person must be accountable to God for his actions. Freedom is responsibility, he stressed; it is a means to live within the truth. The motto of the Jocists became the motto for what Father Kolaković called his “Family”: “See. Judge. Act.” See meant to be awake to realities around you. Judge was a command to discern soberly the meaning of those realities in light of what you know to be true, especially from the teachings of the Christian faith. After you reach a conclusion, then you are to act to resist evil.

Václav Vaško, a Kolaković follower, recalled late in his life that Father Kolaković’s ministry excited so many young Catholics because it energized the laity and gave them a sense of leadership responsibility.

“It is remarkable how Kolaković almost instantly succeeded in creating a community of trust and mutual friendship from a diverse grouping of people (priests, religious and lay people of different ages, education, or spiritual maturity),” Vaško wrote.

The Family groups came together at first for Bible study and prayer, but soon began listening to Father Kolaković lecture on philosophy, sociology, and intellectual topics. Father Kolaković also trained his young followers in how to work secretly, and to withstand the interrogation that he said would surely come.

The Family expanded its small groups quickly across the nation. “By the end of the school year 1944,” Vaško said, “it would have been difficult to find a faculty or secondary school in Bratislava or larger cities where our circles did not operate.”

In 1946, Czech authorities deported the activist priest. Two years later, communists seized total power, just as Father Kolaković had predicted. Within several years, almost all of the Family had been imprisoned and the Czechoslovak institutional church brutalized into submission. But when the Family members emerged from prison in the 1960s, they began to do as their spiritual father had taught them. Father Kolaković’s top two lieutenants—physician Silvester Krčméry and priest Vladimír Jukl—quietly set up Christian circles around the country and began to build the underground church.

The underground church, led by the visionary cleric’s spiritual children and grandchildren, became the principle means of anti-communist dissent for the next forty years. It was they who organized a mass 1988 public demonstration in Bratislava, the Slovak capital, demanding religious liberty. The Candle Demonstration was the first major protest against the state. It kicked off the Velvet Revolution, which brought down the communist regime a year later. Though Slovak Christians were among the most persecuted in the Soviet Bloc, the Catholic Church there thrived in resistance because one man saw what was coming and prepared his people.

Father Kolakovic’s bishops denounced him as an alarmist, but he did not listen. He understood what was happening, and what was going to happen. He taught the Christians who were willing to listen not to be passive, to assume that it couldn’t happen there. He knew that they wouldn’t be able to stand up to the might of the Red Army. He taught them how to use their freedom to prepare for what was coming.

This is what we have to do right now: use our freedom to prepare to resist. Do not listen to the lies of the MAGA diehards, whose fanaticism has been a blessing to the would-be totalitarians of the Left. Do not allow yourself to think that you will be protected because you never supported Trump, Stop The Steal, or any of it. The attack on the Capitol — which was unquestionably a MAGA affair — is the Left’s Reichstag fire: a pretext to begin the systematic oppression of all opposition.

If you thought the Left’s soft-totalitarian rhetoric of smashing rights and liberties for the sake of creating a “safe space” was bad before, oh baby, just you wait.

UPDATE: Since posting this, I learned that Twitter has permanently banned Donald Trump. I feel exactly as Denny Burk does. Trump deserves it — but this will not stop with Trump. Don’t you believe for a second that it will.

I have two feelings at once:

1. I’m really thankful the daily bile infecting the national consciousness will not have a platform anymore.

2. This is a really bad precedent. Really bad. This will likely lead over time to banishment of non-PC speech on social media platforms. https://t.co/JBoU5wSynC

— Denny Burk (@DennyBurk) January 9, 2021

UPDATE.2: More:

1. NEWS

Apple has given Parler, the social network favored by conservatives and extremists, an ultimatum to implement a full moderation plan of its platform within the next 24 hours or face expulsion from the App store.@RMac18 @JohnPaczkowski report https://t.co/eP3AF9o7FZ

— Yashar Ali

My Morning With The Gouger

Good afternoon. I just awakened from the fallout of my sedation dentistry appointment at 7 am. The dentist’s protocol involved advance administration of the tranquilizer Halcion, plus some other med, plus nitrous oxide, plus, of course, novocaine. All of this for a filling. I apologize for none of it. I’m one of those weirdos who is extremely sensitive to oral pain, and psychotic about the sound of a dentist’s drill. They zonked me out pretty good this morning, but I was all too aware of the sound and feeling of the whirring drill hitting my tooth. If I hadn’t been in a Hunter S. Thompson state of mind, I would have jumped out of the chair and clung to the ceiling like a cartoon cat. As it was, I kept making a fist and felt like somebody strapped into a seat in a crashing airplane.

The effect of the drugs, they told me, would make me forget everything. My wife drove me home and put me to bed, where I slept hard until 3pm. Turns out the only things I remember about it was THE EFFING DRILL GRINDING INTO MY TEETH. That, and looking down to see my left hand clench and unclench, spastically.

Here’s a short clip of the time Lisa Simpson went to the dentist. It’s me:

If I ever have to do this again — which I’m NOT because in addition to brushing and flossing regularly, as I now do, I am NOT going to bite down on popcorn kernels and destroy old fillings — I’m going to ask the dentist to allow me to listen to hard rock music via Air Pods, to counteract the sound of the drill. I really am to the dentist, what Indiana Jones is to snakes. If I heard some other person telling this tale, I would inwardly laugh at them for making such a big deal about the dentist. But I wouldn’t wish on my worst enemy — OK, maybe on a couple of them — the feeling of being in that dental chair this morning. (Note well: the dentist and his staff were wonderful. There was no deployment of the Gouger, and if it had not been for the heavy sedation, I could not have gone through with the procedure.)

I am the only one in my family to be like this about the dentist, but it turns out that this is actually a thing: oral defensiveness. It’s not psychological, but physiological. It seems to be connected to the same factors that make me a supertaster (someone who can discern many more flavors than ordinary people, because I have more taste buds). Interestingly, two of my children are very, very picky eaters, and don’t like strong tastes or unusual textures. Never have. The older of the two was diagnosed as a child with sensory processing disorder. We didn’t bother having the second one diagnosed, because we knew what we were looking at. They’re both supertasters too. Whereas they have an aversion to strong tastes and unusual textures in food, I seek that out. But they’re both fine with the dentist, whereas their father turns into Woody Allen having to storm the Normandy beaches on D-Day.

The body is so very strange. A Czech friend horrified me a story from the Communist dentistry of his youth. He underwent two root canals without anesthesia, because there was no anesthesia in the People’s Republic. I told him that I would be jacked up on tranquilizers ‘n stuff. He responded:

That’s probably the right way to go about it. Otherwise you could end up like me putting dentists into the same category with concentration camp guards. I still remember their names, faces … sadistic bastards! Dental hygiene was a collective activity. You’d go with your entire class. The dreaded day. Everybody sitting in the waiting room, names read, kids disappearing in the offices … then the unmistakable whine of painful dentistry drills … a day inevitably ending up with some poor kid barricading himself in the toilet. I remember their names too. Cowards!