Rod Dreher's Blog, page 92

The Railroading Of Mark Crispin Miller

Earlier this semester, Mark Crispin Miller, who teaches media studies at New York University, got in trouble because of something he was accused of saying in his class on propaganda. The academic free speech organization FIRE explains:

In September, a class session focused on campaigns promoting mask-wearing as a means of limiting the spread of the novel coronavirus. After a student took issue with some of Miller’s in-class statements and the sources he cited, she took to Twitter calling for him to be fired. Miller’s department chair, Rodney Benson, replied to the student’s posts and indicated that the department had made her concerns a priority.

On Oct. 6, Miller responded on his personal blog, outlining the material he shared in his course, noting the criticism he received, and expressing concerns — which FIRE shares — about the threat to academic freedom posed by investigations into course content. He also shared a petition asking NYU to affirm his right to academic freedom, which has garnered more than 17,000 signatures.

Then, on Oct. 21, several faculty members of the media department penned a letter to Dean Jack H. Knott and Provost Katherine Fleming calling on them “to publicly support the NYU community and undertake an expedited review . . . of Professor Miller’s intimidation tactics, abuses of authority, aggressions and microaggressions, and explicit hate speech, none of which are excused by academic freedom and the First Amendment protections.” However, the letter itself contained no specific allegations of policy violations, focusing instead on “the way in which [Miller] engages discussion around controversial views and non-evidence based arguments”; his petition, which they characterize as an “email campaign against the department”; and others’ negative responses to the student’s criticism of Miller’s course.

On Oct. 29, Dean Knott launched an investigation into Miller based on the letter.

FIRE takes Miller’s side in the matter, and explains why; read its entire piece, and the letter it sent to the president of NYU defending Miller from this outrageous investigation.

I know about this because of this fascinating interview with Miller on the dirtbag Left podcast Red Scare. I strongly urge you to listen to it. Miller is, by his own proud admission, a man of the Left, but he lays into the Left for supporting what he calls in the interview a form of totalitarianism like we have not yet seen. Here, in Miller’s own words, is the background of what happened to him (it’s a more detailed version of what the FIRE story says).

As Miller explained on the podcast, he asked his students to think about the way Covid masking was sold, as a story about propaganda. He says he never told his students not to wear masks, and wouldn’t have done so. But he did want them to understand how propaganda works, using a contemporary example. It’s not the case that propaganda is always for a bad cause (though Miller apparently believes that masking is ineffective, or at least not as effective as we have been told). The point, Miller told the podcasters, is that he wants to encourage students not to take the word of authorities — not even himself — at face value, but to do their own research on all issues.

This prompted a single student to take to Twitter to accuse him (falsely, he says) of telling students not to mask, and thereby making her feel unsafe. Here’s a tweet in which she called for action, and a tweet in response from Miller’s department head:

So they went after Miller. Nineteen of his colleagues signed a document demanding an investigation. According to Miller, none of them contacted him in advance to get his side of the story, or anything normal like that. This is why he has filed a lawsuit.

Miller tells the podcasters that it’s his belief that at least some of his colleagues signed the letter to punish him for something he said earlier about transgenderism. Miller comes across as a kind of anarcho-leftist, highly suspicious of concentrated power. He said that he has absolutely no objection to transgendered people, but he did mention that on his website, he published his “critique of transgender ideology.” [Hear MCM talk about this starting at the 49:55 point on the podcast.] He says that it was occasioned by a Sprite commercial showing a mother binding the breasts of her daughter. Here’s a link to MCM’s post, from back in February. MCM demands to know why billionaires are funding the transgender movement, and offers what sounds to my ears like a crankish leftie theory.

But so what? It’s a very fair line of inquiry, sparked by his wondering what interest an international soda corporation has in airing advertising affirming youth transgenderism. MCM links to this Jennifer Bilek piece from First Things in which she traces the money trail from rich men like George Soros and Warren Buffett, to the front lines of transgender activism. You would have to be blinded by ideology not to wonder what was going on here. According to Miller, this is what triggered one or more of his colleagues to falsely accuse him of saying that he hates transgendered people, and so forth.

It is entirely possible that MCM is partially, or even mostly, a left-wing crank. He believes that the Covid response is in some sense hyped to promote corporate power and centralization, and though he despises Donald Trump, he believes that the presidential election was stolen from Trump. Is he nuts? Maybe he is. But academic freedom protects people like MCM who hold unpopular opinions. In the podcast, Miller says that his academic colleagues are so deep inside an ideological bubble that they believe what they hear on NPR and read in the Times without question, and demonize any person and any claim sounding like it might be something that Trump would say.

Again, I would by no means say that I agreed with everything Mark Crispin Miller says. I don’t know much about him, though there is no question (based on things he’s published on his website) but that he believes the Covid phenomenon is a conspiracy to police the population and to concentrate power and control into a few hands. This might well be a crackpot belief — but the man should not be libeled and be forced to fight for his job because of this belief. Listening to him tell his story reminded me of how it felt to be part of the public discussion back in 2002, as millions of Americans (including me) were convinced that only cowards and fools believed that the US had no business launching war on Iraq. Today, Mark Crispin Miller might well be a fool about Covid, but I am not willing to stand back without protest and watch him crushed professionally for his dissent, even if he is wrong.

Listening to that podcast episode, and reading up on this controversy, it is clear to me that he is at the very least a victim of the kind of soft totalitarianism that I’ve been warning about for some time. As I said earlier in this post, he even talks about what’s going on as a form of totalitarianism, on the Chinese model. I wish he had said more about it. You do not have to agree with MCM on Covid, or on anything else, to recognize that what is being done to him is also happening to dissenters within academia and other institutions — those who have the courage, or the craziness, to stand against the cancel-culture mob. Once more: the principle of academic freedom is meant in part to protect gadflies like Mark Crispin Miller from precisely the kind of cancel-culture frenzy that is operating here. It is very much in the interest of all free thinkers — Left, Right, and center — that he should prevail in his lawsuit against the NYU mob.

It is also very much in our interest that we inform ourselves about what Prof. Miller is being put through by his institution and those within it. They will eventually come for us all, you know. One thing Miller said in talking about Covid struck me: he said that extended lockdowns destroy small businesses, and benefit major corporations (especially Amazon), who have the size to withstand the shock, and who can buy up ailing small businesses for pennies on the dollar. Miller may believe that the Covid lockdowns are being staged precisely for this sake, but I don’t think you have to believe that it’s all intentional to recognize that this is one economic effect of the crisis. If we have fewer small businesses, we are all more vulnerable to woke social engineering at the hands of major corporations. Small businesses are one of the few institutions where dissidents can find shelter — where they can make a living without having to compromise their consciences. If we emerge from this crisis with many fewer of them, who does that benefit, and who does that hurt?

Here is a link to the Red Scare podcast with Mark Crispin Miller:

I shouldn’t have to say this again, but to get out in front of accusers in the comments section, I will: my recommending the podcast interview does not mean that I endorse any of Prof. Miller’s views. It only means that I think he has some things to say that we should listen to and think about. He is a victim of soft totalitarianism within NYU. You might think he’s 100 percent wrong about Covid, but that does not justify the way he is being railroaded by NYU. If they get away with what they’re doing to him for his Covid opinions, they can get away with doing it to anybody over anything.

UPDATE: I have no idea if Conor is talking about Mark Crispin Miller, but this new tweet applies:

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Father Zatorski, Dead Of Covid

News from the Tyniec Abbey in Poland, and it’s not good (translated from Polish by Google):

Today, December 28, before 5:00 p.m., Fr. Włodzimierz Zatorski, a monk of the Benedictine abbey in Tyniec, died.

Father Włodzimierz was born on June 27, 1953 in Czechowice-Dziedzice. After graduating from high school in 1972, he began studies at the Silesian University of Technology in Gliwice. Repressed for his opposition activities, in 1976 he spent over six months in prison and was suspended as a student. He graduated from the Jagiellonian University in 1980 with a master’s degree in physics. Immediately afterwards he joined the Benedictine abbey in Tyniec; He took the habit on August 23, 1980, and made his first monastic vows on August 26, 1981. On the feast of St. Benedict made solemn profession in 1984 and was ordained a priest on May 9, 1987.

Founder and longtime director of TYNIEC of the Benedictine Publishing House and initiator of many publishing series appearing until today. Among the numerous tasks entrusted to him in the monastery was the office of prior, performed by him in 2005-2009. As a novice master between 2010 and 2013, he formed many monks for monastic life. In 2011 he stayed in a hermitage in Masuria and in a Benedictine abbey in Jerusalem.

In the years 2013-2019 he took care of the monastery’s financial affairs as the steward of the abbey. The deserving prefect of the Tyniec Oblates, he held this function from 2002 to 2019, contributing to the significant development of this community and caring for the formation of all lay people who wanted to live according to the Rule of St. Benedict in the world.

Author of many books, respected preacher, retreatist and spiritual director, recently involved in the activities of the Benedict Option Foundation; for many a close friend and spiritual father. In 2012

He stayed in the hospital from December 9, when he developed breathing difficulties. There, he was diagnosed with bilateral pneumonia caused by the SARS-CoV-2 virus.

The funeral will be held on Saturday, January 2 at 11:30 in the Benedictine Abbey church in Tyniec. Due to the epidemic threat still present, we appeal for remote participation in the Holy Mass. funeral via Tyniec.tv or YouTube channel . We ask everyone to pray for our Confrere, that our Savior will accept him to His glory.

Father Zatorski was deeply interested in The Benedict Option, and indeed established a foundation in Poland to support a Benedict Option community. He was its spiritual director. Here is something from the Opcja Benedykta website:

WHO WE ARE

We have families, circles of friends and acquaintances. Like everyone. We are senior and ordinary employees, we work in schools, offices, and public institutions. We run businesses. Among us, there are retired people who have the willingness and the time to share their knowledge and experience. Among our many obligations, we try to find the time and place for prayer and quiet, for reflecting on God’s Word, and for Christian meditation.

In the “Benedict Option” Foundation we wish to build a culture of living in community. We base ourselves on what is important for us in life: the Benedictine Ordo et Pax, respect for humankind and nature, trust, responsibility, balance between work and rest. We wish to offer workshops and retreats for spiritual and personal development to all who are searching for meaning in life.  We wish to create a space for believers and seekers. We wish to serve as a place in which peace and tranquillity prevail, where the rhythm of the day is marked by the Liturgy of the Hours, lectio divina (spiritual reading) and meditation.

We have chosen the region of Mazury, on the edge of the Pisz Forest, far from tourist routes. Here we are building our Centre and hermitage.

 

THE IDEA BEHIND THE FOUNDATION

The idea of a community was born 30 years ago in the heart of a Benedictine monk, Fr. Włodzimierz Zatorski.  It was he who inspired lay people who went to Tyniec for retreats and workshops.

Like St. Benedict, we wish for “God to be worshipped in everything”: at work and at home, in daily duties and in leisure, and  in encounters with other people. The wisdom  written down in the Rule of St. Benedict would appear to be a timeless remedy for the maladies of today’s world. It is a list of simple truths, tested both in lay and monastic life. They are universal laws governing people’s spiritual life. The Rule was written 1,500 years ago and was a response to cultural decline. Today we are similarly experiencing a crisis of faith and spirituality, a crisis of being and of mutual relations.  This is happening because basic laws of life itself are being broken. The building of communities is a response to these challenges, as was said half a century ago by the Rev. Joseph Ratzinger, the future Pope Benedict XVI.

Because ever more people are struggling with basic questions relating to the meaning of life, happiness, and faith, we therefore see profound sense in creating a “Benedict Option” community. It attempts to build on tried and tested laws relating to life, because no matter  what we think up, even if it seems to us to be the noblest, most excellent idea, and then try to do it ourselves without divine guidance, it will become fruitless and lack life. Therefore the first and most essential thing is for us to hear God’s word, directed to us. Only then, by responding to it, can we do anything which builds us up and roots us in truth and in life.

What a man the monk Father Zatorski was! When I met him at Tyniec, others told me afterward that he is known all over Poland for his spiritual wisdom. And now he has gone to be with God, far too soon for us all, especially for his beloved Poland, which is suffering so much from the loss of faith.

Now that he’s gone, I can tell you that it was Father Zatorski who confirmed for me at Tyniec what young Catholics in Warsaw and at a conference in Tyniec were telling me: that Poland is ten, maybe twenty, years from turning into Ireland — a former Catholic stronghold where the faith has disappeared seemingly overnight. We were talking in a meeting room at the Tyniec monastery. I told the monk that this was so difficult for me to accept, because Poland has always been to my mind a bastion of faith. Well, he said, it’s a hard truth, but it’s true.

Why is this happening? I asked him. Father Zatorski’s English was not strong, but he thought for a moment, and said the word, “Vainglory.” Through the translator, he explained to me that the Polish institutional church was so pridefully focused on itself that it missed the decay of the faith in broader Polish society, and has responded badly to the challenge. This was one reason he was at the time (we met on July 14, 2019) planning to start a Benedict Option retreat center and community.

Any reader of this blog who is moved by Father Zatorski’s life and death, or who loves Poland and wants to help preserve the faith there, please consider donating something in his memory to the Opcja Benedykta Foundation in his memory. 

Father Zatorski had earned a good retirement. But despite his age, he did not rest. He read the signs of the times, and acted to serve God and Poland by doing something bold and new. I thank God for his life, and am confident that we have gained a powerful intercessor.

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‘Alexa, Put Me Under’

I’m sorry, but this is crazy — and not because I don’t believe in hypnosis. I do believe that it can work. From the Wall Street Journal:

Hypnosis is no longer considered crazy in the medical field, doctors say, but many patients, like Ms. Cutler, still are leery. The practice has increasingly gained acceptance in the medical community, and in the last two years, the research into how and why it works has accelerated, with new studies on the use of hypnosis to alleviate anxiety; ward off pain; and successfully inhibit the fear circuitry structures in the brain.

Silicon Valley entrepreneurs and investors have started to take notice, creating new apps that aim to popularize hypnosis in a similar way to meditation, which until recently was also considered fringe. A safer alternative to medications like opioids, hypnosis can be a helpful tool for combating the stress and anxiety caused by the pandemic, doctors and researchers say, especially as it can be done successfully via recording or over Zoom.

Now there’s a hypnosis service that you can access over your Amazon Alexa home speaker:

Reveri Health works on Alexa by using natural language processing, which decodes incoming sounds and matches them to pre-prepared instructions or responses. The program asks questions like “Where are you feeling stress right now?” and responds to the answers accordingly, then asks the user to participate in a series of breathing and imagery exercises. (“Picture that you’re surfing waves of uncertainty.”)

In recent years, new research has led to a greater understanding of how hypnosis works. Four years ago, brain imaging published in the journal Cerebral Cortex suggested that the hypnotic state reduces activity in the parts of the brain involved in critical judgment and analysis, allowing a therapist to reach areas of the brain that are more open to suggestion.

Or as California hypnotherapist and coach Linda Shively explains it, “hypnosis gets the conscious mind out of the way.” That way, she adds, “change can happen quickly, relatively painlessly and effectively.”

So: you are opening your subconscious mind to suggestions offered to you by an external electronic source that adjusts its responses to your own? Gosh, no way that can be abused, right?

Actually, that’s not the main worry about this, not for me. If this service were found to be abusing its privilege –and that would be easy to detect — it would be disastrous for the company. The real worry is that users are giving incredibly detailed personal information to the company about their own problems, and teaching the company which buttons to push to render them susceptible to subconscious control.

It’s one thing to use an electronic hypnosis program that’s on a closed loop. I tried one for weight loss the other day on Spotify, as a way of trying out the Air Pods Pro I got for Christmas. It was pleasant, but didn’t really work; I didn’t go under. Maybe I’m not hypnotizable, or maybe I was just too tense. I’m not planning to try it again. But that was a pre-recorded program. This Alexa thing is on an open loop that responds to one’s commands. Is it wise to teach an AI machine how to hypnotize you? Is it wise to learn how to be hypnotized by AI machines?

Is this the kind of relationship we should be having with our machines? You know that everything you say to Alexa is potentially recordable, right? Is it smart to give Jeff Bezos and his agents the key to your subconscious?

Don’t forget what former Czech dissident Kamila Bendova said in Live Not By Lies: any information you provide Them will be used against you one day, if they choose to. I would love to e-mail Kamila and ask her for her opinion about hypnosis through Alexa. But that’s not possible, because she doesn’t use e-mail. Too risky. Her flat was bugged by the communist regime for years, and her husband was behind bars as a political prisoner for four years. Anyway, I know exactly what she would say about this Alexa hypnosis thing. And so do you.

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Should Elderly Die For Social Justice?

Because this essay by the Johns Hopkins political scientist Yascha Mounk appeared only two days before Christmas, you might have missed it. You really should read it. In it, Mounk, who is a liberal, confessed that he is “losing trust in the institutions,” and explained why. Here’s the core:

[T]here are also some bedrock principles on which virtually all moral philosophers have long agreed.

The first is that we should avoid “leveling down” everyone’s quality of life for the purpose of achieving equality. It is unjust when some people have plenty of food while others are starving. But alleviating that inequality by making sure that an even greater number of people starve is clearly wrong. The second is that we should not use ascriptive characteristics like race or ethnicity to allocate medical resources. To save one patient rather than another based on the color of their skin rightly strikes most philosophers—and most Americans—as barbaric. The Centers for Disease Control have just thrown both of these principles overboard in the name of social justice.

In one of the most shocking moral misjudgments by a public body I have ever seen, the CDC invoked considerations of “social justice” to recommend providing vaccinations to essential workers before older Americans even though this would, according to its own models, lead to a much greater death toll. After a massive public outcry, the agency has adopted revised recommendations. But though these are a clear improvement, they still violate the two bedrock principles of allocative justice—and are likely to cause unnecessary suffering on a significant scale.

Since states will now have to decide whether to follow the CDC’s recommendations, the fight for a just distribution of the vaccine is not yet over. At the same time, the past days have already taught us two lessons that sum up some of the most worrying developments of the past years: The attack on philosophically liberal principles has by now migrated from leafy college campuses to the most important and powerful organizations in the country. And, in part as a result, it is getting harder and harder to trust institutions from the CDC to the New York Times.

Mounk recounted the process within the CDC that led to its advisory opinion on vaccine prioritization. Kathleen Dooling gave the presentation:

As the presentation acknowledged, the likelihood of dying from Covid strongly depends on age. According to the CDC’s model, prioritizing essential workers over the elderly would therefore increase the overall number of deaths by between 0.5% and 6.5%. In other words, it would likely result in the preventable deaths of thousands of Americans.

And yet, the presentation concluded that science does not provide a reason to prioritize the elderly. For, as Kathleen Dooling wrote in one of the most jaw-dropping sentences I have ever seen in a document written by a public official, differences in expected consequences that could amount to thousands of additional deaths are “minimal.”

Minimal. Your grandmother. Your mom. You. All for the sake of “social justice.” More:

It is, all of us acknowledge, very important to ensure that members of ethnic minorities are not excluded from access to the vaccine on the basis of their race. But to prioritize a 23-year-old Latino Uber driver who is very likely to weather infection with Covid over an 80-year-old white retiree who is likely to die from it because the former is part of a group that includes marginally more brown people and the latter is part of a group that includes marginally more white people is to inscribe racial discrimination at the heart of American public policy in an astonishing manner.

It gets even more shocking. The difference in the percentage of white people across age groups is comparatively small. The difference in the percentage of infected people who succumb to Covid across all age groups is massive. Giving the vaccine to African-American essential workers before elderly African-Americans would likely raise the overall death toll of African-Americans even if a somewhat greater number of African-Americans were to receive the vaccine as a result.

In other words, the CDC was effectively about to recommend that a greater number of African-Americans die so that the share of African-Americans who receive the vaccine is slightly higher. In blatant violation of the “leveling down objection,” prioritizing essential workers in the name of equality would likely kill more people in all relevant demographic groups.

Read it all. I cannot urge you strongly enough to do so. Mounk concludes by saying that this should put away, once and for all, any claims that the social justice craziness is merely a fringe phenomenon. It very nearly resulted in the most important public health agency in the United States making a judgment that would have resulted in thousands of unnecessary deaths, all because of progressive racism. Mounk says that he’s losing faith in the mainstream institutions of American life precisely because they are being overwhelmed by this same crackpot ideology. He writes, “I no longer trust any institution in American life to such an extent that I am willing to rely on its account of the world without looking into important matters on my own.”

He’s right. Pay special attention to the willingness of the woke to lie to cover up what they’re doing. Mounk points out that not even The New York Times reported on what the CDC came very close to doing. Of course not! If more people knew what these power-holders really thought, and were really doing, they would be outraged. Your white granny (and maybe even your black granny) needs to die for the cause of social justice. That was almost the official policy of the US Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. Since the Tuskegee experiments were made public, black Americans have tended to distrust public health experts. Maybe whites are now learning that black folks were onto something.

In an infinitely less important, but still telling case, when the Wall Street Journal reported the other day that a teacher named Heather Levine bragged about getting “The Odyssey” cancelled in her school, because it’s white supremacist, Levine was indignant on social media:

Unfortunately for Levine, the Internet remembers what she said earlier this year:

I’ve had a couple of posts in this space recently (see here and here) about a quiet move afoot at my alma mater, Louisiana State University, to mandate a class in “antiracism” for all undergraduates, as a condition of earning their degree. The proposed class is described like this in a bill before the Faculty Senate:

The LSU administration supports this move, it was reported by the Baton Rouge Advocate. Note that the purpose of the class is to teach students how to “identify and combat anti-Blackness,” which is not defined in the bill, but certainly has a politically charged meaning. It is also a class to teach students how to identify and combat “the many forms of intersecting oppression” in American life. This sounds like a class in cultural Marxism, trying to fly below radar cloaked as a mere course on “the Black experience.” The authorities that the people of Louisiana trust to educate their children at LSU are planning to inflict this on them, unless they are stopped by the public and lawmakers. How many people in Louisiana — taxpayers who support the university, and tuition-payers — follow curriculum requirements at LSU? I’m pretty well-informed, but I knew nothing about it until a campus source tipped me off. It’s like Yascha Mounk (a liberal!) says: social justice ideology has so captured the institutions that we cannot rely on the judgments of those who run them.

The post Should Elderly Die For Social Justice? appeared first on The American Conservative.

Cancel Cult Comes For Homer

Another day, another crazy thing from the world of progressive utopians. Meghan Cox Gurdon writes in the Wall Street Journal about how the latest lunatic thing is banning the study of Homer, Shakespeare, and the other greats because of white supremacy. Excerpts (behind paywall):

A sustained effort is under way to deny children access to literature. Under the slogan #DisruptTexts, critical-theory ideologues, schoolteachers and Twitter agitators are purging and propagandizing against classic texts—everything from Homer to F. Scott Fitzgerald to Dr. Seuss.

Their ethos holds that children shouldn’t have to read stories written in anything other than the present-day vernacular—especially those “in which racism, sexism, ableism, anti-Semitism, and other forms of hate are the norm,” as young-adult novelist Padma Venkatraman writes in School Library Journal. No author is valuable enough to spare, Ms. Venkatraman instructs: “Absolving Shakespeare of responsibility by mentioning that he lived at a time when hate-ridden sentiments prevailed, risks sending a subliminal message that academic excellence outweighs hateful rhetoric.”

The subtle complexities of literature are being reduced to the crude clanking of “intersectional” power struggles. Thus Seattle English teacher Evin Shinn tweeted in 2018 that he’d “rather die” than teach “The Scarlet Letter,” unless Nathaniel Hawthorne’s novel is used to “fight against misogyny and slut-shaming.”

More:

The demands for censorship appear to be getting results. “Be like Odysseus and embrace the long haul to liberation (and then take the Odyssey out of your curriculum because it’s trash),” tweeted Shea Martin in June. “Hahaha,” replied Heather Levine, an English teacher at Lawrence (Mass.) High School. “Very proud to say we got the Odyssey removed from the curriculum this year!” When I contacted Ms. Levine to confirm this, she replied that she found the inquiry “invasive.” The English Department chairman of Lawrence Public Schools, Richard Gorham, didn’t respond to emails.

Of course they didn’t respond. These people don’t want the world to know what they’re doing. Read it all, if you can get around the paywall.

This is a manifestation of what I mean by “soft totalitarianism.” The state is not forcing any school or any teacher to do this. But they’re doing it — they’re sending the works of great writers, including works that are foundational to our civilization, down the memory hole, all in the name of a utopian political idea that treats teaching as therapy.

What these totalitarians are attempting is to erase the memory of our civilization’s past, as a way of establishing control. Here are two relevant passages from my book Live Not By Lies:

Those steeped in the teachings of Marx believed that communism was inevitable because History—a force with godlike powers of determination—required it. Kundera says that what makes a leftist (of any kind—socialists, communists, Trotskyites, left-liberals, and so on) a leftist is a shared belief that humanity is on a “Grand March” toward Progress: “The Grand March is the splendid march on the road to brotherhood, equality, justice, happiness; it goes on and on, obstacles notwithstanding, for obstacles there must be if the march is to be the Grand March.”

If progress is inevitable, and the Communist Party is the leader of society’s Grand March to the progressive future, then, the theory goes, to resist the Party is to stand against the future—indeed, against reality itself. Those who oppose the Party oppose progress and freedom and align themselves with greed, backwardness, bigotry, and all manner of injustice. How necessary—indeed, how noble—it is of the Party to bulldoze these stumbling blocks on the Grand March and make straight and smooth the road to tomorrow.

“There was constant propaganda about how communism was changing the village for the better,” recalls Tamás Sályi, a Budapest teacher of English, of his Hungarian youth. “There were always films of the farmer learning to improve his life with new technology. Those who rejected it were [depicted as] endangering their families. There are so many examples about how everything old and traditional prevented life from being good and happy.”

Thus does the Myth of Progress become a justification for exercising dictatorial power to eliminate all opposition. Today, totalitarianism amounts to strict, forced regimentation of the Grand March toward Progress. It is the method by which true believers in Progress aim to keep all of society moving forward toward utopia in lockstep, both in their outward actions and in their innermost thoughts.

More:

Tamás Sályi, the Budapest teacher, says that Hungarians survived German occupation and a Soviet puppet regime, but thirty years of freedom has destroyed more cultural memory than the previous eras. “What neither Nazism or Communism could do, victorious liberal capitalism has done,” he muses.

The idea that the past and its traditions, including religion, is an intolerable burden on individual liberty has been poison for Hungarians, he believes. About progressives today, Sályi says, “I think they really believe that if they erase all memory of the past, and turn everyone into newborn babies, then they can write whatever they want on that blank slate. If you think about it, it’s not so easy to manipulate people who know who they are, rooted in tradition.”

True. This is why Hannah Arendt described the totalitarian personality as “the completely isolated human being.” A person cut off from history is a person who is almost powerless against power.

Communism was a massive use of lethal state power to destroy memory. Back in the United States, Olga Rusanova, a naturalized American who grew up in Siberia, says, “In the Soviet Union, they killed all the people who could remember history.” This made it easier for them to create false history to serve the regime’s needs.

Yes, in the late Soviet period, most people had ceased to believe the communist line. But that doesn’t mean that they knew what was true. As historian Orlando Figes says of those who came of age after the 1917 Bolshevik Revolution, “for anyone below the age of thirty, who had only ever known the Soviet world or had inherited no other values from his family, it was almost impossible to step outside the propaganda system and question its political principles.”

You don’t have to be a Christian to benefit from reading my book, and red-pilling yourself as to what these totalitarian #DisruptTexts teachers are doing. This is about establishing control, and this is about erasing from the common memory all traces of our civilization before Year Zero, which started the day before yesterday. This is a cultural revolution.

If you want to know more about #DisruptTexts, read this Quillette article from a couple of weeks back. Excerpts:

In the past, one answer to the question, “Why should we be inflicting Silas Marner on kids?” was “cultural literacy”—a term popularized by scholar E.D. Hirsch, which refers to a person’s ability to understand and communicate using literary and historical allusions such as “witch hunt” or “Trojan horse” or “tilting at windmills.” Children from disadvantaged backgrounds are less likely to acquire this cultural knowledge and consequently less likely to attain a higher command of the English language.

But the #DisruptTexts movement does not conceive of education as the process, inter alia, of transmitting Western cultural heritage to the next generation. Why would they, when they perceive that heritage to be a dark and lamentable catalogue of human crime? Why should they give primacy to literature which interprets the world through the white gaze? “Let us be honest,” Germán admits, “the conversation really isn’t about universality, and this isn’t about being equipped to identify all possible cultural references. This is about an ingrained and internalized elevation of Shakespeare in a way that excludes other voices. This is about white supremacy and colonization.”

To Kill a Mockingbird was voted “America’s Favorite Novel” in a PBS competition in 2018, but #DisruptTexts finds that Atticus Finch is a white savior, and an ineffectual one at that. And Lord of the Flies, a novel featuring “elite, upperclass, private school [students] who are white, cisgender, European males,” is condemned for what it implies about civilization and savagery. So #DisruptTexts has created reading guides which pair the classics with complementary YA literature by authors of color, an intelligent and appropriate remedy for the lack of diversity in the canon. However, the curated list is diverse in everything but theme—five of the eight books are about teenagers of various ethnicities struggling with their identity. One of the recommended reads is Ibram X. Kendi’s Antiracist Baby.

More:

The leaders and followers of the #DisruptTexts movement hold the following truths to be self-evident:

It is a “professional responsibility to… develop students’ critical literacy skills to question the status quo.”
Teaching literacy is teaching kids “to discern where and how oppression exists in society, to articulate the oppression we witness or experience and argue for justice, and to strive for a more equitable world.” This “gets at the crux of why we read and write.”
We must “recognize the ways we are all complicit in perpetuating systemic oppression and consequently responsible for dismantling it.”
These truths are non-falsifiable because any objection (invariably described as an “attack”) is motivated by white supremacy.

And while the average parent may never have heard of #DisruptTexts, the movement has made a significant impact in public education. Notwithstanding their insurrectionary rhetoric and the clenched fist on their movement’s Twitter profile, these activists are not obliged to disguise their efforts “to fuel resistance and positive social transformation” and “bring the power of literacy for collective liberation.” They are not forced, like the teachers of the McCarthy era, to take a loyalty oath. On the contrary, the co-founders speak at educational conferences and workshops, they are promoted by Tolerance, a subsidiary program of the Southern Poverty Law Center; they are featured on the websites and publications of the Association for Supervision and Curriculum Development (ASCD) and the International Literacy Association; they have a regular column in the journal of the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE), whose next convention is dedicated to “Equity, Justice and Anti-Racist Teaching”; and Penguin Books has partnered with them to promote YA novels by BIPOC authors.

And all this has been accomplished without (apparently) incorporating #DisruptTexts as a society or non-profit. It is a grassroots, crowdfunded, and teacher-supported movement operating without the accountability which comes with becoming a legal entity.

Nor are these activists simply assuming a fashionable pose when they express their desire to transform society. They are in earnest. And they are convinced that their ideals are so self-evidently correct, their cause so righteous, and the need so imperative, that they openly speak of “throwing out the white canon” and pushing their students to adopt their views. Movement-inspired teachers exchange ideas on Twitter, podcasts, websites, and various forums. “How do I authentically engage with… a predominately White American student population? How do I manage student resistance to these topics?” asks the Pushing the Edge podcast. Another podcaster reports that “it is the stance against To Kill a Mockingbird and The Great Gatsby that has met [with] the most white fragility.”

Read it all. When people deny that there is any such thing as “soft totalitarianism,” you will know that they are lying. That’s what #DisruptTexts is.

Do you know if this is happening at your kid’s school? Do you care? You had better. Go read the #DisruptTexts website to learn more. These fanatics are truly passionate about their cause. If we are not at least as passionate about defending our culture and civilization from them, we will lose. One lesson of the Bolshevik Revolution is that a highly disciplined, highly motivated minority can defeat a disengaged majority, especially if the minority conquers elites and elite networks. Read my book to better understand what’s happening, and how we can resist. 

UPDATE: Heather Levine put this self-exculpatory lie on Twitter in the wake of the WSJ piece:

 

But that’s not what she said earlier this year:

 

 

Social Justice Warriors lie to cover their tracks.

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Summoning Spain’s Ghost Armies

A reader writes:

You often mention the Spanish Civil War when contemplating America’s future. There was a story in The New York Times today that proves the ghosts of that terrible moment in Spanish history and Francisco Franco looms large in modern Spain. The entire story’s well-worth the read for numerous reasons, but I wanted to highlight the following passage:

The growing influence of the far right within the military has also become an issue in other countries, notably Germany, and coincides with a push by governments to restrict individual rights, like freedom of movement, because of the pandemic.

“Spain has its own singularity within what I see as a worrying Western trend of many people increasingly accepting the ideas and the need for authoritarianism,” said Josep Ramoneda, a philosopher and columnist. “Unsurprisingly, the military is particularly fertile ground for authoritarianism.”

José Ignacio Domínguez, a former air force officer who refused to sign the letter that his cohorts had prepared for King Felipe, said that it was an attempt “to get our king to intervene and help overthrow the government.”

Even if the letter was signed by retirees, he said the political leanings of the current armed forces were increasingly those of Spain’s far-right party, Vox. Last year Vox became the third-largest party in Parliament, winning 15 percent of the vote and performing above its national average in provinces with large military bases.

The reader continues:

The part of the story that they always leave out (probably because they’d self-implicate themselves) is that the escalating right-wing extremism we’ve seen in Europe and now seeing awaken in America is a direct result of both the failures of liberal governance and the increasing illiberalism of the dominant left. I say this as someone who believes the right-wing has always possessed a very itchy authoritarian trigger finger, but there’s just no way to explain this phenomenon without acknowledging that the left’s contempt towards anyone that doesn’t share their “be better” agenda and their own slide towards authoritarianism created a very similar response on the right. Extremism doesn’t prevail in stable societies where all people are truly a part of the discussion. Extremism also doesn’t prevail in a society where people genuinely don’t feel under siege. If leftists want to be known as “liberals,” they need to understand that liberalism isn’t a destination, it’s a journey – a means of coexistence. That’s its appeal, because in an illiberal society, the minority doesn’t get much of a vote.

Over the weekend, I met up with a good friend. His ex-girlfriend (whom he’s still friends with) talked about how she moved to a city in southern VA and how, thankfully, this city was very “blue,” but the surrounding areas were “red” and people were very open about supporting Trump, displaying his campaign signs, etc. She talked about how this city containing “normal people like us” was able to exist amid all this “red.” She later talked about how wonderful it was that the cost of living was so low, how beautiful the houses were, etc. Sounds like she really likes living there.

So, what happened there? First, she assumed my politics, thinking that as a non-White person living in Southern California, I must be a deep-blue left-wing Democrat that would see things exactly the way she did. Second, she expressed thinly-veiled contempt for people not like her, implicitly labeling them “abnormal,” while also talking about how wonderful it is to live in places they’ve built, places they keep running and maintaining, and benefiting from.

This brings us back to Spain. What happened to Spain in the 1930s was horrible. I’m no expert on Spanish history, but I’m watching that documentary you’ve cited many times on your blog and I’m struck by how one of the world’s greatest empires could’ve descended into such cruelty and depravity. How people could’ve come to hate their fellow countrymen, let alone anyone, to the point that killing your political enemies became a spectator sport people watched with glee.

But is any of it a surprise? When the other side really does hate you too, hold you, your culture, your family, community, all of it in contempt, how do you respond with love and tolerance? You can’t. What’s happening with the Spanish military is concerning, but when people, like my friend’s ex, just take and take and take and won’t even dignify the other side of the divide as people, berate their beliefs and culture, and set about endlessly transforming everything for the sake of making it “better,” sometimes, I have to think, “Thank God there are people willing to stand up to this madness.”

Of course, in America, that’s not the military. As you wrote last week, the military, too, has become firmly under the control of the left, that there’s virtually no risk of them becoming like the Spanish military. That also means we can’t expect them to defend our liberties or the republic, because whatever loyalty they possess, at this point, is to themselves. I don’t want what’s happening in Spain to happen here, but, at the same time, I wonder – who protects us? Who stands up for us?

Anyway, this story about the Spanish military proves that Western civilization, liberalism, democracy, all of it, has feet of clay and that clay isn’t as strong as we think.

Thanks to the reader for bringing this story to may attention. The story has to do with a declaration (read it here in Spanish) by 271 retired military officers protesting what they consider to be Spain’s drift into disunity and left-wing authoritarianism under the socialist-communist coalition government. It’s irritating, the story, because once again, you cannot trust the US media to explain clearly to American readers what is happening in terms of right-wing politics in Europe. The Vox Party is not “extreme right”. It’s a nationalist and populist party. The leftist Madrid daily El Pais wrote in 2018 about its platform here.

Here is a more recent CNBC story about Vox’s platform. Vox’s main ideas are national unity (meaning, it’s against separatism) and stopping immigration. Better yet, read Kurt Hofer’s TAC piece from a couple of weeks ago about Vox and its leader, Santiago Abascal. Vox is also socially conservative. In January of this year, I wrote about how Vox was fighting the left-wing government over the right of parents to opt their kids out of progressive catechesis in gender theory and LGBT rights. I quoted this from a Spanish newspaper story about it:

In an interview with the Spanish newspaper El Correo, published on Sunday, Celaá [the left-wing Education Minister] said that a “homophobic family […] does not have the right to make their children homophobic as well.” “Parental authority cannot be confused with property,” she added.

Celaá’s claim that children are not the property of their parents was attacked by the leader of the [conservative, allied with Vox] PP, Pablo Casado, who linked the argument with communism.

“Are they telling me that we have families like in Cuba, that children belong to the revolution?” he said on Sunday. “Are we going to arrive at the point where children inform on their parents if they are not good revolutionaries?

Seriously, read more about how extreme the Spanish left is in forcing gender ideology and the sexualization of little children on Spaniards. You absolutely cannot trust the American media to give you a clear picture of what is happening in Europe regarding left-right politics. 

If you could, you would understand that the reaction of the Spanish military officers does not come from nowhere. Last year, the leftist government decided to dig up the remains of Gen. Francisco Franco, the military dictator of Spain from 1939 until his death in 1975, and move them from a national monument to the dead of the Spanish Civil War into a private tomb. According to an opinion poll reported by the BBC, only 43 percent of Spaniards supported this move, with the rest either against it or undecided. You don’t have to be any kind of  supporter of Franco to grasp how divisive and provocative this move was.

Earlier this month, the leftist government expropriated the Franco family’s winter home, which had been bought for him in 1938 by supporters. Again, you don’t have to be a Francoist to see that the socialists are punishing the Spanish right. Previous socialist governments in Spain have not done this. This one is.

Where do they think this is going to end up? Though Franco’s legacy did not long survive Franco, the Spanish Civil War is still within living memory for the oldest Spaniards. Every family has someone who fought for one side or the other. Must it be revived now? What good can possibly come from this? If you are a Spaniard of either left or right, help me understand it.

Thinking of this Spanish showdown helps me to better understand the genius of the victors of the US Civil War, in letting the defeated Southerners have some dignity. I understand the theory behind the contemporary left’s desire to erase all statues of Confederate generals, and names of public buildings that honor Confederate figures. But did they actually believe that prior to these past couple of years, Americans were under the impression that the Confederacy deserved to win the war? I am a Southerner whose ancestors fought for the Confederacy, and I am grateful that the South lost; its cause — the preservation of slavery — was wicked. But I am also grateful that they were all welcomed back into the United States when the war was over. In the 20th century, Southerners became fierce fighters on behalf of the United States, and even today, 44 percent of all military recruits (age 18-24) come from the South, though only 36 percent of the US population in that age group is Southern. Now that the left-wing mobs have gone after statues of the Founding Fathers, we see that the anti-Confederate iconoclasm was not really about the Confederacy, but about defacing and erasing this country’s history when it conflicts with the current left-wing identity politics narrative.

On Christmas Eve, I did as I have done every Christmas since returning to Louisiana, and placed a lit candle at the grave of my ancestor — Columbus Simmons, my great-great-grandfather — who fought for the Confederates. Earlier this year, my daughter found in a box of documents a thin, cloth-bound book that some relative of mine had printed privately a long time ago. It was old, but not worn; it had clearly been put away unread. It was a memoir by the older brother of Columbus, who had dictated it, or hand-written it, before his death. That manuscript was passed down through that line of the family until someone in the 20th century had it typeset and bound. I had no idea it existed until my daughter discovered it.

I read it in a single sitting — it’s not long — and was struck by its portrait of life as a small farmer in the early 19th century. As I recall, there wasn’t a lot about Columbus, except to note that he was off at the war. What struck me most of all about text was the complete absence of politics from the narrative. It could be that the author, whose name escapes me, was not engaged by the great controversies that had plunged the nation into civil war. But I think it more likely that this was just how life was for small white farmers back then. They held no slaves, but if the Simmons brother opposed slavery, he didn’t say so in this book. I suppose he didn’t; he was a simple country farmer, and probably accepted it as the way of the world. Reading this little book brought home to me in a personal way why so many of the Confederate soldiers fought for the South: because they were defending their homes, and those to whom they were loyal. It wasn’t ideological for them. It struck me as more a matter of, the Yankees are here, where they don’t belong, and we have to fight them. 

I’m going to look for that little book tomorrow and re-read it, and blog about it. I was thinking about it the other afternoon, standing at Columbus’s grave, and thinking about how as a young man, he was drawn into fighting this war. What would any of those country boys, North and South alike, have done? Had Columbus Simmons been born in Ohio, or had the unknown Yankee soldier who shot and wounded him in the Battle of Port Hudson been born in Alabama, things would have been reversed. These poor men did what they were told, and did what their beliefs in loyalty told them to do. America is better off for Columbus’s side having lost, but that does not erase the tragic toll of human suffering in that war, including the tragedies of poor white boys who fought and died so that rich white men could own black slaves. Standing there at my ancestor’s grave, praying for his soul, I thought that one day one of my sons, or grandsons, could be compelled to bear arms for their homeland in an unjust cause. I would hope and expect that their descendants would not execrate them.

If the United States of America ever expects me to execrate my fathers, then to hell with the United States of America. This stuff is primal. I can imagine Spaniards whose fathers and grandfathers fought for the Nationalist side in that country’s civil war are feeling the same way when they see the way things are going there — but of course their feeling is far more intense, because this isn’t about a war concluded 150 years ago, but about one in which the fighting stopped 80 years ago, but which really did not end until Franco’s death 45 years ago.

Where does it stop? I remind you what the reader — who is non-white — who sent me the story wrote in his letter:

When the other side really does hate you too, hold you, your culture, your family, community, all of it in contempt, how do you respond with love and tolerance? You can’t. What’s happening with the Spanish military is concerning, but when people, like my friend’s ex, just take and take and take and won’t even dignify the other side of the divide as people, berate their beliefs and culture, and set about endlessly transforming everything for the sake of making it “better,” sometimes, I have to think, “Thank God there are people willing to stand up to this madness.”

Yes. Yes!

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Jimmy Galligan, Moral Monster

The New York Times has a story about a young man, Jimmy Galligan, who is an example of the kind of moral monsters this culture of ours has created. 

His mother is black, his father white. He went to high school in Leesburg, Va. Four years ago, a girl in his class, Mimi Stokes, used an antiblack racial slur in a Snapchat video lasting three seconds, and sent privately to a friend. Somebody showed him the clip. He saved it, and waited for his chance.

Mr. Galligan had not seen the video before receiving it last school year, when he and Ms. Groves were seniors. By then, she was a varsity cheer captain who dreamed of attending the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, whose cheer team was the reigning national champion. When she made the team in May, her parents celebrated with a cake and orange balloons, the university’s official color.

The next month, as protests were sweeping the nation after the police killing of George Floyd, Ms. Groves, in a public Instagram post, urged people to “protest, donate, sign a petition, rally, do something” in support of the Black Lives Matter movement.

You might think that Galligan would rejoice in the fact that his classmate, who as a freshman had used a racial slur, had changed, had matured, had become more sensitive. Nope. More:

“You have the audacity to post this, after saying the N-word,” responded someone whom Ms. Groves said she did not know.

Her alarm at the stranger’s comment turned to panic as friends began calling, directing her to the source of a brewing social media furor. Mr. Galligan, who had waited until Ms. Groves had chosen a college, had publicly posted the video that afternoon. Within hours, it had been shared to Snapchat, TikTok and Twitter, where furious calls mounted for the University of Tennessee to revoke its admission offer.

The university forced Mimi Groves’s parents to withdraw her. She now lives at home with them and attends a community college. More:

Ms. Groves’s parents, who said their daughter was being targeted by a social media “mob” for a mistake she made as an adolescent, urged university officials to assess her character by speaking with her high school and cheer coaches. Instead, admissions officials gave her an ultimatum: withdraw or the university would rescind her offer of admission.

“We just needed it to stop, so we withdrew her,” said Mrs. Groves, adding that the entire experience had “vaporized” 12 years of her daughter’s hard work. “They rushed to judgment and unfortunately it’s going to affect her for the rest of her life.”

Jimmy Galligan goes to college in California. He is proud of having ruined Mimi Groves’s college experience:

One of Ms. Groves’s friends, who is Black, said Ms. Groves had personally apologized for the video long before it went viral. Once it did in June, the friend defended Ms. Groves online, prompting criticism from strangers and fellow students. “We’re supposed to educate people,” she wrote in a Snapchat post, “not ruin their lives all because you want to feel a sense of empowerment.”

For his role, Mr. Galligan said he had no regrets. “If I never posted that video, nothing would have ever happened,” he said. And because the internet never forgets, the clip will always be available to watch.

“I’m going to remind myself, you started something,” he said with satisfaction. “You taught someone a lesson.”

Read it all. What a horrible person that Galligan kid is. Notice too how the black friend who accepted Mimi Groves’s apology (delivered before the clip became a big thing), defended Mimi Groves, and got bashed on social media for it. Mercy is a crime in this world we have created.

The Times story focuses heavily on antiblack racism in the language used at that particular high school. If true, then it’s awful, and those kids should not be talking that way. But come on, these are high school kids. The kids who bullied me (with physical assaults as well as vicious words) when I was in high school never apologized, but I am sure if I confronted them about it, they would. I don’t need an apology from them. I wrote a book in which I talked about leaving my hometown for another school because of being bullied. Had I wanted to hurt the people who hurt me back then, I could have named them and caused them public shame. Who wants to be remembered by name by the author of a New York Times bestselling book? But why would I do that? Why would I want their children to know that their parents had behaved so horribly in high school? What could possibly be gained by that act of vengeance? They might have forgotten what they did to me. Maybe it was nothing to them, though it was everything to me when I was 14 and 15. But kids can be terrible to each other.

And let me be honest with myself: How much hurt did I bring to people in high school without being aware of what I was doing? I can think of a particular incident at my new school in which I participated in the humiliation of an unpopular student. I am ashamed of it. If I ever saw this guy again, I would have to man up and apologize. It did not involve bigotry, but it was much worse than this Galligan kid hearing an old clip of a classmate saying the N-word in a clip four years earlier.

The context of the Times story might make it seem that Galligan’s vengeful act might have been a necessary part of fighting cultural racism in that school. The lives of individuals don’t matter here; what matters is that Mimi Stokes was a representative of a hated class: privileged white people. Galligan even tells a story about chastising his own white father about white privilege. What a life-giving ideology antiracism is: teaching people to despise their own parents in the name of social justice.

My middle son is about to be 17 years old, and doesn’t understand why his parents won’t let him have social media. My kids were all raised to think of racism as evil, and never, ever to use racial slurs. But so was Mimi Stokes. She made a mistake. A single mistake, though, involving a politically potent topic, and recorded on the Internet, was all it took to destroy her college career, and to have that clip remain forever on the Internet to hurt her. Mimi Stokes’s repentance before it went viral helped her not one bit. I cannot imagine what mistake my son might make that could be recorded on his social media account (were he to get one), and hurt him in ways he can’t yet foresee, because he’s a teenager, and not great at grasping the long-term consequences of inappropriate actions. Besides, what thing might he say that’s innocent today, but tomorrow will be regarded as an example of intolerable vice? What a curse it is growing up in this merciless culture, where people police each other moralistically, and believe themselves virtuous in destroying the impure and flawed. There is no room for error. I would be angry at my kid if he or she used a racial slur, but proud of them if they admitted error, and apologized to those they offended. I would be horrified if my kid ever did to someone who offended them what Jimmy Galligan has done to Mimi Stokes (who, note well, did not utter that slur to Galligan).

This Times story will follow Jimmy Galligan everywhere too. If that kid applied for a job at my firm, I would never hire him. If he were my co-worker, I would stay away from him, lest I offend him and get the Little- Anthony-from-The-Twilight-Zone treatment. He has shown the kind of person he is: a hateful progressive who takes pleasure in causing others unnecessary pain and suffering for the sake of virtue. He wants to terrorize others. Everybody who goes to college with him now, and who crosses his path, should consider themselves forewarned.

We will always live in a society that is in need of moral reform. We are human. But it is a monstrous society that doesn’t offer a way for people to turn from their sins and failings, and find forgiveness and restoration.

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‘Antiracism’ At LSU, Part II

It’s Christmas Eve, so I don’t want to focus on bad news here. But I do want to give you a follow-up to a post I wrote the other day, about how my alma mater, Louisiana State University, has plans in the works to go woke. In my post “‘Antiracism’ At LSU,” I talked about how the Faculty Senate, with the support of LSU administration, is attempting to pass a graduation requirement that all LSU students take a class in African and African-American Studies. According to the proposal, the class would do this:

This is not merely a black history class. This is a class in left-wing, Critical Theory propaganda. The tell is how the class intends to help students “begin the process of identifying and combating the many forms of intersecting oppression that characterize 21st-century United States life.” If you don’t know what intersectionality is, click here. It is the idea that all forms of oppression of marginalized peoples are connected. What this course proposes to do is to reveal the magical key to understanding American life as nothing but a cesspool of hatred, in which heterosexual white Christian males have their boots on the necks of everybody else.

I have written in this space about how this kind of thing has manifested at other universities, and corrupted them. Now it is being proposed for my alma mater — a state university in a very red state. If it cannot be stopped here, where can it be stopped? One of my children is at LSU now, and I hope to send the others there. Why would I want to pay for them to be told by the university, as a condition of graduation, that they (or their brothers and father) are oppressors who have constructed a society whose purpose is to keep those not like us down? It’s a lie, and a destructive lie — but LSU is considering forcing every student to sit through a class of this kind of propaganda. And God help the kid who challenges any of these claims in class. He or she will be called out as a bigot, and be graded accordingly.

Well, the Baton Rouge Advocate, our local paper, writes today about the controversy. Here’s how it starts:

LSU’s faculty is considering a resolution asking university officials to require future students, in order to graduate, to successfully complete a course focusing on African American contributions to Louisiana and America.

Faculty wishes are routinely ignored by administrators and supervisors at LSU, but this resolution has the support of the provost and system president. Plus, implementing “diversity and inclusion core requirement for all degrees by March 2021” is a check off in the university’s “Diversity & Inclusion Roadmap, 2020-2022.” The recently published roadmap sets out goals to make Louisiana’s flagship’s university, which has long history of racial intolerance, more welcoming to minorities and women.

This frames the controversy dishonestly in two ways.

First, the controversial part of the proposal is not about black history. It’s about intersectionality, and “combating anti-Blackness.” The black history component — which is generally unobjectionable — is being used to smuggle in radical theories. I explained what “intersectionality” is above. The term “anti-Blackness” (see commentary about it here) is used in a particular way to condemn whites and their identity. Robin DiAngelo, in her wildly popular book White Fragility, says that white identity is founded on “anti-Blackness.” DiAngelo writes:

[T]here was no concept of race or a white race before the need to justify the enslavement of Africans. Creating a separate and inferior black race simultaneously created the “superior” white race: one concept could not exist without the other. In this sense, whites need black people; blackness is essential to the creation of white identity.

Here’s a link to a multicultural studies center list of resources to combat anti-Blackness. The thing people who are not aware of this discourse — even journalists — miss is that it is built around an essentially Marxist concept of society as a struggle for power between groups. Critical Race Theory draws the lines between races. And in this radically egalitarian conception, where there are disparities in outcome between races, the only explanation for it is white supremacy. This is the view of Ibram X. Kendi, author of How To Be Antiracist and the most influential public intellectual in the US now, whose theories have been demolished by black scholars like Glenn Loury of Brown, and John McWhorter of Columbia, but who nevertheless goes from triumph to triumph.

This is what they want to bring to LSU, and compel students to study as a requirement for graduation. This is not a class in black history. This is a class meant to radicalize students along racial lines, and, through the theory of intersectionality, along lines of sex, sexual orientation, and gender identity.

The Advocate‘s introduction is also misleading in that it describes LSU as having “a long history of racial intolerance.” That of course is true. The university refused to admit blacks from its founding in 1853 until the 1950s — a shameful fact. But the description in the newspaper makes it sound like little has changed at LSU since the 1950s. What evidence can these people produce that racial intolerance still exists in a meaningful way at LSU, such that all students must be compelled to take a course on antiracism and intersectionality? Or is it more likely that these activist faculty and administrators are using the fact that LSU was antiblack 70 years ago as a justification for radicalizing the students there in 2021?

Journalists — and Louisiana lawmakers — ought to press these antiracism activists to explain why the history of pre-Civil Rights LSU justifies forcing students today to take what sounds like will be a highly ideological course of instruction.

The Advocate piece quotes my blog entry here:

Rod Dreher, an LSU alum, wrote about AAAS2000 earlier this week in The American Conservative: “From the description here, it is not mere history; it is highly ideologized history (“intersecting oppression”). And if this passes the LSU Faculty Senate, taking this course in left-wing racialism would be a requirement of graduating from LSU.

“If this proposal passes the Faculty Senate, the university will have declared that it is more important for LSU graduates to have had instruction in “intersectional oppression” than Plato, Aristotle, Shakespeare, Milton, Locke, or any of the other greats.”

(LSU’s current curriculum doesn’t require studying those philosophers and writers.)

Two very brave math professors also spoke out:

Charles N. Delzell, associate head of the Mathematics Department, noted the resolution pointed out that most students aren’t instructed about the true history of slavery or contributions of African Americans. He pointed out that most high school students don’t take courses on ancient Greece or ancient Rome or ancient Judaism.

Delzell said the definition of institutionalized racism seems to have morphed into requiring courses on the history of certain races but not others. “Students in anti-racism courses and programs may be forced to confess that they are racist or to admit that modern day LSU and America are institutionally racist in order to pass,” he told his colleagues.

Professor Stephen Shipman, of the mathematics department, said he is a faculty member – and he believes there are many – afraid to speak against the resolution for fear being ostracized. “We have to be careful not to demonize one race,” Shipman said.

All of this is true. Why should the experiences of black Americans — whose gifts to American life are unique and irreplaceable (read the black scholar Albert Murray’s The Omni-Americans for more on this) — be pedagogically privileged over Greco-Roman culture, over Shakespeare, over ancient Hebrew culture, and over the Enlightenment philosophers — all of whom were foundational to the culture of the West? I graduated from LSU in 1989 without ever having to take a course in any of those histories or areas of scholarship, because like all students, I was allowed to chart my own academic course. It’s my own fault that I didn’t take those courses, but it really is a scandal that it’s possible for an American student to get a college degree without having studied the Greeks, the Romans, Shakespeare, the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, etc., in a systematic way.

But now the university proposes that it is so important that its graduates leave with an understanding not only of the history of a particular race in American life, but of a fashionable political and cultural philosophy that holds the Greeks, the Romans, Shakespeare, and all the rest, in contempt by reducing their thought and their art to nothing more than the product of whiteness, and the manifestations of white supremacy? This is where all this “intersectional oppression” talk goes. This is what is at the root of these academic radicals’ mission: to make students hate their civilizational patrimony.

Is this what Louisiana parents want the state’s flagship university to inculcate in their children’s minds?

To see this controversy as only a matter of reminding white people that blacks have been mistreated in America (especially in states like Louisiana, which had slavery and then segregation), is to fundamentally miss what it’s really about. My new book Live Not By Lies talks about how these contemporary left-wing social justice activists are following a well-established playbook for radicalizing institutions and indeed a generation. It must be resisted! They are attempting to destroy old-fashioned liberalism, particularly on racial matters, and the only way that a pluralist democracy can thrive, with its peoples living in peace. They may not know what they’re doing — I think they do, but let’s give them the benefit of the doubt — but they are setting us at each other’s throats.

Do you want to see the outcome of this kind of ideological instruction? Take a look at this video from Yale, in 2015: Prof. Nicholas Christakis, a good and decent liberal, tries to confront a Social Justice student mob, and engage them with reasoned dialogue. They aren’t having it. They screech and sob and curse him, accusing him of disrespecting them. This is the poison the radicals are putting into the minds of the young. At every college where this way of thinking has been mainstreamed, nothing but fear and strife have followed.

We do not need this at LSU. A line in the sand must be drawn. We have to tell the truth about what these activist professors and administrators are trying to bring to the university. I know that Prof. Stephen Shipman of the LSU math department is right when he says that a lot of professors oppose this but are afraid to speak out, because I have been hearing from them privately since I wrote my piece earlier this week. It is time for them to follow the courageous examples of Prof. Shipman and Prof. Delzell, and speak their minds.

I hope too that The Advocate will write more accurately about what’s really going on at LSU, and about the phenomenon of Critical Theory. Ordinary people who don’t follow academic trends have no clue about how toxic, and how powerful, this stuff is. If you present it as simply raising awareness of black history, that is a fundamental mischaracterization designed to disarm opposition. It is not that at all, and people have a right to know.

 

The post ‘Antiracism’ At LSU, Part II appeared first on The American Conservative.

A Warning From Outside The Walls

I just received this remarkable letter from a reader, and have to share it with you:

I have never written to someone I have not met in person, so this email marks a first for me. I found your writing at TAC this past summer, and I’ve read your work daily ever since. I’ve subscribed to your Substack newsletter, too, and will become a paid subscriber once that goes into effect.

While reading Live Not By Lies and then The Benedict Option(I heard of LNBL first but then ordered TBO right away), I found myself continuously nodding and thinking, “Yep. He gets it. This is so spot on.”

I was quite surprised, then, to read the reviews by Trevin Wax at The Gospel Coalition (TGC) and Samuel D. James at Christianity Today (CT) because I read their blogs regularly and have generally felt them both to be rather astute cultural observers and solid writers. For the most part, I have agreed with whatever they write, probably because my theology closely aligns with theirs. Thus, their take on LNBL was a curveball of sorts for me.

How could they see your thesis as alarmist? How could they disbelieve the reality of soft totalitarianism taking over American life? How could they be so naïve about this when they are so insightful in their other writing?

I have pondered this quandary ever since reading each of their reviews, and I can only come to this conclusion. While we (the two reviewers and I) hold the same theological beliefs, we live and work and fellowship in very different cultural contexts. Trevin lives in the Nashville area and works as a Vice President at LifeWay, the publishing arm of the Southern Baptist Convention. He writes regularly for TGC and obviously has many connections with high profile Christian leaders, pastors, and authors. The same is true for Samuel D. James who lives in the Chicago area (where Wheaton College is a Christian institutional behemoth and where CT also happens to be located) and is an editor at Crossway, a publishing house committed to Reformed Theology. In sum, they live and work and attend church in key hubs of Christian thinkers in Christian institutions.

Me? I’m a GenX woman who lives in Los Angeles County. I don’t run in the inner circles of conservative Christian publishing. I don’t live and work in a conservative Christian bubble. Far from it. I have lived in California my entire life, and I have raised my family here in LA (my kids are now 25, 18, 16), and they all attend public schools. The churches here, both large and small, should be a sanctuary from the insanity pressing in around us. Instead, the churches here do their level best to imitate the Seeker Sensitive model that came out of Willow Creek. The teaching is weak at best, outright apostasy at worst. (The adamance of these churches to remain Seeker Sensitive — given what we now know to be true of Willow Creek’s founding leadership, and given the fact that it has not resulted in the much-hoped-for-wooing of Millennials and Gen Zers — remains a mystery to me, but that is another topic. I realize, of course, that this is a sweeping generalization. I know of some exceptions, but the Seeker Sensitive model, along with Moralistic Therapeutic Deism, remains the overall spiritual tenor of the churches in my area.) Basically, I live and work and go to church in Babylon.

Why have Trevin Wax and Samuel D. James viewed LNBL as alarmist? My only answer is that they must be too much encased in a conservative Christian bubble. If everyone they live with and work with and interact with are just like them, then why would they believe anything different is coming or is, in fact, already here? It’s not a part of their world. At least not yet.

Here in LA, though, soft totalitarianism is already everywhere. My kids’ high school teachers tried to fill my kids with ideas of Critical Race Theory and LGBTQ ideology. You should see the things my kids’ friends post on social media. They have completely adopted Socialism as the only viable option for “compassionate and thinking adults.” And if you dare breathe a word that counters any of this, you are vilified and canceled and labeled a hater. Facebook and Instagram are already removing posts that are deemed “hateful,” when in fact they are posts about God and the Bible. The algorithm-driven life is the foundation upon which this Brave New World of high tech is already indoctrinating public opinion.

Christians, churches, and Christian publishers must stop thinking these platforms will allow them to continue advertising their books and their messages indefinitely. It is only a matter of time before these algorithms completely remove all Christian content from their platforms (which is another reason why everything you say in TBO is so important).

And the legal precedents that have been established because of COVID-19 are scarier than the disease itself. For the record, I believe the disease is real, and I wear my mask whenever I go to the store (which is the only place I go anymore), but here in California, the extremely Democratic governor has issued executive orders (EOs) almost daily which have drastically altered the landscape of how the state can operate. These EOs continue to give more and more power to the executive branch of the state government. There is little power left to the people. We’ve been on lock-down more or less since March. The recent surges in hospitalizations we’re seeing now is due to the winter season coupled with extreme quarantine fatigue. If people visited their families during Thanksgiving, it’s because they hadn’t been allowed to see them all year.

All this is to say nothing of the anti-business laws that have been put into effect over the years. The California exodus is for real. My husband and I and our kids are next. We’ve just sold our house. The thought of living in a mostly Christian community in another part of the country actually sounds pretty nice. I don’t fault Trevin Wax or Samuel D. James for it.

There is so much I could say about the exodus happening here, but this email has gotten too long already. Just know that a regular reader of Trevin Wax and Samuel D. James thought their reviews of Live Not By Lies were way off the mark. Perhaps if they lived in Los Angeles County and raised their kids here they’d realize it too.

Keep writing. What you’re saying is so important.

I am so grateful for this letter. I agree that Trevin and Samuel are good guys, usually on top of things, but their takes on Live Not By Lies were mystifying to me. Someone else earlier this week said the same thing to me: that the world looks a lot less alarming from inside a bubble where you are guaranteed employment even though you might hold views the world sees as deplorable. But traditional Christians who are living outside the walls of the city, so to speak, know how vulnerable they and their kids are.

I dedicated the book to the memory of Father Tomislav Kolakovic who, over the objections of some of the Catholic bishops of Slovakia, who called him alarmist, prepared the Catholic people for the coming persecution. From Live Not By Lies:

In 1943, a Jesuit priest and anti-fascist activist named Tomislav Poglajen fled his native Croatia one step ahead of the Gestapo and settled in Czechoslovakia. To conceal himself from the Nazis, he assumed his Slovak mother’s name—Kolaković—and took up a teaching position in Bratislava, the capital of the Slovak region. The priest, thirty-seven years old and with a thick shock of prematurely white hair, had spent some his priestly training studying the Soviet Union. He believed that the defeat of Nazi totalitarianism would occasion a great conflict between Soviet totalitarianism and the liberal democratic West. Though Father Kolaković worried about the threats to Christian life and witness from the rich, materialistic West, he was far more concerned about the dangers of communism, which he correctly saw as an imperialistic ideology.

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.

The passivity and conformity of contemporary Christianity is no match for what is here, and is coming even stronger at us. Believing, as Samuel James does, in the fact that Americans have historically been religious, and in the power of the First Amendment to defend us, is a dangerous fallacy. Christians (and other traditional religious believers) had better resist more directly when we can, and, like Father Kolakovic’s followers, prepare networks of support now, while we still retain the freedom to do so.

The California reader mentioned my Substack newsletter. I invite you to read what I’ve been writing there by clicking here.I’ve been writing it nightly since late October, publishing every weekday. The newsletter is more intimate than this blog, and focuses more on reasons to hope — that is, not merely reasons to be optimistic and happy (though I’m pleased to write about them when I find them), but on reasons to be confident in life’s ultimate meaning — that even if we suffer, we are not suffering in vain. I’m more overtly religious writing in that mode. I’ve been doing it for free so far, but after the first of the year, I’m going to a paid model. I’ll be charging five dollars per month, which amounts to about 25 cents per day. I hope you’ll take a look at what I’ve been doing there, and will decide to sign up, even if it costs you. But if you just want to read the archives, and read the things I’ll be writing over Christmastide, you can do so for free.

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Gen Z’s Erotic Failure

Someone blogging as The Flaming Eyeball wrote a long essay responding to a blog post I wrote back in October, in which I reported data showing that 30 percent of American women under the age of 25 consider themselves to be LGBT. I wrote, in part:

Has anything like this ever happened to any society, ever? Three out of ten women under the age of 25 consider themselves to be gay or transgender. Five percent, sure. Maybe even eight percent. But thirty? Will they always think that? Maybe not, but these are their prime childbearing years.  The US fertility rate is at a 35-year low, and there’s no reason to think it will rise. Some critics blame structural difficulties in the US economy that make it harder for women to choose to have children, but European nations make it vastly easier for mothers, and still cannot get their fertility rates above replacement.

What’s behind this is primarily cultural. We have become an anti-natalist society. And further, we have become a society that no longer values the natural family. We see everywhere disintegration. Yesterday, on the Al Mohler podcast, I talked about going to a conservative Evangelical college a few years back, and hearing from professors there that they feared most of their students would never be able to form stable families, because so many of them had never seen what that’s like.

And now we have 30 percent of Gen Z women claiming to be sexually uninterested in men. There is nothing remotely normal about that number. It is a sign of a deeply decadent culture — that is, a culture that lacks the wherewithal to survive. The most important thing that a generation can do is produce the next generation. No families, no children, no future.

The Flaming Eyeball (henceforth TFE) has a lengthy response. This is from the first part:

I write this essay as a Zoomer university student. In many ways, I am one of the most successful of my generation. I got a near-perfect SAT score, and earned a BS in a STEM degree from a major university in only 3 years. Although I am not an incel, I have had to give a lot of thought to the question of my generation’s sexuality in the past several years, because a large fraction of the guys I have met in high school and college seldom or never went on dates, had sex, or had girlfriends. Many of them still hung out with girls, but a lot of them never connected romantically or sexually. All of it seemed very ominous to me: if one guy can’t get laid, people can write him off as a loser, but if a large percentage of young men are sexually frustrated to the extent that they rarely get any attention from women, there is something very odd going on. So I found myself forced to theorize about what exactly has befallen us, and what are the roots and implications of mass sexlessness in America.

Why, overall, do men and women desire one another less?

What follows is a long, heavily linked analysis in which TFE talks about the effects of being acculturated by social media, the large, measurable decline in testosterone, neuroticism, learned helplessness, and the collapse of religion. I find the last one the most interesting, because it’s in my wheelhouse. TFE discusses how his generation is filling the God-shaped hole in their souls with politics — but it’s not a positive politics, but rather a politics of negation. They are fanatically against what they hate, not in favor of what they love. And because they are hysterically intolerant, few who disagree will say anything about it, because as socially isolated as they already are, they don’t want to get even moreso by outing themselves as thought criminals.

I hope you’ll read the whole thing, and weight TFE’s argument. He concludes:

To sum this up, the relationship problems of my generation illustrate two far greater trends, which will intertwine and play out in various ways over the course of the next few decades. The first, which played out in the Mouse Utopia, is that Generation Z on balance is the weakest generation, having been raised by a micromanaging and decadent society to be soft and utterly dependent on the system. The second is that they are thoroughly spiritually bankrupt, atomized, and lonely, leading to corresponding longings, confusion, and rage which will at minimum unbalance the system. Rod Dreher is one of the few mainstream thinkers to ever touch on these issues, and for this is met with consistent mockery and denial by his commenters that these constitute problems at all. I have witnessed, in both statistics and personal experience, the widespread destructive trends of poor mental and physical health, inability to socialize or pair-bond, and loss of faith and spiritual values. They are very real, and they have caused and will continue to cause such tremendous suffering and destruction that unchecked, they threaten the US’s ability to continue as a nation.

Here’s a link to TFE’s whole post. Again, I hope you’ll consider his argument seriously. It seemed plausible to me, but I am a Gen Xer who has little interaction with Gen Z. What I thought about when I finished it is how I felt when I finished archaeologist Bryan Ward-Perkins’s 2005 book The Fall Of Rome. In it, Ward-Perkins, who teaches at Oxford, discusses the material collapse of Roman civilization when the state fell. He documents that the knowledge of how to do basic things required for the continuation of civilization disappeared; some of these things (like, say, how to build a roof) did not return for centuries. The things Ward-Perkins talks about are skills you wouldn’t think people would forget. But that’s not how it works, shockingly. I think it’s entirely possible that we are losing the skills for how to reproduce. I’m not talking about “how to have sex,” but I’m talking about the human skills needed to form families and perform the basic task of every human generation: produce the next one.

So, Gen Z readers: Is TFE’s post an accurate description of life as you know it among your generation? I put the question to my son Matt, who is a 21-year-old college student. He responded skeptically:

I fail to understand why these people have to blame some amorphous evil Marxist soyboy ray for all this when the explanation is simple: most peoples’ lives consist of being plugged into a screen, driving, and sleeping. Like my roommate last year — desperately trying to work out why no girls are interested in him when he has no life outside his computer. This is what it means to be alienated from the world by the horrible suburbanized existence we’ve made for ourselves. Amateur endocrinology doesn’t enter into it. We could all be chiseled muscle hunks and just as miserable as we were before.

Hmm. I think that he and TFE are actually closer than he realizes.

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