Rod Dreher's Blog, page 98

The Giuliani Meltdown

I have not followed the post-election vote counting controversies closely. My general stance has been that President Trump has the right to challenge in court what he believes to be dodgy voting results. I would not be surprised if there was voting fraud somewhere in this big country. If Team Trump can produce meaningful evidence, then we have to take it seriously, no matter how much that ticks off Democrats.

Yesterday’s presser by Rudy was an embarrassment, and not just because his hair dye melted down his face. A conservative friend said Rudy went full “Claude Robichaux.” Claude Robichaux is the conspiracy-minded old gent in A Confederacy of Dunces who believes that there’s a “communiss” behind every bush. More significantly, Trump’s attorney Sydney Powell alleged a Vast Left-Wing Conspiracy to steal the election by nabbing millions of votes from Donald Trump.

If you didn’t see Tucker Carlson’s segment on this last night, you need to watch it. He reports that he asked Powell to come on the show and present evidence of this conspiracy. Said he would give her the whole hour. She refused, and told him to quit bothering her. Tucker, who is well-sourced in the White House, said that members of Trump’s circle told him that Powell has given them no evidence either.

When you’ve lost Tucker Carlson, that’s a pretty good sign that the b.s. has to stop. Trump has only won one of the 31 election-related legal challenges he has filed, and that have been settled in court. At this point, they’re just throwing whatever they can at the wall to see what sticks. Peggy Noonan:

Responsible Republican leaders ought to congeal and address the fact that what rough faith and trust we have in the system is being damaged. Which means our ability to proceed as a healthy democracy is being damaged.

There is no realistic route to victory for the president, only to confusion and chaos and undermining. He is not going to find the votes in recounts to win the election. Dominion, the voting-machine company under attack, has not been credibly charged with doing anything wrong. As the Journal said this week in an editorial, “Strong claims need strong proof, not rumors and innuendo on Twitter. ”

Trump lost. One may regret it, but there it is. It would have been more shocking had Trump won, given how badly he has governed, and campaigned. The Republican Party, however, did amazingly well on Election Night. Now is the time to put this Trump thing behind us, and get busy creating an effective opposition. Trump is going to carry on for ages trying to delegitimize the new president, because his ego cannot bear to accept that he lost this race. There is no need for conservatives to play along with this charade. The Democrats are going to try to do serious damage to the things many of us care about. Conservatives need strong fighters, ready to punch back hard. This Trump psychodrama only makes it harder for them to do their jobs.

Tucker Carlson is right: if the Trump team can come up with hard evidence for its extraordinary claims, then by all means let’s hear them, and see the evidence. But if it can’t or won’t provide that, it should shut up and accept reality. In Live Not By Lies, I write about Hannah Arendt’s claim that a society in which large numbers of people prefer to believe bizarre things absent evidence, because it suits their emotional needs, as a sign of a pre-totalitarian society. I talk about the Left and its crazy beliefs about the founding of America (e.g., The 1619 Project). But we are seeing the same kind of thing on the Right with this post-election psychodrama. Trump failed. It’s not the end of the world. The next four years are going to be hard for us conservatives because a liberal Democrat sits in the White House.

But to pretend that he did not fail, that he was stabbed in the back by conspirators, even in the absence of evidence — that’s dangerous stuff. Conservatives who don’t live in reality are going to end up losing. This year, the Democrats underperformed in part because the radicals who are disproportionately influential in party circles convinced themselves that “Defund The Police” was a popular idea. They refused to see how it looked to people outside the epistemic bubble, and it cost them. Similarly, conservatives who are full-tilt MAGA conspiratorialists on the election need to understand what persisting in this belief stands to do to their cause, and to the country.

Again, when you’ve lost Tucker, you’re in deep trouble. In that segment, Carlson laid into the news media for its Russian conspiracy obsessions, and its other foibles. But in the end, he invited Trump’s lawyer on to offer the evidence that the election was stolen from the president by a conspiracy — and she repeatedly declined to make the case. He told her to put up or shut up — and she told him to get lost.

That speaks for itself.

UPDATE: A reader just sent in this short response Sidney Powell offered on Fox to Tucker’s criticism:

UPDATE.2: John Hinderaker at the conservative blog Powerline, says that Trump lawyers confused data from Michigan and Minnesota in one of their legal filings:

Evidently a researcher, either Mr. Ramsland or someone working for him, was working with a database and confused “MI” for Minnesota with “MI” for Michigan. (The postal code for Minnesota is MN, while Michigan is MI, so one can see how this might happen.) So the affidavit, which addresses “anomalies and red flags” in Michigan, is based largely, and mistakenly, on data from Minnesota.

This is a catastrophic error, the kind of thing that causes a legal position to crash and burn. Trump’s lawyers are fighting an uphill battle, to put it mildly, and confusing Michigan with Minnesota will at best make the hill steeper. Credibility once lost is hard to regain. Possibly Trump’s lawyers have already discovered this appalling error, and have undertaken to correct it. But the Ramsland Affidavit was filed in Georgia just yesterday.

Team Trump’s chief legal analyst, attorney Lionel Hutz, is trying to process this information:

UPDATE.3: Whoa! Listen to this whole thing:

calls to mind the prediction/warning that gained traction about a decade ago in certain circles as cultural secularization was taking hold: if you don't like religious conservatives, just wait until they lose their Christian faith https://t.co/Dr0XdsImaZ

— Charlie Camosy (@CCamosy) November 21, 2020

I accuse — correctly! — many on the Left of having made a religion of politics, but this MAGA zealot definitely has done so.

The post The Giuliani Meltdown appeared first on The American Conservative.

‘Muir Woods, Queer Woods’

Ever been to the Muir Woods, the redwood forest north of San Francisco? It is like heaven on earth. First time I went, I thought, “So this is why people become druids and worship trees.” It is not only one of the great treasures of America, but of the world. To enter the Muir Woods is to walk into a garden of transcendence.

Or was. This is what hits you now when you show up at the park:

 

No kidding. Here’s what the National Park Service tells you about the Queer Ecology of the Muir Woods. Excerpt:

Queer ecology is the series of practice that reimagines how people think about nature. It studies gender, sexuality, and behavior in the natural world. It uses the word “queer” because it draws from a related field called queer theory. Queer theory studies dominant, social norms around sexuality and the way those norms hurt people who are queer. Queer ecology looks at how dominant, social norms impact our understanding of nature.

A common way mainstream American society understands nature is in “either/or” boxes like “male/female,” “natural/unnatural,” and “human/nature.” Looking at nature with our societal norms, we might look at two spiders and assume the big one is the male or “dad” and the smaller one is the female or “mom.” Queer ecology investigates if the norms we put on people apply to plants, animals, and insects. Often, the answer is no, just like the answer is no with the spider example above. In many species of spiders, the physically larger spiders are female. Many times these societal perceptions don’t universally apply to people either. When we impose our societal norms on nature, we miss how diverse nature really is. But when we learn to recognize societal norms and question them, we can more accurately study the natural world.

The Redwood forest is a wonderful place to experience queer ecology. When we look at Muir Woods in the lens queer ecology provides, we see past the structures that we have traditionally held to be true in nature. Redwood forest ecosystems are so diverse and there is a lot we can learn from this incredible variation. Here are a few examples of queer ecology in the redwood forest.

They give examples — gay bats, genderfluid banana slugs, how making creeks straight harmed the forest, and so forth.

This is the National Parks Service, a US Government agency. Watch the five minute video where gay and bisexual forest guides tell you all about the Queer Woods. 

Here’s the embed:

You know why this is totalitarian? Because totalitarianism is what you have when politics invade every aspect of society. Mussolini, the Italian Fascist leader who invented the term “totalitarianism,” defined it as “all within the state, none outside the state, none against the state.” For us, it’s “all within wokeness, none outside of wokeness, none against wokeness.”

One of contemporary progressivism’s commonly used phrases—the personal is political—captures the totalitarian spirit, which seeks to infuse all aspects of life with political consciousness. Indeed, the Left pushes its ideology ever deeper into the personal realm, leaving fewer and fewer areas of daily life uncontested. This, warned Arendt, is a sign that a society is ripening for totalitarianism, because that is what totalitarianism essentially is: the politicization of everything.

Infusing every aspect of life with ideology was a standard aspect of Soviet totalitarianism. Early in the Stalin era, N. V. Krylenko, a Soviet commissar (political officer), steamrolled over chess players who wanted to keep politics out of the game.

“We must finish once and for all with the neutrality of chess,” he said. “We must condemn once and for all the formula ‘chess for the sake of chess,’ like the formula ‘art for art’s sake.’ We must organize shock brigades of chess-players, and begin immediate realization of a Five-Year Plan for chess.”

Today they would be demanding that we queer chess, or develop a Five-Year Plan to make chess antiracist. The mentality is the same: there is nothing that can exist outside of wokeness.

By the way, here is some of the material being taught to elementary school students at a school in the Bay Area, according to this tweet:

 

More news from the Bay Area, this one from a reader in Los Gatos:

I readLive Not By Lies and it is great.  A powerful warning for what is coming.  Thank you for writing it.

I was reminded today of the stories told by the people in your book who know what it is like to live in a totalitarian society and the unmistakable warning signs that it is happening.

My wife and I were in our front yard today and a wonderful woman stopped to talk to us (from a safe distance).  She left East Germany 40 years ago.  She talked of living in fear every day and the toll it takes on people to live that way.  They could never say what they really thought and had to limit everything they said out of fear of imprisonment.  She never knew who was listening or who would turn her in.  One of her relatives, to this day, will not discuss politics over the phone out of fear of being arrested.

She moved here in 1966 hoping to get away from the fear.  She had.  Until the last six to nine months.  The rapidity of the change has stunned her.  It is all too familiar.  The fear is creeping back.

You might be thinking, well, just get out of crazypants California, and everything will be fine. Do you seriously not think that what starts in California stays in California?

UPDATE: A reader writes:

What a crazy story. William Kent (who donated Muir Woods to the country) would have been horrified. Here’s what he said about the donation — and if he had accepted having his name on the park, he would have to be canceled today for having such retrograde views.

Shrouded in fog banks that roll in daily from the Pacific, California redwoods reach hundreds of feet in height and thousands of years in age. They once filled many northern California coastal valleys, but it was one of the last remaining mature stands that William and Elizabeth Kent purchased in 1905. In donating a 300-acre tract north of San Francisco to the Department of the Interior, the Kents asked that President Theodore Roosevelt declare it a national monument, and name it Muir Woods in homage to naturalist John Muir. Acting on their request in 1908, Roosevelt created the first national protected area to be donated by private individuals. But the President suggested the monument should bear the donor family’s name, in recognition of their “generous and public-spirited” act. William Kent demurred, saying he and his wife were raising “five good husky boys” and “if these boys cannot keep the name of Kent alive, I am willing it should be forgotten.”  

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LGBT Lobby Coming After Christian Schools

The Law of Merited Impossibility: It will never happen, and when it does, you bigots will deserve it.

This law never fails. It’s how the Left operates, without fail. They just wanted marriage equality, remember? And now the Human Rights Campaign, the powerful LGBT lobby, is asking the incoming Biden Administration to crush Christian colleges that do not conform to the HRC’s idea of righteousness. It’s in the HRC’s recently released “Blueprint For Positive Change 2020” — a policy brief for Biden.

Al Mohler writes:

Yet, the most shocking demand in the report is found under the section for the Department of Education. The Human Rights Campaign demands the Biden administration to ensure that “non-discrimination policies and science-based curriculum are not undermined by religious exemption to accreditation standards.”

That is sinister. I’ve not seen any document like this before—the Human Rights Campaign is effectively calling for religious colleges and schools to be coerced into the sexual revolution or stripped of accreditation.

The Blueprint states, “Language regarding accreditation of religious institutions of higher education in the Higher Education Opportunity Act could be interpreted to require accrediting bodies to accredit religious institutions that discriminate or do not meet science-based curricula standards. The Department of Education should issue a regulation clarifying that this provision, which requires accreditation agencies to ‘respect the stated mission’ of religious institutions, does not require the accreditation of religious institutions that do not meet neutral accreditation standards including nondiscrimination policies and scientific curriculum requirements.”

In terms of accreditation, that is an atomic bomb.

In clear text, for all the world to see, the Human Rights Campaign summons the Biden administration to deny accreditation—or, at the very least, to facilitate the denial of accreditation—to Christian institutions, Christian colleges and universities, and, for that matter, any other religious institution or school that does not meet the demands of the LGBTQ orthodoxy. This would mean abandoning biblical standards for teaching, hiring, admissions, housing, and student life. It would mean that Christian schools are no longer Christian.

Read Mohler’s entire piece. 

If a college or school lost its accreditation, it would have to close. Simple as that.  This is the point. The HRC believes that if you do not accept its vision of sexuality, then you should have no place in public life.

These activists are something else. They have won the culture war spectacularly — but now they are bouncing the rubble.

I have never been more grateful to have a conservative majority on the US Supreme Court. That doesn’t guarantee anything, but at least when these cases are litigated, the First Amendment has a fighting chance against the diktats of the Homintern.

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Down With Card-Carrying Communists

Joining is free. Get the card that strikes fear into the heart of the imperialist bourgeoisie! https://t.co/icAtTHN8mn#SocialismOrBarbarism pic.twitter.com/5w3ijAQKUH

— Communist Party USA (@communistsusa) November 18, 2020

This happens more than it should with a generation born after Soviet Communism’s fall. From Live Not By Lies:

Recently, a bright-eyed and cheerful twenty-six-year-old California woman told me that she thinks of herself as a communist. “It’s just so beautiful, this dream of everybody being equal,” she gushed. When she asked me what I was working on, I told her about the struggles of Alexander Ogorodnikov, a Christian dissident imprisoned and tortured by the Soviets, whom I had recently interviewed in Moscow. She fell silent.

“Don’t you know about the gulag?” I asked, naively.

Of course she didn’t. Nobody ever told her. We, her parents and grandparents, have failed her generation. And if develops no curiosity about the past, she will fail herself.

She’s not alone. Every year, the Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, a nonprofit educational and research organization established by the US Congress, carries out a survey of Americans to determine their attitudes toward communism, socialism, and Marxism in general. In 2019, the survey found that a startling number of Americans of the post-Cold War generations have favorable views of left-wing radicalism, and only 57 percent of millennials believe that the Declaration of Independence offers a better guarantee of “freedom and equality” than the Communist Manifesto. The political religion that murdered tens of millions, imprisoned and tortured countless more, and immiserated the lives of half of humanity in its time, and the defeat of which required agonizing struggle by allies across borders, oceans, political parties, and generations—this hateful ideology is romanticized by ignorant young people.

Writing in the The Harvard Crimson in 2017, undergraduate Laura Nicolae, whose parents endured the horrors of Romanian communism, spoke out against the falsification of history that her fellow Ivy Leaguers receive, both in class and in the trendy Marxism of intellectual student culture.

“Depictions of communism on campus paint the ideology as revolutionary or idealistic, overlooking its authoritarian violence,” she writes. “Instead of deepening our understanding of the world, the college experience teaches us to reduce one of the most destructive ideologies in human history to a one-dimensional, sanitized narrative.”

This really is a scandal. It should no more be acceptable to be proud of your Communist Party card than it would be to boast of a Nazi Party membership. The fact that any young Americans does testifies to a shocking lapse in historical education, as well as moral seriousness. Perhaps now you can see why so many of the US citizens who emigrated here from Communist countries get so angry that Americans won’t listen to them. Perhaps related, I’ve written three New York Times bestsellers, but Live Not By Lies is by far the fastest seller of them all. At the rate its going, it will soon pass The Benedict Option‘s sales numbers, which have been accumulating for three and a half years. It has done this with zero coverage from the mainstream media (aside from a favorable Wall Street Journal review). Our media wish to memory-hole the experience of Communism’s victims, and are not interested in what they have to tell us today. It is worth contemplating why that might be.

The Victims of Communism Memorial Foundation, which was founded by the US Congress, offers educational programs for American schools. Here is a link to a curriculum the Foundation offers for use in schools. It is so very important that students learn these facts of the 20th century. One more bit from Live Not By Lies:

Forgetting the atrocities of communism is bad enough. What is even more dangerous is the habit of forgetting one’s past. The Czech novelist Milan Kundera drily observes that nobody today will defend gulags, but the world remains full of suckers for the false utopian promises that bring gulags into existence.

“Not to know what happened before you were born is to remain a child forever,” said Cicero. This, explains Kundera, is why communists placed such emphasis on conquering the minds and hearts of young people. In his novel The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Kundera recalls a speech that Czech president Gustáv Husák gave to a group of Young Pioneers, urging them to keep pressing forward to the Marxist paradise of peace, justice, and equality.



“Children, never look back!,” [cries Kundera’s character Husak], and what he meant was that we must never allow the future to collapse under the burden of memory.

A collective loss of historical memory—not just memory of communism but memory of our shared cultural past—within the West is bound to have a devastating effect on our future. It’s not that forgetting the evils of communism means we are in danger of re-creating precisely that form of totalitarianism. It’s that the act of forgetting itself makes us vulnerable to totalitarianism in general.

Put another way, we not only have to remember totalitarianism to build a resistance to it; we have to remember how to remember, period.

If he’s lucky, the young man above, with his party card, will one day come to see that image as the most shameful thing he’s ever done. By the way, two great books to read, from disillusioned Communists who came to know the truth, are Witness, by Whittaker Chambers, and Under A Cruel Star, by Heda Margolius Kovaly. I had known about the Chambers book, but discovered the Kovaly book as part of my research for Live Not By Lies. Kovaly was a Czech Jew who survived the Nazi concentration camps. She and her husband, also a Jew, embraced Communism after their release because they were desperate for hope, and because Communism was the farthest thing from Nazism. Her husband became a high-level functionary in the Communist regime there, but was later falsely accused of political crimes, and executed. Kovaly writes:

What I remember most vividly from this period following the coup is a feeling of bewilderment, of groping in the dark that was doubly oppressive because the darkness was not only outside but inside me as well. How could we have been so credulous? so ignorant? It seems that once you decide to believe, your faith becomes more precious than truth, more real than reality.

People like the young man with his party card put their faith in one of history’s most monstrous lies. Maybe that faith will be impervious to reality. But he and all those tempted by this false hope should at least be compelled to see as much reality about Communism as we can muster for their inspection.

UPDATE: By the way, I’m hearing from a few readers who say they are reading Live Not By Lies with youth groups. Fantastic! Here is a link to the free downloadable study guide I wrote for just this kind of thing. 

Also, readers of this blog who are interested in my writing about non-crazy, non-appalling, non-outrageous things of the world might like to check out Daily Dreher, my Substack newsletter. I’m getting a lot of great feedback from readers of this blog who appreciate the balance. The content is all free for now, though I’m going to switch to paid eventually.

UPDATE.2: A reader writes:

As a young person who has interacted with a lot of serious card-carrying communists as well as the more general people who are interested in “socialism” I thought I’d try and shed some light on why my generation in particular (Gen Z) would be more amenable to the idea of Communism than generations before us.

My generations upbringing has been defined by its instability. I was born in the year 2000 so I don’t remember a time pre 9/11. I grew up in the shadow of a global recession that stunted the job markets of the generation before me, and in a system where it seemed like the government existed to shovel money to large corporations while regurgitating free-market dogma and pull-yourself-up-by-your-bootstraps personal responsibility platitudes out of the other. While I’m not yet in the position of graduating into a recession like the Millennials did, it’s looking increasingly likely like I will also have that dubious honor.

This instability has caused us to look for utopian answers to complex and imperfect problems. Combined with the ease of finding similar opinions on the internet, which we grew up with as a facet of everyday life, where sets of facts are constructed in a way that best appeals to our biases,it becomes very easy to be radicalized into a particular way of looking at the work and using only one lens by which to interpret a complex and messy world. It just becomes easier and easier to ignore stuff that doesn’t fit into your narrative because you can just go somewhere where no-one questions your narrative. This likely helps to contribute to the intolerance of differing ideas that is so common to my generation.

On the other hand, while I’ve met my fair share of card-carrying Marxists and Communists (not a hard thing to do at university especially for one studying political science), I feel like most of what people talk about when they mention socialism or communism is more of a social democracy with a stronger social welfare net and attempts to lower the increasingly obscene wealth divide that we have seen especially reflected in the COVID lockdowns, with the middle-class professional set able to more or less comfortably work from home where the less fortunate have to risk infecting both themselves and people that they might live with just to make ends meet. It also doesn’t help that for ages the right has been engaged in a project of shouting down anything to the left of Hayek as socialism in the first place, so when people think of socialism/communism, they don’t think of the atrocities of Mao and Stalin, but instead think of policies that might make a positive difference in their lives like a stronger national healthcare system and higher taxes that could fund better education for their children.

Our generation sees itself as facing near insurmountable problems. Burdened by student debt, with the highest rate of anxiety and depression in history, with an approaching climate crisis and a political culture unwilling and unable to compromise, we can’t see a future in which slow and incremental change and compromise produces the policies likely to help us in the future. Even after 2008, the government response to the COVID crisis was to shovel more money to corporations and, while some direct support was issued to Americans, largely left people to fend for themselves. In this context, revolution, even if it’s from a failed ideology, seems attractive because it offers a way to actually get things done. There is also a certain hubris of the present, that because we are so much more advanced than people were in the past that we could never make the same mistakes.

In any case, I hope this is illuminating in some respects. It’s definitely not the best overview of why this stuff is on the rise,but if I gave a full analysis it would probably be the length of a dissertation, and I have exams coming up in the next few weeks. I may write again once I have some more free time though.

The post Down With Card-Carrying Communists appeared first on The American Conservative.

Benedict XVI & The New Totalitarianism

The Italian journalist Antonio Socci writes about something Benedict XVI said to his biographer Peter Seewald. Excerpts from Socci’s piece:

The crucial question placed by Seewald to Ratzinger is this:



One phrase from your first homily as pope has remained particularly impressed in our memory: “Pray for me, that I may not flee for fear of the wolves.” Had you perhaps foreseen what awaited you?

The pope replies that this was not an allusion to the problems of the Vatican (such as Vatileaks), as many thought. Benedict XVI explains:

The true threat for the Church, and thus for the Petrine service, does not come from this sort of episode: it comes instead from the universal dictatorship of apparently humanistic ideologies. Anyone who contradicts this dictatorship is excluded from the basic consensus of society. One hundred years ago, anyone would have thought it absurd to speak of homosexual matrimony. Today those who oppose it are socially excommunicated. The same holds true for abortion and the production of human beings in the laboratory. Modern society intends to formulate an anti-Christian creed: whoever contests it is punished with social excommunication. Being afraid of this spiritual power of the Antichrist is all too natural, and what is truly needed is that the prayers of entire dioceses and of the world Church come to the rescue to resist it.

Anyone who contradicts this dictatorship is excluded from the basic consensus of society, said Benedict XVI — and he went on to associate this with the power of Antichrist.

This photo was taken of St. Peter’s Basilica on the day Pope Benedict announced his resignation:

The American Conservative.

Richard X, The Woke Divine

At Yale Divinity School, a “Dear Theo” letter is an open missive to the YDS community, usually written anonymously, and sent in the school’s daily e-mail to students. Here’s one that went out yesterday. It is such a perfect specimen of the kind of thing it is that one ought to recite it aloud, as if it were a sacred text of an arcane crackpot religion:

The Amazing Grace of the White Theological Academy 

Yale Divinity School is haunted.

Like all other white theological academic spaces, there is an ever-present ghostly specter that looms over the Quad, that dwells in the chapel, and sits in our classes. It is a remnant of a world that we love to pretend does not exist or only exists in the writings of yesteryears. However, slowly through the writings of Dr. Willing Jennings in After Whiteness: After Whiteness: An Education in Belonging, this phantom comes into focus.

“there is an image of an educated person that propels the curricular, pedagogical, and formational energies of Western education, and especially theological education. That image is of a white, self-sufficient man, his self-sufficiency defined by possession, control, and mastery.”

At the intersection of what Jennings describes, there is a triad of terror, a haunting myth called meritocracy. However, it may be reductionist to call meritocracy solely a myth. It is an evil byproduct of what Emile Townes names as the “fantastic hegemonic imagination.” Meritocracy seeks to assign value and worth to bodies based upon their productivity and judge the inherent value of bodies based upon their utility. From politics to policing and most relevant to this letter, pedagogy, meritocracy has been a centering ethos for the project of anti-blackness.

Ah, so achievement is racist. Let’s continue:

This past week, this specter enfleshed itself in the soiled imagination of our faculty. A decision was made to offer students the chance to change their grading structure from letters to the credit or no credit format. The credit or no credit format allows students to receive a grade for passing a class with an HP- which roughly translates to an 80% or above. Yet, due to the advocating of students, faculty, and committees, some students will be allowed to choose between receiving the standard letter grade or the credit or no credit format.

The most unsettling part of this ethical conundrum is to hear members of the Yale community describe this decision as “grace.” Grace? How does one mistake a ghost for grace? What manner of grace is this?

What grace demands that bodies contort to the whimsical pretense that we sustain some matter of normativity?

What grace demands that bodies crash against and stumble over themselves during a season with unknown stress and anxiety?

What grace demands that the illusions of scholarship and academia remain unsoiled by the messiness of a dying world?

What grace upholds the name and prestige of Yale by demanding for students to “pull themselves up at their bootstraps” and produce work?

This is the ghost of white male meritocracy. This is the afterlife of the auction block manifest within the theological academy. This is not grace.

A change in the grading policy at Yale Divinity School has echoes of chattel slavery? Of course it does! More:

Grace ruptures our narratives about worth and worthiness. Grace throws into chaos our claims of personal achievement and success. Grace turns over the table of production. Grace is an ethic of counter living, a living over and against the capitalist impulse of production, and the ways it traffics in the maintenance of our exhaustion and anxiety. Grace is the response to what has already been done and not what we can do ourselves.

Since the demand of production remains central, and the subsequent; evaluative measures of said production persist, so then the claim of grace by Yale is empty, futile, graceless.

Extending final paper deadlines, no matter how flexible, is not grace.

Allowing students to use notes, no matter how copious, on final tests is not grace.

Giving fewer guidelines for final projects, no matter how creative, is not grace.

One cannot practice grace and meritocracy at the same time.

Grace is not a conditional clause. Grace is a promiscuous promise.

What then, is this “grace” that Yale has offered?

It is the “amazing grace” that Anglican clergyman John Newton wrote about while owning black slaves. A song that I have heard so confidently sung in spaces of white theology and academy. It is the grace that allows one to experience the warm embrace of white saviorism and to commit it to paper on the rhythm and soul of Black bodies, bodies whose lives never knew the grace Newton claimed so freely for himself. It is the amazing grace that allows one to see their individual practice as reform to a system filled with corpses. It is the amazing grace that proclaims that “not all professors” (just like “not all police”) have practiced violent pedagogy in an academic system of production that is inherently violent.

It is a cheap grace that doesn’t require us to confront our fantastical ideals concerning assigning value and worth to what bodies can produce, even our own. It is nothing but the latest example of the lukewarm euphoria of neoliberalism that allows us to pat ourselves on the back while at the same time still holding tightly to our illusions about who we are as scholars, illusions of Yale as an institution.

It seems as though our beloved Yale community will acknowledge the presence of systemic racism, sexism, heteronormativity and injustice everywhere but at its own doorstep, sitting comfortably at its own table and feasting on the bodies of its own students.

This is the “amazing grace” that Yale Divinity has offered its students and faculty.

We have been allowed the honor to choose the knot of our noose.

We must not.

 

I remind you, reader, that this is about a shift in the grading policy. More:

 

This choice is not manna from heaven, this is crumbs from masters table.

Yet, benevolent anti-blackness is still anti-blackness.

The only graceful response is to give every student an H for every class for this semester.

Anything less is sin.

Anything less is violence.

Anything else is worthy of rioting.

Anything less is worth nothing at all.

I have no nuance in this claim.

I offer no tension to think through.

There is no caveat or “what ifs.”

There is no ethical middle ground.

I offer no such comfort to a University that is hell-bent on the maintenance of its image rather than the mental health and stability of its students. A University that rather kneel at the altar of accreditation boards and regulations than take up the costly call toward radical discipleship. A University that presents itself as “Christian,” the same way America does, that is to use the narrative of a blood-filled story to legitimize the blood it so casually spills every day.

Every student, Every class. An H.

An H to honor that we are still here.

We are still here despite a disease called Coviod-19 that has claimed millions

We are still here despite a disease called Coviod-45 who too has clutched the lives of millions

We are still here despite the cannibalistic capitalist nature of theological academic spaces

We are still here despite the parasitic posturing of administers and deans

We are still here.

We may not be flourishing, blossoming, or rejoicing.

But we are here. Still.

While a universal pass would relieve the gut-wrenching anxiety of finals, it would do nothing to confront our pre-pandemic problem with worthiness and productivity. An H for all s would make the H, the prized possession of Yale’s grading system essentially worthless. It would irreconcilably defund its worth and utility. Without a doubt, it would mean the end of the grading system as we know it. Afterward, would require that we lean toward imagining something else, a way of grace to engage student scholarship without indicators or markers of performance.

The irony is all this talk about grace is that Yale is always asking for some.Grace for the racism black students experience in class every day.

Grace for their sexist microaggressions and mishandlings of transgender students.

Grace for its centering of Christian normativity and dismissal of other forms of spirituality.

But the grace they ask for is a forgetfulness.

A willingness to ignore their commitment to violence and students just be grateful just to be here.

We can no longer offer this. We can no longer settle for this. This is the only grace that I can offer:

Yale Divinity School, despite its behavior, is still here. Unbroken. Unburnt. Untouched by the cloud of witnesses consumed with righteous indignation at the sins of Yale University.

Grace by us students, especially black students abounds.

But how amazing, how sweet the sound will be, when that grace finally runs out.

Richard X

Golly. Sounds like the white supremacist dog ate his homework.

OK, this is spectacularly stupid, and let’s be fair to Yale Divinity School: there is no reason to think that Richard X represents its entire student body. But after snorting at the Epistle of Richard X, I believe we should take it seriously. Our failure to take this kind of insanity seriously is one reason it has gotten so far.

As I point out in Live Not By Lies, no society can afford to ignore the thoughts and discourse of its elites. Twenty years ago, what we now call “gender ideology” was a niche academic concern. Today, we have the incoming President of the United States having recently voiced his support for transgendered eight-year-olds. Whether you are for it or against it, you have to admit that it is an extraordinary social change.

Similarly on race, Critical Race Theory is smashing the post-1960s MLK consensus on how to think about race in America. I mentioned yesterday that a reader who works for a large Evangelical Christian organization, one whose name and reputation even non-Evangelicals would know, told me in detail that the organization is swiftly radicalizing from within, around Critical Race Theory. The reader said that one of the most stunning things about this is that the radicalizing leadership is unwilling to accept dissent. Either you are on board with it, or you need to pack your bags, racist.

In the Richard X letter, notice the emotional hysteria. This is something I see a lot in statements by the Woke. They are exhausted, they tell us. They are usually in the most privileged environments in this country, but they write as if they are huddling in a barn on the underground railroad while armed Kluckers patrol the perimeter. Can you imagine trying to have a meaningful debate with Richard X? Think of poor Prof. Nicholas Christakis on the yard at Yale back in 2015, trying to have a rational dialogue with the Woke mob, which just shrieked and cursed and grieved and … carried on in the Richard X rhetorical mode.

It is shameful and undignified. It is childish. But it works. Why are these adult students so damn fragile? Why do they revel in their fragility, in their victimhood? I don’t believe it is merely a conscious strategy to gain power. I think they really do believe it. Where did they get this stuff?

More to the point: how do we stop it in its tracks?

After reading the letter, I put the question to a friend who is in graduate school in the humanities at an Ivy League college. He lives among the Richard Xs of the world, and said the stance and style of that letter is quite familiar. He is a conservative and a Christian, but one who, by his own admission, has kept his head down and “engaging in more ketman than I’d like to admit.”

(Ketman is the Persian practice of intentional hypocrisy and double-mindedness — of presenting yourself falsely to the world to protect yourself. I write about it in Live Not By Lies, as something that people had to do under Communism.)

My friend said he knew he was entering a Woke lion’s den when he started studying at that school, but that he had hoped when he arrived that once his leftist peers got to know him, they would at least be willing to listen to his views. After a couple of years, though, he has given up hope. They don’t want to know what people like him think about anything. They just want to crush them as evil.

I asked him what the Richard X letter, in light of his own experiences at an Ivy League grad school, tells him about the future of the Christian faith in this country. He replied:

Until something happens that proves the error of this kind of reasoning, there is no stopping it. These arguments, like Freud’s, are unfalsifiable. “You either see the pervasive blackness, or you’re too blinded by privilege.” The woke movement will either take over discourse, or it will eat itself alive, I can’t tell which.

I wonder, though, about the graduates of Yale Divinity School: where will the graduates of this program teach? The kinds of churches that embrace full-tilt wokeness are dying. On the other hand, opportunities are opening up in more mainstream Christianity, which is fast awokening among the younger generations. It is ultimately a sterile gospel, one that will put the nails in the coffin of Christianity. But it has the wind in its sails.

Last night on a webinar, a viewer asked me how we can engage the Woke in dialogue. I told the viewer that we could not. They are un-engageable. They are fanatics that cannot be reasoned with — watch the Christakis video if you doubt me — only resisted. As my Ivy League friend said, their arguments are unfalsifiable. If you disagree with them, that shows that you are not simply wrong, but also evil.

As I have written in this space before, a different friend who did graduate work in an Ivy — he’s European — said that the most striking thing to him was the fragility of American students. He said that these were among the most privileged people in America (and therefore the world), people who had no doubt at all that they were meant to rule. Yet they were ultra-fragile, emotionally and psychologically. He said this was a very bad sign for America’s future.

He was talking about Richard X, I see now.

These people are not liberals by any stretch. They are zealots who have surrendered their minds to an essentially religious ideology. Any organization that lets these people in and gives them authority is inviting its own destruction. If you see an organization, religious or otherwise, that gives people like Richard X standing, run the other way.

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Megyn Kelly Vs. Yankee Radio Rwanda

A few years ago, I wrote a series of blog posts here about the racialist radicalism of Tommy Curry, a black philosophy professor at Texas A&M. Here’s one of them, but there are several, all around the same time. Among the many shocking things he said on the record, “In order to be equal, in order to be liberated, some white people might have to die.” He rejects the “integrationist” philosophy that strives for people of all races to live together in peace, and believes that contemporary America is a “slaveocracy.” He says that black Americans should strongly consider violence to better their condition here. You get the idea. I drew attention to the racist radicalism that Curry preached, and caught hell from some liberal voices, including the Chronicle of Higher Education; many liberals believe that it is somehow racist to hold black people responsible for what they say. Curry is now teaching in Scotland.

I could not have imagined that Tommy Curry’s hateful philosophy would so quickly go mainstream in America. But that’s where we are. Megyn Kelly and her husband have decided to leave New York City. According to the Daily Wire:

Kelly, who founded Devil May Care Media, revealed a letter that her boys’ school administrators circulated among parents and faculty during an episode of her podcast, “The Megyn Kelly Show,” on Monday. Kelly said that she and her husband were pulling their children out of school and leaving New York City over the “out of control” racial social justice agenda in the city’s schools.

“It’s out of control on so many levels, and after years of resisting it, we’re going to leave the city. We pulled our boys from their school and our daughter is going to be leaving hers soon, too,” Kelly said. “The schools have always been far-left, which doesn’t align with my own ideology, but I didn’t really care. Most of my friends are liberals, it’s fine. I come from Democrats as a family.”

“I’m not offended at all by the ideology and I lean center-left on some things, but they’ve gone around the bend. I mean they have gone off the deep-end.,” she continued. “This summer in the wake of George Floyd, they circulated amongst the diversity group – which includes white parents like us, there are people who want to be allies and stay attuned to what we can do – an article, and afterward they recirculated it and wanted every member of the faculty to read it.”

Here’s the letter, written as a blog post by Nahliah Webber, and appearing at Education Post, a blog for education activist. Excerpts:

There’s a George Floyd in every school where Black children learn. Black children are screamed at, berated, surveilled and searched in schools. Black children are slammed and dragged, kicked and prodded in classrooms. Black children are denied an education and disrespected because of their culture. Black children are groomed for containment. We’ve got children walking on tape with hands over their mouths like prisoners in training.

Black children are suspended, detained, “demerited” and isolated in schools for trivial things every day. And there’s a killer cop sitting in every school where White children learn. They hear the litany of bad statistics and stereotypes about “scary” Black people in their classes and on the news. They gleefully soak in their White-washed history that downplays the holocaust of Indigenous, Native peoples and Africans in the Americas. They happily believe their all-White spaces exist as a matter of personal effort and willingly use violence against Black bodies to keep those spaces white.

Yet whenever we talk about what’s wrong with the systems that train and socialize young minds to become violent and depraved adults who, say choose to choke people out as part of their jobs, all we ever hear is that Black children, Black families, Black communities, Black-NESS are “behind” and stuck in gaps. Conservatives, liberals and progressives alike grow their careers and feed their families off of myths about Black deficiency.

More:

White children are left unchecked and unbothered in their schools, homes and communities to join, advance and protect systems that take away Black life. We never talk about this moral and human failing in White culture as something that needs to get fixed now. Instead, we pour millions of dollars into discussions, conferences, professional development, curriculum and consultancies that talk about fixing Black people. And I’m tired.

I’m tired of White people reveling in their state-sanctioned depravity, snuffing out Black life with no consequences and then having the nerve to tell Black children that they are “behind” and need to work harder.

I’m tired of White people telling Black kids that they need to be held “accountable,” yet killer cops go free when they take Black life and White teachers go free when they miseducate Black kids.

I’m tired of White people taking their violent culture, standards and metrics into Black spaces and telling Black children that they don’t measure up. Because who is really failing here?

Where’s the urgency for school reform for White kids being indoctrinated in Black death and protected from the consequences?

Where are the government-sponsored reports looking into how White mothers are raising culturally deprived children who think Black death is okay?

Where are the national conferences, white papers and policy positions on the pathology of Whiteness in schools and how it leaves White children behind as adults?

Why isn’t Bill Gates throwing billions into school programs teaching White kids how not to grow up racist and choke out Black life?

And:

Because that’s where the problem is—with White children being raised from infancy to violate Black bodies with no remorse or accountability. That cop didn’t just learn how to snuff out George Floyd’s life in a police training or on the job. He spent a lifetime preparing for that moment with his parents and family, teachers, coaches, neighborhoods and churches.

Read it all. You really should. It is deranged. This is Rwandan radio stuff — propaganda to inspire and cultivate race hatred as a precursor to violence. The Left is planting seeds of race hatred everywhere.

It is not, sadly, a surprise that people believe this garbage. But it is extremely alarming that race hatred like this is being mainstreamed in public and private schools. I see that a much-praised children’s book called Not My Idea: A Book About Whiteness is part of the curriculum at many elementary schools — for example, in suburban Philadelphia. A Philly TV station did a puff piece about what a glorious thing this book is. The book was cited by School Library Journal as one of its Best Books of 2018.

You can listen to the book being read aloud here, and see its illustrations. There’s a lot of historical truth in this book, but good grief, is it ever simplistic and manipulative. It teaches little white kids to confront their parents, because their parents have been lying to them.

 

I certainly don’t object at all to black history being taught; in fact, I welcome it. But I very much object to the manipulative way this story book treats children, to turn them against their parents — even thinking of their parents as collaborators with racism.

I had a long conversation this morning with a man from within a major American institution, one that has been considered institutionally conservative, who reported to me that anti-white wokeness has captured the leadership, which is transforming the mission of the institution from top to bottom to reflect racialist priorities. I hope I can write with more specificity later; he asked me to hold off now, because he’s afraid for his job. He reached out after reading Live Not By Lies because he wanted to assure me that everything I talk about in the book is happening in his organization right now — including people being forced out for not accepting wokeness — while the great majority of people who support the organization’s mission remain completely in the dark. He gave some specifics, which were simply jaw-dropping to me as someone who knows this institution’s reputation.

Something quite horrible is being prepared for this country by its progressives. Megyn Kelly and her family are right to exit those schools, and NYC. Get to somewhere safer and more sane if you can, while you can. But don’t think that you will be able to escape it completely. We’ve got to fight. There’s no alternative. But we have to make our stand in places we might actually win.

Do you know what your kid’s school is teaching about race, sexual orientation, and similar woke topics? You had better make it your business to find out. Don’t think for a second that the fact that your kid attends a Christian school means it’s going to be okay. Look at this Catholic school in the Baltimore area.

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Christian Leadership Failures

I had a long conversation this morning with someone who discovered Live Not By Lies, and reached out to me in concern. He is on the inside of a big conservative Protestant religious institution (not a church), and who shared with me his concern, and even his grief, over the institution going militantly woke. I can’t share anything about our conversation, but I can say at least this: the senior leadership of the organization has embraced Critical Race Theory and the entire Woke package, and is forcing it on the organization from the top down. According to this man, most people have no idea that this is going on. It is institutional capture by the Woke, happening within the confines of a Christian institution that has long been theologically conservative. The man told me that everything I talk about in Live Not By Lies is happening within this institution, including people being fired for dissenting even slightly from the new ideology.

“It’s going to have to get a lot worse before people wake up, I’m afraid,” he said, of other Christians. He gave me examples of how the Wokesters cloak their radicalism in the language of therapy and compassion, which completely disarms most middle-class people.

Here, from National Catholic Register, is a similar story, about a Catholic school in the Archdiocese of Baltimore. Excerpts:

When a third-grade girl at School of the Incarnation here told her classmates she was a boy, parents of other students were surprised to learn that the Archdiocese of Baltimore had agreed to cooperate with her new identity.

In the face of cultural trends that suggest someone can choose a gender different from his or her biological sex at birth, many parents who send their children to Catholic schools expect them to uphold the Church’s teaching that gender and sex cannot be completely separated.

Indeed, a 2019 document on gender theory in education from the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education states that Catholic schools have a legitimate aspiration to maintain the Church’s understanding of human sexuality, which communicates that each human person has an immutable male or female biological identity. It also makes clear that gender ideology “denies the difference and reciprocity in nature of a man and a woman and envisages a society without sexual differences, thereby eliminating the anthropological basis of the family.”

Still, the Archdiocese of Baltimore reportedly approved accommodations to enable the student, whose father at the time was an administrator at the school, to present herself as a boy. She was allowed to use a masculine name, gender-neutral pronouns and a private bathroom. Furthermore, parents discovered that the school’s parent/student handbook had been altered to include “gender identity and expression” in the sections on discrimination and bullying.

The Archdiocese of Baltimore’s school guidelines are startlingly pro-trans. The girl-to-boy’s father was a school administrator, and recently resigned after parents figured out what was going on, and started to complain. More from the story:

Before the girl’s father resigned on Nov. 6, saying he had a fundamental disagreement with certain teachings of the Church, parents said they were particularly concerned that as a school employee, he was in a position to advance his daughter’s new identity and compel those he supervised to comply.

However, in a letter to George and Theresa Fritz, grandparents of three students in the school, Archbishop William Lori said that although the faculty had been informed of the child’s new name and a request from her parents that gender-neutral pronouns be used for her, no teacher or student was required to use them and those who did not would not be subjected to disciplinary action.

Still, parents who had formed the group Archdiocese of Baltimore-Parents Protecting Catholic Identity pointed out that by the time the girl’s father resigned, most of the children in the girl’s third-grade class already were calling her a boy.

In a Nov. 7 Facebook post announcing his resignation, the father said, “I know y’all are excited. I am too. I’m also proud and excited that I finally get to say publicly that my courageous youngest child is a transgender boy.”

His post, which elicited more than 300 positive reactions and more than 80 comments, all supportive, closed with, “I’ve got lots more to say and that will come later…”

As of the time this article was published, the girl and her older sister were still attending the 750-student, pre-K-8 school, although one response to the father’s Facebook post suggested the parents might seek a new school.

More:

In his letter to the Fritzes, Archbishop Lori outlined the steps taken by the school and said, “I believe that every attempt is being made to be faithful to our Church’s teaching in all areas of the school’s life.”

However, George Fritz said he considered the accommodations for the student to be contrary to the Catholic faith.

“This whole situation is completely foreign to me,” he said. “I don’t understand why the hierarchy is not standing up and saying this is wrong and an abomination in the sight of God.”

Because that would require them to show moral courage and conviction. It would require them to be willing to be hated by the world.

Read the whole story. It’s important. Note especially how the Archbishop making the pronoun policy optional in the school allows the crowd to change the policy de facto. It’s Neuhaus’s Law: Wherever orthodoxy is optional, it will eventually be proscribed.

Here’s a screengrab from the Letter From School Leadership page on the school’s website:

That is the one thing that the school’s leadership chose to emphasize, in a boldface pullquote: that they are proud not of the students’ faithfulness, or commitment to Catholic teaching, or the Jesus Christ — but rather to social justice and community outreach. Check out their page explaining why Catholic education is important. It is rather revealing.

Remember what the anonymous Catholic parish priest said in this space last week: that the battle now, and in the future, is not going to be between the Church and the world, but within the Church too. Catholics cannot count on their bishops to hold the line. It’s the same thing with Evangelicals and other Protestants: more and more, the leadership class is not going to be trustworthy. You cannot take trust for granted. Do as the Fritzes did: ask questions, demand answers, and prepare yourselves to become pariahs for the sake of standing for the truth.

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Jodi Shaw Vs. Smith Snotty-Tots

If you haven’t heard of Jodi Shaw yet, you will. She is waging a one-woman battle against one of America’s most elite liberal arts institutions, Smith College, located in one of the most left-wing towns in America, Northampton, Mass. She has been a liberal all her life, but she simply got sick and tired of being made to feel by the college that she is a bad and deficient person because she is white. And she said so.

She said so on a series of YouTube videos in which she says that Smith’s so-called “antiracism” campaigning is in fact racist against whites, and have created a hostile workplace environment. You can watch them all here; start with “Dear Smith College, I Have A Few Requests.” One of the more interesting aspects of her case is that she points out what she sees as the class hostility inherent in Smith’s antiracism campaign, namely that it is privileged white people dumping on working class white people to assuage their bourgeois guilt. That’s why I called her on Twitter “the Norma Rae of the Anti-Woke movement.”

Jodi Shaw agreed to do an e-mail interview with me about her case. It follows:

RD: For people who haven’t followed your YouTube messages, what is the controversy at Smith College about?

JS: I am a staff member at Smith. I provide administrative support to the office or Residence Life and the division of Student Affairs. I recently created a series of videos to protest the ongoing environment of racial hostility staff endure at Smith.

This hostility comes in two forms:


Trainings, dialogues and discussions intended to achieve “racial justice” and “equity and inclusion.” These trainings and discussions frame racism not as an observable material act, but as an invisible force that permeates all structures and systems, and is unwittingly perpetuated by white people simply by virtue of being white. So we have moved from what you are doing is wrong to who you are (based on your skin color) is wrong. It is against this ideological backdrop that staff are expected to “discuss” race at these trainings and workshops. I would argue that the fact that these trainings and discussions are now directed toward staff (as opposed to only faculty and students) is largely a result of the incidents and aftermath of July 31, 2018. (That is a longer story that deserves to be told. I encourage any investigative journalist to tackle this one.) [Note from RD: The July 31, 2018 matter is an incident in which an employee of Smith College called campus police to report a suspicious person, who turned out to be a black Smith student eating lunch. Read about it here.]


And then we have the plight of individual staff members (those involved in the July 31, 2018 incident, and those harmed in the aftermath) who find themselves on the receiving end of racial allegations by students. We have a campus dynamic akin to the Salem Witch Trials, in which students are emboldened by the college to accuse staff of racism. The college emboldens students both by the legacy of July 31, 2018, and by promoting the notion of “racial microaggressions” (entirely subjective interpretations which do not take into account intent). This is combined with the belief that all white people are inherently racist, which removes all individual agency and puts staff — who are majority white — on notice that the deck is already stacked against them. And lastly, without any due process procedure in place to handle these accusations, it is impossible for staff to receive a fair shake; anything you do could be contrived as an act of racism, and the price of being accused is very, very high.


In these ways, Smith has managed to create an extremely hostile work environment, fraught with racial tension and is an absolutely terrifying place to work for many staff. The college continues to reinforce this atmosphere by taking administrative action such as the abrupt dismissal of chief of campus police Daniel Hect in April 2019, after students peppered the campus with hard copies of some of his tweets they found objectionable. By immediately capitulating to these and other student demands, the college empowers students to act as judge and jury, with the fate of staff (and in other cases, faculty) in their hands. In many cases these staff are not highly compensated and their paycheck from Smith is their only financial security. For these staff, seeing such things happen to others is beyond terrifying.

It is against this backdrop that I myself was subjected to two individual, explicit acts of racial discrimination and racial harassment, committed by supervisors. I believe the existing backdrop of hostility enabled these behaviors to occur.

One of these was a training session in which I was  told by professional hired facilitators (in front of my colleagues) that I was committing a “power play” when I declined to discuss my race. In June 2020 I filed a complaint with the college’s internal EEO compliance officer of racial discrimination and hostility.

While my complaint was pending, George Floyd was murdered, BLM became very active and a pandemic continued to rage across the country. Staff were put on notice that mass furloughs were a distinct possibility in the near future. It was during this period of time that the college president released a letter to the Smith community entitled “In Response to the Death of George Floyd, May 29, 2020, in which she told the community “It is our responsibility, especially those of us who are white, to do better.”

Shortly thereafter, the college released a document entitled “Toward Racial Justice at Smith,” This is a four page document, outlining the college’s intent to increase programming, classes, trainings, etc. aimed at combating racism and achieving “racial justice” and “equity and inclusion.” For anyone familiar with what is happening beneath the surface at Smith, the document is eerie: it reads like something straight out of 1984. It specifies its expectations that staff involve themselves in these efforts, and will be mandated to do so in some cases. The document also announced the college’s intent to increase the “accountability of individual staff, faculty and students at performance reviews, merit calculations and advising sessions, by tying equity and inclusion more closely to incentive and compensation structures” and proposes examining whether or not “employees across different registers of identity (race, gender, age, etc.) compensated equitably.”

The timing of the release of this document, issued in the middle of a pandemic, during a time in which most staff at the college are desperately trying to adjust to sudden, rapidly shifting policies imposed by the abrupt closing of the college (including for some the sudden switch to remote work, with children at home), combined with the legitimate fear of being furloughed, is an absolutely stunning example of a college administration that is incredibly out of touch with the every-day realities of the human beings it employs.

The trainings and initiatives outlined in this new document are similar in nature to the ones highlighted in my own internal complaint, so naturally, I was concerned. With my complaint pending, I had expected that the college might engage in at least some self-examination of these practices, which I made clear in my complaint I believe are both legally and ethically questionable.

I sent an email to some of the deans and members of the president’s cabinet expressing my concern. Of the five recipients, none responded.

Knowing that the college, with its billion+ dollar endowment, is more concerned with optics than legal action, I decided the best course of action would be to create a video. In my first video I highlighted my requests, followed by other videos outlining specific things that have occurred at the college. That first video obviously struck a nerve, a few people have responded negatively to it, but by far most (I would say over 95%) of the response has been positive. Either way, I now have the college’s attention.

RD: You seem to believe that there is as much a class element to this conflict as there is a racial element. Could you elaborate?

JS: The rhetoric that would have us (or force us rather) to believe across that white people have power and privilege and people of color have none, is an interesting notion to promote at a place like Smith. The group with the largest demographic of whites is staff, who are also the lowest paid group of employees on campus (and as we have seen, at least publicly, the ones most likely to find themselves the object of student racist allegations) and a student body that is 45 percent white, and therefore does not possess a racial majority. For Kathy McCartney to stress in her letter on May 29 that “white people are especially responsible for working to end racial injustice” is a fascinating example of an administration that is completely out of touch with the racial and class dynamics of its own institution.

The dining staff for example, one of the lowest paid groups of employees on campus, have arguably the most contact with students and as such, are most likely to be the object of racial allegations. They serve the students three meals per day inside student residences. These staff work hard to ensure the material well being of students who are receiving a $70k+ per year education, which for most, is double their annual salary. Whether a student is “full pay” or not, it is difficult to argue that a student at Smith is not in a highly privileged position relative to staff. The power dynamics already in place between staff and students are exacerbated by the college  telling students that all white people are racist and immediately enacts disciplinary measures against staff whom students report for racially motivated or other behaviors related to offense around immutable characteristics. There is no due process procedure for staff, no transparent policy through which these staff can go through. The disciplinary procedures are all very opaque, which only serves to increase the fear and “walking on eggshells” environment for staff.

It is a special kind of fear to be afraid that if anybody finds out you might be having the wrong thoughts you will lose your livelihood and reputation to boot. In this sense, the college’s behavior in regards to these trainings and dialogues and discussions constitutes an abuse of power. There is psychic damage that accompanies this constant fear. The fear that 1) you will be caught in the wrong place at the wrong time (student accusation) or 2) be found out that you are not on board with the content of the trainings. The natural response to this is to try to save your own skin by enthusiastically agreeing and diving in to signal to everyone that you are fully on board. This requires one to lie. It is impossible to lie, day in and day out without suffering some form of psychic damage. Personally, I could see that continuing to go on that way would cause more psychic and spiritual damage to me than losing my job ever would.

RD: What has the reaction been on campus to your videos? 

Because of Covid, we only have around 100 students on campus and I am working remotely. It is in this context that I attend Zoom meetings with people just like before the video, except now there is this huge elephant in the room. It could just be me being paranoid, but it feels palpable.

The college responded to the video in an official Message to the Community to let people know that I do not “speak for any part of the college.” This language is very telling. The college has positioned itself as a single ideological unit from which I have clearly been ousted. In reality the college is comprised of thousands of individuals, each of whom (hopefully) are in possession of their own thoughts and opinions. In other words, a diverse community of individuals. As such, by linguistically lumping everyone together into a single unit, the college is very much in conflict with the traditional liberal arts college value of pluralism. I would hope the college would support and promote pluralism and tolerance of diversity of ideas and thoughts rather than discourage them by making statements like this. However, the college insists on what I see as increasingly totalitarian-like behavior.

Meanwhile, behind the scenes, the Provost issued an email to all faculty stressing the importance of presenting a “unified college response” at this time. The college is clearly having a tough time with this, and to me appears only to be digging itself deeper into the hole in which it now finds itself. You may have noticed the title of my YouTube channel is Smith College Big Dig. This is a nod to the notorious Big Dig project in Boston. It would appear that the college has indeed pulled out its shovels and is already at work digging.

On an individual level, staff and faculty have reached out to connect with me, many of whom I did not know before. This is good! We are using this new back channel to find each other. From here is where we can somehow begin to build a coalition of some sort to stand together in opposition to the college’s ideological stranglehold and commitment  to legally and ethically questionable behavior toward staff, faculty and students.

There are others at the college who have made clear (through the use of social media and direct emails) that they disagree with me. There are alums who have reached out to me to tell me I should be fired. I believe there is a letter circulating now, for me to be fired. So it’s a mixed bag at Smith, but for the most part I am very hopeful about the very positive connections I am making amongst staff and faculty (and even students) inside the college. Aside from preserving my one last thread of integrity, that was the whole point of the video. So in this sense, you could say the video is a success.

I have also received many communications from people at other colleges and organizations. They have connected to say thank you, to express support and offer words of encouragement. Many tell me they cannot do the same out of the (legitimate) fear of losing their jobs, so they are glad that I am doing it. All of this support is very encouraging to me. Speaking out has given others some hope that this ivory tower tyranny has an end date.

RD: Of all the places to expect resistance to wokeness, Smith is one of the last. Western Massachusetts is the heart of progressive Whiteness. The people in Northampton must see you as a traitor to the community. What is your daily life like since you went public?

“Western Massachusetts is the heart of progressive Wokeness.” Oh Rod, if only I had known that before moving here! As a Smith student in the late ’80s to early ’90s, Northampton felt like a much different place. A liberal utopia, where people of all stripes lived and played, where diversity of thought was a reality. Probably not unrelated, it was a lot less expensive place to live back then too.

I do not know how people in town see me. This is partly a function of 1) Covid (I don’t get out much), 2) all my close friends live elsewhere, and 3) the local newspaper has not dared to print anything about it. The Hampshire Gazette is not known for critiquing the college. It refused to publish a letter by a staff member that openly criticized the college’s handling of the July 31, 2018 incident, which concluded that the college had created a hostile work environment. The Springfield Republican ended up publishing it first. The Gazette eventually wrote about her letter in some fashion, but did not reprint it. As a small town, Smith is a major driver of the local economy, and as such, wields much power in Northampton. It is discouraging to think that even the local news outlet is afraid of incurring the wrath of Smith College.

RD: Why should people outside of Smith care about this?

JS: Because this ideology -one that you cannot question or you will be ousted, shamed, and shunned to no end- is coming to a K-12 school, dance class, knitting circle and/or city council near you! This ideology, one that tells us that a person’s most important attributes are immutable ones, that breaks people down into racial groups and then asks us to assign status (power, privilege or victim) to individuals according to their (observable) membership in one of these groups is not unfamiliar. Seeking to compel people, through the use of shame, to conform at all costs to an ideology that is not only illogical but is destructive and divisive, is not unfamiliar. This tactic has been used many times before, to justify some of the most horrific and shameful acts in the history of humankind.

My friends who refer to themselves as liberals, who think the left is morally sound and always good, and therefore anything coming from that “side” must be okay, need to seriously question their assumptions right now. These are not liberal values. This is a rigid, dogmatic and dangerous ideology. These ideas are distinctly illiberal. This is not going to go away on its own, we need to work for it.

RD: The Polish anti-communist dissident and intellectual Czeslaw Milosz once wrote that people should pay attention to what the intellectuals say, because they set the tone for a society. Similarly, the sociologist James Davison Hunter has argued that elite networks are the carriers of cultural change. The kind of people who graduate from schools like Smith are going to be the people who run businesses and institutions — and we had better be concerned by how they are socialized to think about race, because it’s ultimately going to affect us all. Am I right about that, or am I missing something?

JS: You are absolutely correct. I notice you used the word “socialized.” I think what is going on in this case could be referred to as training. I would even go so far as to call it a form of behavior modification, one in which fear and shame are the tools used to compel acceptable behavioral outcomes.

Students and their families are paying a lot of money to attend Smith College. As an insider, I seriously question the quality of the education they are receiving, and I am deeply worried about how they will fare after graduation. It would appear as if many of these students graduate and immediately set to work using the same tools of shame and fear they learned at Smith to coerce others into conformity. I ask anyone considering going to or sending their child to Smith College to engage in some careful examination of what is going on across all levels (students, staff and faculty) at the college before making a commitment.

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Sacrament Factory Blown To Smithereens

The Catholic academic Larry Chapp offers his take on the McCarrick Report, the Vatican’s 400-page analysis of how former cardinal Theodore McCarrick became one of the great power brokers in the contemporary Catholic Church despite having been a homosexual lecher. The report is rather deficient, for reasons Chapp explains. But first, some background from him:

As I have mentioned before, when I was in the seminary at Mount Saint Mary’s (Emmitsburg, Maryland) from 1981-85 I knew several seminarians from the diocese of Metuchen during the time that McCarrick was bishop there.  In fact, one of them was my roommate for a year.  And he and others told me that McCarrick had a habit of inviting seminarians to his beach home at the Jersey shore for little weekend parties wherein McCarrick was constantly drunk and was very prone to groping people inappropriately while drunk and that he routinely selected one of the seminarians to share a bed with him for the night.  Therefore, to say that it was an open secret that McCarrick was a pervert is a gross understatement.  Because it was no secret at all.  Everyone knew about these “rumors” and everybody joked about it.  Indeed, even one of the seminary professors, a priest, upon hearing that McCarrick was going to visit the seminary warned many of us to stay away from “Bishop Howdy Doody” as he called him.

I eventually left the seminary and moved on with my career as an academic, but I always kept one eye on the rise of McCarrick to high office.  And when he was made Archbishop of Washington, and then later a Cardinal, I just could not fathom, in my naivete, why somebody had not blown the whistle on the guy.  I could not get my mind around how such a manifest sexual deviant and drunken ecclesiastical party boy, had gotten so far.

It was the worst-kept secret of the Catholic Church on the East coast, but it stayed a secret because nobody who had first-hand knowledge of it, and could have blown the whistle, actually would. I know this because I tried to get them on the record; they wouldn’t do it. You can imagine how hard it was to me, as a journalist and a Catholic (at the time), to take phone calls from priests telling me everything they knew about McCarrick, and urging me to do something about him … but not willing to go on the record themselves. This is the main reason why the story was so untold for so long.

Chapp says the McCarrick Report does hit the nail on the head from time to time. It grieves him that a hero of his, St. John Paul II, was so deaf to the pleas of abuse victims. But the Report misses the mark, in Chapp’s view:

However, even after taking all of that into account, I also think such analyses fall short of the mark because they do not analyze the actions that were taken with regard to McCarrick by his fellow prelates through the lens of a performative reduction.  And by that I mean that our tendency is to analyze such things too abstractly and our questioning never rises to the level of asking the concrete question of what the performative actions of the prelates in question tells us about what it is they truly believe – – or, as the case may be, what they do NOT believe.  Because if we know one thing for certain after the revelations of massive priestly sexual abuse and its cover up, it is that this is not a problem peculiar to either liberals or conservatives and it cuts across the ideological spectrum like a hot, searing, scalpel that lacerates to the bone.  Nor is it reducible to the inaction of a single pope or popes, who failed to “govern” the Church with due diligence.  Nor is this an issue that is largely a matter of “bad policies” that can be fixed with “charters” and absurd “Virtus training programs” for lay people who, for crying out loud, are not the core of the problem. In fact, the presence of Virtus training programs is actually a symptom of the problem insofar as it represents nothing more than a nod to the lawyers and insurance companies.  It is also a cynical exercise in deflection.  Cynical, because they don’t really think it will work (nor do I think that they care if it does or does not).  And “deflection” because it is merely an attempt to foster the illusion that “something is being done.”

My claim is actually more shocking – – some would even say “dark”. My claim is that the concrete actions taken with regard to McCarrick in particular, and the entire sexual abuse issue in general, tells us that many (most?) of our priests and bishops are de facto atheists.  They may overtly give public statements of faith, perform the Sacraments, kneel dutifully before the Blessed Sacrament, bless boats and homes and pets, all the while being “men without chests” as C.S. Lewis puts it. I would further add the following: most lay people in the American Church today are also de facto atheists who, therefore, swim in the same cultural soup of cultivated spiritual mediocrity.

Those lines put me back to a walk through Manhattan I was taking with a Catholic priest friend, in 2002, as we were all struggling with the enormity of the abuse scandal. As we walked around Columbus Circle, I told my priest friend that I simply could not grasp, as a Christian, why priests would do this, and bishops would allow them to get away with it. I’ll never forget the priest’s answer: “Because they don’t believe in God.” He went on to say that you could not understand the abuse crisis except in relation to the broader crisis of faith within the Catholic Church.

Now, eighteen years later, here is Larry Chapp saying the same thing. In the end, the McCarrick Report makes him angry for what it does not say:

And so as I read the summaries of the McCarrick report and skim through its many pages my overall reaction is a mixture of anger (as I said at the beginning, everyone knew.  EVERYONE), sadness (for McCarrick’s victims, some of whom were my friends, and for the Church) and disappointment that the deeper issue that what really afflicts the Church is a deep, deep loss of faith was never addressed.  I get that the report was not meant to delve into such deeper issues, and yet … damn it, it should have since without it the entire report just becomes a cataloging of failures without a point.  This is, after all, a document of the Church and not the cold analysis of a corporation inquiring after why its market share has gone down.

But that’s just it: the men who run the Catholic Church, too many of them have turned the Church into the Sacrament Factory. And too many of the laity are happy with that, and don’t want it disrupted.

Read his entire post.

This is not just a Catholic thing, as his post should make clear.  This is the world we all live in. The crisis manifests in different ways in different churches, but we all live and worship under its cloud. I’m guilty of it too. If I really believed in God as I should, I would live differently in small but important ways. I know this. Every time I choose to stay online, reading another essay, and put off nightly prayer, I know exactly who I am, and why I do this. I am not an atheist. But I am not the Christian I should be. I do not love God with all my heart. I do not love my neighbor as myself. I don’t even much love myself.

That said, let’s not lose one of Chapp’s core points about the McCarrick Report: it represents a failure, even after all these years, of the Catholic institution to tell itself the truth about itself. Among my friends, the most committed Catholics remain Catholic because they genuinely believe that the Catholic Church is the ordinary means of salvation established by Christ. But they don’t expect anything from the institution but mediocrity. A Catholic father, lamenting the situation at his kids’ Catholic high school in a big football city, said, “They don’t expect anything more out of these kids than that they will become champion tailgaters.” The idea that the Church and its educational institutions exist for something beyond themselves — that has been lost in many places.

I can’t tell you how it is with us Orthodox Christians, because we are so very small in the US. I can tell you from talking to my Protestant friends, they are going through the same thing, though it shows up differently. At the moment, so many of the Evangelicals are reacting against the excesses of right-wing politicization in their ranks by leaping uncritically into left-wing politicization. It’s all so despairing, because it is a way of avoiding the problems.

This e-mail just came in from an Evangelical:

I think I’m one of those young people. I’m 29, and I recently left my church I had been growing distanced from because of MAGA when the pandemic sent people off the deep end. Misconduct and conspiracy theories nearly drove me to suicide.

I’m picking up the pieces with Kent & Rosaria Butterfield now, trying to figure out where to go from here. I’m still not 100% sure I believe in Christ anymore.  I had always been the first to say that the conduct of Christians doesn’t control the truth or falsehood of Christ’s resurrection. But I’m trying desperately to cling on now.

1. If Christians will believe anything, if their discernment is so sick, what about the resurrection? If Christians are so stupid, what if the disciples were too, and they’re just delusional about the resurrection?

2. I thought Christ was supposed to discipline his Church. What about Hebrews 12 discipline? 1 Corinthians 11 discipline? Acts 5 discipline? Where is that? It’s not the actions of Christians themselves that bother me … but the apparent inaction of Christ. I want to scream at God and demand him to discipline his Church or else. And if that discipline and judgement has to start with me, at least I’d feel loved — that’s what Hebrews 12 is about.

It’s stupid of me. You know you should fear God. You know that when you say that … it’s the extreme version of “Be careful what you wish for … because if you ask God for patience, he might teach it to you the hard way.” Who knows what I could bring on myself?

But I just want Daddy to treat me like a son.

I just want Daddy to treat me like a son. See? The hurt, the disillusionment, the felt absence of authority, and the rawness of it all. Me, I just want to sit with this young man, and say, “I’ve been there, and it hurts, and there’s no easy way out.” It took years to heal after having my Catholic faith ripped out of me, and to see that what had drawn me first to it as a young man was the craving I had for a father figure who didn’t reject me. I projected all that need onto John Paul II. When I learned how worthless the fathers — bishops, but even the Bishop of Rome — were at protecting children from predators among their own, it was shattering to me at a level far beyond propositional thinking.

Yet by the grace of God, I remain a Christian. Jesus had been there too, saying to his Father as he hung on the Cross: “My God, my God, why have you abandoned me?”

These are not problems that can be white-knuckled through, or pushed to the side, or solved with bureaucratic acts, or building better coffee bars in the narthex and buying a more sophisticated lighting system.

What do you do when the Sacrament Factory (or Protestant equivalent thereof) has been blown to smithereens? Because that’s where we are. All of us. Flannery O’Connor said that faith is walking in darkness, not a theological solution to a mystery. Think about that.

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