Alan Jacobs's Blog, page 185

for the record

First time I’ve seen anything like this in my eight years in central Texas, and I strongly suspect that if I live here the rest of my life I won’t see anything like it again. (Photos cropped but not filtered or otherwise edited.)

Walking around in my neighborhood I keep hearing, from down in the arroyo, the gunshot crack of snow-burdened branches breaking.

essential reading for skeptics (and others)

Some of my readers will have friends and family members who believe that the 2020 Presidential election was stolen from Donald Trump and that the recent invasion of the United States Capitol was therefore justified — or perhaps that the Capitol was actually invaded by leftist activists. Some of my readers may hold these views themselves. So I’d like to share some recent reporting, analysis, and commentary that may be helpful. All of what follows comes from conservative, Christian, and Republican sources — in some cases the writers are all three.

The links below are not, except for the last couple, opinion pieces. They report.

First and most generally: There are many “fact-checking” sites out there, but if you are a political conservative you can’t beat the one from The Dispatch. That link goes to their complete archive, but here are some especially important ones related to the election itself:

Did Pennsylvania Have More Mail-In Ballots Recorded Than Were Requested?
Did a Dominion Technician Manipulate Voting Data in Gwinnett County?
Did a Georgia County Use ‘Sequestered’ Machines to ‘Break the Dominion Algorithm’?
Did Detroit Poll Workers Scan the Same Ballots Over and Over?
Did Joe Biden Receive Millions More Votes Than There Were Eligible Voters?
Fact Check: Debunking Donald Trump’s Claims About Voter Fraud

That last one is the most detailed. Also from The Dispatch, on the storming of the Capitol Building:

Debunking the Conspiracy Theories Claiming That Antifa Led the Attack on the Capitol

(I think all of those are out from behind the paywall — my apologies if they aren’t.) Maybe you believe The Dispatch is not trustworthy because it’s run by a bunch of Never-Trumpers. That’s okay — you don’t have to take their word for any of it. Each of those posts has many, many links to other sites that have the hard-core evidence. Here as in all other cases of research, wisdom lies in patiently following the trail of bread crumbs as far as it goes.

Further, from the front lines:

John McCormack of National Review reports on what it was like to be in the Capitol last Wednesday (may also be behind a paywall, sorry)
Newly elected Republican Representative Peter Meijer, who was also there, on what he experienced — and what his party should learn from it

And, for all my fellow evangelical Christians, please read this post by David French, especially these words:

Rebutting enabling lies does not mean whitewashing the opposition. It does not mean surrendering your values or failing to resist destructive ideas. It does mean discerning the difference between a problem and a crisis, between an aberration and an example. And it means possessing the humility to admit when you’re wrong. It means understanding that no emergency is ever too great to stop loving your enemies and blessing those who persecute you.

And the rebuttal has to come from within. The New York Times isn’t going to break this fever. Vox won’t change many right-wing minds. But courageous Christians who love Christ and His church have a chance.

Amen, brother David — who also made a wonderful and powerful case, on a recent episode of The Dispatch’s podcast, for welcoming those who have recently come to see that their trust in Donald Trump was misplaced.

It is extremely discouraging for me to see so many Christians, and so many churches, losing all sense of their mission and purpose — and at such a crucial time. Political conflicts and anxieties are at the forefront of American minds right now, but in another few days the catastrophic effects of the coronavirus will loom into our general view again. (They never should have left it.) I find myself thinking about all the ways that many American churches have soldiered on bravely through the miseries of the past year — and about all the ways that other churches have stoked political conflict, denied the truth about disease and elections alike, angrily demanded their rights … and ignored their mission, which is, after all, to seek and save those who are lost.

I’ve moved away from the business of evidence and fact-checking, but I’ve done so for a reason: None of us is likely to practice due diligence in finding out the truth if our hearts are not properly oriented, if we’re not primarily actuated by the double love of God and our neighbor. If we are so actuated, we’ll find ways to pursue our mission even in the darkest hours.

My patron saint in all these matters is the Reverend Pat Allerton, about whom I read in a recent piece by Harry Mount in the Telegraph:

In the first week of the first lockdown, as the Church of England shut its doors, the Reverend Pat Allerton, vicar of St Peter’s, in London’s Notting Hill, had a brainwave…. ‘I had an idea to take a hymn and a prayer to the streets of my parish, to lift spirits and bring a bit of joy. So, on the 26th March, I went out to the Portobello Road.’

He was cautious about the effects of hitting the streets with a loudspeaker, blaring out Judy Collins’ “Amazing Grace” on Spotify. ‘I thought I might be told to do one,’ he says jauntily. ‘But I was amazed by the response. People were really moved. They clapped and invited me back! They probably regret that now. I believe God was coming alongside people, letting them know He’s there.’

Over the following weeks, Allerton did 64 walking services around London, helped by the amazing weather. Each service – with a hymn, a prayer and a 60-second sermon – took seven minutes. He invited people – up to 50 at a time – to join in from a window or doorway. ‘So many people commented on social media, saying things like, “I’m not religious but I’ve got goosebumps. There are tears coming down my face.” God’s presence was touching people.’

Allerton is not happy about his government’s restrictions on church services. He thinks they are shortsighted and unfair. But still, there’s the Gospel to be preached, people in need to minister to. So he gets to it.

My own pastors have been getting to it for the past ten months. Preaching the Gospel, baptizing newborns, confirming young people, burying the dead, comforting the grieving — all of which are ways of preaching the Gospel. My wife Teri has certain pre-existing medical conditions that would make it very, very dangerous for her to contract covid, so we haven’t even dared the recently instituted outdoor socially-distanced Eucharistic services. No problem: our associate rector Neal McGowan recently brought the Eucharist to us. And would do it again any time we asked. Meanwhile virtual Morning Prayer continues, a six-times-weekly blessing and encouragement.

No protests, no insurrections, no complaints, no cries of persecution, no demands for rights: just ministry in the name of Jesus Christ, the Way, the Truth, the Life, the one who came to seek and save those who are lost. Christians who focus on that cannot go wrong. And caring enough about the truth to get our facts right is actually part of that ministry.

it begins



Maybe someone will introduce Trump to WordPress and that ...

Maybe someone will introduce Trump to WordPress and that will herald the blog renaissance I’ve waited so long for. 

looking backward

I’m blogging too much, focused too much on the things of the moment, but I think the circumstances just may warrant it. It’s certainly hard for me to concentrate on anything other than the current political calamity. And since soon a new term will start and I’ll be back in my old books, here comes another round:

In my reflections on Donald Trump when he was running for President in 2016, I made one significant error: I didn’t think he would nominate responsible judges and Justices. I thought he would hand out judicial appointments like candy to friends and toadies. But it turned out that the judiciary couldn’t capture his attention, so he farmed out the decisions to others who acted on sound conservative principles. (Given how many of the very judges he appointed ruled against his recent frivolous lawsuits, precisely because they were honest conservative jurists rather than toadies, I wonder if he’s belatedly reassessing his priorities.)

But I think my more general assessment, made in June of 2016, has, except for one point, stood the test of time:

We all know what Trump is: so complete a narcissist that the concepts of truth and falsehood, right and wrong, are alien to him. He knows only the lust for power and the rage of being thwarted in his lust. In a sane society the highest position to which he could aspire is apprentice dogcatcher, and then only if no other candidates presented themselves.

If you put a gun to my head and told me that I had to vote for either Donald Trump or Hillary Clinton, I would but whisper, “Goodbye cruel world.” But if my family somehow managed to convince me to stick around, in preference to Trump I would vote for Hillary. Or John Kerry, or Nancy Pelosi. In preference to Trump I would vote for the reanimated corpse of Adlai Stevenson, or for that matter that of Julius Caesar, who perhaps has learned a thing or two in his two thousand years of afterlife. The only living person that I would readily choose Trump in preference to is Charles Manson.

The one point that I can’t now affirm is that last one, but only because Charles Manson is dead.

A few months later I published an essay about the Christian defenders and celebrants of Trump, in which I described the pastors who claimed that God had revealed to them that Trump was The Chosen One — perhaps in the mode of King Cyrus of Persia — and looked toward the possibility that his presidency might run onto the rocks:

These leaders have replaced a rhetoric of persuasion with a rhetoric of pure authority — very like the authority that Trump claims for himself. (“Nobody knows the system better than me, which is why I alone can fix it.”) Consequently, their whole house of cards may well collapse if the Trump presidency is anything other than a glorious success, and will leave those who have accepted that rhetoric bereft of explanations as well as arguments. Presumably the most fervent supporters of Trump will argue (as Trump himself will argue) that his failures have occurred because others have betrayed him, have rejected the man that God raised up to rescue America, but this will require the replacement of the Cyrus analogy with another one yet to be determined. We can only hope that no one compares a failed Trump to an American Jesus betrayed by American Judases.

These claims to divine revelation have certainly been perpetuated by Eric Metaxas, who claims to have all the evidence he needs right there in his heart to prove that the election was stolen, and who has asserted, in classic “name it and claim it” style, that, no matter how things appear, “Trump will be inaugurated.” I’m sure that as I speak Metaxas and the other Jericho March leaders are writing Donald Trump Superstar and are debating whether the role of Judas is to be played by Mike Pence or Mitt Romney. I’m betting on Pence. (Update: I changed my mind.) 

More soberly, in that same essay I wrote this, wrapping up my reflections on the Christian True Trump Believers:

If all this sounds like a strange fantasyland of narrative, an imaginative world of what members of the Trump administration have taken to calling “alternative facts,” that’s because it is just that. The larger, and longer-term, effect of accounts like this is to encourage Christians to abandon the world of shared evidence, shared convictions, and shared possibilities, and such abandonment is very bad news for Christians and for America.

And lo, even as I foretold, it has come to pass.

For alternatives to all this nonsense, I’d encourage you to reflect on two essays: one by Michael Gerson that I quoted yesterday, and a cautionary message, both prescient and wise, written by my friend and colleague Frank Beckwith five years ago.

scale, cont’d.

The other day I published, at the Hedgehog Review site, a little dialogue on scale, and the common human inability to understand the scale at which many of the events that affect our lives happen.

Something happens almost every day to confirm the points I make there, but you’d be hard-pressed to find a better illustration of the problem than the behavior of the people who assembled in anger at the U.S. Capitol building on Wednesday. I heard an interview with one protestor who shouted that the protestors were there because they knew they were being lied to and cheated by the deep state, by the lamestream media, by the Democrats, by RINOs — and they knew it, he said, because of “what we’ve seen with our own eyes.”

What did he mean? I can’t be sure, but I suspect that there are two chief elements to his claim.

He has almost certainly attended Trump rallies and seen massive crowds cheering the President on (something that Trump himself has often commented on, contrasting the large size of his crowds to the meager attendance at Joe Biden’s drive-in-movie-style rallies); likewise, I would bet that, wherever he might live, in his neighborhood the pro-Trump lawn signs stretch as far as the eye can see, with nary a pro-Biden sign to be found.
He has almost certainly seen video clips which, their posters falsely claim, show voting fraud in action. Those clips have been tweeted and retweeted, shared and faved, held up as evidence again and again by people disinclined to do any fact-checking.

To him, then, it is simply not possible that President Trump lost the election. The evidence of his own eyes tells him that the President won in what Trump himself called, in a since-removed tweet, “a sacred landslide election victory.”

What that man does not understand is that everything he has seen — even under the wholly untenable assumption that the viral videos show actual fraud — amounts to no more than a drop in the American electoral lake. It’s statistically insignificant; it’s not even a rounding error. He simply does not understand how big his country is, how many people vote in its elections.

And the point of my post was: That kind of understanding is extremely difficult to achieve. We are simply not cognitively wired to think on that scale. Which is why my little dialogue raises the possibility of a “School for Scale” to teach us. Because if we, all of us, don’t get a grip on these matters, we, all of us, will continue to perpetuate massive and massively consequential misunderstandings of our country and our world.

opportunity

Michael Gerson:

The collapse of one disastrous form of Christian social engagement should be an opportunity for the emergence of a more faithful one. And here there are plenty of potent, hopeful Christian principles lying around unused by most evangelicals: A consistent and comprehensive concern for the weak and vulnerable in our society, including the poor, immigrants and refugees. A passion for racial reconciliation and criminal justice reform, rooted in the nonnegotiable demands of human dignity. A deep commitment to public and global health, reflecting the priorities of Christ’s healing ministry. An embrace of political civility as a civilizing norm. A commitment to the liberty of other people’s religions, not just our own. An insistence on public honesty and a belief in the transforming power of unarmed truth.

the new strain of covid

My friends at The New Atlantis have posted an informative and slightly worrying Q&A about the new covid strain. A necessary read, even if we in America also have other things to worry about.

If you do not subscribe to The New Atlantis you really should. They are doing vital work, which they describe here.

frivolity

Dostoevsky’s Demons is often read as a denunciation of a spineless liberalism that makes way for a nihilistic radicalism. But the fundamental problem with Stepan Verkhovensky, the father of the revolutionary Pyotr Verkhovensky, is not that he’s a naïve liberal — though in fact he is that. No, what Dostoevsky ruthlessly exposes is the sheer effete frivolity of Stepan Trofimovich and people like him. Stepan Trofimovich loves playing at being a dangerous figure: pretending to explore radical ideas, enjoying his sense of himself as a fearless intellectual unrestrained by convention and tradition. He delights in the pretense because he has the serene confidence that it’s all a game: No one would ever take such ideas seriously, the existing social order could never be disrupted, his peace and comfort would remain untouchable. And the little frisson of self-delight at saying something risqué would always be available to him.

That’s Senator Josh Hawley this morning expressing his solidarity with the crowd that would soon storm the Capitol building, trash it, and parade around inside it with Confederate flags. (Yes, they’re patriots all right — but of what patria?) I’m sure he never saw it coming. Nor did my own Senator Ted Cruz. It was all a game to these senators, an enjoyable and rewarding game, to connive at the frothing-at-the-mouth rage of the Trumpistanis, to cheer them on, to pose as their advocates and spokesmen. What harm could come of it?

Trump, he loves this. He loves the bile, the wrath, the mockery. It’s a well-done steak to him, with extra ketchup. But Hawley and Cruz? I bet they are befuddled and mystified. How could it possibly have come to this? They are, then, our own Stepan Trofimoviches. It was all a game to them, until it wasn’t. They are, like him, utterly frivolous. If they had any dignity, any moral backbone, they would resign their offices. But the very frivolity that led them, and us, to this pass is the vice that will prevent them from acting honorably. I hope I am wrong, but I expect they will go to their graves thinking How could we have known?

UPDATE: I affirm every word of this by Kevin Williamson.

clarity

The events occurring in the United States Capitol building as I write offer a certain clarity about the issues I raised in a recent post. You can have America or Trumpistan. You can have a country in which leaders are chosen in democratic elections, in which citizens and their elected representatives can dissent from the will of the executive without fearing for their lives, in which other elected representatives will uphold the laws they have sworn to uphold rather than twist and pervert those laws in order to accommodate the tyrannical and the hateful, in which power is transferred in legally-guaranteed peace; or you can live in the country the people who are storming the Capitol right now want you to have. Pick. 

UPDATE: At least we know where Sen. Josh Hawley is: